Utilitarian Scripture Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I get drunk because
I am a dog all over you. How many years
Now since I seen your lips
Sparking like a box of matches from that
Speedy distance,
Like a nebula skipping town:
And in high school we jaunted
The same halls,
Smoked the same smokes, laughed the same
Echoes;
And I came courting for you after a good rain shower
Further north than the Everglades,
The same courtyards as the HariKrishnas, the football
Jocks, the early morning traders:
I used to get up every morning and think of you-
You were my eggs and butter and marmalade.
Leaving her like a solemn tributary,
I’d smell you out like a wolf beneath the banyans and the
Silver windowed hauntings. Now after so many years
I still don’t know what I’m doing, but
Drinking the cheapest liquor and trying to sound you out,
Testing the depths of each shot glass hoping for the
Sonar of your fingerprints or lips-
I really don’t know what I am doing at all,
Except that I am the sort of anthropologist who doesn’t give
Up on your leggy civilizations, even if you ride the buses
Of other mostlt apple-cheeked boys,
Those guitar players, or soothsayers, or super-heros
Sprawling with the midges of their forensic evidence all over
You in the beastly pollinated meadows of a Victorian novel
With its widely populated lascivious undertones:
They’ve long since closed the doors to their class rooms and
Shut me out,
But I’ll tip my bottle upwards in the unobstructed rains and
Salute my sailors and their fantasies of high romance,
And when I finally see you once more up so many ladders,
In your high towers and shopping malls,
And escalators and bean-stocked habits,
The skyscrapers of your successful beauty,
I shall call up to you once more, and tell you my name
In voluble successions until you know my game,
And can see it in my eyes,
How you are reflected for such finite perfection,
And then maybe you’ll ride the elevator down to the lobby,
And we’ll make sweet love that mixes our nectars,
The blood and zygotes which tend to go roaming
The oppositions of the regular paths and parkways
While the shady preachers scry and the blue birds twitter,
The soft lesbians nuzzle, and the red alcoholics jitter,
And the aces flicker in the spokes of so many fast and
Wondering bicycles,
Because I am just a drifting schoolboy,
And you my ever beautifully apocryphal scripture.