That Griefless Cause Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I try my best, girl,
And perhaps have succeeded in the lesser elements,
All those materials known to man
The things we walk on and inhale:
The stuff put before our eyes only to move away,
Like fine women in a dream of where she lives,

But the places of greater poets I’ll never know,
The lines they put down without learning to breath,
Leaping travelers of the celestial spheres,
Consume the spikenards of outer space,
And return the world to the bulbous carriage of
The rainy park,
The river of power lines up the pined ridges,
the game of stones in reckless collisions
Between a red lover and his greater mistress,

The lonely planets they exhume and propagate,
Whiffed in the cantankerous bellies of chartreuse gas giants,
Young boys living in the trailer parks of an otherworldly flume,
Drunken beyond the red visages of the living dolls;
I could not go to them, because they are already gone,
Spaced out in the unreachable bang,
A gunfight of tears and bight marks,
Though I’ve tried my best, girl,
I have tried, and you the motivation of that griefless cause.