Never A Tourist In My Lines Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Over the current years I’ve replaced
Each lost part until the entire
Man came to be made of tin;
And my old dogs and my new dogs love
Me just the same;
And it is the same moon over yours and mine
Head,
But maybe it is not proper English:
There are layers of clouds like frosting and fluff
Up to the moon candied by airplanes
And impolite boys who are taking their time on
Your trapeze and not giving me my chance
At petting up;
And you’ve gotten as fat as a super confident alligator,
Even if you are not quite as Saturnine,
But I don’t know about you, or how you really smell.
Do you smell like your new car,
And where are you going back and forth along your
Chartreuse boulevards singing the favorite
And popular songs of your ballrooms;
And I don’t want to have to wake up tomorrow,
But I guess I will, if only because my lion outfit
Is made out of two real lions skins; and I’ve already vanquished
The gunfights who had any chance into the creek,
And now all the girls are congratulating me,
As I sing like the last song of a song bird at the mouth of
The mine,
And looking up I see the cross of minors standing out against
The skree and snow;
And I know nothing except that death is kind, and I
Was never a tourist in my lines;
And this I know.