Tuesday, October 2, 2012

JUST WANT TO STAY INSIDE


JUST WANT TO STAY INSIDE

Just want to stay inside. Don’t want to see anybody.
Don’t want to be anybody. Just want to forget for awhile
that I exist. I’m sick of being besieged behind my eyelids
by a hundred thousand ghosts all gibbering at me
because they were reincarnated as blackflies
that want to be treated with the same poetic protocol as swans.
Flake off and find another furnace to thaw on
and take all these weeping mirrors with you
that can’t look at the stars without smearing them.
I’m sick of splashing through them barefoot.
Go puddle on somebody’s else’s floor. I’ve gone
as deep as I’m going to go with you. Don’t want to mean
anything to anyone anymore. Maybe
there’s someone out there you can tie
your umbilical cord to like a leash on a pet submarine.

Just want to get clean. Take a meteor shower
like the Arabs do when they can’t find any water in the desert
to wash their faces for prayer. Tayyamum.
Who knows? Maybe I can grind my eyes into lenses
like Spinoza in his attic for myopic glaciers
that don’t believe in global warming though the proof
is running down their cheeks in tragic laughter.
Want to be crowded out, effaced, erased like the leftover seraph
of a letter in chalk dust on your blackboard
that dropped out of your alphabet like a Mayan glyph
running in the blood of another futile sacrifice
to avoid the next astronomical catastrophe
they brought down on themselves from the ground up.

Feel bad about this. Mean. And casually ungenerous.
My heart was a wild rose a moment ago, now
it’s a withered green star with the bulbous body
of a black widow spider at the bottom of a teacup
that’s about as Zen as venom, leaking out of itself.
biliously weary of prognosticating the future for people
numb as pharmacies in their outlook on life.
Don’t want to reach out to anyone. Don’t want
anyone reaching out for me when I’m not the one
who’s drowning. Just want to be an empty lifeboat
drifting down my own mindstream as composed
as a leaf torn by the wind from a tree like a censored page
of the Book of Life. Don’t want to be there at dawn
like another excited bird breaking into song
when the sun comes up like the Taliban
and splashes acid in my eyes because I can read
the signs of our demise in three dead languages
and one that’s on its deathbed mouthing the sacred syllables
of its last words fouling the air with lies about the disease
that it’s dying of like everyone else listening to a guru
like a poultice to draw the infection out and break the fever
of the nightmare they’re sweating in. I don’t need a holy man,
selling snakeoil like an antidote to the dragons of serpent fire
running through my veins when I’ve got
home remedies of my own I can administer to myself
like the breast milk of the Medusa that can keep me
from turning to stone with a tincture of the lunar serum
I can drink from my skull cup, bottoms up, in a single gulp.

Spare me your alibis. The interrogation’s over. Forego
the duplicity of your two way mirrors and all your mea culpas
enraptured by the felicity of your own happy sins or not.
All the lanterns of the truth in the hands of the nightwatchmen
are nothing but fireflies covered in soot. Chimney sparks
flying out of a black hole of creosote to tar and feather the stars.
I’m out of here like the heigh ho Silver of yesteryear.
You might hear me howling late at night
like the last of the hunted wolf shamans on the wind
high above the timberline where the air is lucid and thin.
You might be a snakecharmer but I can still shed you like skin.

PATRICK WHITE

ANGRY, SMASHING ANTIQUATED CROCI LIKE FABERGE EASTER EGGS


ANGRY, SMASHING ANTIQUATED CROCI LIKE FABERGE EASTER EGGS

Angry, smashing antiquated croci like Faberge Easter eggs.
The air is rationing its oxygen, and even the wind begs.
I’m holding it all together like an abandoned barn,
but there are flashfloods in the mirror trying to humble
my lack of concern whether it rains for forty days
or all goes up in fire as I’ve been forewarned.
Don’t care if it’s nuclear winter, or just a passing storm.
I’m not mining diamonds like stars in the rifts of the clouds.
They can do without my eyes for awhile. Looking
for a white hole on the other end of this black one
like a ground hog with two, or the flip side of a telescope
shining at the other end of the tunnel the dead go through.

Madness imparts a significance to everything I do.
The spiders are weaving dreamcatchers and badly tuned harps
between the antlers of a dying caribou, and here
in this cow pie of starmud I call a brain, the warp and woof
of my axons are hairbraiding dead protein
into straightjackets for the two-headed wavelengths
of my meditative theta snakes. And it hurts to write this
like an exorcism of myself without fireflies in attendance
or the scribes of the wild grapevines
intoxicated by their purple passages of blood.
But I’m the only ghost writer left in this scriptorium
of solitude, where the beeswax candles dripping
with lachrymose honey keep confusing their wicks
for the stingers of drones defending the hive
like the Golden Dome of Jerusalem. Though it comes
as no surprise when I tell them God’s not on anybody’s side.

Wild crab apples crushed underfoot with no appetite for war,
it’s flight or fight in the woods once you get past
the autumnal equinox like a truce between day and night
to give the herbivores a chance to squirrel away the dead
before everything slips into a coma with the raccoons
and the bears, and the houseflies cluster like black dwarfs
into a galaxy of anti-matter between the walls
of the hovel that’s all that remains of the pioneer ice palace
two farms over and six generations down the sway-backed road.
Sickly sweet, the smell of decay, like the corpse of an angel
under a tumulus of fieldstones shrouded in bracken
to keep the wolves from digging it up like grave-robbers.
And all around it the clarions of the daylilies
with their flaming swords and trumpets
all tapped out at sundown like collapsed lungs.

The lake has less to say now that the loons are gone
and the trashed cornfields are pitstops for the Canada geese
bumping into each other without a traffic cop on take-off.
Joy always receives a warmer welcome than despair
when it comes like guest to the door, but, in fact,
one can be as dangerous as the other when its car breaks down
on a lonely dirt road, and yours is the only heart
for miles around, where it can seek shelter for the night.
So how could I set a place at the table for one above the salt
and the other below. When guests come. Receive them,
knowing you can delight in a disease that intrigues you
and sleight the cure because it tastes of hopelessness.
I celebrate the graces of joy and observe the protocols of despair.
Butterflies and bluebirds yesterday. Alcyone in the Pleiades
now Algol bloodied in the fist of Perseus. I break bread with both.
Yesterday I wined and dined with the stars like a chandelier.
Tonight I’m gnawing on an avalanche of moon rocks like a glacier.

PATRICK WHITE