NO MYSTERY IN THE STIGMA OF THE MISERY

NO MYSTERY IN THE STIGMA OF THE MISERY

No mystery in the stigma of the misery, regret rebounds

as cynicism and disgust, the way it is with us,

every emotion a life study in a death mask,

every thought the pose of a moment that eludes us,

and the stars hair-braided into the tresses of the willows,

and the bridges we burned like the Milky Way so

no one could cross after us into the abyss,

the prodigal homelessness of our return address,

as our tracks are swept away on the Road of Ghosts,

actions of strategic gestures of peace with ourselves,

a truce, at best, with the dangerous stranger within

that plays host to the dead as if he were one of the guests,

as the ideals we die for demonically bless the means.

The labyrinth lost in us, looking for an exit sign,

the planets spinning their wheels in our starmud,

intractable kings of the hill waiting for the equinox

to light up our bones like kindling in our barrow tombs.

She’s not at peace with herself because she remembers

nothing she hasn’t repeated to her friends like an ally

that doesn’t know who or what she’s fighting against,

seldom for, anymore, that nothing makes any sense

and her life’s spread out like a Tarot pack on the floor,

pondering the destiny of sex with the ex of an old lover.

Nobility among the humble trivialized into the whim

of an action hero trying to live up to the movie

made of him like a two minute trailer

in a Bronze Age scarred by copper and tin.

He’s a voice coach in a choir of echoes

half a note off the ghosts of the nightbirds

that used to send a cold chill through the woods

before the agony of their unadulterated longing,

the infallible sorrow in the depths of the hunger for love

went extinct as yesterday’s moonrise.

His eyes are always busy as a security camera

but see nothing that’s unusual about him

except for the way his ego is always mistaking

his reflection for someone who might be sexting him.

Window-dressing and mannequins of expendable democracy

looted by the firelight of rioting thieves

demanding the same private rights as the key

to the executive washroom the slumlords

and feudal bankers hold over the heads of the peasants

like a watercloset over a common moat.

There in the red emergency exit light,

crumpled like a potato sack up against the door

that only opens one way, would you believe

that junkie used to sing as if she were having

a heart attack on stage like a sparrow hawk

shrieking into a microphone at the top of her lungs

as she went after every note like unsuspecting prey?

What do you say? It’s plagued me most of my life

as if my heart were insufficient, and compassion paled

in comparison with the damage done, irrevocably real,

as the mind takes account of successive images

and mouths some idiotic abstract mantra

about the collateral damage of the tragic element

in a comedy of errors in the eye of the beholder

looking upon the aesthetic desecration of idols

in the modern era like fourth century Christians

gone heresy hunting in the name of the Lord.

Maybe it’s time to upgrade my pagan superstitions

into benign cosmic theories about quantum foam

as if the universe were frothing at the mouth in a fit

of hydrophobia adrift on the waters of life.

Eye-witness to the suffering of others there’s

so little I can do anything, nor have the right, about

love beyond desire has its will bent

by its own redoubtable impotence as its first line

of self-accusatory defence. How many times

have I simply wanted to reach out and touch

the despairing silence in someone’s eyes

with a image of beauty, indelibly undisguised

without its deathmask on and no sign of perishing

from one breath to the next that might reveal

the hidden jewels in the slag of the ore they’re

buried in like exiles in a darkness far from home?

Cults of shadows dance around the lanterns

of the nightwatchman slowly being ground down

like a lens that gives him something to focus on

that’s more starlike than mere reflections

in a window no one looks out of anymore.

Every intention has its effect, but the effect

seems drastically out of touch with the ailment

it was meant to cure and the good deed elaborates

into superficial paradigms of the sacrificially complex.

You end up speaking like a hex of God

upon the freeborn waters of life at an altar with a knife

you don’t know whether to gut yourself with

or drive through someone’s heart like a righteous kill

as you ask out of a lingering sense of feasible compassion

that anyone’s will, other than your own, be done

as it isn’t right now with heaven’s hand

over the mouth of hell like an enculturated cellphone

meming the iconic oracles of the last prophetic skull

we listened to as if our lives together depended on it

like a happier estrangement than anything

our imaginations could have fervently wished for.

PATRICK WHITE