Tight Rope Walkers Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I’ve lost the clarity of the five fingered discount:
I want to live too much in the bright hymning spokes
Of a bicycle learned to pedal for the first time:
I am turning into a white man right now, and I am
Not afraid to hum at weddings;
And the palm trees are well spindled and seem to
Be drinking deeply from the pumiced roots
Of the ironed green conquistadors; now they are the
Piqued speed bumps alongside the weedy borders
Of a half forgotten elementary school;
And I will not be accused of witch-craft, for a I
Have kept prayers for all my deceased house animals,
And a list of the girls who should have come over
To swim without moving, topless in the splashes of
Shade wrought down for the over spilling sun:
Because the girls were too beautiful, it was impossible;
They own cake shops, and wine shops, and discount
Parlors, and had to be answering to the men who could
Pay for that; and I trundled to the side without knowing
What it meant;
And so my mythology chose to fall in love with the
Face of the girl who could not speak except for dancing,
and took up drinking without paying for
It; and the lions in the downstreet amusement park took
Up yawning because they couldn’t care, though their
Love digressing into laziness, their eyes wandering
Savagely over the little girls who wandered hand in hand
With little girls insouciantly safe along the predestined walks
Outside that well-fed ferality, their legs still spry and
Growing; though they themselves were likewise as uncomplicated
As the aerie of nimbus where the memory of failed tight rope
Walkers danced between buildings that should have existed.