The Civilization Of Juno's Appreciative Virtues Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Pretend to spill wine from your absence:
Because I am dead, I cannot taste but recommend
Its bouquet just to please you,
To let you pass through time with your jingling
Knights, embossed inheritors who can play
The guitar who like the pornography and cigars
You buy for them:
After I have helped you move into a new ghetto,
Lay me down here beside absent girlfriends and
Say, this is the coffin I scavenged for you where you
Will live;
And nothing will call, and nothing you’ve created
In sloppy reverence for the superficiality of my
Bosom will be recognized or will sell;
And you are drunk- you are always drunk and
Getting ticketed, even on your mythological bicycles;
And a girl can only drink one or two poems,
Before dehydrating on the failed lucidity, like trying
To survive down in the esoteric creek beds of
Utah- And lay into him, hard and untruthful, even if
He is your girlfriend’s man, which I have surmised
From my constant telegraphy and seven dollar rums:
They still card me out here in the worthless desert,
The cannibalistic blue jays and the mothers who will not
Sell; and it is a funny, murderous thing- How I have
Spent myself into your unappreciative vases, because
I thought I recognized your naked virtues in an oil painting
I happened upon in kindergarten, which made me lost,
Just as I am losing myself again stumbling through the
Trailer parks and happening upon the weedy train tracks
Where you’ve long since passed with your favorite dogs,
And your favorite men, with the same impossibility of
Happening up the civilization of Juno’s appreciative
Virtues, either way I chance.