The Sparks Of The Show Poem by Robert Rorabeck

How deeply can I explore the dungeons
Residing in my children:
The battlements manned by mice
that coronate their exuberent, tiny minds:

Diving into the coral reefs of their souls,
And those spots that have gathered beauty over the warring everglades,
How deeeply can I explore them
Before I am too old, '

A cenotaph gargantuan from McDonalds-
A boy driving in his car chasing an ancient balloon:

And here I am in the armpits of Shanghai-
Drunken too much wine in the middle of the day:
My children, golden acoutrements to this busted world.

Which way are they going? hung up in the weathers
of their televisions,
Feeding soft-shelled tortoises,
Yet believing in the golden faces of their gods:

In all of the right-hand angles there is divinity with tin wings,
but in her left hand the emptied bullets
and the blue-prints of her trickeries:

My gilded daughter, she knows the spells of metamorphosis:
Before she turns me into a frog,
Perhaps I should jump out of all of her windows-
The skeletons drinking wine in their palacesare counting down
to unprenounced credits,
the denoumets which find their heroes coming home:

The world, she looks like a firework-
and in theses spaces my peers have never touched,
I can go on forever-
skydiving angel-the icebergs melt-
Frankenstein's monster is picked up-

And my children grow up, muscled, busted
butterflies
outside the gates of Mexico-

And i can believe again, galloping,
the cloaks of my grandmother protecting my ghost from
the sparks of the show.