Far Too Sweet Or Too Sudden Poem by Robert Rorabeck

A thief and then a liar pass over the two dueling overpasses
Who are fighting their ways into the jungle of heaven:
Words break down about them, and are disregarded and fed to
The toothless lions looking with uneager vanity into
The shallows where the blue gills are mating,
Where the suddenly dashed bicycles rest;
And it oh so happens tonight that Alma does not join her brown
Loins to my pale streets:
She sleeps with a man who ran away from Mexico with her,
Who ran away from her and then back again, crossing the frontera
So many times, seemingly unafraid of saber tooth’s:
Certainly he hasn’t read these comic books, and his pornographies
Are all alone,
Even though he will be losing sweet Alma again come the next
Downy morning, when I sing to her like the carnivore of a blue jay,
Like a wolf in the forest of a candy store;
And somehow she has recognized me and called me in, and her body
Presents a storm of Ferris Wheels down across the empty bones in me,
And plays there a melody so fickle and so real,
That I can never capture for a meal, nor own as something for to sell;
But she will sing down to me again by the successive displays of
The sun,
A firework with a pulse, a happenstance of an apathetic providence,
Far too sweet or too sudden to understand.