Sunday, August 18, 2013

I COULD SAY NOTHING

I COULD SAY NOTHING

I could say nothing. Or I could exert my imagination
to say the way it never is, nothing but exceptions
working to rule, functional disparities between chaos
and clarified thought, the dream grammars
of magicians on the nightwatch asleep on the job.
It’s a polymorphous perverse multiverse
that will take any neo-gestural suggestion
as seriously as a potter shapes the emptiness
of the urn he’s making for himself on the wheel
of birth and death, his hands caked in starmud
that comes with its own kiln baked into the mix.

I could say nothing about the lack of an inexplicable reason
for why it is the way it is and return to my ignorance
by default like a solar prominence lashing out
into the dark as if it were scourging the softness
in the eyes of the upper atmosphere almost in tears
for the way it rants at a planet determined to see for itself.
I could busy myself, soul-searching for words
the silver-tongued Russian olives might risk
whispering into the ears of the willows still in their gowns.

I could mine the crude ore of the asteroids and turn
the motherlode into subtler refinements of the mind,
as the soothsayers of greed have foretold
like an oracular app on their stealth cellphones.
I wouldn’t be alone in this, with all
these affable spy satellites and drones for familiars
keeping watch on what I write about the breadlines
outside the surrealistic circuses that distract us
with the infinite variety of living like people
with no choice but to be consoled by the private rights
of wild animals shocked into performing
for a ringmaster with a whip and a footstool
to keep the savagery of our rage from getting out of hand.
Or something disgustingly cute to take us off the ball
we’re losing our balance on, keeping in mind
inside every sentimentalist is a nasty brute.

Trying to seed a sea change with bullets in an exchange
of gunfire is the forget the immaculate conception
this sea of precarious awareness first had of us
when it breathed light into the waters of life
like moonset into the barrier reefs of the sponges
and corals that engendered us to live outside the law
as if we were honest with ourselves. First impressions
shall be the last, and the last shall be the worst of them all.
If people don’t concentrate enough to lose their focus
in someone they love anymore, the rest is fate, and we
just dissipate back into the void like a passing thought
or the one way tickets of Monarch butterflies on the way home
like illegal aliens estranged by the toxicity of our pestilential
presidential run-offs as we research how to musically embrace
extra-terrestrials in a bond of cowering friendship to feel
we’re not alone in the world, except together with each other,
where it isn’t familiarity that breeds contempt,
but the encylopedic holy books of our hatred we keep
preaching to the choir like voice coaches and spinny healers
laundering the bedsheets in a cult hospital of blood-stained angels
racially profiling the stranger at the gate
as if his shadow fell any darker on the earth than ours
in the doorway of a house on fire torched by a burning cross.

Dry ice for tears, people don’t cry for each other anymore,
they evaporate spiritually, they sublimate, they sigh
for a better world than this worst of an infinite number
of better alternatives as they arm their innocence
like a children’s crusade on the way to another holy war.
Is it feasible any image we were created in the name of
to love one another is as rabidly addled as the memes
we follow like Ibn Attar’s pilgrimage of birds
to look into any god’s eyes and see ourselves
in a parliament of corrupt politicians padding their travel-fares
as they do their bodies, egos and hairdos at public expense?

When hasn’t the death hex of the military industrial complex
not been a blessing in disguise to the corporate undertakers
who wash the corpses for burial like sins off their hands.
Offices of great state enshrining human rights on the Vietnam Wall.
Dividing, we rule. Together, like the old woman
who unwound her spinal cord into a million weak threads
as if she were sorting out the bloodlines of xylem and phloem
in the heartwood of the tree of humankind, we open
a school of assassins to preemptively protect the golden rule
with concealed weapons against the genocidal madmen
who secretly feel, by killing children indiscriminately,
they’re pschoBabylonically on the road to becoming one of us.


