Tuesday, May 15, 2012

MURDER ME AGAIN WITH YOUR VOICE


MURDER ME AGAIN WITH YOUR VOICE

Murder me again with your voice,
the moon, your maculate heart, the weapon of your choice.
I am space, light, water, air, stars beyond your reach.
Meteor showers have been looking for my species for years
And still I thrive like glass eyes with real tears,
in the shadows of your amorous extinctions.

You can snuff a thousand votive candles out.
You can desecrate the shrine where I bury my feelings
like the small bodies of gentle birds
beside the ashes of the dragons that burnt out
like solar flares returning to the source.
You stab at the wind. You can try to ruin the sun
with a pettiness that isn’t worthy of the moon
that sends no night bird out to look for you
though my longing says you’ve been missing for years.

Nothing against you, nothing especially for,
though I thought I saw for a moment Bailey’s Beads
peeking through the lunar valleys of your last eclipse.
And there was a time I’d trade two of my fingers
just to have a taste of your lips again as they were
when the apple orchard covered your nakedness
in the blossoms of the first drafts
that couldn’t improve on you by revising anything.
Come the first time right, or better not come at all
and they fell, each more perfect than the last.
Now it’s like French-kissing a voodoo doll
with pins through its lips that makes everything you say
the martyr of a brutal kind of unspoken curse.

Make it worse, if that’s all you’ve got left to feel.
Get it out. Oxyrhyncus Jesus says that’ll save you.
I’m an old ghost. Do you really think
you’re my first exorcism? Boo. I’m gone
just like the mist off a morning lake,
just like a gust of stars in the lens of a telescope
that can bring you close, or set you at a distance
just like that piece of tinfoil you wrap
like skin around your heart as if you were saving
some kind of vegetable in the cold shining
you think of as the Pleiades on a binge of light.

Screech, shriek, rave, rake your fingernails
down a blackboard like an ice age in a rage,
like a glacial striations cut into shale
and ambush the mammoth, the sabre-tooth, the dire wolf
of twelve thousand years ago when you stole
the water out of their mouths and returned nothing but dust
like you take the words from mine now
that you’ve uprooted the garden of your own.
Carve on me like a bone if you must, break my skull
like Pangaea into a synarthritic jigsaw puzzle of continents
and I’ll do nothing but diversify my species.
I’ll turn the scars in my starmud into calendars and alphabets
and wait for the next golden age like honeysuckle
tangled in a cedar fence after a storm
that strikes at itself like sheet lightning,
after your apocalypse has finished venting itself.

You’re a white peony, not a wounded rose with thorns,
though you both shed the moon in common
to get down to the withered jester’s cap of the star
hiding like a spider under your eyelids.
You kill me and you kill me deeper into life
not because it’s me you hate, but what I refuse
to hate about you as a coward who turns her back
at the sight her own blood on her razors and wrists
and runs like a river system on a starmap
toward the emergency exits of the red giants
even as they’re imploding under their own exhaustion
who promise to suckle you on the dream milk
of the poppies who opiate you into believing
you’re twice as deceiving as death in Aleppo,
racially profiling the stars in infra red for the Gestapo.

What a silly girl you are, to expect a firing squad
to show up for your rescue, every time you click
your ruby slippers like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz
and tiny eyes emerge from the gigantic size
of the blackholes in your deathmasks like gnats
swept up like stars in your stillborn tornadoes on the moon.
It takes more than a snakepit to make someone an oracle.
However you enrobe it in incense and drugs
and mollify your fear in an exchange of syringes.
More fangs on a hydra-headed Medusa than there are
crescents of the moon lactating with antidotes
as if to say the cure is in the heart of the disease.

