POST-MORTEM CONVERSATIONS WITH MYSELF
Post-mortem conversations with myself.
Dissociated memories of old fires and distant smoke.
Rainbows in eclipse.
Gothic lovers with oilslicks on their lips.
Covens of doves at a black mass for bleeding hearts.
Echoes returning like smart comebacks
to the original lines of the voices
I keep trying to slip between
like a love note waiting for a name
to address it to
as if thinking weren’t a dialectic at all
not this not that
being and non-being
but an ancient mode of migrating
without anyone noticing you’re gone.
And I still burn in the memory of some fires
that weren’t worthy of the heretic they consumed.
Creative intensities that turned my eyes into glass
to clarify the darkness of the black stars
that kept their shining hidden
from the cults and constellations
on the fast track of the zodiac
that liked to see their name in lights.
I preferred hydrogen to inert gases at the time
and there was always something garish about fame
that made me see all that neon
flickering like a cheap one night motel for attention.
All outlaws are wandering scholars
but these days I feel more like a Druid
walking between warring factions
with the diplomatic immunity
of an estranged superstition
to put an end to old conflicts
that live and die like blackflies
in two intense days of direct sunlight
at the end of May when they cleanse the temples
of what winter tracked in like a shelter for demons.
The victory is as boring as the defeat.
And I’ve run out of white flags and red capes
to use for bandages to stop the bleeding
so I let my wounds mummify themselves
without interring any grave goods
under the geoglyphs of their scars.
And here come the righteous rich again
like another crusade against the infidel poor
to dislodge them from the global expansion
of the holy lands over the whole earth
like dandelions in the lawns of
within the corporate reach of napalm
and bell-curves of white phosphorus
going supernova
like the Star of Bethlehem
burning through the eyes and skin and hearts
of the children of
like the evil side of Tinkerbelle
spreading the fairy dust of ethnic cleansing
like a foreign policy that salts hell
with deathstars no one can make a wish upon.
Six pointed stars.
Eight pointed stars.
And that square constellation of fifty
arranged like beer in a box
over thirteen wavelengths
of blood on the snow
with no return on the empties.
And there the bloody handprint
of the red maple
of my own autumn country
complicit in the history
of bigger fires on the world stage
than this one little flame
we’re all huddled around
trying to keep one side of our hearts
warm and human
in the first storm of the new ice age
that keeps blowing it out
like a candle in a manger of straw
like a phoenix in a barn-fire of heritage ashes.
Armoured war mice
war elephants
warring troops of snarling baboons
with red decals painted on their asses
like underbellies of Mitsubishi Zeroes
to identify the friendlies
from the swarms of killer bees
raising cults of i.e.d.s
like terrorist drones
in hives of milk and honey
wired to cellular phones
like bombs in the promised land
that break the word of God
like the bodies and hearts and minds of children
who huddle in their ancient places with the fairies
under the concrete rubble
of the stone that slew Goliath
and all his children
like a ricochet of collateral damage.
Hashashim pouring out of the mouth
of the Old Man of the Mountain
like fire ants down the slopes
of their heaps of formic acid
to sow the olive groves with stinging nettles
and make war on weddings
by rending that which God has joined together
asunder in
Undoing the zippers of their flies
as if they were parting the
like the chromosomes of the unborn.
Half their genes on crusade
and the other half on jihad
where love has pitched its tent
as a disappointed Yeats would say
in the place of excrement.
PATRICK WHITE
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