These are the painful errors reflected from my face, <br />As if I had been in a knife fight instead <br />Of going to prom, and bled in the swimming pool <br />Where my luxurious sisters had planned to swim, <br />And I am left injured in a mirror where my friends <br />Have been cutting coke, <br />But feel so bad about it, they make me promise to <br />Keep it a secret, but I am so far out here, <br />Down past the bustling rapids of cars, where the <br />Waters begin to pool into the everglades, <br />Where they burn sugarcane <br />In the celibate shadows where the caged lions pace, <br />Where not even games of baseball intrude, <br />That there is not a soul to tell, swimming in the higher <br />Clefts of palm trees, skipping like flat stones of sunlight <br />Along the underbelly of aeroplanes; <br />Thus, I thought my disease could be an aphrodisiac, <br />Like a trilling call, which would thus enunciate myself to her, <br />The way a grandmother may sometimes fall in love with <br />A young musician, <br />But she is too busy pouring the liquors of preoccupations, <br />To listen to a drunken demiurge, the first desire of a greasy <br />Teenager to become a god of the fallow classrooms, <br />To write love letters on the chalkboard as if a universal answer <br />To the indescribable equations, <br />But she has a real artist cutting her hair and <br />Walking her dogs, buying her ice-cream dripping in sweaty <br />Cherries down at the parlor- a groupie of the pretty boys <br />And their polygamy, thus I remain the scarred and chased, <br />Dreaming of the weedy paths first brushed by Conquistadors, <br />And the house I might have one day in the humid island of <br />Bachelors and their howling dogs.<br /><br />Robert Rorabeck<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/bachelors-and-howling-dogs/
