LADY IN THE RAIN SURFING HER EXCESS DOPAMINES

LADY IN THE RAIN SURFING HER EXCESS DOPAMINES

Lady in the rain surfing her excess dopamines

like foreign exports her neurons can’t afford to reabsorb

because she’s intelligent, bored and lonely though

she revels in friends the hilarity of their smiles

is way too severe to be trusted, a moshpit for the Taliban.

She snorts comets of stardust as if life were

no more than a biochemical powder when you squeeze

the tears out of it like an aquifer of Sodom and Gomorrah

without a desalination plant. And for the moment,

and the moment is eternally inclusive as an interreflective jewel

in the net of Indra, interoriginally elaborating

mutual fractals into blazing chandeliers of edgy insight

into this anodyne of power and joy that makes her feel

she’s healing like a naked god that just got into

her deathbed with her, and he were her creator and she

were an abysmally deep solitude greater then he could imagine.

I prefer constellations, myself, but this isn’t

an anti-drug commercial or a self-help manual

for people who think they’re doing just fine.

I’m an asmatographic cartographer compiling

an encylopedic starmap for lost fireflies who are apt

to mistake themselves for chimney sparks

when the wind is whipping across the glazed snow

like a downed powerline venting like a spinal cord

on a Fender Stratocaster whose nerves have finally snapped.

Born in a furnace like the urn belly of a dragon

that miscarried, what else can you do but stick

short straws in the black, bitter bread of your starmud

to see if you’re done, or the oven gave birth?

Way past feathers in the scales of my self-worth now,

what does it matter the price you put on your head

like a wanted poster when no one’s looking for you anyway?

Solitude’s not so tough once you threaten

to walk out on it if it doesn’t stop whining.

Draco on the nightwatch like one half of a chromosome

winding around a winged caduceus, when the need arises

to know something about the better half I’m missing

I watch other people sleepwalking in a dream

I’m spiritually well-mannered enough not to wake them from

like the prophetic voyeurism of a metrosexual Teresias

that hasn’t noticed that he’s gone blind and is led

by a seeing-eye girl that died young like Beatrice.

When you want to study the life of the mind

it’s always wise to begin by taking your name off it.

If you’re intelligent enough to be grateful for being alive

it’s inevitable you’re going to die haunted by the feeling

as hard as you tried, you couldn’t help wasting it,

and, oxymoronically if you’re stupid and spoiled

you’re going to rejoice like a ponzi scheme in your success.

Long after your death they’ll still be talking about you

like an oversight with a Dixie cup of coke on your desk.

But my preferred folly is strictly a matter of taste

and that’s as much motive as anyone needs to make it through life.

I efface myself and take the low place like the persona

of a sea on the moon that receives the rivers and sewers of life alike

and I greet what I can’t avoid like the universe that says

it would recognize me anywhere in my crowded solitude.

Sometimes we live like thieves in a refugee camp,

hovels among the Taj Mahals that don’t commemorate

the Mogul loss of anyone we’ve loved, hoping

we can pass our moral squalor off as patrician poverty

exiled in the slums and favelas above the city of God

with an aerial perspective on the angel fleets docked like yachts

that bloom and wither like stalks of the birds of paradise,

and hell invariably adopts an oblique attitude toward heaven,

looking down on what it can’t hope to aspire to.

Others keep absinthe on tap like the heavy water

of a Wormwood Star in a housewell that glows in the dark.

They live as if they were wreaking a slow vengeance

on their own self-destruction, snakes with their tails

in their mouths who’ve lost all track of the eternal recurrence

of time as it eats them all the way up to their heads.

Where the roads part in life they crack

the wishbones of the harps in their throats

and make a wish that seldom comes true or gets sung.

It’s not the words of the song they want to impart

so much as their voices and tongues that are listening

for an encore of applause from the echo of a mother

that abandoned them on opening night in an empty house.

Isn’t it wild how many people are trying to stay close

to people who didn’t love them by practising their mistakes

as if that were the only way they could embody them

in their absence, or when lovers break up they both

walk off with the salvage of the other’s shipwreck

like crooked lighthouses lamplighting in a storm,

astrolabes of fireflies faking fixed latitudes

off the coasts of consciousness like whole galaxies

of phantom sea stars prying the lids off an oyster bed

where the dead in their coffins sleep with pearls on their tongues

to pay the ferryman and grave robbers off with coin of the realm?

Compassion isn’t the default anti-dote of any venom

known to humans. Born with winged heels humans love to get high

on fletching themselves like the arrows of toxologists

whistling like the deathsongs of warbonnets in the aviaries

of the toxicologists who have been trained not to be insulted

by massive insults of any kind like hypodermic snake bites to the brain.

Lady in the rain trying to keep her powder dry

as the whites of her eyes in the doorway of a Masonic Lodge

that serves, once a week, as a gateway drug

into the occult occupations of the mysteries of life.

So many ruined temples like columns on their knees,

gods and goddesses unhoused by what they seek from themselves

as they drink from their skulls like the begging bowls of their grails.

Compassion might not be a panacea, nothing is,

not even death in life or out of it, whether it be

merely the mirage of the moment cast by the shadow of time,

or the fever of the nightmare you’re suffering in a dream

like the decapitated history of the acephalic iambs of humankind

dancing on its own volcanic grave with a serious limp.

One way or another, there’s always a hidden crimp

in the sundance of the lapwing that gives us away

like a false alibi at the dawn of a noetic eclipse.

Just the same, and that’s the whole point of these metaphors,

lady in the rain snowploughing a mirror you’re

trying to keep your pain from crying on, my muse tonight,

my lovely simulacrum across the street, stopped

at this station of life before you wander off into the darkness

of a party town trying to get down like a church bell

from a steeple that’s giving it nose-bleeds, compassion

remains, like water, the most cultivated taste in the mouth

of these hermetic deserts where the vipers leave scars

in the sand like signs of an oscillatory intelligence

looking for the Rosetta Stone of its own wavelengths among the stars.

On your way, there you go, wraith of blow. May

there be no dead air in the music of the day ahead of you,

and the masters of tenderness not lose heart

turning away from the rain on their windows

as if they had to weep harder than that to apprentice themselves

to the lost art of compassion thawing the wounds

of those who’ve grown callous about life

like a peasant princess holding herself for ransom

in the glacial palaces of the feudal ice-age in her eyes.

PATRICK WHITE