Cruel Sorrows
Cruel sorrows on the living room floor
among misshapen thresholds, angry apricots, unbeaded orbits
of undefeated accusations, the eye pits of bitter avocados
looking for the lost contact lense of the moon under the black pillow
just getting off the nightshift with half-eaten celestial smiles
next to the green grape cameos on their bored antlers
wondering if they could still gore an answer from the red matador
trying to pick his teeth with the next word to come out of
the lunchbucket of his gangwar cottonmouth,
I open my heart of wounded horizons like a summer window
and let all the skies I’ve ever found unfeathered by the side of the road
go like the flyers for a garage sale I’ll never get up early enough
to get around to anyway.
If there were a fire, if just once,
someone stepped on their glasses like an emergency fire-alarm
and the tears went off like sprinklers in the hard pawnshops of the backup lights
flexing their overcharged batteries in the smoke-filled soap opera halls,
I would change my mind about humanity,
I would write it in hieroglyphic tatoos, sunspots, ants on an orchid,
in the dead stars of the beauty pageant that gambled for my skull
with a throw of her tempestuous dice like meteors against the mirror
and lost, on every gravestone of my generation’s
communal orphanage for the children of the truth I would proclaim
like a magnetic note on the fridge, I was wrong to dismantle the lighthouses
that kept ratting on the storms you kept tracking into the house like junkies;
I was wrong about the direction of your eyebrows,
and the non-biodegradable tits you said were environmentally friendly
and the journal of perfect lips you keep stored in the freezer
like the blue quotations marks of memorable quotes to be made at a funeral,
and I would admit to the mountain of saffron and sulphur
you import from your own infection like the beginnings of a new religion,
I would get down on my knees in your favourite temple
a chastised angel drunk on the transubstantiated vinegar of a black mass,
and repent every lucidity you ever condemned for arson.
And I’m going to miss the way your eyes followed me around the room
like a paternity suit with no children, and your celebrity fingertips
that always touched me as if they were trying to impress a sidewalk
with a movie-star; wasn’t it ever clear to you I wasn’t your spotlight,
and the sidereal contract you said you saw like a new constellation
rising over the hills of the mindscape in my sad blue eyes,
was never yours to sign between the lines that came without agents.
You’re not really the kind of woman meant to give birth to nations,
and if you had ever made it once around my heart,
and thought of the moon as something other than a screenplay,
it wouldn’t have mattered in which direction,
without fretting your exits were all wrongway entrances,
that would have been enough of a circumambulation for me
to get on the next plane to L.A. with a fire-hydrant inscribed
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poem by Patrick White
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