Tuesday, November 27, 2012

AWAKE AT SIX A.M.


AWAKE AT SIX A.M.

Awake at six a.m. The clock ticks, nicks,
flintknaps little pieces of my life off,
a French executioner’s sword quicker and neater
than the sloppy axe of the moon
naping the strike. I swan on the block
to the drum roll of a panicked palpitant
among kitchen utensils. I’m the crucifix
of Cygnus in the Summer Triangle,
arms outspread. I’m severed like a carrot.
I’m the headless horseman. An acephalic shallot.

Someone yanks me up out of the earth
and holds me up by a gout of hair
like a prize turnip with a characteristic look
of freeze-framed despair on my face
as if it had just been amputated.
I had a snake transplant. Now I’m Medusa.
The star, Algol, in the grip of Perseus.
The ghoul of my own solitude, I can heal
or I can enflame the disease with an unclean needle.
Beware. In case of no urgency. Break glass.

My torso sits at its desk and tries to write.
Headless as the rest. A skull, a book,
an ashtray and some candlelight, coffee
and a keyboard clotted with sticky nicotine
and the finger sweat of a thousand poems.
Stem cells and salamanders come to mind.
Regenerative urns scattering my ashes
like sunspots on a Flemish complexion,
crows in the dusk. My hands feel
like a pair of mouldy gloves, newly exhumed,
but they do the work of twenty spiders.
Ten silkworms gnawing on a mulberry bush.

Prussian blue with an aura of gegenshein,
I wonder if the windows ever wish they had eyes.
I can see right through their deathmasks
with my X-ray insights. The thrum
of the emergency helicopter lands nearby
like a dragonfly on the hospital’s lily pad.
Nightshift angels bloom like nurse’s caps.
The war memorial is wounded by felt poppies
dressed for the weather this time of year,
like a haemophiliac that never stops bleeding
for the boys of summer who went off to war
wielding their ploughshares like swords.

Good-bye Jerod. Good-bye, Joe. I see you
baling corpses like strawdogs after a bayonet charge.
I grieve like chlorine. My tears burn like mustard gas.
My grandfather died spitting up blood
on a sheet of newspaper beside the bed.
Is it any wonder I’m staining this unexpurgated page
like a Rorschach test conjuring up the simulacra
that bear an interior resemblance to me
to see if I can put my head to rest
like a jellyfish parachute candling
in its own tentacles like unbound spinal cords
of serpent fire striking reflexively at the unwary air?

Take this bar code of a chromosome off my heart.
This emission spectrum with genetically modified
Fraunhofer lines, these frayed deltas of life
in the palms of my hands. I am not
a product of my times. I won’t be sold
like the child of a Goth for dogmeat,
though the vultures are in a holding pattern overhead.
I’m not road kill. I won’t be culled
by a hunting license north of highway 7.
I’ll give myself to the wolves furthest from my door.
Let the Aztecs go to war if they want a human sacrifice.

I’ll die by my own wits like a lunatic
raising a skull cup of blood to the noble enemy
of the god I deprived of my barbarous piety
as she does me, food, love, money, sleep, respect
and this flickering head I’ve made a candle holder of
so the light can weep for hours until it burns out
like Aldebaran or Antares in another false dawn
that wires me bloodshot flowers. Eyeless carnations
freaked by the scarlet crackling
of another seismic breakdown
of incommunicable excruciations.

PATRICK WHITE  

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