THOSE NIGHTS I WENT OUT WITH A
BUTCHER’S KNIFE
Those nights I went out with a
butcher’s knife
down the dark alley between our house
and the triplex next door, twelve years
old,
my courage running down my leg, to stab
a full grown pervert running down the
back stairs
when you flipped the porch lights on to
spotlight
the spider stealing your panties off
the clothesline,
onto my green gladiolus of a Spanish
short sword
that hadn’t tasted the blood of its
first blossom yet,
I don’t want to remember this
anymore.
I don’t want to be estranged from my
own childhood
by garbage cans that look like
dangerous men in the moonlight.
When I think of those days, there’s a
pervasive grey
that saturates everything like a cold
fog,
and all my emotions are black oilspills
on the concrete.
And all my insights come to me with a
shock
like unknown eyes peering through the
mail slot
you eventually boarded up like a plague
door on the inside.
I watched the stardust of my innocence
blow away
like the topsoil of the dirty thirties,
as you spread flour
under the windows every night to see
if the drunk who lived above the
grocery store
were painting his footprints on the
ballroom floor again
as he had three nights before the cops
wouldn’t come
to arrest an increasingly brazen
Peeping Tom.
saving themselves a bullet for everyone
of us who ate our own.
I don’t want to remember how
excruciatingly transformative it was
to want to be the hero of a squadron of
model Spitfires
that hung from my bedroom ceiling, and
then
be called upon by a frightened whisper
at the door
to go outside like a dragon with a
flame thrower
of aviation fuel to confront the dirty
end
of the joy stick of a sick world
terrifying you
with the atrocious scenes on True
Detective magazines
that were more intimately real on our
front doorstep
than in any paranoid fantasy of yours
where big-busted blondes in torn
blouses
were chained to trees by men with axes
and no one was trying to save an old
growth forest.
I wish there’d been a timelock on my
childhood years.
I wish things had been different, and
you were always safe,
and I say this with no regrets, because
I had to know
how to stand like a flaming angel at
the gates
of a ruined Eden, to keep you and my
sisters
out of reach of the hunting snake
with forbidden fruit between its legs
crawling up the tree towards panicked
eggs in the nest
you flew around like a mother bird
in an emergency without an exit. It’s
been light years since
and it’s funny how after all this
time
the man in me has begun to shed
delinquent tears
for the boy who had to know what a
woman fears so early
I weep for you and I weep for me for
all the pain and fear
we had to endure like a nightmare while
we were still awake,
though I’d do it all again, for your
sake, if I had to,
except now I’d go out back with a gun
to get the job done.
Just the same. I wish I hadn’t grown
up in No Man’s Land
and my childhood wasn’t an elsewhere
zone with warning signs
not to enter without abandoning all
hope
that things would ever change for the
better.
I wish I’d learned the spirit of the
word first
like a feather of light in the scales
of the jackal-god
before my heart knuckled down to the
hard and fast letter
of learning how to ambush things that
go bump in the night
while my heart beat harder than a
hammer and an anvil
at what I was about to meet in the dark
like the nemetic karma of the eldest
son of a welfare mother,
tenuously prepared to inflict a stomach
wound on a stranger
who forgot the baby rattlesnakes could
be
as toxic as the adults, if you scared
them so badly
all that they feared was focused like a
snakepit
on wanting to get you over with
summarily like an intruder
on the threshold of a lethal childhood
I wish would pass
transitory as the dew on the grass, not
these ageless glaciers
that still wake me up from my boyhood
dreams
in a cold sweat of garbage cans and
moonbeams.
What kind of a man would I have been
if I hadn’t seen perdition as a child
too afraid
of being afraid, lest worse be hung
over my head
than a World War II model airplane, and
I burn alive
out of shame in a cockpit that never
got off the ground
or went around the back to confront an
unknown horror
that cut both ways like the crescents
of the moon,
two sides of the same wound, one that
congealed
like blood around a cut, and the other,
a gash
deeper than that, in a childhood that
never healed.
PATRICK WHITE
