I am not sure if many readers recognized this as a self-portrait when I posted it on TDE last year. Maybe "he was 50 when I met him" put some off the track - but this was about the age I began to acquire a little self-knowledge. This is more of a psychological rather than physical self-portrait.
Refined
Through extremes of drought and thunder, in the ochre land downunder,
he had spent a life in travel and avoiding family ties.
But despite his constant motion from the bush down to the ocean
and then back the other way, he still could not outrun his sighs.
As he said, he had his reasons to pursue those wandering seasons
through the scrub and open grasslands and the gibber plains from hell;
when his dearest friend and lover had betrayed him and another
man had taken to their bed he said " I need to take a spell".
But the spell had taken over, turning him into a rover
and depriving him of hope that he could ever settle down;
he was in its ghastly clutches and it drove him into hutches
where you wouldn't keep a dog and so he kept on moving round.
And on all the tracks he travelled, whether tarmac, dirt or gravelled,
he was always running into men, he said, who'd gone like him;
men turned bitter, gnarled and rugged, men who said they "can't be buggered"
taking any time to worry at the bone of "fitting in".
He was fifty when I met him, but at first I didn't get him,
and in fact I thought he might have been a weirdo or a thief.
But beyond his sad confusion, broken hopes and disillusion,
I could also see the substance of the soul that's born from grief.
Some might think it was a pity that he ever left the city
just to stumble through those deserts of his hopelessness and pain;
but perhaps his greatest blessing came with all those long distressing
journeys, lost and broke and lonely in the sun and dust and rain.
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[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited June 22, 2006).]
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