Snow On The Streets
Snow on the streets grooved by tires
into a bar-code. A band burning its first c.d.
Garbage bags humped against the parking meters
like terraformed drunks in an albino mindscape.
I want to sleep. But savage clouds are fuming
with moonlight. Oblivion's sweet, my little death,
gentle as a snowflake but the prelude to it
is pierced by cauterizing anxieties
like a needle park for voodoo dolls.
I'd rather be a butterfly, a pinwheel
spinning on an axis through my thorax
but you can't have it all. I tilt away from the sun
at perigee and try to stretch the night out
like a budget of meds for the month.
The dark's a cool poultice that draws
the infection out of my dreams. It
sublimates my sorrows like dry ice
that skipped the tears. I don't want to get wet
in an ice-age. Crucified by icicles
that drip like syringes in a limestone cave.
I smear my face in red ochre, blood
with desiccated binders, oil pastels,
and lay my prophetic bones under the firepit.
I place a great stone on my chest
like the weight of the world
to make sure I never get up again
but pain is a homeless ghost
and I don't think, even with my knees
popped under my chin like an embryo
every part of me is going to fit
my place at the table like a grave.
I throw a few cornflowers in
and wander off with my spirit
like a thought wave that's tagging along.
I chip away at my heart
like an obsidian lunette
with a bone that's edging it
into a phalanged Clovis point
for a throwing spear to penetrate
the mammoth of the wooly moon.
I think I'm going extinct.
I've culled too many stars.
The herds are thinning over my head.
The green of the traffic lights
that turned yellow in the fall
drops its single, blood-stained berry in the snow.
As the birds and the bards say
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poem by Patrick White
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