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Not Again, Tonight, These Fin de Siecle Blues

Not again, tonight, these fin de siecle blues
that subsume all my blossoming overviews
into the mystic specificity of concrete things
I stub my heart against as if I'd just had
a head on collision with the moon. Impact.
Emotional meteor showers, the Virginids, perhaps,
I'm being stoned by my own congenital radiants
as if I were being driven out of somewhere
like an extinct species. Bad memories, lifeboats
that didn't make it back to shore, things I've tried
to mythologize like a shipwreck in coral on the moon.
Subtle childhood fears that run my tongue along
the shadows of their blades, when I was scared and young,
and the words would come out like drops of blood
sliding down the length of the stargrass I grazed upon
alone as now in my high wide starfields.
The same ones that are seeking me out tonight
like a rogue planet that's never quite known
where it's belonged, or with whom, if anyone
or where at all. Looking for an exit sign
in the infinite labyrinth of the nightmare
that's walked me like a shadow through all these years.

Most of the past, a waste of good innocence,
and the people and things I loved about it
I cherish more now than I did back then,
usually wounded irreparably in a way
I would have suffered for them if I could have
in order to have my love of them hurt me less,
given I always thought I was more worthy of the pain,
because more deserving of what they endured
than they were. Maledictions of draconian experience.
Miracle of miracles, I transcended everything so savagely,
it's hard to forgive myself now for ever being a child,
but I try. I put my arms around people when they cry
even frivolously, and offer them a few blue ribbons of wisdom
in exchange for their butter-fingered nooses
and the occasional smile at the antics of a sacred clown
who left his tears painted on a dressing room mirror
as if it had been raining for years without anyone
but himself, a circus of one on tour, getting wet.

I've fallen through more cracks in the earth
than most earthquake zones, whenever the continental plates
of my tectonic skull put their hands together in despair
but couldn't manage prayer as I jumped in on horseback
to save someone's cornerstone, like Rome, whether
I was delusional or not. A few people lit candles in remembrance,
but just as often as the fireflies light their lamps
they blow them out to return to the darkness
as the closest thing to home. I'm inured to the intemperance
of selfishness as well as gratitude. People approach me
with their secret charade, and I cancel myself out
like a circus parade I'm sure is never going to come,
a kid kicked to the curb who's been waiting too long,
and we're both a little estranged by our mutual equilibrium.

Wild parsnip in the drainage ditch boils the flesh and leaves
permanent scars. And when I don't see them as arsonists
and flammable gypsies, I see the poppies as
the blood-soaked rags of solar flares that have staunched
and cauterized the bleeding awhile. Hot knives
applied to the heart's excruciations like a brutal code of mercy
to distract me from the agony of my indifference
to the end of an era of unacknowledged supremacy
as the occult master of mirages on the nightshifts
of intensive care, the terminal ward, desolation row,
a fencing master of scalpels who knew more ways
of cutting the heart out of himself and offering it up
to someone who needed it more for the moment,
thinking they had a better use for it than I ever did.
A poultice of water applied like an oasis to a desert's forehead
until even a corpse could rise up out of the glass-blowing heat
like the inexhaustible amphora of an Aquarian among the stars.

One of the dark jewels of my childhood
in the ashes of a dragon that left me its eyes
by eclipsing mine so I could see
where the black holes were ahead of time
and warn the well-meaning lighthouses that clung to the coast
not to trust their starmaps to get their bearings
or ask for directions from the mentors of the lost and the blind,
but to turn the wheel of life and death loose in a storm
of demonically dispassionate clarities intense enough
to weld diamonds by staring through them
with the ironic compassion of an empty lifeboat
lowered from the deck of an enlightened shipwreck
on the lunar bottom of the Sea of Tranquility
I can weave like a flying carpet of real water
out of the wavelengths of high frequency mirages
like a homoeopathic wolf shaman in shepherd's clothing.

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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