The Wishes That Never Was Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Thirty three years to divide all of this stuff:
Burning up the newspaper of my open wrists and armpits
To keep warm,
Or to be recognized by the mermaids all curling in their
Pits,
While I’ve made them underneath the overpasses:
And, recognizing their perfumes,
I call them all up from the over priced rhymes of orange
Fields,
And undress them into baseball diamonds- while my
Mind is gone,
And the field is not blue- the field is not blue,
Because my muse is being turned out by another man,
And all of this is the day gone Shakespeare out on double
Display in the dime store courts of another man’s
Ferris wheel:
And there she goes, and there she comes again,
Taking off her cloths, and putting them on again, and yet
Singing so sweetly, as the world slips around my ears,
Taking off her clothes again, unbudding her roses,
And swearing up the streets that the airplanes wish they
Were stamping
That she will be around again, only so that her gardens will
Finally have to lay off of her long hallucinations
And have to take final rest in the long and glazed fields,
Where the butterflies were superimposing- if only if because
They are always lighter than air, and only if because
That was always what they hoped they would one day asked
To be changed into,
While from them the days turned on, piling up their roses,
And giving up their wishes even to the wishes that never was.