Robert Rorabeck Poems

Taken down in a single slender
Comely dash,
I get back from the movies and I
Crash;
...

I must remember to tell mother that I found out
How Rupert Brooke died. We heard his poetry on the
Radio as we passed through Albuquerque, just
Two poems before we stopped to get gas and corn
...

Tonight there are people on airplanes over
The ocean, and men who stay up all night long
In emptied shopping malls, and endless wayward traffic,
And children who will never go home:
...

The fidelity of the day
Runs along the chrome gills
Of her highway,
...

They decorated the star-well
Until they became the center
Of gravity’s loose attention
And all the eyes of their peers
...

I get drunk and get sallow, puppy dog eyes:
I get flag poles of creamy surprise-
When I get drunk,
I just want to look into your eyes; or,
...

Long lost passageways come down
sometimes from the sun they help
you remember how the holy ghost
burned when you were young
...

Sometimes while delivering pizzas in
Gainesville, random girls would ask me
To pick them up and take them with me
Dressed up to go dancing with
...

New Years,
Cyclical like the Anglo-Saxons,
Her monthly period, presidential elections,
A night (like all the others spent, droning)
...