I Suppose We All Must.... Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Stacked against me,
I suppose we all must die,
But I have a nasty trick of taking a whole
Lot of ba$tards with me before I go-
Even in daycare after school in Elementary,
I caught the dodge ball between
My trembling knees and called the teacher
Out,
And he had to go; and that was the end of
That, and we had won,
But, I suppose we still all must die;
And I’d check out Sherlock Holmes from the library
And keep it in bed with me well overdue until even the fine
Detective smelled of piss and fear;
In fact, he entirely lost his sense of smell,
And ended up following the wrong trails,
And was bettered by feral young bloodhounds with
Immaculate olifactories;
But I guess you’ve already been told that
If you’ve read Mark Twain’s A Double Barreled
Detective Story; and if you’ve been listening,
You’ll know I suppose we all must die-
Think of the flowers picked for corsage,
Or the flowers I picked for you who came all the way
From Sweden,
Were yet molested by Swedish bees and late at night
By romantic Swedish vampires, before they gave
Their extinguished photosynthesis to you,
But what did you do with them?
Didn’t even those flaming sex organs mean a thing,
Before you chose to settle down into the blue anchors
Of his smiling wounds
Which took you all the way down to the bottom
And sat there making unmitigated love with you;
And how long do you thing you might be able to hold
Each other- For another poem,
Long enough for a finer gentleman to paint you naked
Into prehistory, glamorous and exposed like a
Newly discovered extinct species, like a postmodern pictograph
Upon the walls of a working class cave;
And I’ve thought of you driving up to Michigan,
Or selling fireworks in New Mexico;
I’ve thought of you down with the broken
Arrowheads scattered like seeds out in the pasture,
Or while reading from my indebted cliffs far into
Each succession of afternoon;
And maybe one day I will find you out,
And call you by some secret name, and catch you
About the neck, and drink off your lips as if I were
Tipping back a flower,
Your tongue a pistil, your limbs undraped each petal
A game,
Solving you for a little while before the end,
And the dawn of a knife blade along the dusky arteries
Where the bank comes reaping what we all must owe;
And I’d thought I’d find you then while
The curtains close and all the dancers wilt off the ballroom,
But even if we won’t at least we danced together
Mammals of the same language, breathing so similar
Of thoughts that we might have been of the same body
Even though we were so far away;
And I would hold your hand even as the book was closing,
Even after I had failed at the last chapter,
I would keep to you and decorate your passing in the
Beautiful gifts of finished stone that said you name,
Whatever I could buy or steal for you;
And even if I suppose we all must die, I would like to pretend to
Having known you,
Of giving you my drunken thefts bottled, tossed into a weeping sea
And carried so far away.