FEEL LOST SOMETIMES

FEEL LOST SOMETIMES

Feel lost sometimes, abandoned, a loser

that’s been fighting a guerrilla rear guard action against myself.

Light years of shining and I feel reduced

to these colours and words crawling across thresholds

that recede like inconceivable farewells into the past.

No human touch, but three goldfish named after

the Greek city states of Athens, Thebes and Sparta,

in an expanding solitude that’s all womb, and no embryo

however the stars swim through the Milky Way upstream

like salmon to the creative wisdom of their sacred spawning pools.

We’re all sharing the same aquarium like a life support system,

a lifeboat that knows it’s a shoreless life

so it’s highly unrealistic to expect to be washed up anywhere

except on the moon, there’s always the moon,

where the mad go berserk in the shadows of its tides.

There’s a pettiness about my wounds, though

several go deep, that makes me feel like a creep sometimes

when I consider that I’m alive enough

not to have been finished off by them

and God knows what I owe for the wisdom

that’s accrued to me like a shipwreck on the bottom

that’s being used as an artificial coral reef.

Sometimes I feel my heart’s being swallowed alive

like the virtues of a noble enemy

or a frog in a fetid bog of waterlilies

crawling with snakes like the radioactive wavelengths

of black lightning experimenting with flesh and blood.

Every poem I write, another sail, another horizon

I’m going off the edge of like the flat earth of a lily pad

down a black hole with more dimensions than it can fathom.

Even in spring, autumn’s always approaching

like some orthodoxy of decay with a silver stake,

a thorn of the moon, to hammer into the heart of the scarecrow

that got mistaken for some kind of vampire

after standing guard over the harvest so long

through all kinds of tempests and turmoils

even the crows admired him safely from shelter

like a street drunk in the tent of an all weather overcoat

from the wardrobe of a Salvation Army bin

with straw padded shoulders that made him look

as if he’d been crucified like a sacred clown just for the fun of it.

I preserve my self-pity like fireflies I’ve put up for the winter

in a canning jar where they’re all dogpaddling for their life

in a red tide of pectin running like a bloodstream in the light.

And I send my imagination out like a dragon on reconnaissance

to search out what everyone else is missing

so I can plot this airlift of self-healing metaphors more accurately

than the dandelion seeds I’ve been sending out lately

like parachutes candling in the manes of the lions of the sun

to ease their suffering as if I couldn’t be whole again until they were

even in the way we all fall to earth, some on good,

some on bad soil like Icarus scattered on the wind,

and some like me, into the uncharted seas of awareness

like a rogue star sent into exile by an albatross

that makes it impossible to tell from one day to the next

whether it’s a blessing or a curse, or it’s me that’s hexed

the way life seems to advance as you get older retrogressively.

PATRICK WHITE