Robert Rorabeck Poems

I develop you while walking the way I know
Home-
The day is hot- the sea is foam:
I have two beers in a plastic sack and a serpent
...

Pleasant words for lovers in espionage
Thought out as the spines of flowers trapped in
The teeth of dancing foxes who are
Just learning the first words of a bucolic country
...

Lashed upon the teeter-totters of some milkweed
Park
The butterflies have spent across like burning paper
Bleeding and now across whose shoulder blades
...

This is not the only thing I stole tonight:
Here are my fingerprints running down your sister’s
Sand dollars while your brother was out trying on
His bicycle, and you gave all of your kisses
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Blue gill in the lake of my childhood
Underneath the burning sugarcane of my childhood
Which I never truly saw:
Nor were there stolen bicycles in the canal,
...

Some pretty flask tossed into the canal
Sleeping in the alligator’s bed as he dreams of Girls
As the witches fly over their housewife cousins:
...

Clouds the color of young gods
Leaping or breathed from the lips of a plum eating
Dragon
Like mist rising from a petit lake from a land where
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Lost pageantry of a cenotaph’s art form
Dances in a carousel of hard licks
While the rain makes bereaving motions against
The window in the house where everyone has left;
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Illusions in a fluted world practice
All kinds of mimicries, while the sad poetess
Weeps underneath her gravestone in a
Record heat wave:
...

Underneath of a rose the jaundice pinpricks
Of another metamorphosis of things- your friends
Here in the undefined colors
While tourists move and gesticulate to the sea
...