Just Another Unlucky Song Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Oh now all of these scars, believing that I was wrong,
Trying to find their own way back from Mexico
After you had fled with your legs:
Here are the words spent in the silent interludes of the
Mute and fixated circus: this is how we do our
Change,
As the washing machines wash- the metamorphosis
Of windmills and princely kings:
The joys that we have known for awhile in our reddened bricks:
The city flies, reciting its metronomes:
Her fingers caressing, filleting the bone:
Words that find rhymes far away from school,
Scuppernogs on the vine, pulling down her clothes in a dressing
Room of Michigan,
And then to her all of these estranged hopes fly,
Like unlucky eyes in a dressing room:
That I was here: I spent the most of my life in Florida, getting an
Education, going home again at night to an old woman
Who never whispered to me- Getting up again,
Filing for the battles: as a child, remembering the rattlesnakes
Coiled in their rehearsings of gold: the wilderness so wild,
The dolphins on her tears of shoulders, the battles
Boiling like memories, practicing the things I never told her:
And then it was here again, bodies of flesh and bone,
Smelling up the bedrooms- the baseball fields- the playgrounds-
The witchcraft I never loves: just the joy of love they stole
Away from me, and basically imprisoned; while through it
All, Alma is my searing fire,
And this is just another unlucky song for her.