Appomattox Poem by Robert Rorabeck

In bed with the early morning shadows
bleeding the night into another killing
where glorious colors like afterbirth flows
in nebular jets into the horizon’s bowl,
revealed, I have the presentiment that my
life will fail, and rising against my Northern
dreams, I secede against their human impulse
of hope, and the cities inside me scream,
“You will never have her. She will never love you! ”
and through me a million men suddenly
charge into battle, slamming into each other
like tectonic plates mounting inside my body; after
a few bloody seconds there is a fissure running
through my forehead and over 650,000
of them fall dead, and my deep southern
thoughts fall down like sweat to the oppression
of my continuing hope for her; many of the
confederates are hanged, the remainder forced
to sign their lives away in indentured
servitude in the back of my mouth, never to
be spoken out loud; and so I go to sleep in the
North, victorious, the day beginning its bloom
in the low cut bodice of a harlot, my last words
being, “She will be mine. She will love me.”