Tulip Farms Of Norway Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Nefarious whispers- let them come,
If it’s the only thing
You can do then let your drunkenly lascivious
Fingers run up and down-
Haunt me from that house in the woods
I read about once so far away.
Give me novel reasons to turn back again,
Looking for you across the playground gutters
Of Florida. Help me get feverish on the swings
Of your impossibly carnal joy,
And throw up my chicken noodle soup
Over the hydrangeas and the other frilly sex organs
They were trying to sell before I got to them;
Because I have new scars like wilted corners in
The bat wings of my cheeks- novel disturbing
Not quite knowing why it hangs out plastered beneath
The smoky sky when it should be in
A whispering classroom wafting your perfumes over
Its song bird shoulders-
This is the only mathematics I seem to get out,
And I let it pour out of me, a flooded city at a subatomic level
While swearing like a transplanted sapling that I would
Do better in your insouciant shade,
All the time knowing your permed roots curl deep around the
Transformed cenotaph of a better love,
And for all of this I might only receive a freckled cage
In a richer man’s side show;
And even then your heartbeat won’t linger anywhere nearer
My drunken corner enthroned by enraptured
Though despotic metamorphosis;
Because you are always waking up in the bowers of
A cerulean woods sharp and attractive with virginal light,
Tinseled by woodsmen and their handy oil-cans,
Guessing you can come down anytime you want,
And thumb the fat highway which spreads corpulent and flooded
As if laid out for you happening like a faithful sign
both ways from the
Convenient doorstep like the
Tulip farms of Norway where you choose to live.