Saturday, June 23, 2012

BLAND PERFIDY, YOU WILL NOT MASTER ME


BLAND PERFIDY, YOU WILL NOT MASTER ME

Bland perfidy, you will not master me. I shall
cultify my resentment into a an insurrection of one
and feed you like keys to the fireflies in the zoo.
And the black lions savage you like a fake rose of blood.
I shall write about the colours of the flowers you abused.
The lethal spreading of your goodness like manure
over a garden that hasn’t bloomed since childhood.
The way you’ve gagged the mouth of the sun
with toxic clouds that don’t remind you of anything.

Distractive lie, polluted moonlight, I shall
turn the oranges on your breakfast table
you write about in grisaille, into the black dwarfs
of imploding stars, ambush your newsreels
and sword dance on your grave in a wreath
of stinging nettles just to hear you howl once
like a real poet when I rip the stitches out of your heart.

How will you angle your toes like a misstep in a dance
when you hear the harpsichord of shattering glass
as I throw the moon through your window
and watch it bleed like a beer bottle in a street fight?
Nuclear winter in a wasteland, the dawn
of a new species of fire with poetry in its glands.
A violet wind will sweep you like mirages off the sidewalk
into the dunes of the shad flies of North Bay,
and even the thieves who’ve come to melt
your gold death mask down into nose rings
won’t bother to exhume your pyramid
like a publishing house not worth breaking into.

By the immutable coincidence of the contradictories
because you did not breathe life into the drowning
and fed your mouth in the mirror before you
even heard the child-faced birds dying in the trees outside,
I shall use your skull as a doorstop in a hurricane
to keep the backdoor open to the weatherfronts of the furies
that are mustering under your windowsill,
black holes without an event horizon.
And the unapproachable night air we let out
of your mythically inflated tires will be saturated
with the oracular apostasies of hostile prophecies,
and your proverbial drop out and crawl all the way back
into your anthology of nepotistic verdicts
that are afraid to tell the judge what they really think.

I see how you slaughter the playful intensities of life
by throwing bad meat down the wells of the muses
and the effluvia of your poems contagious as radioactivity
slyly insinuating yourself into the drinking water.
The spider I wear like an eye patch on my third eye
wants to get you out of the way of the sun
like the slag and cinders of orbiting dirt
you kick in everyone’s face like a meteor shower
that fizzled out even before it took the plunge.

Someone’s got to tell you like a warning from your shrink
you’ve got the emotional wingspan of a scenic calender
for places to be when you’re reading out west
they give away for free in a real estate office.
I want to chew on a wad of your heart to see
if its’ really gum or not, and if it is
I’ll cut it out of my hair with the same scissors
you use to clip and paste the spinal cords of your poems.
I want to stick C-4 to your incisors
as if I were blowing up a bridge in preoccupied Toronto
and see if anything explosive might come out of your mouth.

Fire-swallower in a circus morgue, hic sunt dracones,
snakes with wings, flame-throwing wiverns
angered by the desecration of their shrines
and fangs like flowering scalpels rooted in their jaws.
Gratuitous infirmity. Termites in the foundation.
Too much straw in the haystack to go looking for
your needle of identity pointing true north
to a vast pristine land of squalor and drugs.
The quicksand cornerstones of your unzippered fixes.
Moonrise and sunset on the blacklists of your eyelids.
I should compile a hive of killer bees
and when I’m talking to you without a grant
charge admission to the Eleusinian Mysteries
of how to write without a camera or a mirror,
and start a buzz that would leave you
with nothing unmagnanimous to say
about the dangers of pouring curdled honey
into a wound as raw and vicious as you are dull.

PATRICK WHITE

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