Time Crimes Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Strange gifts here they are.
Some would say they don’t come easy
From the shadows of the aloe,
Beside the blue carport across the sleeping canal;
Beneath the electric blankets of breathing dirt
Mommy and daddy are sleeping behind the
Stringed beads,
The television is in its corner atop the
Overturned corn hamper,
And further down the white coral road
Imperfect from pot holes,
And the scattered lilacs of little flower-
Girls, kidnapped never to obtain sororities,
To feel the love of his eyes burning across some
Extraordinary graveyard,
Unreachable neighbors live sawing alien lumber;
I live here, not knowing what I do, perceiving
What silence I turn in my hands better than the empiricisms
Of all the sensual armies, and that I should
Use my occult knowledge to woo another girl,
Out of her place and time- Should I find her lectured by the
Latin grammarians of my future,
Young legged, scatterbrained in her intermittent
Virginity,
While white hot rabbits lie sleeping strewn through the
Rock gardens of my mother’s dusty throat,
To show her where the amphibians yet serenade,
Where the skies above the east are yet salmon
By the premiering influences of that opening light,
Where the mermaids bathe temporarily alleviated
From the leaping caesuras;
And if my words are not entirely pure,
And my temporal abductions slightly criminal,
To assure her we’ve started an infinite doubling that might
Always come back to itself and try to hold its breath long
Enough that she might metamorphose,
In to something that holds me together, like the spine going
All the way up to her eyes, for my hand to crawl intrepidly
Like the spider from its nursery rhyme,
And to her lips to drink their well, to mark them afterwards
The way some tramps carve in fence posts that everything is
Good here,
That we should elope for awhile longer, mutually imposing
Our bodies to the juvenile dust,
And decide that here is a very fine place to breathe hands
Cupping what we should not see if
We were both unaware; but taken together
This is very much real,
And the wind sleeps like a dozen kittens
Curled up in the aloe.