Saturday, November 3, 2012

THE DEMONICALLY ENLIGHTENED SEE FURTHER INTO HELL


THE DEMONICALLY ENLIGHTENED SEE FURTHER INTO HELL

The demonically enlightened see further into hell
than the light the angel eyes see by. Who knows
a woman better than when you’ve lost her?
So I know the bliss of heaven as I know
the depth of the regrets of Pandemonium.
Both ends of the telescope. The vapour of the rose
and the smoke of oil fires throwing snakes
and black feathers on the pyres of the wildflowers
that shed their petals like scales. A white star
in the arms of a black hole it’s dancing around binarily.
The via positiva coiled around the via negativa
like the copulative way of day and night,
helical theta waves killing and healing,
changing their spin contemporaneously
in synchronicity with the charged starfields
in every creative moment we live here to shine
a light out of the darkness of awareness
we haven’t seen before. And I say,

prophetically hooded in snake skin,
this interim in the late fall, this fateful pause
in the roseate third eye of a galactic hurricane
bearing down upon us like diamond-edge blades
in a threshing field full of scarecrows
that incorporated the crop into the strawdogs
of their bodies, is the Age of Disappointment,
the bursting of the myriad balloons of the multiverse
blooded like roses hemorrhaging on their own thorns.

We grow older faster than we used to
trying to keep up with the pace of our longevity
fleeing from the light of the way things are,
one jump ahead of our youth, as if the ship
were abandoning the plague rat of time
by scuttling itself on the reefs of a foreign eternity
wearing the deathmask of the moon
that gapes down upon us all in shock
at what we’ve done to ourselves in the green room
like an atlas of shattered mirrors slashing out at us
in a frenzy of reflections that make things clear as blood.

Disappointment is the prelude to desecration.
And though we all hype our optimistic overviews
of the text to come, we haven’t seen anything yet
like the wind that will knock us out of our words
like the empty nests of the birds that had heard enough
to stop singing before us. The terrible stillness
of the first sign of a red alert in heaven
and the great silence that overwhelms
the air raid sirens of hell. And all
the opinionated lighthouses and foghorns
that made a career out of not taking their warnings
seriously enough, snuffed out and blinded
like the mouths and eye-sockets of prophetic skulls
in the decaying orbits of an avalanche of asteroids
taking their lead from the insurgent cells of shepherd moons.
A ravening species of life that eats itself
out of house and home like a cannibalistic planet
that lives off its own, gone antibiotically insane.

But even a total eclipse doesn’t cover the sun wholly
and the corona gleams through the valleys
of the lunar mountains like Bailey’s Beads.
And there’s even a dim halo around the rim of a black hole.
And among the condemned you can sometimes see
a begrudging kind of merit that shines out
of the slag and slurry of the excruciating transformations
of the ore that’s being refined by suffering and experience,
a black jewel that radiates dark energy
even in the false dawn of an unworthy afterlife.

Just below the scar tissue of the earth’s crust,
seven kilometers down in a diamond mine
blind on the coal road to the light,
thermophilic bacteria have regenerated life on the planet
after near annihilation three times.
So if any of us survive ourselves in this empire
of mineralized cells and exotic metals
out of our exuberant neurons what photons
of our bioluminescence might jump orbitals
and spread like foxfire across the scorched earth again,
casting the ashes of stars in the urns of the rose-hips
on the roots trying to cling in the cold
to some notion of spring that keeps their bloodstream
blooming in their underground hearts
like one of the more graceful arts of survival?

PATRICK WHITE

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