I ADJUSTED MYSELF LIKE CEMENT BLOCK BRICK BOOKS AT A PICNIC TABLE

I ADJUSTED MYSELF LIKE CEMENT BLOCK BRICK BOOKS AT A PICNIC TABLE

I adjusted myself like cement block brick books at a picnic table.

It’s not a funeral march to immortality baking its starmud

by the liongates of the sungods. I’m just looking for a star

through the dirty window of the world. How many opportunities

in life do you get to see your own death in the eyes

of the way people love you? I’m blessed. So says

Buddha Pinocchio, but Azazel thinks he’s evil cause he guessed.

And keeps on guessing, guess, after guess, after guess.

But what’s the sun got to fear from the fire when it’s all us?

Alone together in the same liferaft. How you exit like a peasant king

delirious with poetry. Summer wandering into a mine field

should I say it, think I will, tumours. Pop goes the weasel.

Or is it Betelgeuse? Got to stop that before I get carried away

with myself. Ride your bannister like a red tailed hawk.

Metaphoric code for an asphalt wavelength of a joy ride.

Better to be a river than a highway. Or a rat snake.

You’ve got to leave them alone to eat the vermin.

Insanity, my friend. You write good poetry. Sylvia Plath

says so. But you’ve got to watch all those Anglo Saxon

gutturals when you’re trying to pray with

a ventrologuial mantis on your knees that talks like a cardinal

about debilities as if he had an oven up his sleeves

like an emotional crematorium for broken hearts

trying to make it in the arts. Pray. Now altogether pray.

Glad I got that out of the way. Hope he’s happy.

Let’s get on with this. Pass me a cigarette through the bars.

I think I see stars again. I’m a Chinese mandarin

who reads Ovid in the original by the Black Sea in the winter.

Maybe I should put some city imagery into this

for oxymoronic effect. Tug boats off Haidai Gwai in the distance

and a lone heron on the fly who takes the moon for granted

because it’s all so impersonal to fake. Green moss

on a totem pole lying in the bracken and the seagrass

as if someone fell off their seahorse. And died with the moon.

OOOOOOOOOO It’s calendrical. Stonehenge, anybody?

PATRICK WHITE