Not A Rhyme Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I want to be beautiful.
I want to be Santa Claus.
I want to go to school and learn how
To more expeditiously unfasten bras;
I want to watch her stepping out of the sea,
And wash with me under the same open-ended
Shower seductively,
Which pissed off my girlfriend ten thousand years
Ago, which resulted in our later end break-up
On the far side of college,
And her subsequent marriage to a more colloquial
Boy of her similarly ancient persuasions:
I want to drink my rum,
And fold down my own house and sail the seas as
I want to, alone or with spouse:
This is what I am going to inevitably do,
Because I can’t be contained in the imaginations of
Shakespeare,
I can’t write with the vitriolic etiquette of Mark Twain,
Or learn every curve of the Mississippi by midnight:
And I shouldn’t try to seduce Erin Adamson with another
Expensive bouquet. By rights,
I should learn to die peacefully, dramatically out underneath
The Australian pines with a bottle of
Ketchup and paper snowflakes, reading off my lines to
My kindly grandmother, the entire audience,
A tear in her eye and clapping with sincere compliment:
I must shoot up my last bottle rocket into oblivion,
Figure out the nesting place for my last line and
Then go to sleep, because everything I imagine is so
Beautiful, and inspires to the fortitude of infinity,
But society has another game with all the boys better
Situated than me, copy editors and their ilk ready with mitt
And ball out in the red dirt, and I might pray to my
Special witch to persuade them otherwise,
But my satanic muse is just this:
She doesn’t exist but for the amusement rides behind my eyes,
And she must disappear in me with it,
With all the sadly flawed language I have tried to surmise,
I’ve cut her out of copy paper and breathed breath into it,
But giving the busty golem a will was a depressing
Mistake,
She’ll heard the steak sizzling on the grill,
And the ants crawling through the grass, the blue midges
On the Victorian field: She can hear everything;
Set loose like a well-crafted paper-airplane, she’s gone
To take advantage of it,
Leaving me with a hand that I can’t play,
An empty bottle of booze,
The last line of a poem but not a rhyme for it.