City Rose
City rose, you don't bloom like the other flowers
the sun coaxes into unclenching their fists, you unfold
like an ocean at night lingering in your dark depths
behind a veil of fish hooks swaying
with the bullwhips of the kelp to the pulse of your tides.
How suburbanly garish you look all trashed out
like the black farce of a substitute for love.
A poet and a prostitute. Doesn't get much more skinless
than that. We're both walking through the world naked
in a blizzard of thorns blunting themselves
against our ice-age hearts in an interglacial warming period.
Dying on the instalment plan to make a living,
there's a glint in your eyes like moonlight on a knife,
and you're armed to the teeth with fingertips and lips
and hourglass hips and here you can have my sword
even before I surrender as you know you can
when you walk into my life like an eclipse of the moon
with mascara running down your cheeks
and ask me if I still love you as I ever did
and I say, lady, you're an innate releasing mechanism for me.
I sublimate you into poetry like dry ice.
I may be the bullet. But you're the trigger.
And what's a voice without a tongue but a gutted gun?
How could I ever use you on myself when the day comes
if you weren't here with me in this wilderness
dancing for my head like a mirage in the skull
of a vast abyss that's gone on dreaming all this
like a boy with a book under the covers way past lights out?
You give me that funny look like I'm half mad
or I might be making light of you, but your spinal cord
resonates like a guitar strung with powerlines
on the same wavelength as the crystal in your dreamcatcher
and I know your listening for disturbances in your web.
And I remember when two roads diverged in a yellow wood
like a wishbone the separated the song from the bird
and that night you came pleading to me out of the rain
to let you into my homelessness, and I took you in
like a wet kitten with claws and needle sharp teeth
that never knew when to let go of my heart
like a piece of raw meat you were always snarling over.
And you weren't exactly the noble enemy
I always hoped would eat it, more a foodbank as I recall,
but you can't always choose the heroic sacrifice
you give yourself up to, and I gave it up to you,
saying to myself you don't always need to believe
in the witchdoctor to take advantage of the medicine,
and I'm always moved when your sunflower
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poem by Patrick White
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