Bedtime Story Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Here is a canvas I must destroy, for soon the lightning
Will be on the peak, and we will need to scramble down
Into our graveyard before we are struck by a juvenile deity
Who is angry we have been playing outside our gray rooms;
But before I go, I wish to leave this for you, where you are
Just a glowing insect in the East, burnished by the waves who
Leap up to greet your hips like happy pups.

Where the air is thin, I breathe for you, light my eyes like
Kerosene so that they burn over you flickering like the scene
Of an early stage, where you perform your life like a bosomy
Role, far away in the inebriation of a pretty set: casually you
Tromp across it, extending your lips and hips for the
Patrons of your pinkish stores, the vertebrae silked in flesh
Which chimes when someone enters.

But now the storm is upon me, and the red devils are cracking
Their whips and flailing swords, and my house is an airy dream
In the small suburbia of a green yard, and your sailors are all
About you like flaxen tattooed waves, and oh how they attract you
Like a magnet on their staves. So, I must leap and tumble like
A nursery rhyme back into the trees, where the graves are sunken
In the lime, and virgins on their knees pray for me that I make it home in time.