Robert Rorabeck Poems

Looking up now—children in the sky—guts of butterflies
Over flying saucers: kissing cousins,
As high schools reopen and spend their afternoons
Weeping in the fabricated existence of adolescent wisdom:
...

I've put you into the corner where it doesn't hurt
So much to look at you—
The coral snakes come up and kiss your feet just
Like the corners of my cheeks,
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Don't you know the cars driving away
Sounding like raindrops
On the highway that isn't a dream but is getting louder
And louder as it too becomes a vortex,
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Another try into the brigades of light—another day
Falters into a dictionary or a collection of
Museums: I remember selling Christmas trees across
The highway from a comic book store,
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I'll half remember you,
Placed like an insincere crucifix
Between the caesuras of
A butterfly's wings—something truly
...

A womb of a pledge of allegiance no one
Stands for—
In a sky full of ancestral promises without a single
Drop of rain
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Alone in the alkaline gutters,
Commuters travelling over us, hurrying over
The places we lie down in the places
That keep to their own shadows—where hobos
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A sea of trees brimming at the edge:
A well of holes of words pretending to fill a soul—
And Jack-O-Lanterns on a porch,
And pornography across the canal—and many, many
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Lights that peel out forlornly behind wimpled
Windows,
The dead poetesses who sleep out bare-chested now
In the dead center of black town,
...

Words of clues to find beauty,
And grandmother,
So that I become shot full of false arrows.
I bleed ketchup from my armpits
...