Sophomoric Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Here you are
Crawling on your belly
Doing the lines of another
Man’s God,

Card tricks to occupy
The Pope while you
Crap in his woods.

Trying to use the vocabulary
You stole from high school
English’s lavatory
To get the cheerleaders
To do a four-letter word
To you:

To spark
A fire

To F234
Like chimneysweeps:
It is an ancient and time honored
Profession,
Especially in the Bering Sea
Between the Eskimo and the Commies
The tangled pewter coitus,
The silverware and candelabrums
Spilled like valuable sex
Stripped naked on
Dead polar bears
Auditioning for
Tooth-paste commercials

There to turn on the light of
Their cadmium broom closet
Clicked under the tongue,
Swallowing nitroglycerin pills:
The sudden urge to kiss the Principle
The perfect cadaver of memory
Lit up with shadowless authority

The salivary glands you test out
Under the yellow school bus
Broken down during lunch period.

Spit into the abracadabric key
Toasting new threats
That are so fertile orange
Trees grow in toy orchards
In lakes of spilled beer
Along the tabletops,

In great seas of naked abdomen
New species of dolphin flop
And squeak like
Retarded ballerinas

And little see-through men
Spill out of her brazier
After she helps you get it done.
They apologize and swim
In marathon across the canal
To safety.

While the teacher’s pets scream:
“Skippers! Skippers! ”
Until the sharpshooters get
Them dead,
Then go off to drink Vodka and
Swing in the moony park all day.

Her iris is a fossilized creature
In an auburn trench,
She shrugs and says they
Were her grandmother’s keepsakes

On the concrete under the rain
For the rest of the day

Paleolithic,
The beauty only exists
In bedded strata,
So they cannot figure out
What to say.
Their unpleasured souls
Become waltzing neophytes
French-kissing
Pre-socratic philosophy,
Stuff they won’t read about
Until they dropp out
Of college.

Her first husband
Was also her mathematician

But until then,
Between 5th an 7th period

Their eyelashes the straws of
green brooms,
The proletariat,
Stolen from the witch’s coven,
They bend down and kiss
The floor,
They cheer your name in
Brilliant camaraderie.

They leave by the back door,
Very silent things cast into
The budding night,
They float up high enough
To spy from trees

And the rest of the school filters out
Like a tatter of silver pagan festivity,
For four years,
The current that somehow
Never quite existed.