One Hundred Fifty Watt Gutter Poem by Robert Rorabeck

To aborted words gathered in
Clotted gutters, in the annals of
Sewers with the excrement of mother’s
Harnessed animals, the tamed squatting
Of little shaggy legs nearby the curl
Of the satisfied lip,
Painted blueprints for greeting cards—
The worthless places beheaded and
Tossed away
Pieces of our uncle’s splattered butcheries,

To Leviathan’s bleached carcass,
Coroneted by horseflies, spiced by maggots
In the contaminated surf where ocean-liners
Age in red flaking briars and piss motor oil into the
Festering snatch of the infected sea
Toasted by fleshless architects with
The venomous goblets of garroted pirates,
Their eyes and lids eaten away by microscopic
Sea creatures with her Christian name….

In the places that rot, the crumpled
Legal papers, to treaties stomped upon,
The annexed bedrooms, the expanding putrid
Distance of ex-lovers, two nuclear warheads
Shot away from the Heartland to
Contaminated coasts, fallout the pallid glow in
Driveways of homes of gated communities, on soft
Green walkways, where murderous hands
Hold each other, trembling the sickly mask
Smothering love’s grander design,

In the morbid voluptuousness of ballroom homes
With min-vans on the boarders of gentle green golf courses
Lay like a manicured landfill over the unavenged memories,
The rape of true love with her dress torn off
And her name beaten out of her,
Running naked and lost through purple thorned suburbias,
Until captured by the well-suited poachers who
Skin her gentle in married bedrooms,

Whored between bachelored grandfathers in the
Name of Christ and sadomasochism, whipped
Until she forgets her maiden name and the country of her origins,
So, like a whisper indistinguishable, she travels back
Every night to the white-washed sewers,
Hanging her owned skin near the door of
The sarcophagus she crawls into the 150 watt gutter.