The Rest Of My Days Poem by Robert Rorabeck

There might be a song in the night of birds,
And thousands and thousands of stories of great deals:
The princess just might love me if this is how she feels:
Or she is probably just keeping me captivated in the
Sugar-land shade
While the apiaries make their honeys into blouses of
Marmalade; and as she tells me she loves me,
Her lips stamp on repercussions of flesh: she thinks of entire
Squadrons of other men sliding down poles or
Climbing up ladders: the boy who saved her cat on Valentines
Day,
And all the world was whole, and she had never fallen down
Or bruised anything;
And in the morning she might kiss me, but I know she’s going off
To get another tattoo, the pictures scarred into her flesh
Telling the truth she will never say to me,
Light upon her body like paper dolls, like designs on airplanes;
Like scars given after birth, like candles burned out on a birthday
Cake:
And then I sit and watch her in the shade of some kitchen,
Some tree’s shade wimpling her through the blinds, before I have
To go to work and she has to go back to washing the dishes,
And dreaming her things that are too precious and caustic
That to ever share with me who petrify me in the stage of a basilisk’s
Gaze, and into a graveyard of gray topiaries with the living-dead
Pets I would be forced to pine away the rest of my days.