Slowly Over The Years
Slowly over the years
like a queen cobra that didn't like
the music she was dancing to,
the right song but the wrong flute,
life has made a big impression on me
by showing me what it can do
to the magnanimous equanimity
of all those who went looking for the Buddha
to explain what they'd just done to themselves
in the late sixties by straightening out their wavelengths
like the curls in their long bucolated hair,
or the creases under the eyes in the mirror
that weren't there yesterday
or the day before whenever I last cried.
I used to tattoo starmaps like blackholes
on the bad moon rising of my skull
like the eye sockets on one roll of the dice.
I put an emergency exit sign over one ear
and over the other. Enter here.
Like the back and front covers of a hardbound book.
Emotional butterflies caught in the passions of a forest-fire
like broadsheets in a revolution,
spiritual gazelles like slim first volumes of poetry
martyred in the eternal flames
of the solar corona with the mystical sun dog
they mistook for their third eye
before it evaporated into thin air
like the last two drops of bloodshed on the savannah.
It rained vipers. It rained manna.
Authority struck my crystal skull
with an iron billy club
it carried around like an organ transplant
in case of urgent insurgencies
and where you can see all these little frayed threads
of the deltas and rivers and roads I've been down
like a pilgrim asking everyone I met along the way
whose holy war this was and had they seen
a dreamcatcher fractured by nervous, white lightning
walking in its sleep on the moon somewhere
uprooting the wildflowers of the stars in her eyes
to replant them like corneas in the gardens of the blind.
Right here. Where that shard of a star is missing
like the capitol of an unknown country
is where I broke out of the cosmic egg
and made a getaway like an arrow
in the opposite direction of the divine.
Not every journey ends in a shrine.
Right here is where I stepped out of the night woods
like starlight through my eyelashes
into the clearing of a vast inconceivably open space
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
