Friday, November 30, 2012

BY THE LIGHT I HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO GO BY


BY THE LIGHT I HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO GO BY

By the light I have been given to go by,
I can see how homeless the journey truly is.
How provisional the shrines along the way like milestones
we stop to paint like the inside of our skulls
or the caves we first dwelled in with our dead
buried under fire and the numinosity of our picture music
impregnating the womb walls of a space made sacred by fear.
The darkness bears my secrets, and in the torchlight,
in carbon and red ochre, a diary of shamans
gored by defecating rhinos speared to death.

I have imagined my way into an understanding
that is a rite of passage into a space that is
a vast abyss of intelligence, a nothingness
that speaks through an intuitive grammar of things
as if a galaxy, a star, stone, tree, raindrop were each a thought,
a sign, a word, the syntax of a growing paradigm
of creative awareness that we’re completely alone
and lost at sea like fish on the moon crawling out of its tides
as if nothing bound us, not even detachment,
nor a god that exists as a confession of the way we do,
nor any medium we work in as reflection of our presence
labouring away at an unattainable world that won’t exist
until we do, and it’s 7 to 5 against anyone making it that far.

But what a joy to emerge out of our own nothingness
like a secret we’re letting ourselves in on,
making it up as we go along like a deportable myth of origin
we can adapt to our infinite beginnings
because for starters, it has none of its own.
We were born to express ourselves like apple trees.
We were born to see and be happy marvelling at the event.
To enjoy longing for things we were never missing
and be guided by wise men we never listen to
back to a silence that has nothing to say for itself
that we didn’t already know in the first place.
Everywhere is the threshold of the return journey.
Life is either an exile, or it stays at home like a follower.
Bless the enlightened apostates of the dangerous religion
that desecrates the mind by worshipping it.
Why make a chain out of your umbilical cord
and get your head wrapped around it like a noose
because you forgot meaning was an art
and not a way to take yourself way too seriously to heart?
Why go to war with your own mind
just to administer to the needs of the suffering
when you can paint a god in blood and ashes
and decultify yourself with the creative freedom
of your imagination deconstructing the fable of your belief
that it’s the being, not the becoming, that endures.
And you can do this without even knowing how to draw.
A starmap doesn’t shine. A blue print doesn’t open a door.
If you ask a crutch to do your walking for you,
it’s going to throw you away like a miracle
at the top of the stairs of Notre Dame de Coeur.
Better to be the sacred whore of a thousand profligate gods
than the unrepentant nun of one who shuts the world out,
like art for art’s sake, to revel in her own extinction
in a mystical connubium with an unregenerate imagination.

You can burn your gates and cages in a wild field if you like
for not being able to keep the flowers in, or keep the wind
from rioting with the leaves way past curfew,
but there was never any risk of being granted what you ask
because life is the unpredictable moon rise
that deepens the calendars with a renewed humility
towards the extraordinary mutability of time.
What have you ever been that baffled your imagination?
It isn’t reason that inspires us to become a stranger tomorrow
to the self we knew today. Genuine faith isn’t
an artificial life support system to keep something alive
that should have been allowed to die quietly away yesterday.
Millions upon millions of facts like a graveyard of skeleton keys
to a door we can’t find open within ourselves
as if we’d just stepped through it to be here where we live
deciphering the shapes of the clouds as if we lived in code.

Hide your secret deep enough if you want it to be known.
Walk alone as far as you can until you can’t
if you want the world to walk the rest of the way with you.
The white demon that knows heaven and hell experientially
mentors the senses in the spiritual subtleties of the black angel
that comes like the new moon of a third eye
to help the exegetes of light see further into the dark
by blowing their candles out like flowers.
All seekers are roads looking for a map to follow.
Preludes after the fact, that set out to look for their own endings.
Be a star. And keep your afterlife behind you
like the shadow of the last form you cast upon the earth.
Be an eye that doesn’t leave any room between the moon
and it’s reflection so that the substance of life is seeing
not that you’re a distinct and separate entity
that cosmically identifies with your exclusion
but that you’re wholly within easy reach of everything
that depends upon you for its existence. Just as every leaf
you let fall in the autumn like an adage of wisdom
about how you can know the world by its fruits
first came to the tree like a smile to your face
when you realized your imagination was
the inconceivable dynamic of a creative state of grace.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LIGHT DOESN'T TALK TO THE FLOWERS ANYMORE


THE LIGHT DOESN’T TALK TO THE FLOWERS ANYMORE

The light doesn’t talk to the flowers anymore
the way it used to. I can feel a lot of shadows touching my face
as if it were written in braille. Acid in the rain.
Tears of dry ice in the housewell. Weathervanes
knocking at the door to get out of the storms
they used to revel in, and the storms themselves,
no kamikazes riding a divine wind against the Mongols,
at best, a mango-flavoured tempest in a Japanese teapot.
And even Zen can’t put an edge on the full moon
to cut through everything like a harvest being threshed.

