Pantomiming The Clouds Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Pantomiming the clouds, what strange verbiage of
Mercury poisoned haberdasheries
These words become, hardly recovered, though they
Are gathering themselves from a battlefield of plagues
Halfway to Saint Louis or Egypt,
And the dogs wine up to the night, the coyotes bellowing,
The mother possums bighting their lips,
As the rockets of cosmonauts continue shooting off:
Shooting off as all of the stars of their nations die,
As half eaten horses get up, but do so little good,
As the enormous and poisonous centipedes dance
Halfheartedly with little girls,
As I call my best friends from their newly dug graves and we
All stand like a chorus of flighting carolers outside
Your bedroom’s parlors, singing of the night’s holidays,
The banshees of misshapen housewives beating their
Unkind hearted knell into the roof; and it rains broken horsehoes
And hardnosed pix-axes;
And the gypsies come like cold hearted butterflies and steal
Everything, so in the morning our tree is gone, but your eyes
Are still burning holes straight through the world that has killed
Itself so many times for you.