Drifting Before I'M Drifting Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Drifting now before I’m drifting:
Oh, Frank O’Hara, my new girlfriend, sanctified
Like a long legged mailman for awhile:
I will worship you good, go down on you for lunch,
And then grow fickle and let you disappear
Beneath that bad meat and flies of a dune buggy:
And I want to have dreams, but they are made for
Better boys who can understand and teach their grammars:
Or boys who don’t mind at all,
But who can swing that bat and cross their blue-anchored
Arms over themselves and look like well-developed
Swans:
There is just nothing for my disease, something like a
Scattered prince blowing out his ashes along the Mississippi:
I work for no one, and it’s a good job, because
Nothing has as of yet broken down,
And the city is vagrant and made for versatile fuel:
And all the most beautiful people are so beautifully employed:
They have so much going for them; they know the classics
And can allude to those sunny sororities: Like,
There’s a girl in a garden misquoted, and my two dogs are
Laid out but in their time will wake up again and worship
The things I should dare thing to sea; and I loved a single person
Wonderfully, but I am not brave enough to publish my
Poems for them:
I am not brave enough to find a suitor and disappear into
The unsuspecting trance of commuting angels:
And down, and down, and make yourself comfortable on the
Way to the job; but it wasn’t suppose to end like this,
My love, but so it ends.