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Putting It Down To Some Impact On My Heart

Putting it down to some impact on my heart
in my sleep, this sunny afternoon edged
with cold anger like a residual hangover
from some dream I don't remember having.
Did you visit me again last night like an albino nightmare?
Was Venus in Virgo? Were we unaligned?
Was I talking through a window embedded
in heritage brick? Did I mutter things at the sky
that were indignantly unjust without meaning to?

I wonder if the stars after all these light years
they took to get to my heart, are completely happy
with an afterlife without flowers or hermit thrushes.
Who knows why anybody looks back on their past
and risks turning into a pillar of salt,
or returning to the dead by default
but did you let go of my hand again last night?
I'm sick of your absence always being the prelude
to my dismemberment. And those eyes
that always rebuke my poverty as if they'd
been bathing in jewels. Those spiked stars
you bait like red meat you leave out for polar bears.
The brittle sensibilities of a neglected ice age.
Did you break your windows again like a frozen lake
to get at the waters of life in your mindstream?

I hate it when the light goes unappreciated
but this soulless blue of a late autumn afternoon
is beginning to get on my nerves
like a Hallmark greeting card that's chewed
all the real flavour of life out of its feelings like gum
masticating its words for public consumption.
I feel I'm letting some prophecy down somewhere
as if I were misreading the tea leaves at the bottom
of the moon cup of my prophetic skull.
The gash of first crescent early this morning.
A lunar hair on the shoulder of the dawn that swears
it wasn't untrue to the sun the Luciferian morning star
is leading on as if a new fool were born every day.

No matter. By the time I was ready for sleep
I expected a lot less of you than anyone's ever delivered.
And I'll be ok in a while, and you'll hate me for it
when your heart turns into a toxic arrowhead
that didn't have any effect. Just this Clovis point
to say you'd been here once and been wiped out
with the larger mammals of North America
in the dust bowl of another sudden flash freeze.

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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