Better To Flash A Sharp Knife Quickly
Better to flash a sharp knife quickly across someone's throat
as the last remaining mercy
than bludgeon them to death retroactively as you do.
The first is just another big city workaday murder on the nightshift
but the way your offended sense of righteous indignation
has turned to hate
as you sit there sliding needles into your arm
like loveletters into a bruised envelope
you've addressed in blood to yourself
I can tell you're sticking pins into the eyes
of black madonna voodoo dolls
deep inside a secret hiding place in your childhood
where you indoctrinate them into genocide.
You're a beautiful woman with lots to hide
and I don't want to know where the corpses are
as if the only intimacies worth caring about
were all long buried in this desert of stars.
And twice before I've tasted the blood of the black widow
and yes it may be sweetened
by all the butterflies it's eaten
but then your heart goes numb as an ice-cube
in the fix at the end
that comes on like an eclipse
of the light at the end of the tunnel
where all your dead relatives
are dying to greet you again.
I wear my heart on my sleeve
like the colours of the ghetto I was born into
to watch my mother die of overwork for nothing
of any estimable value including me
when I look at it from her point of view.
And I like the sexy West Coast sixties look
of those black Stevie Nicks Gothic spider webs
you wear more like skin
than the net of Indra
with jewels at every intersection.
And I've always been tempted and still am
by dangerous pariahs on the lamb
from the witch-hunts of medieval men
who fear a female messiah
that can cast her nets wider
than any constellation
among the fishers of men.
And o sweetness don't doubt yourself.
It's still a cheap thrill to feel so sublimely vulnerable
daring the taboo event horizons of your powers
like a firefly going eye to eye with a blackhole
even as I bend space to stay clear as a gravitational lens.
But you're hooked on your own elixirs
like a dealer who wants to get out of it
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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