SOMETIMES THE DEEPER I'M LOST THE HAPPIER I SEEM

SOMETIMES THE DEEPER I’M LOST THE HAPPIER I SEEM

Sometimes the deeper I’m lost the happier I seem.

Missing. I go looking for myself

with Mason jars full of fireflies and a crystal skull

I send out like search parties into the woods

but I’m getting more selective as I get older

about who finds me. I’m a lighthouse

cowled in the hoody and cape of an eclipse.

A sinister cardinal with a heart of gold

that’s been burnished in the forges of hell.

I doubt if I’m anything at all except

the bone rack of the skeleton I climb up on

to paint new provisional creation myths

to accommodate the growing sensibilities of the stars.

I keep tearing myself down and building myself up

as occasion and opportunity require.

Known a few angels that got in my way for my own good

but said, no, you’re looking for my brother, Jacob,

and went on limping my own way with the old demons

that keep things running smooth as the last ice berg

of a comet in an ice age riding its own thawing

like global warming breaks the spirit of a wild glacier.

It’s not a warning. No one needs to convert the Roman Empire.

The stars come out in the dark. The flowers

come out in the light. I’ve got a damaged heart

but there’s more art in the bruise than in the caress.

You let the dead speak through you. You can hurt your voice.

And what the living who accuse you of putting words

in their mouths like cockatoos in the aviary of a zoo,

have to say for themselves, when called to account,

is self abuse however you try to dissuade them.

The way of the stump is the jedi of trees in a swamp.

I’m rooted like a molar in a lower jawbone.

I’m the sunken caldera in the archipelago

of an island hopping volcano and I’ve got my fault lines

like a small delta of tears reaching the sea

in the corners of my landlocked, Mongolian eyes.

Most of my genes have come to me as a surprise

from my ancestry spread out all over the earth

as if their prophetic skulls were trying to cover

all their bets. I have high cheekbones like the ledges

of a precipice I’m always on the brink of.

In the absence of a soul, I get by with a little love

from my friends like a cowboy Zen master

from the lunatic fringe of the West Coast sixties.

Good possibility I’d scare you in my silver-buckled,

black leather belted avatar, but it’s the snake skin

of a new moon I don’t intend to shed just to blend in

with the inoffensive twilights of a wedding cake into yoga.

Not as tough anymore as I used to be, but it still

gives the mail lady a cheap karmic thrill

if I play the part. Never hurts to act as if

you’re into the dark, nemetic arts of the occult.

She says my shades look like the irisless pupils of a shark.

I tell her they’re just eyepatches to cover a detached retina

in my left eye that hurts like a spider wincing

in the glare of the flashlight that caught it in the corner

like a moment to remember forever on You Tube.

In truth, I’m a hermit thrush. I’m inspired by the dark.

I can wow you with the way I keep

my heart in my mouth like a strawberry chocolate

without getting lockjaw from the rusty nails of the saint

who keeps following me around trying to pull

the fangs of the snake with the claws of a crab

when what he really needs are the dental pliers

of the first and last crescents of the moon,

but his polymorphous, atavistic perversity

isn’t nuanced enough for that. And there’s no gold

in the albino ore of my happy, happy crowns.

Comes a time when your body begins to feel

like a used mattress someone’s throwing out

like a corpse from a trunk in front of the Sally Anne.

I work out like a hair sculptor labouring in carrara marble

but I’m not a masterpiece of Michelangelo,

more Moses than David, but I’m still not standing

in the puddle of a melting candle of body fat

at a black mass. I drink my own blood. I eat

my own flesh when there’s nothing else in the house

but the last full moon of tunafish in a Mayan calendar.

This might be the Last Supper, and I’m sitting here

in an upper room by myself, but I’ll go without

if I must, give up my place at this desk below the salt

like a peasant abdicating his throne to avoid

the protocols of the princes he’s trying to be free of

even if they say their coup d’etats are all about love.

I’m not a tenant farmer. I’m not an habitant along the river.

If I pay tithes at all these days, it’s to an extortion racket

that threatens to cut my secular lights and heat off

or the internet when things get really rough.

I juggle things around like a balancing act on black ice.

As Willie P. once sang before he died, wouldn’t

be in this mess if I could take my own advice.

But who am I to tell anyone what to do

unless they’re hurting someone else, and isn’t

that precisely the whole point of art? To get yourself

out of the way to let other things come into play?

To disappear like a volunteer at an exorcism?

To be the gold that synarthritically mends the crack

in the skull cup of the Great Schism that broke

like a collection plate at a Japanese tea ceremony?

Even if sometimes taking shelter from the storm

can lead to Pearl Harbour or Megiddo in the valley

of Jezreel. Or Icarus trying to hang on to his tar and feathers

like a wing and a prayer in a two bedroom apartment in Perth,

with north facing light as circumpolar as the wheel

of death and birth someone once told me they were turning

like a cosmic starfish, but I took as an idle boast

and went on burning like Arcturus caught like a kite

in the powerlines of a sacrificial host. Less Holy Ghost

than a last lifeboat drifting like a lost starmap

to the jewels in the land of the lotus eaters on the West Coast.

PATRICK WHITE