Robert Rorabeck - Three Legged Horse

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

Robert Rorabeck

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