Who I Might Be Or Who I Really Am Poem by Robert Rorabeck

She got married on the same damned day that another
She was put in the show before the grave:
And the fair came and gathered up the eyes of the churchgoers
And the gravediggers,
While I pretended to sit on the lap of both my living and dead
Muses and practiced the patience I would need to
Call the rain:
And the cars came and the cars, flipping like switchblades before
The alligators’ thirty degrees of old vision:
Like wolves leaping in a zoetrope, or in the geisha’s fan:
And just as well, because I was skipping school, and bighting my
Tongue, saluting the hidden grotto while you made open thoughts
Of your man;
And you never graduated high school, so what are you doing now
But one thing or the other, but the living are still living,
And the dead are still damned,
And you drive home in the morning weeping never once figuring
Upon who I might be or who I really am.