I WANT DARK ENERGY

I WANT DARK ENERGY

I want dark energy.

I want release.

I want riot.

I want wishing wells

too surfeited with the prayers of the undeserving

to haemorrhage like watersheds

thrown from the balcony of the theatre

like plastic hysterectomies onto the anointed heads

of my immaculate conceptions

of blue madonnas in the audience.

I want tantrum.

I want chaos.

I want nemesis.

I want pandemonium.

I want a black mass

where the wafer of blood and flesh

isn’t a cookie on my tongue

that wasn’t burnt in the oven

but celebrates my suffering

in a holy communion of razor blades.

I want freaks with distractive affinities for the implausible

to rat their hard drives out to the police

like copycat serial killers

downloading corpses

like a motherboard at a seance

channeling the voices of virtual reality

into a living host.

I want the anti-muse of fire

to stuff my mouth with the ashes of urns

that weren’t inspired by their own negativity

to let the medium eat the message of the people

like a government dedicated to its own preservation.

I want to spit out toxic lyrics

like a cobra in disgust

at what it’s expected to swallow

like the sound-bite of a happier fatter afterlife.

I want heretical stigmata

to make the sign of the cross

like the blade of a Swiss army knife

to suck the poison out

and spit it back into the eyes of the Taliban.

I want foreign advisors

to parachute into my third world emotional life

like a snake pit they’re training to bite other people.

I want enlightened voodoo dolls

with boundless sex appeal

to reverse the curse of the blessing

that lied to me about who it was from.

Empty the slums the jails the ghettoes

the asylums the low rent housing projects.

Undo the first and last crescents of the moon like handcuffs

and free the beautiful lunatics

from their straitjackets and meds

to do post-doctoral research

into the genius of the stone-age tribes of Borneo

who knew how to shrink heads long before Freud

went into a trance and started playing witchdoctor

to a cauldron of biochemicals that can’t dance

like sugar plum fairies.

These are not the nabobs of madness.

The wrong miscreants have been committed

into the care of worse deviants.

Justice is an economic condition

that depends upon the law of supply and demand.

Build a prison.

And they’ll come

because nature abhors a vacuum

more than a black hole of economic isolation

with the singularity of a contagious victim

trying to tunnel through the bottom

like a drug cartel into the black market of another universe.

I want to reverse the order of things

like a digital hourglass

whose moment has come at last

to stand the pyramids on their heads

like the reflections of moonboats

capsized in a sea of sand

whose cargo sinks to the bottom

like the trickle down economics of an afterlife

that’s leaking down the leg of a drunk

in an executive urinal

dreaming of sweeter intoxications to come.

If what they tell me is true

and the tree of life is rooted in heaven

then it’s time we all started raining up

and shining from below

as if we were walking on stars

instead of rooting like thermophilic bacteria

seven kilometres down in a diamond mine

ready to regenerate life on earth by default

after an astronomical catastrophe

or being harvested

by corporate blue whales like krill.

Road kill like refugees

all along the panicked highways to hell.

I want an antidote

to the spiritual syphilis

that afflicts the human imagination with false hope

like snakeoil salesmen

milking the fang for a sure cure

to the other one that kills you

by convincing you to humbly bend over

and faithfully take it up the ass

like a syringe full of immunity to asps.

Disgorge the black honey

in the hives of the killer bees

and spread oilslicks like molasses

on their daily bread and butter

on the waters of their life

on the air they breathe.

For all the folksy spin

of their hand-painted commercials

consider how difficult it must be for them

to renew their virginity like a brand name

in the same public facility everyone else uses

without getting caught

fouling the earth like a toilet in an executive bathroom.

Monostomes that shit out of the same mouth they eat with.

Bring on the bitter the ugly the outrageous.

Bring on the doomsayers

who wish upon the first star they see at night

to be vindicated like a Mayan air raid siren

for howling like a banshee at the prophetic window

of another astronomical catastrophe.

Bring on the mythic inflations

of the apocalyptically hysterical.

Bring on the species we raised

like an assassin in our own house

to replace us with the same relentless indifference

that we showed to those that no longer exist.

Bring on the nightmares of feudal despair.

Bring on the extortionist thugs

of privatized health care

withholding the drugs

of a cancer patient for ransom

like dealers hooking junkies up to a higher price

knowing they’ve just got to have it or else.

Bring on the media pundits come

like scar tissue and rational bandages

with antiseptics on the tip of their tongues

to doctor the spin on the wounded psyche

of a disease they’re carrying

like the story of themselves.

Bring on the medicated luxury

of being able to feel something

with varying points of view

where tolerance too often

is just another norm of indifference

in the comfort of your living room

the one message the one headline

the news carries every night

like an after dinner mint

when one half of our global brain

watches the other half slaughtered or starved to death

raped enslaved kidnapped and decapitated

or swept like collateral damage under the monuments

to the lies we like to tell like modern history

about why so many had to die

so we could feel as special

as an NBC documentary on a national holiday.

