Robert Rorabeck Poems

Epitaphs prick with blood,
And each dropp is a hidden chain,
Woven by the puckish goddess,
Who chooses her men whimsically
...

Her stars weren’t filled in:
When she kissed me, it was during nap time.
I had a fist full of woolly carpet
And orange diodes for wishing:
...

Broken for so long without any glue,
Like glass on the short arch of the bridge leading home:
The color is beautiful but dangerous to touch,
For it has been hording sun, and the edges are sharp:
...

And sun, and sun, and sun, and sun,
And night, and night, and night, and night.
We get up and revolve, eat, make love:
Some of us go down to the park and swing,
...

Now the sun is on the lip of the canyon and
She is utterly biting him to keep him there
And outline her long body to the strange settlers in her;
But he will not tarry, for he is tired too,
...

Nothing yet to do but to distill
My bone:
Sweaty on the concrete the young
Skeletons fart at their game,
...

There are unreal lands where
Maidens love me
Blue maidens and
Yellow maidens and
...

So here is the charred millennia you call a home:
Out on the beach, there is the smell of something different,
Where children used to hold hands
When the stars still filled a book of scribbling dreams,
...

I’ve seen her pictures again
Beneath the torpid palms.
She does not know she is smiling at me,
Or that she is the sea and the east
...