The Tragic Shoreline Of My Other Venal Muse Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Rubbing dimes together,
I cause little presidential fires beside
The train tracks
And little girls come and get caught outside
Their backyard swings:
They think it is neat magic what I do to
Cook what I need to survive,
And they attribute the resurrection of their
Favorite cats to me,
But it was not me: I was not thinking of the
True freedoms of their welfare;
I was thinking of my sick muse, lost in Colorado
Five feet tall in a witch’s pony tail,
Skin so pale like opal snow: How she haunts me
And I test the wind against the zinc
Firecrackers to see which way the trains are going
Today,
And I steal the pink martinis from their mothers’
Boudoirs, because even the weakest liquor gets
Me so high it tells me I can float
Up like the moon drippy like a Spanish gourd over
The white-capped spine of this country,
The beautiful cords that are bleeding tourism and
Wine,
And that I can find her, and spend so much in her thoughtless,
Winter-whipping store,
As to make her remember my name
For a night in a hotel room of short change, before I have
To go leaping back again to the tragic shoreline of my other
Venal muse.