The one mantra that’s being subliminally repeated

even if you go off to bed

disgusted at the obscenity

of any average day on earth

and take a soporific

to just tune out

and get a good night’s sleep

and wake up as refreshed as a web page

is keep things the way they are

because isn’t it good to live

in the shadow of the

biggest brother on the block

and look at the world as if you were exempt

when all was said and done to everyone else but you?

Most people aren’t looking for freedom anymore.

They’re looking for exemption.

And if you ever do see someone these days

out in the open as if the sixties weren’t over

nine times out of ten

unhinged by their perceptions

they’re looking for a good strong door

that keeps everything out and nothing in.

Bring on Armageddon.

Bring on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Bring on Adajal the red-haired one-eyed Liar.

Loose the Goog and the Magoog from behind their iron wall.

Let the shepherds of the black camel

build tall buildings in the desert.

Let no birds sing in the eucalyptus trees of Israel.

Let the last man on earth

grovel in the dust at his sister’s feet.

Let the extreme chaos of conditioned consciousness

load their hadron colliders with anti-matter

and have it out like gunslingers

in the streets of Laredo

as if an expanding universe

weren’t big enough for the two of them.

Here comes Alaric in the year 410 anno domino

with his Visigoths to the pantry of Rome.

Here comes Hulagu and his Mongols

and the black plague of 1348 anno domino

and the danse macabre of the flagellant fanatics

who tar and feather the night like a black swan

they set afire to keep the ugly ducklings in line.

Here comes the gamma radiation

like a starburst flavour in a wad of gum.

Bring on nuclear winter to savage the flowers

the grass the trees like a black sheep of seasons

that crept in among the flocks

like the shepherd of wolves

in the Duc d’Berry’s Book of Hours.

Let the earth put its big toe

on the last crescent of the moon

and pull it like the trigger of a double-barrelled shotgun

it’s got stuck like a mantra in its mouth

like the red hot ball of a koan of doubt

that’s been eating it from the inside out

and is about to break through

to other side of enlightenment

with the meteoritic impact of the Late Cretaceous

upon the chances of new mutant life forms

adapting to the desecration of the womb

that miscarried them into life

without a myth of origin

to explain their devolution from us

who took up all the oxygen in the room.

I want a more merciful chaos

than the relentless drone

of this blood-sucking order of doom

that plants its cosmic egg upon your forehead

and eats the butterfly out of the caterpillar

before it’s had a chance to bloom.

I want leaderless spaces

where everyone can move freely

wherever they want

with no back or front to the line

when everyone’s on a wavelength of their own

multiverse by multiverse

No more derisible politicians

with the integrity of fire hydrants

running for election

that any dog with money can piss on

in a house that’s already burnt to the ground.

You let me have a casino here

I’ll let you do cancer research over there.

I want to announce last call to all awareness

if the only thing we’ve figured out to do with it

is abuse it by arguing over whether

this obscenity of human lovelessness

is petty or profound

when the heart doesn’t bleed out

it haemorrhages before the last act of atrocity

has been played out in the belly of the beast.

The number of the beast

is the number of a man.

Could have been Decius.

Could have been Nero.

I want an infinite number of zeroes

behind my name.

What’s so scary about 666

in a triple X society five times as bad

and twenty-two times as mad

than Caligula making his horse a senator?

Let Rome burn.

Is Paris burning?

Has Beijing caught fire yet

like a red book in a cultural revolution?

I want dark skies in the eyes of my skull.

I want everything to go missing.

I want to fulfill my creative potential

like an unlit candle at a Zen funeral

that expresses everything I don’t know

about poetry and life

like an eloquent ignorance

that’s sensitive to light.

In a world as radioactively irrational as this

I want to be wrong for all the right reasons.

I want to play musical chairs with the seasons

and be the one that’s left out.

I want a medium with no message

it can identify with like the stem cell of a word.

I want to fall toward paradise

from such a long way up

I’m sure to burn out in the upper atmosphere

like a snowflake on a furnace

long before I ever get there.

Let someone unworthier than I am

take my place.

I want the cool background bliss

of my liberation

to put the cosmic hiss of my creation out

like a flickering candle

with a snake’s tongue

witching the air for the direction of prayer

between my godly forefinger

and my prehensile opposable thumb.

PATRICK WHITE

VENAL PERTH BLUES

VENAL PERTH BLUES

Venal Perth blues.

No room for arterial red.

I’m trying to get this local universe out of my bed

by spitting sunflower seeds in eclipse at the dead

in memory of her cotyledon splitting in two

like the vulva of a Venus figurine

with her bellyful of a population boom

that peopled my solitude with myriad familiars

that said they knew me once in a previous lifetime.

She was mad.

