THIS LITTLE PRICK COMES INSUFFERABLY AROUND HERE

THIS LITTLE PRICK COMES INSUFFERABLY AROUND HERE

This little prick comes insufferably around here

to throw acid in the eyes of my poetry

by talking about the exhausted limits of imagism

and the logical positivism

of what’s cathartically confessional

about talking to no one in a telephone booth

when it’s snowing heavily outside

as if he didn’t know when to hang up.

It was bilious enough to watch poetry turn into a career

but now to watch it turn into a campaign

is more than I can stomach. Write what you want

anyway it comes out; what’s missing

is no less an expression of you than what isn’t.

Don’t compromise the integrity of your negative air space

by letting little maggots like this

convince you you need to put training wheels on the wind

if you want to reach cruising altitude.

Sing in the shower. Sing in the rain. Sing

on the radio. Sing under a highway overpass

if you like the acoustics, sing for your supper,

sing to get laid, sing alone in the nightwood

to someone who doesn’t want to.

Sing to yourself when no one else will

and don’t worry about remembering all the lyrics,

sing because your cat came back,

because the fire god came looking for fire

and burnt his fingers on your heart

lying in ambush under the ashes,

sing because you feel other people’s pain

more tenderly than your own

or the moon keeps picking its blossom

up off the ground

and putting it back on the dead bough

as if one day the graft is going to take

and drop crazy windfalls of lunar fruit at your feet.

Bitter, mad, gentle as wild columbine,

soft as green moss, angry, compassionate,

sure, beaten down, compassionate, doubtful or dangerous,

sing like the sea making love to its own weather

and drown the astrolabes, the weathervanes,

the fog horns, the lighthouses of editorial opinion

the crow’s nests of the next critical theory to sight land,

the compasses, the wind socks, the starmaps

the crows and the doves

that take it upon themselves to come back

with forensic evidence of what you meant to mean.

Turn the wheel over to the storm

and ride the poem out like a seasoned sailor

that knows when he’s met his match

and concedes to his defeat

as the last card left he’s got to play

to overcome things from the least expected quarter.

You listen to these mud-puddle Balboas

about new planets swimming into their ken

and you’ll end up lowering your lifeboat

into a wishing well somebody’s thrown bad meat down

like the half-eaten carcass of a toxic unicorn

as full of worms as Herod on the day that he died.

Better to wear a crown of a razor wire on Mt. Helicon

then win your laurels on American Idol.

Fame is the taste of your name in the mouth of people.

Better they should whisper it among themselves

as if they’d come across a blue rose

blooming in a desert,

or a garbage bag full of unmarked money

and didn’t know who to tell

who might believe them

among the cynical mirages

who keep a jealous eye on miracles of any kind.

For God’s sake, if you’re dying of thirst

like a fish out of water beside the Lady of the Lake,

roll over and drink like a sword

that wants to get the taste

of sun and blood out of its mouth.

Or if you’re lost and you don’t know

what medium to work in

work in air like a bird,

water like a fish,

light like a star

earth like a star-nosed mole

that likes to get down to the roots of things.

Once many years ago on Laurier East in Ottawa

when I was holding court

like a jester in Graba Java

making fun of the Etruscan kings of the zodiac

for suggesting the asteroids be rezoned

as a housing project for the poor,

a young insecure, cocksure, obscure young art student

from the University of Ottawa,

joined us like a table of contents

and started going on about this and that

synthetic paradigm of bloodless abstraction

he intended to paint like the plumage of a parrot

with the eyes of a peacock

he plucked from other birds

who painted for concrete sex

and effective camouflage.

And I asked him,

standing at his easel before

that white snow witch of a canvas

that swears this is her very first time

if all that vampiric shit was on his mind

when he was about to take her feigned virginity

with a slash of cadmium red middle

like a blood bank under siege

and he said, no.

And I said what’s the good of it then

if asked to paint the Sistine Chapel roof

all you ever do is paint

your metaphysical scaffolding over and over again?

Let the paint tell you what it wants to be.

Let the poem grow from the inside out

and don’t cram all these quacks into the womb

that will leech it, and bleed it, and bleach it to death.

Invited to drink from the grail,

the wellsprings of the muses,

who cares if you have to drink from your hands,

a Tibetan begging bowl, a proboscis,

the dead seabeds of the moon,

or the thin-skinned goblets of the morning glory.

The point isn’t the vehicle, the raft

you use to get to the other side

the booster that drops off

like the empty cartridge of a fountain pen

as soon as you’re free of gravity,

and even if you’re a frog in scuba gear

and take all the contextually correct safety precautions

just don’t let one of these scorpions

talk you into giving it a ride piggyback

to the middle rock in your mindstream

where it will invariably sting you to death.

You’ll look at the moon

and it won’t mean anything to you.

You’ll look at your doorway

and you’ll wonder why it’s always

emptier than your mail box.

And then you’ll realize

trying to piece the parts that are left

like a dragonfly sticking a chrysalis together

of whatever it can lay its hands on

some apprentice planner with phoney blueprints

has stacked your little house of transformation

among the coffins of another housing project

and nipped the wings off your heels

and dug their spurs like backhoes

into your eyes so deeply

you had to settle for streetlights and security cameras

instead of stars

to know where you were going.

Better to walk down a long country road in the dark

whistling to yourself to bluff something into thinking

you’re not afraid to be here

than trespass against the darkness

by buffing the brutal radiance of the stars

with the artificial sweeteners of heritage streetlamps.

I’m not going to release anymore doves

to try and read the mind of someone I’ve never met

by relying on the fools

who think it’s all just a matter

of ritualistic spiritual etiquette,

or neo-Chicago Aristotelianism,

but I am going to liberate all my insights

like heretical fireflies

from the usual preservatives

of a cramped, conservative Mason jar

and watching them rise like sparks

from someone burning at the stake

let them make up constellations of their own

that they don’t take so seriously

because they never step

into the same mind set twice

and nothing that emerges like a paradigm

from the creative chaos

of their unconditioned light

is going to stay fixed long enough

for anyone to draw up a starmap

to ask advice, see where they are, look for signs.

What star, what flower, what lover, what poet,

waits to be illuminated

like a canary in a coal mine

by the shadows of what it longs for

before it shines?

PATRICK WHITE