Awake At Six A.M.
Awake at six a.m. The clock ticks, nicks,
flintknaps little pieces of my life off,
a French executioner's sword quicker and neater
than the sloppy axe of the moon
naping the strike. I swan on the block
to the drum roll of a panicked palpitant
among kitchen utensils. I'm the crucifix
of Cygnus in the Summer Triangle,
arms outspread. I'm severed like a carrot.
I'm the headless horseman. An acephalic shallot.
Someone yanks me up out of the earth
and holds me up by a gout of hair
like a prize turnip with a characteristic look
of freeze-framed despair on my face
as if it had just been amputated.
I had a snake transplant. Now I'm Medusa.
The star, Algol, in the grip of Perseus.
The ghoul of my own solitude, I can heal
or I can enflame the disease with an unclean needle.
Beware. In case of no urgency. Break glass.
My torso sits at its desk and tries to write.
Headless as the rest. A skull, a book,
an ashtray and some candlelight, coffee
and a keyboard clotted with sticky nicotine
and the finger sweat of a thousand poems.
Stem cells and salamanders come to mind.
Regenerative urns scattering my ashes
like sunspots on a Flemish complexion,
crows in the dusk. My hands feel
like a pair of mouldy gloves, newly exhumed,
but they do the work of twenty spiders.
Ten silkworms gnawing on a mulberry bush.
Prussian blue with an aura of gegenshein,
I wonder if the windows ever wish they had eyes.
I can see right through their deathmasks
with my X-ray insights. The thrum
of the emergency helicopter lands nearby
like a dragonfly on the hospital's lily pad.
Nightshift angels bloom like nurse's caps.
The war memorial is wounded by felt poppies
dressed for the weather this time of year,
like a haemophiliac that never stops bleeding
for the boys of summer who went off to war
wielding their ploughshares like swords.
Good-bye Jerod. Good-bye, Joe. I see you
baling corpses like strawdogs after a bayonet charge.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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