On Monday Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Wounded without cars, and there are no more
Bright new houses:
Everything is out of a book burned in a fire,
And father is dead and still laughing
Where, in the cemetery, her hand has fallen like
Misspelled leaves strewn carelessly by the birds,
Cannibals. Rocket ships leave past noon,
I suppose, with their books of poetry and their
Dusty gunfighters. She has no more cares for me,
Not even an epitaph on a tomb bright new lovers leave
Smears of lips on like snails and other things.
On Monday, the asteroid passed so dangerously close to
The earth you could smell it,
And the car salesmen stopped dead, and my scars tingled,
And supper is ready:
The last orange grown in the earth and cut about in
The sad kitchen atop the scales of a three-headed fish;
But I am not called up to eat it,
So I douse the light and dine alone:
Associating her tears with mine- it is the only thing
To eat in such a land where all the cars lay buried,
And the gas fires sizzle, rimming the failing eyes of bums
Like wayward saints lost in a dusty park- it never ends.