By The Sweat Of My Proletarian Brow Poem by Robert Rorabeck

There is no subtly, so this is not art,
The pornography of a greeting card can say
I love you as coolly as an apathetic banker,
Thusly I greet you again, like a stranger out
In the humid woods, perhaps next to a queue
Of terrapin in a teal traffic-jam:
There are tadpoles in the sludge, their flagella
Ululating with the squeal of metamorphic atrophies,
And the muses are the butchered canvases,
Leftovers for the fine young forensic teams,
Their eyes now gone the way of heliotrope flies,
Gossiping as they go about their janitorial duties,
And behind her not a grotto glossed and brushed with
Micas, but a junkyard of abandoned cars up on
Cinderblocks, their vinyl stabbed and holding not
Passengers but stacks of nudie magazines which started
Molting when the rain blew through their abandonment,
And the bejeweled spiders began their trapeze acts:
Now I love you, but this is where I take you to make out,
Telling you I am someone famous with an intricate disease,
But you have turned me over and seen that my belly is
Tapioca and my navel the indication where someone stole
The cherry- I am very utilitarian- You can send me
Out to the store and I’ll come back expeditiously with a carton
Of chicken eggs, not one of them broken: Or you can hand me
Your mail, and I will walk down the street whistling, passing
It out, making sure to return the love letter you mistakenly
Disavowed; but it is not proof of any genius I hoped
To exemplify, nor a pretty lake I hoped to entrench you near,
But the spittoon of a muddied furrow, along a slender track
I laboriously plough by the sweat of my proletarian brow.