AWAKE AND LABOURING

AWAKE AND LABOURING

Awake and labouring for light in this dayshift of dreams

as the platitudinous dawn takes her make-up off,

her eyelashes the hands of amputated clocks

that once prayed over the ruptured acids

of identical batteries, the premature twins

that exhausted their patrimony of corroded polarities

on the green-blue lichen that eats them in their graves

and spreads like an infection of the moon, I realize

I need a new emergency, a more radical embryo

than this destiny of durable shoes to fulfill the imploding uterus

of a radioactive fortune-cookie. I need more bells,

I need more bullets, I need to rise from the ashes

of my passport to anywhere with a completely new identity

that’s good for an eternity of idiotic bliss. Give me a face

I can believe in that isn’t

a drug-sniffing dog at the border, eyes

that don’t know more about me than I do,

that aren’t surveillance cameras of everything I do,

that don’t watch for me like herons hunting fish. Unspool

the movie and give me conch-shell labyrinths for ears,

I want to be lost at sea again, and a mouth

that isn’t the last druid of a dying language. And I want

an island like a shipwrecked woman who’s marooned on me,

no more of these petulant nunneries and shepherding moons,

no more of their tedious gravity and menstrual atmospheres,

there must be a muse somewhere conceived in her own fires

that isn’t a defection of all that she inspires.

I’m sick of this ghetto of overweening awards

that put their best face forward to accuse me of failure

and whine like the tarnished brass of palatial promises

I did not make that they will go on suffering for my sake.

There comes a day, an hour, a second, the ambush

of an insight that isn’t just another auroral peacock

with a shovel full of eyes, that it’s time to walk out on yourself

like the dark ages and cancel your subscription

to the jaded slug-lines and papal dispensations

of liberations that die like crusades in iron cocoons;

and I don’t care if I’m forgiven or not, let hell

thorn its black rose in my blood again,

and heaven feed like lilies on the corruptions of the swamp,

I’m already recruiting for a new holy war

that won’t make me surrender on my knees.

And how many times can a man cross his own thresholds,

his arms full of wives and groceries and hundred pound keys

he drops on the counter like anchors before

he raves for chaos to craze the plywood windows of his usual enormities

with wilder hurricanes than these that come on

like weather-reports in an onslaught of nicknames?

I want galaxies off the coast of my peninsula, I want

to hear the exaltant screaming of albatross and eagle

slashing through climacteric volumes of electric air

like maverick hinges and butterfly blades in a surf war to the death.

There must be storms in me yet that I can wear like eye-patches

to raid the angel fleets and whole universes

waiting like heretics and ferocious luminaries

to enlighten this burden of wish-bones I carry to the grave.

PATRICK WHITE