Teenage Coffins Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Scar of a nightingale, sing to me of gunfighters,
And lets make a movie in the hollow of a tree.
When I was seventeen and ran my fingers down your throat,
I waited out the window, and you opened- I cleaned your boat;
And other men after me, going down the week;
Smoking Chinese dragons coming through your window,
A parade of men haunting underneath bed sheets-

What needed you from me took only a day or two,
We smoked in the sunken grotto beneath the hem of the sea-wall;
I got drunk for seventh period History; George Washington
Was crossing the Delaware in a pink wig, pointing ostentatiously,
Floating on my rum; the ice melted from bad poetry,
The lady shook it in the lake; we all went down to meet her,
And baptized for badness’ sake- I wanted to love you like
A dog, and lick you like a frogs’ backside: You showed me how to get there:

Or you keyed my cherry red car. They had parades in the red hearted
Court, and rides that turned around flipping spitted sin up to the heavens;
I watched him drawing blood from your neck, his teeth a regular syringe:

Then, and on and on, the alligators fornicated on the lawn.
The little girl in her training bra hanging like tinsel down from the
Cypress’ arm; To cut it short, I drank the port and f-ed your mom
In the jubilant shade of suburbia’s teal tennis court, and hydrangeas-
I failed the report; but the nights remain so long and humid, drawn
Out like a cancerous divorce, I followed the trained otters up the easement where

The sisters in law are Siamese twins, you’ve never met them.
They let me in, I bump both of their chins on a gold knobbed four
Post bed while we watch the weather forecast, and their professional Jewish husbands
Drive confusedly around the landscaped cul-de-sac. You want it
Back, you want it back? But I won’t let you in. My opera is far away
In the canopy of the savage Amazon, where the cannibals exclaim that
The white man he taste just like chicken-

I wanted to cup your breast and pop your hymen,
To lay you down and ornament the mowed and dewy yard,
but you kept me waiting
In the pews while perusing your jockeys and greasers
under the bleachers in seizures of
Epileptic sin: Now the day is dust and the school is a graveyard full
Of rusting teenage coffins, squealing Amen!