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
