Underneath The Canons Of The Lord Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Waking up everyday, thinking of what suicide
Some wolves will give, if they invade me now
The release they’d give:
Fjords around my eyes, awful maidens behind
Them:
I want to get drunk, I want to get drunk and feed
The horses;
It’s all of my capability to show penitence beneath
This dishonest star: To say its name, to slur
And to fail immediately, the spotlight cast haplessly
Across the human sea, watching as every relative
Is canned into wooden boxes: You know who they
Are, you’ve seen them,
And the light flickering like an early stage,
Painted women are taking a break, laughing, smoking
When they were before being paid to dance.
Now that they’ve seen the tricks of the cannonball’s
Thunder, they are no longer incredulous, nor afraid
Of the first snows;
And I am lying beneath them, lying as a humbug in the
Crass weathers of oily flesh,
Not knowing what my next meal will be- Preferring
To eat myself like a worm on a flower, than to return
To this dust, this frightened old country chapped by that
Star, the ageless old curse-
The release by a beautiful woman’s eyes, the freedom
Of her sensory bliss: its all I have to do this for, but she
Is not mine, another man’s child hung nursing upon her tit.
Gathered around a Christmas tree of so many warm souls,
I grow even more consumptive, my last candle burns blue;
And I wait for the final wagon to turn by,
To sleep in its ruts, sprawled out like a unclean outcast
Beneath the resounding claptraps the mountains seem to collect,
Diminished to the selfsame oblivion underneath the
Canons of the lord.