This Unpublishable Suburbia Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Old books in my hands,
Are rectangular planets of the psocids who live in them;
Each page a whispering continent prone to wispy quakes,
The spine an avenue which halves this earth,
The migrations of flagella over the landmasses of dark consonants;
The tattooed paragraphs flow ignored....

I dreamed last night that you had a terrible disease,
And while I slept you danced in the conversing shadows,
While the avengers of the world’s evil doers
Flipped each page to move you on-
You were the zoetrope of a luminescent paramour,

That night I dreamed with my diminutive manager
Under the beer-can mobiles across the erstwhile yellow apartment,
In the dirty turnabout of the way station beneath the busy airplanes
And the flat tires in disregarded towers reaching
Up your slender ankle,

So where you worked became some kind of castle
For Don Quixote and my bankrupt uncle;
They came in every night when you were closing,
From the banking hill of the laughing windmills,
In the hour where your blouse glowed like slow cadmium;
The fuse persuading gunpowder from the impossible mine,
And your eyes, your eyes were at their most indescribable....

“A castle it is, ” they said in the dream,
Looking at you like gold toothed mules,
The animal man survived from,
Climbing with their lucid thievery up your canyon- not knowing
Of your consumption,
And how those coy eyes flew over their grayish shoulders,
Searching out the tawny paladins of your affliction.

Then I would awake, confused,
Inebriated by the genius of celibacy, and the day’s headlights....
As the industrious lawnmowers perambulated toothily across
The current page of this un-publishable suburbia.