Blackman’s Backbone Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Best to let yourself go so far to where it doesn’t matter;
If you shoot your sister in the eye, make sure she’s good and shattered:

To avoid the gossiping repercussions,
The steadily swelling lines queued up for holidays,
The way your lovers looked you in the eyes,
before they looked their other ways;

And if you must go to where there are celebrated days,
Then turn you back and go down the easement of yesterday:
Down to the teal basements dredged out by demiurge,
Better to gather the poisonous boughs and sprigs
In the venomous cenotaphs that foundation in the dirt

Than to swell up all the higher riding caesuras of spit and flirt
Where children are uncorked and braided from unsealed sorts of
Domesticated climates,
Like secrets spilled from the backyards of flirts and firemen;
And if you were to see from the fiery window that woman
Supposed to be your wife cleaning dishes in another man’s kitchen,

Smiling so finely out the window, know then too that she’s been
Told to buy those things by which she might be more finely censored;
And the girl she once knew has flown so near the forest that she is
Not herself to mention, but a twitter tattered in the branches,

Better to do your penmanship by unacknowledged midnight,
To sough your friends in furrows under the red lights of the Martian influence,
And to call them rightly when they develop fully bodied out of circumstance
And leap upon one another in a regalia of unclothed pugilists;
To kiss and slap them bleeding in the painful cuts of such a friendly reminiscence;

Or if this is not the thing to do, well at least you get the gist of it.