Robert Rorabeck Poems

By sweetened virtue I start out, dashing as the cavalier
Knight:
The butterflies cut from the paper from the womb of a
Beautiful girl’s diary:
...

God touched the
Charismatic youth on
His subtle shoulder and spoke,
“I like this one.”
...

I am touching on you
The places you cannot feel.
When you look up,
It is only coincidence,
...

Wept the Lord on her doorstep,

“But I loved you for
A burning summer;
...

I shouldn’t have made love to you,
For I shrunk,
In hiccupping seasons where the world turns
Away; and I was cuckolded for good
...

Beautiful frogs are farting in
Beds of droopy chrysanthemums.
Chartreuse and poisonous, they are waiting
For her sombulent march, to cling to
...

Caffeine has me up, while they make love
In another sea, spilling vocabulary words
I haven’t memorized: the piano plays behind
The unmowed grass, like minutes of sunlight
...

I wait for customers in this bay,
Or I read Anne Sexton and hope for quaint
Stigmata, like overly dramatic Catholic plays:
Or the overly education girls from the peripheries
...

Red in the handlebars of the sun,
Something always gold-
And I can hardly hold on:
I don’t like to look where she is milking,
...

They just go on and one,
Don’t they- and they can start up in
Anyway,
Like pulling the choke string on a kite
...