The Roses Which Still Bare My Name Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Unicorns wounded on the road floating
Above the discos and orange parlors, like armless
Beggars,
Their outlawed horns like the perfect ice-cream cones;
Their goblins are road kill, and there is some kind of
Orchestra rising like gnats for two days over
The sink holes of ex-girlfriends before they
Disband like band members, like overweight boy scouts
Or Hitler’s youth given up on the mountain:
So many overpriced airplanes, Japanese Zeros,
Panzers in the flea markets:
Really, I stumbled upon a toy soldier show in old Lake
Worth; I ate a cow, and congratulated myself:
I stared at pregnant ants and their beggars in the relief
Of unborn bedrooms;
I nuzzled in the straw in the Eucharist of starless generals;
I fainted, and came to through the smelling salts of my own
Wrists;
And now my parents are home, and I have trapped myself
In a human body to go mad, but the village is still
Defending itself, the archers bristled in the cornfields and the
Tennis courts;
And I almost bought something, I almost defeated myself
Into the penumbras of your overpriced love;
But I am not so easily found and committed;
And there is yet so much more to be defeated in the colorful
Grooms of the sound;
And I am antique and pulling myself out of a race with
The waves,
And you can never love me, because that is how I made myself,
While even now the turtles are making love
Across the stretch-backed darkness corrugating I-95;
I have hidden myself so well, neither the egret nor the kite
Can find me, Erin;
Nor can you ever be allowed to find me, because I am not
Well;
I have crashed into the mangroves and the thousands of
Islands of the pet cemeteries and Indians of the
Everglades,
In a thousand pieces of indescribable cenotaph,
And the mailboxes are empty,
And the housewives are amputated in crepuscule,
And you are a perfectly beautiful woman,
Erin,
Except that you have never bitten your lip in wonder,
Or had thoughts of summiting my shipwrecked mountain,
To find me grinning there like the remains of
A way post with the skeletons of the roses
Which still bare your name.