Robert Rorabeck Poems

Some people are so beautiful after midnight:
I don’t know,
I dispose of my head by the parks and estuaries-
I cannot name those birds,
...

Sleep entails smoking hideous white,
Getting married in a horn of a snail, reclining
To the green zinc coffins stamped up the hill,
The mad processions recalling your little sisters
...

Robert
Wants to die in a pageant of 25 cent confetti,
Because he remembers the long days of high school,
The fake knives;
...

The mother is gone,
To cut her hair- and the day is humid,
Because its not wrong,
The sun its constable pin wheeling;
...

Houses like limpid shells,
So limpid, smell and taste like their
Previous masters,
Like girls so god-d-mned old;
...

This morning all my blood is
Sweating off its alcohol-
All my blood is jogging, and circulating
Its early neighborhood,
...

Too old to care now what lays just over those hills.
I used to go out all the time and dream of you,
And walk up her curls like a fairy-tale-
I wanted to take you there, even while you were all pearly
...

I’ll follow you until the windows shut,
And then I’ll die right into the snow;
I was meant to be a lonely cut
From a Dickens novel- I was meant to look at
...

Jumbling jail rooms,
Brides in a cage- kaleidoscopes of
Sea-green caesuras
Washing their clothes:
...

I’ll never christen the sun where he can be
More successful:
I don’t like men like him that much,
Outdoors or in the post-office,
...