Prelude To A Job In The Service Industry Poem by Robert Rorabeck

When I sometimes don’t believe in
Poetry anymore,
Most particularly my own,
Then there is no wind, and the sea
Is all doldrums:
Dogs are just dogs,
And men are just men,
And even Neruda’s lines hang like
Wet clothes in the backyard of some
Foggy home too poor to inspire
Anything but pity, and spare change,
But I know this is all I can afford,
Because all my experimenting in high school
Has ostracized me forever from
The peachier labyrinths in my brain,
Leaving my fingers to wreak the
Halfway feverous mob of drunken zoos:
Bukowski when he was only part way through
His first red bottle, and just beginning to light;
Rimbaud in his waning twenties,
Believe instead in importations and
Not pink sluts open in the cheering balconies;
Stretching, Baudelaire in a grave christened by
Deep graynesses of topless gin:
Braughtigan with a self inflicted bullet in his pan,
Jim Carroll with a needle in his vein
And crabs in his pants,
Ginsberg without any young boys to godhead
And a nuclear meltdown,
But that shouldn’t mean these digits shouldn’t
Tap dance extemporaneously in their canceled show,
Alone on the keyboard’s stage below my boogied nose-
These streets are mine, even when they
Are without a care, and even if my rhymes slur
Like the leaking guts of a blue car
Beneath the moonlight of the sleepless streets;
These words are mine,
True if broken, weary and struggling through
Their classes of incomprehensible professors,
And the heretics of a better gloom,
They can sleep anywhere there are friends of the
Liberal arts; and, if not, they can always flip burgers....