In Our Unrecognized Hands Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Lovelessly, enjoy the tennebaums of infrastructure:
Salient as a terrapin just knocked up at a
Bowling alley,
Jog your pin-shelled hips along the consumptive avenue,
And tell your girlfriends at hand that there
Is something not at all right in
All of this:
But look at how the grand houses have made it all up
Beside you,
Pillaging like ruthless children and down right bullies
Into adolescence,
And saying to one another neighborly, and tongue less
But using all of those gaping transoms like
A gauge:
Look what we have done, grown brawny and well-
Developed in the competition of our
Neighbors,
And now we really have swung so high that it no longer
Matters to contemplate where the swing sets and
Other dalliances of our youths have gone:
We were jaundiced anyways and out of sorts;
Our family’s pets loved us better than anyone, but they are
Now all cotton mouthed down south into graveyards,
Where the airplanes lick them like thoughtless quills over
Paper,
But without any ink:
And men come anyways and trim our yards and verbiage,
And put roses in the lapels of our front doors:
And housewives come in and frequently cook, or infrequently
Make love in us,
Their haughty daughters swimming and sunbathing half nakedly
In our backgrounds of pools: so, so what- if that girl we
First knew was never fit for us,
And has forsaken our grand playgrounds of ballrooms for not
Even a fifth of us; and sectioned off in her little hut
With her brown man and wonderfully breaded children, maybe she throws
Fits, like the sea in her carrion of whimsically sociopathic
Dressing rooms; it is never for us,
And our affluence is wide open and gaping, not even good for
Carrying grapes: until we rot we will think of her
With the sun coming up like a popgun over the marble busts
And trellises of our head rooms:
And we are only good for apiaries of homeless, sugar toothed
Wasps;
We think of her hair as it glistens, and cascades; and we look
Out at our roses the men who do not know us have planted at our
Knees,
And think day after day what it would feel like to hold them over her
Like a rosary in our unrecognized hands,
And become our hoped for parts by offering her the shady perfumes
That she has already told us she can never willingly accept.