WHAT A STRANGE STRAITJACKET AGEING IS

WHAT A STRANGE STRAITJACKET AGEING IS

What a strange straitjacket ageing is

when you’re constrained by your own freedom

to do whatever you want. And forever young

is an attitude you wear like a chip on your shoulder

when the hour that bullies you knocks your teeth out,

and your denatured enemies begin to gather around you

like a wolfpack stalking a sick elk with soft horns

it wields like a candelabra of dozy trees in deep snow.

But I remember my step grandfather at a sawhorse

cutting more wood with a Swede saw at eighty-three

than I could when I was fit and cocky as a lifeboat

in my inflatable twenties. Let him be an example

unto me at sixty-five of the way I should conduct myself

as a senior citizen. So I say in my best Punkinese

to the motherfucker that’s looking at me like an easy kill,

come try your brief, wretched life against my will to live.

There’s a reason I got to be an old dog that’s about

to revolutionize your universe by gutting you

on the shiv of the moon the night’s just slipped

up my sleeve on the q.t. in passing like a fang

I’ve never waxed nostalgic about unless it was stuck

like a last crescent through a petty enemy’s pygmy heart.

Might not sound like it, but I’ve had enough of violence

with the likes of you to last me for the next

ten thousand lifetimes and like my friend Charles Fischer said

to his daughter at ninety-one, don’t try

to understand an asshole, don’t argue with an asshole,

just walk away and leave him for dead, wiping

the blood off your blade on your sleeve like the hour hand

of an alarm clock that just added injury to your insult

as the ambulance rushes you off to emergency

like a poppy in a death cult out of your league,

though I added that last part just to keep you intrigued.

Charles was a happier man than I am. He grew old

more gracefully than I can, and truth to tell, want to

when I’m confronted with a nasty little prick like you

trying to dance like a butterfly and sting like a bee

in a dragon’s mouth that’s still less of an urn

than a furnace that’s going to burn your feelers off

like a grey power surge through the filaments of your lightbulb

I’m going to shatter and scatter like the down

of your fledgling ashes on a Buddha that hasn’t brought me

to enlightenment yet. Or maybe has and I just

conveniently forget whenever the occasion calls for it.

PATRICK WHITE

FLIES SLOWING DOWN ON THE WINDOWS

FLIES SLOWING DOWN ON THE WINDOWS

Flies slowing down on the windows like the minutes

of a clock as it gets colder out. Signs of rain. But for all

the billions of circles the rain has made

over as many lightyears, ripples and tree rings,

they all remain unbroken however aberrant

their orbits get. Same way with thought and emotion.

Drop one little tear on the earth any time of the year

the way you did yesterday, and after tomorrow

puts some mileage on the light, come back

to the shadow you once cast like your lot in

with the night, and see for yourself how it’s either

grown into an ice age or a biophilic ocean of awareness.

The windows shake with Sunday traffic. Church

and then a restaurant. How many cows does it take

to outfit a bunch of middle-aged bikers and their women

in black leather? Overaged spectacles of fear. Still

it’s wise to keep your distance until they don’t.

God bless the bare-legged girls in cowboy boots

and tank tops like the last of the summer flowers to wither.

For something to look at that isn’t a parking meter

stuck in cement like a daffodil that isn’t going to bloom.

Geese last night passing through Aquarius, running

the spearhead of their farewell through my heart

as they called out in a gesture of courageous melancholy

to the empty heavens like heralds of our recurrent departures

as we enter into one exit after another like a waterclock.

Call it a pulse. At least you know you’re alive.

As the flies are slowing down on the windows.

Life thrives on its own destruction. Why be upset

the rose is a hag of a baglady and the daylilies

are rotten curtains at the abandoned windows

of eyes that turn to glass and pass by their ruination?

Wasn’t it clear from the start? Never trust a telescope

to stay near to the heart. Their clarity is cold.

Stars jitterbugging on the dance floor of a lens

grow small and remote as a spider mount

when you turn a telescope around and look it in the eye.

A poultice of wet leaves on the forest floor

drawing the infection out of the fever autumn is.

Clingy starmud soiling the wings on my hiking boots.

The wind rasps through the stiff leaves on

the silver Russian olives like a broom on the front stairs.

Poetry dredges the dregs of what it’s drinking.

Eternity’s just an abyss dressed up as time

and ageing’s nothing but a cold-eyed witness

to the re-runs of the dreams it once starred in.

Glorious delusions that now seem out to lunch

with brown paper bags over their heads

like dunces in the corners of future executioners.

I’ve never been so happy or thrilled to be alive

as when I was deluded like a desert by my own mirages.

Since then I’ve learned not to take myself so literally

and I touch life more warily like a monarch butterfly

the toxic pollens of wildflowers with no natural enemies.

Beauty, like power, can go to your head like a deathbed.

Mordant dragons smouldering in their unrequited desires

like heaps of scaley leaves raked up into pyres

to taste fire in their mouths again. Better to burn

than rust, but the rain has the final say whether you

go up or out like a wet matchbook of reincarnations in bud.

PATRICK WHITE