Your Intensities
Your intensities dissipating in the silence
that follows your urgent avowals,
it hurts to be subjected to oblivion
like a burnt out streetlamp in a city of light,
to stare into the invisible blaze of the vastness
without eyelids
like craters on the moon aghast with shadows
scabbing the nightshift of a crown factory,
love's labour locked out,
a footprint on the neck of a flower,
trampled like a protest sign by the crowd
of platitudinous slogans that defame it,
and the pain growing wider than the bridge
that can cross it
and my heart trying to pretend
it's still a scratched poppy
when everybody knows
it's a haemorrhaging rose.
And the stars have hardened into diamond thorns
that score the eyes like rocks
striated by arctic runes
in the path of advancing glaciers,
and there's a hawk in my chest
excavating the message of the dove
I sent to look for land,
and every moment is the era
of a lingering why
that hauls me out to sea like a death barge
to dump my severed body parts
like scrapings off a plate
and no matter how eloquently
I rehearse for a role
in a farce of infinite agonies,
I've played the part too many times before
not to know
it's all just birdseed in a cemetery
that's tired of hearing itself moan for the dawn.
The wind blows through me
like the ghost of a curtain
long after the window it hung from has thawed,
blows through me like the slash
of a long, fluid incision
as if a knife were learning how to master
the serpentine penmanship
of a sacred crescent of the moon,
and there's blood all over the page.
And even as the schoolhouse
of a famous arsonist's childhood,
even as a sacrifice bunt at home plate
I feel neglected and trivial,
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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