For The Life Of Me Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I shouldn’t have made love to you,
For I shrunk,
In hiccupping seasons where the world turns
Away; and I was cuckolded for good
Reasons,
Because, blandly I ate the cake before her
Birthday, and ruined the party.
All her cousins wept and made fun of me
By getting naked except for the vocabularies I
Hadn’t the intelligence to learn,
And they jested and held up mirrors,
Until I could not open my eyes, and the witch
Who had added the freshman fifteen to her jowls,
Went three times around the palm tree,
As if it were some ritual;
But it was not Christmas, not even Halloween,
But how I went down on her, because she
Said something needed change;
And I worked until it was good and cleaned,
And left little gifts for her children around her knees,
And they opened them on Christmas day but wept
Because of how she refused to remain so
Calm and pleased, and saturnine:
She was Junoesque, that I learned, but
Disinterested as a sated bee, lips plump and busted
By the rimes of early-morning honey;
And she flitted, and how I shrunk, until I could
Swim away unperceived, and she lived for many
Year anonymous, yet in his arms, her eyes in
A book of pulpy dreams, I could not dream,
Or think to write for the life of me.