These Late Night Sessions With Myself
These late night sessions with myself
that crowd the world out
to make room for me to be alone
delinquently with myself
while the rest of the town sleeps,
barring a cabbie, a cop, the grocery clerk
that works at the all night Mac's Milk.
Can't sleep.
My pillow's a hive of killer bees.
I'm swarmed by the lethal trivia
of high-maintenance anxieties.
The picture-music's running the rapids
in a jazzy clash of high hats
and I was hoping for something like Paul Simon.
The medium waits like a seance
for me to appear
like the message that was summoned.
Something resonates like a wavelength
from a tiny point in space
and calls me home like a Martian rover
though I can't say for sure where I've been
like a shadow at noon
I know the sun shines at midnight
when I'm together enough again
to remember what I've seen.
And when the dawn makes the fieldstones
of the bank across the street
blush with pink
like some shrink's idea of a more quiescent prison,
I'm pinching the wicks of all my feelings
like candles in the morning
just to see if I'm still awake or not.
Between now and then
I'm watching a poem evolve like a chromosome
that's trying to make me up on the go
in a game of snakes and ladders
as one enzyme opens the door to six others
like a Chinese puzzle box
or a Higg's boson particle accelerator
and after awhile I'm looking at the genome
of a mirror image of myself
that refuses to recognize me.
As if a dragonfly
crawled out of the chrysalis of a fortune-cookie
and spread its wings to dry
like a winning lottery ticket
that just went through the laundry
in effusive elations of wind and sky.
One grey thread
of stray cigarette smoke on my shoulder
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
