Before The Creeps' Parade Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Before the party reaches climax
And suffocating home makers begin
The desperate groping
Through the adulterous treasure chest
Of their neighborhoods’ keys,
Proving their eyes’ covetous
Fetish for the flesh they see every day
Walking out into the muted sun
From chintzy front stoops so alike
That they sometimes forget
They are different people,
Fools’ goldfish in the drunken tombs,

I cut my teeth on my wrist’s open shell,
Realizing, like Sylvia Plath,
I am not new anymore/
I am not in her heart/
My cheek is scarred like a Great Poet
..... But not,
For the marble bust of her immortality
Is already taking up the
Crawl space under her mother’s stairs

Out under the open night
And I am not doing so well/
I cannot make up my mind,
As their laughter fulfills the wishes of their hearts.
Secluded and beaming, in great strides
They copulate
And fill up their shopping carts
With their religious beliefs and
New children birthed under
The propitious neon signs....

And if they vanished?
And if they move away?
But it is okay, because this is mitosis,
And, decided, fixed, assured,
They are one and all.
What is broken can be fixed.
Insured, they can never die.
Socialized, they will live on....

They are the multiplicity
Of good capitalism/
If in a shattered mirror
See
Exponential suburbia

All the same
Subtle changes on the
Surface of pleasure

If the economy is healthy
They will continue to grow

From the self-ostracized shadows
I watch them walk out into the cold blindness.
Already they are beginning to feel-up
Whoever is closest to them,
Their lips drunkenly cradling
Lusty sale-pitches. They will get into cars.
They will drive to homes which look so alike,
To wives and beds and rooms
So alike
That they cannot be blamed if they make
The small transgressions of their class’ bliss.

I see her in them and I want to cry....
But she has already taken his name/
The great salesman, a man of her faith.
They bless the mezuzah on the threshold
And follow through.
Soon children will come and a larger house
With many guests their eyes will pass around,

But they will never see me again.
She will never say my name again.
Already she cannot recall the hour
I walked outside and lost my way
Pallid anemic hope of the lesser word.
Agnostic and fleeting,
I remain the juvenile scholar,
The half-assed philosopher eating fast-food,
Imagining the average woman naked
And versatile,
The greater lesser man with his dogs
And his traveling case,
A wanderer’s identity slipping
From the show early
Before the creeps’ parade.