Insignificant Infinity Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Coldness comes best under the hardest of sun,
When you cannot wear enough clothes because of all you have drunken,
And loneliness on the busiest street of the biggest city,
When you cannot recognize a single face and no one looks at you,
When all the little boys are up in the rooftops counting
Down, their misdeeds in glass bottles in paper bags high above
The alligators’ heads,
When the little girls are sitting knob kneed in the
Bowers of golden cypress,
Believing in things they shouldn’t say, as the green lips
Of the water rises and slobbers the hem of their dirty
Pink dresses with seahorses and brine;
Then the insignificant infinity rolls out like a Catherine Wheel,
And the otters come out of their lonely hollows to watch
The sky spin,
And the foxes yip with the pin wheeling the pine trees
Make overhead in a ringed gathering of serpentine forest;
For the day is getting over, and you take the curve of the road home,
And the bridge which falls over the canal where the soft
Shelled tortoises burp and fart brown enduring bubbles,
Floating up with lazy curiosity amidst the plastic bags and crumpled tin,
And the coral snake curls up black and red and yellow
In a smutty, faded magazine, glinting like a venomous pearl.
You go home to sit in the immense barrenness of the
Living room’s green carpet, think of a girl obscure by bitter orange trees,
ejaculate, watch t.v.,
Listen to the screams from the wildlife preserve down the far road,
And wait for the light to fail over the burning sugar-cane,
For your parents to come home greasy and exhausted,
And then to shower and sleep upon the aching coils inside
The bars of the humid nocturne, waiting for you eyes to open
Once again so long ago, as the cautionary friends slip further
Away into insignificant infinity.