“Once he reached for something golden,
hanging from a tree, and his hand came down empty.” (Carole King, ‘Tapestry’)
This
is the way it ends for the broken kind,
Missing
in a maze of trimmed hedge cul-de-sacs,
A victim of a
simplified minefield that is my mincemeat mind,
With the colours of
my culture multiplied and maximised -
White on white but
never quite optimised -
Every melanoma
scar scaped like scabs on my scared skin,
But pristine
compared to the wounds of the suicide within.
The Africans called
me a Cambridge wash-up;
But I was a product of red-brick schools and fibro slums;
The Asians said I
looked like an old footballer,
A rugby type,
thick-necked from too many scrums,
Yet striving to be
amongst the thinkers,
While the locals saw
me as one who belonged with the drinkers -
Soon to become a
rejected son of Australia.
And so I steered the
years of quest and failure,
'Til my hand came
down empty, though I’d climbed the trees
To reach for the
branch where the fleece fizzled in the breeze.
Now I'm just an
ageing face in the audience,
Eyes bloodshot red
and yellow with jaundice,
Straining to see
beyond my reading spectacles,
Each lens reflecting
the specious spectacular,
Restricted to
thoughts riddled with speculation,
A wasted brain that
somehow became
A mere receptacle
for others' brilliant exceptionals.
