The Boys Who Love Your Skin Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Brown as the boys who love your skin,
Who play naked as matches across the misbehavior of your heavens—
Who conduct strange lassoes trying to beat the cruise ships to
The hurricanes—
Drinking rum and skinny dipping in the Dry Tortugas—until something
Is finally ignited like the very first baseball game and cannibalisms
For old time's sake—and that very world that you forced
Me to develop from forever with the airplanes swinging like marionettes
Over the make believe sky of a banshee—
And the fire coming down through the forest—
Well, whatever happened eventually—this is the very end of the golden book—
And now your child looks like he will never desire to enter a cathedral,
And the sky over the ocean is a little less blue, because something in
The refracted light has gone away—and the pain sings in the harmony of
A chorus—through the backyards of the moonlight
The pilots continue to admire even as they go blind.