The Better Means To Live Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I want you to love me, but mostly I want you
To read my poems:
And I’ve been listening to Bukowski- and it makes
Me a wreck,
And I want to take you by your straight black Cherokee
Hair straight into the aloe
While the airplanes are chirping,
To do things with you by tongue that I’ve seen done
In dirty magazines: and it’s all a fraud,
And you were smart enough to ship the goods to other
Men before I got to you,
And your house has awakened, and even without a chimney
It is red eyed and following-
Where the canal represents death,
And the red Florida holy the means for an out for the Pre-
Socratic philosophers,
And I am dying- And the kittens are licking themselves,
And by whatever hour, the alligators are smiling:
I am not a professional golfer, and so I feel that I should have
More liquor: I feel that you should write to me unprompted,
So that one day I might carry myself all the way up
To your slope and unfurl and drool so that you might smile
And hold your child out in front of you so that
She might too learn of the monster who has permitted so much
Love to bile out from his shoe-polished sack;
And that I might raise up a midget hand, still shrinking,
And ask for whatever little means you might have to
Give,
So that I might just go off again, leaving my translucent trail,
To buy more fermented grains to sign off to you,
For you to show your child, giggling, biting her fist
And tasting that flesh which is too yours,
And provides the immortal nourishment- the better means to live.