Coloring-Book Conquistador Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Are you still doing this, or are you too busy
Stealing bicycles, the spoken fauna of the student ghetto;
I know, and there are trailer parks further out in the brush
And people who live in them sometimes
Dress up and go to work at Renaissance Festivals:
I’ve been to one or two,
And just down the block a little toy airport where my paper
Airplanes are always breezing, mottled in the rain,
They still taxi with hidden appreciations in their spectacularly
White fjords, with plastic stewardess serving drinks
To your painted fingernails: Rub my belly like a lottery
Ticket, see my magic rabbit hanging in the cactus garden,
These images I have for you, like pornography not
So deep in the woods that a little boy can go easily for
Awhile, a coloring book conquistador, find out how you
Lay your legs around every fire-hydrant- a sure thing,
Tomboy; and once I live nearby the sea, won’t you come and
Visit, and watch me spill out my guts into the fine, fine
Sands, like a toy chest itself, cowboys and Indians and great
Presocratic heroes spilling out; its what they do,
Because I’ve brushed my teeth.
Because I have inside me most everything you can pickup
At the dollar store and walk right out the door with;
And I don’t know why I am doing this, bequeathing my
Genuflecting art into the night, the penny candy the werewolves
Eat like after dinner mints after feasting on the neighborhood’s
Cats, and then always returning to doorsteps and toady
Carports. Restive on their burry haunches, half-man thinkers,
Reciprocating with the waning gibbous, down they salute
You whilst you drool like a creamy mollusk across the downy
Pillow half a body’s length above the saltwater good atrocity
Of that aromatic maidenhead.