Muffled By The Rain Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Beautiful virgins tend to call up the dead
From the mausoleums as foreplay for Halloween-
So I come- What else am I to do,
Happening with my scars and lightning bolt tattoos-
Grey headed,
Hoping to make love to a halfblooded Cherokee-
I come and the virgin straddles me in her surplice- eyes of numb
Hibiscus freshly picked from her sorority,
And the tumbleweeds crawl across the lazing cowboys
Like cart-wheeling brainwashed spiders, like dry and brittle fingers
Fresh from the arid dryer;
And they crawl as slow as synchronized mollusks, and the cowboys,
Shaded by their dusty brims, eat poisoned apples to
Atone for all their sins;
And they laugh at us mewing there like stillborn kittens
In the mausoleum beside the half-remembered carport
Where the clothes are drying noisily;
Where the suspicious machines are thumping,
And she has called me out, the dead, to play around in the
Gardens of blue stone and pain,
And the puppies try to howl but they are muffled by the rain.