FEEL LIKE A BIG RED ENAMEL BILLBOARD

FEEL LIKE A BIG RED ENAMEL BILLBOARD

Day 7: Little shakey this morning. I think it’s the meds

they’ve got me on. Corduroy road. Is that close to Tobacco?

And typos, swarms of them, blackflies

flying into my eyes and mind like cinders

and space capsules and moths in degenerating orbits

As I am. Caw, caw. Death’s firesticks.

I think I’ll make a kite out of them as long as I can.

Decamethsedone. if you say it fast enough

it convincingly sounds like a train coming your way.

This is the drug that sobers me up when

I firewalk to the other side of the moon, and this

is the drug that keeps me from throwing the last one up.

An angel who saved me from a month long Mafia of migraines.

But this tumour is acting like a competitive poet

in my brain who’s ferociously mad at me

for being the older, better published poet

and I am, at least for the next little while

or he bumps me off he can, and he can’t

and he never had to but he doesn’t know it

not just yet, that dawn is sometimes grey

as a religious order of cigarette butts, and that’s ok.

It can’t always be catacombs, urns and Auschwitz.

And I don’t mean that at all casually. I say it with respect.

Thank you. Thank-you so much for teaching me

what I’ve really never been able to quite as

convincingly learn from myself before

and this isn’t emotional baby oil I’m smearing

all over your heart like a mirror in the shape of your body

that was once the universe. I really mean it.

Or maybe you like the oil better. But either way

I’m trying to let nothing ever come between us

so I’m writing this right out in the open

where the lightning likes to play with arrows

from a war bonnet with Druids of mistle toe

like the streetlights on Douglas St. In Victoria.

God, a I miss that seagull now. That’s natural. And human.

Which is what I want to be with you, not

Heartbreak Hotel, or Hill or bone box at the end

of an equatorial meridian that once a year

kisses the skulls at the other end of the hall

on the forehead like a long shot with a cue ball

of prophetic skulls tucked in for the night. The kids

are all right. But if it’s got to be that, too,

you don’t need to steal the Buddha’s purse

to buy the buy the Buddha’s horse. I’ve got

a bag full of gold in my head that sings

like a waterbed of rattlesnakes that strike like a rose

when their aroused. I’ll be the voodoo doll.

I’ll take the fall for all of us. I used to jump

bareback mares up at Beaver Lake, holding on

by the waves of their manes for dear life as I am now.

Thanks for unbeaching my heart like a dolphin

that’s washed ashore out of a storm of torn fishing nets.

I’m blundering through a labyrinth of life and death

on the internet, and I used to meet each of you

coming down the other side of the road

like Buddha Pinnochio whose nose grew longer

with every truth he told, but now you walk beside me

like a blood and shadow travelling companion

to God knows where (Allaho Allahim) and I’m

grateful, o yes I am, I’m so grateful for the company.

Feel like a big red enamel billboard I painted

once for a pizzeria to advertise out on Highway 7,

two three quarter inch plywood sheets, sticky

hot paint that sweats, I leaned up against

the abandoned four car garage, spiders and tires

and wrenches and spanners I didn’t have a clue

how to use, rusty fans from Precambrian summers ago

and boxes of nails and screws, baby snake fangs

that have been collected over thousands of years

like poisonous punctuation marks, or gravegoods,

in an abandoned hippie organically abandoned farmhouse

that left a lot of pickled fiddleheads and Jerusalem

artichokes ready for a market they obviously

hadn’t made it to in Perth Saturday morning in the parking lot

where half of everybody who gathers there

gets real capitalistically muncipally unmerciful about selling

their wares off as if they were trying to tempt Jesus in the wilderness

and the other half just come to see the Middle Ages,

have a pageant of fun for a change, get out, put a little

colour on their face that doesn’t look like warpaint.

Jerusalem artichokes in bloom O they were beautiful

that hot red afternoon when I kept picking the dragonflies

out of the paint with the tip of a very slim painting knife

to trowel them out like tumors in a red, Burgess Shale,

Vietnam all over again but with a jeweller’s wings

this time, and solemn, yes, but does that black wall

have to look like it’s assuaging your guilt as if someone just

stuck a Scotch thistle under your saddle or

a whole constellation of them like a bouquet of Velcro burrs?

No slurs here, no slurs, please, and if I’ve desecrated

anybody’s feelings and they’re beginning to hear

the roar of savage indignation as the crowd rises

to its feet to savage somebody for being who they are,

well, it’s happened before. (Interjection. A mind spear.

I’ve finally figured out what all these little signs

on the page like little black, squirming, alphabetic maggots are,

and I don’t mean this in a mean way this time, are really all about.

Hoofprints. Cloppitity. Clop. With Siamese fighting fish in them

for a day, a day, a day of life I’m a rocking horse

who aspired to Pegasian elevations that would give

Icarus a nose bleed of mystic fire from a dragon’s mouth

that spared the butterfly by mythic comparison.

