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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476978" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Those Nights I Went Out With A Butcher's Knife</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476978" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Those nights I went out with a butcher's knife <br>down the dark alley between our house <br>and the triplex next door, twelve years old, <br>my courage running down my leg, to stab <br>a full grown pervert running down the back stairs<br>when you flipped the porch lights on to spotlight<br>the spider stealing your panties off the clothesline, <br>onto my green gladiolus of a Spanish short sword<br>that hadn't tasted the blood of its first blossom yet, <br>I don't want to remember this anymore. <br>I don't want to be estranged from my own childhood<br>by garbage cans that look like dangerous men in the moonlight. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476978" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">When I think of those days, there's a pervasive grey <br>that saturates everything like a cold fog, <br>and all my emotions are black oilspills on the concrete. <br>And all my insights come to me with a shock <br>like unknown eyes peering through the mail slot <br>you eventually boarded up like a plague door on the inside. <br>I watched the stardust of my innocence blow away <br>like the topsoil of the dirty thirties, as you spread flour <br>under the windows every night to see <br>if the drunk who lived above the grocery store <br>were painting his footprints on the ballroom floor again<br>as he had three nights before the cops wouldn't come<br>to arrest an increasingly brazen Peeping Tom. <br>saving themselves a bullet for everyone of us who ate our own.<br> <br>I don't want to remember how excruciatingly transformative it was <br>to want to be the hero of a squadron of model Spitfires <br>that hung from my bedroom ceiling, and then <br>be called upon by a frightened whisper at the door <br>to go outside like a dragon with a flame thrower <br>of aviation fuel to confront the dirty end <br>of the joy stick of a sick world terrifying you<br>with the atrocious scenes on True Detective magazines <br>that were more intimately real on our front doorstep <br>than in any paranoid fantasy of yours <br>where big-busted blondes in torn blouses <br>were chained to trees by men with axes <br>and no one was trying to save an old growth forest. <br>I wish there'd been a timelock on my childhood years. <br>I wish things had been different, and you were always safe, <br>and I say this with no regrets, because I had to know <br>how to stand like a flaming angel at the gates <br>of a ruined Eden, to keep you and my sisters <br>out of reach of the hunting snake <br>with forbidden fruit between its legs<br>crawling up the tree towards panicked eggs in the nest<br>you flew around like a mother bird<br>in an emergency without an exit. It's been light years since<br>and it's funny how after all this time <br>the man in me has begun to shed delinquent tears <br>for the boy who had to know what a woman fears so early<br>I weep for you and I weep for me for all the pain and fear <br>we had to endure like a nightmare while we were still awake, <br>though I'd do it all again, for your sake, if I had to, <br>except now I'd go out back with a gun to get the job done. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476978" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Just the same. I wish I hadn't grown up in No Man's Land<br>and my childhood wasn't an elsewhere zone with warning signs<br>not to enter without abandoning all hope <br>that things would ever change for the better. <br>I wish I'd learned the spirit of the word first<br>like a feather of light in the scales of the jackal-god <br>before my heart knuckled down to the hard and fast letter<br>of learning how to ambush things that go bump in the night <br>while my heart beat harder than a hammer and an anvil <br>at what I was about to meet in the dark <br>like the nemetic karma of the eldest son of a welfare mother, <br>tenuously prepared to inflict a stomach wound on a stranger<br>who forgot the baby rattlesnakes could be <br>as toxic as the adults, if you scared them so badly <br>all that they feared was focused like a snakepit<br>on wanting to get you over with summarily like an intruder <br>on the threshold of a lethal childhood I wish would pass<br>transitory as the dew on the grass, not these ageless glaciers <br>that still wake me up from my boyhood dreams <br>in a cold sweat of garbage cans and moonbeams. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476978" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">What kind of a man would I have been <br>if I hadn't seen perdition as a child too afraid <br>of being afraid, lest worse be hung over my head <br>than a World War II model airplane, and I burn alive <br>out of shame in a cockpit that never got off the ground <br>or went around the back to confront an unknown horror <br>that cut both ways like the crescents of the moon, <br>two sides of the same wound, one that congealed <br>like blood around a cut, and the other, a gash<br>deeper than that, in a childhood that never healed.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Patrick+White">Patrick White</a></strong></div>