JIMMY, CAN YOU HEAR

JIMMY, CAN YOU HEAR

in memoriam: Jim Morrison

Jimmy, can you hear the scream of the butterfly now;

can you see the colour of agony in its blood,

the horrible beauty of its wings that were always

a crazy hinge looking for a gate to anywhere? Who listens to you now,

brother, if there’s anything more than bone and hair

to fret and string the music out of

like a spider sizing webs? Thirty-four years longer into this, Jimmy,

and even the flowers are screaming their mineral rage at the sun

that dazzles them like a dealer they can’t escape, white light,

white blood, bleaching them into the mouthless madness

of their decline into ribbons of dirt when all they wanted

was root-room in the starfields. Brother, are you dreaming;

do you care, awake and dreaming, perhaps, do you see; the heart

is a spiritual junkyard posing as a hospital with twelve beds

and a terminal prognosis that goes on forever like a priest

on death-row? Did you die with an erection? Did you ever need more

than your last thought; apocalypse and ecstasy

shuddering out of the soft cranium of your cock

into that sweet, unlonging smile

that troubles the living with the joys of the dead? Oblivion

the ancient snake that follows you through the blue desert

under three moons

writing your poems in sand, innocent as God. You always meant

to make your death last forever

by announcing it like a prophecy you threw over the fire

like a night sky full of strange legends and forbidden stars.

The rest of us accidentally lived our way out of it

as far as this ripple of the moment into the sexless, sensible revisions

that tried to turn your Roman wilderness of pain

into a petting zoo, mystic-heated wine

into angel-meds. Every new creation the dawn

is a nurse with a straitjacket; and even the birds

are trembling on the hydro-lines

waiting to be issued an improved flight-plan. People live

in the crack between life and death

like overlooked blades of grass. Even if

you tattooed the truth to their foreheads with a sewing machine

and gave them a mirror to read it,

grapevines would still turn into razor-wire

and the maggot grow fat in the liar’s rose. Coal is as far

as a real feeling gets to diamond for most; the rest play

at being alive. There was never enough time to waste

debunking illusions to phantoms; less now

that each of us approaches alone the vastness and the nothingness

of everything that used to touch us like fingertips.

Let the fire god come looking for fire

among all these neurotic extinguishers, young and old alike,

and he’ll snuff his own flame for lack of anything to consume,

nothing worth burning, no spirit in the ashes; even the bitter water

that put it enviously out, sedated in a ghetto of clowns.

Dying, the body haunts the soul, not

the other way around. You see backwards into the future

and remember it as if it were from the past; the light

shines inward into a visible silence

that spreads out overhead like a new sky

articulating its urgency as virgin stars

no eye or name has stained with saying or seeing.

Who more than nothing or no one could lift the veil

in this brief eternity before and after

the beginning? And this is not the only end.

You could die like a spiritual mutant

dazzling the peasants

with shit they don’t understand.

PATRICK WHITE