Just Trying To Survive Poem by Robert Rorabeck

It is cold to be without blankets,
Or tumbled with the paradoxical attributes of the
Female’s sex:
She has so many friends and she smoked and lives
In a double-wide:
Why can’t I train myself if her hair is so blonde, though
She’s been giving it high lights:
And the stock cars moves in righteous herds;
And it is not fair those boys who drive:
I remember her laying back in high school like a one of a
Kind firework while I was still alive:
And now the houses of my better ancestors are real and have
Eyes,
And they can follow their housewives straight over the
Parallel roots of the canal: they can become fairytales too:
That is what they do, and all the children perambulate,
And they remember the men who once were presidents;
But all I care about is how her legs divide:
She is my classroom, while more than one child has birthed
Outdoors from her truancies:
Butterflies are dying like paper cenotaphs in Mexico;
And what am I doing, but quieting down and falling down
Like a drunken hiker into Mount Saint Helens:
That I am just trying to survive.