PRETTY BONES FELL FROM THE SCAFFOLDING OF HER OWN RIBS

PRETTY BONES FELL FROM THE SCAFFOLDING OF HER OWN RIBS

Pretty Bones fell from the scaffolding of her own ribs

like the rungs of burning ladders she’s spiritualized into serpent fire

that climbs up her spinal cord like the pilot lights

of the scarlet runners to paint paradise in earth colours

with invisible highlights of the hotspots in a candle flame

anybody would hold their right hand of power over

just to talk to her for an era or two as if she were

Van Gogh’s unmarried cousin. The kind of beauty

that makes everyone in whatever room of the palace

of recycled chandliers she steps into like an ice storm

feel cold and lonely and longing as they’re drawn to her

like Celtic bards burning their poems in the fires

she jumps through naked as a witch that inspires them

like an heretical muse to take greater and greater subjective risks.

Pretty Bones hands you a begging bowl full of thorns

and tells you not to mistake the decrescent crown

of the moon even when it’s neaping on the wane

for a nest of inspiration it would be folly to hope

the same blue herons are going to return to

as they did last year and the year before that

like a recurring dream that nothing’s gone, it will all

come back like symbols of dusk to the limbs

of the dead trees washing their corpses in the waters of life

by the glow and the gloaming of the apple-green irises

in the eyes of a peacock spreading its feathers out

across the sky like a starmap to enlightenment

tinged by the sad colours of cool bliss in the background

as if she had an aerial perspective on time

and could turn the hour hands around like the petals

of the wildflowers leaping back into spring

without advancing forward into the auras of autumn.

Pretty Bones maintains she’s still vernal even here

in the tarpits of hell where the white swans

drown in their own darkness like vows they made

to the occult promise of a new moon to open their eyelids

as if they were giving birth to the light out of

the dark abundance of their own innate potential for radiance

like waterlilies shining as if their eyes were shy peers of the stars

saddened by some deep secret of life they enigmatically

keet to themselves like the silence of the nightbirds

that falls like a veil of longing and wonder over the distant hills

buried like sacred gravegoods in the same afterlife

they stole from like the vernal equinox from the bone-box

she carved out of her own heartwood like a place

she could rest her prophetic skull with no fear of being snake bit.

Pretty Bones is never any less fictitious than you want her to be.

She accommodates the freaks and the ghouls,

and the demonic zombies that are trying too hard

to have their mummified leathers patched by

the ghosts of dead outlaws with the rockers of their own gravestones

as a testament of their unthinking loyalty unto death.

Her compassion is alluvial as the flesh of the Nile

and even the crocodiles who eat carrion are too beguiled

to open their jaws like satin coffins to unwary gazelles.

Pretty Bones can see windows within windows like the light

in everyone as if she were passing by on the street at night

on her way to some hectic rendezvous with her anti-self

to paint the town red in scarlet letters as if

she were just learning how to spell the alpha

of a new beginning in elaborate labyrinths of magic kells

that say it all iconically in elaborate fractals of random spontaneity

singing like crows and angels in the sacred groves

of trees abandoned to their own fate like spray bombs and chainsaws.

PATRICK WHITE