Without Anything To Say Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Beginning to stutter in a rain shower,
I take my face down from the portrait and
Vacuum the house in despair:
Ink stains and semen helix the carpet like
Adjoining wounds, and when my mother calls
Me from another state, she addresses me, “Hey
Guy. I think your dog is sick, ” but her voice is
Less real than the rain, and the nimble fumblings
Of school yard boys and Mexicans at their games
Of marbles and yeguas:
Every time my father passes me in the yards of
Azure flies and mounds of horse excrement, he
Sighs busily outwards as if I give him a toothache:
Sometimes he burps, but I haven’t been paid
Eight months wages, and I dream of the sea when
Nobody trusts me and I’m not even good enough
To place in poetry competitions,
But I prefer to kick the can a little further down the
Road, where the suburbia is cloistered with bright
Flowers and flowing cars,
And little families dance in amnesias and dreams of
Circuses and rodeos all the way down past the swings,
Where the alligators live on like immortal spectators
Without anything to say.