Wednesday, January 7, 2009

I CAN SEE HOW YOUR BRAIN

I CAN SEE HOW YOUR BRAIN


I can see how your brain

freezes like a stone in the mindstream

when I talk two or three wavelengths beyond red

and there are pictures going through your head

that play you like a strange song

on a mechanical piano

you used to know

when the child in you was alive.

You live inside your crainium

like the fruit of a nut

afraid to be a tree

but this is not the siege of Jerusalem.

You’ve lived so long inside your coffin

you think it’s death to open the door

and distribute the life

you’ve stockpiled inside

to the refugee you were

before the war defiled you.

You’ve consumed the body

and shrunk the head

of the cannibal who consumes you.

And it’s a great pity

you don’t understand

the more you horde

the more you starve

and it’s your own tongue

that exhumes you

like an unspoken word from the grave.

The messiah showed up like spring

but there was nothing to save

and now you can’t hear the birds sing

or feel the wind ride the wave

like the air on your skin.

You crush the carbon

you pluck from life’s fires

and spraypaint your hand like graffitti

all over the walls of your cave,

defining the negative space in black,

but I can see clearly

through your imprimative design

you’ve left out the nail and the lifeline

that could have shown you the way back.

Five fingers of an empty space

that can’t grasp anything

that I can look clear through

like a window to the rock underneath

that will come through the glass one morning

like a mountain with teeth

like a dragon to the bait of the moon

like an army to a well

like a thorn to an inflated sky

like tears down the cheeks

of a stone woman

who thought she couldn’t cry,

like streams down

from the frozen crown of the fountain

that’s been posing as the mountain

she couldn’t wash out of her eye.


PATRICK WHITE