The Moon And The Airplanes Poem by Robert Rorabeck

With the bonfires gurgling jaundiced boned,
The marionettes are leaping over
In a perplexity of spells: yes, they are trying to become
Real, true—even the truest boys,
While I contemplate
Making a living selling hermit crabs,
And the butterflies who used to be my lovers
Contract tennis-elbow,
Just as in each wave lies imprisoned a wind-chime
Of perpetuated unicorns:
In this, the shallows of our racing courses—
Beautiful diseases disguised in words of Latin
Or the literary complexity of suicidal professors:
When, in actuality, it was just the disease of some love
Lost so many millennia ago as if to
Become a religion to blind children stumbled off
The marble footsteps of some buses,
To reach out, stumbling, hands outreaching for
Blue gills and pitch forks alike:
The joy in the unrecognizable senses,
In the words that fit together unrequitedly—
It is in the morbidity after society’s sensibilities that
We find ourselves, and lay down for a long time in the unwinding
Grasses, flitting like censures without any priestly virtues
Back and forth underneath the moon and the airplanes.