I Want To Be Alone And I Want To Talk To People Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Pain burns out eventually like an exhausted fire,
Like a scarred baby shushed into sleep approaching
The bleary dawn,
Smoldering as it faints, dreams of walking:
Sift it, though, and it is still alive,
Hibernating in the starless coals,
Black caterpillars to be metamorphosed into blazing wings,
Hiding like a little girl who can speak with dragons,
When these mountains are very dry,
Like parched lips waiting for the ore of lovers, and lightning comes
Riding like a debauching gentleman promising
Rain, but there is none, but he already has her in his saddle,
Carrying her to the complicated alders for her to swoon,
Thatched in the crossties of sickly pealing trunks,
And wake up enveloped and undeniably compromised,
And the wind is crazy and dispossessed,
Can move the bolts against the stockpiles,
Can bend trees like great bears foraging for the rarest honeys,
And pollinate the valley in a single huff,
Like a drunken giant can fornicate with mountains,
Can caress their nipples until they spill volcanic milks,
Can give the scent of elk to the wolf and lead him on,
And the natural elements know the pain is waiting, the
Foreboding instincts under the misrepresenting rime-
Pain is the sort of predator which hibernates inside the
Greatest judges, and the microscopic flees,
And is even there when the circus is in town, and when
Someone is smiling, and does not need shadows to hang around
And though there are times when pain is numbed,
When kissing in the lawn, and swimming in the glistered chlorine,
When having a good dinner, and petting the animals who come
Out of their hutches to be fed, pain is all around,
Waiting for the butterflies to wilt,
And the game to fold, for love to disperse to strange continents,
For parents to die, then pain struts and is king,
And he can be seen for miles around, and felt coiling like
A ball of infant coral snakes in the marrow of the bones,
Striking with venomous precision in gleesome darts-
And I told her, if she came to me pain would dry out like
A starved criminal upon a moldy couch in the middle of a
Black forest surrounded by the industrious city; I told her
To come to me, and she said she would, but she did not come,
Knowing that it would only attract more pain, eventually;
Thus my pain lingers, and she kisses a tall gentleman gleaming
Like mercury whispered down from the weeping moon;
He is seemingly without pain, and this why
She touches him all over in slow ways, and says his
Name the way the sea sloshes and licks the legs of
The dock, but pain is there too, mumbling in his dreams,
And soon he will wake up like a sudden catastrophe,
And then pain will be all over that place,
Like salt in the fire’s wound.