The True Romance Of Pulp Fiction (Or: How I Have 50 Days Left To Live) Poem by Robert Rorabeck

She said our relationship was like Star Wars: The Phantom Menace,
The worst of the series:
Flat, without character,
Distant from the audience,
Sexless,

Our house a blue screen we
Acted against (poorly)
- not knowing the way to the
Emerald City-

She said she wanted our relationship
To be like it was before,
As good as the originals,
The Empire Strikes Back,
The best of the series:

Fucking and what they call:
Making love in a warm bed,
Making love against the italics of
Snow fields on Hoth,
Like Luke and Leia
With a black man on the fringe
To be politically correct
And to sell more tickets

With suggestions of incest,
The Freudian implications,

But I was tired of going in and out
And out and in
Of her cave just to end up back
Where I was, with my X-Wing
Sunk in the swamp,

Trying to prove myself to my father
Who sold himself into a computer
For the American Empire:

I told her everyone of his movies
Was just to make $$$ and not art:

To expand the waste of Capitalism’s
Glut,
To sell more Tupperware (of course)
And the undergarments and circumcisions
Made in China made by little men
With ancient fathers,

Like Darth Vader,

She didn’t understand/
Either did I, how she lives in Boca
With her sister and the hands they’ve
Grafted into the Middle-east and the
Ancient religion they turn to when they
Need to buy things,

Goyem

We are all the alien species
When we need to buy things and move
Far up north to Michigan’s northern peninsula
So we can freeze with a snow beast living inside of us.

Without universal communicators
We make love on the football field

So we separate into Galaxies
Far, far away.

A long time passing,
Sometimes going through Burger King’s
Drive-thru
We try to remember us
By buying limited time collectible
Watches:
I have all six

The characters in that cold space,
The graffiti of our bones.