The Delicious Fats Of Forbidden Playthings Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I am innocent of plans-
Nor am I now drinking rum, or
Scribbling up skeletons for novels
Which should not involve
Fervent incest with half-glorious aunts,
Looking like consumptive poetesses,
Whose shadows are the bright smolders
Of early morning forest fires,
Who crackle and drip off the cooking bone
The delicious fats of forbidden playthings-

Like tennis players’ sweat pearls on red clay

Or of inglorious entrepreneurs commuted to
Mars, like sunny Florida,
Christmas trees that are allowed to forage on,
The tall naked arrows of a yet fermenting atmosphere,
Elusive sacrifices to Earth’s broken down apocrypha-

I write on plain manila paper, like empty cicadas on melaleuca,
To save the lines,
Or to create new shelves over amnesiac oceans,
To mine fresh scars over
The swelled cornucopias from whose blue horns
Fish are leaping;
As a guest all alone, to open her parents’
Refrigerator and devour what
They’ve been coolly saving up for their bourgeois pallets;
Tongue liver and caviar,
To kick the dog.

I have no job to define these dreams,
No craft to distract death
Long enough to move my queen to victory,
To chat him up to change my seat and join the
Ostentatious gentlemen who
Took sips off the first lights of invention
Which rose up browned and throbbing
Sparely along the potted streets;

Here it is, the unnamed future
For us who are not professional,
Who drink too many wishes,
Who pissed against society gurgling
Amidst the coins-
Who are now burned out
Like the stomach of our country,
The lazing belt inexhaustible with
Trailer parks and tin stars;

Already duplicitous to Rimbaud,
A decade on Rupert,
With Teasdale breathless,
Disavowed back into earth,
The pantheistic natives leaping jubilantly
Around the fence,
Illiterate and proud in their cars;

No plans at all,
But I am still a young holidaymaker,
Bouquet a jaunted mess not yet all wilted,
Who might yet beat
Bukowksi at his swine heart game,
Who might yet become
Like Harvey Silver,
Rotund and rain-explored,
Alter-ego to something uprooted,
Beautiful,
Extemporaneous and pervasive,
The effusive light making pretty water stamps like
Souls migrating up and down the street.