THOSE NIGHTS I WENT OUT WITH A BUTCHER'S KNIFE

THOSE NIGHTS I WENT OUT WITH A BUTCHER’S KNIFE

Those nights I went out with a butcher’s knife

down the dark alley between our house

and the triplex next door, twelve years old,

my courage running down my leg, to stab

a full grown pervert running down the back stairs

when you flipped the porch lights on to spotlight

the spider stealing your panties off the clothesline,

onto my green gladiolus of a Spanish short sword

that hadn’t tasted the blood of its first blossom yet,

I don’t want to remember this anymore.

I don’t want to be estranged from my own childhood

by garbage cans that look like dangerous men in the moonlight.

When I think of those days, there’s a pervasive grey

that saturates everything like a cold fog,

and all my emotions are black oilspills on the concrete.

And all my insights come to me with a shock

like unknown eyes peering through the mail slot

you eventually boarded up like a plague door on the inside.

I watched the stardust of my innocence blow away

like the topsoil of the dirty thirties, as you spread flour

under the windows every night to see

if the drunk who lived above the grocery store

were painting his footprints on the ballroom floor again

as he had three nights before the cops wouldn’t come

to arrest an increasingly brazen Peeping Tom.

saving themselves a bullet for everyone of us who ate our own.

I don’t want to remember how excruciatingly transformative it was

to want to be the hero of a squadron of model Spitfires

that hung from my bedroom ceiling, and then

be called upon by a frightened whisper at the door

to go outside like a dragon with a flame thrower

of aviation fuel to confront the dirty end

of the joy stick of a sick world terrifying you

with the atrocious scenes on True Detective magazines

that were more intimately real on our front doorstep

than in any paranoid fantasy of yours

where big-busted blondes in torn blouses

were chained to trees by men with axes

and no one was trying to save an old growth forest.

I wish there’d been a timelock on my childhood years.

I wish things had been different, and you were always safe,

and I say this with no regrets, because I had to know

how to stand like a flaming angel at the gates

of a ruined Eden, to keep you and my sisters

out of reach of the hunting snake

with forbidden fruit between its legs

crawling up the tree towards panicked eggs in the nest

you flew around like a mother bird

in an emergency without an exit. It’s been light years since

and it’s funny how after all this time

the man in me has begun to shed delinquent tears

for the boy who had to know what a woman fears so early

I weep for you and I weep for me for all the pain and fear

we had to endure like a nightmare while we were still awake,

though I’d do it all again, for your sake, if I had to,

except now I’d go out back with a gun to get the job done.

Just the same. I wish I hadn’t grown up in No Man’s Land

and my childhood wasn’t an elsewhere zone with warning signs

not to enter without abandoning all hope

that things would ever change for the better.

I wish I’d learned the spirit of the word first

like a feather of light in the scales of the jackal-god

before my heart knuckled down to the hard and fast letter

of learning how to ambush things that go bump in the night

while my heart beat harder than a hammer and an anvil

at what I was about to meet in the dark

like the nemetic karma of the eldest son of a welfare mother,

tenuously prepared to inflict a stomach wound on a stranger

who forgot the baby rattlesnakes could be

as toxic as the adults, if you scared them so badly

all that they feared was focused like a snakepit

on wanting to get you over with summarily like an intruder

on the threshold of a lethal childhood I wish would pass

transitory as the dew on the grass, not these ageless glaciers

that still wake me up from my boyhood dreams

in a cold sweat of garbage cans and moonbeams.

What kind of a man would I have been

if I hadn’t seen perdition as a child too afraid

of being afraid, lest worse be hung over my head

than a World War II model airplane, and I burn alive

out of shame in a cockpit that never got off the ground

or went around the back to confront an unknown horror

that cut both ways like the crescents of the moon,

two sides of the same wound, one that congealed

like blood around a cut, and the other, a gash

deeper than that, in a childhood that never healed.

PATRICK WHITE