The Sandbox In A Child Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I am nothing but a sandbox in a child,
Burying red trucks while the teachers and
Students are sleeping in the structure;
I am alone and the lightning goes laughing
Like troubled day workers in the nebular greydom:
Perturbed for the afternoon,
I hold the rain to my cheek like tears,
And imagine French-kissing a Shirley Temple
Named Chelsea- She is only six,
Anyways, and I have already stolen from her
The intricacies of careless good-will;

She doesn’t know me now,
Like a song in that part of her mind she’s
Destroyed with all that alcohol and sex,
The little things girls do to come on to the world,
To find the boys shooting arrows in the caves,
To take one and kiss him like an acolyte,
A purveyor of the divinity’s truth,
And those legs who struck the fact,
Kicking upon men’s jaws
Across the Smokey Mountains:
The bearded revolutionaries,
The Shakespearean Thespians,
The landowners,
And the inventors of electricity:
In quick time at the cabaret, she owned them all:

Though they are now all dead,
The reclusive life-long abstainers,
The highway men in grandfather’s grave,
The successions of better men, falling to the fast
Flung pellets, falling to the bears,
To the lucky Indians, and the plotting of the rich:
The machete’s blushing glaze,
The machine gun’s extemporary enjambulations
To the unforeseen mishaps of chaos’ broken jaw,

Along the highways
And her thighs

They lied down ploughed in the fields,
And did not wake up, even after her accoutrements of
Aphrodisiacs and witchcraft, she placed upon their
Winsome foreheads, watching by the jetting penumbras,
Cared after by the old maids still full of breast,

The men who lied down for lovely wisdom,
Even before they were fully formed,
The pilots of blushing gardens,
And the forbearers of this knowledge so far-

Thus, striking out, I find her a little ways outward
Before death- the low oxygen harem of her eyes,
In the highest mountain of Alaska’s insufficiency-
I love her, I love her, I love her-
Though I am neither whole, nor justified-
No longer do I know what I am no more-
None the less, and all along, I cry out to her now,
The wounded wolf, nor fully formed
But protected by the government-
I cry out to her now, from my little play room
Above her head-
If she should hear me let her know that I am
About to end,
But I am waiting for her still,
And still hold hopes of finding her in the
Expensive amusement parks of rodents,

In the soft salted gardens,
Where I still imagine twists with her tongue,
And long talks with her eyes,
Should they choose to bloom upon me still....