DRUNK ON NETTLE WINE

DRUNK ON NETTLE WINE

Drunk on nettle wine, alone, scalded by stars

that harass my sense of wonder like blackflies

with the atomic futilities of transformation,

the broken windows of their radiance,

an ice-storm of splintered glass

that catches me in a downpour of histrionic chandeliers,

the legends of enlightenment, a farce of words,

and the only thing the night has said for hours

that makes any sense in my patrician isolation,

an ambulance, a cat in heat, and the click of a loaded zippo,

I sit in a ghetto of upwardly mobile elements,

and confess to myself there’s little left of my life

that shines in a way that isn’t buffed
with time and separation and sorrow.
And I want to set fire

to the heavy theater curtains of my bloodstream

that are always sweeping closed
like capes and lilies and weather fronts

on the tragic premiers of my inexorable flaws,

and the decrescent scars of my cosmic screenings,

and the fools that went mad to unman their malignancy;

I’ve broken my teeth on the iron bones

I’ve been thrown to gnaw at under the periodic table

as if I were the dog of a molecule;

and I’m sick of filling in for the missing letters of neon motels

as if I were the inert footnote of a nightshift gas;

or falling through the gaps into this half-life

between calcium and carbon. I want a diamond skull

with eyes as blue as uranium skies

and a heart of gold free of the ore of its afterbirth,

and chlorine blood that flows as green as spring

in the lady at the gate, no lead in my shadow,

and a silver smile, and a plutonium voice

with an intercontinental delivery system.

I want off the flat bell curves of my railroad pulse,

and out of the fish-net Saharas of thought

that will always, only, ever be the first draft of an ocean,

amateur gills of sand. I want to give

these opening night roses back

to the baglady who stole them, 

and the moth-pocked wardrobe

of defused relationships that left the stage

with the grace and the charm of a blasting cap,

and no more tungsten honey from the hive of the streetlamp,

and no more silicon brain implants

to upgrade the cleavage of a sagging I.Q.

I want to be a river the rain can look up to,

I want to be a tree so certain of itself

even its shadow has fingerprints

that reveal its personal history, I want to be

someone who doesn’t know what it means

to not want to be

the white lament in the womb of a pregnant pause.

PATRICK WHITE