Friday, December 23, 2011


NO DOORWAYS, NO WINDOWS

     No doorways, no windows, I come to this white-washed wall on the glaring computer screen, not knowing whether it’s an end or a beginning or a means to something I’m not aware of. I almost go snowblind staring at it as if I were waiting for someone on the other side to step through it like a homeless man in a blizzard, or one snowflake with an identity unique enough not to melt on your eyelid like a kiss that trickles down into your tear ducts sooner or later. This is the great white light at the end of the tunnel coming at you like a train that’s trying to bead the mountains into an aboriginal rosary of bear teeth. And if it could, it would bore a hole in the moon like some Neanderthal drilling through a seashell to prove it wasn’t a brute. This is a Saturnalian white night the day after the winter solstice in the void bound doldrums of late December. This is the anti-nirvanic revelation of someone who’s been illuminated on the dark side of the Via Negativa, though he was hoping for butterflies that flapped their wings like white sheets drying on the line in the sunshine. This is that negative of a starmap where the dark is white and all the stars look like constellations of cigarette-burns and black holes. As if some Oedipus when he put out his eyes, put out theirs as well. And you can see it as dove released by a Roman augur, or, as soon as I type the first letter on it like a bird track in the snow with ambitions of becoming an alphabet, a Martian meteor, billions of years old, landing in Antarctica like the unabridged version of a flood-myth. Land Ho! In the dense fog of this cloud of unknowing, where the linearity of forms is absolved of itself like water, it’s the crow on nightwatch in the masts of the leafless trees that first spots a place to land on the moon as it appears in full sail on the horizon like a waxing phase of the Sydney opera house.
     And that’s when I begin writing a long note on this white wall to someone I’ve never met I imagine is on the other side of this, who wasn’t home when I called to hear what I had to say, or was, but was preoccupied on the other side of this one way mirror blinded by its own blazing like a mediocre detective enthralled by a prime time confession to a sin of omission that didn’t do anything at all. I waver like a mirage in a desert at night between leaving a detailed suicide note, a loveletter to the world from hell in terza rima, of writing a local recipe for making home-made raspberry jam to explore the distractive potential of dysfunctional domestic poetry by putting an apron on a butcher and teaching him to make bread. But I’ve got too much of a surrealistic temperament not the see the jam pouring out of the empty Mason jars of starving children like a hemorrhaging rose from a bullet wound in the stomach that felt like the first thing they had to eat all day. And I begin to despise the triviality of the culinary poets who abuse their domesticity by using it as a gateway drug to a cozy corner in the kitchenin denial of the mundanity of hell while their schoolhouse of homey horrors burns down all around them. At least, sleep with your mother first, before you put your eyes out. And your poems like obsolete pennies from a child’s piggybank on the eyelids of those you were blind to, and would not speak up on behalf of, because what you don’t see is going to hurt everyone. And what you don’t say can make a liar out of you just as fast as what you have said about how much pectin to add to your poetry to keep it from being overwhelmed by the real flavour of the raspberries that don’t give a damn about who picked them. There must be a graveyard of cracked teapots somewhere that like having the wool pulled over their eyes like a tea cosy, but that doesn’t mean it’s any kind of place a real elephant would go to die with all his memories intact. You can put all the local homegrown you want to into a marijuana pie for a body stone that’s going to last all afternoon, but that only makes it the quiche of a mediocre high. Better to be Icarus and fall to your death out of the precincts of the sun than poultry that’s lost the will to fly. Mechanical Byzantine nightingales singing their hearts out like semi-precious stones in a tree of lapis lazuli. The aesthetic tomfoolery of fatuous objects replicating the symbolic orthodoxies of fraudulent zircon jewellery. But you need to be born with the third of a fish to know how to debone a diamond, and mine opens more like an enlightened observatory at night that’s happy just to look at the stars like a diamond in the rough that’s not inspired in the least to filet the Circlet of the Western Fish in Pisces.
     Cellphones of rage like the larynx of a blasting cap in a beaver dam made up of the bones of mass graves discovered after the fucked act of the fact deep in the forests of Poland where everyone was either shocked or shot for what they knew all along. Something evil in the air like the sickly-sweet smell of corrupt lilies in the lapels of the slapstick politicians in a vaudeville of Baudelarian flowers squirting acid in the eyes of literate schoolgirls. But sight, to me, is a kind of love I read on a poster giving a lecture on how to become enlightened in the student union building of the nineteen sixties. So nix that shit like a black angel in a plague year with a paintbrush at your front door that isn’t trying to sell you anything or ask if it can come in. And I’m tired of writing retroactive love-poems to all my girfriends and ex-wives that are always missing the last word like the other shoe that didn’t drop like an astronomical catastrophe out of the blue into the biosphere. Or the meteoritic impact on the foodchain of an oil spill by BP in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing personal, no offense to dead Mayans talking about cosmic events they didn’t live to see like a misinterpretation of what they actually meant about entire civilizations being lost in translation like truths that keep their mouths shut about the stone-faced lies that drive current events to the brink of extinction. And I’m more interested in life outside the theatre while the play’s going on than I am in rich Sophocles telling me like North Carolina a black welfare mother that it’s best not to have been born. The brave propositions of Nazis leading politically to the cowardly conclusions of Auschwitz. Over and over and over again like the estranged tears of a summer rain on the tin roofs of a concentration camp emptier than the promises of regret that were made not to forget what was done here was done to overweight children with specific names and pudgy hands that felt like comfortable armchairs full of loose change and lost keys to doors no one could remember. Not the bloodless abstraction of some Malthusian ideologue who preys upon statistics like a wasp upon the eggs of an ant like an occult science. And yet, that’s not it either; that’s more rage than this sword swallower can handle without gouging the eyes out of the record like a needle in a long playing thirty-three rpm eclipsed by an album the size of the moon turning on the axis mundi of a drum major at a Nuremburg rally. History repeats itself, the first time as the millenial tragedy of Senecan Rome, the second, as the six black farcical years of the Nazi demolition of Berlin. Which only goes to prove that arrogance makes you stupid and stupid will get you killed faster than evil. Give a blowjob to a cobra and you’ll end up washing your wedding vows out of your mouth with gasoline. But right now I lack the physical stamina to contain that kind of theme like a nuclear meltdown of my Fukushima heart, tears of heavy water turning into the radioactive steam of toxic outrage that makes you want to do unto others what’s been done unto these. And I will not. Knowing hate hates the hater first and worst. And the perpetrator always dies at the end of the farce like a self-inflicted karmic curse on the clowns who would be kings and ride in triumph through Persepolis as if the swarming of flies were the same as the flight of eagles. But at the end of the day, I don’t want to introduce birds of prey into the conversation of the larks and nightingales trying to strike the right note on the dead boughs in the aviary of my muse to harmonize this cacophony of chaos with the delta blues of Robert Johnson. I just want to get out of this cramped cosmic egg and add my wingspan to the vastness of space like the flightplan of a horse that couldn’t care less whether it stays the course or not. I want to graze like a planet in the twilight pastures of the sun, and when night comes on like the stars of the Milky Way by the open gate of the Great Square of Pegasus, I want to run until my heart explodes with light, knowing there’s no end in sight for a blind beginning that doesn’t trust its eyes enough to look into the dark mirror of its inconsolable eclipse to let what appears, appear, even if it be nothing for light years, but tears in the night bright with the stars that nobody sees, nobody points out like Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider in the handle of the Big Dipper, nobody stands among the brittle stubble of cattle corn in an open field of snow and makes up new myths about to adapt the life of meaning to the untapped watersheds of wonder.

PATRICK WHITE

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