At The Crossroads Of Martyrs And Reptiles
At the crossroads of martyrs and reptiles,
annihilation's easy enough. It's carrying on
that's hard. All my emotions are feathered
like crows or osprey, hermit thrush, Canada geese,
and the occasional humming bird but that doesn't mean
they're perched in an aviary, or forgotten
what it was like when they had scales.
I've softened as I've aged. Molars and mountains
worn down like a planet in the tides of time and the stars.
I used to embroider my emotions in blood
on pillowcases full of razorblades that had
as many phases as the moon has thorns,
broken stained-glass windows, the shards
of shattered mirrors. I lived like stolen
radioactive material in a black market
with no flower-stalls, though I was raised
in a city of gardens with hanging baskets
dripping from the lamp posts outside the pawn shop,
with three full moons of leprous white globes
cloned incommensurately down the main street.
I buried my emotions at sea on the run
like depth charges deep within me
where the sharks and submarines cruise
for targets of opportunity. Boom.
But on the surface all you'd hear
in polite company, was this muffled wump
like a boxer connecting a right cross meteorically
with an entire species. And I'd tuck myself in at night
under the chained blankets they use
like straitjackets to discipline dynamite.
I'd dream like a junkyard dog with its head
on its paws in between thieves of one day
winning my colours like a moonrise in a wolfpack.
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
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poem by Patrick White
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