You Were A Hooker At Sixteen
YOU WERE A HOOKER BY SIXTEEN
You were a hooker by sixteen.
Your mother, your madame
The navy at N.F.B. Esquimalt, your john.
In the triplex, next door, upstairs
on a Friday night, all the windows
broken from the inside by whiskey bottles.
My friend, since you were seven,
how we struggled to keep our innocence
out of the world's greasy hands.
Oil slick on the rose.
White peonies of blood-stained Kleenex
in the toilet bowl. Eclipse of the flowers
in a city of gardens. Even when the stars
were out, the darkness lurked, the doorways
housed strangers like trap door spiders.
Joy held a grudge against our wariness.
The windows didn't trust us, and the street
was a firewalk of ordeals to test us
for things we really didn't comprehend
but sensed, like broken glass, were crucial.
Painful to remember even now,
grey, grey, grey, the middle-aged children
trying to inch their way through the concrete
like dandelions or blades of grass,
or when it was wet, wrote their names in it,
each the founding member of a different slab,
gravestones with graffiti epitaphs
laid like bets against a future
that had been conditioned
by violence, poverty, disappointment.
The mythic inflation of human extremes
venting fumaroles of pent up emotions
entrenched like killer bees in their hearts
swarming the children in the agony of their perversity
as if they were always trying to get even with God
for something that drove them mad
with distemper and spiritual rabies.
Desecration always the answer.
Smashing beautiful things, debunking
the rare gestures of human divinity
that reminded them of who they weren't,
fouling the waters of the children
with the effluvium of their own degeneracy.
I can see the chestnuts of your big brown eyes,
your helical blonde hair, your mulatto lips
and the pearl of your nacreous smile
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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