HOLDING IT IN, THE PAIN, THE DOUBT, THE
SOLITUDE
Holding it in, the pain, the doubt, the
solitude.
Caging my wild heart out in the open
where the stars live,
and the bars are all on the inside like
toppled pillars
still holding up the friezes of a few
high ideals as much
out of habit, as to show a lot of class
in the way you fall to your knees like
a bull
in a tauromachia of the zodiac with
seven sunbeams
like acupuncture needles or porcupine
quills in your back,
as your ear is cut off like Van Gogh’s
and thrown
like a rose of blood to a lady in the
crowd.
Living in the lunar half light of all
my uncertainties.
Trying to see things I’ve been dying
for most of my life
not as expiring consolations on a
terminal night ward,
night lights in the morgue, flowers
beside the bed,
soft, white shoes whispering down the
polished halls of the dead
so they could get a good night’s
sleep, knowing
there were more nightmares in their
lives
than the hard pillows of the world
they lay their heads down on as if
they were getting used to their
gravestones.
Stripped of meaning like the frayed
ends
of my thinning neuronic synapses pared
to the bone
without any insulation to bear up to
the next lightning strike,
that would make even the weathervanes
shriek like rust
with the pain, the pain I’m holding
in, on trust
it’s going to transmogrify itself
into something
death-defyingly creative, the art of a
noble calling,
like a snakepit of gamma ray bursts as
if space and time
were hemorrhaging like a miscarriage of
the heart.
Biting the bullet, eating the pain like
an organic vegetable
that’s good for you, hoping the
character it builds
isn’t Frankenstein, or the missing
link in the madness
of some other species of suffering
keeping its distance
because it can’t believe it’s
descended from you.
My heart numbed by laughing gas, an ice
age of novocaine,
I’m still trying to pull the thorns
out with my teeth
like a physician who knows how to heal
himself
but if the truth be told, feels more
like a toxin
than an antidote milked from the fang
of the moon,
a junkie slumped in an abandoned back
alley easy chair
like a lotus-eater among the feral cats
inclusively alone
to nurse his despair into dreaming of
no better life than this one.
I’m still trying to pull the sword
out of the stone,
a syringe out of the arm of a lion, the
last hinge of the door
that’s hanging like a lapwing without
a wingspan anymore.
Down on myself like a meteor shower
trying to exchange
one hundred and thirty-five million
years of dinosaurs
for just one warm-blooded moment with a
mammal.
As new a day to me as it is to a baby,
and I’m doing my best
to live wholly and now in the moment,
without losing my appetite for time
or letting the starfields be overgrown
by underbrush,
but when there are more scars and
skeletons on your dance card
than there are wounded new moons making
a recovery
on the rebound, you can feel like the
abandoned ark of a barn
scuttled on Mt. Ararat like a love
cruise that wants its money back.
And time is just a snake-oil salesman
that heals nothing.
Space turning to glass. Time in
convulsions
having tasted a little of its own
medicine
and the light that broke this morning
like a halo of hope
around the rim of the black hole that
had swallowed me live
I was being so cooly detached about,
though my heart,
voodoo doll it may have been in the
past, beat as fast
as the rain stitching up the seams of
the mirrors on the street
as if they were on the same wavelength
as a surgical sewing machine,
until it realized this false dawn was
as dark as the last
and all it was doing was patching up
the ghosts of the past
with clouds of unknowing that had no
secrets to reveal
and pathetic fallacy aside, knew
nothing about the way I feel.
Trying to be a human who healed more
than he wounded.
Trying to be a man that his jeans
aren’t ashamed to wear.
Trying to be a Zen hard rock strong
enough to climb the mountain
than come down on everyone like an
avalanche of cornerstones
giving up like Sisyphus on pushing
another moonrise up the hill
even when I’m swimming through
quicksand
or paving a way that others might
follow as lost as I’ve been
on this long, dark, strange, radiant
road
that isn’t just another starmap with
pit stops,
that isn’t the asphalt of spiritual
La Brea Tarpits,
or a labyrinth that ends in a cul de
sac of glass ceilings
like the crumbs of the dreams of a
habitable planet
I saved like a rosary of near-earth
asteroids
just a few fly-bys outside the Van
Allen Radiation Belts
I wore like a bodhisattvic warrior
without any scalps
to bring things back together that have
been too long apart.
PATRICK WHITE
