Purification

Purification

And yes, I drank sickly sweet liqueurs
With beggars
And wandered beneath the burning sun until my feet bled.
I watched vultures circling above corpses
Beyond my field of vision;
Deep within the forest.

The sun dried my mouth;
I slept naked in empty apartments. A voice cried out not to eat, and so I did not eat. I fasted
And wept upon napkins, scraps of paper.
They are all lost now,
Carried away by time.

All those little poems that I bled, and which bleed through me.
This vocation that I did not choose
But which chose me, when I encountered it
In a grove of loss, wandering, and isolation.

Tender were the lines, profaned
Again and again by time,
And only the vocation survived.

I wandered alone before the prostitutes
In nights that seemed they would never tip into day. Beside the railway tracks,
Dragging my luggage alone,
While the smell of burning engines sang
Within my lungs, my throat, and my eyes.

I tasted the sulphur of my death
While I languished
In the house of the mad. Watched over by attendants
For the great illness of a broken heart;
Shattered against the rocks of the finality of a world
Which in the end could neither
Nor would
Understand.

These lashings,
Until at last there remained only the blue soul
Looking out from the window of my body.
There I possess no name
From which to love,
And yet the beloved is perched
Near the window,
Overlooking the street; the streetcars.

The burning cement over which I leaned
With a telephone,
Toppling worlds with the tongue of my mind.
This draught is now hot, golden, red, and blue.
Whatever color it pleases me to give it.

Poetry has purified my soul,
And it is at last the lens through which I see.
These lashings
Which tore my flesh down to the root of my words,
Ripped the false voices from my bewildered mind
And offered me the elixir of the soul’s sound
Which falls from me effortlessly,
For it is at last my true voice
And the sight of my eyes
Purified
To produce the manifestation of the real soul.