For A Kiss Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Away from the night
Everyone moves across the street
To be together, far from,
They are attracted to the light
And the music the flesh makes
As it dies
Traveling away from home
A cross to where I have no eyes, intersecting without hope
And I can not see where she is, gone,
The thing that never was between us
And the flowers in the gutter leading
To the sea- before the sun rises,
The thing that never was dissolves and goes away
In tiny fragments before the sun
And her kiss imagined, always felt,
But never,
All the pleasures of the system, petals budding
From the glowing stems,
Like lines on a road,
The conduits of rushing people,
Discarding me
And I am roadkill lying dead beside
Her bed (as they make some kind of attempt at love)
And forgotten on her neck, a broken gem,
Once priceless- now trash-
In the shadows beside where all
The lives move
Dances to the lights and forgets
Neighborhoods drunken and empty, abandoned museums,
And the life flipping over in mausoleums
Pages in a book read but
Not understood, a bed of transgressions
And falsehoods made-up to hide the stains
Like the nights coming on attracting the
Insects calling our humanity, a god of weekends,
And spirits past,
Forgetting to resist the temptation,
Where my wrist lays open and waiting

For a kiss.