Robert Rorabeck Poems

You are dumb, and yellow
And stupid: your children also live in the armpits
Of a flower,
While the wolves hang out opened tongued
...

I am a good boy and I get up from an early
Number from my slumber,
And I say to the kissing teeth of the vipers
That from my windows
...

Lost in the sections of an oval race
As sunlight falls on the wrong side of my face,
And the housewives come home
To their vineyards along the groves of the sea-
...

Joyless tabernacle of dollar bills:
Housewives jumping out their window sills.
As the days of any number spill
And spill-
...

As you work in lights hanging over
An empty bedroom, soon I will be a teacher in
A high school all of my peers left
A decade ago-
...

Trundling of golden marbles
Down the lips of a child or a songbird:
So many words,
So few to mention: new born mothers getting up,
...

Liquorless words there melting in the
Sky,
Down the same old avenue of childhood:
Words that evaporated
...

Drink while you’re awake-
And don’t forget to spell, or bring your love
Bouquets.
Soon it will be science-fiction: soon it will
...

Now the mountains: you there, where the golden
Things are hidden, and how strange-
Artifacts of her lips where the Indians climbed,
And had children.
...

On the loose though exhausted, what would you
Do in the backyard shirtless all afternoon, remembering
The bottle rockets that you wasted-
Or the girls that you left behind to learn math in school-
...