Like Nocturnal Daydreams Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Words respond to lovers
As the trucks move and move by themselves;
And I went to California for a week and then two while
I was very young
Where there’d been forest fires; and I rolled down the parks,
Just as long as you thought you could love me,
But I didn’t hold out:
I couldn’t be sure if I was really talking to ghosts.
That is why I have never succeeded or stopped touching myself;
It is the very sad reason why I am sleeping alone again
Tonight once again
In my daylong work clothes:
I never take off my clothes now, slip into the comfortable nudity
Of your better game:
While, aren’t you sleeping now with your back up against the green
Man smoking forever your sweet young children
Out from the crepuscule of the sweet young glades:
It is what I know you have been doing for so very long-
You break like the waves,
And you kiss the glass chalicing your wine without having any real
Faith:
That is why you sweetness perpetuates the wave machine breathing
Like starfish forever in the shallows and the tidelands
That are always sending out the chivalrous knights on their
Unconditional quests to reach you and bring you back to me,
Like grains of sand carried like freckles upon the foaming shoulders
Of its unabashed tide
As it moves between the countries of your bedspreads,
And slips like the ethereal tendrils across the fluttering hemispheres
Of your doors steps where you move back and
Forth like the shadows of animals in a zoetrope pushed by
Your motherly fingers to reinvigoration each of your children’s
Interests until they fall asleep
Drooling the minerals you lactate like pearlescent syrups,
Like nocturnal daydreams from their open and pleasant mouths.