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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476523" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>City Rose</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">City rose, you don't bloom like the other flowers<br>the sun coaxes into unclenching their fists, you unfold <br>like an ocean at night lingering in your dark depths <br>behind a veil of fish hooks swaying <br>with the bullwhips of the kelp to the pulse of your tides.<br>How suburbanly garish you look all trashed out <br>like the black farce of a substitute for love. <br>A poet and a prostitute. Doesn't get much more skinless <br>than that. We're both walking through the world naked <br>in a blizzard of thorns blunting themselves <br>against our ice-age hearts in an interglacial warming period. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Dying on the instalment plan to make a living, <br>there's a glint in your eyes like moonlight on a knife, <br>and you're armed to the teeth with fingertips and lips <br>and hourglass hips and here you can have my sword <br>even before I surrender as you know you can <br>when you walk into my life like an eclipse of the moon <br>with mascara running down your cheeks <br>and ask me if I still love you as I ever did <br>and I say, lady, you're an innate releasing mechanism for me.<br>I sublimate you into poetry like dry ice.<br>I may be the bullet. But you're the trigger. <br>And what's a voice without a tongue but a gutted gun? <br>How could I ever use you on myself when the day comes<br>if you weren't here with me in this wilderness <br>dancing for my head like a mirage in the skull <br>of a vast abyss that's gone on dreaming all this <br>like a boy with a book under the covers way past lights out? </div><div style="margin:10px 0">You give me that funny look like I'm half mad <br>or I might be making light of you, but your spinal cord <br>resonates like a guitar strung with powerlines <br>on the same wavelength as the crystal in your dreamcatcher<br>and I know your listening for disturbances in your web. <br>And I remember when two roads diverged in a yellow wood <br>like a wishbone the separated the song from the bird <br>and that night you came pleading to me out of the rain <br>to let you into my homelessness, and I took you in <br>like a wet kitten with claws and needle sharp teeth <br>that never knew when to let go of my heart <br>like a piece of raw meat you were always snarling over. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">And you weren't exactly the noble enemy <br>I always hoped would eat it, more a foodbank as I recall, <br>but you can't always choose the heroic sacrifice <br>you give yourself up to, and I gave it up to you, <br>saying to myself you don't always need to believe <br>in the witchdoctor to take advantage of the medicine, <br>and I'm always moved when your sunflower<br>turns toward me like a full-faced friend into the shining <br>and I'm the one who feels I've been following you<br>like a starmap to the dark matter shaping the universe.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But tonight the rose is bruised. You're crying <br>like a broken window pane over the death of the wind. <br>Your eyes are funeral bells and your body language <br>is indecipherable, and I don't know what's hurt you so deeply, <br>and it's only worse when I guess, but there's <br>a dragon in the heart of the firefly I'm trying to be <br>that's got a scorched earth policy toward anyone <br>who tries to lay their hands on you for any reason <br>other than lust. And though I'm an intimate of the oracle, <br>I never ask. You franchise your body like a fast food business<br>with crooked books, but I'm not your spiritual accountant<br>just because I died before you did and I don't <br>think of the unknown as something impenetrably mysterious. <br>You, for example, whenever you discover<br>the young woman in you that isn't looking <br>for vengeance upon herself for lying about <br>the things she wanted to be to her dolls. <br>Voodoo dolls or not. With marbles or buttons for eyes. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">And you abuse her like a country mouse for reminding you <br>how you used to live off the crumbs of everybody else's dreams<br>but now you're a cultivated rose of bling and tinfoil <br>that wins all the garden shows they weed in Eden<br>like the bad girls from the good, but, off-stage <br>when there are no lights shining on you, and the rose <br>wipes her lipstick off like blood on her sleeve, <br>I've seen you mesmerized like a stone bird on a fountain <br>staring into the eyes of a snake pit of venomous regrets<br>for the way you abuse your innocence as if <br>it were subject to experience and time, all used up, <br>too much scar tissue over the wound that kept its mouth shut <br>like dawn over the ashes of a dollhouse you burned to the ground.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Did you ever go back in for your dolls? <br>It's not too late, you know. It's never too late<br>to stop treating yourself like a straw dog at a black mass.<br>It's not a religious ritual. It's just a bad habit of misperception.<br>And however much sulphur dioxide there is in the acid rain <br>of your tears, the rain still doesn't fall in pentangles<br>and the stars and the wildflowers in the abandoned fields<br>still don't attend opening night rehearsals <br>to improve their appearance on the catwalk of the zodiac.<br>They're still walking the same old fence they always were<br>like gold medallists on a balance beam at the Olympics.<br>And I can see that the moon, as it does in you, <br>still dies inside them like a swan at a ballet except <br>you come to the climax of the dance dressed in Satanic black.<br>And that's just the scarlet letter of a dead alphabet <br>you've carved into your forehead with a fingernail, <br>not the Rosetta stone that's going to open you up to yourself <br>like Egypt with the eyes of a mood ring. O yes, <br>I know how many thresholds you've crossed, <br>how many taboos and cracks in the desolate sidewalks <br>you've stepped on to break your mother's back, <br>but she wrote her alibi on a gravestone a long time ago <br>and she's well beyond anything you can do to disappoint her now. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Born into sin, isn't death a drastic enough measure to take <br>to clean the slate with the tears that should have been shed<br>while we were alive? The roots that should have been <br>watered with stars, the hands that should have been revered <br>like gnostic gospels even in a time of persecution and exile.<br>Maybe the blossom was betrayed by the roots <br>and the fruits were ruined. Who can say for sure <br>whether the tree's a strong rafter or a coffin door, <br>or you're just punching holes in your own lifeboat <br>to be spiteful, but I suspect you're tired of sinking by now.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Three bells and all's not well. And you remember <br>how you wanted to fly with the effortless beauty <br>of an arrow straight through the heart of a falcon prince<br>who came when you called out like a night bird<br>for someone to hold you against the dark like a door<br>love leaves ajar like the place in the book <br>where you left off reading and started dreaming again.<br>You're taking a bath in the squalor of your own grave to renew <br>the ambiguity of your innocence as if you were <br>holding your breath underwater until you turn blue, <br>but there's an expiry date that doesn't matter if you're late <br>and you don't need a passport to walk through the gate unchecked.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The mindstream doesn't cling to what it reflects.<br>It clarifies itself like flowing diamonds in its own running, <br>like crystal skulls thawing like honey in a blast furnace.<br>You can project yourself imaginatively like clean water <br>on the moon, and still feel the rain is a message <br>to someone else more like a watercolour than you are an oil<br>but before you begin painting in pain again, <br>look in the mirror. Isn't that mascara running down your face<br>like a black willow rendered in sumi ink by a sad geisha <br>or is that just you washing off another eclipse <br>like a dirty window you've got to break to look through? <br>The light will find you all on its own if you stop <br>using the night to cover your eyes with shadows <br>when there's something you don't want to look at <br>that shines like a waterstar in the face of a sewer <br>blindfolded to the beauty and grace of its own imperative to change. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Be that as it may. Just because the exit's false<br>doesn't make the entrance unreal, and I can see how <br>you're looking out the window for something <br>to fix your gaze upon like a reflection from a bridge<br>you let go of like the hand of someone you loved <br>to wear this blossom of a painted life mask <br>like a screening myth for the reason you let her drown.<br>Hurt, and lovely, and sad, battered down <br>like an orchid in the aftermath of an unexpected storm, <br>you make me want to cry for everything in existence <br>all at the same time, for what happens to us here. <br>I feel my vulnerability in yours. Half-insane for a moment <br>looking out the same window you are I become the pain.<br>I embody the sorrows of the trivial and sublime alike <br>and there's no one to scream out to who isn't wounded themselves<br>and I've died repeatedly not to make a philosophy out of love <br>just to satisfy death with a verifiable alibi for what <br>I was doing while I was alive, and none of it <br>lessens the sum of our suffering by a single tear. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">We can put cushions around it and bank it up with dolls<br>and throw a warm blanket over it and kiss it <br>goodnight on the forehead as somebody else should have done<br>when childhood was wholly the timing of the content, <br>and go to bed with a will like a broken arrow<br>and a heart bruised like the blue rose of a starless sky <br>waiting for some small light, even a firefly of insight, <br>even a black hole on the negative of a starmap back to our eyes<br>to emerge from all this like Venus sinking down<br>over the darkening hills of her eyelids as if to dream <br>in the solitude of her beauty of rescuing her voodoo dolls<br>from the fire she threw them into, casting spells <br>like the shadows of moonless nights on earth <br>when pain had no value, and love was of little worth.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But in the face of it. Staring it in the eye <br>like a star or a reptile, trying not to lie like a placebo <br>to the spiritually hysterical about to give birth to the new world <br>out of their apocalyptic expansionism, not minting <br>cosmic keys to things that are not necessarily locks, <br>mustering my dusky yellow blood into the fire sage of a dragon, <br>and foregoing my penchant for self-destructive optimism, <br>the deepening of the terrible silence of our suffering <br>is the only reason I can come up with that our burning doves<br>don't come back like loveletters we write like waterbirds on the wind.<br>There's a silence within that is slowly ripening into the new moon<br>of the black pearl we're making of the dirt in our hearts.<br>It's not a third eye, or a rosary you can say the names of God on, <br>not even a sacred syllable of a secret that keeps to itself, <br>but something distinctly human that sacrifices its suffering<br>on the dark altar of the absurdity there's no metaphor<br>to cling to like the lifeboat of a shipwrecked paradigm.<br>That everything's been left relentlessly unexplained<br>as if only the silence were pure enough to receive our sorrow <br>the way our roots can't conceive of the fruits of their labour, <br>or the sea receives the rain like a mirror of eyeless tears.<br> <br>Sweet one, sleep without redressal. in the quietude <br>of what appears to include you in its innocence<br>like sugar in apricots when the locks fall away like ripe fruit. <br>The rained out peonies weeping their eyelids away<br>like phases of the moon by the open gate always<br>look ravished by the wind's indifference to bliss. <br>The nightwatchman's in the next room playing <br>solitaire with the scars of a wound as old as the stars.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Patrick+White">Patrick White</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476523" data-title="City Rose de Patrick White" data-description="City rose, you don't bloom like the other flowers
the sun coaxes into unclenching their fists, you unfold 
like an ocean at night lingering in your dark depths 
behind a veil of fish hooks swaying 
with the bullwhips of the kelp to the pulse of yo..."></div>
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