No songs from the birds that used to wake me up in the morning,
only these spiders weaving their smokey laryngeal webs
like a voice that got stuck in the throat of a chimney
when it forgot, when you sing from the heart,
you don’t need a medium or a seance. Not even an art
that’s interested in what you’re saying unless
you’re obeying a grammar of headstones that don’t know
what you’re talking about until it’s not worth
bringing up anymore in anybody’s language
whether the metaphors are living or not. Words in a bonebox.
Locks and bars on our eyes. Dumb-bells stuck through our tongues
like someone was doing voodoo on the leaves
or the baton of a drum major in a parade
that’s never going to come, afraid to leave home on its own.

Since I was a boy in the late Cretaceous,
I’ve always wondered about the timing
of the asteroids and comets and why
they had such an impact upon the dinosaurs.
But I hear they were already on their way to extinction
because of the earth’s own volcanic activity,
and, at worst, the asteroid just accelerated
the flywheel of birth and death a bit.
Bad spin on an antiquated myth of origin.
Better luck next time, but right now the mammals
have evolved so far beyond that they’re destroying themselves
in a long, slow nuclear winter of attrition
that’s putting a pillow over everybody’s face
like the cloud cover of a screening myth with an air force
that buffers the light with our own ashes
and much prefers smouldering to ignition.

What did Berryman say in a letter to Wang Wei,
centuries after the fact, just before he jumped from a bridge
into an ice-covered river with the Pulitzer Prize in his hands?---
O to talk to you in a freedom from ten thousand things.
Be dust myself pretty soon. Not now. Or words to that effect.
But just the same, it’s hard to get into the skull
of the man anymore without the flame of a candle or a dragon
to see where you’re going in case you nudge an atom the wrong way
and bring on another astronomical catastrophe inadvertently.
Minefield covered in snow like a pioneer cemetery
buried on the hilltop of an avalanche with a view of the valley below.
Dangerous, too, to move among the stars freely
like a rogue planet without a starmap, causing perturbations
in the orbits of the shepherd moons on an exploratory flyby
to see if there’s any kind of intelligent life you can identify with.

The nights are getting darker. The stars are moving further apart.
Sooner or later everything tends toward empty space
until there isn’t even any room left in it for itself.
And nothing ever dawns upon you there but endless entropy
and time comes to a sudden halt where spaces runs out
and the bones of the fossilized stars are left like empty chairs
in a dark auditorium with bad acoustics.

I’ll write it on the wind now, while I have the chance.
I’ll write it like a fire in smoke at a ghost dance.
I’ll write it in blood and tears and rivers and stars.
I’ll write it in scars and wounds as deep as roses.
I’ll write it on the skins of the snakes that I’ve shed
like serpent fire running up the lunar thread of my spinal cord
like a lightning rod tattooing the clouds of unknowing
with the insights of fireflies into the mysterious darkness of life,
who know that one glimpse is enough of a Big Bang
to satisfy even the blind who go looking for their eyes
with their eyes like a windfall in a thunderstorm of picture-music
though they’re still hanging on to the same old lifeline
like an umbilical cord between the backdoor and the barn
in blizzard of stars and butterflies. I’ll write it in light.

I’ll write it on the eyelids of eclipses and occultations alike.
I’ll write it on the foreheads of the mute rocks
in runic striations of glaciers retreating north in tears,
I’ll write it on my bones before I’m buried under the hearthstones
with a big rock on my chest like an asteroid
rolled over a cave to make sure I’ll never rise again
like Jesus and Muhammad said I would if I was good,
or Ali Baba and the forty thieves muttering their shibboleths
on the thresholds of an artificial paradise, in case I wasn’t.
Now is the light. Now is the loving and the living.
Now is the hour for the hidden nightbirds to raise their voices
in the sacred groves of the moon to celebrate
the brevity of their own longing for the unattainable
blossoming on the dead branch of their aspiration.