PATRICK WHITE

I CAN SEE THE LOVE AND THE LOSS IN YOUR GREEN, GREEN EYES AGAIN

I CAN SEE THE LOVE AND THE LOSS IN YOUR GREEN, GREEN EYES AGAIN

I can see the love and the loss in your green, green eyes again,
stars away from the light I wanted to be in your life.
Deadly nightshade and sunflowers, I remember the loveletters
that used to arrive like wounded doves with strawberry hearts
bleeding through the snow, wild roses in an ice-age
with flint knapped thorns and the lunar horns
of a dragon of desire for firesticks. I would have
smudged my ghost with a noose of sweetgrass
from the highest rafter in this house of life long before this
if you hadn’t left the gate of your absence open
to the dark paradise of the abyss I’ve been falling through
ever since love got precipitous as a Clovis point with a razor’s edge
and every nightbird in the repertoire of the songs I wrote
started playing with my jugular like a one-string guitar
strung like a highwire act over the voice box
they’re still looking for close to where I crashed.

Some people focus like telescopes on what they can see.
And some look under the eyelids of their deathmasks
at the dreams disappearing like the fragrances and vapours
of the spirits that changed the way they look at life
like a waterclock of endless nights that write their names
in their breath on the black mirrors of a seance of new moons
that can’t meet the same stranger twice, given once
is enough of an afterlife to make death seem petty
compared to the nightmare of the exits we have to go through
to get here, alone and homeless as a welcome mat
on the threshold of a fire escape that descends into a dark alley
where I jam with the feral cats on the urn of a burnt guitar
I carry the ashes of my love poems in like a moonrise in my throat,
birds of the morning singing in the false dawns
of the creosote clinging to my vocal cords like boat-tailed grackles
on a powerline that came down in a storm, how
could it have been otherwise, like a bullwhip across my eyes.

Fireflies are intimate with the tenderness of pain,
but the dragons of love wreak utter destruction in their wake.
And everybody dies in the intensity of the conflagration
like a savage heart on the bone altar of its pyre
just to keep the fire fed like a star that consumes itself
for the sake of shedding a little light on the immensity
of its solitude, many, many nights without curfews ahead.

I resent nothing. I regret less. I don’t plead
like a rosary of skulls beaded like black dwarfs
on an abacus of love that renders an account of all I’ve lost.
If I’ve grown wise as an enlightened eclipse from the encounter,
it was an accident, and if I’ve deepened my ignorance sufficiently
to understand the evanescence of dark matter, there was
never any intent to seek shelter under the wing
of an evil portent that mentored me to see in the dark
that the petals of your loveletters had stopped blooming
in the Jurassic greenhouse of your eyes, like the flowers
and feathers we hoped would evolve out of our scales
like guitar picks into the quills of an oracular snakepit
of picture-music singing back up to the hidden harmonies
in the lonely ballads of the cosmic hiss that puts a finger
to the lips of the silence in a command performance of bliss
that made the darkness shine for awhile, and aged the wine
in the bells of the sorrows that emptied the urns
of the skulls we once raised to celebrate fire on the moon
like lunar starfish burning under water like a shipwreck
of white phosphorus in the Sea of Tranquility
you had to learn to handle like fireflies piloting the Pleiades
through the earthbound starclusters of the New England asters
as if it would always be September ever after
like the crossbones of a harvest moon perishing
like an outdated calendar with the scenic view of an abandoned house
where life once happened in the shadows of the candles
in a wax museum I’ve never been able to put out
like a nightwatchmen that keeps all the doors to his heart unlocked.

A gust of stars settling like dust on the windowsills of the past
and if I don’t say it in a rush of light, I forget
all the words to the song and start making things up
like the flying buttresses of fossilized dragons
I dredge up from my starmud to support the loss
of the faith I used to have in my memory not to lie to me
about how rapturously intimidating it was to see you
walking up the driveway to the door
that keeps opening me up like an unread loveletter
as if you were always standing on the other side
of the pain thresholds I’ve crossed out like the tree ring
of my name carved into the heartwood of a scratched guitar
just to see the love and the loss in your green, green eyes again
and maybe sing, o yes, sing a little in the dark
of what you meant to me like a star in the willow boughs
of the saddest poetry I’ve ever recited like a fire in the night
I ghost dance around in the war bonnets of love
I shed like the swan songs of summer stars in the autumn
as our flightpaths arc like arrows fletched in flames toward earth.


PATRICK WHITE