Twilight's Vacancy Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Thus, feverishly, I pick another stem and hold it lilting to you
Gaze, but I am a thief, for you are not my attended gardens.

So the sea has washed his lower lip, and made it droop like wet
Grass, and the sands are measurable if time was petrified,
And the heavens were a sorority of far away oracles,

And the fort they made to extend the empire stands like a surveyor
On the perch of tourists, and the graveyard they gave to their penitence
Is awash in the gloom of a concrete cross,

Where little children not knowing who they are run around
In the allocated space of games, and lovers like overrun persimmons
Are in the angles of worship, where they are best seen in the
Peripheries of twilight,

Thus in the air blooms the preservative of missing theme parks,
And the grand finale is on the coral parapets, crying the silence’s joys,
For the tourists are glutting amphibiously upon the halogen wharf,


Faint latchkeys swim with mongrels around the satin hotel,
Now a haunted university, and the quicker lovers who will soon disperse,

Like spores to dry in autumn’s impotency, rile in the act in their
Possessed room beneath the flashing neon sign of a cheap motel
They will soon forget, as their weddings occur far away from one another.