The Abandoned Court Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Pigeons high above the honking streams,
Smoke stacks in the cold chapped air,
Leaves as dead as the love I’ve never felt,
The bread trucks unloading stale loaves at
The derelict supermarkets,

Shakespeare is in a tidal pool where the river
Has thrown up the flat tires,
Marlowe is down on his knees, his eye poked
Out from a vengeful branch,

Her lips are tired from their taste tests,
But his neck is still hungry, and his chest warm-
He is a refugee from Nigeria, with a faux gold watch,
That keeps calling her eyes to it,
Like willful sparrows stealing time, lining a gaudy nest,

I do not wear enough clothing for this unfaithful weather,
And my lips expel the fume of a rimy heart,
Like the heavy exhaust geysers up from the silver bumpers,
In long congested trails of mechanical asses,
Chassis of tremendous strength, lost and grazing in the
Deeply rutted spheres, and the empty windows like the poached
Nests of wrens,

Stolen in the urban sprawl, the bodies move like willful mannequins,
I am in love with my girlfriend from another world,
Sometimes her name is meaningful though in a savage park,
Laid down in the homeless newspapers of vandalized wood;
I try to cry to her once again, but the buildings raise soundless tombs;
Thus my meanings end up lost in the abandoned court.