ARE YOU TRYING TO CONVINCE ME

ARE YOU TRYING TO CONVINCE ME

Are you trying to convince me

that kindness does no good?
That no good deed will go unpunished,

that I should do a good deed and duck,

that trying to love and understand you as a friend,

give more than you dared to ask, have the power,

but not use it to reply to you in kind

when I pull the sacred syllable

like a pin out of my heart

and hold it tightly in my hand

like a white phos grenade I don’t dare let go of

because this starlight’s so blue and hot

it can burn right through your skin like the Pleiades?

You rage pre-emptively as if in everything

you were defending yourself vehemently

against some bootcamp of an injustice

your childhood went to to learn how

to stand up for yourself even when you’re in the wrong.

Do unto others before they do

what you imagine reflexively

they’re about to do unto you.

I get that. So many times I’ve blunted

the edge of the sword on the rock of the heart

I drew it from, bent its blade for the grave,

tempered it in a trough of hot tears

I shed like a dragon for what you

had suffered alone at the hands of those

who were supposed to love you

but always seemed to find a way

to bungle it in the second act

of a tragicomedy for angry tricksters.

So I’ve treated you like a dove

in maculate feathers for the last ten years

and stood down like a scarecrow

whenever you lured me away from my watch

to amend the commotion of a lapwing.

I’ve been a good friend to you in all things.

There when you called. Generous

when you needed, streetwise wolf doctor

when you asked for an oracle

to howl at the moon with you

in an agony of unanswered wounds.

And I know it’s hard to be proud

and grateful at the same time

as if needing someone’s help

as we all do, were conceding

to a weakness in the hill fort of your vulnerability.

So I’d put out the white flag

from my window first to make sure

you didn’t have to conceive of surrendering first.

Anyway when you walked in just now

fuming like a star mass

of inflammable hydrogen gas

I was feeling like a firefly

for the first time in a long time

remotely at home in the universe

as it went off in my face like the Big Bang.

One moment I’m on an endless firewalk

following the signs the stars left me

to catch up in my own good time

and the next I’m listening to an arsonist

make up alibis in her own interrogation room.

And I’m asking God, after you return me

like a splinter of my former radiance

that won’t wash out of my third eye

because it’s lodged like a nail in a jellyfish

candling like a parachute in its own tentacles,

to the relentless intensity of my abysmal solitude,

thinking hard, hot, flashy thoughts

that cut like the sabres of a meteor shower

through the ionically charged upper atmosphere

where my spiritual aspirations inflate

like weather balloons disguised as ufos

even as my demonic descents back to earth

are making a big impact on an extinct species.

God, I say, apostate, heretical, or demonic

I may be. Do ut abeas. But I didn’t ask you

anything back for this kindness I do left-handedly

not to ameliorate doing my time standing up

nor as an infernal sacrament on the altar of hell

that rebels like a lion lying down with the lamb,

but just to put a smile on the absurdity of it all

as if there were no harm in trying it your way occasionally

by stopping the war between

ceremony and the sanctimonious

long enough to remember we’re all

dying of one thing or another in the same lifeboat

floundering on this fathomless night sea

of shoreless awareness we’re all immersed

over our heads in like the tears of the unblessed.

PATRICK WHITE

DANCING WITH AN OLD MAN UNDER THE MOON

DANCING WITH AN OLD MAN UNDER THE MOON

Dancing with an old man under the moon

with nothing but your tattoos on,

as it rose over the treeline like a mushroom

and as beauty is to wisdom,

the blossom of your fire

to the smoke of stacked firewood

waiting to be immolated in the Bonfire of the Vanities

like an library of fingerprints on paper

just to prove that we were here once

long before this autumn made a ghost of us

and we could feel more naked with our clothes on

than we ever have done with them off.

Junkies hitting up in a snakepit of desire,

the Burmese python a heroin addict in a swamp,

the high-wire act of the rose in the circus,

the aerial acrobatics of our noblest emotions

swinging through the unimpeachable air

on a one-handed trapeze that was the axis mundi

of the world in the aberrant orbit

of a lightning struck weathervane.

