Robert Rorabeck Poems

I’ve climbed forty of the fourteen thousand
Foot mountains in Colorado,
Sometimes four in a day, past tree line
Where the rocks gossip in a lightning storm-
...

I really want to touch
The cliché of your golden ransom:
Oh yeah, hemlock,
Also other pain killers like-
...

Inkless, I expose myself-
I am just a shell pressed to your lips:
Drink my flesh,
Gnaw on my elbow I toss to you
...

The full poem is in her lips,
Pursed, she cannot spell.
Opened, she kisses him and he goes
Home and grows a garden in his sleep:
...

Because I haven’t caught her yet,
I’m casting out again letting this silver net
Of lies free to sink and entangle about her
Pinkish knees, where she rests wading
...

These are the painful errors reflected from my face,
As if I had been in a knife fight instead
Of going to prom, and bled in the swimming pool
Where my luxurious sisters had planned to swim,
...

First whispers in the morning meaning nothing,
Give no candle flame warmth, unless they are of your
Lips,
Just so these words crawl meaningless through the
...

Starting all out all of the runners know the words of
Their joy,
But eventually only the best will know the absence of fatigue,
And they will molt the histories
...

Now I’ve said too many things, as pensive as an apiary
Of afflicted numbers,
And now I question the space between our bodies, and how
To rush through that space to find you:
...

It comes up to this, and then it goes forever away:
Lapping and making love and counting the strokes that is necessary
To acquire each color,
And I have lived alone for so long that it isn’t even necessary to
...