Three Green Lies Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Lost in the woods,
Three young girls make love,

Topless under the cypress
Flesh brushed by the do nothing wind
Which rustles amidst the forest, as
If checking for loose change

As their fingers play posies,
Ringing around one another’s rosies

Until the green man comes
With his cabbage-green guns
And chases them
Over the opal hills,

The wind picking up everything
They dropp to take back home, to vend
At the pawnshop.

They jog all the way downtown
To the cafes on the promenade,
Where they settle their blue pills
With tall glasses of beer and pink lemonade.

Then they are nice young girls,
With good postures and clean panties—
They have apple green cheeks which bunch
Up when they eat like sacks full of goods,
Swinging brightly from their eyes,

Here they wink and nudge,
And there are little pinwheels of pure delights
At the corners of their upturning lips
And smiling eyes

As the young boys go by,
Who they count,2by2 and when they’re
Really lucky,2by4, with pouts in their
Pockets, wanting just one more to stay,
To brush each of their thighs in hidden
Turns under the table, like charades for
The hard of hearing.

Here, in the purple city, where
All the girls look nice,
And half look pretty.

On the sidewalk,
Where the sun gets drunk,
And colors his love blushing,
The play of stoplights through the alders,
To the nuzzle of a grizzly bear….

I try and remember her in
My bed, her lips pressed
To my forehead, like a soft gun
She used to shoot at me with
Gasoline and bottle-rockets,

Pure fun

Jovially,
She shot out my eye

From the window at the back of the bar,
The whole world starts out and keeps going
On like a tunnel down the walk.

Here there are the 3 girls still drinking beer
And lemonade, beginning to look at each other
Like sly foxes, their foreheads warming to that
Recent dream in the forest,

And their one poor boy, begins to look for a 2by4,
Now that they are playing together again,
His fingers have nothing to do.

And the green man, stooped around the corner,
Smoking a tree branch as he counts his bullets—
3 bullets shot into green flies,

The thrifty wind picks up, before letting them
By,

And I’m by myself, on the other side of the room,
Because she’s done blowing her smoke into me,
And I have nothing else to do.