Jack Johnson Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Women like us
Because we eat cold eels
And think distant thoughts
Stolen from the opal waves.
When there is no rain for sometime,
And the sea doesn’t swell,
Then we grow hungry and roam.
Our eyes, half dreaming,
Stumble to the amusements beneath
The grinning moon,
Where her thighs are bared from
The slip and she revolves on a
Carrousel, laughing distantly
On a wooden horse;
The same one which destroyed Troy.
She is so young she is like a youth
We could hold with little exertion,
And so naive we could steal famous words
And hang them to her lips like sardines,
And she would take them out of our
Fingers and swear to marry us.
We go to her,
The darkest pugilists who
Do not raise a hand,
And let her fall into us like a silk ribbon,
Like a single vein inside us, but most precious.
Faithful and faithless alike, their eyes shine like
Polished dimes from the cold gutters;
And we eek out which rooms we will give
Her to sleep and sing and to groom.
Thus clutched in the embers of our troubled
Dawn,
We take her to the couch of the woods,
Where, looking back, she is like a pillar of salt
Building our thirst,
And our night is the truest thief,
But our smile is just compensation.