Waiting At The Desk Of Scribbles For The Sea To Take Us Too Poem by Robert Rorabeck

This night sinks, sinks,
Sings—like a drowning woman
She is doing very well:
Looking at myself now, gray and boorish,
Somehow distracting from her lavish protestations:
A virgin bride underwater,
Slipping, slipping,
Singing now, being distracted by her own song,
Being this:
A knife in the eyeball of a poet’s illusions,
Trying to figure out this liquor,
The downfall of all of our grandfathers,
And the bad arrangements which distracted and
Sank the ship,
And the lights are on at the very dregs of the ocean,
And the waves are like the bangs of a gargantuan mistress
Who eats her little girls and eggs all day,
And to this goes our uneasy, feverish psalm,
The first again tonight to be done with the spice of cheap
Liquor,
When both of her daughters are down and easy in their
Beds, well situated with their professional illusions,
I do this uneasy work,
I tip the burnish glass as vanished friends give me no
Reason,
And I get up into early morning to cheer over the
Paltry games of ghosts,
And my skin envelops me like a shroud,
And I fail math, and drool at my desk of scribbles,
As the ladies sink, singing a song which gets me into detention,
And Saturday school which was like being in a movie
Where I met so many friends where we sat and made games
In the sand and waited for everything to get deeper
And take us too.