Not Sebastian Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Shower off everything else,
In the little apartment biding time,
The recourses of the month, the sad tuitions,
And the dreams that step out the door and
Drown with the leafs in the communal pool:
The clean death smells of chlorine.
Two stories up she lives with her two Dalmatians
In a studio.
She studies to be a paramedic, a house wife,
Something greater than working at the drive-thru window,
But she doesn’t look at me.
She has always looked at you, but you are already a father.
Someone not named Sebastian, a grad student in a bad economy;
Everything here rings like the wind chimes’ telephone.
I knock on the door, but no one is home.
She is making love somewhere else,
A place of greater expanses, a concrete prairie,
A movie theatre, the football stadium,
And the blowndry herds masticate towards the gymnasium
Where their eyes fawn, their bodies move
Under the greater lights of the upwardly mobile marches;
The bellies of middle-class diplomas sweat in the tanning booths,
But she doesn’t look at me.
She has always looked at you- Someone not named Sebastian.