Satan's Dream Poem by Robert Rorabeck

So here is the charred millennia you call a home:
Out on the beach, there is the smell of something different,
Where children used to hold hands
When the stars still filled a book of scribbling dreams,
And nothing ever died;
Now the junked cars parade like frozen basilisks
In the knotty surf, where the people were going
Sliding beneath the visible overpasses to escape the winged doom:
All of it in some kind of halo it is the only thing
The nude goddess wears as she flickers like a
Fluctuating reception above the compulsive waves,
And the only thing there is,
The only thing there is at all is the memory you tore
Out of the pages of life, and crumbled in your pulsing hands;
Now your body is hot like a kiln with fever,
And your precious future is a butterfly with a wing torn off,
Your tomorrow is blown glass ill formed,
And thus transformed again in the flames into uncertainties;
The women have melted away- all the women you never knew,
But loved compulsively like a foundling child:
All the women floating in the air, blown away like dandelion spores,
The crematorium is the horizon, and they are thoughtlessly
Covering you with their remains, and they are covering the
Sea, and the cars like snow,
And the goddess hovering slender at the waist, her head a halo
Is sipping away the orange sun,
And flickering like Satan’s dream.