Fighting Romeos Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Look how quickly my inky bugle scrolls the air,
Sending out in the spider’s fingers
The madcap rows of my fighting Romeos:
Without a general, they are leaping over the ditches
You have set up with your reserve, to nock them down,
Your silence putting many of them to sleep,
The euthanasia you garden, cultivated to keep a distance:
And your eyelids drawn upon the windows
Of your body’s house, when you crawl into familiar estuaries:
Disbanded, like the valiant zygotes which
Will one day penetrate your cyclical eggs,
Like the victorious knights at a jousting contest,
They search you out alone,
Some the wanderers of a lonely country,
Nodding under the overpasses of careless men
Who, arriving too early, find you in an unripened bed;
Others, the seafarers, like otters
Looking for you through the oystered fluids,
Drawn to the wetness your eyes partake of them,
The sea creatures who swim on your daydreams
When the rains shutter on the roofs
Of your old classrooms, noticed until the weather passes:
Here are my few surviving romances,
Cleaned up, they wish to take you out on a date,
And they will fight for you like brilliant tigers;
If they knew where you lived, they would send you
Springtime hillsides of extroverted daisies;
If they knew your key, they would already be inside.