Growing Up Far Away Poem by Robert Rorabeck

These days are lonely and humid,
And the year so far one long warbling trill
Filled with innocuous hunger,
And the hands of planets who have been
Demoted into balls of ice,
And thus float so far away they have no
Recollection of the linchpin desires of modern
Homo sapiens, and how the highways run
Distended and spilling over into
Other towns with all the same billboards,
Department stores, and drive-thrus worked
By the hair-lipped and greasy dispossessed,
But still closer than the other things,
The harder elements we have no names for,
Because they are so far away from the sun,
And they spin around and around like stone children
In their ellipses, and weigh so much that
They drag the lighter things around them,
And spin them like coy playing with wine corks
In a Japanese pond,
But if they have a color, it must be added,
For they are not orange, and their hearths do
Not blush, and they do not have a work ethic
Or awards ceremonies were doctors are hooded
And their lives turned into a dreamy soiree
Filled with easy hours, facile sex, and crumbs
Of salt and vinegar
Placed like cake by hummingbirds in the corners
Of their smirking mouths: This is the brightness of
Our world, or so I am told by the body language of
Lovers making the pleasant intercourse of interlocked
Fingers in the chirping parks, biting their lips over
The names of unconcealed children, the following
Generations of amusement parks, while the darker things,
Those without skin or heart disease warble in
The fugue of unfathomable motes unrequited by the
Celestial spheres, the folded maps of little towns with
Steeples through which starving men walk with
Bowed heads.