The Formless Evils That Will Never End Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I go down- I go down.
The flights crowd over- Sunlight motes
Above long-backed crocodiles,
I grind my teeth- and the next line should
Contain thoughts of a woman so far away
To say them would be to consider
Inappropriate time travels;
And though she is real and earthy, and goodly
Contained,
It would be a fantasy, an apoplectic bull keeping
The unicorns in the waves-
For she has her new lover who could never compare
To the adulations of Percy Shelly,
Who keeps her well protected,
Stocked with soups,
Harangued on a leased apartment with two cats
And communal pool, crystal chochskies,
Dust pans and all the modern confections which
Crowd around her, singing the few songs of
French simulacrums; or she has just arrive on a new
Planet- Jumped ship into the low gravity Eden,
Begun to steal away a new knowledge,
OR, if not contented, she’s at the old university,
Serving drinks to men with blue anchor tattoos-
She stands up straight and auburn and gives strange
Necks kisses like hummingbirds to scarred lumberjacks,
Just like she pretended to give once to me;
And when she’s on her break she reads
South Florida crime fiction, loose but well fitted
Satires by Carl Hiaasen- And I’ve wanted to jump her
Bones since high school, and pretended that she called me
Over the linoleum seas during Latin, called me so long
Ago when I was less scarred but no more beautiful,
But I fumbled the ball, became the line that doesn’t end:
I wrote this poem and wound up for six years in Arizona
Floating over a dead sea,
And she went down and had her name choreographed in
A dance inlayed with his, thinking that he was young and
Smooth and yet ironically crocodilian, and it would
Be better for me to spend more time with my dogs,
To fantasize about opal women lined up along the hillside
In the shape of trees,
To get nosebleeds and hangovers while writing these
Insignificant things, these unpalatable denouements,
The wordy epitaphs to put the babies to sleep in graveyards,
The perishable unpublishable abominations of gout-ridden
Sailors who just go on and on like in some
Beowulfian conflagration of the inner sea, the whirlpools
Of tourism which wind up eating themselves which never
Quit except with the defeat of our pseudo-graphical heroes
Eaten in turns by the society of monsters,
The housewives and their daily lovers,
The formless evils that will never end.