To Where All The Genies Live Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Technically, the words can play for a little while,
Drunkenly
Five stories up in a Shanghai suburb
Even if no one else remembers me:
The little places we used to go,
Alone,
But with a glowing bottle,
And the language that we used in our nocturnal day
Was not so peaceable,
But it made love to flowers
And made fantasies out of acrobats—
In the morning, as the children return to lock and key,
You can only see the used car sales men
And all of the atrocities underneath the sun—
But for a little while
I ventured to where the genies live—
And we in our truancies took a knee in the waves,
And cursed and threw all of our flowers,
Especially the roses, into the sea.