Missouri Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Encourage me again to keep drinking,
To take the interstating highway up past cloud
Cover,
Where the wind is cutting pure dreams,
And all of this unhealthy resin I’m still squeezing
Out of high school:
Now, without having to say anything, my lips are
Exhausted, and cars are learning how to fly into
Other states,
And nobody understands me but the sad flowers
Bundled together like tinseled f%gs
So high up even the skyscrapers feel like children:
And where is Diana now,
Keeping what harem in this kind of night:
Can she feel me bedecking her, the first great poet of
This next depression:
Can she feel me doing my thing in bed next door
To my parents, carrying her flag of obnoxious colors:
Imaging her perfumes matriculating out of that
Lunch wagon, that she had been married once
In Columbia,
That she has a young daughter with the same Cherokee
Hair
Who knows nothing but the leaking faucets of laughter
In a world cartoons;
And I want to give the little darling a rose to give to
Her mother, while the wind blows the sky blue,
And I am so glad I didn’t have to stay in Missouri.