Robert Rorabeck Poems

Less complicated and more beautiful
When you don’t wear an expression,
I will never know what you are thinking
Except that you love your father.
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Two dollar beer is the life for me,
Because I don’t have the memory but for
One or two things:
I used to cut paper and make snowflakes
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If all of a peacock was purple
It would be a star—
No cerulean or evergreen—
No place for
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Meretricious beauty—the definition of my very own
Muse struggling toward higher art—
The same way that F. Scott Fitzgerald loved his wife:
For no reason except for her chassis
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Crawling to the forefront of another misery of
Guatemala—I drink my rum,
I say my lines—and I await for another day to splay me open
To the eyes and senses of fishermen—
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We will have new candles brought to us—and our fathers
Will buy us new cars amidst our birthdays:
Even if she will never sing another song for us—but she will arise
And wake up her children
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Like a river sings despondent blue grass
For the baby Moses,
I uncurl this cap:
I hate to say that I still dream of barmaids of
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I was drunk when I called you down from the sky.

Now I don’t know what to do with you.
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I do not know how to love her properly;
My mind sparks words that have no fear,
The heart-strung knights
Who leap upon the world. Like entrepreneurs,
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Would that you’d been born my sister,
Then you would already be happily married,
Free of the holocaust
When your mother left to be born again;
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