You Say You've Taken All The Tension Out Of Your Life
You say you've taken all the tension out of your life,
but to me you've just planed a mountain range
into a parking lot. Your sacred syllable is flatlining
like a synonym for death, and your eyes,
o those eyes were so blue once
I could have made a cult of the colour
and happily sacrificed myself on the altar
of a sky burial where the angels reverted to ravenous birds,
but now they're one way windows on a braille runway
for blind aliens on the Nazca plateau.
You talk like a tourist guide
with a photo-shopped cheeriness
in the same tone of immaculate voice
as if genesis were beginning all over again
with a logo in the mouth of a vociferous abyss.
I believe in your natural kindness,
those summers of feeling so much like August
out in the fields of an abandoned farm,
where the light kissed the fieldstones on the forehead
as sweetly as it did the eyelids of the wild flowers.
I believe in the integrity of your search,
the sincerity of your confusion, the sway
of your compassion for cellular tissue
over the ideological abstraction of the living details
extracted by vampiric points of view.
Life is messy, soiled, tantrically spoiled,
and even when the moon spices the wine
with love potion number nine, most of the time
we're still drinking out of a dirty cup,
but I know you're not blind to the rapture
of the fireflies showing off to the stars,
or the waterlilies shining like a starmap in a swamp.
You see the green candelabra of the maple saplings
rooted in the decay of the mothering stump.
I know there's love in you. I've gone
pearldiving in your sea. And whatever
the coral reefs that rip the hull
out of your moonboat now, I've seen
that great Atlantean heart of yours
and its irrepressible buoyancy
rising to the surface like a breaching whale.
You don't need a broom to sweep
the mirages of an encroaching desert off your stairs.
You don't need to cherry-pick your delusions
to accommodate a school of gerry-mandered gurus.
Just let your thoughts roost like birds at dusk
in the black walnuts for the night, and rinse
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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