Galleria Of Nostalgic Senses Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Love me when the show’s over,
When you have the rosy glow from
Walking barefoot beneath the lanky mangroves,
Teething on the saw grass, teething;
And when it rains over the service industry of
Well-calved stewardesses:
When the university is pulsing through
The young steams bowed in holy:
Love me, and put dried flowers in my book of
Blank verse,
Turn your head and cough,
Black-eyed in the shadows, put on injuries,
Dirty your nails and jog for me short-skirted
To the semi’s h*rny bl*ws-
Graduate for me in the lighthouse’s slender
Cathedrals on the land spit, spikenard
For alligators,
Defanged lions cleaning themselves in emasculated zoos
Of androgynous thunder.
Love me too in old picture books of the Holy Land,
In Mark Twain’s moody vitriol and broken narrative
Structures,
Love me in the tramping disillusions of handsome
Winos taking to cardboard shelter with their dogs-
Love me to the drenching pitter-patter.
Love me because I drive all night for you, and
I plow the fields of ambitious sunlight,
And I am impregnated by the distant pit of your
Turn-based carousing;
And I drive all night for you just to be under the
Cheap liquors of your sundry billboards,
Following the sandy curves of wise men and their hunchbacked
Dromedaries, the red tracks of shoeless baseball players,
The wandering Jew whose name I am carved beside,
Hitchhiking in the stripped galaxy of cars led by
Ferguson through the
Galleria of nostalgic senses,
Love me looking upwards from all those saintly grottos,
The muse painted ceaselessly by all the old masters,
Or scribbled dreamily on a desk in math class:
This star that doesn’t sleep,
Or the wound that will not close:
One breasted, where satin drapes like the denouement
Of a wishful play,
Where the wind cuts across the abandoned lot except
For all the lesser cars,
And the greater airplanes leaping from the tarmacs of
Their home towns to a faraway land where there
Shall be no love to return.