Showtime Poem by Robert Rorabeck

A man without his lover sleeps near the sea.
In fact he is dead and nothing but bones,
And, oh how that dead man grins
To see the night and day reciprocate.
When his skull drinks the wine of sunset,
When the sea is rushing and twisting in watery knots—
Then he can think about the love
The world has shown to him,
As crabs scuttle like little forget-me-nots,
Red and hinged pupils dilated in his dreamy eye-sockets….
Then he can see her riding in the red mists,
And already her suitor is upping her razzle-dazzled skirts,
And, oh how he can see her getting it done,
As the wild sea bucks— There in the waves,
A herd of Arabian horses are stampeding,
But that is just a metaphor,
But the man’s lover is real. There she is,
Just off the East coast of Florida
Flaming like a disease—He sees her and grins
And gets drunk on the breeze as his ribs
Grow brittle in rows half embarrassed by the sand—
Parts of him are thrown away. Parts of him are halfway
To Africa, but his skull is there grinning like a prize—
And he drinks his wine in awful fits,
As he sees his woman getting f-cked by the flash and bang
Of that sunset—Oh what filthy lust!
But the sex is good and the horizon is its stage,
And the dead man’s skull drinks his wine
And laughs at his memory’s terrible play….