Robert Rorabeck Poems

The treats are almost done,
The little girl’s fingers sticky with salt and she is
Almost home:
Her eyes satisfied by what her fingers have given to
...

Becoming sheathed in the vanishing colors of
The yard;
I would have liked to say that her favorite color was
Red, like an ixora:
...

Housewives like naves,
Like low strung truants sleeping in their backyards
Of days,
Strung out and as drooling as mastiffs on the pretty
...

Call now down the boy from his dreams,
Because the day itself is weary and the school yard
Is going away,
Like a vase of flowers emptied;
...

I have a book published,
And your dreams are stupid;
But your legs are very sexy:
And that is why you have all of your children:
...

Now you are elected by what I must know
To become the milkmaid of my dream: I have put you
Here the queen of my everything,
And these words are for you like the breaths ornithologists
...

I am famished by liquor and see how I swim out
Past your jetty:
See how I destroy the laws of society; and you are in bloom:
You are the luxurious cream on the lips of the void:
...

Loneliness is my day, and it is almost perfect:
I jog the quietude of the canal just west of the freeway:
All of those commuters don’t perceive me;
And I wonder if I went to school with any of them,
...

Parks smolder like little girls upset for Valentine’s
Day;
And I go out from their Sabbath School Grottos and watch
Them French Kissing fresh Thom’s in the parking lot;
...

I give and I take nothing, all day long:
No butterflies, and it is funny, funny that I can keep repeating
My desirous song,
When my desire is so far down stream singing out to no one,
...