We No Longer Go To School Together Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Cars can-up the road,
And business is good,
And mail boxes are choking:
Girls in the shortest skirts you’ve ever seen are
Walking their dogs,
Leading them into the open throats of crepuscule,
Leading them to the good lakes of sad colors.
Then the world is only blue and has an easier alphabet:
You could spell it once or twice with your first words.
In this place there are only so many houses in the world,
And they turn all the same way
In their zoetrope neighborhood. Coyotes chase them innocuously,
And I fall asleep open mouthed
While dragon flies capitulate around the ringing light
Of the foyer’s centerpiece;
And all the dinner guests have died, but they have not
Walked away,
Because death is talking a piece;
His scythe like a shepherd’s cane resting over beside
The wheat.
And it is warm and cool outside across the yards of modest
Sepia that don’t even try to grow but an inch a year;
And I sat out there amidst the faux roman
Pillars and wrote this you would love me many latening
Evening ago;
And the world was so polite even the insects didn’t bother me;
But I confused politeness with apathy,
Because I can no longer climb those mountains between us.
I am blinded by my loneliness, you have taken his name,
And we no longer go to school together.