Insignificant Wound Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Do you sleep with dead women?
And when they look at you, can you feel them
Cascading in the opal vases of the spine,
Before they shattered in the rainy war:
As if you’d shot your sister’s eye out with that BB gun-
Miraculously, how they became new women then,
Who wouldn’t look at you:
Somnambulists in a coma,
How they shed naked right there and sat
In the barber’s chair, as he cut them anew:
Farting nervous anticipations, until
When you saw her laughing on the red brick steps
With people you didn’t know,
What did she say to you then, as you walked by
In the cathedrals of the novel year:
Was she another woman you didn’t know,
Kissing him in the renovated places you used to kiss
Her doggy-style behind the couch
When grandmother and Jeanie were visiting on
Their way to Oregon:
Some kind of plan of Succubus, she’d sucked it out
Of herself, the poison of venomous wound,
The pellets you’d planted in her gut:

The shed skin you sleep with, the lingering scales
Of this mirage, the same hair you knew still curls like
Finger nails up from the grave,
The bud-less roses of the decapitated garden she does not attend;
Walking away, she pulled the glass out of herself
And metamorphosised into the strange,
Leaving your triaged with an insignificant wound....