Everything That She Has Promised Me Poem by Robert Rorabeck

In the green avenues of her favorite color,
When I was young and skinny,
I hunted up snakes for two weeks in California:
It was my dream.
To sleep in empty train cars in the tall, tall grass,
Like a fairytale without any wine:
And the apartments that we reported to no one but
The ghosts in their swimming pools
One story below;
And my face was all so awful to look at,
And I got my stories and my furniture from the trash:
And I failed right away,
Marooned off the graveyard shift, and I crawled back
Home and lived there,
And went to college in Florida: I got nobody pregnant:
I went to Disney World once or twice,
Lived with and then separated from a girl, thank god:
Diminished into a wave and found a city of
Other fools and an apartment as big as a single footprint
Left in the smeared trail of a centipede,
If you even cared; and thought about movies, and went to
Them:
And I am still singing my imperfect song underneath the
Limpid runways of the off worldly values of the heavens,
As tomorrow I will be waiting for Alma: for Alma,
Because after all of this incest and decents and flights
From the terrors of hell, the suicides in the flutes of
Trees,
And the witches casting their awful perfumes of spells
Over the vacated baseball diamonds,
I have finally found my true love, my true love;
And I believe in everything that she has promised to me.