His Regular Music Poem by Robert Rorabeck

You have your patron, and he has his regular music,
And now there is nothing left that cannot be believed, while the
Neighborhoods of the affluent just get more and
More beautiful- just don’t look so guilty there in the last evening before
Christmas: and we are still making love,
While I promised you all of these gifts- and I touched you just while
The last of the winter’s sun was rising up:
And you moaned your wish that showed as your children grew up,
And filtered through the rooms of your house:
And your brown, velvet brown body showed its goose bumps:
As my cousin looked at you out in the yards of your infidelity:
Alma, but you said it was okay to play around as
Long as he didn’t touch you: even while my poems graced the vanishing
Lips of my poor grandmother’s grave:
And I still sing for you- As I’ve been to Spain, and the night still keeps
Culling up, and pulling its cattle past the tree lines of the richest mountains;
Until all that remains after the airplane’s song, Alma: is you and I
Calling to one another like shadows weeping toward themselves;
And it is all less than gold, or the science fiction of the ancient Greeks:
As the candles promise so many birthdays, but they just keep dying before
They can add anything more to your youthful adventures:
Where you have so faithfully gone off the surest paths, and let all of your
Roses bleed into the un chiseled smiles upon the feral swing sets
Of the loping gentlemen who have stolen your tiny brown legs
Alma, just so you could watch them run.