By These Monsters Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I busied myself with cutting wood
Until the men braver than me came with glorious
Instruments as well as women enamored on strings;
And they invited me into the labyrinth for which there
Was no answer save to proceed: And they gifted me with
Battlements and miniature forges worked by industrious
Insects and clever bats and their ilk;
And there was one strange instance where they sat me out
On a gun-deck in a green field before I went underground,
Like a driving range, and I sat in the seat of that gun and fired
Off heavy charges into a swarm of balloons, like jellyfish
Let loose before the rows of Australian pines, swaying like
Rootless dancers, trying to convince us the highway wasn’t
Even there, though it could be heard streaming in both directions,
But mostly southbound: Afterwards, we dived like Beowulf into
The first fitt, and the door closed behind us and we drank as
We dried off, but then I was alone, with my selection of arms,
And the tattoos imprinted upon me by lasers upon joining the
Company. Beyond this, it is horrible, for after each sequence the
Door is closed. No one told me this: there is no going back,
And the water is over spilling so all the time you are about to
Drown, as the monsters become exponentially more terrifying,
With greater and more sympathetic back stories the readers get no
Chance to hear save for in the denouement, which is never gotten to.
But I must confess, these scars are my own, these brilliant regalia of
Pain which makes the eyes flit to, and the mouths to dropp with the
Morbidity of dead ancestors. Underground, they provide the only light,
Save for when my bitten blade sojourns along the plate necks of
Dragons and alligators, while above tender house wives drink expensive
Liquor and masturbate like teenage saints crossed upon a fourpost bed;
But I don’t know any of that, but must keep heading downwards. Soon
I will meet my father and his gang, and the hungry windmills pin wheeling
In the frozen lakes. Soon students will crowd over me with their bicycles,
Swarm like ants, and professor will ask me why there ain’t no stanzas.
Certainly though, coated with gore, my old skin hung upon a coat rack
In a far distant dimension, it is true what they say now: That I can only
Know myself by these monsters.