The Ghost Of A Bullet Hole In My Right Temple Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The last of the rum swoons in my throat,
The ghost of a bullet hole in my right temple:
The temporary lines of the minor leagues
Glowing in dim hallucinations
Where I dropp them:
Her eyes so very far away,
Not even caring to notice or understand
The sadness in my wrists, and the lonely
Papier-mâché echoes I hang on the
Rainy walls for her,
As I worship the abandoned distance between
Us both:

I have taken her name from her
And hidden it beneath the indented knees
Of a particular cypress:
God will return on Easter-
She doesn’t know who she is anymore,
So she cups the mouth of a nearby man
And marries him as she supposes:
He is fitfully masculine, without any of my concentricity:
When I was of her circumference,
I ran around her for seven miles and recorded poetry,
Though just at that time I hibernated
In a Jewish woman’s cave:
Incidentally, now she is married to a Jewish man....
(And I am the only true Jew)

Today, they are taking my manuscript to the printers.
Yesterday, the publisher warned by that he might have
To reconsider,
(Notice how that rhymed, coincidentally)
In Britain, it should always rhyme,
But her eyes are always the same,
And looking away, if I could see them-
Today, my father asked my for $50,000,
And in return I would get good interest and all of
It after Independence Day:
F*ck the red coats, because we are all now azure-
Lighting off some fireworks under the moon,
If I saw her eyes and remembered them,
What might I suppose she would let me do to her?

The sea without a name is where people
Make love:
When they make love they sing like young cats
Making love:
I would like to do this to her,
To become the nameless grotto in
The darkened window in some Floridian city:
To pass her my tongue, like selling produce:
A strawberry:
If you are reading this and you know who
You are, please write to me, because I am very alone,
But you will not write to me,
Because you could never understand this:

This is poetry:
And here is my tongue:
I am not yet a middle-aged pirate,
Looking to get a law degree, but all of it is selling
Something:
For instance, now all of this is the thing:
The beautiful linear random verb that should
Be my sovereign line:
Here it is: I love my father, though we are always alone:
And the four years in this spacious basement has taught
Me a rhyme:
That I am too late to uncork her hymen,
Though if she could let me, I could love her still:
And present philologistic cursive that she never felt:
I could return to her city for the first time,
And become that man she has hoped
For on the blue border,
And write her these lines that get entangled in briars,
The tumbling needs of bankrupted
Necessity....

But no- now it is done,
As I have had time to read it over,
With my flesh in a band-aid:
This is enough nonsense, Erin:
I love you, but who am I anyways?
I should die like a crucifixion in a used city:
And if I come to your town tomorrow,
Ignore me- because I am the inexcusable bruise,
And we are headed towards the last line:
There is the man who will supercede me:
Take him by the jugular and make him enter
You several times,
Because I do not know what I am.
And he does-
And we are all ghosts living in
A certain distance from who we want to be:
Yes, this is all, sadly,
And you are the only one who knows it.

Now I am spent like ejaculation,
And that is my failure:
And I will not read this another time:
Now it becomes rudimentary and vulgar:
I love you, but I am corrupted:
I need you but I do not know who I am:
Drunkenly, on my little raft,
I will swim away now without an entourage:
All I need beside me are me two dogs,
They love me:
I am going away now,
And this is no excuse for an ending:
Publicly, I have opened my chest
Like a number on a fast-food menu,
And that is all that I’ve got:
I love you, but you don’t yet remember,
I love you, but the world is so
Busy reproducing itself....