Let all those boyfriends you stole like corpses
from a graveyard, believing you were the artistic genius
who was mistress of their vital organs, rise from the dead
as if they’d finally learned to stand up to you
and making a move on your surgical flesh
say, hey, now, mistress, come lie down with us
and see, for yourself, what a heady lover death can be
when you don’t take your cliches so seriously
you’ve rewired your waterlilies to the stars
until they all sting like superclusters of jellyfish
tasing you with the acid rain of your own tears
like rootfires of desire blossoming underground
without a flower to speak of or break through anywhere
you could point to and say, there, I grew that out of love
as if I weren’t even trying all that hard
to stand here alone, alive, and beautiful as I am
not as an alibi for dying, but as an act of life
as indelible in its absence it is when it’s here.

So go your own way with blood on your hands
and blessings on your head as you wish.
And take a last parting shot at the stars
if you want the last word
as you stand like a likeness of yourself
like a commission you’ve always had done
by every doorway you’ve ever stood in like an easel,
and step into a smaller realm than the one you’re leaving
as if your eyes were too small for my windows
when you hurled yourself against them
like a housefly against a mirage in an hourglass
being emptied and filled at the same time.

And, yes, I will cry for you with deep regret
I couldn’t die for you any better than I did,
and you couldn’t live for me
just for the cheap thrill of it.
And then I’ll wipe my tears on my sleeve
where my heart used to be
and make my comic entrance into the next world
laughing like a sacred clown at the sublimity
in the enlightened madness of it all
as you back up like a tragic exit into yours,
troubled by the punch-lines in your nightmares
you never got.

