Robert Rorabeck Poems

Fake people standing against high rises,
Paper dolls lashed against the gates:

Little girls that once were have gone missing.
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The city at night,
The city at large:
Open mouthed, swallowing,
The giant in the clouds;
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In the amber woods, the beetles call-
The rain falls upon the school.
The cats and the children awaken from their sleep;
Their eyes awaken to the moon-
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See a line of Lancelots jaunting familiar
Silhouettes atop a hoary hill,
Laughing cousins, clanging as boisterously
As lions,
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You morons,
while the night was leaking peonies,
I strutted to the castle.
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Womb of a coiling rattlesnake,
Pregnancies of why she looks up at
The sky lazily
And doesn’t care if anything
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Less complicated and more beautiful
When you don’t wear an expression,
I will never know what you are thinking
Except that you love your father.
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Two dollar beer is the life for me,
Because I don’t have the memory but for
One or two things:
I used to cut paper and make snowflakes
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If all of a peacock was purple
It would be a star—
No cerulean or evergreen—
No place for
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Meretricious beauty—the definition of my very own
Muse struggling toward higher art—
The same way that F. Scott Fitzgerald loved his wife:
For no reason except for her chassis
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