Living In The Coliseum Of The Creeps Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Plato invented the first Barbie for example
And said, “This is what I mean, ”
And set her on a model horse
And watched her leap the scene.

And all the beardless students gathered there
Clapped and roared,
Not knowing that they too exemplified
The imperfection of the horde.

She spent her days grazing knee high in the
Sultry wheat,
But getting to the higher fruit proved a tougher
Feat;

But when she got up to the sweetest bough
And such rare fruit she did perceive,
She thought now I have the means to prove that
I shouldn’t grieve;

Yet, when she leaned outwards to get the rarest thing,
Her ample bosom stymied her: her breasts got in the way,
And she had not the wings to save herself from
The most innocent of graves:

She fell so far for she had not the means to fly
And by this I mean she went into a languorous dive:
Drinking from the evening eyes of men, she stopped along
The highway and entered into a place of ill-refute:
She lingers there while the world had a changing of the
Guard:

She never made it up to college, she didn’t keep her guard;
And thus bringing her into the fruition of a newer lord;
And there was many a evening he sat her on his blue-jeaned knee,
And said, “Now, Barbie, it’s time to play with me.”


Thus the moral of the story, folks, is that nothing
Can be real with any perfect certainty; and thus Plato was deceived,
Later on Newton ate the apple that defined our certain gravity;
But that’s little more that hearsay, mentioned in more loquacious stories.

One thing remains for certain, though;
We all live in the coliseum of the creeps,
And what doesn’t kill us, though,
Will surely make us weep.