The Burning Sugarcanes Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I listen to my father relieve himself in the bathroom.
Conquistadors bending down like penitent flowers
Kissing the first lips of waves,
Like nothing else you can find in a bookstore;
And then we are done, like a report handed from door to
Door,
And then finally like a mismanaged fact given to the
Police man;
And the beauty of the world is that there are always kittens
And that they are always dying;
And I want a house with a pool:
I don’t want to be savage anymore; or if I fail I want trains
Jumping like the lips of fireworks all past
Saint Augustine,
Across country limping in straight lines all the way up
To the heads of Colorado where dreams grow
Like
Cauliflower on its monkey vines; and then I would throw
For a bus and a heavy jacket- The way Kelly chose to wore my
Flannel today;
And I can think of all the days I barely survived, chained to
Something or other,
Looking up into the lips of the divine; and then a little ways
West driving to sod farms, wishing that there
Could be more barefoot games,
And roses growing here, roses and roses weeping and true
Like maidens lost and amnesiac out amidst
The burning sugarcanes.