Their Perfectly Contented Ennui Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I have frightened you because you are actor,
And I am a poet,
But only one of us is anything good enough to feel reality:
Only one of us will live forever, even if he is now dead,
Even while the spitting young ingénues swing delightfully at your hips,
And my popguns blow smoke alone across the barren foyers;
Only one of us has folded so many paper airplanes
As to make his fingers bleed:
Only one of us has heard the cars whisper, the crickets sing:
And I could write the stone words above your resting place:
I could give an everlasting fever to crown your superfluous soul;
Because you have never loved a girl named Alma,
And you have only gone with the other tourists to the bellies of mountains:
Never even gone far enough to smell the perfumes above the lights of
The venal innuendos,
To let the silly yellow light of the foam of girls kiss your dimpled chin;
But that doesn’t mean you are beautiful,
When I have blinded myself by the nubile sun: I have climbed four mountains
In one day: I have been atop the two highest points in Colorado in one
Day, even while my old girlfriend was making love to her freshman
Love,
And I came down and the tourists could have made fun of me if I
Chose to stay anywhere around them, but I was already gone,
John;
And this is not yet an epitaph to the truancy in my ever loving park,
For I will sing out so silently for some time to come that
Only the dogs will whine: For they are things like me, sensing the world
Through the grayness of others, loving me as unconditionally as
Instinct,
So far away from the cowardly glow where all the glass wildflowers
Are cheering around a grinning window frame
That looks out into the dinner party whose wine glasses are singing
Such a feverish eucalyptus that they don’t know how
The end has already gone, grinning as he drinks in the deep bliss
Of their perfectly contented ennui.