My Prayer Book Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The camera focuses on the pretty thing-
It always does, even when the author is promoting
His book,
And in the theatre you can find me kissing her
With rum on my lips,
As the dog is hyperventilating back on my bed,
My lonely bed I have slept on alone for nearly half
A decade now,
But it is unfathomable to consider I am not a superhero,
And can’t make flying suits out of tin
And pilgrimages of spit:
Instead, she sends out mass emails pleading with
Strangers to help her strange lover to transcend
And become a staple of pop culture,
And the roaring crowd surrounding the rich clay
Shapes of the baseball diamond:
So I gladly vote for them to make love fully aware
That there were no rock stars in ancient Greece,
But hemlock and the zygotes of philosophy,
And the traces of my DNA populating the tragedy of
The rainy theatre, like weeds creeping about in the cracks
Of the marble busts:
And I have strange daydreams in the middle of summer
Movies: That I will become discovered and easy,
As we are all in the middle of the cemetery, even though
There isn’t much of the presence of death,
And maybe I am still getting published, which will,
After I have paid for the doe eyed girl’s drinks, get me a
Flash of Botichelli breasts, and the anthem of high school
Athletes. In the dark, unidentified girls choose to sit
Next to me, and I am pleased for whatever reason,
Though I can ’t help but contemplate her lips pecking his
Chest, diving in little wet sips the way hummingbirds
Divine their daylight meals:
When she goes to his orchestra to worship after silence.
Now I will rhyme, because I am weak: Nothing is real,
And, strange enough, it snowed all day in Northeast Arizona:
Caked the roof of my car given to me my professor grandfather,
March 22nd, and in less than a week my mother will be
Turning fifty-one, or fifty-two, but older, older,
As the sun goes round again, like the earth’s manager checking
To make sure nothing is stolen, and that not too many two year
Olds have died from plagues,
And still most major poets are homosexual:
Ginsberg,
Rimbaud,
Lorca,
Nerduda too (but not Micheline or
Bukowski- Oh, no, never,
Though from time to time I have seen them
Slapping the faces of my imagination)
And there is a picture of Jesus on the thick door in
The noisy abbey,
But I cannot help still liking leggy women, particularly
One:
She knows who she is, and doesn’t care,
Because she has someone fully engorged in her mouth,
To the tune of mortalities:
And I can’t blame her for her disinterest in my scarred
Presocratic erections, far away across the populating sphere,
For we have never rode a roller coaster together screaming,
Melancholy fills the mind when I see kings,
And they will not remember me,
Because I am alone on my mountain with my dogs,
And their lives are short, just a decade, maybe two,
And then the great day will come when we will
All be contemporary facing forever east,
With little epitaphs carved by unidentified men
Who have made their career out of painting lies
For the inevitable deaths of all-
The greater and lesser men,
And the anonymous men who have no category,
But a word or two paid by entrepreneurial fathers to
Sell the riches out from under her forgetful seas.