Going Ahead With It Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Professors have their most beautiful language,
And the hidden cameras in the bedrooms of actresses
With consumption,
And they listen as if haunted by the marching step
Of armies, of men in the shadows,
And of waves. I sit out and sweat on the porch,
And drink from a flask,
My lips quiver like molting insects across the
Space where the girl dances erotically,
Like a fruit tree, a postcard of a sickle moon
Above the trances of absentee tourism;
I should say I have scars, like bruises a fighter
Carries on tender-hooks,
And stranded on the concrete islands I watch cars,
Like furtive glances of advertisements freshly painted,
Where the sun plays a violin over the brightening
Of crosswalks, and students dressed up in firs and
Lipsticks of oilfields, and enormous eyelashes like
A peacock’s flounces; and now we are going to pay
For it all, and the soldiers will burn the cabaret, and
We will be run out hungry onto the street and have to
Make entertainments volunteering for the experiments of
A holocaust, and the professors will watch us from
The portholes of high towers, taking notes and ejaculating
To radio signals which speak to them like busty brunettes,
Telling them of the weather,
And how they lay upon it there out across the ocean
And far from their didactics, debonair and swooning,
Their lacy garters, like the kind chorus girls wear in
The silver mines of Colorado, licked by the waves,
As cigars toast lips and lungs, and entire novels
Are sacrificed, tossed down from the ancient rocket-ships
By the mad kings, and entire classes burn,
And the liquor burns from this shadowed stoop,
And the parade is coming, creeping like a thief with
Company, for they have went ahead with Halloween.