In The Solitude Of The Sane Poem by Robert Rorabeck

This hinge squeaks like a mottled-gray
Mouse,
Or that moth who likes the corner room in
Your grandfather’s corner house:
These words stay up some nights and drink
High-balls inside your dreams,
They laugh and smoke and go out to take a leak:
Back inside your skull again they are echoing
High-heeled gentlemen who don’t give a lick
What they have to say,
The gray mustachioed nonsense awakes and talks
All day:
Nothing publishable or very keen- You’re
Quite too sure they don’t have any means, but they
Are too silly to be insane,
And thus they crack their jaws like joggers yawning
In the jogging rains- They’d wish they had something
Beautiful to think, but after all they are only like
Mother’s hands washing dirty dishes in your sink.
They haven’t traveled very far for many a year, or kissed
A woman’s lips or smacked an orchard sweet
Derriere- No, they seem instead to be waiting for all things
Like meadows eager for flowers in a hibernating spring;
And thus nothing better from them out should come,
But maybe if you bought them a little home,
And brought to them like leggy breathy gifts a little wife
And from her ploughed like Cadmus in red Martian fields,
Toothy, friendly kids, a mini-van, and the usually other
Commodities, if then they could think of nothing better
At least they could circle around these things their
Choice of songs,
And you could unlace yher speckled shoulders through
Their freckly psalms,
And after work and all that such, call the children in from
Playing for a late but satisfying lunch. Then maybe these old
Fools would come to join you too, and sit some quietly
In those rounded calcifying halls like typifying bowls where
The general organs bunch; or grow so quiet as barefoot steps
Out in the soft green blades under rain,
And then you could lie down in your own bed and rest
And kiss your wife, and whisper quite safely in the
Solitude of the sane.