Not Just A Werewolf Poem by Robert Rorabeck

If I could dream of you then after school
Where grass stains and burns
Kidding knees, where you might
Fall all tripped from a rather long basketball game,
Held over slightly weeping:
Just all cut down because you couldn’t grow anymore
After seventeen:
I bight my stained teeth without looking you in
The eye
Lounging through classes in the flooded parking lot
With no one around to tell you what they like
. Oh, how so like a steamy love scene in a
Rain stained teen-romance,
Folded pages of cartoon characters and knick-knacks
Almost humming; or just beneath the press-
Metal corrugations out at lunch, and the blue eyeliner
And all those truants smoking in their rows,
All in their finely gaggled tresses like fashion
Read macaws, but not one of them a true Indian-
Not really anymore on any long term warpath-
Not even conquistadors, not even
One such: Alligators as tiny as plastic green grenadiers
Lost in inland dunes,
Nipping at their bashful ankles, ant lions and me too-
Little love bites like stain glass splinters,
Like the humid spindles Mosquitoes flume:
That night they threw a little carnival amidst the red courtyard
Where we sat around seven in the morning, casually gunning
At each other with lustful eyes, the special ed students moaning,
Trying to eat early morning butterflies; and two liter pop
Bottles full of Vodka, and quarter sticks of Dynamite-
Suburbia all drawn out around it like an orgasming picnic…..
Then pixie sticks and cocaine on Halloween-
Moms in the kitchens and rotten eggs
And cops and Roman Candles on David’s roof.
Stop.

Now I’m 30 with scars to prove it that you never did really
Love me- never got my name.
I tried out for track and got lapped by a black kid,
Try to follow after your neverending legs,
But ended up stealing from the neighbors-
Then had fever-dreams of becoming an ornothologist
Awakened again in the expensive Scotsdale desert.
When I told you I’d written really good analytical writing,
I foreshadowed you’d slapped me and drove off into the cherry red
Show floors of used car salesmen,
Revolving with romantical cliffs of silver chrome
And elevator musak:

Then, home again, hung-over,
Engorged and onto something bad:
just a careless child as foxy as Tom Sawyer, skipping school
And smoking my corn cop pipe,
Not just a werewolf
Flicking something bothersome, I catch blue gills and slap them
Promiscuously against palm trees, because someone told me that
Fish couldn’t feel your eyes upon them smoothly like pre-Socratic
Trainwrecks in newly washed linens: Those candies were for him,
All your lavender spaces,
Lemon drops, warm molasses poured into quivering
Recesses, cakes on the griddle

But the secret knocks and epitaphs on grayish tombs
I’ll keep,
The not so far off lightning,
Something Gothic foretelling on chipped porcelain,
The letters above my head sealed but for the nearly blind woman
Who feels them like a cantankerous fire lapping like
A fine young specimen out in the open skies of her
Double-wide bedroom
Like an ever living library rolling an almost green
And cold hearted sea.