Wilderness Of Disinterest Poem by Robert Rorabeck

You’ve said this is the summer,
But you do not know, but are just attempting
To wax poetical,
Even though a better poet than I am,
When you are drunk and your lips burned on
Cigarettes and just beginning to black out,
But I don’t really know about such things,
How to be cool, how to meet girls and
Persuade them, but I like to sound like I know.
Rather, I am thirty and woke up today after
A wet dream I’d rather not go into explanations
Of, and changed my pants and walk outside
As if in the first stages of a sleeping sickness,
And moaned under the sun, and watered the horses....
But it is better, for I no longer wonder if
You read my poetry, and would really rather prefer
If you didn’t- For it is true, that you have separated
Yourself from my pleaful dysfunctions,
Spread yourself open like a garden overrun with
Pollinating bees, laid yourself like a red bible
Suppliant to the religion of his smooth hands;
If I was a better poet, women would love me as they
Know how, and maybe even you would love me
And come into my room whispering with the eyes of
Your disquiet, but my physicality would be just as scarred
And unappealing, and I would lay out just the same
Beside the yellow pools, the zoo of sterilized ocean,
And let my fingers howl unrestively, like wolves
Hunting through your unbuttoned preservation,
Starving in the wilderness of disinterest.