The Fainting Of The Unfortunate Twins Of Marie Antoinette Poem by Robert Rorabeck

We will all be socialists soon enough,
but the dogs will continue debating through the night;
The little thefts that much more unclear,
Yet the poetry will flow like blood from
The lips of the guillotines; her beauty will pay
Us all the same, and she will love us in a smoky
Union out the door of the chortling cabaret;
Jubilees of leggy flirtations, our hands on her thigh
And further up as runs the floorboards,
As we move the trailers go thump and rattle,
Shipping the produce over the cobbled stones
Starting out in the earliest mornings, as the monochromatic
Harbingers leap from the radio waves of wire-framed
Towers, the way storks migrate around storms of
Apoplectic pregnancy; and in the great dusty tears
Of the global depression, we will gather to hear the
Monikers of the men who hoard the wheat;
We should spit and curse, and hold her red silk dress
Up a little more, the same color as her consumptive
Lipsticks;

I can’t wait to fill my blue jeans up with her red fingers,
And the faceless washers of our tomorrow’s currency.
And listen under the furtive corrugations to the loose-change
Of the rainstorm,
The infant’s milkless gurglings,
The empty trains’ hustling, and the thudding bodies
Shortened by just a head,
Rolling into washing bins, like stricken doves,
Or, taken all-together, the fainting of the unfortunate twins of
Marie Antoinette.