Pretending That She Could One Day Be Mine Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I go into a strange neighborhood and make love
To a strange woman- back and forth through the gates
Of her suburbia- she seems as if about to fall
Asleep as I make love to her,
But she says I am sexy and bigger than average:
I say she’s about ready to transform into the next
Starlet of the overworked Hollywood block buster:
And when I go home: I go home and I have no
Dog waiting for me, but my house is paid
For and a water fountain arrived today and a place
To put my television: I put them both together
And it helped to take away the hours of the day:
And now I sit on the sofa that I got from a place of
God, and I listen to the water that I poured earlier
Into the fountain from a water jug- and I think of and
I feel the pain left over from a muse who has left me
After a year: a brown girl who was married to another
Man: a brown man who knows nothing of the circus,
Who used to beat her, but he didn’t know how often
I picked her grapes and like a fox I hung from her
Petit vines, as she asked me to promise her boob jobs:
Now she is gone again back to her children and their
Little brown arms: and she is- his, because she has
Stopped pretending that she could one day be mine.