| The Poetry of Richard Sansom Published by The British Sansom Society | |
 
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| There’s Always Neitzsche I know there's no such thing as pay-dirt. There are only baskets of slag and silhouettes of horizons and endings. When I drink from another's face, their words beat at my feet like beached fish. It doesn't matter. There's always an ambulance. When I send out feelers and seekers, they all come back like trash returned in a storm. The sun has a good laugh. . . the moon is not dejected. It’s like walking out of an old movie long after it's over. But I stay beyond the end, and the aisles are full of decisions staring at me like persistent monks. It doesn't matter. There's always Buddha. There's no such thing as pay-dirt, so why do I tattoo my prayers on the bottle, walk the chambered nautilus of my room banked by old pirates, wind striped and stark, lascivious and cheap, and take into my songs the drugs of this wilderness? I've begged for it many times, pimped, I should say, wanting nettle to splay me raw with light, my women doing all the cutting through glass-hard ribbons, to the flowers of passion. It doesn’t matter, there’s always wine. There's no such thing as pay-dirt, between day's calyx and midnight's spore, under plantations of life, alone with the same nightmare of meeting myself at the door. It doesn't matter. There's always lavender. In the street my heart falls like a sack of hearts, before I can give it to an old wretch begging hearts and love. But no one sees it fall. They’re too busy dancing on the bricks and girders, and burned into the sidewalks with graffiti and epics steaming on their lips, wanting nothing but volcanoes and soup. It doesn't matter, there's always Chagall. Memory drags in its articulate damage, the lovers, fathers, daughters and mothers of speed-of-light wrecks, strewn among my manila folders, bleeding, as if I collected specimens. It doesn't matter. There’s always Nietzsche. | |
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