COUNTING ORPHIC SKULLS ON THE ABACUS OF
A SPIDER WEB
Counting Orphic skulls on the abacus of
a spider web.
Listening to them click like pool
balls, crabs and castanets.
I’m beading new solar systems out of
the nebular air. I’m seeding
clouds of unknowing with genetically
unmodified meteors.
I’m lawn bowling with black holes.
I’m collecting
echoes of zeroes from the rain on
shepherd moons
and trying to link them like empty
buckets
into a waterclock of life that flows
inflammably
like thicker tears of methane on the
surface of Titan.
I’m Saint Darkness in a sensory
deprivation tank.
My aspirations are houseflies belly up
on a window sill.
My longings have all been exorcised
like the baby ghosts
I keep in incubators like the mangers
of messiahs
on the night ward, knowing no one will
ever come
to claim them. I give them names and
raise them on my own
like poems that take me for granted as
I teach them
to walk all over me like a starmap you
could drown
your sorrows in. How not to be
crucified
for the metaphoric content of the
message you deliver.
And if you’re going to rise from the
dead, rise
like the unknown headwaters of an
alluvial river
that can grind civilizations of wild
starwheat into bread.
So the angels can hover over the town
at four in the morning, knowing no one
went to bed hungry and listen to the
prayers
of the people they can’t do anything
to help
except hang there like the curtains of
the northern lights
as if they were thinking out loud in
the dream grammar
of a mystic trying to paint the mystery
of life
in a palette of picture-music that
hurts as deeply
as it illuminates the beauty and the
agon
of staying alive long enough to know
what for.
I celebrate the dangerous awareness of
my crazy wisdom
on the merest of hunches that play on
the bird bone flutes
of my deepest hopes lingering like
lyrical spirits
around the asteroid belts of my archaic
graves
rolled like thousands of stones away
from the tomb of Sisyphus
trying to beatify his absurdity like an
orbiting avalanche.
Good luck, my brother. Watch out for
low-flying telescopes
trying to shoot out any stars it
catches in its cross hairs
like a spiritual trespasser trying to
transit two thresholds at once.
And don’t be discouraged if you hear
them calling Einstein a dunce.
Sooner a persistent fool ageing wisely
than a sporadic sage
acting out like a bitter green apple in
late winter.
Put it down to the age I live in. The
fountain of youth
is syrup in a Coke can everyone is
sipping from
like hummingbirds on crack, fish in
medicated water
outside their dilated kitchen windows
next
to the hemorrhaging thermometers of
their patriotic syringes
at a needle exchange for global
warming.
No mercy asked. None received. Take all
the space you want.
The gravitational eyes of the universe
are upon you, sunbeam.
Shine on, shine on, shine on. You’ll
be a wildflower yet.
I’m trying to be rationally
surrealistic about the perversity
of the ambitions of perfect vacuums
sucking the life
out of their fellow insects like
parasitic guests
of the corporations they’re elected
by like mud slides.
The free press has become a screening
myth, a smoke screen,
a trivially, distractive one-eyed liar.
Politicians
lead with their anus like mouthy
monostomes
for whom it doesn’t make a difference
what end
they speak out of, to, or for. How
deranged
does it have to get before the
electorate stops consulting
expert proctologists who speak like
rubber gloves
for spiritual advice about their
innovatively tragic lives
in the most pleonastically, lucrative
of times
before everyone starts talking in
tongues
to the local nightbirds like I do
whenever
I want to get something off my chest
like an avalanche of gravestones and
asteroids
trying to jumpstart my life all over
again
by upgrading the quality of the starmud
they spread all over my alluvial plain
like lunar corn silk and a few more
scarecrows
that get along, whatever the song, with
the nightbirds
in the hallowed valleys of my brain
where I sow thorns and question chaos
about my solitude.
PATRICK WHITE
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