Ewoks & Escargot Poem by Robert Rorabeck

An hour past noon,
Fingers itching from the caffeine,
Gun in the bottom drawer with the bullets,
But there isn’t going to be a fight.
Pissed in the high jewel-grass where the
Bouquet of wildflowers rots,
F*cked into an anonymous grave where
I dropped from the homosexual-yellow
Apartment; saw her lips mulling,
The dykes had their fingers in the pool;
When the moon got out, they’d howl like
Cats, and it was easy down those collegiate
Ways, to inebriate and swim;
She decried me that I should have taken
Away her buffet of suitors, eyes grazing in
The well-lit cafeteria,
But now you can buy my little book in Japan,
And I had my opportunities, and even more
Scars, a favorite place to sit in the sun and
Read well-viewed from the windows of
Liberal arts, about fateful mountain climbers
In the cerulean crevices of Everest,
Infants in full gear and crampons engulfed by
A subzero womb, the howling of silence;
The girl from folklore class came up and sat
By me for several minutes, hoping for a turn,
That I might teach her mathematics with a full
Set of fingers, but I only got up to her black nylons
And the midnight polyester dress she wore:
I was always afraid to look her dearly in the eyes,
And she gave out on me and flirted with hombres,
No greenhorns tacked to books, sweaty ledgers
Which held my tells: So I became a latchkey and
Fell through a well of well-shined skulls,
And they laugh at me, while I mull over a novel
About a dark skinned dwarf named Milo,
Who knocked on my door in the student ghetto,
And said he’d once been a giant, but had made
The same mistake as me, and moved next door
To a witch who cursed him with her switch,
So he could no longer deliver pizzas,
For his feet would not reach the petals, and
He was ignored by the barmaids and the bimbos;
Thus there was autumn, and the supermarkets
Carried gourds and corn stalks,
But we didn’t buy any, but worked the midnight
Shift and got drunk in the crook of
That sh*tty north-central city.