Before The Monstrous Cognoscente Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Carried into the room
Outside the eyes lies all imperfection-
I should have never taken off my
Hat to step outside,
For soon the dog had killed the cat
In the geological guts of the rock garden,
Though almost inchoate my father
Came home for Easter
Trailing behind him the sad hopes
Of the waves’ Diaspora
And we siblings grew up failing
With the natural lips suckling
Nourishment from our fingertips:
Until we grew faintly anemic
To a downhill graveyard where
The new Cadillac’s park
And the living suffer in the structure
Of the inevitably departing-

Standing up
With eyes closed I can see
The world I left.
The way she looked back in high school,
Untouched and nicely stratified.
When I lie down alone
In a bed nothing yet knows me in
I can almost return to the time
Before the monstrous cognoscente
Isolated in the gardening before the apex
The fluid sky hoping in a pin wheeling
Sea of yet optimistic comets swimming
Inside the unawakened consciousness
Where yet defined my fortunes continue
Breathing in the unmalleable
Cornucopias of inner possibility.