Little Porcelain Doll Poem by Robert Rorabeck

It’s time for people to start paying me, really,
For to hide in the glorious spread of fondled light
Winnowed from the spiked palms,
Where the diminutive refugee of the circus lives;
Her tits the tart apples they pay quarters for ten second
Beholding; I’ve tried to pick her up and carry her
Into the white washed rime and pumpernickel where
The dentists and clairvoyants, and romance novelists live
Out as in estuaries of chlorine, where the pools vibrate
Like belly-dancers, and little sorts of harems,
And underage spoiled-brats get virtual reality games,
And acne-scarred hookers to bight their teeth on without a
Glint of shame; I’ve tried to pick her up from her dugout in the
Heart of the palm at the left edge of the frame of the football
Field, where she floated to disheveled and feral from her
Flight from the screw-tape ringmaster and the pinching hell,
Her topless mermaid suit and the tank of teal,
She came crying on the knobby back of a crocodile she charmed
With her sequined skirt and a funnel of the king’s liquor;
But she will not go, though I tease and tug her, for she says she
Likes it here, in the buggies of spikenard, especially after
The Mexican has cut the grass and gone away, and the crickets
And grasshoppers are hopping headless and madly, and the midgets
Are garlanding the cypress, and the housewives are driving home
Like sepiaed and dulled floats in a parade of winsome hearses;
Then she can stare at them all like a little porcelain doll, and
Coo in her creel, and if she were still a child, I would love her,
She says, but not now with all her tattooing and banishments;
But, quietly, I love her still, and creep to her out from the middle
Of school, and bring her sacks of hamburgers and things I
Weave for her from different colors of worry; and she promises me
One day soon when sleep becomes the professionals, we will
Creep out together on the drooling green, and swing in a pattern
Of circles, likened to two planets making love in a dizzy universe.