The Next Awakening Sea Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I am found in the quiet solitude of
My inebriate isolations,
Found this way surrounded by all the
Brothers of my species,
Salivating over the conditioning of
My brotherhood of likeminded holidays:
This is the way we go,
Each in the fraternity of the crashing sea,
The drive in movie theatres of inexpensive
Foreplay,
The kind of want that aches in the teeth,
And kindles in the eyes,
The want of fingers to play over the overturned bowls
Of divine knees,
Over the tumbling and sweet still life:
For eyes to burn into eyes like the strange
Explorations of two unexpectant stars
Which cannot ever reach their true light
Across the abandoning distances;
And this is all we have,
The striking of keys into the gutted cars,
Her lips surrounded by the made-up scars
And she stands out fixated amidst the
Tumbleweeds—
And the attentive jackrabbits—
And we put the rattlesnakes into the tip
Jars, and the rainbows replicate the cheap
Promises,
And this is the way we are headed,
Famished and hallucinating in the cinder-blocked
Courts—the tiresome game we have to play,
Our ever attending bones the instruments,
The skin such sweaty canvas, and there is no
Escaping the impossibility of the tide ever escaping
That way,
Of ever caressing the highway or even the
Orange groves,
And I have no more dreams of her,
For my inherit definitions have had their day,
And there is no separating the deserving man from
His well-earned currency,
The tourisms she has abandoned and redressed
By throwing all of it away and
swimming out before the next awakening sea.