What Was Supposed To Have Been An Ode To Zucker's Bicycle Poem by Robert Rorabeck

How easily we can be defeated
By any word we choose next—
An entire classroom of
Wrong answers in
A high school of enemies-

Like businesses of trophies
Seemingly triumphant
All of a sudden
Shot down into the
Shark filled abysses by
Enemy airplanes—

Now, entire decades later—
I have children and a family,
But before that I was alone on Thanksgiving—
And I stole Zucker’s bicycle
And rode to the closed down high school—
And, entering crepuscule,
When all of the mailboxes- according to
The regular laws of suburbia,
Like all of the crickets and housewives
Crossing and uncrossing their legs
And making twilight noises
With their scissorings-
Began to seem to hum
And to glow
As if perplexed by a fairyland’s contingency of amusements—

I stood upon the common asphalt and concrete monuments
And it seemed, momentarily,
As if I was finally triumphant upon the aforementioned holiday:

In all of the holidays practiced upon by America through
The daylights upon this resurrected peninsula
So exhumed from the salty boudoir
Of the feral and surreal daydreams of the sea’s daughter—

With my son laughing in my ear
And exalting in his newfound comprehensions of money—
I seemed momentarily glorious and alone—
My soul felt as if it were a closed-down amusement
Placed like a slumbering lover atop
The abandoned daydreams—
All of the lost children who also did not know the corrected answers—
They seemed there before me—
Nameless constellations that were long since placed above
Me, properly attributing to the heavens—
Like little golden teardrops pricked upon the fingertips
Of the aforementioned teachers:

I stood there alone and beneath the stars—
As the alligators hibernated underneath of the school buses—
And the other children,
Lost and found, beneath the roofs of their own houses—
Like gingerbread houses filled to the rafters by their
Salty dinners,
Tended to yawn and look up—
And forget of themselves as rivers graduating towards
The state universities they would find their new commonly
Accepted identities destined towards:

Tributaries I had at first run away from only to
Return to,
Lost and frightened and delicately frost-bitten:
Looking at the parked school-busses,
I was lost again;
But, having stolen my favorite teacher’s bicycle to
Return to here
I felt momentarily heart-broken—like a rabbit
Trapped against a high wall between here and Mexico:


Half a decade later,
Having been rejected from that place of a holy cemetery—
Having drunken half a bottle of $10 rum,
My son fawning and making trucks dance around my elbows—
I try to remember something that once was
Absolutely beautiful—
An esoteric and occultish beauty that we were forced to
Find inside the places the state would force us:
Inside a hidden cave into which our parents
Could not even begin to pretend to love:

And our favorite teacher’s bicycle:
An instrument once animated—a muse
That we lifted from her habitat—
There she slept beneath the increases of our monuments—
And here we write to her, forlorn and yet collecting for
Evermore,
As if we were the waves surceasing—
Battings upon the lashes of a daydream that happens once
In a while as the rockets that are supposed to leave the
Earth fail and return again, exploding into
The lips of gravity
And back into the whitewashed daydreams of an
Adolescent’s afternoon.