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Patrick White

I Feel The Thorns Of The Rose Making Inkwells Of My Eyes

I feel the thorns of the rose making inkwells of my eyes.
It's me that hurts. But without meaning to,
I'm bleeding for everyone. A watershed of blood and tears.
A reservoir of pain. Not all my own, I drink
before anyone like a hummingbird, or a canary in the mine,
to make sure it isn't toxic. No goat skull in a well
of rotten water. No blood on the horns of the moon.

What a disgrace it is to be a human sometimes.
What a sorrow when your heart wobbles like a drunk bell
and there are perturbations and precessions in your orbit
it's hard to explain except as the flawed configuration of a dream
with your waking life, though they're both just two waves
of the same sea of awareness, feathers and scales.

Oxymoronic maple keys vertiginous as Sufis
at the crossroads of everywhere and here. My heart
is a bone-box full of elegies for Arctic swans
shrinking like ice-bergs from global warming.
And I'm not as mindless in love as I should be,
though a muse is still pure oxygen distilled
from a thousand undiscovered plants in the Amazon
as beguiling as the ghosts of the fragrances
along the Perfume Trail. And sometimes, I swear,
I can smell the weeping of wild blackberries
eclipsed by the shadows of voracious crows
pecking out their eyes like dark jewels
in a crown of thorns. And there's a feeling
with too low a frequency for words like the afterbirth
of an orphaned universe that resonates within me
like the poignancy of the embrace of one
of the saddest graces of compassion limning its tears
with a star's worth of beauty glowing through the clouds.

And goodness arises within me like a loaf of bread
left out to cool on an August windowsill, and I'd
break it into as many pieces as my heart to share it
if only for one instant, with the hungry and the suffering
as I've heard several people did inconceivably even in Auschwitz,
just to make things better a little bit, if I could,
though I feel like fog trying to put out a forest fire,
knowing among the selfish and indifferent,
a gift is a kind of minority protest
that you have to keep an eye on before it gets out of hand.

Reality's just a truce people make with the way things seem
and what they don't understand, a consensus
of poll-watching dilettantes who average out the crucials
in advance of random happenstance. Perhaps.
Reality can be any kind of copulative verb it wants,

[...] Read more

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