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