Your Golden Rules Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Daffodils in the penumbra of my uneasy afflictions;
And unicorns,
And I know you cannot look at me, or be my true love,
But I just want to escort you still out into the
Yard,
To hold your hand like the page of a soft mammal,
To watch you metamorphose on the strings;
To leave off you like a dead boy with
Blue socks in the weeds to Canterbury,
If you can’t be my fable, if you can’t be my dream:
Then I will not want to take your beauty,
The hope of all your freckles, the shadows of the heavens
Or goldfish flirting with the cat’s saber tooth;
I just want to pay my dollar to get a good look at you,
To tip my bottle and well perceive the beauty as
You wash your feet in the lucky river;
If want to be your weary fetish, the knuckle bone of skeleton
Rubbed in your pocket, your silver boy kept in the
Secrets of the railroad tracks;
And if you are never to come around again, to be like a single raindrop
Quiver on your roof, never looking indoors as you learn from
Your teachers, as you have children and pools,
As you divide and multiply and live by your golden rules.