Sunday, August 18, 2013

Rain for the Sunday Painter

And if my life to this point falls apart ‘cos it’s not real
I learned from firm sand walls of my creation
how boundaries are all for the lost.

Knee deep in ambrosia I yearned others could believe in
my private miracles, to peer heel-high like a girl for a kiss
at the black-eyed susan glow beyond the bush,

to see the fireflies on the highway tonight, the universe of
unseen raspberries, the clots of pond moss pull away the sluggish
green from the jungle’s weary summer of no sleep.

The bus to Utopia passes Parsons Street at each lapse
of the clock, while couples lope in white cloths and shoulderbags,
rarely talk, sing notes occasionally in Chinese keys

as time goes dripping by, July waiting for some word from the coast,
the barest of frictious breezes, and I eat my sangfroid sanguishes
wrecktified and rectitudinal before the all-seeing blind eye

saying don’t believe the hope, the righteous pettifoggery
all it ever does is kill you the hard, slow, painful way
in pennyante petitbourgeoisie-ary catching on your petticoat wad.

Nobody came when I locked myself in the closet, three years old,
the darkness total, like the shame I felt in liking it, the rent of escape
others' need for me to become them (and, if not, stand in judgment),

and when the neighbor girl let in the light, and I saw my mother’s face
still absorbed in her dried flower reveries, I knew that I’d felt guilty
for nothing, I’d been cheated like some orphan sold the snake oil

of propriety toward the whole, that brand you’ll never understand
but must let control you, your impulses, your instincts, your desires,
the monolithic presence that does not even exist: the world of others.

Barbarian sophisticates with fright wigs de rigeur
will sleep on blotter sheets with fishes. I only scrivened, I said,
the ledgers, I didn’t game the deals, 
 
but an antiquarian of greatness
is no less on his own
than one who is without any other.

My blue harmonica home, still the heart stays sick;
I don’t want to be alone
any longer.