AND IT'S SOMETHING

And it’s something I’ve been trying to say for eras something almost there, almost ready to leap from the penthouse of my tongue like an encyclopedic suicide note coming down the slopes of my heart like an avalanche of blue strawberries, a starmap that finally let go like dice, a pool table racked with prophetic skulls, and if I could say it, if I could make you see it, if I could make you taste it like light in an apple, or the blood of a tree, or smell it, the perfume sampler of a black rose in heat slumped like junkmail across a mystic threshold I’m sure it would make you silent and sad and you would know what the rocks lament when they finger the mirror like braille to see their own reflection, or the grief of second hand shoes in the long hallways of farewell pleading for a compassionate echo. You would see what I see when I peel the moon from the hidden watersheds of my eyes like the skin of a grape, the scalp of a frontier comet, and look into the wound like an arrow; delusion transcending delusion like buddhas playing leapfrog, refugee oceans cowering in the hold of the moon like spiders in a duel of flashlights, the desolation of all human endeavour. And if you could break the black bread of an unleavened eclipse cooling on the windowsill like a crow in a cradle of wine, just once thumb your nose at your mind, and aristocratically disdain to die in an outhouse, I could show you what it’s like to live in the vastness of an abysmal solitude like a concealed weapon. PATRICK WHITE