Why You Are My Venal Muse Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Lights that peel out forlornly behind wimpled
Windows,
The dead poetesses who sleep out bare-chested now
In the dead center of black town,
Little black boys pissing on their graves,
But only half as worse as the corpulent tourists
With cantaloupe sized hearts,
Freeze-dried lawyers for sh&t canning astronauts
Walking their dogs,
And moping through the ruckus of this canopy
The way little lives do
Every day through the franchised and fast food
Drive through,
While you are in your sport,
And liking bedding down, while you imagine
Puffy unicorns up in the sky with black eyes without
Reason,
And your he-men running around on your
Color television, bare footed and fighting the skeletons
Of lesser men’s diseased;
And they tore down the church to expand your work,
And right now the professors are sniffing paper bags
Of glue,
And your university looks so red and shiny,
As shiny as a ruby shoe, but everything about it is
Venal,
Caught around a line of tenements and things that
Have a hard time breathing,
And your eyes go on forever seeming, auburn
Fires of old news:
This is why you are my venal muse.