Go Down To The Sea Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Go down to the sea and listen
To it slap the docks like a sailor
Slaps the thighs of his barmaid.
Listen to the gulls screech like
Murderous souls sentenced to swallow
The wriggling, scaled bodies of
Drowning fish, as the sea spits
Hoary waves up at them,
As the sun lances spears of light
Down upon them,
As the day gyrates like a drunken waif,
As daylight tumbles and slips down
Through the watery sheets,
And there to begin drowning,
A hypnotizing death
With the slow slumbering eels,
Like loose cords of fat brown ribbons
beneath the
Bellies of sharks and rays
Down to where the menservants slip away
After a lifetime of shuffling for the aristocracy—
There is the cool, cool place
Where you cannot breathe…. Where you
Become forgotten liked drowned ships and trees,
And sound is muted like screams
Pressed beneath pillows,
And the sea above is like the sky,
Is like outer space, that strange distance
Which sucks your skull out from
The old, fleshy cage and in that drowning
Park where kelp and bodies sway,
In the black black sea far beneath the
Streets where drunken lovers still spat and play,
Nothing there will see your pale, eternal gleam…..