The Thoughts Of Idiots Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Tell me you love me, even if I hate you:
Even if you are my most imperfect muse; and yet my muse,
Because I make love to you,
Underneath the light bulbs of the candle wicks and the Ferris
Wheels, while nothing else endearing has to move,
While the lions have to roar,
And each of the most beautiful girls in the sorority has to
Touch themselves,
Before almost immediately they must get married and move away:
As the clouds do every day, over the graveyards,
The junked cars, and the pornographies of my childhood;
As if there was entirely another world across the canal
That they will be building up anyways; and I don’t
Understand the politics of this hullabaloo:
I was best when I was four years old, a wire in my jaw
From slipping on the interstate, my pants wet from daycare,
My sister crying for me, and my mother reading me the folklores
Of my first obsessions through all the better parts of the
Premier afternoons that I wish that I could remember:
The cars rolling on, and fieldtrips to wedding parties of topless
Women, and grottos where the ceiling fans purr;
And her hands on my shoulder blades like the sunlight of angels
Weighing me down in a wishing well,
Making me hold my breath until I could arise baptized into
An entirely different situation where her mouth kissed my blessing,
Hiding me by dimming light of the parks that knew my childhood,
As the alligators knew the thoughts of idiots
In whose parades, Alma, we continue to kiss and make love.