NEVER MAKE A GOAL OF YOUR DESTINY

NEVER MAKE A GOAL OF YOUR DESTINY

Never make a goal of your destiny, a chore

of your happiness, a precedent of your originality.

The night air is querulous. The full moon

harvests its perishing. Time wanders in a fog

of flagellant willows trying to blood the abstractions

of a teenage philosopher fallen out of love

with the river she questions like a way of life.

Hick town drunks holler ubiquitous obscenities

out of the open windows of their vehicular

boom boom boxes cruising the streets for meat

with a pulse trying to relate the wavelengths

of a watersnake like a delayed lightning strike

in tight jeans dancing to the music of thunderous toads.

Come the false dawn like the dead pallor of grey skin

shed the morning after as if the anti-climactic apocalypse of lust

had fizzled out like a wet firecracker grown ashamed

of its own nakedness in the more vulnerable light of day,

and every virgin it saw after that, pimples on the ass

of a goddess, it called a slut, as if it had carnal knowledge

of what it was talking about, like blood on the sheets,

dogs in heat on the sexually frustrated streets

of a small town that changes partners like a square dance

every spring and autumn, as a distraction from the boredom

of laying heritage brick at the glazed gates of Babylon.

Little Red Riding Hood follows the bush wolves

into the woods like a scarlet letter at a witch burning

and everybody’s saddened by her lack of experience.

The waterwheels don’t turn anymore now the gears

of its teeth are seized like lockjaw, and the stairwells

to paradise in the flesh are helical as Sisyphus

listening to the recoil of his dna in the distance

start another avalanche of starmud to keep him

from being buried alive in a crossfire

of ricocheting gravestones milling more chaff

than grain like asteroids trying to make a big impact

on the eternal recurrence of evolution returning

to its hometown from a curative year in Toronto

like the first to abandon the farm to the barn owls.

Everybody’s trying to heal the nostalgic panaceas

that afflict them by applying leeches to their heart

like wet leaves to the forest floor of an old growth book,

or the stick-on stigmata of scar tissue that bleeds them

like the warning on the wall spelled out in the pedestrian kells

of wounded fridge magnets talking among themselves

like the logos of post-modernist oracles growing corpulent.

Despair is the fuel and fire of love in the house of life

when the whole planet’s burning at the stake we prepared for it

like a pyre of crutches and flying buttresses we needed

like a ribcage to stand up on our own two feet again

after being knocked down like a nosebleed that wouldn’t

turn the other cheek like the face of the moon

that would rather stare out into the abyss than

turn around and take a good look at us and what we’ve done,

and unrepentantly, how we look for the algorithms

of the grail that will green the ailing kingdom

without intending to fix it. So the exits are blocked

and no one has the strength, even on the inside,

to roll the shepherd moons and asteroids away from the entrance.

Every beginning has an oceanic notion of where it ends.

And in the interim, nothing but the desperate gestures

of drowning men and women watching reruns

of their lives flash before them like sunspots on a firefly.

Despair of the radioactive ashes in the hearth

of the nuclear family with solar systems in its ancestry

like a broken circle of prophetic skulls trying to set bounds

to the petty Armageddons in the domestic fires of love

melting cosmically down, down, down, like candles

and ice-cream cones embedded in the ashen wicks

and gravel on the roads that divide in life like the Milky Way

and the Road of Ghosts, as we’re firewalking on hot diamonds

of translucent insights into the nature love and life and art

in our dreams, only to wake up, after splashing

cold mirages on the faces of our disbelieving mirrors

to find ourselves crying real tears like chandeliers in a coalbin.

We lie like labyrinths of bullshit to ourselves

like bad highway engineers starmapping a spiritual path

through the roadkill that died without anyone meaning ill,

but there it is, the fox, the porcupine, the skunk, the beaver,

the cat, the dog, the frog, the snake, the drunk, Iraq,

torn, mangled, no jewels of light in their eyepits,

hung, gutted, drawn and quartered like racks of meat

by the serial undertakings of the funereal turkey vultures

at the sky burials of Gobekli Tepe, or a rock concert in Ardoch

where the woods, after the sun goes down, are

the black ops of darkling predators with nightvision

as everyone’s preoccupied with painting pretty pictures

on the walls of their caves by the numbers in blood, soot, and spit.

But here’s the thing itself. There’s no point trying

to colour in the negative space with the bluebirds

and weeping rainbows of a positive attitude

trying to outline the identity of the shape of emptiness

like a candelabra, a tree in winter, five ways

to go in life that stop dead in their tracks

like cul de sacs in an abyss that runs like a watercolour

down limestone stalactites. Or the fingers of a hand raised

in greeting or farewell as if the difference were negligible

as the direction of the wind to the doorway

of our return journey to the rustic innocence

of the dream grammars that reveal our most sacred nightmares

like red creator spiders empowering a mandalic web of dimensions

as everybody feels a desecration nobody else cares about

lost in the dark woods of their philosophical apprehensions.

PATRICK WHITE