Immoral Car Show Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I don’t know sh^t: I studied enough to learn
The job,
But I forgot everything:
In the new continent where I watched my peers
Kill Christians;
But all I killed was a dancing chicken,
And the trees went forever upwards, haven’t
Being used: Fry the meat, live in waddle and daub,
Steal the girl: get a good paying job,
Tie your shoes:
This is what they sang to me from their cars,
Going up the hills with ease, graveyard shopping,
going fast and clean
And surreal, Catholic injuns- the feather light professional Christians
With new tongues and tickets to ride the ski lift:
Odin said kill them all, but
All I could do was fall in love with her at the university.
I lived in a hole like a rabbit:
I had a red lizard’s soul, and I sharpened my knife
On her wet stone heart,
But she was thoroughly petrified and I broke my
Gift on her and it didn‘t come back,
Like a dog would, or that careless, captured sea:
I wrote a worthy thesis and climbed some mountains
As an exegesis, and no one cared:
They moved in together and shared, and I lived in my
Hole in the earth, strange erotic dreams of bright teal
Tennis courts where my papers flew like late blooming moths:
All over the place, restive and reasoning under her leaping tennis skirts.
The housewives loved me, molted the exoskeletons
Of their insouciant habits: Those auto grazers
Were giant and had so many legs, and ate themselves
With afforested tongue, and then laughed about it
Going to the tanning salon in their blazers:
She changed her name and forgot how I’d showed her
The tattoo south of my navel I got in Spain:
I forgot everything I learned about her,
My comrades forsaking me thinking I was dead,
A consumptive pickle-faced Mary Jane, I drank alone in my
Pine-needle bed- my toes peeking out of the covers to
Check the weather, and continued to worship the reindeers I could
No longer raise with my impotent necromancy
Stuffing my head.