There’s only so much time, and then, in a moment or two, forever.
The heart sings awhile like a red-winged black bird on a green bough.
And then the eyeless silence of the stars
who have looked down upon nothing for 14.3 billion lightyears
and watched the fireflies dancing to the music
of their own tiny hearts, lockets of light, of insight,
that open like seeds and eyes sown into the abyss
to let all winged things, and even star-nosed moles can fly,
out of the cages of their earthbound solitude like dragons
taken down like occult books from their hardwood shelves,
with the wingspan of constellations singing in the night to themselves.

PATRICK WHITE

Thursday, November 29, 2012

HAUNTED BY LONG SORROWS


HAUNTED BY LONG SORROWS

Haunted by long sorrows like a ghost
in a lighthouse on the moon with no one to warn
stay away, stay away from me,
I’m a radioactive dump site, the slag of stars.
A snakepit of downed powerlines
dancing without a snake charmer
to the backbeat of dark energies
that sweat me like a dragon in heat.
The moon is the urn of the ashes
of a nuclear reactor. My sister muse,
and, little sun, that shines at midnight,
look kindly upon my total eclipse.

I am not your deathmask, but I burn,
I burn like white phosphorus in the starcluster
of the Pleiades. Infernal incense
screening the smell of a scorched heart
that’s always in camouflage when it prays
in the shrine of a furnace to a fire-god
to put out the flames, put out the flames,
the drapes of the poppies are burning
like Molotov cocktails. Am I still as safe
as I was thirty years ago in a house
that’s burned to the ground? Or is this
another terrorist attack on my embassy?

The eyes in my crystal skull that change
dimensions like the lenses in a telescope,
are thawing like glaciers of the last ice-age
and the windows are crying earth-shaped
pears of glass in a flashflood of global warming.

Someone lend me a fire axe and I’ll chop
the head of the moon off like a hole in the floor
we can all fall through like followers of Lucifer.
Venus takes a swan dive in the morning
on the day of enlightenment. Sometimes
taking a fall for the sake of the other guy
is the only way you have of standing your ground.

Drive me out into the wilderness to cleanse your sins.
Pelt me with doomsday asteroids. Ever wonder
what the scapegoats are preaching in the desert
to the vipers and the scorpions that glisten
like the bling of hot jewellery lost in the hot sands
of the sun? Tar me in asphalt and feather me
like a pillowcase that has nightmares about flying.
And I’ll return with the pearl of a black dwarf
between my teeth like an implosion of light
deepened into a dark master of esoteric gravity.
And I’ll pull you down like a moonbeam by the ankle
into the dark mirror of the lake like a snapping turtle
anchors a swan in the starmud on the bottom.

I’ll show you the life that thrives out of reach
of the light. We’ll make a pilgrimage of the smoking fumaroles
of your subconscious, and I’ll show you
the whole zoo of surrealistically sentient life forms
mythically inflated like the giant squids and krakens,
sea cucumbers ten times their surface size
living on the hydrogen sulphide of your magmatic desires
like the R-complex of rotten cosmic eggs
that leave an evil aftertaste in the mouths
of the snakes, dragons, and crocodiles
that spit out their yolks like gamma ray bursts
of bad sunshine sublimating the dry ice of your eyes
into the tears of a ghost at its own exorcism.

Like a massive planet in an outer orbit
on the horns of a dilemma, I’ll purge
the black halo of comets you wear like a corona
in an eclipse, and clear your solar system
of that laurel of thorns wrapped around your head
like a galactic turban of razor wire
uncoiling like the spiralled wavelength
of the God particle of a snake in the mystic fire
of another martyred heresy that set you free
at the stand up pulpit and pyre of my own auto de fe
to aspire abysmally higher than the death of desire.

PATRICK WHITE

THREE FLAMES, MY GOLDFISH DANCING LIKE STARS


THREE FLAMES, MY GOLDFISH DANCING LIKE STARS

Three flames, my goldfish dancing like stars
in a telescopic lens with a narrow field of view.
Eerie slate blue in the blank windows
across the street, as if they once had eyes.
Blind prophets in the dawn. What do they see?
One poet on nightwatch sitting in an apartment
by himself with the lights out, listening
to what the silence has to say about everything,
nothing, the way the sky is beginning
to keep its stars to itself as if
the great liberties of shining
they took with the night are practising
the greater discretion of candle wicks
that someone lights up and someone blows out
and they end up bending back on themselves
like solar flares, or ingrown hairs,
or tiny black monks concealed under the cowls
of this holy hour like shadows of noon in the sun.

