LOST IN THE GUTTER

LOST IN THE GUTTER

Lost in the gutter, skeleton keys

that used to be people before

they ran out of doors to open.

How many thresholds back from here

to yesterday? And those eyes,

such dark jewels, where can I

get a pair of sharky shades like that?

Ghosts dance around a burning oildrum

where the prophets are boiled in alcohol

for not saying anything of much worth,

like a poem no one wants to steal

the hubcabs off, or a rainfall in November

too late to do the flowers much good

or the working girls on the corner

like cotyledons in hot pants. Indoor orchids

under tungsten grow lights in the snow.

When the mystery wanes unadventurously

and what you see in life asks too much

of your eyes at dusk and moonrise

to look for a black box that isn’t

a voice-over of the stars’ untimely demise,

but might be the genuine you singing to yourself

in your sleep like a hermit thrush

trying to accompany its own silence

with something sweet and sad that beguiles

your melancholy for awhile, the jester

too deep to ever take himself seriously,

the apostate mystic enters a surrealistic circus tent

redolent with the cheap thrills of enlightenment.

He walks around like the ground of being

with a sacred limp believing he’s experienced

a meaningful death much more profoundly realized

than the nocturnal longings

of the wounded street gurus

busking outside the liquor store

like a cult of uncut koans on a Friday night.

What an estranged world this is

that has such exiles in it. Intense heat,

unusual sprouts, and this era’s been unbearable.

Something mean about the water

we’re depleting like our own housewells

of oxygen as we kick the issues to death

for fracking on someone else’s astroturf.

O look, a finger puppet show of gang insignia

spray-bombed like Kufic writing on the wall.

Why is it always the literate who are the last

to learn how to read that? Tomorrow comes

soon enough. And yesterday’s an obituary

with spelling errors. And as for this moment

together with you in the abyss, you’ve got

an imagination. Make it up for yourself.

And I mean that as a gift, not an insult

to the unkept promise of your native intelligence.

Madame Maudlin with her magic phials

of snakeoil and tears guaranteed to restore

your sense of pity like a purgative at the end

of all these endless tragedies, says

there isn’t a watershed in the world deep enough

no matter how far it got her down like Atlantis

she couldn’t buoyantly bubble up from

like something obnoxiously effervescent

about her nature. And you notice her breasts

on the marquee of the matinee, and you know

right away, that’s a double feature of her

dogpaddling on the moon with mythically inflated

waterwings making flightplans for Leda and the Swan

like one of her runaways and a john.

What kind of a coma is it to live dissociatively

in a society where even the emergency opioids

can’t numb you to the recurring nightmare

of orphaning your dream of a better life from sex

like an unwanted child you’re trying to keep clean

by driving it away from yourself like a scapegoat

into a wilderness with the sins of a tribe on its back?

Street wisdom is the occult science

of demonizing the innocent by exalting

the deviant as a special form of the straight and narrow,

the fledgling rain targetting the tree rings

and rootfires in the heartwood of its own arrow.

Here comes another heroic prologue

from the Bronze Age to make a coward

of the text. When you receive a loveletter

you’re always the envelope trying to read

what’s been written on the inside of your eyelids

but send one that unfolds like an encoded flower

and you’ll always feel as if you were putting

your emptiness to good use, your silence

to the task of deciphering your third eye in solitude.

Ever weep and not know why like a waterclock

trying to keep pace and pulse with a time zone

as big as oblivion overflowing the abyss of your heart

like the bucket wish of a watershed appealing

like a housewell to the rain to bail you out by

filling you up until your skull cup runneth over

like a gutter on the moon that cuts through your heart?

Among the lost arts, suffering is the most

ferocious form of compassion the imagination

of a human being can be disciplined in

without any effort on our part at all because

we were all born with a genius, if not

the motive for it, or the experience, from the very start.

In the gutter you can always hear

a sincere young woman singing the blues

like edgy moonlight through a broken window

and later, no crossdraft in a hot apartment,

huddle in the cement threshold of the doorway

where she lingers in the cool of the night

like the smoke of a rebel cigarette posing

like the portrait of a ghost for an empty picture frame.

In the gutter you’re a drop of emotion

in an ocean of chaos and Lady Luck’s

the patron saint of talent, and for city blocks

as far as you can see through the blazing of the blind,

people are either waiting to be discovered

among the bullrushes like illegitimate children

exiled from their own promised land,

or orphaned on the steps of the temple

with blue ribbons in their hands

that meant something much less venal once

than a dynastic return to a pimped-out innocence

riding like a gold rush through a slum

trying to stay an avalanche of starmud ahead of itself,

or the greater vehicle of a medicine chest

of pharmaceuticals hatching out like cosmic eggs

of crackhead serpent fire living the dream

it was cursed by when it got what it asked for,

anathematized by the backfire of the blessings

we don’t bestow upon one another as if

even here in the gutter where nothing matters

given how random forever is, and love

just as seldom and rare as the opportunity presents itself,

o, yes, yes, yes, let none deny it, it especially does.

PATRICK WHITE