MUNDANE WORLD STUCK LIKE TAR ON MY
FLIGHTFEATHERS
Mundane world stuck like tar on my
flightfeathers.
Denser gravity. Depressive atmospheres.
Sunlight,
but more like sulphur than saffron.
Moonset
in the La Brea Tar Pit. The clearer
things get
the more they hurt. Looking for
penumbral exits.
Why did I clean the windows? Now
they’re
gleaming like silk and my eyes feel
like burlap.
I hate the contrast. Things I must do
to survive.
Always a minute from midnight, last
chance,
only shot, photo finish between hope
and despair.
I want to get a job weaving baskets to
catch the heads
of the windfall guillotines in late
September.
What I must do to survive at odds with
the things
I sacrifice my life to do to stay
alive. Fully,
even as the dupe of my own absurd
ideals, second guesses,
groping intuitions, inconceivable
conceptions
of what I’m doing on earth spending
so much time
alone with the stars as my heart
withers in empathy
with the last of the wildflowers,
thinking life
doesn’t cherish anything it creates
for long,
much like a poet emptying the cup of
the full moon
to have it filled again by nature
abhorring a vacuum.
Life’s more the circuitous blossoming
of a back-country
dirt road that gusts up into a patina
of dust on your shoes
with nowhere in particular to go you’re
ever
going to get to on time, except for the
profusion
of white sweet clover under your nose
and the sound
of bees attending to agendas of their
own that console
the troubled soul with the earnest
white noise of their droning
and things going on as you imagine they
should be,
than it is a highway strewn with
collateral roadkill.
Acculturated mob mind systematically
tries to crowd
the poetry out of my solitude like a
cinder from a glass eye,
a fly on a computer screen, the
splinter of a star,
a thorn in the heart of a nightbird
it’s too late in the year
for anyone to answer but the hills and
the stealth
of the snow owls. I lament the
declining standard
of predators who were meant for nobler
deaths.
Now I feel hunted by corporate maggots
and tapeworms,
plagues of bureaucratic blackflies,
collection agencies
of encephalitic mosquitoes swarming the
bloodbanks
of my overdrawn, cash-strapped
transfusions
like the first link in a foodchain of
paint thinners
as I change the cellphone numbers of my
genomes.
I miss the old pretence of knowing what
I was all about.
I can wax nostalgic about my arrogance
sometimes
though I’m aware I’m being more
permissive
than disciplined about my collusive
behaviour in the past
with glass-blown dragons who couldn’t
take the heat
for all they bragged like mirages in a
mirror
about all the time they’d spent like
heretical monks
in the desert. Gnostic prophets trying
to make
a name for themselves in black
fleamarkets
returning atavistically to their
reflexive upbringings
whenever the ghosts of the revolution
began
to oxygenate them for real and said,
burn, baby, burn
but they fizzled out like wet
firecrackers and matchbooks
beside their 80 USA proof rum flambes
blooming
like a bouquet of candles skunked on
the outhouses
of the coffins they were buried in
standing up for nothing.
The literary history of misery. Who
believes a poet
who’s nothing like his poems, or a
singer
who forgets the words to his own song
as if
he were wiping his breath off a mirror
with a long sleeve
or writing runes in watercolours that
washed off in the rain
like fake hard rock tattoos, and a
forty of booze?
I don’t long to be a famous firepit
of the bridges
I burned behind me. My urns aspire
higher
than the second magnitude ashes of
circumpolar dragons
that want to elevate their mediocrity
into the limelight.
For the hell of it. Pure and simple. As
if
nobody were listening to the wind in
the sumac
rising in the full plumage of its
flames
like the voice of a phoenix in a
self-immolating choir
of root fires spreading underground
from one starfield
to the next. It’s more convincing to
overhear
the severe beauty of the heartless
truth in human terms
than it is to be told to your face by
fireflies and galaxies alike
you had a chance to shine, but you
burned
like a ghost of dry ice as if creation
had banned you
in fire season. Green punk on the pyre.
No flare. No flame.
I want to be ineffably famous for
forgetting I had a name once.
PATRICK WHITE
No comments:
Post a Comment