HOW TO WRITE POETRY IN A SNAKEPIT
How to write poetry in a snakepit
without getting bit.
It’s easy enough to prophecy
from the bottom of desert wells
on mountaintops
in prison
and it would be sheer mercy
to be torn apart by Daniel’s den of lions
or swallowed by a whale
instead of being consumed
for what you believe
by maggots and tapeworms.
Parasites have no sense of a noble death.
But how do you write poetry in a snakepit?
How do you weave flying carpets
out of diamond backs
that strike out at anything that moves
as if their fangs couldn’t help it
you were born with the reflexes of a loom.
What wipes the blood off the crescents of the moon?
Where’s the antidote to the toxic tatoos?
Why all this treachery deceit and meaness?
Is it cool to shine with a reflected pettiness?
Almost fifty years
half a century
I’ve been sitting here doing this.
Trying to listen to what the stars are whispering
over the universal hiss of primordial assholes
who’ve been there from the very beginning of the myth.
In an ugly world
beauty isn’t just a mesmerist
in the eye of the beholder.
It’s a dynamic form of protest
that can kill someone into life
without a weapon.
And it’s hard enough
trying to understand war on the molecular level
the slaughter of the innocents
the loveless obscenity of its pornographic expense
the way it snatchs lives
like scraps of children
off their parents’ plate
and leaves them hungry for the rest of time
and try to reconcile it with a unified field theory
of infinite worlds within worlds of wonder
each with a cause of its own
and a monopoly on the means of its laws
to insist on being itself.
But if you want to see hatred and delusion
on a quantum mechanical level
as it is here up close and intimate
look into the faces
of twenty of your friends
and then turn the mirror on yourself
as if you had your finger on the trigger of the moon
in a game of Russian roulette
with intensely unhappy strangers.
In an ignorant world
insight isn’t just the usual suspect
and wisdom its unwitting accomplice
and the facts their DNA and fingerprints.
It’s a way of splashing acid in the faces
of illiterate extremists.
A way of teaching them how to read
from the burning books they’ve banned
like a child’s eyes
in the name of God.
It’s the most humane way of planting
improvised roadside explosives
that will blow them into kingdom come
like a field full of ripe poppies
milky with snake serum.
All snakes are addicted to their own venom
and speak of it as if they were the fountainmouths
of a secret elixir in the hands of a great magician
who once worked miracles for the pharoahs of
before that bastard Moses showed up and ruined everything
by throwing down his rod
to see whose serpent was bigger than God.
Snakes are full of penis envy
and you can’t train them to bite other people
or regurgitate the cosmic eggs they’ve swallowed
into a litter box.
And it took years and tsunamis of tears without eyelids
to learn how to be mastered by the skill of it
but the first trick of learning
how to write poetry in a snakepit
is knowing how to turn their scales into feathers
and putting wings on them
without them knowing it
shed them like dragons of old desire
heading south from a cold-blooded climate
like the souls of the dead in the bodies of birds.
Don’t let yourself be hypnotized
or turn away like words
from the eyes of snakes
but remember you can’t live like a fly
and write like an eagle
and turning your pen into a talon
with a firm grasp of the issue
as if it were a neck you’ve pinned down
with a witching wand
look them straight in the eye
and ask them how many children had to die
to keep them safe?
Then drop them on the rocks below
until they learn how to die for themselves.
And it’s crucial
to keep the universe
at the room temperature of fire long enough
it burns like dry ice on their skin.
Poetry is an oxymoronic pursuit
of the highest by the lowest
in a conjoining of mutually engendered opposites
and the lowest will always sting
the way you feel
like
with a poison arrow
or Hades contracted a snake
to kill Persephone
so he could rape her in the spring
and drag her down below
like the corpse of an anti-romantic necrophile.
If you don’t want to hold a grudge like summer
so that even the earliest of your flowers
are inspired by the muse of grief
tear out your hair like Medusa in a fit of rage
and realize it’s better to go bald
that try to get the cowlicks out of mop of snakes
that never wear the same hairdo twice.
And always remember
it isn’t just the angels
who keep their places like baby teeth
under the ancient stone of the pillow
where you lay your head.
