Their Wounded Shores Poem by Robert Rorabeck

They stand at the sun tanning brink
When they should be sleeping:
They French-kiss in well known vocabularies:
Each on of them makes a sound in
Their throat,
As if they wanted to say something more,
But they dropped out of high school,
And now sell the perishable oddities
On the slender border
Of reality and feral fantasy:
In the premature morning without flesh,
And the eyes that can only see shapes,
The lovely people who read to them
Of the massacred school children
From the first world war
Laid out in a unplowed fields like cut flowers:
Groceries in paper bags on the kitchen floor:
Two friends from early childhood,
Watching the kittens climb up and
Down the carpeted stairs,
In a new development they came to know each other:
Their fathers bet their lives away
At the race-tracks in bottles of booze,
And the divorces which gave them more time
For tête-à-têtes in blue tents on green grass:
The gentle stares under street lamps,
And the furtive kisses which felt out wounds,
The blue diodes of laughterless cyborgs
Made them feel better pressing
Their scabby knees against wounded shores.