Your body, a guitar; your soul, an inflammable violin,

when I wasn’t burning bridges with you

like connections we didn’t want to make

we were going for long firewalks among the stars

hand in hand like a couple that grew up

in the same neighbourhood that paid no attention

to whether they went out into the world and made good.

I was improbably inclined

and you were desperately uncertain

and we kept the little that was chaste between us

bucolic with shepherd moons

and major and minor dogs trying to pasture a rabbit.

Some women are beautiful like moonlit gazelles

and Greek vases are, and you stand back silently

as you would before any masterpiece of classical form

cooly and contemplatively as if you were musing

in your amazement on a first magnitude star

it would be an aesthetic desecration to touch

with anything as unshapely as a human in love.

But you knew how to swing your hips like an hourglass

and I’ve always been happy to be suckered by time

into filling in on the night shift for a sacred clown

who had to meet a dead line, finishing a cartoon

of the constellations he drew for a newspaper

like an out of date starmap that had to cut back on its print run.

You came with doves, I saw them, with plaster casts

on their broken wings, deadly nightshade, black orchids

that had once been the shadows of beauty queens,

and the fragrance of big pheromones charging

the summer night in your eyes with an aura of urgency

you kept hid under the eyelids of your innocence

and I could never tell whether you were the salvage

of the witch that was drowned in a trial by ordeal

or the one that showed everyone how easy it was

to walk on water when you had to save yourself.

Intrigued by the dawn of your smile, by midnight,

I was ready to sacrifice myself to the cult of it

like a Druid with a lunar sickle to the apple-bloom

of a tree alphabet deranged by the dissociated sensibilities

of an occult muse just coming out of eclipse.

I was making catalogues of the stars

that lay like ashes in my eyes when you suddenly flared up

like the saline spirit of a green flame burning in all my firepits

that began to feel they had the vision of a young dragon again

to see such foxfire blooming in the eye-sockets of its urns,

after the dark rain and fire storms, the excruciating pain

of living a life of coal predicated upon the possibility of diamonds,

the transmutation of the low into a union with the high

like a snake with wings that could ride, by God, it could ride

its own mystic wavelengths like a plutonic alloy

of the early Bronze Age just as the heroes were getting ready

to cut the umbilical cords with their hysterical, Medusan mothers.

Gratitude? Yes. You braved the taboo of the wizard

like a night bird on my windowsill, like a star

through the bars of my isolation cell

in a covert observatory buried underground

like a radical theater in a dead planetarium

staging doomsday scenarios for an unenlightened think tank

that never turned the light around on themselves

to discover that their third eye isn’t the lens of a telescope.

And maybe you were the last hurrah of my flesh and bones

but, baby, you didn’t leave anything elegaic in my blood

to prove it and I think it came as no less of a surprise to you

as it did to me, beyond the shadow of the searchlight of our doubt,

love had removed the black spot from my heart

like a planet in transit across a Venutian sun

and put it on your cheek like a beauty mark

in the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Beneficent

to tempt Hafiz into offering Samarkand

to a young slave girl if she would only take his hand

among the rose bushes on the banks of the Ruknabad

even if it meant he had to account to the khan

for what he squandered like gardens on the moon.

Born with wings on the heels of my cowboy boots

instead of spurs, who so club-footed

or cloven-hoofed and sodden

as camels in a B.C. gold rush

as to dance with you in sensible shoes?

Your hair was autumn. Your eyes were spring.

I lived for awhile, o who could know how to thank you,

for six months like a supernova in love with a black hole

at the vernal equinox in the thirteenth house

of the zodiac I still consult like a starmap of your tattoos

when I’m out walking in the woods alone

with the full moon that hasn’t paled them in its light

even after all these years, still dancing with you in the night,

an old man circumambulating the fires of a dark bliss

by himself, certain he knows who he’s dancing with and for.

PATRICK WHITE