And Perseus still carrying that old decapitated head

of a snakepit around as if he’d been part of the French Revolution

or Verinus in serial Rome after his wife committed suicide

to prevent him from committing an honour killing

sporting some kind of new Parisian hair do

with his arm stuck out like a stop sign on a schoolbus

in his Christmas tree saddle, or is it a life line?

Please somebody, help, though I say this more

in expectation of what shall we say, accuracy and art?

That’s got a way with it. We’ll go with that. Accuracy and art

as long as I don’t have to paint it on a billboard

that sings like a gravestone. Who’s this? The sacred clown.

Or spotted tanagers at a ghost dance. This is too much fun

with words for the picture music going through my head right now

to believe it’s madness, and even if it is, it’s

liberating and hilarious in a heartless kind of way.

Some cheap surrealistic circus is in town with its crumby parade.

And I’m drifting oarless too far off shore to make

the continent of a point I was trying to drive across

less obvious than a cattle herd, heard. There. That was a rimshot.

Now let me tell you about the darkness I was

swallowed by like a humid, hot, brooding mouthful

of silence as if it were about to chew on me like a cashew word

with a millstone hung around its neck for good luck,

as if I’d ever let any kind of luck fool me now.

I watched Star Trek. Just to say it makes me feel

all warm and fuzzily nostalgic inside to go on playing

Jim Morrison anymore. Hamlet’s too affectionate

and I like Jim Morrison too much to hurt his feelings.

Blackness, the black dwarf, the black hole, the black matter,

shows up like a bead in transit for an unknown name of God on my rosary,

the one Qasem brought me all the way back from Kuwait

that gate country to God knows (allah ho allah him) where but the way

he so gently and slyly gave it to me still feels good

after all these lightyears I think I’m going to honour

it with an eclipse and a clip of Canada geese out of a Tom Thomson painting

after he stopped painting them with a geometry set

as if he were engineering a highway instead of a snake,

a rosary, or the river of life as it makes it way south

in the bodies of birds I’ve been comparing to urns lately

because I can have fun with the image turning it

in the light of an image I think I stole from Georgio once

but I’m not sure any more and it doesn’t matter anyway.

He’s a priest. And I’m not so sure about all of that.

I take an interest. And drink deeply and passionately

out of the skull cup as a sign of respect for my host

and I’m still wheeling like a universe of Sufis

at the crossroads of my little galaxy here trying to follow

the golden ratio like a sunflower as if it didn’t do very well

in math at school. And I did. But not well enough in my own estimation.

I haven’t been like the old woman Muhammad mentioned

unweaving a strong spinal cord into a million

feeble nervous systems as I keep repeating to myself

my head’s still in the stars as surely as my feet

are still planted on the ground, though I don’t want

anyone to take that quite literally just yet. When

a galaxy’s not ready to bloom, you don’t take a crowbar

to open it anymore than you do a flower or a woman or a child

or pet. Do you get the point? The nebula

tinctured by a moondog of medical grass will blow away

on its path to ignition and the Pleiades will do the rest.

Stars, stars, stars. What is it about them that since that first

night on my mother’s back porch trying to see them

through the Macmillan and Bloedel pulp smoke

that was killing all the flowers I had stolen for my mother

like geranium fire from the gods. O my good

Promethean son. God, how I’d love to hear that now.

That fifty-seven years later I still feel startled

in my heart, soul, mind, body, eyes, blood

tears, joys, terrors, mystic and otherwise, as if

the clouds just broke without meaning to on

the Queen of Heaven’s face and she lifted one

of her veils, though their was no return address

on the envelope, she smiled, I swear to God she did,

into my face as if she really meant it. And I’m not talking

about a flying saucer here I saw one night, She really meant it.

Back to the billboard. To break out of this trance

and be lovingly numb in a weird human kind of way

about emptying the ashtray like a Virgo indulging himself

with a little comfort order in his life he doesn’t have to feel

sorry about like a scar that’s more of a doctor

than the wound itself in a surgical theatre that

keeps whispering in my ear this isn’t like having your tonsils out

and it’s a long chaos between here and the garbage can

I bought to throw them in one easy swing of the arm

as if I were some sort of gazelle of a outfield catcher.

Caught it. Cancer. The crowd roars. Foul ball. I’m out.

And London bridge falls to the ground exhausted after

an extraordinary effort to hold itself up as long as it can

as a tragic clown with a heart as honest as he can make it

thinking that might make a difference somewhere sometime

for somebody else like an old blossom of a baseball cap

that somehow fits them just perfectly like a gift from a stranger

or the gods, if you want to make more of it than

it really deserves, it’s just a baseball cap, for God’s sake.

O, ya, that stupid billboard floating around in mind

like a raft I’m still carrying around on my head

gerrymandered out of these scraps of life lying around

from last winter when I made my penultimate attempt

to get to the other side of nowhere and everywhere in particular

but here. Which is the ultimate ride. When it makes itself

vertiginously clear I’m not here, nor are you, we never have been

and yet this dream’s been swirling around us like a river of stars

that had to get somewhere just the same. Five miles. Left at the next exit.

PATRICK WHITE