HOLDING IT IN, THE PAIN, THE DOUBT, THE SOLITUDE

HOLDING IT IN, THE PAIN, THE DOUBT, THE SOLITUDE

Holding it in, the pain, the doubt, the solitude.

Caging my wild heart out in the open where the stars live,

and the bars are all on the inside like toppled pillars

still holding up the friezes of a few high ideals as much

out of habit, as to show a lot of class

in the way you fall to your knees like a bull

in a tauromachia of the zodiac with seven sunbeams

like acupuncture needles or porcupine quills in your back,

as your ear is cut off like Van Gogh’s and thrown

like a rose of blood to a lady in the crowd.

Living in the lunar half light of all my uncertainties.

Trying to see things I’ve been dying for most of my life

not as expiring consolations on a terminal night ward,

night lights in the morgue, flowers beside the bed,

soft, white shoes whispering down the polished halls of the dead

so they could get a good night’s sleep, knowing

there were more nightmares in their lives

than the hard pillows of the world

they lay their heads down on as if

they were getting used to their gravestones.

Stripped of meaning like the frayed ends

of my thinning neuronic synapses pared to the bone

without any insulation to bear up to the next lightning strike,

that would make even the weathervanes shriek like rust

with the pain, the pain I’m holding in, on trust

it’s going to transmogrify itself into something

death-defyingly creative, the art of a noble calling,

like a snakepit of gamma ray bursts as if space and time

were hemorrhaging like a miscarriage of the heart.

Biting the bullet, eating the pain like an organic vegetable

that’s good for you, hoping the character it builds

isn’t Frankenstein, or the missing link in the madness

of some other species of suffering keeping its distance

because it can’t believe it’s descended from you.

My heart numbed by laughing gas, an ice age of novocaine,

I’m still trying to pull the thorns out with my teeth

like a physician who knows how to heal himself

but if the truth be told, feels more like a toxin

than an antidote milked from the fang of the moon,

a junkie slumped in an abandoned back alley easy chair

like a lotus-eater among the feral cats inclusively alone

to nurse his despair into dreaming of no better life than this one.

I’m still trying to pull the sword out of the stone,

a syringe out of the arm of a lion, the last hinge of the door

that’s hanging like a lapwing without a wingspan anymore.

Down on myself like a meteor shower trying to exchange

one hundred and thirty-five million years of dinosaurs

for just one warm-blooded moment with a mammal.

As new a day to me as it is to a baby, and I’m doing my best

to live wholly and now in the moment,

without losing my appetite for time

or letting the starfields be overgrown by underbrush,

but when there are more scars and skeletons on your dance card

than there are wounded new moons making a recovery

on the rebound, you can feel like the abandoned ark of a barn

scuttled on Mt. Ararat like a love cruise that wants its money back.

And time is just a snake-oil salesman that heals nothing.

Space turning to glass. Time in convulsions

having tasted a little of its own medicine

and the light that broke this morning like a halo of hope

around the rim of the black hole that had swallowed me live

I was being so cooly detached about, though my heart,

voodoo doll it may have been in the past, beat as fast

as the rain stitching up the seams of the mirrors on the street

as if they were on the same wavelength as a surgical sewing machine,

until it realized this false dawn was as dark as the last

and all it was doing was patching up the ghosts of the past

with clouds of unknowing that had no secrets to reveal

and pathetic fallacy aside, knew nothing about the way I feel.

Trying to be a human who healed more than he wounded.

Trying to be a man that his jeans aren’t ashamed to wear.

Trying to be a Zen hard rock strong enough to climb the mountain

than come down on everyone like an avalanche of cornerstones

giving up like Sisyphus on pushing another moonrise up the hill

even when I’m swimming through quicksand

or paving a way that others might follow as lost as I’ve been

on this long, dark, strange, radiant road

that isn’t just another starmap with pit stops,

that isn’t the asphalt of spiritual La Brea Tarpits,

or a labyrinth that ends in a cul de sac of glass ceilings

like the crumbs of the dreams of a habitable planet

I saved like a rosary of near-earth asteroids

just a few fly-bys outside the Van Allen Radiation Belts

I wore like a bodhisattvic warrior without any scalps

to bring things back together that have been too long apart.

PATRICK WHITE