Like A Famished Stage Poem by Robert Rorabeck

If you want tomorrow off, I will work your day,
So I don’t have to spend mine staring at myself in insane
Places,
My eyes as deep and uneven as cesspools,
Checking the pseudepigrapha of Oregon to find out how
Girls have the power to change into midnight doves
Of swings and dark and fetishistic lances
To trick their casual knights into honey moons of caldrons
Of orgasms that can never be returned;
Or walk out into the pile driving clouds, turning quick silver
Airplanes into mobiles for drowned gods,
Or gods in their segregated graveyards; and snakes fat off
Of so many, many men that the trees of wisdom are empty;
And yet here is Eve’s hand still curling for the fruit,
Whispering harshly through the narcissistic
Bows of empty honey jars: This is the law she gave us,
And black generals are under her feet like congratulatory
Cenotaphs, and they try to bow,
And the wind breaks loose and is disinterested and mouths off
Some place else;
When, then will she finally have to figure out that we are emptied
By her- And there is no place here now that her inglorious wisdom
Has not found out, or peeled away with titted teeth:
Made us her husk of Ganymede and put that infernal sword
Flaming before our house beneath the graveyard beneath the creek
Where we painted her and held out for her;
And watch her now horrified by our animosity as she leads her
Well-suited family by the hand through the doors of heaven,
The glow closing like a famished stage behind her,
Leaving nothing left for us that we would care or wish for to understand.