Sleeping Poem by Robert Rorabeck

You kissed me like wax burning
Like something on a religious holiday;
And I looked up through the power lines,
And the jaundice cracks in the plastered sky-
I loved you there:
Open mouthed, horny: you were easiest to love,
Even with your stapled god,
Even with those things in your eyes, and your toenails
Painted for Christmas:
And then your children started crying, and you heard
Them like a superhero, and you flew away home,
Home across the Everglades of so many sunken planets:
You didn’t even stop to consider to romance the
Drowned stewardesses:
You just leapt and leapt and kept on leaping like a pillow
Thrown willfully by a preschooler yet perceiving he can
Fly:
Like I did: Maybe it was my very childhood that kept you
Flying, like a paper airplane caught and thrown by my
Deft hand perpetually; and maybe tomorrow I will hang myself,
And you will finally come down,
Your engines busted, your arms steamy: What will you have
To say for yourself, pigeon-holed, now that your artist who
Amused you should be sleeping,
Sleeping.