AHHH, MAN
Ahhh, man
some mornings I get up
and I’m so weary of being me again
with the same old Gordian knot of dilemmas
waiting for the black sword
of an abrupt awakening
to cleave this hibernating ball
of hydra-headed entanglements
down the third extreme of the middle.
Cooler than a French executioner
with the night still over my head like a hood
and the ax of the moon
descending on the nape
of the swanning hills,
I would rather endure one death
that kills me into life
than suffer a thousand looping transformations
like a Swiss army knife in a snakepit
or the fossil of my last breath
still on display to the curious,
fighting for its life in an incubator.
There are nights when I can hear the fire singing
about its homelessness to the stars alone
and days that hang like heavy bells
over a long, secular holiday
as one truth swallows another in the silence
of the smeared windows
that elaborate my view of things
even as I weigh the moon in my hand like a rock.
One moment I’m jamming with the celestial spheres
and the next I’m being tuned like the spinal cord
of a one-eyed guitar
to the fangs of a live snake
with perfect pitch
and everything is snapping and hissing
like a downed powerline that’s lost its keys.
I still extol love and compassion
like the radicals of a lost war
strewing flowers on their roots,
but these days underground
I suspect that my darkness is faster than light
as I plant the quicksand cornerstone
of my pyramidal heart
like an improvised explosive device
in the road I take every morning
like a blind schizophrenic
groping his way on his knees to Damascus,
trying to bring empathy
to a convention of lonely exceptions.
And if I’ve got any faith left
when I look out on the atrocity of the world
like a dungheap covered in blow
it’s the merest of plausibilities,
graffitti on the gravestone
of someone I don’t want to know.
Walking alone on a dusty road
in the fields beyond Perth
as the gravel crunches underfoot
like seashells and skulls,
to taste the ripe stars
on their wild, summer vines,
and feel the eyes that are watching me
like alarmed snails and furtive leaves on my skin,
I realize I will always be
this stranger at the gate
of someone who lives within
who’s never been troubled by anger and hate,
or the abysmal sorrows of love
or distinguished the true from the false
the sick from the whole,
the petty from the great,
or the indifference of life
to the passion of the martyrs
cashing in on their bones
like loaded dice
at the foot of a crooked cross.
He’s never tinkered
with the engine of his actions
hoping to improve his performance,
No lumps of coal like bad memories
disturb the radiance
of his diamond skull
and when he thinks
he thinks like light on water
and even at the bottom
of a sea of shadows
he’s a magus of stars
in the munificent stillness
of his own improbable depths.
He knows how the jewels of clarity
can suddenly open
like eyes in a grave
that are not used to the light
that washes over them
wave upon wave
like the wings of transporting angels,
but he stays where he is for the night
to keep his word to the morning
like the birds of the earth
who wait for the sun
to turn them
like a dead language
into his native tongue.
As for me, my voice
lays out a starmap of black holes to avoid
like a last ray of light
trying to measure its own height
above these sudden event horizons
on the wrong side of town
when the stars I go slumming with
want to get down.
He talks knowledgably with the stars
about what’s beyond the light
but my spiritual life
is bemused in the shadows
like an eye in the night
that peers through the mystery
of the darkness that bounds it
like the personal history
of the ambiguous human
it would rather keep to itself
than give itself away like the fireflies
of a wayward constellation
that wandered off the reservation
like a nation with myths of its own.
All my prophets greet the day
like star-nosed moles in the light
as if they were just getting off
the graveyard shift
of an underground mine
where they’re chipping away
at the ore of the dead
like a motherlode of marrow
and were too tired
to have anything much to say
about why some mornings
ride in plumed chariots
through wild galas of triumph as he does
successfully back from his dream campaign,
and I’m always running
to catch up to the parade
like a clown in a wheelbarrow
throwing out rubber bullets,
decked out like a float from the slum
that looks like a public coffin
with some shit on the side
about a better tomorrow.
PATRICK WHITE
