DON’T WANT TO GO THERE

Don’t want to go there; don’t want to get into that again,

Once was enough for a lifetime if you made it through

and I’m still not sure I have.

I don’t charge my hallucinations overnight anymore

and expect to wake up to an enlightened morning

that will reveal who I am

in this mess of a person I’m living

counter-intuitively against my better judgment.

You could have been me as far as I know

or I could have been you

or there was another dream

where we met in the middle between the two like a razorblade,

but you couldn’t see the crazy wisdom of it all

when the moon chalked the clouds

like a smudge on a blackboard

to show you how

and things just got darker.

Now the windows are not so insistent

and I can swim through myself for eras

without coming across any sign of myself or you.

Sixty sometimes feels like September on the moon

and who knows what comes up

in the furrows of what I’ve sown

now that the moon is nothing but a cold stone

in a vastly indifferent sky

and all that fire and passion

charged with the whole of creation in every atom

no longer believes the rain when it shows me your eyes.

PATRICK WHITE