Robert Rorabeck Poems

The greatest generalization of
Your myth
Spoke to me without
Any shoes;
...

Cold as the spaces of a new sinner’s void,
How could you travel so far away from me without
Breathing:
You were my birthday wish since thirteen,
...

Callisthenic monuments of another
Day’s preening:
My mother comes home through fiberglass porticos
The way mermaids come home from
...

What a life given to me in open measures:
They crowd outwards like floors of fissures, and her
Eyes give me no other wonders:
They stray away from me for other passengers,
...

Clinging to the broken memories upon cowardly buses
And broken airplanes,
Like toys of shrapnel in the green yards fallen from the
Astralplanes,
...

New scars tarrying where they will- always, always tarrying;
And I have had my fill, and would have found my unrequited
Love returned and returned
Bright and spendingly in bathtubs and pools, in the open day
...

The horses this time sleep standing up, Erin;
And my scars have switched sides once again like girls
Skipping rope,
Sending fibrillose and vibrant shadows once again over
...

This world concludes at three am,
The graveyard hour when hobos finally recede into
Cardboard or spikenard crèches;
I don’t know; but other boys are piling like dragons
...

Sharon,
In my trailer park gloom, you are the lightest of
Shadows:
Your soul floats over the net like a cone of badminton;
...

It was the first open mouthed
Kiss I’d had in seven years,
On the very third night of our
Gift giving
...