In These Features Of My Metaphor Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I put this on my face so that you will love me.
My receding hairline is the bosque they are clearing,
To make room for the grandest boys selling the biggest
Fireworks that go on forever…. Effluvious
Victorian showers of velveteen gold;
My little scars are fading fast like salt pools on the
Inland sea,
Each imperfection of a feeling, the earliest realization
Of a wicked infant’s propension for sin;
I wear it like a heirloom of a drag queen, what the father
Said atop the roof before he took off his belt and beat
Him under the winsome moon, and the feline panting:
From there you could see the junkyard of cars across the
Ditches shaded by the pinetree harem, swinging shady,
Shady- Take it off; and my mouth, that bruised harbinger,
That lady killer who mouth-offs to black widow spiders
Who scuttle across the kitchen linoleum when the housewife
Stumbles in drunk after midnight to wash the cerulean dishes,
He is the rock garden out from that is no long there,
Because they widened the road; Filled with svelte cactus
Quills as fine as dandelions, and dead rabbits hung upon them
Like short haired saints- Compelled into their draping penitence
By the peer pressure of neighborhood dogs;
And my tongue, and we could go from here to my neck.
She used to say it was the best thing about me;
And she kissed once or twice between entanglements with
Cotton candy. But she was a churl come down to get out of
The weather, and I soon learned to disbelieve her;
In fact, I am certain she is no longer in these features of
My metaphor.