ANOTHER NIGHT CLOSER

ANOTHER NIGHT CLOSER

Another night closer to hell

and the promise of paradise fading

for lack of interest; even the serpent bored

with tempting the worthless tourists of Eden.

No one need get upset; nothing means anything;

and the crimson parrot with green eyes

isn’t talking to the cosmic apes who are trying to teach him

cosmic gibberish. Lately

they’ve been painting their asses red

and flashing the white bull of the moon for a giggle.

No one seems to get it, but it doesn’t matter;

everything will go on absurdly the same;

old windows weeping like glass toffee

over what they’ve had to look at for fifty years,

emotional cripples on Celtic crutches

giving blow jobs to the defectors

who jumped ship on an island in their blood

and wound up marooned on Atlantis

two days before everything got real deep; assholes

looking up each others’ assholes with flashlights

to get to the heart of the matter

only to find God’s got a sense of humour

they can’t appreciate

without an acquired sense of taste.

One wants to say something,

if only for form’s sake, but what’s the point?

The etiquette of wisdom demands restraint,

and besides they haven’t got the eyes for it.

Why waste the light when tinfoil will do the job;

and they’d prefer a painted moon

to a real one anyway. So the dragons leave,

the sages mourn, the saviours turn their crosses

into clotheslines and the mystic wolves

howl high above the timberline of consciousness,

far from the village minds

who flap like the tongues of old shoes

that stopped just shy of the threshold. Cluster flies.

Occasionally someone smells something burning on the wind.

Occasionally someone sees

something strange moving fluidly among the trees,

just out of sight, glimpses of another world.

And at night, in their sleep, what dreams may come;

what baffling images from other realms, eerie guests

that no one quite remembers, occupying rooms

that no one knew were empty.

Hand them a key to go and see,

and they conceal it like a gun.

The world is solid, flat, and fixed;

their wisdom the hieroglyphics of a dried creek-bed. I repeat,

what’s the fucking point; their gifts are wrapped in flypaper.

And no one gets off without a torn wing;

spiritual amputees all over the floor, fanning the dust

upside down in circles. Look, everyone’s walking around

on their head

thinking with their feet, talking through their heels,

mistaking their toe-nails for teeth. How

can you love that without knocking them over?

It’s not that the demons aren’t compassionate;

but honestly, what herb of darkness

watered by the sorrows of the blackest saints

could overcome their backward ordinariness,

lead them out of their assholes back to their mouths

where food goes in and words come out,

and ease the callouses on the brain

that aches from all that standing?

Better to let them bang their feet against the walls

they’ve built to keep from getting out. The angels have given up,

and the doors, and the windows, and the ladders,

and the demons were always happy

to have them pointed down; but even they were smart enough

to laugh and leave them as they found them,

pissing up their own legs.

Now I’m leaving too, convinced their hearts

are parking meters, sick of their pettiness and meanness,

enfeebled by their raging lack of life,

their inverted mirrors and low door-knobs, the way

they care without caring, and speak without saying

anything that matters two fucks more

that it did before they opened their holes

to desecrate the silence and foul the air

like pop-tarts burning in a toaster.

Even the stars go out hissing in their minds

like cigarettes in a toilet, delighted to be crossed

out of their destinies like illiterate braille.

Why hitch a thoroughbred to a death-cart,

an eagle to the leash of a jackass,

love to the crimes of a fool?

Yellow leaves will do for gold

and dirty ice for diamonds

when everyone’s an embryo shy of old.

I don’t want to scare anyone, or bring

anyone up that isn’t already down,

or anticipate that anyone really cares

what happens beyond the shit at the end of their nose;

this is not the shadow of a falcon

over a chicken-coop; no one

has to bounce down the stairs on their head like a ball,

or squirm on their thrones

for fear of being toppled by a turd.

I have lived long and perversely enough

to leave these affairs

to the creeds of the absurd.

It’s just that I’m hurting worse than ever

as the stars pour into my wounded eye like salt

and always before me the promised land of never

where a border-guard in the guise of someone I love

screams halt, who goes there,

and shoots me through the heart

that was my only hope of refugee-status in heaven,

of waking up inside her,

seven come eleven,

all my gifts, accepted and forgiven.

PATRICK WHITE