Sunday, March 11, 2012

WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES YOUR HARD DRIVE


WHEN LIGHTNING FRIES YOUR HARD DRIVE

When lightning fries your hard drive
and you’re trying to weave a flying carpet
out of snakey wavelengths that took
millions of light years before you were born
to get here. So you feel you’re doomed
to live the eternal recurrence of the past.
Don’t forget about me. I’ll be your friend.
I’ll be your all night window. I’ll be
the third eye of your hurricane.
The occult template of your moonrise mirage.
I’ll be the antidote to your travelling nightmare
and we’ll stay up all night, drinking coffee
and smoking chain letter cigarettes
as we watch the moon through the window
painting her toe nails above the bank.
And if you want to hear wise and profound things,
poetically put in response to the dichotomic genius
of your own spiritual dilemmas,
or just let your hair down like Medusa
and kick back at a black mass of lost wisdom,
I’ll be your friend. Your Wizard of Oz.
I’ll liberate cages and cages of morning doves
and arise to the occasion in hot flashes of insight
like fire from the ashes of the Library of Alexandria.
I’ll put my stones and swords away for awhile
and blow on a forge of stars that stay cool
as nocturnal waterlilies blooming along the banks
of the Fall River in early autumn.
I’ll be your Merlin. And I won’t teach you
the one forbidden thing
I don’t want you to know.
You can just look at things. Or not.
Like alla prima mindscapes I’m painting impromptu
in picture-music on the lyrical night air.
But if all you want to do is bring over some poems,
I’ll listen like Seti to the first verifiable signs
of extraterrestrial life. I’ll listen like a hacker
that’s just broken into an encrypted web-site
through a black hole into the next universe.
Your choice. Or we could just sit there
nibbling on the silence like fish
that have surfaced to feed on the moonlight.
But if you’re feeling a little sanity deficient these days,
I’ll talk to you about the extreme chaos
of conditioned consciousness in such aromatic words
you’ll think a thousand hummingbirds
were swarming the towers of your hollyhocks
like ruby-throated endomorphs and opioids
that just found the sweet spot on your neural receptors.
And by the end of my mystic lucubrations, believe me,
you won’t be drinking black cool aid in Jonestown
or stand there frozen in time, your knees
buckled like Stonehenge trembling
like a calendar girl before a total eclipse
at the winter solstice you don’t think you’re ever
going to get over like a beginning
that just can’t get past itself.
I’ll paint you naked and blue
firewalking on stars like a Pictish tattoo.
We’ll take a moonboat out for a test run
and I can be the sail and the rudder
and you can be the wheel of the zodiac
and we’ll sail around omnidirectionally
among enlightened islands in the mindstream
and we won’t run aground on the reefs of syntax
like a dead language looking for a loveletter from anyone.
And I’ll whisper things you should have heard
in the logic of metaphoric dream grammars
long before the light left, like a Druid
in an old growth forest mentoring a night bird.
And when lightning fries your hard drive
like an ancient oak in July on a Thursday
I’ll be your friend. I’ll make all those
taboos and curses pinned to your skin
like eclipses in a scenic calendar
fall away like leaves
Or we could stay where we are and shine
in the depths of our own bioluminescence
like the new moons of two black pearls
that would rather keep their prophecies to themselves.

PATRICK WHITE

No comments: