Not Interested In The Brand Name Of Your Audience
Not interested in the brand name of your audience.
Poetry makes its own up on the go, resonates
with the stars and the fireflies, mysteriously
marauds its own sacred shrines for the relics
of holy metaphors that can be melted down
into new sensibilities. And you, when you lose
your faith in your herbs ability to heal,
is it you that lets the medicine down,
the exhausted wavelength of an imploding star,
or is your magic just not strong enough anymore
to know when to keep its mouth shut, its grammar
like the secret name of a god, not a public convention.
It's irrelevant to me if you blood your abstractions,
mythic deflation stabbing them through the heart
to keep it from pumping the colour out of the rose
and hanging them upside down over a bathtub.
Or that your insecticidal severances have been
so cleanly disposed of like the wings of butterflies
in the mandibles of seriatim ants. The reek
of formic acid. And it's hard not to notice
that your gypsy nettles don't dance to music.
You've got your head stuck up the eye of the needle again.
Must cost you a fortune in locksmiths.
And why, when you make a confession
of all your sins of omission, does it always sound
like you're ratting someone out? Or you've got
a deathmask on you're always threatening to take off
like a crab carapace in a tidal pool with a detached claw
trying to intimate the great sea of awareness beyond
that's never heard of you, into making waves
even a shore-hugger buried in a puddle could handle?
You can make a cult of your doubt and cynicism,
snakes on the ladders and stairwells of your pretensions,
but I'm not going to be initiated into it. Just because
I was born in a sewer doesn't mean I bathed in it
every time it rained. A metaphor is a metaphor
that's looking for something to compare itself to
and picture-music isn't a drum roll at the unveiling
of a new logo for the hysterically futile fans
of your dysfunctional aspirations to make a big splash.
As if the pond were never big enough for the frog.
Your words don't touch my heart, change my life,
make a serious attempt on my life, derange me,
do anything to me, just lie there
so disconnected from my spinal cord
they're clear cut yarrow sticks that have never heard
of the Book of Changes. Lean-tos and collapsed tents
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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