ARE YOU TRYING TO CONVINCE ME

ARE YOU TRYING TO CONVINCE ME

Are you trying to convince me

that kindness does no good?
That no good deed will go unpunished,

that I should do a good deed and duck,

that trying to love and understand you as a friend,

give more than you dared to ask, have the power,

but not use it to reply to you in kind

when I pull the sacred syllable

like a pin out of my heart

and hold it tightly in my hand

like a white phos grenade I don’t dare let go of

because this starlight’s so blue and hot

it can burn right through your skin like the Pleiades?

You rage pre-emptively as if in everything

you were defending yourself vehemently

against some bootcamp of an injustice

your childhood went to to learn how

to stand up for yourself even when you’re in the wrong.

Do unto others before they do

what you imagine reflexively

they’re about to do unto you.

I get that. So many times I’ve blunted

the edge of the sword on the rock of the heart

I drew it from, bent its blade for the grave,

tempered it in a trough of hot tears

I shed like a dragon for what you

had suffered alone at the hands of those

who were supposed to love you

but always seemed to find a way

to bungle it in the second act

of a tragicomedy for angry tricksters.

So I’ve treated you like a dove

in maculate feathers for the last ten years

and stood down like a scarecrow

whenever you lured me away from my watch

to amend the commotion of a lapwing.

I’ve been a good friend to you in all things.

There when you called. Generous

when you needed, streetwise wolf doctor

when you asked for an oracle

to howl at the moon with you

in an agony of unanswered wounds.

And I know it’s hard to be proud

and grateful at the same time

as if needing someone’s help

as we all do, were conceding

to a weakness in the hill fort of your vulnerability.

So I’d put out the white flag

from my window first to make sure

you didn’t have to conceive of surrendering first.

Anyway when you walked in just now

fuming like a star mass

of inflammable hydrogen gas

I was feeling like a firefly

for the first time in a long time

remotely at home in the universe

as it went off in my face like the Big Bang.

One moment I’m on an endless firewalk

following the signs the stars left me

to catch up in my own good time

and the next I’m listening to an arsonist

make up alibis in her own interrogation room.

And I’m asking God, after you return me

like a splinter of my former radiance

that won’t wash out of my third eye

because it’s lodged like a nail in a jellyfish

candling like a parachute in its own tentacles,

to the relentless intensity of my abysmal solitude,

thinking hard, hot, flashy thoughts

that cut like the sabres of a meteor shower

through the ionically charged upper atmosphere

where my spiritual aspirations inflate

like weather balloons disguised as ufos

even as my demonic descents back to earth

are making a big impact on an extinct species.

God, I say, apostate, heretical, or demonic

I may be. Do ut abeas. But I didn’t ask you

anything back for this kindness I do left-handedly

not to ameliorate doing my time standing up

nor as an infernal sacrament on the altar of hell

that rebels like a lion lying down with the lamb,

but just to put a smile on the absurdity of it all

as if there were no harm in trying it your way occasionally

by stopping the war between

ceremony and the sanctimonious

long enough to remember we’re all

dying of one thing or another in the same lifeboat

floundering on this fathomless night sea

of shoreless awareness we’re all immersed

over our heads in like the tears of the unblessed.

PATRICK WHITE