AWAKE AT SIX A.M.

AWAKE AT SIX A.M.

Awake at six a.m. The clock ticks, nicks,

flintknaps little pieces of my life off,

a French executioner’s sword quicker and neater

than the sloppy axe of the moon

naping the strike. I swan on the block

to the drum roll of a panicked palpitant

among kitchen utensils. I’m the crucifix

of Cygnus in the Summer Triangle,

arms outspread. I’m severed like a carrot.

I’m the headless horseman. An acephalic shallot.

Someone yanks me up out of the earth

and holds me up by a gout of hair

like a prize turnip with a characteristic look

of freeze-framed despair on my face

as if it had just been amputated.

I had a snake transplant. Now I’m Medusa.

The star, Algol, in the grip of Perseus.

The ghoul of my own solitude, I can heal

or I can enflame the disease with an unclean needle.

Beware. In case of no urgency. Break glass.

My torso sits at its desk and tries to write.

Headless as the rest. A skull, a book,

an ashtray and some candlelight, coffee

and a keyboard clotted with sticky nicotine

and the finger sweat of a thousand poems.

Stem cells and salamanders come to mind.

Regenerative urns scattering my ashes

like sunspots on a Flemish complexion,

crows in the dusk. My hands feel

like a pair of mouldy gloves, newly exhumed,

but they do the work of twenty spiders.

Ten silkworms gnawing on a mulberry bush.

Prussian blue with an aura of gegenshein,

I wonder if the windows ever wish they had eyes.

I can see right through their deathmasks

with my X-ray insights. The thrum

of the emergency helicopter lands nearby

like a dragonfly on the hospital’s lily pad.

Nightshift angels bloom like nurse’s caps.

The war memorial is wounded by felt poppies

dressed for the weather this time of year,

like a haemophiliac that never stops bleeding

for the boys of summer who went off to war

wielding their ploughshares like swords.

Good-bye Jerod. Good-bye, Joe. I see you

baling corpses like strawdogs after a bayonet charge.

I grieve like chlorine. My tears burn like mustard gas.

My grandfather died spitting up blood

on a sheet of newspaper beside the bed.

Is it any wonder I’m staining this unexpurgated page

like a Rorschach test conjuring up the simulacra

that bear an interior resemblance to me

to see if I can put my head to rest

like a jellyfish parachute candling

in its own tentacles like unbound spinal cords

of serpent fire striking reflexively at the unwary air?

Take this bar code of a chromosome off my heart.

This emission spectrum with genetically modified

Fraunhofer lines, these frayed deltas of life

in the palms of my hands. I am not

a product of my times. I won’t be sold

like the child of a Goth for dogmeat,

though the vultures are in a holding pattern overhead.

I’m not road kill. I won’t be culled

by a hunting license north of highway 7.

I’ll give myself to the wolves furthest from my door.

Let the Aztecs go to war if they want a human sacrifice.

I’ll die by my own wits like a lunatic

raising a skull cup of blood to the noble enemy

of the god I deprived of my barbarous piety

as she does me, food, love, money, sleep, respect

and this flickering head I’ve made a candle holder of

so the light can weep for hours until it burns out

like Aldebaran or Antares in another false dawn

that wires me bloodshot flowers. Eyeless carnations

freaked by the scarlet crackling

of another seismic breakdown

of incommunicable excruciations.

PATRICK WHITE