Too Coy To Be Frightened Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Plenty to do this evening:
Fifty bins of pumpkins- so many spooks
For one holiday, but we hope to do
Our part at rotting teeth and welcoming in
Satan:
Oh Satan, thank you for your greatest counterculture
We are never allowed to speak about,
And for helping me get this farmer’s tan throughout
The day while the black men stoked up this
White lung of a tent
The lights glow under like the softness of a suburban
Foyer.
And there is a black cat stalking birds in the grass,
Which lights out towards the blue gills in the canal
Whenever she sees me-
Every animal with its survival instinct- That is why
I haven’t looked into your eyes in so long,
And write short poems to get my fingers away from you
Before they entirely burn with insouciant poisons;
And the buses turn around every day like a wedding train
Of really fearful ghosts,
And I always check to see if you might be on one of them,
But you are never on one of them-
And this poem is keeping lit too long to justify any more
Of it being sent into the unreturning sea of obscurity,
Like fifty palates of pumpkins tumbling in the waves,
The moon’s Amazonian breast smiling down upon them
And fluming its milky penumbra to feed the feral cats
Who are too coy to be frightened to say hello.