She Kisses The Karate Kid Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Oh god, the pain in my overworked
Liver:
Blue collar, pushing so many words,
Sands in a bottle!
But I still haven’t found enough
Fishhooks to be rich
In Alaska:
The barmaids are still barmaids serving
Lips and legs to
Somebody, deep alone in their Paul
Bunyan bedrooms:
They love beefcake cartoons,
And roller coasters,
And nearby trailer-parks:
I’ve wanted to love in every one of an
Infinite resort of waves,
But she once asked me if I could cook,
And I said, “Only pancakes.”
I think about her sometimes, but not on
Sundays:
And that she used to surf,
And made love in the burnished surf in great
Long towns of relinquishing tourism
To boys I don’t know,
Except that they are so flawless they’ve
Never had to resort to books,
Or the endless attempts of these things:
Soon I’ll have a house
With a cotton gin and African-American
Fables-
Maybe I’ll even have a shadow in my shower
And female hands to sympathize with these
Scars,
Painted nails to beckon snails,
And soon a daughter to relinquish to the
Humid, mid-western soap-operas:
But this is not a South Florida
Noir: I love her,
But I’ve checked my baggage-
But I am just a tourist in these waves
Fading away,
And she doesn’t have to travel so far to hear
The beautiful notes
Which open up her needing doors
To feed the herons from her palm:
They are tall and dangerous,
But she has tamed them, and now they play
Sports for her senses,
And that is really all she needs.