Wait. Wait. Wait For It To Come
Wait. Wait. Wait for it to come,
the mad folly of my creative destruction.
Bleak the flowers in this ruinous garden
and my psyche speaking in tongues
like gates someone left open banging in the wind.
Bring on the storm. Uproot the lightning.
I will not run. I'll stand here steadfast
as an amputated stump in this open field
with a ghostly feeling I can grow my arms back
like a faith healer sitting like Stonehenge
in solstitial silence at the last broken window
snarling at the fixed stars that keep drifting
in and out of the asylum like a seance of fireflies
that's turned into an angry mob
looking for stars to martyr for not taking
their fanatical starmaps as literally as they do.
I'm an heretical astrologer tied to the axis mundi
of my own imagination. I read my doom,
cowled in candlelight like the skull of the full moon
scrying the entrails of a wounded bull
garlanded in laurels like a loveletter to the gods.
My end without exit. My beginning without a door.
My backbone bent like a rafter from shouldering
this dance floor that's crippled me for life.
Should I paint my skin blue? Should I get a tattoo?
Should I carve a more fashionable deathmask
out of my heartwood and learn to lie like a man
acquainted with the truth? Should I go into battle naked
like a beserker sporting his own vulnerability
in the face of an enemy outraged by the insult?
I'm beating on a pinata of killer bees.
I'm cauterizing my nerves with the synaptic
welder's arcs of the stars until I'm numb as an alloy
of water and blood at the point of a sword
that's about to cut my throat like a ouija board
that's run out of answers and alibis for everything.
I'm jester to the divine sense of humour
of a moody goddess trying to decide if she's a crone
or a nymph. Too late for autumn. Too early for spring.
She falls through the cracks of time
like an old age pensioner. She is the muse
that takes the new moon from under my tongue
and throws it like a penny into a wishing well.
Good luck. I'm done. I've worn my bones out
like dice in a gambling den long enough.
Seven come eleven or snake-eyes,
it's all come around like Russian roulette to me.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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