JUST GO. JUST GO.

JUST GO. JUST GO.

Just go. Just go. I don’t want to do an autopsy

on your voodoo doll. Leave me to the asters and stars

on my long walks into the fields and woods around here.

It was your fault, your fault, as you keep pleading.

I’m glad you see me now the way you couldn’t before

but the roses keep bleeding and candidly, lady, I’m bored

with the abysmal misery of trying to understand

why you look like the Taj Mahal but act

like a hamburger stand where they pat the meat down

with dirty hands. You did what you did,

now be done for good and bad with it. Let’s not

look upon it as a mistake you made, but

as a creative opportunity for us to separate

the salt from the fresh waters of life in our tears.

I don’t think I was cut out to be an organ donor for love.

Full measure and a bit beside. Enough, or too much,

as the poet once said. I gave you all I had to give

with a full heart and an open hand. You were great

in bed, a demonic mystic with a hunger for sex,

but the blood-caked altars remind me of guillotines these days,

blocks to swan on at Tyburn and Smithfield,

and if I thought putting mine on the black market

might bring about a change of heart in you,

the river might flood, the wheat grow taller,

the scapegoats stop boiling their kids in mother’s milk,

I might be more inclined to take a message to the gods,

stimulate my stem cells into reconstituting my body parts

like a Promethean liver eaten like roadkill on the rocks

by turkey vultures circling like undertakers on the fly.

I suppose you expect me to cry or something

and I will, after my own fashion, when this glacier

retreats like an ice-age my species has been adapted to

for way too long. I’ve been flint knapping new moons

like shards of obsidian into spearheads with a razor-edge,

and I may have mastered the art of hunting bigger prey

than I am, but the dreams of the Neanderthal

that has been living on inside of me against the odds

has left me a little flakier than a shaman in a cave bear’s hide

and I’m weary of singing in the false dawns

of the genetically engineered beginnings you keep

offering me as an alternative to my imminent extinction.

The death songs don’t sound the same

when they’re accompanied by a backup band

and a drum machine that never misses a beat

to be real enough to roll with the pulse of the moment

when the heart begins to jam with the rhythm of life

too close to last call to take another request. So please

just go, just go. Shut the lid on the coffin

of my guitar case and save your change for someone else.

I’ve stretched the membrane of my heart out

far enough for you to jump on like an animal skin

that thought of itself as more of a drum at a ghost dance

than a trampoline on the rebound when you

finally came back down to earth like a shooting star

I’d wish on like a lucky scar that might not disappoint me

like the last time you shattered my glass house like a Perseid

throwing the first stone at what you were capable of,

the dregs of a comet that didn’t burn hot enough

to burnish your golden chariot in the emotional crematorium

where the slag of a slum’s been mined out like love.

I buried the yellow canary that used to warn me

you were coming like the Wailing Wall

beside the Dome of the Rock in a bed of Jerusalem artichokes.

Take your body with you when you go. Take

your lips and your hair, your hips and your breasts

and the mammal magnetism of those dresses you wear

as if they were being modelled on a catwalk by the floor

beside someone else’s bed, and I’ll walk skinless

through the world awhile and feel everything again

like a wild aster in the acid rain of a significant climate change

it’s a lot easier to adjust to without you, than it is

to explain to my solitude looking for signs among the stars,

fireflies burning in all these ice-age Mason jars

I’m releasing like the Pleiades from the urns of my eyes,

chimney sparks in a gust of wind, lights out over

the sea at night, and when you’re gone, lightyears up the road,

these first magnitude starmaps I’ll use to start a fire

I’ll sit around, and listen to the wind rustling

through old creation myths like leaves well into autumn,

and try to identify the sound of a tree falling

in an old growth forest when there’s no one there to hear it

and the Canada geese are heading south like hearses of the spirit,

hello and farewell, included in the same calling out

to the silence and the distance between one absence and the next.

PATRICK WHITE