The Flowers Of The Street People
White trash with their faces punched in like catcher's mitts
mooning the flowers of the street people as they drive by
like a float in a pageant of ignorance having a good time
at everyone else's expense. Pygmy heroes of their own irrelevance.
Annie, the bag-lady, puts the avalanche of her head down
and spits like salt as if she just survived Sodom and Gomorrah
as she passes by, sullen and resigned to the blackflies
that have swarmed her like the shadows of commas for years.
You just have to take one look at her face to know
she's the dried rose of a gnostic gospel that went flakey
long before women were forbidden from invigilating
their own spirits. Given the protocols of the bleakness,
even the city can serve as a shrine of sorts. Man bulls
in lunar labyrinths, and the Princess of Spiders,
unweaving her thread in a moment of desire
waiting to have her webs elevated among the stars
in cosmic reprisal for the betrayal of her abandonment to love.
And there's Peter, the architect turned shipwreck,
on a chain gang in a quarry, he's cracked so many rocks
to extract the gold rush out of his sixty dollars worth of meteorites
and flush it through his veins like a motherlode
back into the ore of his panspermic flesh. He begs
money on the corner on behalf of his dealer
all day long, a begging bowl that still has to pay
for his drugs in paradise. One day, if he keeps complaining,
because the last thing to go when you're mad,
is your understanding of money, the dealer's
going to smile like a snake and pat him on the back
and say, yes, Peter, you're right, you should be in on the take,
and give him a rock the size of Gibraltar
that will see his mummy being wheeled into
the sarcophagus of an ambulance by the morning
of the next replicated day. Which is maybe what he wants.
And who killed the hysterical rose lady who
for twenty years flogged a little beauty in the bars
to anyone who wanted to make a romantic move
on the flippant female sitting next to them
spending her disability cheque trying to forget
all the shabby dawns that have come on to her like boyfriends
and how she liked to throw them off the bridge to Hull
like the artworks of terrified ex-cons trying to make a getaway.
This actually happened to a friend of mine
in the squalid back room of a degenerate relationship
after he'd been raped repeatedly by a Christian reformatory.
But he can paint in any corner of six possible restaurants
in the Ottawa Market as if he had the eyes of a peacock
in the full bloom of a mating ritual with the waitresses.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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