The Elbows Of Crippled Songbirds Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I used to go to you when there was no one else
To go to,
And I was done with my witchcraft, and the day was all
Wrapped up:
And I used to dream of you and other muses
From the soft crooks of the orange tree where the
Oranges grew overly small and tart—
The tree that was filled with all of the abandoned paper
Airplanes,
After the day was done with its fires,
And the sky was filled with the cremations of the sugarcane—
And I thought of nothing else other than a high school
That crawled through its abandoned highways—
Making high art of nothing,
For it knew no understanding of aesthetic beauty—
And kept to itself no high elements—
Just the school children lost through its day until, finally,
Eventually, perpetually, to abandon it
In the early menstruations of the afternoon—like ghosts
To wonder off,
Not caring anything of similes and metaphors, or their
Other classes—but loving some of their teachers sometimes—
And careless words tossed up like sacrament for the
Glittering bellies of the airplanes—
And in their days off fornications, and weather vanes pointing out
The directions towards golden valleys—
And towards the unreasonableness of the later adventures—
Even after their mothers had gone, and their yesterdays lied
Elsewhere—even after all of the decades of their youth—
The hallways remained underneath the moonlight,
Elsewise pulling in the new echoes of shallow heartbeats-
Funded by the saints of the well-suited egos—
And carrying on as if the perpetual motions of the heavens—
The daylight drenching them like sunlight along the elbows
Of crippled songbirds.