PATRICK WHITE

WAITING TO SELL A PAINTING


WAITING TO SELL A PAINTING

Waiting to sell a painting.
Cigarettes coffee food gas rent canvases paint
and if anything’s leftover
I’ll hang on to it just to walk down the street
with a little more human dignity
than I did last night.
At least once or twice.
I can see something glimmering on my event horizon
but I’m not sure if it’s a mirage or an oasis
A mirage is a dangerous hope
in this desert of stars
and an oasis
is an Artesian spring with skulls
that punctuate the caravan
like the end of one lifelong run-on sentence.
A place to dogpaddle for the rest of the night
and go skinny-dipping with the moon
like an uninhibited waterlily
before I’ve got to move on in the morning
and do it all again
like the ghost of a dandelion gone to seed.
It almost feels like Sunday outside
but I’m afraid of a black spring.
I should act my age
and stop trying to express myself
like a job description for the poor.
How much depends
upon a knock upon a door.
When God finds out
you’re an incorrigible idol worshipper
he endows you with an imagination.
But what I don’t like most about God
is that he never lets another god go first.
The least are last because the best are worse
and everybody’s cursed
by their place in line on the foodchain.
Wheat is sweet
but meat cursed Cain.
Two cans of tuna away from extinction
and a universe shy of survival
someone else can have mine.
I’m out of here like Van Gogh’s ear.
Or maybe it’s time to start eating my still lives.
Painter with chives and a bowl of fruit.
Or turn my whole world upside down
like a bluejay ass up to the winter wind
picking the last of the seeds
out of the mouth of a dejected sunflower
with its head hung down like a streetlight
wondering why even its own feet
pulled their roots up like bootstraps
and walked out on it.
Sunflowers were good enough for Van Gogh.
He ate them like chromium yellow.
He painted potatoes.
He wore his stomach on his palette
and I’ll bet there was a whole gallery inside of him
that no one ever knew about.
I try to focus.
But I’m not a lens.
I weigh the cosmic sublimities of a moment ago
against the feather of my soul
in the scales of the jackal-god of the dead
who asks me what happened to the rest of it.
And I point to a wishbone and a clean carcass.
But hey as the neighbours would say
at least it’s not Ethiopia
and I think how strange it is
that people feel better knowing
there’s someone else worse off than they are.
We’d both sit down and eat these feathers
if we had any tar.
Or even Mars black.
You can elaborate all the aesthetic theories you want
and go on about the integrity of the picture plane
and keep things flat
or ride the new tide
of neo-retro-representationalism
like a tax return to sex
because when things go flat
there’s no up or down after that.
Whether your hanging antibacterial watercolours
in a disinfected gallery
or trying to convince the lightbars
the flowers in your garden scenes
are realer than real
all art
as it always has been
is hunting magic.
The lean looking for the fat
the way you paint
from thin to thick.
The mind is an artist.
Able to paint the worlds.
And keeping meat on your bones
is a kind of textural perpective.
I blue my hills
and establish my point of disappearance.
Trying to see the world in masses
when you’re trying to flesh
an underpainting out
when you’re hungry
is like trying to put tits on a skeleton
but I do my best to paint a bison whole
on the wombwall of the great mother
who keeps the pantry full
without getting hung up on it horns
like some amateur matador
who draws blood like a rose
but ends up being gored
by the demons in details of its thorns.
Back in those days
when everyone was African
there were roving bands of sacred painters
who kept everybody well fed
not by breaking loaves and fishs on a hillside
like a foodbank offering celestial returns
on earthly deposits
but painting the local wildlife in a cave
with carbon you sprayed from your mouth
like burnt bread
to block out the shapes of the negative space
that surrounded your prey
like the contents of an empty stomach.
Or an open hand.
What’s the difference between
braining mammoths in a cul de sac
using the gifts the great mother gave you
to live with cunning and style
and a hunting spear with a good eye
you can wield like a paintbrush
when you’re out in the bush upwind
trying to pick out the highlights
like the vital organs of a Grant’s gazelle?
Mine are Promethean.
I’m chained to a rock.
My liver grows back
like a magic mushroom at night
and the vultures are gathering
for a communal feast
like surgeons in Renaissance black
trying to explain my cadaver
to the operating room in a Rembrandt painting.
And I’ve already eaten my heart
like that of a noble enemy
to enjoin my art
to be brave and steadfast
behind this shieldwall of paintings
positioned like a Viking
on the ridge of another landscape
that keeps folding like a smalltown gallery
that was good at tactics
but didn’t have a strategy for defeat
other than to run like Naples yellow.
I was raised by a sixpack of wolves
like Romulus and Remus
by the same bitch mother
that littered Rome
high in the wild
to howl at the moon
coming up through the trees
of my last wildlife painting
like a lunatic
with more freedom in his crazy heart
than the American constitution.
It’s getting late.
The emergency can’t wait
but the reprieve doesn’t know
what it’s like to be a clock on terminal row
with its own death on its hands
praying for a last meal.
It’s easier to be more casual about time than death
when you’re not holding your breath
trying to digest it
as if you were down
to your last stale biscuit of ghostfood.
But trying to get to the moon
in a bubble of hope
is Apollo Thirteen
without life support.
Ground control to Major Tom
