Walking Stick

by Brian Wake

I cannot, he would rage, take any more these days,
without a stick, than half a dozen steps, and often
these are only where the stick itself would wish to go.

Stuck in the mud, he’d say, and jinxed, that’s me,
and I, for what has seemed like centuries, and without love,
tread dreadful crannies around the points I have to make.

I write, he would explain, in order to maintainan
equilibrium between the very height of passionand
the grey slug moments, awful dog shit of despair.

I write to make the passive consciousness of possibility,
he’d say, to which all values must belong, appear complete.
I drink to make ends meet.

It has been, dare I say, a good deal less than wonderful,
my life, unfair these morbid, mental growths I’ve had to bear,
unutterably sad. But kind, he said, of you to come.

The doctors here are marvelous but mad.