Robert Rorabeck Poems

As a male of so little means, this is how I
Won her:
I told her I couldn’t be defeated by any old sort of
Fire, and then I told her to look at hers,
...

I dream of a sea of
Lunch trucks,
Like fleets of silver-diamonded waves
And you come
...

I caught a dropp of spit in the stream of my piss;
But what do I care about:
The things that give love also take love away,
And my goddess speaks but she only says cruelty;
...

If I go away now into plaid and silver dreams to
Sleep upon what else I know,
There will be no use of you trying to find me,
No classical illusions to the warm vase of your neck,
...

Words bloom imperfectly like would be young lovers
Now old and gray:
Words clipped like out of control song birds, like designer airliners
In a sumptuous soirée with the rest of the other singing birds
...

She got married on the same damned day that another
She was put in the show before the grave:
And the fair came and gathered up the eyes of the churchgoers
And the gravediggers,
...

Tomorrow is Diana’s birthday:
And she made the woods silken, and she made the
Grottos good,
And even while she was doing this she banished the
...

I lick store brand rum from the hair on my
Forearm; it is sickly sweet, but I must do it; and tomorrow
I will look at houses,
And I will think of some sweet thing or another,
...

Bodies burn like sugarcane, the food and rum
Of the teenage gods, the bombardiers
And the cheerleaders:
While I saw you out on the red oval resurrecting your
...

Sweat of drills of bodies moving to and throwing,
Moving everywhere that bodies can think to go:
Like waves in the sea,
Like everything you could even think of:
...