The Termination Of This Home Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Face mottled like an old penny,
A yellowed nursery rhyme she used to love,
I masticate on imbedded wisdom teeth,
Recall the roadside pornography of the Indian
Hotel I slept in one night in Tallahassee,
On the wayside of the fall:
I remember barely standing the reflecting, the
Spread puddles of commuting wheels-
How I was halfway home to sell fireworks in
A condemned building beneath the palm trees,
Placed in a game board of tennis courts,
Doctors, lawyers, and dentists offices: How I was
Becoming more like nothing, spreading out the
Vantages of the harrowing oblique patrons to
Long-legged malls, to gas-stations, and too it all:
I think now that I could never escape,
But here I am running on the prisms of an oil-slick,
Quilling down another line of poison for the
Thrill of the barley mermaid, schlepping through the foams,
Half-drunk on stinky biceps, hiccupping through the loams;
And now I’ve gone and destroyed the rhyme scheme,
Because she does not read these poems: And I am
Fed up, and I full of cornpone, but it has become beautiful to
Me the exegesis beside the lathered street, behind the wrought-
Iron grate, the woebegone hound gets stuck,
But I set him free, and the trees whisper to the dead, and
They bow down and sooth their marble head;
And it is such a beautiful, beautiful thing to rest alongside
The creatures known to the earth, whom have become the
Past participle to the living, the corruption of the passing form,
The termination of this home.