I put up these broken things as decorations <br />For relatives I haven’t seen before just flown in: <br />These are mute hyperboles on a television nobody <br />Is watching, but I just bought it, and I love it: <br />These are my sad persuasions to the middle-class <br />Saints, asking them to shake off their various staples <br />Of pietas and stigmata and come in! come in! <br />Because they are the very ones I’ve been looking for, <br />And I have a mermaid captured in the bathtub <br />I‘ve been happily torturing to get a name for, <br />And we can talk and have sex <br />And hors d'oeuvres and look out into the back <br />Yard where the dogs are burying their bones as the <br />Foreground of a terrific pastel train wreck. We ask each other <br />About the weather to stave off salesmen, and the guilt <br />Of our knowledge that is everyman’s inheritance, <br />and our impotence in <br />Comparison to each suave dancer out on the floor; but with all this <br />Business, and the successful initiation of foreplay and <br />Ennui, I find myself turning the world into a tank of <br />Glass, farmers gossiping outside the four walls that we wear. <br />Like a ship turning undecided at sea, and then the entire house is a giant <br />Lung of the whale which has swallowed my imagination <br />For so long, and now that it is mine I can sit back and <br />Say I am published, but it isn’t very good. When the knock <br />Comes to the door, only the curious persuasion of my dinner <br />Guests will cause me to answer it; but instead I will leave <br />The uninvited guess to them, and head up stairs to my more <br />Saturated bed: caressing each of her lulls, her lips my carnal prayers <br />Answered, <br />Asking for nothing more.<br /><br />Robert Rorabeck<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/three-legged-horse/
