HOW MANY YEARS.doc

HOW MANY YEARS

 

How many years have I lived in this fire

like a dragon trying to clarify

the soft, dark coal of his eyes

into cold, adamantine diamonds

in this rage of worldly vehemence

where the furnace is full of the ashes

of lambs and prophets

who couldn’t take the heat?

My enlightenment is rooted in ignorance

and fire is the only flower

to adorn the dead branch

though there are times

when I relapse into an old longing

and aspiring like a feather of flame

from an unconverted phoenix

wonder what it would be like

to smile down on nothing as cooly

as the stars in the sky that burn like Zen?

Is it in the nature

of my deranged integrity

to uphold the dignity of the unredeemed?

Intense heat. Unusual sprouts.

Bring on the demons.

Bring on the angels who have their doubts.

Bring on the words

silvered in snakefire

that pour out of themselves

like swords from a stone

to kiss water temperately on the lips.

It’s hard to believe

that this broken faith

I keep with paper

is still more honest

than the air I breathe

or that these long nightshifts in a snakepit

that I spend alone on the moon

listening like a jade rabbit

to what moves around me

like the rasp of distant nightstreams

sliding like scales through the shadows

hunting

is still less of a danger

than drinking from public grails

or that the orthodoxies of hell

that plague the hermit in his hole

with culpable visions

of chesty Florentine mermaids

on the Medicean moons of Jupiter,

are still less of a threat to the creative heretics

than the bonfire of the vanities

that steals fire from men

like a broken Prometheus

and gives it back to the gods.

So if all I can do

is abhor and uphold my freedom

to be catastrophically wrong

in a world that is killing itself

to prove it’s lethally right;

to cherish the dark ore of my heart

as much as the light that comes of it,

and scorn the lustre of the empty cornerstone

that dates itself like a pyramid

that can’t keep up with the past

as well as quicksand,

then bring on my afterlife in chains

like this one I know all too well

is a horror of light

committing atrocities against the night

it pleads to for mercy.

I will not trigger my will

to a spiritually erect gunsight

that aligns the world like a rabbit

in the crosshairs of an adjustable crucifix

and bags one for God

like the scourge and the rod

of the all in one.

It’s the art of a thief

to know how to hunt alone

in the king’s park

without getting caught

and know the mystic meat is sweeter

on the other side of the law

that won’t take a risk

than it is in the mouths of the angels, 

just as it’s a mortician’s sport

to flay the hearts of the butchers

who smoke and preserve it

to provision their afterlives

with honey in the dead hives

of the crumbling mummies

that lie in their eras of darkness

with their mouths forever open.

All my myths begin

with a slap on the ass

not fingers shorting me out into life 

like the star-crossed serpents

of the umbilical battery cables

trying to jump the gap

between heaven and earth.

And what I say to you today

is a direct quote from a tomorrow

no one will understand

except it become their own voice

that speaks from the burning bush

to the spiritually dumbfounded

about the spontaneous dangers

of nursing snakes in your exile

on the milk and manna

of human devotion.

Politicians corrupting the quality of crime

by turning laws into placemats

at the tables of the baseless cities

that eat their young voraciously

without repeal from the blod clot

that seals the heart with defection

against the insincerities of wax

that cross their hearts like heart attacks

and run for re-election.

Money worth more in the tree

than the paper in your hand

the wind blows around

like leaves and marked playing cards

in the dead-hand alleys of Wall Street.

Priests riding the hobby-horses of little boys

they’re breaking in

all the way to the next parish

as they feign their retreat from Troy

to push more pagan Greeks

through the gates of a Catholic boy.

You can feel the underground fire

eating through your roots

as the sun nukes your face

and the stars come out at night

like white phosporus

burning through your eyelids

as the rain grows bitter and caustic

waiting for a passport

like millions of refugees

to prove it’s still water.

And can’t you feel your mind

being enriched everyday by hatred

in the centrifuges

of the seething world around you

like a nugget of covert uranium

deep in your nuclear cranium

meditating radioactively

at the feet of an enlightened bomb?

And the children,

the millions of children

we leave out to die everyday

as if the whole world

had turned into the Tarpeian Rock

and we’re throwing everything born

into our vicious, elitist indifference off it

into a landfill of extinct species

that is running out of room.

Knowing what’s buried here underfoot

I can’t look up at the moon anymore

without wondering what we will bury there

and which of all her many veils

we’ll allow her to wear to her own funeral

when the cemeteries hold up their gravestones

in psychotic glee

like prompters cueing the lines

of a celebrity killer

interviewed on tv

about every lurid detail

of growing up with rabies for a mother

and a paranoia of water

that martyred

the ghouls and the corpses

you rent in agony

from their lifestream

when the moon came up from the bottom

like a snapping turtle

on the other side of the mirror

where the swans spread their wings like waterlilies

before you tore off their gowns

and pulled them down

into their sixty minutes of death.

In a virtual world

morals are supplanted

by approval ratings

that mineralize

our flesh and bones

and distance our eyes from our heart

like the pixellated indifference of aloof stars

looking down upon the horror and the hurt

like the re-runs of popular fossils

dug up like old documentaries

from the blood-soaked dirt

to fill the late night museums and morgues

with tour guides that talk

like scented candles in a skull

they’re walking us through like hell.

 

PATRICK WHITE