Tumbleweeds Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Staring at the sun,
Cheap books populate the eyes of minors
Run away from home;
Long haired latchkeys of the color-blind foundation,
Eat their tuna-fish lunch with grandmother under her tomb-
Some like to say they’re pretty,
Some like to say they’re sharp,
Some swing until they’re dizzy,
But they all drink the mulberry wine deep in the bitter
Park after midnight;
Then is when I’ve seen them, staring until I know they’re true;
Looking like lost cats who want to fly
Like torn curtains under the abandoned moons;
No one knows their names, and I don’t suppose they should;
They walk around in parking lots wearing their somber, unmolested hoods.
They rumble, and they roll,
They jaunt, and they stroll.... And bound as they steal
Across the unfinished train tracks which cascade into the polluted waves.
They live in the boxcars like rusting land sharks,
And in the ditches like unwashed witches;
Some prefer the elbows of pine trees; they climb up with scabby knees,
While some will sleep in the concrete lap underneath the overpass;
Where they are going, they surely are,
And already the night is filled with the disinfected stares;
Like cold beads of unsteady corneas like eclipses in blue and green pools.
They go by the freeways like the detached shadows of an overcast afternoon,
They go into the field like any kind of hungry animal;
The spores of this earth, they look for a place to grow,
But already there is so much hustle on the cold metal show;
So just a little further down the road they amble,
Bobbing their heads, their way and their handle;
Looking for a roof to spool their knotted threads,
A bed with some warm blankets to rest their tangled heads.