The Ugly Trees Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Oh to foam, if I were beautiful-
The slenderest trick skipping home even if
Just for the one afternoon,
Taunting the bullies with my slick ways,
Getting published while still half in malaise:
Loving the general gist of the story,
Pretending to eat hemlock and Florida holly,
Forgetting how to operate a car:
Then all the trees are balmy tannenbaums
Beautifully naked without decoration,
While titling my head on the bicycling I can
Hear the enraptured lions snoring,
The tourists photographing as if summoned to
Honeymoon;
And I’m really strung out on the floor slipping
In and out of reality, eating fried chicken,
Folding paper-airplanes,
Pretending the green shag carpet is Diana’s
Forest and she’s metamorphosing my renegades
Into reptiles of long-shanked kines;
Oh, to be a part again of that wonderful never-
Mind,
With the whole family absent down another
Root, to sleep alone with my heartsick feelings to
Flume around the girls who’d already forgotten
About me, or the pretty heads talking pretty on
The color TV;
And I loved her then, down the eerie corridors
Of vermilion coasts, but she’s forgotten of me:
Distilled, she is the new weather sun-licking windmills
On her scabby knees,
I am just that ugly ghost tangled and disemboweled
In the ugly trees.