Gifts To A Newborn King Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Delivering the goods,
Listen to me preen, my little dilly worm;
If I am the devilish milkman this is
The city, the archway over the river like a picturesque
Canal, a literary devise; it denotes the passage
From east to west,
From mortal coils into Heaven; and I am here
Screaming and calling names at the gate,
Pitching scripts to Caron;
As long as I get the phone-call, I’ll get the job
And will be delivering lunch to the pantheisms
Crowded into the sky-wired tenements:
Gods and godly-men, and wives and godly-wives:
I should soon be seeing them all,
Caracoling my selected neighborhood like a
Fine gentleman, a cheap cabby making his hourly wage;
And when it snows I’ll drink coffee;
When it gets too late, I’ll sleep: I’ll keep doing this
Until its my time to skip out and follow his other way:
Each compass has four points, mostly, and there
Are so many canals and ditches to leap:
I can go far across the everglades: and see how many
Colors there are for the word blue,
And sleep in the outskirts of strange high schools in the
Oil slicks and ink wells of angels and engines,
Skip out of there and drive around and get a new job,
Pretending to follow a bible passage,
Keeping in my pocket stray things to give as gifts
To a newborn king.