Let Me Show You Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Do you make love in familiar rooms,
On the backs of tug boats, cusped in smoky flume?

Your beauty is so easy to love, you are like a ride.
Selective in your romances, you still turn around hard as
You approach your zenith, give resolution to gravity-

I couldn’t say how it is done. I have never been with
A woman like you, a sunny sky in a child’s pastel.
I’ve had one real girlfriend and nine others, indiscriminately
In places of cheap mortgage along the major avenue
Where I and so many filthy others grew up under the pines?

But, I suppose, it must take a gallant man to swing you,
Or a fool, as long as he is appealing and you are tight-
I wish I had a bit of liquor to float down the highway tonight,

As you are in your room dolling up for your engagements,
I am on my sightless bed with my dogs, dreaming of walking
Away lost in some cheap Floridian suburbia,

Where I can go around in circles until I lose my mind,
Turn down the avenues of twilight, and approach death who will
Take me in kind, and he will ask me of you and how you were,
And I can only shrug and say, “I never knew. I never knew.”

Perhaps, then, he would be so kind as to respond, “Let me show you.”