IS IT SUCH A LIGHT TRIGGER BETWEEN YOUR LIFE AND DEATH

IS IT SUCH A LIGHT TRIGGER BETWEEN YOUR LIFE AND DEATH

Is it such a light trigger between your life and death

all you need do is squeeze the last crescent of the waning moon

with the merest of thoughts for it to go off? Done.

No more complication, at least, that you know of.

Or is this about crushing the rotten strawberry

at the heart of the vile world because

your mystic specifics keep being uprooted

from the ground of being like a unique weed

in a generalized garden where comas are preferred

like cultivated columbine to your kind of wild enlightenment?

I’m not going to talk to you like a piece

of fragile crystal, or a bull having a nervous breakdown

in a china shop, wondering if he should saw his horns off

to keep from doing any further damage to a chipped swan.

You want to let your hair down like the willow

of a chandelier in an ice storm, I don’t intend

to stand under it trying to hold you up like a mobile

of the solar system losing its grip on time and space.

Not because I don’t care. Not because

I’m an elder shaman of the sixties who had

a happier time of it than you. I didn’t,

though I wish you’d been there to have

your most hallucinogenic delusions understand that.

I won’t chrome the bumpers you get hit by in life

or buff the blood off to prove you can make

a meteoric success of yourself if you know

how to spin the first impact it made upon you.

Some things leave you lying in the gutter

like a crumpled doll or the late Triassic.

Life’s a risk. Death’s a risk. Avoiding either

is, too. I take one look at you in your plaid tan

and I see a Pre-Raphaelite beauty with a Sunni body

and a Shia soul trying to indoctrinate a day care center

into infantile acts of precocious terrorism.

You’re that old woman Muhammad who loved

women, perfume and prayer, warned

everybody about looking ahead to these end times,

who took a strong rope, like a spinal cord,

and unwound it into a million weak threads

until she found the silken trophy line of a spider

at its loom, she could hang herself with

like an anchor with no sense of buoyancy

or the plumb bob of a corpse fathoming her own depths.

Who taught you to play so seriously you

closed the theatres and scourged the brothels

with razorwire in a danse macabre of flagellants?

When you turn that deathmask over like the carapace

of the world turtle, whose face is it you’re trying to save

by recasting it as a cement portrait of a mime?

You’d look better painting it in moonlight on water.

The palette of your multi-coloured hair, a lure

on a fishing hook that throws back more

of what it catches than it keeps. Just for the fun of it,

exalting in the power of your magical absurdity

to enhance your charms like the spiritual eclipse

of a moonrise smearing Gothic mascara on your eyelids.

Meaningless, isn’t it? Are you devastated

by the stars’ sense of timing that they go on shining

like idiots with grins on their faces while you’re

burning black holes in your heart with a cigarette heater?

Clarity’s an art, not a failure of imagination.

There isn’t a star in the sky that doesn’t know the dark.

You just haven’t grown the eyes for it yet

or learned to turn the light around fast enough

to catch a glimpse of yourself making a death wish

on a falling star that might shock the disinterested fireflies

into realizing some constellations outside the zodiac

need more than fifteen degrees of separation

to stay on the bright side of things like a Tarot pack

with a positive attitude that lies every chance it gets

about the truth of things as they are at the expense

of living a two-eyed life without a prayer wheel in training

for balance. Poor planet. No moons. No fossils

in that Burgess Shale of asteroids you surround yourself with

ready to throw the first stone at yourself like a face

in the mirror of an orbiting telescope you can’t

clearly identify with unless it’s in transit by contrast.

Living isn’t a consolation for getting along without it.

And death isn’t a door prize a starting pistol

hands out at the gate for being the one millionth horse

to overthrow its rider and get out of the blocks way too late

to bet on finishing anything ahead of the pack.

Snake-eyes, baby, then seven come eleven. Things

happen in tandem like binary stars everytime

you throw the dice even in a random universe

that doesn’t enjoy listening to its own advice

it’s important to remember when you’re sinking like this

into one of those tarpits you bleed like black pearls

on a rosary of miscarriages without a new moonrise

heaven’s got an air force, but not much of a navy.

The abyss is full of elemental hydrogen dirigibles

that put their fires out like submersibles in the waters of life.

One torch up. One torch down. Like the dadaphors

of ancient Rome trying to synchronize the hinges of the New Year

like lapwings to the flight plans of imperial eagles.

PATRICK WHITE