Delaware Poem by Robert Rorabeck

A same old night in the city
Shedding like a river of holidays the
Preciously bought lights of movement
Pale and heavenly bodies
Revolving forward and missing,
The shift of direction,
Even more akin to the delicate veins
Inside us, the precious mineral inherent to blood
Depleting only to surge forth again,
A cavalry charge,
The purpose of continents, lungs,
And women giving themselves the
Chance to look again:

This the two lanes of traffic moving
With the direction and drive of red
Ants through the dusty body of their hills.

Jammed into the places they’ve
Been made.

Here,
The old cat is on the roof tonight
Pawing the meaningless motion above my head
Then resting, trying to
Lick itself into
Heraclitus’ river;
Here in Lake Worth the
Electricity finally comes back on
Two weeks after the hurricane,
And everything is the same and
Moving again

And I have to look at everyone’s
Face again,
Most horribly my own
Before I can forget and pass away
Like Christianity
To become the expanse of materialist wasteland
My mind the repeated batter in servitude,
A zygote born to die incomplete
And needy in a spasming orifice:
After all this time I’ve forgotten
To take account of things,
Inviting the creditors to come
Pillaging in me like Conquistador
Virgins eager for a first time
And ever after exchange
In 3 piece suites
With bags of ice and posed relief
Hiding agendas and papers to sign
With fire axes behind their backs
Waiting in line-

I lay on the bed and let
Them on me and all over the
Furniture they dropp their DNA
In a dazzling miasma excreted from
The fornication of this life
Like pollen dripped from the bee
Wasted from flower to flower
All over the furniture and especially spread
Across the bed
Pistil stained I see ghosts of
Her opening every door every day she’s getting
Out of the shower
Undressing the way specters do
Before them:
Too fast and speeding down the
Interstate,

A reckless waste of gasoline
Spilled from the lips

I don’t know her, but my mind
Keeps falling back down into
The luscious sinkhole of a brain
Destroying 3 lanes on I-95
Dreaming of 3 bedroom
2 bath sex spread eagle willingly
Rings on ring fingers,
bones and flesh pressed like flowers saved in a book,
And all those middle-class values,
Cheap wishes that come true:
The possibilities of Feng Shui
A lottery of Pre-Socratic philosophy
Clothed in Judeo-Christianity
With Jesus still fresh and on the
Hunt for a star on the walk of fame;
All of this laid down the suburban lanes
Like paradise

So far away from me

I see her in the blue revelry
In the expanse of tomorrow’s
Wetness, an ocean reaching for her.

I sate the hunger for her
With
An expensive hooker called in
After mom and dad have left
With their racehorse for
Delaware to place in in the stakes/
She has Pape tattooed
On the nape of her back like the
Graffiti on the side of a building
Given up in the ghetto
That keeps staring at me
After she tells me to
Do it to her doggy style
So she and I can finish and
Move on to the next lovely boy
Homeless for a night under the dark overpass;
She’s the first Latino I’ve
Been with, but she tastes the
Same (and puts my score
Up in the double digits)

Now the waves crown,
Rush and come to us
On the beach, the city
Is panting,
Tortoises
whores
Wasted and dark swimming
In the water’s orgasm
ignited
and
We ignore it;
The sea spills away from it
Like her hair falling in
The sink of a vociferous garden
Outwardly beckoning me,
As if I were a classic hero
With a sword able to do something,

I think of brushing her hair
In a bed next to her.

But both the cat on the roof
And Heraclitus are liars,
And Zeno knows I will
Never reach her,
But the tree next door
Still whispers

Her name

To me:

There she is and here
Am I,
Two ends of an ever
Extending line.

When I get a day off work
I go to the movie theatre
To break the law, remaining
There all day
Falling in love with the
Dark emptiness and the illusion
Of light,
Attainment flickering flatly
Magical before me,

As if she were bared there
The two us dreaming together,
A Zoetrope of
Children suspended forever
In a black and white film,
The revolving carousel
Holding hands and laughing through
The disguises of Halloween, pictures of forgotten
Relatives taken in rapid succession
Before the world could change us
Into the inescapability
Of a paused existence.