The Animal You Are Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Slipped into a simple world
You see two colors
Both of them wrong
But supliant
On the first meadow where
Your mother opened her
Early blouse and fed you;
From the milk dripped
Your first word,
Like from a flower's clitoris
The bucolic residence of
A mowed wilderness,
The radius of your vision
Grew like blood drops
Of ink, like dew,
The migratory noise and
The the light leaping through
The rain,
Trying to survive-
The space streaks with tears
The vision blurs
Parcels the roadside,
The nameless emptiness
Goes by unstopping,
In points that reappear,
A timeline of
Lonely empericism
Starknaked and resilient
A disected prarie filled
With intelligent live-
stock,
Living in drywall structures
That coil on green,
The animal that you are,
The people you never knew.