No Valentine Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I procrastinate on my poetry:
I have nothing lovely to add:
You turn me on, you turn me on, you
Know, but it doesn’t get me anything,
So I look up ghosts until I have to get up
At five a.m. to meet the Mexicans driven in
From Chihuahua, or Mecca- We work all
Day with the yeguas- Soon they will make my
Father so rich that he might as well become the sun-
I can’t believe its been five years now, and the pain
Still lingers in my throat like a bite too big to swallow:
She is happily married moving around in her puritanical
Tresses in the humid sanctuary of his last name hitched
To hers like a train car: She can’t even remember me,
The half decade we spent together. I can’t look at
My face, either, for I became lost long before I found
Her crying in my bed, and I should never have turned her
On: Never visited her high school bedroom, got naked
With her and watched the colorful plays of her childhood,
Wanted the connections of transcendental love,
For she is now the sulfurous ghost driving around with
Me as I try not to put on my reflection, and she is all I have
Still when I am all alone in my room with my dogs about
Ready to crawl into dreams that I fear; I didn’t want to
Write another poem, but it is all I have, and her like
Ashes in an amnesiac storm: Already now they have kissed
So many times and made love in a bed which shares both of
Their names- I was just the healthy transition for her,
A part of college, another way of growing up, but she never
Understood that I was made of an eerie material, already
Gone into her grandmother’s valentines, I can barely breathe,
But the second half of this last decade was theirs,
And I have been in my room howling with my dogs taking myself
Back in time, trying to believe I don’t need no
Valentine, don’t need no roses.... anonymous and another poem,
Until I display my bones to my dreams, and let the pallbearers
Carry me through another year.