Tuesday, September 10, 2013

PEACE IN THE SADNESS THAT ALWAYS OVERTAKES ME

PEACE IN THE SADNESS THAT ALWAYS OVERTAKES ME

Peace in the sadness that always overtakes me
this time of night. Distance and time in the silence.
The darkness breathes subliminal fragrances of the past.
Intensities relax and grow expansively immense.
The stars look down on my eccentric solitude
and deepen my emptiness with a strange longing
to shine with the same cold fury of creative turmoil
their unattainable radiance has always inspired in me.

It may well be no small thing to counterpoint
the beauty of their brilliance with my paltry daub
of mortal starmud whose every aspiration ends
in the expertise of an apostate clown trying
to embody the first principles of his sacred folly
without breaking into tears of face paint as if
I were talking to dream figures in my sleep
while I was still awake, and inseparable as I am
from the stars down here by the river where the town
doesn’t weed the stray whispers out of the light,
none of us can explain the oddity of our presence
in the midst of each other like psychic phenomena.

And it isn’t likely I’ll know before I die
whether I’ve wasted my life and theirs or not.
I wonder if Jupiter ever feels like a loser
for letting the sun down like a brown star
that didn’t quite reach critical mass
to shine as a binary companion at the dance
instead of sitting it out on the periphery
like a wallflower in perpetual bud too shy to be asked.
So my mind, as old as I can remember, has
been allegorizing the abyss with surrealistic romantic facts
to reach out like a bridge across the mirage
of a blackwater mindstream in a desert of stars
as if there were someone to relate to
in the clear light of the void less impersonal
than the Planck lengths of speculative graffiti
trying to attribute a narrative theme to chaos
I could humanize like a candle in a lonely room.

Idle ruminations of a restless night owl
with blood on its talons like the last crescent
of the waning moon roosting in the leper colonies
of the inundated birch groves on the far bank.
Most of my life it’s been an excruciating labour of love
to bind the world to me in a collagen of metaphors
that nucleates my cells and atoms with mythologems
of the multiverse in the heartwood of every one of them.

I’ve even come to appreciate the quantum entanglements
of delusion and enlightenment as complementary opposites
that have engendered my oxymoronic awareness
of their coincident contradictories of inharmonious synchronicity
and acted out the crazy wisdom of the fool accordingly.

A liberated discipline of free association
I keep rolling my prophetic skulls like dice
against the odds of my meteoric amino acids
ever having tallowed me like flesh around
the wick of my spine mining liquid nanodiamonds
out of the ore of these spent match heads in Antarctica.

I paint my interior dialogue with the cosmos
in vivid vowels but the consonants still count
as earth colours I can rely on to ground the effect
of lightning rooting in the wetlands of my starmud.

Creatures rise out of the dark lagoon like breaching trees
and I’m subsumed in these visions of their passing away
as if there were nothing more noteworthy about evolution
than someone realigning their body with the angle
of what they’re adjusting to in their sleep.
What random act of inconsequence dreams of us
when we’re not there to second guess the outcome?

Colloquies of madness, poetic cosmologies
extrapolated from supra-dimensional improbabilities,
I’m still amorphous enough to accept the world
on its own terms as if it had all been created anonymously
to intrigue the lunatics who focus on it as if
it meant something as significant as music
to the incoherent lyrics of their longing to hear
a voice answer back that isn’t the echo of their own
in this delirium of mystery where the nightbirds sing
simply because the stars are there to inspire them
and Sisyphean dung beetles navigate their stones up the hill
like a solar system by the spectral radiance of the Milky Way.


PATRICK WHITE

MUNDANE WORLD STUCK LIKE TAR ON MY FLIGHTFEATHERS

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