Not Again, Tonight, These Fin de Siecle Blues
Not again, tonight, these fin de siecle blues
that subsume all my blossoming overviews
into the mystic specificity of concrete things
I stub my heart against as if I'd just had
a head on collision with the moon. Impact.
Emotional meteor showers, the Virginids, perhaps,
I'm being stoned by my own congenital radiants
as if I were being driven out of somewhere
like an extinct species. Bad memories, lifeboats
that didn't make it back to shore, things I've tried
to mythologize like a shipwreck in coral on the moon.
Subtle childhood fears that run my tongue along
the shadows of their blades, when I was scared and young,
and the words would come out like drops of blood
sliding down the length of the stargrass I grazed upon
alone as now in my high wide starfields.
The same ones that are seeking me out tonight
like a rogue planet that's never quite known
where it's belonged, or with whom, if anyone
or where at all. Looking for an exit sign
in the infinite labyrinth of the nightmare
that's walked me like a shadow through all these years.
Most of the past, a waste of good innocence,
and the people and things I loved about it
I cherish more now than I did back then,
usually wounded irreparably in a way
I would have suffered for them if I could have
in order to have my love of them hurt me less,
given I always thought I was more worthy of the pain,
because more deserving of what they endured
than they were. Maledictions of draconian experience.
Miracle of miracles, I transcended everything so savagely,
it's hard to forgive myself now for ever being a child,
but I try. I put my arms around people when they cry
even frivolously, and offer them a few blue ribbons of wisdom
in exchange for their butter-fingered nooses
and the occasional smile at the antics of a sacred clown
who left his tears painted on a dressing room mirror
as if it had been raining for years without anyone
but himself, a circus of one on tour, getting wet.
I've fallen through more cracks in the earth
than most earthquake zones, whenever the continental plates
of my tectonic skull put their hands together in despair
but couldn't manage prayer as I jumped in on horseback
to save someone's cornerstone, like Rome, whether
I was delusional or not. A few people lit candles in remembrance,
but just as often as the fireflies light their lamps
they blow them out to return to the darkness
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poem by Patrick White
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