World Parades Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Chandelier boats of words that don’t belong,
Like a drenched dinner guest under the kiva of her
Jewish wedding,
And helicopters trail blaze underneath the Cornish
Sun-
As all day long feathers start their new paths plucked
By whirling dervishes with great cerulean bosoms:
The feathers fall waywardly like homeopathic spells,
Like Hallmark movies,
And they cut across your eyes and make them softly
Wounded,
And they take you to unearthed graveyards where the dead
Are arriving like an Easter amusement park:
And see them come up holding plastic bouquets like
Love struck boys in the check out line;
And all the parking lots are slicked and postcard worthy
And all the girls are stricken by the beating of
Baboon hearts,
Or they’ve taken nips of liquor from blue bells and
Honey suckle, and the gunman is tucked away snuggly in
His clock tower,
And he’s missed the motorcade and all the dreams are filled
With students, and the graves are green- They resurrect the
Entire state and all of its islands, and the conquistadors are
Like green copper cannons,
And their cross is like an arcade causing epileptic seizures,
And they go across the moats of waves,
And nothing dies- not day, not night, not earth or sky,
And your love you never had for me before is resurrected
And plucked from you as if from an orchard of shoulder blades
And spine,
And it is a splendiferous chore, and such a treat-
And I suckle upon it all day, and twirl it between my gapped teeth;
It making me a boy of only five years old,
And you are like a substitute teacher I wet my pants for,
And stuttering watch you pointing out the alphabet while the
World parades in the three most playful Aristotelian spheres