Tempering The Carbonized Steel Of My Heart
Tempering the carbonized steel of my heart
in a drainage ditch hissing like a snake pit
to make it impervious to the pins the colour-blind lepidopterists
keep sticking in it as if it were a voodoo doll
for the projections they keep putting on it
like death masks of their own making.
Tired of hauling corpses like dead weight up the mountain
on a fragile lifeline where they hang
like mummified spider trophies on a thread of fate
swaying precariously in the wind while I drive
my heart like a piton into rock to secure a footing.
Why is compassion reserved for the weak
who just want to fall backwards into the abyss
taking the strong with them who endure
greater agonies in climbing than they do in falling off?
Enough is enough. Time to cut bait
and throw the little fish back into the depths
like minnows of the moon bottom-feeding on shadows
though they aspire like the vernal equinox
to a constellation of their own where everybody
can see them shining like the Circlet of the Western Fish in Pisces.
Sick of lighting other people's fires and blowing on the flames
until their star is blazing, and then having them turn around
and throw acid in my eyes that burns like white phosphorus
through metal, even under water. All my life
I've pulled one shipwreck after another into my lifeboat
only to watch them punch holes in it to sink us all
behind my back as I was trying to swim through stone.
Why is that? Why do people cut off the hands of those
who were trying to help them like Che Guevara in Bolivia,
and kiss the asses of all those who are sitting on their faces,
who squat enthroned on the garbage can lids they're living in?
I don't make cages of gratitude for the doves and the crows
I've opened the door for so they can sing for themselves
when they get out of the egg and see how vast the sky is.
And I'm not a warden of aviaries trying to brain wash the parrots
into saying the same things I do to myself
when there's no one else to talk to in the dark.
I'm not passing out little executioner's hoods
to trained falcons perched on my arm like cuckoo clocks
timed to go off like i.e.ds at midnight at the stroke of doom.
Shakespeare might have been happy enough to teach the alphabet
to grammar school boys for seven unknown years,
but that doesn't mean he wouldn't have been happier
writing a comedy of errors of his own. I'm not
drawing any analogies here to my own state of affairs,
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
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