THIS GHOST OF A VOICE

THIS GHOST OF A VOICE

This ghost of a voice isn’t doomed

by the silence of your false dawn.

I’ve outlived many more graves

than you have stones to cast at me.

You might fancy yourself a nabob

of taste and sophistication

but you’re afraid to step out of yourself

into this wilderness where everything

is anointed toxically in a crown of fangs.

The jealousy of shepherd moons

grazes a small herd of scapegoats

on the astroturf of greener pastures

than I could ever imagine

the rising tides of these lunar dunes

the wavelengths of the vipers negotiate

through the coral reefs like the shadows

of sun dials in the abysmal valleys

of the quiet mountains, ever transcending

the lowest stations of the superficiality

you aspire to like the polish

on an illustrious edition of emptiness.

I may not have been so enculturated

in this wilderness to the luxuries

of time and space you dawdle away

in your walled garden with prophylactic editors

at the lapis lazuli bull gates of Babylon

you dream of riding in triumph through

like Alexander winning some strategic

literary award, or Nero on a reading tour of Greece,

and it’s less of a plausible improbability

than it is a probable impossibility

I’ll ever become so avuncular in my attitude

some Faberge Easter bunny somewhere

isn’t going to look upon me as dangerous.

That said, which of your neighbours

dumped the carcass of the moon

with that gibbous skull of a goatshead

in the tainted wellsprings of the muses

you drink from like spit out of the mouths

of hydra-headed acephalic friends of the Medusa?

And when it gets right down to ghost writing

the memoirs of famously underestimated

trap door spiders in hard bound books

I’d still rather sting like a rattlesnake

that bite like a swarm of blackflies

singing like a starcluster of black dwarfs

down by the lake in May when the light of the mind

is still too intense to risk the mirrors

you hold up to your narcissistic nature, getting a suntan.

The thirteenth house of the dispossessed

might not have many friends in the zodiac

it can rely on, but then there are more

first magnitude stars burning like heretics at the stake

on the wrong side of the ecliptic

gone slumming in my neck of the woods

than there is phosphorus in the entirety

of your collected matchbooks in a library

of sodden fireworks that fizzled out

before they were lit like a sad substitute

for the Leonids at the peak of their radiant downfalls.

Baa, baa, black sheep. If you’ve lived

long enough in darkness as I have

it’s easy to tell a real eclipse from a lullaby

trying to pull the wool over our eyes

to mystify the starmaps with blizzards of tinfoil

attempting to evade the draconian radar

of anti ballistic missile systems like a low flying kite.

Or a snow globe of the moon with no ice caps.

The truly inspired live in a world

where they never take cigarette butts for granted.

Under the gravestones of the lowliest of the low

you can sometimes find dark jewels

more lustrous than diamonds in the black haloes

of comets skinny dipping in a sun that shines at midnight.

Have you ever had sex with a muse

when she was hungry and they were about

to turn the hydro off like a lightbulb in her housewell

or have you always lain down with a sump-pump

in the basement of your Pierian spring?

Vox populi with just a trace

of an aristocratic accent you picked up at prep school.

Preparation for what? Does it matter

or would it really be too, too, uncool to care?

Laissez fare. So turn the weathervanes

once they realize they haven’t got the wings

for lift off, they’re never going to get off

the barn roof, cock of the walk or not,

however they strut like astronauts,

the haven’t got the right stuff for ignition.

It’s not the alarm clock that wakes the dawn up.

Or do you still think the fool you send off

to jester school, sooner or later, will return to his own,

a sacred clown? Do you still plead with the muse

like a lost and found for things you never

had to go very far to seek? Speak quickly

before you make mellifluous liars out of the bees

coming and going in and out of the mouth

of that wax deathmask you wear

like a helmet of insincere honey over your head

as if you were a dead ringer for a real scar

Zen jousting in a cold war with your own stinger?

PATRICK WHITE