To Be Him Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Mutts get stuck in the patio perchance.
They don’t have the right to ask the pretty
Girls out to dance.
The alligators wait at the end of the gate,
And her father says to have her home by eight;
But what I am doing,
I don’t really know- I just smoke and loiter
Outback at the end of the show,
And yet when I see you its like an entire carnival
Has lit up underneath the slash pines,
And the sky just keeps going forever upward
Like a baby-blue mind-
But this is something after the chance is over,
And the car has come and squashed the dog named Rover,
The old loyal fiend,
I couldn’t hope that you’d remember,
Since you’ve gone and laid your roe all swarthy in the
North river,
And now you daughter comes, leaping for awhile.
She too wants to taste the sweet rind of sky,
But very soon or eventually she has to go down
Believing
All the tired truths that fornicate through these school-
Bus days.
I try and find your eyes through the fire engine haze;
But this catastrophe makes me question where I am.
When I just want to be with you:
I want to be him.