What It Was They Imagined Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Words in the graveyards of little pets:
Thoughts of paper thin things that hardly were ever
Awakened enough to breathe,
Like a family of membranous voodoo cast in a game of
Bones,
And eerily displayed through the broken reflections of
An industrial swimming pool
At a water park of geeks, or in an sluttish aquarium
Where they let the dolphins fornicate
For the commercials of our sweet Disney Worlds;
As the sun receded into commas where it no longer realizes
How attached it is to this
World, and the Mexicans fall asleep straight under the
Orchards
Where the busses wait for them until morning like good
Lovers, their engines idling,
Making oily breaststrokes, and ever one of them remembering
How the truants once slept under their motor boxes,
And cursed the scarred hopes of
Their high school’s infatuated love: before they were stolen
Away;
And like simulacrum who can only imagine one or two
Things,
Are wondering still, while the terrapin steal from the courtyard,
And go out to fornicate under the saucy eaves
Of saltwater embankments, stolen by egrets or left by
Morning before they realize the tarry payoffs
Of what it was they imagined they had to sell.