The Taste Of Your Bread Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Tables of fruit and spilling wine-
Perpetually the debutant swoons, and someone
Is off in the woods in blue socks cheating death,
And we are either studying or selling trees,
While chanticleer is like a great man up on his roof,
Calling the pilgrims with his light;
And I have cut my wrists in the bathroom which has no
Shadows,
As even the water runs with light,
Runs like baseball players on diamond diamonds:
And you have dogs, I know,
And a sister, and a daughter who has your lips,
While Erin is serving drinks to men she doesn’t know,
Who crowd around her perfumes,
Like opals on salt lick:
I told her how wounded I was, and she pretended to care;
But if she saw me, she wouldn’t care that I
Was no longer writing my greater proportion of songs
About her auburn ships:
She just wouldn’t care. She watches cartoons anyways,
And looks at the waves on the television.
So many boys have told her that she was beautiful,
That she no longer has the space for adolescence,
But loves the store fashioned muscle of otherwise weak men,
Who don’t really know how to enter her
Otherwise, with their eyes, or with their pricks,
Or with their flash in the pan souls which leap from woman to
Woman as easy as they can,
Like little boys with pinwheels eating meat and cheese
As the stomp the puddles my greater buses have bled from
Mortal wounds,
Circling you like buzzards who no longer have the taste
Of your bread.