Away, Away Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Your lines are the fleeting
Clips
That you try to advertise,
Rounds for the rosy gun
To sell more than your adversaries
Across the street,
Those little things you say,
Syllabic stings you pin in her chest,
From miles and miles away
To compete,
You sell yourself in the dreamer’s
Marketplace,
Knowing though that you
Can never reach her,
Even if you learned the travels of
Light.
For there she is already hung
Upon him,
Her eyes already half asleep
Against his arms for all
These nights you’ve tried shouting
To her,
Spent yourself in her mouth.
No matter what you say,
Your lips splattered with blood,
Those things that die on midnight roads
To be eaten by granite vultures in ovens of sunlight
Before a single soul drives by,
The bloom of roses in a deep forest,
Speaking to no one the gifts you would hand
Over to her,
The vowels of wild flowers dewing on
The velveteen fields, nourishment for newborn feelings
Arises bravely from their hiding places
To be collected by a ship of sunlight
Disembarking across the daylight’s sea,
The communications of matter through space,
Your whisper to dock soft and restive
Through the sheltered bay of her eardrums;
But her body is too far away to feel this tide,
Though you might explode to communicate,
She can’t hear what you say, and like the earth
With the moon, she ignores the pull of your gravity,
For her universe is always expanding
Away,
Away.