PROMETHEAN CONTENTIONS

My life the wardrobe of a shabby star; here,

take this carnelian pomegranate

that has hardened into a heart

and appease what blood you can, take my tongue

that turned yellow with arsenic in the fall

and was torn down like the flag of an ancient catastrophe

by the denuding expletives of the wind.

I’m tired of the ashes and the cemetery wine

that pollutes them; I’m weary of the view,

this worm-eaten map to nowhere

and the lies it must live to fulfill.

I’ve exhausted the patience

of the bookish rain,

waiting for my shoes to stop talking

about journeys they’ll never take,

so that I can tell them I was a man

with a tarnished direction

that led me off the known roads

to taste the wild blackberries

that ripened in brambles of razorwire.

Here, take the petrified paperweights,

the mephitic moons of my eyes, still stained

by the dead seas that wept themselves empty

to the end of seeing; I once mistook them

for summer sapphires in a mountain crown

but things have been rubbled since then,

and my sidereal aspirations have toppled

to graze on the mannered portion

of the crumbs of light

that survived the avalanche

at a foodbank for wheelchairs and thrones. My mind,

gum under a desk

in an abandoned schoolhouse

and my voice, the graveside elegy

of an extinct species

that couldn’t attune its maverick genes

to the suggested forks in the path of an eloquent serpent,

I am unspooled by my own undoing

as frame by frame

I marred my life with perversions of salt and light

to contaminate my bruised confessions

in asylums of lipless inquisitors.

I am still the ore of the sword in the rock

they couldn’t extort from my ambiguous impurities,

even after the stake and the fire

that moiled the gold of my bones. Blighted by the truth

of a heresy of wounded water,

I was true to the rain

in a holocaust of cabbalistic arsonists

and even here in this fetid ditch of time,

the scattered orchard, the pageant of my blood

is not a danse macabre

or transformative contrition

of flagellant lilies. I am innocent as night

of the stars they impute to me, the lies and legends

of the man who once lived me,

a ventriloquist of physics.

Here take my face and skin, my mouth, my hair, my ears,

and if you still need

a gesture of confession

to glut the cannibal of a creed, here,

take my faith in the expired frequencies

of the universal hiss, or the charred guitars

of my carboniferous impieties. I fumbled the song

you asked me to sing

and limped from the stage

an infamous king of jesters and fools

who overthrew me for a laugh

when the minister of mirrors went insane.

Now I am a smear of sky

on a broken windowpane,

a rumour of hesitant lightning

in a choir of tone-deaf fireflies,

the fraudulent tear

of a leftover saint

who weeps sewers for the poor

to wash the planet off their faces.

I rummage through the garbage

of the aftermath, the decrescent beak of a vulture

reaping the urgent organs of tumescent roadkill

that once cast the dice of their own infraction

to steal their genius back from the gods,

to cool the fire of their solitude on the other side,

to lift the veil

from the star-worn face of the apple

and look into eyes that no one’s ever see

before the worm interrogates the vision

at a carnival of undertakers. Here, take this old taboo, this curse,

the thorns and horns of these dragon teeth

that sowed the forbidden ground of the secret

with armies of fanatical commas

in the service of a virgin period

deported like a holy relic

to the erection of a foreign capital

adorned by the marbles of carnage.

Here take this future from me,

the accident, the crisis and the shock,

the randomness, the tyranny, the sneer

of the heart-crushing boot, the rational madness

of political lovers raised for annihilation, and take this ruse

of happy endings, the chrome and glass

cosmetic face-lifts of a flagging science,

and the indecipherable grammars of the generals

who speak like triggers and the hurricane corporations

who lobby to own the rain

and want to market oxygen as an inert gas,

a logo on every gene. You can have my eyes,

you can bottle my tears

and send them off on the tide, a message and a warning

not to risk a rescue,

and leave me the sole custodian

of my own isolation like a bird in a furnace.

You can plant spies in my semen

and colonize my chromosomes with zoos;

you can introduce me like the skull and crossbones

of a designer virus

and hack into my horde

of piratical ideas to clear the coasts of consciousness

of superfluous corsairs. You can administer

last rites in rosaries of chalk

on ghetto sidewalks and doctor the autopsy

with the platitudinous gangrenes of moral turpitude,

the nemetic karma that plays muse

to your inspired amputations. Bring on the surgeon,

bring on the laughing pathologist

back from a late vacation, unhand me

with the ostrakon, the passport of pariahs,

and distinguish me with a fence, a wall, a camp,

the unmarked grave of a dismembered terrorist

who had no evidence to add

to the celebrity histories of acknowledged slaughter.

Make a token of my head, my prophetic skull

on the platter of a flat earth

to sweeten the sins of your adulterous daughter,

or let me fall upon the sacrificial blade

of the waning moon that lies before me like a sinister eyelid,

I will undo the ribbon of my blood

on a gift that arrived like a stranger

you couldn’t trust. I will endure the abuse

of a premature grave

or enter the vehement emptiness

of a third-world cupboard in a fever of hope

that proves critical, but no demon of your will,

no whim of your capricious brutality,

no reflex of your hatred of love and life, no

acidic austerity of your organized indifference,

no starless wound of any sky

that dawns like bleach in the roots of the rose

that withers like junkmail heaped

before a bolted door on a condemned threshold,

will make me renounce

for the soft immunity of a prosperous lie,

one era, one god, one vulture

of this mountain range

where the apex and the alley are the same,

one adamant link,

one feather of fire or locket of thought

on the planetary chain

of my liberated disobedience,

the enlightened insanity of this sacred malfeasance.

PATRICK WHITE