AND HERE I AM

And here I am, here I am

I say to the answerable

holding the world up for proof.

Why is your song

always a star

paling in the rising light,

and my heart the smashed plum

of the orchard you walk through?

Have I not drunk enough mirrors

to meet your madness face to face,

drowned in enough skies,

lain on the pyres

of enough demonic cremations,

ploughed oblivion enough with my eyes,

refused enough easy dreams and lies

and taken the ram path up the mountain,

leaping from abyss to abyss,

butting rock with the horns of the moon

like a door knocker

cast in the shape of a skull with a crown

that I shouldn’t always have to walk away

feeling like junkmail on your threshold

and that it’s one minute to midnight

before I wake up to myself

and realize you’re not home

even when the lights are on,

and the windows are ripe with radiance,

ready to fall like a house of cards,

and I’m the only joker without a doorbell

and the return address you gave to everyone

like a new religion of multiple choice love letters

is the foundation stone

of a fire that burns like a palace

to enthrone itself in the hovel of its homelessness.

PATRICK WHITE