Drunk Kisses Of Love Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Tonight I told myself I would write—
I bought a bottle of Captain Morgan spiced rum
And a bag of limes, so I could sail those long forgotten seas alone
And end up someplace familiar along Florida’s east coast where
I used to skip school with the old gang, and smoked between classes
In a studious alcove, a buccaneer’s bedroom beneath old stone steps
Where the sea came up in her mighty whiteness, and foamed like a panting huntress
Undressing and lying wetly in the buff about our middles as we toked—

I was going to finish ten single spaced pages, churning out the
Blurry words, with her eyes behind the picture as inspiration—
In my lonely drunkenness, it’s how I reach out from my world
In my chair 8,000 feet above the earth in the White Mountains,
While she plays cards at sea level, putting on the invisible pout of her poker face
With the strong armed boys who fleck her boudoir which was once
Inside a purple porpoise that has now changed its name; but the
Delivery boys still go there to get hung-over on her when their
Shifts end at 4 am leaving only the zombies to moan through streets
Dripping dew and used c#ndoms—

Instead, I failed miserably, as it is my sallow way, when I come
To think of a sickly grad student, a short haired blonde who used to
Take Old English with me— She’s now married and going for her
Doctorate in Kansas City and does not notice Dorothy getting kidnapped by
A hurricane outside her window— But she’s still a raging feminist
Decrying the Anglo-Saxon man and his new arousal to the machine
Gun stashed in the woodshed, leaving the old axe and pitch-fork to
Rust, leaving me beside the dead pilgrim on Chaucer’s way, smiling
And calling me a text-book trooper….

I only finished one page leading up to where Blackbeard will steal
My love and the last of the rum away
which is foreshadowed by the strange and deadly
Rose thickets growing in the waves in the Port of Nassau, before I
Realized I was failing again, that my language was weak,
Though the rum was strong and knotted like oak—
I packed up for the night and the pirates sailed off into other sunlit
Bays, fornicating with their stolen women and my sad hopes,
As I settled down and watched a documentary on the lost Sudanese boys
Who come to America to find heaven—

Here, they are the blackest black, the lowest of the low,
In dirty streets they are the beautiful rebellion of machine-gunned orphans—
Like all the rest of us, they want to lie with the most petite white women
In the rushing beds of sunlight and waves and give them giant brown teddy-bears
where motion comes upon
Motionless and a new medium buds in thickets and avenues for the awakened
Artists to strut down towards her—

Is she still here or have they stopped serving drinks?
She must still be here, in these ancestral halls which echo the long
Motion under the waves upon the beach— My desperations for the
Barmaid who swims with indigo dolphins, who puts a pot on the fires
For the blackest of black boys, the darkest of orphans, those who come
Unsuspecting towards the tumultuous glut of the red, white, and blue
Mechanisms, there to lose themselves to the childish identity, the
African-American. They cannot escape their pigment, which the
Fires of stolen rum highlights, but she sees me standing outside of them,
A tanned pupil with tanned eyes—

Back in middle-school where I used to pretend I was a slave
Shackled to a shit stained bed, dying in my last days in the hut of the
Pitiless white master—
And in high school I used to tell these two guys I ate lunch with that
I should go to Morocco to become a white slave, to pay the debt of my
Ancestors’ capitalistic transgressions, even though I found out later my
Great-great grandfather was an abolitionist preacher who got shot in the
Mouth fighting for the north, going up the gray hills thicketed with seceding muskets,
Only to get married at seventy to a sixteen year old, and the kids I ate
Lunch with laughed at me—Now one is a drug dealer and the other is the
Same thing he was in high school—

I want to tell these Sudanese boys to go back to Africa, because the
Tortoise has always been faster and wiser than the hare. Back in Africa
They can hold hands and call each other dearest love without being called f@ggots—
Back in the original savannah, they might be greeted by the machete of their
Unforgiving counterparts, but at least they won’t be cast upon by white eyes,
The fundamentalist drive-thru’s who have butchered Jesus and sell him with
Greasy fries, those who cause heart-attacks, those ridiculous pirates who even
Now steal her away from me.

Go back! Go back I should scream with ½ a bottle of Captain Morgan
In me, causing the length of this poem and its transgressions, as it calls
Out for her once again, the woman I see serving me the drinks which
Burn these words into me. Go back! Go back to the original space, the
Form without the abbreviated language of the salesman, because she is
Still waiting for you, nude and hungry at the edge of the sea. Go back,
My blackest of black brothers, my beautiful dears, and maybe by
Reclaiming yourselves, you will wake her up and she will take a break
From surfing and come to lay beside me under the steps like a cave
Above where she will lie down beside me, and serve me her
Drunken kisses of love.