Let Me Have Stars Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I write fairly often about the stars,
And other places I will never go, because it
Sounds beautiful to my ear,
The way a mountain lion mews like a newborn
Child, its distempering drool,
The naked mastication out in the early morning
Glade, the conclusion to a crisp novel-
And the panacea for my lonely scars, the evidence
Of cardinal sins drawing me away in a high mountain
Bedroom to read my books,
To say my little things to an open room-
That I should have never gone to college and so become
An uneasy murderer who, fumbling cuts off first his
Foot and then his toe; or to say now, the decapitations of
Soldiers line the pages sent back from the protozoan
Attempts of publication in France, like the spurious flumes of sex:
They sing this will not do, young man, this will
Not do, but you are looking more beautiful than you’ve
Ever been, which is still rather complicated. I could be
Thirteen or thirty, and there would still be too many ex-girlfriends
And grandmothers- This I know, and I could volunteer
All day for it, going around and around in a red fire-engine hosing
Things off, saving cats; but what would they have to say for
Me by the end of it, but a little plot, and a little stone:
Instead, let me sell flowers, to put baby’s breath to her bosom-
Instead, let me have stars, the distant bodies who have already
Died- Who seem to look down upon me, but have already turned
Away and gone into their lover’s bedroom- So far away,
I could never know them, but to attempt to kiss their burry lips
Is an attempt to prove the art; Childless, I will climb up on the
Roof and count them and fold dollars bills along the horizon,
And slip them between their garters of dusk and twilight, and
Say here is another thing I can never touch
But is real.