MURDER ME AGAIN WITH YOUR VOICE

MURDER ME AGAIN WITH YOUR VOICE

Murder me again with your voice,

the moon, your maculate heart, the weapon of your choice.

I am space, light, water, air, stars beyond your reach.

Meteor showers have been looking for my species for years

And still I thrive like glass eyes with real tears,

in the shadows of your amorous extinctions.

You can snuff a thousand votive candles out.

You can desecrate the shrine where I bury my feelings

like the small bodies of gentle birds

beside the ashes of the dragons that burnt out

like solar flares returning to the source.

You stab at the wind. You can try to ruin the sun

with a pettiness that isn’t worthy of the moon

that sends no night bird out to look for you

though my longing says you’ve been missing for years.

Nothing against you, nothing especially for,

though I thought I saw for a moment Bailey’s Beads

peeking through the lunar valleys of your last eclipse.

And there was a time I’d trade two of my fingers

just to have a taste of your lips again as they were

when the apple orchard covered your nakedness

in the blossoms of the first drafts

that couldn’t improve on you by revising anything.

Come the first time right, or better not come at all

and they fell, each more perfect than the last.

Now it’s like French-kissing a voodoo doll

with pins through its lips that makes everything you say

the martyr of a brutal kind of unspoken curse.

Make it worse, if that’s all you’ve got left to feel.

Get it out. Oxyrhyncus Jesus says that’ll save you.

I’m an old ghost. Do you really think

you’re my first exorcism? Boo. I’m gone

just like the mist off a morning lake,

just like a gust of stars in the lens of a telescope

that can bring you close, or set you at a distance

just like that piece of tinfoil you wrap

like skin around your heart as if you were saving

some kind of vegetable in the cold shining

you think of as the Pleiades on a binge of light.

Screech, shriek, rave, rake your fingernails

down a blackboard like an ice age in a rage,

like a glacial striations cut into shale

and ambush the mammoth, the sabre-tooth, the dire wolf

of twelve thousand years ago when you stole

the water out of their mouths and returned nothing but dust

like you take the words from mine now

that you’ve uprooted the garden of your own.

Carve on me like a bone if you must, break my skull

like Pangaea into a synarthritic jigsaw puzzle of continents

and I’ll do nothing but diversify my species.

I’ll turn the scars in my starmud into calendars and alphabets

and wait for the next golden age like honeysuckle

tangled in a cedar fence after a storm

that strikes at itself like sheet lightning,

after your apocalypse has finished venting itself.

You’re a white peony, not a wounded rose with thorns,

though you both shed the moon in common

to get down to the withered jester’s cap of the star

hiding like a spider under your eyelids.

You kill me and you kill me deeper into life

not because it’s me you hate, but what I refuse

to hate about you as a coward who turns her back

at the sight her own blood on her razors and wrists

and runs like a river system on a starmap

toward the emergency exits of the red giants

even as they’re imploding under their own exhaustion

who promise to suckle you on the dream milk

of the poppies who opiate you into believing

you’re twice as deceiving as death in Aleppo,

racially profiling the stars in infra red for the Gestapo.

What a silly girl you are, to expect a firing squad

to show up for your rescue, every time you click

your ruby slippers like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz

and tiny eyes emerge from the gigantic size

of the blackholes in your deathmasks like gnats

swept up like stars in your stillborn tornadoes on the moon.

It takes more than a snakepit to make someone an oracle.

However you enrobe it in incense and drugs

and mollify your fear in an exchange of syringes.

More fangs on a hydra-headed Medusa than there are

crescents of the moon lactating with antidotes

as if to say the cure is in the heart of the disease.

Let all those boyfriends you stole like corpses

from a graveyard, believing you were the artistic genius

who was mistress of their vital organs, rise from the dead

as if they’d finally learned to stand up to you

and making a move on your surgical flesh

say, hey, now, mistress, come lie down with us

and see, for yourself, what a heady lover death can be

when you don’t take your cliches so seriously

you’ve rewired your waterlilies to the stars

until they all sting like superclusters of jellyfish

tasing you with the acid rain of your own tears

like rootfires of desire blossoming underground

without a flower to speak of or break through anywhere

you could point to and say, there, I grew that out of love

as if I weren’t even trying all that hard

to stand here alone, alive, and beautiful as I am

not as an alibi for dying, but as an act of life

as indelible in its absence it is when it’s here.

So go your own way with blood on your hands

and blessings on your head as you wish.

And take a last parting shot at the stars

if you want the last word

as you stand like a likeness of yourself

like a commission you’ve always had done

by every doorway you’ve ever stood in like an easel,

and step into a smaller realm than the one you’re leaving

as if your eyes were too small for my windows

when you hurled yourself against them

like a housefly against a mirage in an hourglass

being emptied and filled at the same time.

And, yes, I will cry for you with deep regret

I couldn’t die for you any better than I did,

and you couldn’t live for me

just for the cheap thrill of it.

And then I’ll wipe my tears on my sleeve

where my heart used to be

and make my comic entrance into the next world

laughing like a sacred clown at the sublimity

in the enlightened madness of it all

as you back up like a tragic exit into yours,

troubled by the punch-lines in your nightmares

you never got.

PATRICK WHITE