Like A Fitful Prayer Given Before Sleep Poem by Robert Rorabeck

A rhyme, a dime, a talking fool:
I step outside and in the insouciant yard my
Pen*s jewels:
By my lead, my dogs go out and scent the
Earth, which is you, my foolish muse:
I peruse you like the easy mediums on their
Shelves: Can’t you see now, how even the
Easy trees are shaken. This is not their season,
And yet in their locker rooms they are getting
Naked,
As by the open doors the November breath
Shivers, my little dog growls at its unwelcome
Brother: I call the German Shepherd’s name
And he hurries back in,
But what does it matter, when you spread your
Cheap legs for other men, and I should have
To wake up to the early morning, and perform
Before my parents as if I was never drunk,
Or had saved enough money to have my own house
In some unsettling plane:
But what does it matter, when nothing I have written
Has been unnecessarily true:
More beautiful men from other planets are already
Married and given off their names to strange little
Gentlemen who will follow us in their more civilized
Manners out the doors:
The laziness my scars is written like nail polish
Along the seats of the bus in junior high school:
There in the jubilance of yet unshed puberty, I had a knife
Fight which was staged, before I even knew you,
And I loved a black woman so feverishly they couldn’t
Even know; but now I am called up to the office from
My little crimes of toys, but looking toward you in the
Backwater mirrors, I believe I have said enough,
And if it should come to war, even with the belly of the ship
Lilting towards the bottom, you should love me,
Because it is in the way I have given you to follow me,
And you have come to me unasked for, and thus our lips
Should embrace like a watermark, the way the final seal is
Given to a defeated army, thus I conclude things
Until you, and this inevitable poem, written the way
No one should read, thankfully, like a fitful full prayer,
Given before sleep.