Those Nights I Went Out With A Butcher's Knife
Those nights I went out with a butcher's knife
down the dark alley between our house
and the triplex next door, twelve years old,
my courage running down my leg, to stab
a full grown pervert running down the back stairs
when you flipped the porch lights on to spotlight
the spider stealing your panties off the clothesline,
onto my green gladiolus of a Spanish short sword
that hadn't tasted the blood of its first blossom yet,
I don't want to remember this anymore.
I don't want to be estranged from my own childhood
by garbage cans that look like dangerous men in the moonlight.
When I think of those days, there's a pervasive grey
that saturates everything like a cold fog,
and all my emotions are black oilspills on the concrete.
And all my insights come to me with a shock
like unknown eyes peering through the mail slot
you eventually boarded up like a plague door on the inside.
I watched the stardust of my innocence blow away
like the topsoil of the dirty thirties, as you spread flour
under the windows every night to see
if the drunk who lived above the grocery store
were painting his footprints on the ballroom floor again
as he had three nights before the cops wouldn't come
to arrest an increasingly brazen Peeping Tom.
saving themselves a bullet for everyone of us who ate our own.
I don't want to remember how excruciatingly transformative it was
to want to be the hero of a squadron of model Spitfires
that hung from my bedroom ceiling, and then
be called upon by a frightened whisper at the door
to go outside like a dragon with a flame thrower
of aviation fuel to confront the dirty end
of the joy stick of a sick world terrifying you
with the atrocious scenes on True Detective magazines
that were more intimately real on our front doorstep
than in any paranoid fantasy of yours
where big-busted blondes in torn blouses
were chained to trees by men with axes
and no one was trying to save an old growth forest.
I wish there'd been a timelock on my childhood years.
I wish things had been different, and you were always safe,
and I say this with no regrets, because I had to know
how to stand like a flaming angel at the gates
of a ruined Eden, to keep you and my sisters
out of reach of the hunting snake
with forbidden fruit between its legs
crawling up the tree towards panicked eggs in the nest
you flew around like a mother bird
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poem by Patrick White
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