Sad To See How We Bait Our Mind-hold Traps With Our Hearts
Sad to see how we bait our mind-hold traps with our hearts,
put all we are on the line, just for a little love, a kiss, a touch
an embrace that doesn't snap shut like the jaws of a great white
we put our trust in not to draw blood at the first bite.
I take people's faces off the shelves as they pass by
like second hand bookstores, and casually browse
their life stories only to find whole chapters ripped out
and sometimes the eyes, so you can see clear through
to the other side of what there was in the way of a view
to look back at you, that someone despised, and cut out
like a number two, twenty pound, book paper death mask,
black holes like the eye sockets of a skull,
slowly eating what was left of a face that yesterday
was the peer of the stars, the great seal of the sun,
the imprimatur of moonlight on the waters of the lake.
And I know those who love love for love's sake
more than they ever have the topsoil of an erosive human,
or the bedrock and watershed of their darker depths
where the fish, like ghosts, or fireflies and stars
have to shine by their own light if they want to walk
swim or fly the rest of the way whistling in the dark on their own.
Or just want to stand there like lighthouses
unaware of the danger they pose to themselves
when they don't take the advice of the seagulls in a storm
and just stand there, upright and brittle as the eternal names
on an obelisk in an earthquake, or a candle
whose spine was broken before it had a chance to burn.
Trashed, rejected, betrayed, played and abandoned,
the spring equinox makes its precessional wobbling way
through ordeals worthy of an Apache warrior
daring his adolescence into maturity
like a flagellant whipped through the stations of the cross,
or the slums of the black-hearted houses of a zodiac of anti-matter
dreaming of Shangri Las of light where totem animals and taboos
are tasted like forbidden fruit with ritualistic immunity.
Bitterly estranged by the excruciating transformations of love
I've seen people befriend and sword dance with each other
like alarm clocks in a snakepit with what they hate the most
to see which of two assassins is going to wake up first
from the coma they've put each other in like a direct hit
in public in broad daylight, or more discretely,
slumped against a lamp post like a garbage bag.
Love can empower a hero in a hardware store,
but once someone walks under a ladder,
love sours into an infernal power base
that depends on the opinion of its inferiors
to sustain its paranoid grasp of supremacy.
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poem by Patrick White
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