All the deep, soul-searching questions
make peace with all the elusive answers
they’ve been searching for like a battered bird
the eye of a storm. And the lies of life prove
vastly less intriguing than its truths.
Every firefly of insight, a dragon breathing
in the distance, exhaling chimney sparks
like a furnace in a dream talking in its sleep.
Plumes of smoke dissipating in the air
from the fumaroles of gentle exorcisms,
ghosts trying to get back to their graves
before the day starts to take itself too seriously.

The numinous aftertaste of all the afterlives
I wanted to live in my mouth, one’s as good
as another, and I’m beginning to exalt
a little in living this one as a creative endeavour
that’s been trying to achieve me all along,
not the other way around. At least
it amuses me to think so though I’m not expecting
a masterpiece. The same eye by which
I see the star is the eye by which the star sees me.
Interdependent origination. Cosmic intimacy.
All these broken mirrors that have given birth to my face.
All these Cepheid variables drumming on the hide
they tanned from my heart like the pulse
of an enraptured ghost dance around a blazing fire.
Listen to one solitary night bird and you can hear
the whole choir singing backup to the human condition.

Compassion is the sweetest sadness when the stars
bend down to kiss the burn like a sunspot
soothing its feet in the lunar shadows of the mindstream
on a long firewalk across the cool sands of a new moonrise
over the Sea of Tranquillity. Why walk
when you can row your way across or fly
like a waterbird through the skies of a million eyes at once?
Mark one jewel and they’re all marked for life.
Whisper to the willows in starlight
and you can hear the booming of the abysmal echo
on the far side of the universe like life in a small town.

When life isn’t copulating in the brothels
of a false dawn, it’s the prelude of a longing
to impart your heart to someone like a secret
you couldn’t reveal to anyone else like a humming bird
that’s caught the ear of the holly hocks.
You enter the dream without knowing
what you’re going to wake up to.
The empty silo keeps the hunger alive.
It’s the full harvest that blows the candle out
beside your death bed. Fulfilments of failure.

No one’s a sailor until they’ve drowned
running aground on the lunar reefs
of an enchanted island you washed up on
like a lost cause doomed to be found in the morning
like the guiding light of a dead starfish
still shining out of habit in a dawn that pales
by comparison when a sorceress sets her easel
up on the beach and begins to sketch
a starmap of you that’s an exact likeness
of the vision you had of her just before you died.

There’s always another side to a black hole.
Turn the emptiness of the hourglass over
like a drink you’ve finished crossing the bar
and it’s a different world with different stars.

PATRICK WHITE

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

PATINAS OF DISTINCTION


PATINAS OF DISTINCTION

Patinas of distinction trying to green the terminated poets.
Death drools its cruel elixirs. Perfume
from ambergris, whale vomit for those
who have the stomach for it, dung
under the snow, then come the squabbling sparrows
to tend upon God in her rehabilitated ruins.

Literary forensics putting flesh back on the skull.
Red threads of blood in the nests
they build for themselves like pyres of cosmic eggs
in the tree where the poet hung
like a poached bird, a plumb bob of the depths,
a pendulum in a still life with choreographed knives.

The cooing pigeons who write with flight feathers
plucked from fledgling suicides. Water has a voice
of its own, the blood, the wind, three octaves
of fire. Here come the uninspired
with insulation, rebar and cement.
And even road kill’s got an undertaker.

A telescope’s more of a work of art
with a poetic vision of the stars
all waiting to greet you like long lost relatives
and friends, at the end of a dark tunnel
than the barrow tombs of all these
blind, star-nosed moles grubbing
among their damp root fires
to add their smouldering voices
in Braille like singularities
to a dying tradition of black holes.

Equinoctial careerists of their fair-minded lies,
they damn the solstice for taking
more of a stand in summer and winter
like a Stonehenge of the light
and lament the evanescence
of spring and fall that sheds them
like roseate petals of snake skin
that strike the heart like toxic sins of omission.

The sheep are hunting the tigers to death
and there are maggots in the moonlight
like toxicara worms eating the hearts and eyes
out of Mozart and Liszt to see what they saw,
to see what they did, but maggots
never turn into butterflies, and in time,
their lives are fined for fouling the footpath
like commas of excrement in the aftermath
of all the winged heels that stepped in it
like Sylvia Plath in a hive of killer bees
making a grand entrance of her exit
like the black queen of the uninhabited planets
in the corona of the starcluster in Cancer.

