DEEP ENHANCEMENT. DARK WOUND

DEEP ENHANCEMENT. DARK WOUND

Deep enhancement. Dark wound. Ancient pain.

Estranged childhood. I hurt. I hurt. To no good purpose

at the end of things. No timing. No content.

And the body mourns the broken wings of the words

that once rose to the occasion like startled waterbirds,

the wind in a prayerwheel that didn’t know what to ask for.

And the heart, stubborn enthusiast, homely shrine

the gods don’t enter into anymore, used razor blades

scattered like the pages of an unbound holy book

that cut all five jugulars of the fatted calf

that bawled like a guitar at the use its innocence

was put to like a musical sacrifice to the tone-deaf silence.

And the mind, that Mephistophelean shadow

that lives in the wake of the dead angel that said

she died for my sake until I saw who showed up

at the funeral. All those black umbrellas, bats in the rain.

Achievement without consolation. Fulfilment

the scam of a false idol. My clothes are soaked

with the tears of ghosts that blew in my eyes

like smoke from a burning sundial. Bad house guests

in the ghost town of the zodiac I once lived in

like a gold rush in the mindstream of the mountain

singing to itself as if the stars were listening

to heal the ache of an old fault line in its heart

that sends a shudder through its foundation stones

like an avalanche across a narrow road winding

its way between a high place and the certain death

among the ice-floes of a jade-green northern river

coiled like a green mamba below. Sad to see

the roadkill of a wolf that had no other place to walk

below the timberline of the life it was hunting for.

Dangerous to stop. The bus hurries on toward Prince Rupert.

Another poetry reading. How long ago was that? Where

I’ll howl at the top of my lungs like the death lament

of my lupine melancholy in a lunar solitude where

my voice carries through the deranged emptiness

of a vacuum that’s come to abhor its own nature

and the most highly disciplined severities of insight

aren’t communal enough to cope with it like a happy face

on a moonrise instead of the usual prophetic skull.

Blue Flower. Black Dog. Sunbeam and nightfall.

Hydra-headed snake fire. Death to release it.

Death to try and hang on to it all. The agon of life.

The struggle to live. The struggle to die.

As raw at the entrance as the exit is refined.

I struggle with the angel in the way like a mind

that lost an eye to the ferocity of the encounter

trying to see past the halo into the black hole of the vision

it was grappling with like a choke hold

on the throat an experienced shapeshifter

that keeps eluding my grasp of the light

like fireflies without starmaps in a hoax of dark matter.

Between the mountain and the river, where

to be held up is to be cast down like an ostrakon

into the abyss where the victors live in exile

throwing their bodies like gauntlets of roadkill

along the side of whatever road they’re on as they

raise their voices in a deathsong like a challenge

to the quixotic echoes that stand in their way

threatening to bring this house of life down

like a handful of starmud on the impromptu graves

of the losers brilliantly infamous for fire walking

their spinal cords like acrobatic spiders unravelling

their silken safety nets like unnamed constellations,

across the moats of the mountains, scapegoats on a drawbridge

that lets its guard down a thousand times a life too often.

PATRICK WHITE