Oh So Sad And Clever Boy Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I.

I’m not very smart, so for you
I have to be clever,

I can be a dolphin clapping in the surf,
You play coy and feed me pregnant tuna
Barefoot in the amber sands;
Up to your exposed knees-
A whole bucketful will slow me down,
And distinguish a gunmetal sleuth in the sunset.

I can be a boy again mind numbed on vodka;
I can set off a quarter stick of dynamite in the
Ruby courtyard, crack open the geode,
and draw your attention,
Smile bare-chested and pick a wild pomegranate,
Juxtapose it near the stigmata of my navel

Or I can play checkers on the green geometry of
Suburbia,
Listening to the sweep of waves like
The alluring static of a coming radio;
but not very well,
Distracted by where you might be molting on a sprig;
Roller-skating over the bones or privateers,
The metal patina of bad conquistadors

And with the canary go down into the mines
For subtle tests of subtraction;
And I’ll see you in the halls and wish you to quiz me,
Wish you to fall across me like a masked ball,
To flutter peacock feathers over your exposed teeth,
Pretending to be genteel while flaunting
A powdered bosom

Or I can hang around the parked cars again,
Any drunken afternoon and
Wait for your smell to waif with sunset, or the cerulean
Bleed of students to homes again:
Restless on Sundays,
I can pretend to see you go,
And begin the tramp of scars- Which I’ve
Been on now, Oh, so long I guess;
Whistling in jest of my own troubles, skipping
Like a Yankee-doodled over the skulls set there to
Trip me,
Or time travel to pick you up from the stink of knightly armpits
In the feral courtyards of Camelot

II.

But you don’t live in the palmettos anymore, do you?
Like a cicada you left your bedroom askance the cypress and
Somewhere else you went

I am not very beautiful, so for you
I’ll have to be clever;
I’ll have to lay down and switch the sides of my
Face, to confuse you: how easy you forget,
And love in those waves you’ve abound in
The stacked pornographies of proletarian
Superheroes,
Pecking at the watermarked biceps of your
Saber-toothed, navy-anchored sailors.

You’ve always had to work for you dinner,
And exercise your legs around and around in
An all too quiet parade:
The discombobulated merry-go-round of T&A
I known, it looks just like how they
Bussed the students in so long ago into our lapsed
Anglo-Saxon fairy land:

Now look at my scars, and lay flowers; I’ve cut a rose
For you: I am a clever boy- Place it in my teeth and I will
Turn about you three times in the air before I disappear
For a spell,
Clapping

Become the gentleman walking north in the dry hills
Of Spain,
Again over the bones who knew more than I,
Who were flayed by Civil War

and turn away so you might not have to see
All the sad men who think my ink a jest:

Or not, for cast off this fibbing cloak and I am not
There at all; I am a failed used car salesman,
As nude as a huckstered king,
And the truant who tight-roped across the canal,
Laughing gapped toothed and spry,
Even when you would have called me home to your
Honey-bosom stung by April bees,
For we would have showered full blown in the pollens
Of vertical meadows populated by sugar rabbits,
And the immortal jay-like bodies of virgin soldiers
Massacred in the pollen,
Stacked like a busty wedding cake up to a
Golden-titted castles

III.

But, oh no,

I am not a smart boy, and I’ve never had to earn my
Dinner at a trot: I’ll buy a house instead and waltz with all
You’ve forgotten inside, and all the pages I’ve written
Never read for you; instead,
I’ll find a wife and put her in a garden,
And hold her there and keep her until she is too tired
To move and wait for her to
Smile, and see how long she’ll stay if
I’m properly egalitarian when she bends low,
And I trumpet her like in a Chaucerian revelry,
If I spit and shine at certain angles of the day, and put off my
Bayonet and watch her trough the daisies and
The blue bells from a fort overlooking the sea:
And sigh, and say like the son of an all too forgetful king,
That this is how it should have been one day for us
When I was yet blond and as well read as a comic book;

But now the storm front moves forward one move;
And it is frighteningly cold, and uncommonly beautiful in
The same town you drive for sex and show back and forth;
You who serve fried chicken and coke at the rodeos
Underneath the shopping malls,
And it has the smell of you on its cleft palate;
And it is pushing you in front of it like a cinnamon doe,
A smell of caffeine and runny ice-cream and cocaine,
A scar-less, carefree and forgetful bouquet that
Leaps clear over the shoulders of new brides,
Making me look for a little while up through the highest windows
And power-lines, to see the blue birds quivering well-fed in their
Nests,

To feel you blow over in a possessed front, tipping over stop-signs,
Eerily shoving down everything you know to see,
Your smells pollinating across the highway, causing traffic accidents;
A stunning breed of musk haunting the intangible borders;
Even while the buses turn around from school, delaying your
Offspring for awhile-
The kids shouting first-time heirlooms,
I can toast you from my middle-class
Parapet,
Uncorking my toy musket and dawning mouse ears;
Saluting you in a nursery-rhyme of an overgrown fit,
Give a turn and start down my sometimes clever stairs,
To greet all that I’ve known to anonymously become.