Writings To The Sea Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Secretive act,
Sobering, a few words on a palette—
Lines of coke snorted before a wide-eyed
Tiger:
I took my last drink in Shanghai
And it tore away my smile.
My wife said I could not drink anymore.
Two months before our second
Child,
A girl—
And I am not allowed to drink to muses
Anymore,
To cultivate the wounds of a bachelor
Who lilted into other mens' bedrooms
Using the broken feet of
A mind quilled by passion—
Like a hart wounded in a forest
Beneath the cliffs of almost vanished ghosts—

As a result of this edict:
For the most part, happiness:
Family, and a drying up of the world—
The muses remain less poisonous,
Hanging out in the amusement parks that
Are forever too expensive for me:
But in the curling hours of the afternoons,
As I imagine twilight and thus
Crepuscule beginning to fall upon all
Of the woebegone mailboxes of
Suburbia,
I allow myself to wander there again—
Thirsty,
I look out into the grotto of shipwrecks
And imagine all of the mermaids
Shopping there,
Mythologies which once toasted my heart,
Impossible dreams that yet pang in
The shallows—

And I let the words fall in a few
Sauntering lines,
Like trying to sew a crop into
A parking lot—
And thus pleasure myself—
My family asleep in another room,
Safe
From the illusionary storms
Troughed from the lines I cast out
To a callously beautiful sea.