The Unspeakable Rituals Of The Game Poem by Robert Rorabeck

These egos are playing musical chairs
On a blue marble cloudy with men:
We are trying to pronounce our children
Into the oasis in the obliterating void:
Listen, Oh Lord!
For we have created talking butterflies,
With wings which can weather
The solar pestilence, and humid wombs
Where omnipotent twins wait to be discovered:
This is the aftermath of our folly:
The clattering alienation of familiar suicide,
Where the strange daughters walk out
Beneath the xenophobic moon,
And there behold the unobtainable knowledge
Of the celestial spheres,
Each one further away and more beautiful:
Then to grow mute and opaque,
And to fear the joy of the crowded sun,
The leaping professors in educated tweed,
The dalliances in the gardens of books
And words put down in persuasive analogies:
The scarred men, burned by the truth,
Fall away from the mobiles of heavenly bodies,
Lose their positions of names in deep mauve swamps:
Pushing against the tombs, they swim out
And kiss the hybrids, the reptilian sirens,
The startling aunts who cradle their forgotten skulls
Like speechless infants, as the slow waters
Running down from their jaw’s cenotaphs,
Refills the unspeakable rituals of the game.