I’ve left the solar system
like a one night stand with a comet
that fell from my lightless halo
to make a hyperbolic pass at the sun.
I’ve gone gone gone altogether gone beyond
to catch up with a fat buddha
who makes a good living
poaching in the deerparks of Benares.
Given the nirvanic quality
of my enlightened life in art
I figure I know as much about emptiness as he does.
I’ve eaten as many desires
swallowed as many fiery swords
like hurtful words
in the marketplace.
What’s so bad
about having people
rub their noses on a full belly
for good luck?
I’ve meditated myself into a coma
as often as he has
trying to get more plenum into my life
than void
trying to turn nirvana into manna
trying to squeeze milk
from a philosopher’s stone
as hard as a nipple on the tit of a Gorgon
that broke her baby teeth on granite.
I’ve got the rainbow body of a Tibetan rinpoche
whose corpse knows how to evaporate like light
but there’s no pot of gold at the end of it
and no word from God
like the arc of a covenant
he intends to keep.
I haven’ been chosen.
It’s getting late.
No one’s coming
to buy my passion
for the Zen trinity
of land water and sky.
No one wants to buy my starmud
like a third eye
and hang it up in their living room
like the original constellation
for the thirteenth house of the zodiac.
And the way I feel about death and time
whenever I paint a sunset
and put Venus in it
to express my gratitude for sex at least
when the lights went out
on those dark nights of my soul
and the music was over
and all that was left
was flesh and wine
lingering in the west
as if there were still time enough to shine
all that
the intensity
the mystery
the ambivalence
not worth a dime.
A man lives to eat to be hungry.
Like the vultures at my liver.
And all for what?
For stealing a little fire to lighten things up?
I’m this phoenix of a heretic
addicted to a stake
because I have a creative desire
to be spiritually and materially fulfilled
by swallowing these hard-boiled bird-brained cosmic eggs
until I sprout feathers in the flames
and rise up reborn
like a green-winged fern
from the ashs of a forest-fire.
I once lived on Jerusalem artichokes
and pickled fiddleheads
that tasted like the sour notes
of vinegrette violins screeching
like fingernails down a blackboard
for a whole month
when I lived organically in the country
painting en plein air with the New England asters.
And every September
late in the month
the Ojibway would leave food and tobacco
at the eastern door of my burial hut.
Until my bones were dust
they couldn’t free my ghost.
After that
thanks to the transmigration of souls
in the bodies of birds
I could get around like a Canada goose
heading south
or back to the West Coast
where I’m originally from.
Now I’m stuck here
like a deflated birthday balloon
or a used condom
waiting for someone to come
who isn’t.
And doesn’t have a clue
what that means to me.
How the universe will change shape overnight
and space will turn its empty pockets out
like blackholes and belly-buttons
full of lint and tobacco crumbs
and all my energy will intensify into dark matter
multiplied by the squared velocity of light
leaving the theatre in panic on the first night
I asked the audience to put itself in my place
and try to imagine
just imagine
just once for my sake
what it’s like to be me
trying to hold a mirror up to nature
like a moonlit lake
in full lotus
meditating on a koan
with my life in great doubt
hoping to break it open
like the sound
of one hand knocking on a door
in an earthquake.
But it’s been my experience
there’s more enlightenment
in the twisted wisdom
of the demented fortune cookie
at the side of your plate
that insists it’s a seashell
worth listening to
on a deserted beach somewhere
life isn’t waiting on a doorbell
than there is in the great ball of doubt
I’ve swallowed like the cosmic glain
of a petrified Pterodactyl egg
that hasn’t got the beak
of a Rinzai master
to break through its shell
with a single liberating shout.
Katsu!
Cat soup!
and put an end
to the pain in my gut
by eating me from the inside out.
The thing I like most about fortune-cookies
compared to koans
is that after you’ve heard your fate.
The buyer’s late.
You can always eat the messenger.
Half the world is grass.
The other half is grazing.
Grass turns into grazer.
Grazer turns into grass.
How can life be a food chain
if it’s always got its ass in its mouth?
If you are what you eat
and you eat nothing
who are you?
Where’s your i.d.?
Put an x next to the zero
beside your name
and move on.
Life isn’t a chain
it’s a food circle
and I’ve got
more wheels of birth and death in me
than Ixion in hell
or the rain.
The mind eats the thought.
The heart eats the feeling.
The eye eats the picture.
The ear eats the word.
The landlord eats the rent.
The Christians eat God.
And the world goes to bed at night hungry.
And I’m the last scarecrow standing
who mastered birds like words
to scare them off
but wasn’t prepared
by any stretch of the imagination
or higher education
or this life in art
for the famine and locusts
that ate Egypt.
If you are what you eat
and life’s got its tail in its mouth forever
like a snake
then the opposite must also be true.
You are what eats you.
I’m consumed by a hungry heart
with an appetite for life and light
as big as the universe.
I set the table
like the composition of a still life
and I eat my own
like the stone Cronos ate
in place of Zeus
so Zeus wouldn’t take
Cronos’ place
in line at the foodbank.
I don’t know who to thank
for what I’m not about to receive
but you can see it on my face
like a blackhole
that hasn’t tasted a star in weeks.
My life in art
is a cannibal
that says grace
over an empty begging bowl.
No sale.
I stick a fork in it
and swallow me whole.

PATRICK WHITE