Paid The Rent
Paid the rent. Roof over my head for another month.
Car bills coming up, and contraband cigarettes;
got to feed myself, provide what is needed,
address myself to elemental concerns,
keep my body clean, my clothes, the house, the sheets,
my wits about me on the streets,
and my heart wary of vagrant urgencies
that take a bride like an ambulance to an emergency
just for the ride, and ends up dedicating themselves like a bloodbank
to a wound that isn't in the book
and won't be healed,
though I apply the moon like a poultice,
like a scar with a dark side that's always concealed.
Even who I thought I was,
more life behind me than ahead,
no more than a passing flaw of feeling,
gusts of birds in the groves of a sacred delirium
where the fools make fun of the saints
and it takes ages to understand
why the blood writes and paints
what the spirit sees of a world
that stains the grace of its mystic absurdity
by forgetting how to play with God, the faceless one.
And things are done that rot like bells
and torture and war and rape and winning sells
peanuts in the Colosseum
and no one knows who I am
because they're clinging like frost
to their own faces
in dangerously intimate places.
And that's okay; that's okay too
because I'm just an empty lifeboat passing through
the eye of a dream that won't wake anybody up,
just another prophetic crack in the cup
that proposes a toast to its host like a grail
as we fail and fail and fail our way through life
all the way to the top of our decline
like a parachute tangled in a powerline
that didn't know how to jump toward paradise.
And I wouldn't advise anyone giving or taking advice,
but I will go out and encompass the day like an accident
that didn't happen to me,
and there will be moments like mini-blackholes
that will grain my image into the ferocious clarity
of a face that bends space like a lens
to cloak the offence of my rarity
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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