Awake And Labouring Poem by Patrick White

Awake and labouring for light in this dayshift of dreams
as the platitudinous dawn takes her make-up off,
her eyelashes the hands of amputated clocks
that once prayed over the ruptured acids
of identical batteries, the premature twins
that exhausted their patrimony of corroded polarities
on the green-blue lichen that eats them in their graves
and spreads like an infection of the moon, I realize
I need a new emergency, a more radical embryo
than this destiny of durable shoes to fulfill the imploding uterus
of a radioactive fortune-cookie. I need more bells,
I need more bullets, I need to rise from the ashes
of my passport to anywhere with a completely new identity
that’s good for an eternity of idiotic bliss. Give me a face
I can believe in that isn’t
a drug-sniffing dog at the border, eyes
that don’t know more about me than I do,
that aren’t surveillance cameras of everything I do,
that don’t watch for me like herons hunting fish. Unspool
the movie and give me conch-shell labyrinths for ears,
I want to be lost at sea again, and a mouth
that isn’t the last druid of a dying language. And I want
an island like a shipwrecked woman who’s marooned on me,
no more of these petulant nunneries and shepherding moons,
no more of their tedious gravity and menstrual atmospheres,
there must be a muse somewhere conceived in her own fires
that isn’t a defection of all that she inspires.
I’m sick of this ghetto of overweening awards
that put their best face forward to accuse me of failure
and whine like the tarnished brass of palatial promises
I did not make that they will go on suffering for my sake.
There comes a day, an hour, a second, the ambush
of an insight that isn’t just another auroral peacock
with a shovel full of eyes, that it’s time to walk out on yourself
like the dark ages and cancel your subscription
to the jaded slug-lines and papal dispensations
of liberations that die like crusades in iron cocoons;
and I don’t care if I’m forgiven or not, let hell
thorn its black rose in my blood again,
and heaven feed like lilies on the corruptions of the swamp,
I’m already recruiting for a new holy war
that won’t make me surrender on my knees.
And how many times can a man cross his own thresholds,
his arms full of wives and groceries and hundred pound keys
he drops on the counter like anchors before
he raves for chaos to craze the plywood windows of his usual enormities
with wilder hurricanes than these that come on
like weather-reports in an onslaught of nicknames?
I want galaxies off the coast of my peninsula, I want
to hear the exaltant screaming of albatross and eagle
slashing through climacteric volumes of electric air
like maverick hinges and butterfly blades in a surf war to the death.
There must be storms in me yet that I can wear like eye-patches
to raid the angel fleets and whole universes
waiting like heretics and ferocious luminaries
to enlighten this burden of wish-bones I carry to the grave.