I Wake Up Late Again.3 Pm

I wake up late again.3 pm. More afraid
of what the world can do to me in the light
than in the dark of the night. Depressing grey
of the clouds smeared on the windows
like the salt and dirt of last winter
still clinging to my third eye where the rain
can’t reach to wash it off. Why is dread
always the alloy of the pain I feel
as soon as I open my eyes to the devastation
I have made of my life, to write something real
in fire and roses and ashes and blood, to pursue
an earthly excellence from world to world
well beyond the bounds of an ugly life
out of the suicidal folly of staying true to an art
that’s keel-hauling me like the moon
over the hull of my own heart encrusted
by the corals and worms of my worries and griefs,
the gnawing anxieties knotting nooses
in the frayed shoelace of my spinal cord?

And the only ray of light at the end of the tunnel,
this stoic sword that’s always tempting me
like an exclamation mark, to fall upon it like a man
and put an end to this long apprenticeship
in a guild of sacred clowns. Put the pen down.
Leave the page blank. Take my hands off the wheel
of this apocalyptic moonboat in a pyschic storm
of stars arising in the desert every hundred years
like the lost imam of a long-awaited mahdi
surrounding Khartoum like a galaxy of dust and doom
being swept up into the black hole of a vacuum
nature abhors. I steel my will like the sabre of the moon
and imagine I’m anti-heroically carrying on
this long-standing, counter-intuitive aesthetic tradition
of winning every battle and still losing the war.

Just once I’d like to surrender before
shooting out the stars, raise this white flag of a page
and say here, take my sword, give it back to the lake
I found it at the bottom of beside the herb of immortality
the snake stole from Gilgamesh, bursting his bubble
as soon as he came up and fell asleep on the beach,
exhausted by the trouble he’d gone to to underwhelm death.
As I do, night after night, in a living coffin
of a smoke-filled room, shedding my life
like the scales and skin of an old circumpolar dragon
trying to keep the horns and stars of its constellation,
dry as powder above the uneventful horizon
of the false dawns in the whites of their albino eyes.

I play with my kitten. I talk to my goldfish.
The walls are lined with a thousand books
I never want to read again, including my own. I attend
to the voices in my head by the third summons
and wait for the mercy of nightfall to put an end
to my relentless beginning. I never wanted
to suffer the humiliation of another art martyr,
still too angry at what happened to the solitude of Van Gogh
for the cheap consolation of a guilt-ridden reputation
he doesn’t even know he has. I live and work in protest
of all the good reasons I have not to paint and write.

I know I’m diving for pearls on the moon.
I’m saying a mantra of sacred syllables over and over
again to myself, like a rosary of eclipses I made
to remember the names of God in the echoless valleys
of an eyeless abyss. But she doesn’t care
if I can’t bring myself to paint another panicked wolf
to make up what I owe on the rent. Or feel like the farce
of another domestic morality play of my uncommon sense
in overcoming my biological imperative to live
by writing another poem in my own breath
diminishing on the cold window
in this neglected orphanage of literature
where I’ve grown too old to be discovered,
and too accurate about my darkest prophecies
to believe that Venus is ever going to cast my shadow again
like the lyric of another heartwarming loveletter
on this blanched page of snow on a moonless night
at twenty below the worst case scenario
of the frozen thermometer that’s become of my bloodstream.

O, yes, I still dream of some random fluke of circumstance,
some crumb of luck in the corners of my eyes when I awake
every day to the same recurring nightmare of white magic
sounding the depths to find Moby Dick and remove
some of these harpoons like tacks from a starmap,
needles from the eyes of a voodoo doll, axial pins
through the thorax of transfixed butterflies
like the critically acclaimed collected works
of a posthumous die hard with a rock solid alibi
for what I’ve done to myself in the name of poetry.

If it weren’t for the indignity of the past fifty years
of my prolific life in art, I wouldn’t have
any self-respect left to live up to the aristocratic penury
of the birthmark on my heart that singled me out
to wear this laurel of stinging nettles to the grave.

Three bucks for a loaf of genetically modified
twelve grain bread, two cans of tuna,1.07$ each,
ranch dressing,1.57$, and a buck for three lighters
because I haven’t got matches to light a candle
to smoke a cigarette-butt from the midden of the ashtray
at three in the morning, when nothing’s open
but Mac’s Milk and the wound of a penniless poet,
contemplating maggots in place of commas
to keep it as clean as a run-on sentence
as he searches the lean windows for a star
like a blue jay gleaning a leftover sunflower
over the blockade of tar paper rooftops
starving the eyes until one window asks another
for news of the sky out of sight of the heritage lamp posts.

The silence sings like a stave of hydro lines in the rain
this dark hour of the morning dogpaddling toward dawn
when the ghouls will fill my mailbox
with discounts on a funeral I still can’t afford,
as a way of thinking ahead on behalf of a family
that doesn’t belong to me anymore if it ever did.
And God forbid I importune my loved ones with death.
And the longer you live, the less your suicide means
to anyone interested in the arts. I’m intrigued
like a landlocked sailor in the desolate music
of irreconcilable extremes as the furnace pipe
knocks and taps and snaps its untimely rimshots
like someone practising the drums like the pulse
of a damaged heart, or ice cracking like my lifelines
under the next step I take toward the blowholes
of the mermaids who don’t sing to me as well as they used to
clubbed to death like baby seals shrieking in e minor
the moment they come up for air and open their mouths.