It’s not just the apple-trees
that have to worry
about who they let slide into their orchard beds
but there are rattlesnakes
under the rosebushs as well
that can smell you coming with their tongues.
And if you’re at all spiritual
don’t be naive about illumination.
The light fans out in all directions
like the wavelengths of snakes
thawing like knots combed out of the locks of the spring.
If you want to sit full lotus
in the middle of a public snakepit
and think of it as a private shrine
keep in mind that the same light
that opens the gates to heaven
like the eyes of the flowers
falls into the blackhole skull sockets
of spiritual Calcuttas as well.
If you want to be a lamp unto yourself
you hold up to the darkness
on a vision-quest
remember that creative enlightenment
is radiantly omnidirectional
one mile east is one mile west
and the same firefly that reveals paradise
is a traffic light at a crossroads in hell
that never turns green
and that the worst demons
like the crumbs of celestial dreams
you broke like bread
to share with those who had none
love to gather in the corners of your eyes
like spiders weaving dreamcatchers
to ambush the butterflies.
And though it might seem tempting
to take Medusa for a muse
when you’re trying to write poetry in a snakepit
remembering she’s the death phase of the moon
with immediate access to oracular powers
but it’s just as hard to learn
how to go down on her without turning into stone
as it is to look back on
without turning into a pillar of salt.
Consider the quality of the inspiration
and its source
and think before you drink deep
from her Pierian spring
like black cool-aid from dixie-cups in Jonestown.
There’s a darkness deep within you
that the light doesn’t know anything about
and it never goes out like bright things do
because it’s the long night
that gave birth to the stars
out of its own emptiness
as it did me and you.
It’s the black mirror
that shines more deeply than the white
once your eyes have adjusted to the clarity.
All the muses are bottled water
compared to its oceanic expanse.
It’s much better to sail your paperboats
like cherry blossoms
downriver to that
than it is to ask a snake
to inspire you with serpentfire
so you can write lovenotes to a sparrow
as if she were sitting on cosmic glains.
Snakes are all throat and no voice
except for the occasional rattle
but what they entrance
they swallow
and there’s no more music
in your whole notes after that.
You’re poetry goes flat as a gutted shell
or the shedding skin of a used rubber
and you’ll never get it up again in your afterlife
even if you sprout wings on your heels
like Hermes Trismegistus the Thrice-Blessed.
Pegasus is dead.
Long live Icarus.
Even tarred and feathered for flight
by an abusive muse
I know it’s hard to live like this
refusing to eat shit
and call it your daily bread
or waiting for manna to fall from heaven
like an airlift from a spiritual foodbank
that doesn’t understand flesh and bone
when you’re a species all of your own
trying to write poetry in a snakepit
and they ask what you do for a living
and you say
I paint and write
among things with two gashs for eyes
that squirm and coil and flare and hiss and spit and bite
out of the pure spite of their snake-nature
no matter how well Orpheus picks the lute
or the snakecharmer fingers the stops of his flute.
Expect to get bit
but don’t be ashamed of it.
I’ve lost track of the number of wounds
I’ve had to suck the venom out of
as I could feel my nerves numbing out
like the unempowered lifelines
to the lights
of a city off the grid
as a night of cold came on like a slow glacier.
And I’ve got so many puncture marks
all over my body
I feel like a cross between a starmap
and a popular voodoo doll on a good day
and a birthday balloon for porcupines on a bad.
Crush a few skulls with the stone of your heart
if you must
but even if the Sufis are right
and you take on the characteristics
of anyone you’ve been around more than forty days
even trying to write poetry in a snakepit
and this is of paramount importance
whatever you do
don’t grow scales on it.
Don’t look for a quick fix
but build your tolerance up slowly
as if your poetry
were the bloodwork of a syringe
that breathes in
as if it were taking a deep draft
and deliberately takes its time
like a good wine
to push back.
Don’t try to regulate the heart
of a warm-blooded mammal
with the rheostat of a reptile
or you’ll wind up writing
haikus and heiroglyphs
that read like the lines of vipers in the sand
and no one who’s ever written poetry in a snakepit
like an antidote to an ancient poison
will ever forgive you for or understand.
PATRICK WHITE
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