At The Crossroads Of Martyrs And Reptiles
Ask me what the nights were all about back then
and I'd immediately say black. Intense,
voracious black. Black matter, black holes,
black energy, black dwarfs, black diamonds
on the coal road they took like the wrong path in life.
I'd look at the traffic lights, the colour of lifesavers,
and I'd see three eclipses, two for the way
I looked at things, and one indelibly patched
over my third eye like cataracts on the windows
of a black out in a blitz. Not brutal, not cruel.
But it wasn't often anyone looked at the ore
and saw a jewel. I was a chip off the old block
as my mother used to say referring to my father,
and I'd go away for days at a time feeling
like Charlie Manson in a nuclear winter
for carnivorous losers like Smilodon
in the last ice age who would never know
what it was like to be petted under the chin and purr. You could burn, you could burn, you could burn,
you could burn like a clear blue white star,
pure acetylene hotter than the indigo petals
of the wild irises with their tongues hanging out
like Sirius A in the Big Dog because of the heat.
You could know them all by name and still,
and this is the best part of any art, have no power
over them, even when you knew the secret name
of their god, and kept it to yourself out of gratitude.
Even when they were grasped by the throat like swans
by a john as sometimes happened, it only
went to prove how unattainable everything is
you think you've got a handle on, as they'd
slip through your fingers like water and clouds
and seductive perfumes with the names of romantic novels
billowing like mustard gas in no man's land.