You Don't Come
You don't come. Your absence is a guillotine. My heart
plummets from the altitude it risked in looking forward
to a day with you outside of time and circumstance, jumps
from the edge of paradise, the flat earth, the back
of a winged horse. You don't come and such
is the nature of love
I go out of the plane not knowing
if I've got a parachute on and my heart
pulls the rip cord to see if there's any salvation in the fall,
any flowers for me in the bag, morning glory
or dandelion seed, or this is just another
mode of acceleration to death. You don't come
and my heart candles without a reserve,
I haven't packed a spare dawn
and though I will make every effort to understand
there's a grave waiting down below like an open mouth
and the void is laughing at the persistent folly
of my believing you would come,
and my fear of not being worthy of love anymore
sends my mendicant self-image out
wandering over thirteenth century Europe like some flagellant
on a pilgrimage of flogging, ribbons of blood running down my back
from salted wounds, and though I know
the expectation and the disappointment are both delusions,
birdshit on the claws of a sphinx, and I will try to be
intelligent and wise about the whole thing,
tugging my heart out like a garbage-scow into deep space
where it will be laced with explosives and scuttled once again,
and I will be awarded another paradoxical brownie-badge
by another scout-master Tibetan rinpoche
for knowing how to survive alone in this empty wilderness,
a tiger of will, a Viking of resolve,
an aging clown without children or laughter, a jester-king
officiating from the throneless butt of his own joke,
a poet with nothing to praise, a painter
with cataracts in the eye and flowers in the sky, I
know there is nothing I can tell myself, no spiritual weed
I can poultice over the vacancy that goes on forever
to draw out the infection from my heart, the gangrene
from the broken pillar of the foolish temple I erected
to serve the goddess in any of her lunar phases,
and though I struggle like a diminished thing to accept my dejection,
to imbibe the toxins from the left tit of the Medusa
while trying not to turn into stone, while trying
not to avert my eyes from this crone-form of the moon, let
Kali drink my blood, in the name of insight, clarity and courage,
good wolf, I know this, too, is delusion, another
projected holograph from the third eye of the pineal gland,
and kick the chair from under
the useless fruit of my head in a noose. Back to earth
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poem by Patrick White
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