Windy Night For Boo Radely Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Good and drunk enough now
To write about a Guatemalan wife:

When I swore I wouldn’t:

What a sad and tragic display to write
About a beautiful woman
You see ever day

When she is just trying to feed her children
Or her boyfriend
And make the car payments
And pass the time

When you are so troubled and
Silver on a tree
That she can barely look at you,

When you love better and more venal women
Who are always so much further away,
And your father sells star fruit,

And your life is a famished joke,
In which you once jogged the length of a marathon
In Okaheelee Park with no one to see
When you were still with another girl,
Who just bought a house with her husband
Who is also a small time lawyer,

And yet you managed off enough gin and water coloring
Tonight
To get this all out there
And finished the game early in the seventh because you
Kept throwing duds
And managed to turn her eyes even further away
In the grass where the jaundice
Lions are panting
While the tourists fart
And take photographs:

And thus the word is concluded,
The muse turned around and led back to the
Suburban butchery:

She doesn’t love you,
She- She is a beautiful mouse in
Disney World

And it is another windy night for Boo Radely.