In The Crypt Of Utopia Poem by Robert Rorabeck

If everything was better,
I could take off work,
Or I could cut hair for a living;
But now it is impossible to be occupied
Not ever having learned math
Or memorized the periodic table-
Imagine if the country hummed like a chorus
Of wasps again,
And the neat choreographed segregations didn’t
Bleed,
Or that gray wasn’t the new color in our flag;
And I imagine deliberately unbuttoning her shirt
Speckled by the ancient canopy in the cemetery
The fence around us high enough to
Keep us in the crypt of Utopia,
And this should be our gothic Eden
Where the insects philosophize in the lips and
Beards of the old hemlock professors,
And sting her breasts like little flecks of
Homeopathic telegraphy
While the Mississippi trickles off in our left ear,
And our eyes hypnotize us simultaneously
Until our bodies swim to the steady rolling of
Traffic and over us,
Bright smoke and shadows, the orgy of angels
Singing and laughing,
And the humorists orate in long, effluvious
Folk verses,
All the time they are building newer skyscrapers
Over our wonderful séance,
Never realizing who is now our king,
Or that death has sucked all the sweetness
Of the flower as the
Snake has sucked the yoke,
And the bouquet is wilting on the table to the
Home where there shall be no return.