Second Story Of Another Dream Of.... Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Lifeless brides suntan in the blindness of
The dead lighthouse,
I have felt her amber eyes searching through
The back rooms of my address,
And her fingers did the diffident waltz of
Skeleton stilts, balancing on each bone
Of my xylophone backbone:
A churchyard holiday of neuron ridges
Arching like caterpillars up to my globed head....
Spinning the whirligiged doodads.
I have her in the back of my mind,
Stenographing my purple intellect with
Spiderish good looks.
I have her like a little grave six inches
Down my skull;
Something stolen from a little girl’s dollhouse,
And then torn up in the muffling rainstorm.
They took off my cap and placed her in
Like a begonia used up by the bees one spring,
And corked it with a piece of eight
Removed later to buy twenty minutes from a mermaid.
Now she sings my mind like a mauve worm weaving
The silk in a white tent burning the oils in a sinking tree;
She is there cooing as snot drips from my feverish nostrils,
Humming a dream I once had in the ports of Catalan,
Where the lady in the rocks remains stepping outwards,
Her russet locks streaming into the brambles and
Eventually the bone-fair homes of artists drinking
Sangria and thinking of their dead sister beneath the
Kites and the orange tree,
Up upon a second story of another dream
Of another dream.