From Another Forth Of July Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Now they shuffle off—
In a time of piss and envy,
I collect a new gut and a new body,
So decry this up to the airplanes,
To the spaces that once could happen
Anywhere—
This is another of my poems that for once
Will never go remembered—
This is the place where the dead can
Lie anywhere—
And they do,
While the monuments that once were
Now gather
The strangest confections of their memories
Underfoot-
Was not this where they pretended to once live,
And in their neighborhood of rotten gas lights
Pretended somehow to
Concoct this ordeal:
Yes, this is how it happened, the murder
That was noticed by no one—
By the little boy amidst the merry go rounds
Of the shopping malls of anywhere,
Stared upon by the glass tombs
And the ruby eyes of the albino alligators
Just after his first kiss,
Just after he thought to disrobe from all of
His clothing of lies—
Another play unfolds
Another butterfly spreads her wings,
And at the moment of preternatural climax,
Another American finds the opportune time to become
Indebted to the moment of climax,
All of the fundamentalists inside of her
Knotted belly unutterably sure that all is needed is
But two of a kind to be rubbed together
To see the almost religious dawning of another
Sacrifice to the crucifixions of
America that was paid all too little to lie down
Upon her fading bed
And to pretend—just pretend
For another fourth of July.