My Pessimistic Expectations Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Empty and alone under a big
White tent in South Florida.
I could be shot any time,
In the back while being alone,
Which is significantly better than raising
A house of embittered family,
When thought about and realized that’s
The way it always works:
Bicycles always rust,
Cut flowers die, and eventually she drives
Away into other skinny dives
When you thought she might be pulling
Into her driveway:
And I don’t know, but the traffic is so
Plenteous and every car too is so afraid to
Die:
None of them swim upstream to deposit
Their roe way up in the skyscraping backs of
Her youngest god:
Maybe they think she will turn off them,
Maybe they think that they don’t have a chance,
But whatever it is they keep low and well
Fed coming and going through the required hours,
And she lays off of them,
And takes pictures of herself in Colorado
And hangs paper snowflakes from the clouds
As she dabs her lips on her husband’s
Neophyte cliff: he doesn’t know what he is doing,
But unlike the traffic,
He has no reason to be afraid,
For she is gathering over him even now,
As she is happily crying in the tiny glacial lakes
Which crown
A happy home so far away from the skittish traffic
Of my pessimistic expectations.