The Local Public Zoo Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I will soon be a tramp who flights towards
Nothing,
Drinking his alphabet liquor and weeping weeping:
Oh, the age old tire swings creaking and repeating,
Wondering about the ratio of whores to
Housewives in the world:
Oh I love whores, the ones who have turned out the way that
They should because they were always up to no good:
Oh, I love you women, your otherwise saturnine
Nights, the wimple of your stars and your tattoos and how
Your eyes don’t fawn on my bruises like
The retarded lips and eyes of housewives: Oh, how I love you:
And pay you my good money underneath the soft and
Otherwise translucent bellies of the crimson airplanes:
There they go leaping again like foals in a mainjure,
While I as drunkenly as in my childhood reach for another
Poetry book,
When just before now I had Melody straddling me and it was
Almost her time to get on home,
And there was a hurricane warning before the President drove
Through town; and I got my brains and maybe a heart,
While all that was courageous curled up next to the velveteen
Lions of some paramour who was claiming to be a very
Vermillion mermaids enraptured at the local public zoo.