WASTED IN THE MORNING

WASTED IN THE MORNING

Wasted in the morning luxuriating in the semi-comatose

numbness to the last ghost you’ve seem returning

to its grave without being bothered by it like an immune system

you could take for granted as a sign of the state

of the health you’re in when you can’t get to sleep with tumours

and all you want to do is disappoint pillows. Vita brevis. Arta longa.

Look out the window at the enlargements of the dawn

as much as you can when you’re able to stand.

Pet the cat. Have a long blue drag on a fat cigarette

that’s beginning to look like a pregnant guppy

humping a seahorse in my hands. Remark

to myself that I’m not the first man

to see the pigeons flying over the tarpaper roofops

as if it were fun to be a pigeon with the northern lights

around your neck and I wished I was one of them

waking up in a happy town to throw myself around

like wedding confetti at a morning marriage of bells

or a scrapped manuscript torn to bits because it’s got talent

or apple bloom and mailmen trying to get some coffee into them

cooped up in a restaurant like one of hidden wonders of the age.

PATRICK WHITE