In Shanghai Poem by Robert Rorabeck

In Shanghai I practice a mundane drudgery:
I lay in bed all day
Some five stories up in a Shanghai suburb:
And so I sleep off and on in my wife’s
Parents’ bed—my inlaw’s bed,
As it seems to have some magical properties:
We conceived our first child in it,
And now, for a second time,
My wife is nearly two months pregnant:
But I concoct various non life threatening illnesses
In this bed,
Not including my ‘poetry’
Which I get yelled at for when I write,
Because I am never anymore allowed
To be drunk—
I’ve been sick for almost two months in Shanghai,
I lost my hearing briefly,
And now I have hemorrhoids—and a pimple
On the side of my nose.
My back is breaking out too,
But my wife, surprisingly, loves me—loves me,
As my child does—
And my second child soon to come—it has
Served tremendously
As a tremendous weakening of my insouciant
Art-
I’ll get drunk once a week and write
Down my pitiful thoughts,
But the saviors and the ghost like angels will
Not come—
I guess it is that they have since abandoned me—
It seems that I have lost my job but I yet still have
Plenty of money—
But yet no room to better my art—
While somewhere in the mountains of my dreams
My dogs yet lay awake for their honey.