PATRICK WHITE  

SNOW ON THE STREETS


SNOW ON THE STREETS

Snow on the streets grooved by tires
into a bar-code. A band burning its first c.d.
Garbage bags humped against the parking meters
like terraformed drunks in an albino mindscape.
I want to sleep. But savage clouds are fuming
with moonlight. Oblivion’s sweet, my little death,
gentle as a snowflake but the prelude to it
is pierced by cauterizing anxieties
like a needle park for voodoo dolls.

I’d rather be a butterfly, a pinwheel
spinning on an axis through my thorax
but you can’t have it all. I tilt away from the sun
at perigee and try to stretch the night out
like a budget of meds for the month.
The dark’s a cool poultice that draws
the infection out of my dreams. It
sublimates my sorrows like dry ice
that skipped the tears. I don’t want to get wet
in an ice-age. Crucified by icicles
that drip like syringes in a limestone cave.

I smear my face in red ochre, blood
with desiccated binders, oil pastels,
and lay my prophetic bones under the firepit.
I place a great stone on my chest
like the weight of the world
to make sure I never get up again
but pain is a homeless ghost
and I don’t think, even with my knees
popped under my chin like an embryo
every part of me is going to fit
my place at the table like a grave.
I throw a few cornflowers in
and wander off with my spirit
like a thought wave that’s tagging along.

I chip away at my heart
like an obsidian lunette
with a bone that’s edging it
into a phalanged Clovis point
for a throwing spear to penetrate
the mammoth of the wooly moon.
I think I’m going extinct.
I’ve culled too many stars.
The herds are thinning over my head.
The green of the traffic lights
that turned yellow in the fall
drops its single, blood-stained berry in the snow.
As the birds and the bards say
of the chokecherries, ripeness is all.

Snow-blinded by this white page,
and blazing is a kind of blindness,
I want to leave something behind
for people to follow like the tracks
of a wounded caribou writing
in the cuneiform Braille of my starmud
you can read with your fingertips
like a hungry clan that hasn’t eaten for a week.

I don’t want to be sought or thawed out by anyone
who isn’t burning my fat in their lamps
or sewing my hide with a splinter
of my femur, threading my sinews
through the eye of a needle
stitching me up in an emergency room
like the mouth of a wound
that’s had its say, and holds its tongue
like the exhausted flavour of silence
masticating a wad of pitch and pine gum
like the sacred syllable of the spear point
I was trying to make an era ago
before I got stuck in this one like a tarpit,
an exile returning on a migratory journey
to the prodigal museum of my homecoming exit.

PATRICK WHITE  

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

ALL THE DUFF AND DETRITUS OF MEANING IN MY HEAD


ALL THE DUFF AND DETRITUS OF MEANING IN MY HEAD

All the duff and detritus of meaning in my head.
Turmoil of celestial sediments in a tormented creekbed
of starmud. Images and symbols, glimpses and insights,
effluvia of indelible impressions that focus
a whole lifetime into a locket of tears, mingling
in the waters of life like the tributary of a deeper feeling
entering my mindstream like a first violin
in a symphony of picture-music conducted
by the silence of owls with blood on their talons
singing Allah hu, Allah hu, Allah hu under their breath
like a Sufi dancing like the axis of a galactic umbrella
at the crossroads of enlightenment and extinction. I don’t mean
to be thematic about all this. It’s more a synthesis
of happenstantial contradictions and random nuances
in a matrix of suggestive wavelengths having sex
in a lunar snakepit like a triple x porn flick
wasted on a blind prophet who had already seen too much.

The sting of the most beautiful sorrows
ages like wine in the catacombs of your heartwood
if you let it sleep a long time like a passage of poetry
you never understood, but could taste its hidden harmony
as if you were drinking life straight out of your skull.
A rapture in the absence that lingers like a ghost of smoke
on a bridge that burnt a long time ago,
where it hopes to meet you again, though it knows
it can’t, the timing of our departures less crucial
than the content of our arrivals. The stars
pale in the dawn. Venus in Virgo. And the Pleiades.
Funny how we try to hang on to what we’ve already let go of.
So many lovers, friends, intriguing enemies, gone.

Dream figures that didn’t wake up with us
in the same surrealistic play of dark energies we did.
Farewell is always the shadow of a sad hope
standing in the doorway staring out
into the terrible emptiness of threshed fields in autumn,
weeping like a watercolour in the rain
back into the river we drew it from. And the wisdom
that comes like an afterlife, meagre consolation
for the excruciating transformations we endure
to adapt a little happiness to it like an exile on foreign soil.
I spread bread crumbs on the snow for the birds.
I hang meat on the clothesline for the wolves
when winter turns against everything that lives.
I wrap burlap on the roots of the rose the way
I used to bundle the scarf of my daughter
on her way to school when her breath
was a wraith on the air of a dispossessed exorcism
yet to come, and I would be the one she disposed of
as if the parents, not the children, were hostages to fortune.

