UNLIKELIEST OF INCLINATIONS

UNLIKELIEST OF INCLINATIONS

Unlikeliest of inclinations. Poetic madness

in the face of common sensical catastrophe.

I’m writing this for no one’s sake, not even

my own, a gust of stars in a back alley,

vertiginous dust devils of skirling snow

nipping at my winged heels like frost-bite.

Routinely annihilated at the crossroads

of celestial equators intersecting skewed ecliptics,

the surrealistic mystic in me dances in protest

at the nave of a jinxed prayer wheel

mistakenly enlightened by a yellow daffodil.

I could have been a lightning rod. I could have been

a weathervane, a sundial, an astrolabe , an astronaut,

an astronomer measuring the eyelashes of the stars

in a spectrographic analysis of the tree rings

in the heartwood of the light. As it happens

I’m squatting in the thirteenth house of the zodiac

dodging wrecking balls like a punchy boxer

whose sea legs keep being swept out from under him

by black ice that wants him to take the fall.

Adjust according to circumstances laying bets off

against the smart money I won’t make it

out of this coma to show up for the next round.

If so, I want my coffin to be a cabal

of underground resistance to the death of me.

I want to thrust my clenched fist through the duff

of everything that’s ever unfeathered me in life

like a mushroom in a sacred grove of black swans

waiting for the plumage of new moons to break

into a flightfeather of white light that isn’t mocked

by pink-eyed albino crows driving the fire

of foxes into deep snow to peck their eyes out

like militant evangelists of the colour-blind.

One moment I’m riding Pegasus bareback

with Deneb and Albireo spurring me on

to greater heights than I’ve ever soared before

and the next I’m devoted to this discipline

of turning my insides out lyrically like a pinata

hanging like a medicine bag from a black walnut tree,

bleeding siloes of Virgoan starwheat out of the wound

of a lunar bull Mithras Tauroctonus is sacrificing

like a cornucopia for waiting scorpions, dogs, and snakes

whose symbology is lost upon me like the arcane taste

of alien sensibilities who don’t speak

the same dream grammar I do without an accent.

No end of the doors or the million ways

you have of saying nothing when you approach

your folly like a priest instead of a sacred clown

blowing the pollen of mountain flowers

like gold dust from the palm of your hand,

or gusts of stars roosting in your eyebrows

like chalk starmaps ageing at a blackboard.

I see you trying on lives like different meanings

to pre-determine what pleases the mirrors best,

as if you didn’t so much express as calibrate

what moves you most like the tantric pique

of a yogic paperclip disguised as a praying mantis.

There’s no conviction to your absurdity

so your peacocks lack the courage to sing.

Your lions roar, but the victory goes to the blackflies.

Are you still hunting pygmies with harpoons?

PATRICK WHITE