Even When You Are Fleeting Poem by Robert Rorabeck

My jaw is a soup bone for your cold dinner;
Or it ornaments a barbed wire fence softly
Singing in the drying pastures,
Gnawed on by standard bred horses and
Antelope:
You can drive by, but you should not see it
From where you are at,
Keeping time with your better movements,
Your eyes illicit waterfalls down the good-side
Of his face as he drives,
As he flexes for you and you pass into the
Shade of the forest
Before returning to the later half of New Mexico,
To all those silver mines and jewelry shops
Where he mined you;
But if you should come back around this
Way maybe on the weekend or for a make-believe
Holiday, doing your arbitrary shopping,
Or pretending to visit the high lonesome places
Half shutdown where once John Wayne ate his
Breakfast,
Do me a favor and do not stop if the sun should happen
To whistle me down to you,
And skip like a little street boy polishing the sweet sounds
Of politics and religion right out of me,
Even though I have nothing to pay him for the job-
Do not stop- Don’t even slow down, because that
Would make some tourism out of my unrequited decorations;
And because I am already stood-up,
Just let me keep hanging around doing what I do because
It would be all but useless, and I prefer to think of
You as something beautiful even when you are fleeting.