Friday, November 14, 2008

YOU DON'T DO CRACK OR SPEED OR HEROIN

YOU DON’T DO CRACK OR SPEED


You don’t do crack or speed or heroin;

you’re not lifting the moon like an eyelid

to find a new place to shoot,

but you’re boiling your heart in a spoon,

you’re thawing the six rocks of your emotions,

boiling away the seven oceans

that will get you through the night

as if you were another sign of global warming.

And now you’re weeping and raging in my living room,

violently shapeshifting through your withdrawal

like an exorcism gone wrong

because the latest hot lover

you got hooked on like a dealer

proved to be a snakeoil salesman in paradise

who convinced you the scales of your daring

would turn into feathers

and your falling take flight.

Not everybody who jumps from heaven makes hell;

for example, your heart there on that rock

you’re kicking around at your feet

like the skull of the world,

isn’t that the sun on your horizon

pouring out of its broken shell like the yoke

of another tragic casualty of spring

fallen like Icarus from the embryonic wax

of your exaggerated wingspan?

Love is not a form of substance abuse

and I’m not the local, walk-in rehab centre

you can duck into anytime

you’ve spent your last dime like a bullet

on a dealer that’s not reloading,

but pain is pain and I can feel yours

chaining itself to all your emergency doors

so that no one could ever get out

when you go hunting for yourself

like a contract you’ve taken out on a highschool.

But it isn’t the object of your longing,

the focus of the star, the shining

that you’re addicted to

like all those placebos and soothers

you keep calling boyfriends,

faking you’re better

everytime you take one:

you’re addicted to addiction.

You’re addicted to the promise you mean to keep.

And you can keep on taking your clothes off like Christmas

and suffering the usual unwrapping depressions,

but you’re addicted to being a gift that was meant for someone else

and it’s never your name that follows the to or the from on the label

when you give yourself to Santa Claus

like a pimp in sable

and he addicts you to the starburn above the stable

that keeps making an ass of you

when the wise men take back their gifts.

So here you are again

before the perilous depths

of these preciptious cliffs

trashing your afflictions like female newborns

that were born of all that genetic junkmail

you once opened frantically like a loveletter

that wasn’t addressed to you

on the rocky threshold of the shore below

that looks up at you like the sickle of a smile

that reaps what you’ve sown,

but I know what you’ve always known:

that you’re addicted

to being unmarrowed by the moon

when the hummingbird who sipped honey

like gold from a cold stone

finds herself out of money and alone.

I can help you out with the cash flow

and though I know I’m not your drug of choice

measure my feelings out like methadone to ease the abyss,

but if you want my advice,

being addicted to addiction

is like trying to step into your own bloodstream twice

or drowning while diving for pearls

that have already risen like the full moon

and crossed you off the calendar

like the X that sucks the poison from the kiss.

Everyone longs for a night, a face, a space

they knew once even if just for the glance of a moment

when joy spiked the wine

and what was singularly human

rushed like a flashflood through the valleys

of the universally divine

and rain that had fallen like tears for years

on an ocean of sorrows

with no hope of flowers

suddenly bloomed like the moon’s corals

in the meadows of a mystic sea

and everything that could possibly be, was.

I knew that moment, for instance, once with you

but the inconceivable eventually flows down into the believable

like stars into mountain streams

and we end up panning for the irretrievable

like a nugget of night we lost in the moonbeams,

and impeaching each other like credible constellations

that can’t shine out of the box,

we check the locks on the mine

and go our separate ways

like abused metals,

mutants of gold and lead

that couldn’t turn the one into the another

once the alchemy wore off

and the glass alembic of another transformative cocoon

was shattered by the harvest stone

of an unphilosophical moon

and the pain was a change of species.

And you’re still the anti-muse of the butterfly effect

that inspires my chaos theory

of postdeconstructive poetry

when I strike one planet against another

like your heart against mine

looking for a spark

that might keep the universe warm for another night

but I know I can’t light the same fire again

or shoot the moon like silver

into the same exhausted vein

now all that matters is the next homeless hit

and this infinite choice of elixirs

that don’t quite do it

whenever I go looking for my voice

like a small word

in the ashes of a burning bush

or that bird of your phoenix heart that once sang in me like you

and fell like an autumn cradle from the lullaby tree

that still calls to me sometimes

and still keeps me up

like the ghost of an albatross

wailing off the coast of a lost art

wounded like the black sail of a loveletter on an unlucky wind.

But that doesn’t mean

I wait for you like a widower on the moon

for the last lifeboat that overturned in space

when the seas evaporated like the eyes in your face.

I’m not rummaging through my heart

like a medicine chest

for the three bells of the last all’s well

I can crush like the moon into a paste when I cry.

I’m not flagging my heart like a fit

sucking up the tranquil shadows of the moons’s dead oceans

as if I could bind your heart again to me like a barrel,

a clown in a shipwreck he’s wearing for pants,

and go over your falls again as I once did

in a Niagra of love potions.

We’ve had that dance

and the music we heard in each other

was wine unique as night

to the glass that contained it like a body,

and I don’t need to seek again

in these lotions of rain that fall gently now

what was so wholly and incommensurably once

that in every drop of water I feel you like the sea.

A truly enlightened junkie

only needs to hit once

and it’s good for a lifetime

so there’s never really any chance

of coming down from the people we’ve loved

who poured the stars into our abandoned wells

like a nightwine that shunned the sun

so why all this talk about kites

that caught fire and crashed

and the new space shuttles

you keep wheeling up to your gantry

like all these love affairs you keep trying to launch

like a rave on ecstasy,

trying to swim with the stars

when you’re already flying

with the whole of creation

like the nightsea of a black rose

that can only be seen

in the depths of its darkness

with eyes of wine

that have shed their petals and waves

like a sky that has let go of its lifeline?


PATRICK WHITE