Deep In The Forest Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I put on pageants to excuse my scars,
To delay my inevitable novel: It has a flat
Tire, and the night is wild and flipping over itself
Like a firework pinned to a tree.
The mad man has taken over the fort and shot the
Donkey, and no one is brave enough to harvest
His meat;
But for a little while he’s made the street beautiful,
As beautiful as a woman society has given
Over to him for a dance or two: a serene
And agreeable woman,

He crouches like a gargoyle with all the things
To say. His hands are scarred by the pull strings of
Divine Providence. He wonders,
How far will he fall once all the lines are cut and
The fish is free to roam with a giant hook in his mouth,
And his mate dead,
A trophy on some fisherman’s wall;

It is like he has stumbled unto a valley where there
Used to grow grapes until the grandest fire tromped,
And now there are only stones,
And an entire colony of windmills like church goers,
Waiting for the wind to take them in spend-thrift fits,
To see the hallelujahs of their spinning hands’ jubilee;
And to see this is madness,
And it came upon him in a host of swirling motions,

So for the rest of his lines he wasn’t there:
He couldn’t be seen except for a distant threat lighting
Off homemade fireworks,
And for the rest of the movie there were only officials
Debating what they could do about him,
Until the audience all left,
And the argument continued like a tremendous tree
Toppled like an erroneous whisper deep, deep in the forest.