0 NEW MESSAGES

0 new messages, eight-six in the box,

write the fury out, write the fire another love-letter,

train the crows to preach

in a snakepit of downed powerlines,

euthanize a stamp by holding it down under the wavelengths

of an approving postal service, its gravestone

a passport to delivery, it’s date of death on record,

and the radiant message it carried out of the past,

the light of a remote star

trying to make contact with similar forms of life,

luggage and a toe-tag, wind in the ashes

of dismembered dolls. And there are

disappointments so grievous, careless mishaps of the heart,

wolf-spiders wince and close up

like startled flowers under hot match-heads,

delinquencies of feeling that prowl the shopping-malls,

and wounds that bleed out of their mouths

acidic rivers of red army ants

that scald their way through the grass to enslave

the gentler colonies of another midnight without you.

And I’m here alone in the plundered tomb

of an evicted house with bad water,

clinging to the planks of my shipwrecked bookshelves,

waiting for doves and lifeboats

in a regata of sharks circling this drenched bouquet of sodden galaxies

I’m holding out to you above the sloppy waves

like flowers and flies I saved from the drain,

and your tiny sin of omission, the broken blade of your avowal

to never intentionally hurt me

is blood in the water, the fuse

of a feeding frenzy, of haemmoraging roses,

and my heart’s a lousy sump-pump for the pain

of being nicked like this by the petal of a daisy razor-blade

that loves me not. And I could be cool and noble, easy

to lie about the flaring poppy that immolates my art,

hoping for other rescues in the vicinity,

breeze over the burn like an ashen firepit, and poetically forgive

the arson of your oversight as just

another seasonal meteor shower out of Leo,

just another falling star to wish on, but it lights me up

as if my bloodstream had turned to gasoline,

and I’m not much of a monk when it comes to cremations

or emergency fire-alarms that no one answers

or the one-runged crutches you tell me to climb down like fire ladders

from the glass dragons of these melting windows

and huffing supernovas reaching critical mass like blasting caps

in a beaver dam. I can be October sumac

and set my wings afire like a phoenix all on my own,

and I’ve been burning for you like white phosphorus for weeks

to give you something to read by in a black-out,

and I’ve been cooked in the fires of separation before

like a good-natured steak tenderized in the wines of hungry women

trying to please capricious palattes

over the igneous briquets of a glowing heart,

and I’ve been happy to do it, happy to let them carve my tongue like meat

and chew till their jaws fell from their hinges like weary gates,

just to see them pleased and full, their bloodlust satisfied,

and I’m tiger enough in my own stoked fires to do it all again,

but if the chimney sparks are fireflies that want to flirt with the stars,

so the whole wilderness has to go up in flames

before anything can grow,

I’ve got a message from Mars

and a dove, with a Zippo.

PATRICK WHITE