IN THE DARK, IN A TONGUE-TWISTER OF A WHISPER

IN THE DARK, IN A TONGUE-TWISTER OF A WHISPER

In the dark, in a tongue-twister of a whisper

I can hear the silence has added a new voice

stuttering over the sacred syllables of my past

as, even after all these lightyears, it’s still trying

to pronounce me like the patois of a dead language

rooted like a stump in an old growth forest to the earth.

Desecration follows in the wake of anything

you try to create out of your own starmud

like an empty lifeboat drifting aimlessly

through the fog toward the ghost of an unknown voice

pleading to be rescued from its own night sea of awareness.

Or dream-figures cremating secret loveletters

in rusty oil drums burning under the overpasses

of my rebarred solitude as if an embassy

were about to be overrun by outdated passports.

Stars are the flowers in the gardens of the homeless

and a few sparks like breadcrumbs from a final analysis.

The desecrant noetics of a viciously troubled mind

seeks freedom from itself in the dark to keep

from self-destructing before its prime like wine

and supernovas. What terrorists love best about themselves

isn’t so much the explosion as it is the timing.

Can’t you hear it, the nightingales singing like cellphones?

And this is the hour of the noble word that sounds

like smut in the ears of the cynically liberated

confounded by the chaos of their ungrounded indecisions.

Sometimes it’s better just to sit by the river

and watch the light on the water dancing

with its own shadows like the music of your eyes

playing a soft lament that uplifts your spirits somehow

like the passing and approach of an undivined beginning

in every moment of silence between the whole notes

of the nightbirds answering one another like longing

in the heartwood of the rootless trees

that yearn to echo in the spring again like tree rings

and the tintinnabulum of the rain that ripples through them.

Who doesn’t wish for a taste of something gentle

and forgiving that hasn’t been conditioned

by perdition or horror, especially in this hour

of quantum foam frothing rabidly at the mouth

like frog spittle on the grass with a hydrophobic

animadversion to the waters of life. No asylum

from the madness, even the river laced with

the antidotes to our own toxins as we strike

at one another for boiling ourselves like kids

in our mother’s milk while we were still on the tit

so even the galaxies are dying like sea stars from the acids

we spit into their eyes like a snakepit of angry umbilical cords.

And God forgive the boy scouts who show up

with one eye open and nooses around their necks

as if they were mastering knots that might prove useful ahead.

In a dark time endure like fire in an ice-age

painting on the walls in the house of life

whenever the shadow of a bird crosses your mind

with a suggestion of what to paint with all the flightfeathers

that have drifted down to you over the years

like a road of ghosts that leads anywhere you want to go

because you’ve shed your last starmap like a windfall of eyes

that ripened in the light of your own seeing

without aiming your telescope like a firing squad at the stars

that shoot back from ambush if you look at them blindfolded.

Beyond understanding, the dark watersheds

these mirages in the void reflect like the fountainheads

of our flowing away from ourselves as if

one step forward were one step back in the perpetual stillness

of the here and now throbbing with the improbability

of a pulse as erratic as love buried at sea on the moon.

Even the most tender of fools bobbing for apples

in their birth sacs to amuse the giddy children

with the unforgivable delinquency of their sin of omission

will eventually be toughened up by the crazy wisdom

of forging their words like swords out of an alloy

of compassion and intelligence that doesn’t cut the cord

under their tongues because they speak left-handed

in a world that’s turned right, to find directions out

by wind-resistant indirections at the crossroads of chaos

muttering to themselves like sleepwalkers

grazing on shepherd moons that have put them out to pasture.

Lost sheep in wolf hides trying to follow the herd

like shamans afraid to embrace the absurd as if

they didn’t have any faith in their own prophetic words.

Be the first among poets to be recognized by the homeless

for the way you wander in and out of doorways

like a drunk off the street who’s sure he’s been sent

to the wrong address like a nightwatchman who

keeps on turning doorknobs nevertheless

while everyone else is asleep in their beds

thousands of thresholds away dreaming like photo-ops

of all the children that went missing from the lost and founds

of the abandoned milk cartons they were weaned from

as if some perversity of radioactive starmud in the gutter

had just pulled the plug on their camera shy haloes,

like trap door spiders peeking at butterflies out of their black holes,

undertakers of their own desecrated innocence

as if to have been them and young once were a gateway drug

to the hard stuff that didn’t get off on them

like head bangers in a moshpit of polka-rock

that smiled like an accordion at the end of every gig

as if their lives were kind and fair and intelligible.

Merd, the self-exiled anarchist sings as he drives a knife

through his art in the process of disassociating rationally

from his surrealistic sensibilities burning cold and clear

like stars shining down upon the dry ice of the broken chandeliers

weeping glaciers over the plinths in the eyes of the Pleiades

as if they were firewalking on the toxic thorns of fractured mirrors.

Apocalyptic imagery appears when ecstasy can’t find

a metaphor for itself like an equals sign between its energy

and the speed of light it’s travelling backwards through time

advancing into the abandoned dimensions of its derelict solitude

as dawn breaks like an empty on Devil’s Rock

as if you’d come to the right door, but forgot how to knock.

PATRICK WHITE