The Child Of My Tongue Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Let us explore across the canal now:
The places you never thought to go,
Holding his hand, entranced by his salesman’s eye,
Skipping through the social avenues
So easily walked down:
Humming the cursory aplomb-
There is only a pittance in a trance
That way, only a fraud of a family’s name:
If you will not come with me willingly,
I will kidnap you in a tangle of lips,
A shackle of blood-filled groins:
I will carry you cross the back of the crocodile:
Singing to you the folklore’s rainy rhymes.
After you have swooned,
I will not hide the lightning-scarred face:
I will kiss you full bore even as you sleep,
And slip into you as a dream,
My bare feet the only trail to your
Restive tomb: Over the ditches we go,
Amidst the depressed cypress-
Here the unrevenged ghost sing the echoing,
A caravan of my feet,
And your heart’s patter through the
Underage storm: Tonight your neck
Is an opal psalm, reflecting the comet’s riding,
And you might look upward once
As the thunderheads mosh- Then
You will cry my name as an epitaph of love
Amidst the fine red holly in the swamp:
You will come to see the doldrums divide the sky,
Like the suburban avenues destroyed by time
And hold upon my neck like a child on a cliff,
But I will not forgive you:
I will mute you with a kiss,
As you close your eyes ashamed that
You could have strayed so far from
My effortless love:
I will put you down in the mud,
And change you into the child of my tongue.