Drunk On Nettle Wine
Drunk on nettle wine, alone, scalded by stars
that harass my sense of wonder like blackflies
with the atomic futilities of transformation,
the broken windows of their radiance,
an ice-storm of splintered glass
that catches me in a downpour of histrionic chandeliers,
the legends of enlightenment, a farce of words,
and the only thing the night has said for hours
that makes any sense in my patrician isolation,
an ambulance, a cat in heat, and the click of a loaded zippo,
I sit in a ghetto of upwardly mobile elements,
and confess to myself there's little left of my life
that shines in a way that isn't buffed
with time and separation and sorrow.
And I want to set fire
to the heavy theatre curtains of my bloodstream
that are always sweeping closed
like capes and lilies and weather-fronts
on the tragic premiers of my inexorable flaws,
and the decrescent scars of my cosmic screenings,
and the fools that went mad to unman their malignancy;
I've broken my teeth on the iron bones
I've been thrown to gnaw at under the periodic table
as if I were the dog of a molecule;
and I'm sick of filling in for the missing letters of neon motels
as if I were the inert footnote of a nightshift gas;
or falling through the gaps into this half-life
between calcium and carbon. I want a diamond skull
with eyes as blue as uranium skies
and a heart of gold free of the ore of its afterbirth,
and chlorine blood that flows as green as spring
in the lady at the gate, no lead in my shadow,
and a silver smile, and a plutonium voice
with an intercontinental delivery system.
I want off the flat bell curves of my railroad pulse,
and out of the fish-net Saharas of thought
that will always, only, ever be the first draft of an ocean,
amateur gills of sand. I want to give
these opening night roses back
to the baglady who stole them, and the moth-pocked wardrobe
of defused relationships that left the stage
with the grace and the charm of a blasting cap,
and no more tungsten honey from the hive of the streetlamp,
and no more silicon brain implants
to upgrade the cleavage of a sagging I.Q.
I want to be a river the rain can look up to,
I want to be a tree so certain of itself
even its shadow has fingerprints
that reveal its personal history, I want to be
someone who doesn't know what it means
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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