So be it. Walk on. Bite the bullet. Swallow the loss.
Look at it through the eyes of an experienced star
speculating on what all the light comes to in the end.
What it all amounts to when the shining itself
must bud and bloom and fall. I love like a mammal
but I grieve like a reptile. I don’t show any feeling at all.
My blood returns to absolute zero. Entropy
as a kind of self-defence. I whip the air with my tongue
like lightning for some real or imagined offence.
By day, I scrounge for the sun on the rock of my skull.
By night, I wait for comets and meteors down by the river
like the eclipse of an advent calendar marked for extinction.
I can blaze like a dragon sage. But I live in a coma
like a neuron star upstaged by a comedic deathmask
and my mind is leaking out like anti-freeze through my hair.

PATRICK WHITE

AWAKE AT SIX A.M.


AWAKE AT SIX A.M.

Awake at six a.m. The clock ticks, nicks,
flintknaps little pieces of my life off,
a French executioner’s sword quicker and neater
than the sloppy axe of the moon
naping the strike. I swan on the block
to the drum roll of a panicked palpitant
among kitchen utensils. I’m the crucifix
of Cygnus in the Summer Triangle,
arms outspread. I’m severed like a carrot.
I’m the headless horseman. An acephalic shallot.

Someone yanks me up out of the earth
and holds me up by a gout of hair
like a prize turnip with a characteristic look
of freeze-framed despair on my face
as if it had just been amputated.
I had a snake transplant. Now I’m Medusa.
The star, Algol, in the grip of Perseus.
The ghoul of my own solitude, I can heal
or I can enflame the disease with an unclean needle.
Beware. In case of no urgency. Break glass.

My torso sits at its desk and tries to write.
Headless as the rest. A skull, a book,
an ashtray and some candlelight, coffee
and a keyboard clotted with sticky nicotine
and the finger sweat of a thousand poems.
Stem cells and salamanders come to mind.
Regenerative urns scattering my ashes
like sunspots on a Flemish complexion,
crows in the dusk. My hands feel
like a pair of mouldy gloves, newly exhumed,
but they do the work of twenty spiders.
Ten silkworms gnawing on a mulberry bush.

Prussian blue with an aura of gegenshein,
I wonder if the windows ever wish they had eyes.
I can see right through their deathmasks
with my X-ray insights. The thrum
of the emergency helicopter lands nearby
like a dragonfly on the hospital’s lily pad.
Nightshift angels bloom like nurse’s caps.
The war memorial is wounded by felt poppies
dressed for the weather this time of year,
like a haemophiliac that never stops bleeding
for the boys of summer who went off to war
wielding their ploughshares like swords.

Good-bye Jerod. Good-bye, Joe. I see you
baling corpses like strawdogs after a bayonet charge.
I grieve like chlorine. My tears burn like mustard gas.
My grandfather died spitting up blood
on a sheet of newspaper beside the bed.
Is it any wonder I’m staining this unexpurgated page
like a Rorschach test conjuring up the simulacra
that bear an interior resemblance to me
to see if I can put my head to rest
like a jellyfish parachute candling
in its own tentacles like unbound spinal cords
of serpent fire striking reflexively at the unwary air?

Take this bar code of a chromosome off my heart.
This emission spectrum with genetically modified
Fraunhofer lines, these frayed deltas of life
in the palms of my hands. I am not
a product of my times. I won’t be sold
like the child of a Goth for dogmeat,
though the vultures are in a holding pattern overhead.
I’m not road kill. I won’t be culled
by a hunting license north of highway 7.
I’ll give myself to the wolves furthest from my door.
Let the Aztecs go to war if they want a human sacrifice.

I’ll die by my own wits like a lunatic
raising a skull cup of blood to the noble enemy
of the god I deprived of my barbarous piety
as she does me, food, love, money, sleep, respect
and this flickering head I’ve made a candle holder of
so the light can weep for hours until it burns out
like Aldebaran or Antares in another false dawn
that wires me bloodshot flowers. Eyeless carnations
freaked by the scarlet crackling
of another seismic breakdown
of incommunicable excruciations.

PATRICK WHITE