Thus, feverishly, I pick another stem and hold it lilting to you <br />Gaze, but I am a thief, for you are not my attended gardens. <br /> <br />So the sea has washed his lower lip, and made it droop like wet <br />Grass, and the sands are measurable if time was petrified, <br />And the heavens were a sorority of far away oracles, <br /> <br />And the fort they made to extend the empire stands like a surveyor <br />On the perch of tourists, and the graveyard they gave to their penitence <br />Is awash in the gloom of a concrete cross, <br /> <br />Where little children not knowing who they are run around <br />In the allocated space of games, and lovers like overrun persimmons <br />Are in the angles of worship, where they are best seen in the <br />Peripheries of twilight, <br /> <br />Thus in the air blooms the preservative of missing theme parks, <br />And the grand finale is on the coral parapets, crying the silence’s joys, <br />For the tourists are glutting amphibiously upon the halogen wharf, <br /> <br /> <br />Faint latchkeys swim with mongrels around the satin hotel, <br />Now a haunted university, and the quicker lovers who will soon disperse, <br /> <br />Like spores to dry in autumn’s impotency, rile in the act in their <br />Possessed room beneath the flashing neon sign of a cheap motel <br />They will soon forget, as their weddings occur far away from one another.<br /><br />Robert Rorabeck<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/twilight-s-vacancy/
