Ecstatic Truth Poem by Robert Rorabeck

What bedtime stories
Will you choose for your children
To knock them back
Into the poppies to sleep,
My pretties,
To send them snoozing
From their overfed
Satanic Paradise
Caged in a middle-class house
Sequestered by a manicured
Golf-course
Locked with a gate code
The nitric oxide allaying fears
Into the briefest of
Sugar-coated comas?
Certainly not the vulgar
Hypocrisy of your
Communist youth—
That the man you first loved,
Which was I,
Is not their father,
Nor is the next one
(The stranger you left me for) :
But the third one,
You assure them:
You are rather sure he is their father.
The ecstatic truth
That you can never
Explain to them,
The poetic justice you fear:
That a homeless man,
A breathless copse of shedding limbs
In the croaking gutter,
Maggots vortexing a writhing sea
In his swollen liver,
Has more glow of deity
In him than
Their poor,
Well-kept mother.