House of Dust
I said:
I'm becoming everyone I know.
Chains of them wrangle and snake
into a starless universe.
I close my eyes,
eclipse everything that's real,
un-bang eternity
and there I all am.
I can barely be me.
Except when I'm humming yesterdays
in the shower in darkness
-a seventeen year old girl at the piano,
fresh from palming her naked breasts
with these compliant hands.
She's playing These Foolish Things,
andante
and we're in God's house -
well, an outpost of it.
And I'm thinking of someone else.
I hear the hammers strike the wires
and some kind of beauty
cascades, engulfs.....
and I am Narcissus, illusion and saint in love
impaled on a perfectly sharpened thorn
a flowing moment of awe -
suddenly snapped by thought...
and I whisper to the darkness:
I am my own meme,
my own camouflage.
I am evolution;
I'm every part and every whole;
I am nothing lost for limits
in a log-jammed circle on the desert,
I spill over, am pushed over.
The circle's edge is an endless burning bush.
And I'm scorched by the ocean that repels,
that they clamour for all around me,
and I am wounded and they are whole
in their need, under their false stars,
and I patronise with pity, curse myself,
and fight my way back,
through muddied puddles to the starting line.
To the fiery silver white teeming of night
the child in me grasped falsely - or was it truly -
to the splashing crystal pools that happiness was,
and I say out loud:
I need a lot more time than this.
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poem by Jim Hogg
Added by Poetry Lover
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