The Little Puddy-Romeos In Their Sideshow Cavorting Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I have all these scars inside me
Which no one reads;
They come out when it rains and play the
Trombone;
They skin their knees,
And sometimes they like to pretend that
The clouds are made of bones,
Like drunken conquistadors,
Which is one of their favorite words,
Because they too have their cherished aphorisms,
They delight in such jobs,
But they are lonely and dwarfish;
The world is too big for them,
And they don’t wash, but crowd up amongst the
Grass in knee high socks,
They put their spider-knuckles to her windowsill
And pull up, grunting,
Wanting to see what it is she’s up to,
The little puddy-romeos in their side-show cavorting:
They always want to do this, and they pretend to
See her watching her favorite sitcoms,
Instead of just the usual shadows in a cave;
The house they made for her so empty it’s whistling.
Her brazier drying like a silky weathervane out on
A line outback the row of shotgun houses;
Everything is made of paper, and its crinkling-
They do not understand that everyone here is so poor
That they’ve left their homes, and yards,
And moved into their cars
Where they now sit all-together rusting at the blank
Drive-in movie theatre not so far away from here,
But far enough that she isn’t real,
And her effrontery but a set they lie out in getting heatstroke,
Waiting for the mailman,
Who comes bearing bags of confetti,
Thinking they look pretty;
But they are not getting paid, licking their chapped lips
Under the heedless kites and other things which have
Half-way escaped the truer convictions of gravity,
Like butterflies who are so slippery as to shoplift
Almost anything, who have entirely laid-off migrating,
But mostly aren’t very real.