Wednesday, August 29, 2012

THE BLACK ANGEL


THE BLACK ANGEL

The black angel in my blood tells me it’s time to die, go, disappear
from myself into the next loveless oblivion
like rainwater down a snake’s hole. The black angel
in my heart laughs and reminds me how worthless I am
to any of these who keep dying like rivers in a desert
everytime I look to see if there’s anything real to drink
behind the mirage of their smiles. Look how they all salt their own gardens,
killing anything green that had a chance to grow
with their incessant no no no to anything
that isn’t a straitjacket they ripped off one of their mental dolls. My heart
says die, my heart, too hurt to cry on any more fires, says die
and be done with all these shifting sands and lies
that look like life but turn out to be nothing more than nothing more,
black match heads trying to bloom in the dark, extinct flowers
cut off at the root of being by their own refusal to open.

No is their own rejection; no is the mirror returning their own reflection
like a passport at a border to a face that isn’t enough
to be admitted in, to cross the threshold, to enter, flowing,
the sea. And yet they all say they want to know, want to be
more than the adolescent outside the dollar-store, peering
penniless through the window, over
the monkey-bars of a baby buggy. My God, how they cheep in their shells
at the chance of any real sky outside the cramped confines
of their postered walls. But show up like a crack,
show up looking anything like liberation and growth,
and everyone chickens back into the coop, wingless and terrified
in the shadow of the hawk high overhead
riding the wind for the joy of it. Frauds and imposters,
day-old dainties in a bakery-window singing lead
in a choir of flies. And the demons within me scoff,
and the black angel comes forward out of the miscarried dream,
carrying the dead child that gave its life to believe in them
and asks me if I’ve had enough of their toxic ordinariness,
their insistent tainting of the secret wells it took so long
to divine on the moon with a broken water-wand. Idiot children
peering out of the shattered windows of an abandoned orphanage
like tiny eyeless idols waiting the return of a huge blind god
that can’t see to sign their creation. And it isn’t judgment, it isn’t
any lack of compassion or understanding
that wants to thaw their glass tears and heal
the home-made tattoos that puncture their hearts
with dirty needles of ink, it isn’t feeling above or beyond them
that turns the life-boat into a floating hearse crammed with moaning ghosts;
it’s watching them look for salvation among the sharks
that devour them one by one
in a frenzied graveyard of fins. Tonight, so alone, so dispirited, so
uselessly empty, a suicidal clown in a tentful of humorless junkies,
I weep into my own hands like a man
trying to wash off his own face in the acids of a private hell so complete
death is the only rumour of a messiah
these black winds whisper in the ashes
of everything I wanted to be. What’s the use of love, what’s
the good that comes of wasting a lifetime learning to care,
learning to give and killing yourself off to give more,
giving away your eyes, your heart, soul, hands, blood, time, talent,
until exhausted and immaculately impoverished
you don’t know what you’ve got left to give
when everyone’s smearing lipstick on their rectums
and sewing their mouths shut
so nothing real or true gets said
when they tell you how much they appreciate
the generosity of your death
and ask for more before you’re buried in their bull.

And I listen and I listen and I listen with my ears and mind and heart
until their small doomed stars are splinters of glass in my own eyes,
their pain mine, their healing mine, their fate my own
until the dagger’s buried in the wound of my own being so deeply
I alone am left to the business of dying over and over again
in this solitude of regenerative hell
where to ask for a drop of blood in return, a touch, a smile, a last embrace,
one word of genuine love
to ease the fear of the passing
is to be refused with honey and cunning, is to learn, bitterly
that all you gave as a gift
is taken in theft
and fenced in the seedy pawnshops of their pedestrian greed.
Look, there’s my heart in a greasy window, over-priced, almost
the cost of a new one with a guarantee, and there
by the chipped plaster of a mantlepiece wolf
howling at a nicotine moon, the soul
I squandered like a sudden flashflood
on a dry creekbed that said it was going nowhere.

PATRICK WHITE

I WOULD SPEAK TO YOU IN MY NIGHT VOICE


I WOULD SPEAK TO YOU IN MY NIGHT VOICE

I would speak to you in my night voice
if you were still here. If you were even as near
as the stars commingled in my breath,
I’d thaw my secret zodiac of crystal skulls
and let my mindstream run wild at your feet
like a flashflood waking the dry creekbed up
from its long dream of making the desert bloom
with real flowers in a mirage of metaphors.
I would ignite the pilot lights of a thousand stars
to blaze in an honour guard of mythic starmaps
waiting for you to bless their colours,
because wonder’s never been known to start a war
with a world it’s amazed by in every mesmerizing detail
without annihilating itself first, bursting
its own bubble in an efflorescent multiverse.

I’m a surrealistic mystic to give it a funny name,
and you’ve seen my hidden housewells, sacred pools
receiving the moonlight on the water like the blades
of ceremonial swords that tasted my blood first
like a rose bleeds on its own thorns, now let me
show you my watersheds, the fathomless voids
of dark abundance and bright vacancy
where my eyes swim like the Circlet Of The Western Fish
that never swim out of themselves
or the oceanic awareness they’re luminously
immersed in up to their gills in the clear light
of the emptiness shining back at them like a distant mind.

Under the icy eyelids of methane seas on shepherd moons
I can feel life stirring like the muse of itself
and though it’s too early in evolution to see yet
I’ve jumped ahead of myself like the light of the Pleiades
and gathered up a herd of wild telescopes
grazing on the stars like big-eyed, thin-legged antelopes
waiting for you to make an appearance on opening night
and watch how they’d dance and leap for you
like grasshoppers in the Bolshoi Ballet
who didn’t give a damn that autumn was on its way
to throw cold water on the fire because in this universe
imagination is the physics of the place, and the ants
might busy themselves gathering butterfly wings
like the covers of slender chapbooks of poetry,
but I’m drunk on these lyrical elixirs of the mind
that I take as a sign that you are near in the night
and who has to worry about snow,
when they can live in your light on an occult planet
where myriad seasons can pass in a moment of spontaneity
and the fruits of life invariably fall toward the sky?

Are we both not rooted in the ancient fires overhead?
Nervous systems of black matter, scaffolding the mind
climbs up to paint the origin of worlds before their grand openings,
dark palettes of our third eye, skeletons of pictographic bones
beneath these scriptures of flesh we can read with our fingertips
like holy books and X rays written in the boustrophic signs
of the last time we ploughed the dark side of the moon together
and filled the siloes of the stars with galaxies
that spun like Tibetan prayerwheels, or Moroccan Sufis
or dust devils at the heels of winged messengers
conducting us like the flightfeathers of the dark arcana
we can read in each others eyes like loveletters
written in the cursive dream grammar the heart sings to itself in
when it’s a lonely nightbird, and you’re there like the stars.

PATRICK WHITE