The Stamp Of Anonymous Rest Poem by Robert Rorabeck

If I could drink more liquor, I would write
More romance, the bottle is good for want of woman:
The bottle is good when you are all alone:
And the city is busy and made of coral foam,
And airplane dust: Airplanes are angels on the rush;
And I could leave my dogs and add another conjunction,
My working class pith,
And walk out under the swaying shoulders of
Saint Louis: I’ve got enough quarters for another round,
To see my pretty mythological sisters hibernating red-lipped
Underground:
And all the women in the city are made to be in love
With certain men; and a select few are with them- The
Rest, scorned, will never love again:
Angelic women from high school with angelic bone structures:
I would like to populate my airplane with all these women,
And give their identities in a sweet list,
But what would that say about me, truthfully- if anyone was
Reading this- This sad lonely song, only it is not a song;
It wants the root of immortality, but it won’t live so long;
Girls who I still hear ringing in the halls,
Who I remember fondly, whose newborn children I shouldn’t
Recall at all; and I want my immortality on a garnished plate,
And everyone around me to declare, “That boy can write, ”
But that’s not what is waiting for me down at the dimming hall:
An open sack is waiting for me and that’s all:
With no rhyme scheme and no name tag, the coroner will
Examine me and say, “Not bad! ” For a boy who didn’t know
His lines, the park was his mistress, his wife a lonely mind;
But is dogs did love him, I have an awful hunch, but now
Where those dogs are, I haven’t a hunch- But god bless them,
And keep them in their feral mortality, and let them range along
The train tracks under the moonlight of this world’s humanity;
And when they have a moment of pause and rest,
To think of this kind master, and tell the ghosts of beautiful women,
The name of their lonely master, of him whom we have put
The stamp of anonymous rest.