Taking My Place In His Grave Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I start over- I start over and believe in guardian angels:
That’s who I was in kindergarten,
Yet molested by the long hungry drive-
Still entertained by the trees hung-over the tin
And plastic grief of the pet cemetery:
All houses were enormous- All cars were divine:
I’d never drunken liquor, but she’d already shown me her
Thing:
The agelessness of shells is everywhere, in the road
Where the puppies play,
In the pornographies hidden in the cars underneath the
Australian pines;
How I had my first troubling kiss under or around the
Hibiscus by a girl I didn’t mind- Maybe she was much older
Than me; Maybe she was an aunt with brown,
Brown eyes:
Now I’ve sipped airplanes and my first beer;
And I’m really trying to do well-
Trying to do better, but I can barely get a grasp on it:
I can barely sing, and the kidnappers are prowling the streets
And my corn bushel can hold only so many fireworks;
And I wouldn’t so much like to wake up the world,
As I would one single girl- One single good girl;
It doesn’t matter her colors, or her songs-
But that she should strike across me like a match run across
The apex of the first house I can remember, to strike a fire in me
That does away with all the other fires, the fires of liquor and
Grief, the boom slang, necrotic fires that her careless Disney World
Struck into me even as she got in the car and sped off to
Her hideous wedding with the body who would become
Her husband while I took his place in the grave.