Robert Rorabeck Poems

You have an office and I have a song,
And so many restraints:
I paint the signs over and picture you, whetting my whistle
On the suppositional hullabaloo:
...

All the paddy-whack in the woods is returning to
The sound of the comely boys beating themselves into the
Grounds,
The bicycle slaves, the Lincoln-log towns:
...

The neighborhood is becoming gentrified,
And this isn’t the first rodeo she’s been too, but you can still
Step outside and see the motorcycles being ridden away
By graduating bicycle thieves;
...

Going home and crashing cherry red cars
Just like the verbs of puberty; while earlier that day there
Was math and Lincoln Douglas debate and really great
Girls who couldn’t care a lick for me:
...

You don’t care if you hurt me, as long as you stay
Beautiful:
You are like my mother- maybe you live down a ghostly
Street under the manticores of parasitic street lights:
...

It is cold to be without blankets,
Or tumbled with the paradoxical attributes of the
Female’s sex:
She has so many friends and she smoked and lives
...

When the lions germinate they are asleep:
The airplanes are silver quarters in the arcade of cerulean sky:
And this is south Florida, or this an arcade:
And the lights are out, but the power lines, like camels,
...

These words die like lucky rabbits in rock gardens:
And you’ve been speaking so long with your
Blue eyes,
Getting hitched up on buses and making it all the way
...

They are such good people they have no more liquor
In their souls,
And she has been cheating on him again in the early morning
Falseness of trailer parks and
...

Walking the pensive rounds in that darkness
Probably in Colorado
Caracoling the lake off to the side of family get-togethers,
Looking at low hanging spruce branches to hang
...