THE LACHRYMOSE SHINE OF DAMP POLISHED BLACK WORKBOOTS

THE LACHRYMOSE SHINE OF DAMP POLISHED BLACK WORKBOOTS

The lachrymose shine of damp polished black workboots.

The leather of the asphalt street suffused with a patina of storelight

as the ghoulish banks of snow startle the colour white

with albino ranges of impassable blockades from the ice age.

The white’s unreal in the tungsten lamp posts. Blue apricot

titanium corpse. Sybil priestess in a California laundry sheet

in a cult of 1111 who died before the mothership could

take her back. My dear, my darling, do you hear me where you sleep?

Again, tonight, awake and at the window waxing pellucid

about absolutely nothing. The faint cachet of someone’s

distant dreams. No stars, No flowers. A garden of traffic lights

and lamp posts and parking meters. No people. And the trees

garlanded in Christmas tree lights looking like fattened forlorn bulls

for a sacrifice to Mithras Tauroctonus Tautologous whose come back

to claim his birthday from Jesus when the sun is born again

in the winter Roman solstice hammering in the golden nail of the New Year

which is the only poem Horace ever wrote for Augustus.

What am I doing here like a strung out line of Canada geese

migrating like a prayer bead abacus skull nugget calendar

from the studio into the den the kitchen the hall and then

back again as if I were caught up in migration older than my own?

What am I walking off like an exiled hourglass across

the Rub al kali desert full of stars and mirages and itty

little white gravestone pills that give me the shakes when

I try to lie down under them and everything quakes

as if the fault lifelines in my life were about to change for the drastic.

Sick of the drastic. Sick of the catastrophic. Sick of the apocalyptic.

Sick of the climacteric. Sick of the asterisk. Suddenly

a hundred little white pills go running over the precipice

like lemmings in a year of overpopulation balancing the books

of evolution with Malthusian mass suicide chuteless fruitless jumps.

The same way Neanderthals used to kill mammoth and stag moose

in the Pleistocene. Driving them over a cliff

with heritage lampost streetlight torches with reduced Led lumens.

Not much life left after they were wiped out like an extinction event

for humans with an appetite for living it a little bit differently.

Where else should I be? That wants to make me live my death

as bad and deep and bleak as this beatifically condemned place.

PATRICK WHITE