Sunday, July 5, 2009

GREAT SEX IN A BOWER OF RAZORWIRE

GREAT SEX IN A BOWER OF RAZORWIRE

 

Great sex in a bower of razorwire

and every kiss the splash

of an electrical rose

that just fell into the jacussi

as if it were committing suicide.

I remember you like the proof

of some mathematical theorem

I learned in school.

You were certain proof

I was a fool.

Foolproof then you said

but by then I was so fucked up

feeling like the antiChrist of Zen

I just wanted to be

as simple and lucid

as a horned skull that had fallen

like a chunk of the moon

into an unnamed desert

and let the stars crawl in and out of my eyes

salvaging whatever insights they could.

But you were the dangerous neighbourhood

I fell into instead

like a lost traveller’s cheque

like a miniblackhole in my brain

like a pebble into a wishing well

that taught me like a dead echo

you can’t draw water from a snakepit

even when you lower

the silver bucket of the moon

like your heart into a troubled sea.

I tried to write your mystery in comets

over the old cave paintings

of the constellations

that stuttered across the sky

like the text of an ancient windstorm

you couldn’t get out of your eye,

but you mistook them

for the writing on the wall

and the fear you nursed

like your own assassin

broke them like a code of candles

in the shattered mirror of your seeing.

Everything I wrote after that

was either a lighthouse or a searchlight

looking for you among the wrecks.

I remember stepping out of the men’s once

and seeing you across the bar

when you didn’t know I was looking.

You were that nudged-over, foam-nosed

beer-drinker huddled in the corner

of what you were trying to forget

like an ocean that wouldn’t stay hidden.

You were the long shadow

of a mountain on the moon

wondering why nothing grew

even when you watered the garden.

My dick, my heart, my blood, mind, art

all wanted to bloom for you so badly

like lightning rooting luminously

in your emptiness

just before the beginning of a world

we could both live in

without opening our eyes

like disastrous fortune-cookies

and nightmarish bottles of spider-wine.

But I was only breaking bread

with the crumbs of a dream

to feed the hungry multitudes

you sent against me like armies

to salt the ground of my being

and rubble my stars

like towers of light

torn down by the powers

of your darker night.

I wanted to touch you like rain,

like the moon touches

a wounded iris

and it breaks into flame

like a ghostly lover

that never let the fire go out.

And when there were scales

you wore like sequins

where there should have been skin,

I wanted to touch you so brightly

stars would appear in the night skies

of the blue-enameled tiles

that covered the mosques of Isfahan.

But we were serpents

that never wore

the same skin twice to bed

and it was difficult to tell

who took whose tail in whose head

when we sought to embody eternity

like two waves in search of a tide

that would ferry them all the way

to Treasure Island

where X marked the spot

where we sucked the poison out of each other

like two junkies from the same spoon

trying to shoot the moon.

You had a way of diminishing gravity

so we both could get off

whenever we wanted

to melt like frozen seas

and breathe ourselves away

into the profound inconsequence

of our letting go.

I may have fallen like a meteor

exiled from a crown of fools

for jesting with the protocols

of their imitation jewels

into the dark mirror of my own eye

like a bullet through the brain

when things turned unattainably sane

and the book of life

began to lock its doors at night,

but you wiped out the dinosaurs

for being a species that had grown

unworthy of your scars,

as you often said of me toward the end.

And tonight I confess to the stars

that hang like swords

over both of us again

in deranged configurations of pain,

without the least need of forgiveness,

that like any catastrophic event

you were abortively right

about what my non-existence

meant to you

that era of a moment

you said we were through

and you pulled the sky

over my head

like a volcano on its death bed.

And I want you to know as well

while the snaketongue’s in the bell

how much I’d want to sleep with you again

and let the flesh savage our mystic immensities

like tents in the deserts of Scorpio

stripped like flowers in a sudden squall of stars.

Time is the temperature of the world

but that fever has never abated

and whenever I dream of sex with you at night

I wake up in the morning

with strange tatoos all over my skin

that improve the indelibility of your allure.

But if I was a lizard before

now I’ve crept out of the iridium ashes

and apocalyptic micro-diamonds of your eyes,

and my scales have turned into fur

and my blood warms its hands at its own fire,

and though we’re as compatible

as creation and extinction

through some unexpected transformation

without being born again

into some afterlife of desire,

I’m being improbably true

to the greater elation

of missing you.

 

PATRICK WHITE