Rodeo Poem by Robbie Coburn

And now the day clearer
in the unthinkable, nameless air
where I may have died in the night
and you are not alerted and not questioning.

I remember you here as you are there,
the way your heart murmurs as if it were unbalanced
and not a part of you
that midnight's calamity to the arrival of hands
carrying you towards your flesh
and mine.

one night you dreamed you were older
and saw the house burning around you
the walls shrinking as you began tearing them away -
the night was too dark for you
and I was never born
in that hell eclipsing your birth.

remember we would wish time was not illusory
and not drenched in all the lives we had lived before
the unforgiving landscape where time buried us
in the whitening night air.

what did you call me and what did she feed you
that I could not counter
that parasitic voice you willed into our lives
which burns my skin at this distance.

within you and from where I am
in the dawn burning away beyond your gaze
where I have died and been forgotten in an instant.

I see it all, believe me.
from where I am lying
I have never loved you.

I can see my sleeping body vanishing
where all the eyes have hungered for
becomes as it always was.

even you
I see even the emergence of catastrophe
ultimately means nothing

even the connected bodies mean nothing.