Lost in the transcendental woods,
With a beard as knotted as Walt Whitman,
Pretty girls whistle at my scars,
And even when you get lost its like being in
A Disney Movie,
Even when you know what’s going to happen,
That there is a slab and a mortician with a scale
To weigh your brains,
And some hungry Mexican to go around afterwards
And pick up the spent fireworks from the weeds
And wildflowers,
Always careful of the rattlesnake’s glowing,
Phallic venom,
And the tall-legged ways she wrote about how
He’d slip through her exposed window after midnight,
Like a Chinese dragon;
And in the deeper parts of the woods there is incest
Infecting dreams, and rich Anglo-Saxon demiurge,
And suicide over foamy cataracts which
Are also beautiful women,
But we will not go that way: This is only a day hike,
A kindergarten for children to get lost and steal things
And then take breaks for lunch,
And they will not live forever here:
Their names will not resound or echo and swirl in the
Obsessive compulsive basins,
And there will neither be time for plastic flowers
Or cenotaphs,
Because soon their steady parents will be coming back
Around from work, or the adulterous cloisters
With peanuts from the bar,
And they will pick them up and hold them in their
Sweaty clairvoyant palms for a little while,
Telling them that this cannot happen to them,
That they will live just as long as everything else that
Isn’t real, and they might chastise us for a little while,
Even while we just smile and mow the cemetery’s grounds,
And look up through the shaken stuttering of woods,
Remembering all those things which couldn’t
Possibly be real.

Robert Rorabeck

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/remembering-all-those-things-which-couldn-t-possibly-be-real/