Robert Rorabeck Poems

I fantasize about houses
And sometimes her free flowing legs,
Which shiver in the fortitudes of Pentecost,
Like the sustained and bleary kiss
...

Lamps are jeweled with the drool from a sleepy sky,
And I have told her to get off her knees,
But she was only checking my navel for the hibernating
Butterfly- When it flew away like a beautiful disease,
...

If pain, then let it be slow like mercury-
Let it eat the moon in all of its hemispheres,
Entwine like beautiful barbed-wire glowing under the sea,
Time and time again around her neck,
...

For just a little longer, pain,
To get what you want to, perhaps-
A year or two more with your dogs,
Your parents and their disapproving scowls.
...

Pigeons high above the honking streams,
Smoke stacks in the cold chapped air,
Leaves as dead as the love I’ve never felt,
The bread trucks unloading stale loaves at
...

Tired, where the hole in the heart buzzes,
And hairy men who tell me they are transcendentalists
Keep going down, down, down, chewing nature food,
As they point out the molasses cataracts,
...

Prettily the light is winnowed by the green
Fingers of the pine,

As if sorting out the empirical yarns from the
...

Expensive skeletons
Prance at the fair; their bones
Are tasseled with ribbons of air,
...

Warm burn in the throat,
Horses out in the darkness with the wolves,
Innocence demystified:
...

My parents live on the precipice....

My ears are ringing like maudlin wind-chimes,
From the last of the rum,
...