By The Waves Poem by Robert Rorabeck

You get home and take a
Shower trying to wash off the
Molten day, how the sun has made love
To you and is now done with you;
The way it flooded around you:
The swarms of eyes and tongues
Directing with noise and implication
The thoughts, desires, and rejections.
Each day awakening,
Arising up from the oily bed
Into the old but always triumphant furnace
The body aching: the teeth throbbing
In bloody gums, the skin chapped and
Burning, blemishes under a mask of
Promises, the joints twisted and rusty,
Squealing like old gates and rodents,
The flesh weak and changing,
The simple, repeated needs of the
Animal repeatedly thudding like your
Heartbeat
Getting dressed, moving out of the
Door and into your car,
Turning the keys in the ignition
Deliberately starting the day,
Remembering the faces who wait to judge you,
Driving on the mercurial sphere, drowning
In the rich and disgusting layers of
Polluted gravity and polluted oxygen,
God’s hands pressed upon you,
Knowing Religion is the cheep out
Of a weak mind
Who follows it’s own shadow
Down dead-end caves-
By the time it comes back up,
Everything is sold and everyone has
Gone home for the evening;
Your father deciding to have a
Son, so he f@cks your
Mom and out you come,
His ascendancy, his hope,
The successor of grief and the
Family business
With the eyes scrutinizing hard upon
The flesh, your mother the very worst,
The knuckles flickering white-hot
Around you,
The undertow taking you
Further and further,
Stretching you until you
Become the dissolution of
A self broken apart
By the waves.