Robert Rorabeck Poems

Filling a coffin with rum—making a sea of the graveyard:
And I remember in the middle of my thirty
Years, skipping work and playing hookie with you in
A hotel:
...

They made room for us in
The beehive.
We're the busy French girls.
We're taking off our clothes
...

So many ways of crying home: waxy of bosom—
Making the foxes foam:
And the will follow you just as long as there is
Day left in high school:
...

At the bottom of the stairs,
An estuary where you can look up and see
The billboards of your souls:
Things that can be sold to survive—
...

Sun bathes the unicorn
And I write poems
And drink rum:
I write poems and
...

Burn my soul in a hole—in a hole as deep as a bucket—
As a bucket waking up on Sundays—
And teach me—teach me to rhyme and sing like a king—
Like a king come Tuesday—
...

And if I were dancing drunkenly
South of Spain,
Would you catch me in the New Years of that
Country and across
...

Here: the scars are awkward:
They prevent romance, but not love;
They prevent a meaningful conclusion to
Those erection which go up like cerulean tents
...

The work is really about the work, they sing:
The young punks with Mohawks and hair-lips.
Tree frogs jeweled in heliotrope, they sing. The
Epitaphs they give these graveyards in mass, our song,
...

An hour past noon,
Fingers itching from the caffeine,
Gun in the bottom drawer with the bullets,
But there isn’t going to be a fight.
...