Sunday, October 26, 2008

MEAN-PEOPLED MIND-CLUTTER

MEAN-PEOPLED MIND CLUTTER


Mean-peopled mind-clutter this morning

edging my rebirth into myself

like a prophecy that never comes true

with little hicks of razor-wire

that think they’re an improvement on thorns.

I wish I was sitting in the middle of a crossroads

with nothing on my mind but a few stars

and a lost sense of direction

that was happiest not knowing where I was going,

or what I wrote in the dust for the wind to read

with a crazy finger.

I don’t want to make an effort to be generous and kind,

I don’t want to make an effort exhaustively once again

to take the high path like some bumbling goat

and try to understand

why the moon butts heads with the mountain

or why all the wildflowers

turn into little bouquets of matches

that go off like solar flares

whenever I ask for a light?

I much prefer the immeasurability of a woman

to the measure of a man,

but there are acids in the rain these days

and glass tears that burn like windowpanes

and lethal illusions of angelic translucency

that weep like box jellyfish

because they haven’t got a backbone.

And it isn’t the moon that weaves and unweaves itself

on the looms of the great themes anymore

but the memes of a hydrophobic pettiness

that arises like the mahdi of a holywar in an hourglass

to defend nothing against nothing like sand.

But I don’t want to judge.

And I don’t want to not judge.

And it’s not as if I expect everyone I know

to be a magus or sybil of lucidity,

and I learned a long time ago the hard way

you can’t turn swine into buddhas

on a steady diet of pearls

or summon fish like a seance

back to the corals on the moon.

I’d rather implore the transformative abundance

of the black hole I keep like a coin of cyanide

under my blue tongue just in case

to turn me inside out like a pocket

to prove I’ve spent myself like a star at the bottom of a well

shining up at nothing,

and I’ve been a great fool,

but no one who reached out to touch me

with night in their fingertips

and light on their lips

ever got burned.

Maybe it’s just another way

of launching an appeal like a nameless lifeboat

against my demonic innocence,

and believe me,

I know myself like the sea,

or celestially seasoning the moon

I steep in my tea,

but I’ve come to conclude

like a man in the nude

there are people whose emotions

are homeless killer bees

that have never tasted honey

that even hell won’t waste a hive on

let alone a human heart.


PATRICK WHITE