Kill Joy Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Men drink hard liquor to
Kill joy,
To see you sitting on a park
Bench
In some kind of necrotic penumbra,
Feeding the crows
With just your eyes-
We stagger there remembering high
School,
The way you touched yourself
By the lockers
And went away, leaving room for
Us to cry in the bathroom,
Or under the school bus-
Then only to see you from a distance,
Switchblading with all your friends-
We lit off fireworks to draw your
Attentions,
But they were only duds,
And the great penumbric lizards continued
To sit and glow,
But even they didn’t know how years later
Along the canals and
Resting airplanes,
Just how big their family would grow.