The Bed In Which They Didn'T Belong Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Faces of forgotten cowboys on the high ridges of
Opulence:
Now covered by the tricks of dust, their masks hidden, and the
Way they used to sing woebegone for their women
Who were all enamored inside the towns they were too
Nervous to approach:
Full of occupations and the knowledge of apple trees:
They felt better on the cattle drive, under the moon:
Blue like velvet,
Like the orbit of a wave: they could never even imagine cars:
Things driven to take her further away:
The cities boiling up to the tombs in the sky,
And the wisdom of their adversaries teaming in the fine stock of
Railroad cars
Gathered together as if for a game: Now all of the lush frontera is
Gathered out before them.
Spread like a dinner plate where the Mexicans move insatiably
Trying to get through the wounded orifices
And from there into the working machines of
America;
And fireworks over that, and the long coattails of peacocks
And cockroaches,
Strutting perpetually and unannounced to all of the new occupations
Of man kind who somehow figured out
The subtle wonders of in ground pools and golf courses;
That they have become so sated over the fineries of the female form,
That they have saluted her and made grottos for her inside
Malls,
And the bestial natures of the heavens have gone into story books
That only their youngest of children imbibe,
And soon grow out of: they grow up into roller skates and then
To kiss her neck inside the perpetuating arcades,
Leaving hickeys, and the tiniest of stains almost indescribably but
There and unremovable in the patinas of the beds in which they
Didn’t belong.