The Witches Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Nothing yet to do but to distill
My bone:
Sweaty on the concrete the young
Skeletons fart at their game,
Chewing on the soft candies of their conquest,
Out back on the basketball court of ruleless rusts
Wanting to nip their teeth on harder reservoirs:
Only freshmen in the gravities, they can see
Those swervey females about to graduate from their cleomes,
Their knowledge floating in sad bellied cloudbanks on the
Backs of woven broomsticks:
All the pretty witches awakened from their ditches,
Their long black hair, their dark swaying eyes,
Circling, circling, in their kind of spells:
The young boys can barely drive,
But they have a cherry red Super 88 Oldsmobile
Leaking fumes they fumble guffawing like loony-tunes
To the sea, to chase her down, the shadow
She left behind her moted over the waves like
The darkest complexion of a gaze inside a tent,
The way the moon sneaks a peek through satiny pantaloons.
They smoke in the grotto as the waves slip in,
Each one a little bent of green, the claret crabs on their backs,
The pallid fish out of their element;
Next year there will be a cabaret of vodka,
And the deformities of black snails hiding under concrete benches,
Leaking their slicks like bodiless sex:
They will smite, and they will run, and through the
Classrooms chalkboard crypts cause they their sophomoric pandemonium.
They will hypnotize chickens, and sleep under the broken
Down bus when it rains, and tight rope across the canal
To shoot of fireworks atop the milkmaid’s house,
But never again can they ever see the fortuitous entrails
Of those lips, the higher educations of the state funded ditches,
The long black tassels of the hoary bitches,
Already married to their tree of hung knights,
Who crawl out of suburban windows when the full moon bites,
The tomfoolery damsels, the busty poison apples,
The rich housewives in dark new engaging parades,
With their spotless tennis shoes pressed down on the gas,
The swirvey females graduated from their cleomes,
Forgotten in the sad lights invented by a celibate scientist,
Their bodies in a bed of cleaned stitches,
The prettiest young things, the witches.