Robert Rorabeck Poems

You give me reasons to pull rabbits and roses
Out of my wounds while I tramp,
While I keep doing this, evading cops who aren’t
Even paying attention, going into the park after midnight
...

A dour search for houses haunts me
If I go into new places where the tourists are
All sleeping,
And admire the green copper cannons crowning
...

Give to me more of your esoteric
Delights, basking in cauldrons
Underneath the sweaty trees-
Throw your dead soldiers of love in
...

Dancing around the spikenard and
Their dead rabbits of luck; these American women
Have dreams, and they are emerging
From the bummed out trailer parks with their briars
...

I am calling again casting the paper-snow
Flakes of my show,
That easy death my grandmother applauded some years
Before she herself died;
...

Beauty and genius die young, at the time
Of my illiteracy,
All I knew of was the lines of afternoons of
Salient truancy:
...

What strange hope this fettering tool
Which gives me to breathe each morning and at
Dusk,
And puts this elongated mammal into its familiar
...

Pretend to spill wine from your absence:
Because I am dead, I cannot taste but recommend
Its bouquet just to please you,
To let you pass through time with your jingling
...

I can’t use a dime to call you anymore,
So I look at you red-eyed in photographs,
And your face looks like the tanned rainstorm of
A pretty girl’s misplaced secret desires.
...

The silence rings- the universe is expanding,
Old girlfriends are getting married,
And well fed: What is truly beautiful now, the alien
Pollens of your high-school garden cannot really
...