Poetry
The Collected Poems of Steve McRoberts
The Collected Poems of Steve McRoberts
  Street Scene

Like surrogated fantasies,
the sex-shop owner in his den
views triple-eXcess nudities
as means to some forbidden end
as, licking lips, stoops and devours
the slick and glossy photograph,
a slogan's heard: "No choice but ours!"
which mothers chant on our behalf
as they, on high, with picket beat,
decry the non-maternal breast,
Rambo slays across the street
with no one marching to protest.

A ten-speed whizzes past the scene
with biker's lungs of car exhaust.
A hoped for girlie magazine,
from shyness toward the marchers: lost.
The housewives share a common sigh:
too much pain with their pleasure lingers
to let the onan-artists tie
the world around their sticky fingers.
And lonely, would-be customers,
whom these same women scorned in school,
turn quickly to the theaters,
escaping scathing ridicule.
Since angels stand to guard from men
their only glimpse of paradise,
they learn not love, but war again,
attending Rambo's sacrifice.

Then, on to the abortion clinics
where mothers' home-made bombs are tossed
by former hippies now turned cynics:
the sexual revolution lost.
As Reagan, smiling down on them,
plants his own bombs in the sky;
in the name of peace he shall condemn
all non-reaganites to die.

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