Hurricane Season (Censored) Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The great sea’s rim overspills—
The hurricanes in South Florida
Flood parking garages and low
Grave-like suburbias in cornucopias
Of spiny sea-urchins, the color
Of anemic arteries; waves riot
Through gated communities and salt
Bow-ties and bleach lady’s bobbing evening-gowns
Upsetting the dress-codes of moonlit swarays,
Making old ladies gasp in Palm Beach
And grab their jewelries, as old men
Clutch their toupees—
Down military trail and US 1, mother
Nature shuts out the lights and beckons out
The looters, as if she is showing us
What she thinks of social distinctions,
As her waves rise up, a commune of
Salty blue horses, the blue collared laborers
Of her tide that swells and march down
Okeechobee Boulevard stopping traffic—
Conducted by the moon, oared as if in a
Cauldron by the moaning, chain-rattling winds,
Her waters wreath and spit and curse and laugh;
They slap down high rises and $uck in condominiums,
They turn golf courses into lakes
And parks into swimming pools;
Professionals are downgraded into castaways
And day laborers find permanent employment
As rummy pirates;
As she reclaims the everglades for those
Things that slither, Florida’s reptilian ancestry,
The ghosts of the Seminoles in great tribes spill out
Of unmarked graves as the useless student body is packed
Into the stadiums now mass undersea tombs,
Where entire fraternities and sororities now
Sway waverly like leafy kelp upon the sea-bed, while
Horse-shoe grabs eat out their disinfected eyes and
Nest in their hollowed skulls….
As illegal aliens ride by grinning waves, on old
Rusty bicycles gifts regurgitated from the sea’s throat,
Drinking the free liquors that come floating opening by,
Equalized with the pasty professionals half-alive,
Bits of flotsam and jetsam, as their transportation
Is dictated by the tides, while their clients cling like
Wet rats scurrying up
The highest boughs of the mangrove trees,
As sunlight cuts up the land like a comic tragic play,
Bounding in brilliant flashes along each crest
And down through each trough,
Like leaping yellow spiders—
The only show in town, the drunken boats go spinning
By as if God was a little child playing his games
While his mother bathes him, as the sea over-
Spills her salty gown, drooling over the rim of
That porcelain basin down I-95,
From Miami up through Palm Beach,
The great shadowed beasts swim, the leviathans
Called in by the sea, like strange aeroplanes
Over the eerily swaying heads of the sleepy masses….