Saturday, September 7, 2013

MY NUMB, UNAPPOINTED NIGHT STARE INTO OBLIVION

MY NUMB, UNAPPOINTED NIGHT STARE INTO OBLIVION

My numb, unappointed night stare into oblivion.
The bar band across the street has stopped
for the night. The silence digs a deeper black hole
in the white noise of the iron lung sustaining
the town shutting down to sleep than the undertakers
of the music buried in the closed coffins
of their guitar cases wishing they were machine-guns.

An end of the hammered laughter, the hormonal squeal,
the amatory barb of weathervanes in whaling boats
going for the heart through the eye of a needle
in drunken tears too well-versed to be believable.
I almost envy people who always have
something to insist upon, incontrovertibly.
I’d throw a punch just for the sake
of the absurdity of it, but I know when
feathers come to scales deep in my R-complex,
the left front parietal lobe of my neo-cortex
wouldn’t mean it except as a Zen cowboy
kind of glee in the energies expressed thereby.

More wings than spurs on my heels these days
when I’m not waxing and waning like Icarus
in a dead fall. And sometimes I’m just another fly
at the window trying to buzz myself in
to an upstairs apartment with an unnerved
security alarm and a cat-clawed bugscreen,
moth holes gnawed in it that look
as if someone bent the bars back
like the wire eyelashes of a jailbreak.

The great escape. To what? Eight beers
and a shot of tequila to top them off, trying to loosen
the sexual mores of a workaday straitjacket
up, thread by thread, as if you were brushing
stray hairs off the bare shoulders of a legal assistant
toying with taboos as she drunkenly decries
the life she’s chained to like a connubial visit
by conviction, irrepressibly proclaiming
to the sheepish citizenry of the permissive street,
no one’s ever getting out. We’re all guilty by dissociation.


PATRICK WHITE

No comments: