To Touch What I Was Not Meant To Feel Poem by Robert Rorabeck

There is no easiness to this body’s way-
There is goes, pretending to be of some good avenue,
When even near the major highways of sunlicked
Stock,
It is wandering off with its eyes:
I am wandering off, looking for the milkiness of
Your sodden gold, the crèches down by the carports
Of your knocky thighs;
And, as a little boy- I had wishes; and I had dreams,
And I snuck across the property line
And drank the neighbor’s beer;
And I have had wishes and dreams of you
Since first I ever saw you-
I have put you in the triage of aloe: I have put you
In a spell- You- so dashing, blue-bell,
Curled and tucked into mountain rind,
Abashed by the old forts of the old gods’ sea-
I am trying to cheat fortune to hold your hand,
To brush one finger once across your tremulous lines-
To dab one spot of flesh onto your spot of gold,
Just once, while you are yet breathing and surreal;
And I do not know your proper names for the things you dream,
For the children you are yet to have;
I am but half winsome, comely and lost- and I’ll go by my
Own motorcades down away from you into the sweltering peat:
I’ll fornicate in old graveyards if it’s what I have to do,
And pay less attractive women to whisper venal nothings into
My ear;
If that what it means to surround you in a turgid ghost,
To envelop you like a decrepit seal: with no royalty in my host,
To touch what I was not meant to feel.