And she was nude.

And incomprehensible as fire.

And we revelled in each other’s sensuality

like two fudgicles on a hot August afternoon

when we were kids in the gutter

and had better things to do with our tongues than speak.

Such were the depths of absurdity we sank into

not caring who was the sabre-toothed tiger

and who was the starless tar pit of blameless oblivion.

I saw her spirit once under a blacklight

in a friend’s basement apartment

and saw how she greeted life with laughter

like a stranger from her own hometown

relieved to meet someone as crazy as she was

this far from anything they’d ever known before.

She entered a relationship like a demolition derby

and if your heart got bruised in the head on collision

she’d never let you put your hands on her steering wheel again.

And I don’t remember if it was the danger or the pain

that first attracted me to her

but I recall looking through her like a broken windowpane

into a savage mindscape with the biggest full moon

I’d ever howled at in an agony of lust and longing for years.

She was the darkest witch

in a coven of prime-time muses

that got behind everything she was up to

like the night gets behind the seven sisters of the Pleiades.

And at first I thought she was too high up

for the short-lived chimney spark of my voice

to ever reach her at those altitudes

as a sign of intelligent life from a furnace of desire

I was standing in like the ore of the Old Testament

to refine myself like gold from the base metal

of a soul that couldn’t forget where it came from

and wouldn’t turn its back on its own.

I wrote poetry in those days like a dragon in the rain

trying to keep my fire alive

on the lachrymose tinder of the sodden inspirations

that passed through my life like women in distress

until everything I wrote read like an s.o.s.

I sent out like a desperate loveletter

to anyone who was within earshot or not

for the princess to come to the rescue of the dragon.

And she did

once my tongue

got on the same wavelength as hers

like the witching wand of a tuning fork

and hit all the right notes through the three octaves

between lightning and fireflies

and we began to resonate

like the highs and lows of dark energy

in an occult universe whose physics were magic.

And from her point of view

I showed up like the joker

in the middle of a pack of Tarot cards

that didn’t think I was playing with a full deck.

The thirteenth floor was missing on the elevator

and she wasn’t sure she’d get off on me

but tentatively decided I was worth

coming up snake-eyes for

if she went as far as seven come eleven

when she heard that I liked to gamble.

I take great subjective overbidding risks

when my heart is on the table

and it’s winner take all

so how could I fail to fall in love

with any woman who was uncanny enough

to call my bluff and raise the stakes

like candles at a black mass

to purge my luckless soul of heresy?

An auto de fe.

No blood guilt on her hands.

She got into bed like a jihad

in the Court of the Star Chamber

and made love to the cloaked one

as if her holy war were won

long before she ever declared it

like an infidel on her way to confession.

Only as recently as yesterday

she said the apostasy of the flesh

was her profession by choice.

A kind of female crucifixion.

She’d heard a voice.

She was on a mission.

She was falling off her horse

on the way to Damascus

to start another church for sacred prostitutes.

And I said it doesn’t sound like a profession

but a religious calling to me

as she undid all her taboos

to convert me to the error of my ways.

Venal Perth blues.

No room for arterial red.

It’s hard to choose

between the farces of the living

and the legends of the dead

when you’ve lived light years beyond both

and the muse’s memory is beginning to fail

of just how crucial you were once to her fairy-tale.

And in the last twenty minutes

this lady’s changed her hairdo

like an Etruscan shapeshifter

from an Austrian ballroom chandelier

to the decapitated head of Medusa

in the star Al Gol of the constellation of Perseus

and back to a snake pit of downed power lines

expressing enigmatic paradigms of a future

that doesn’t see much for either of us

in the hydra-headed directions

we’re both going in

like the seven extra dimensions

of crazy wisdom we had to forget about

just to feel we belonged here for a while

with everyone else

who were just as lost as us.

But sometimes you’ve got to let go.

You’ve got to lose it

to find your way home alone in the dark.

And I’ve never minded being a lifeboat for somebody

but it’s time to jump ship

like one of a kind

when they start attaching tug boats to me

like an ark that just got out of drydock on the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

WORDS. JUST WORDS

WORDS. JUST WORDS

Words. Just words. Don’t be fooled. Oscillating wavelengths of laryngeal frequencies echoing in the mind as if ghosts had ears. Just because you’ve taken a bite out of an apple doesn’t mean you’ve experienced an apple tree. You’d have to swallow the whole universe in a single gulp to do that. And it’s more than a mouthful even for the word mongers. Selena. Moon. Luna. Al Qamar. She of the wide shining brow. Europa. All sounds for the same thing. A way of pointing without the finger. Picture-music without the baton. Sounds of the living. Sounds of the dead. First words from the cradle. Last words on a death bed. We paint with sound when we’re up. We sing the blues when we’re down. I ask my eyes to explain my ears. My ears talk about loud and understated colours. My senses keep passing a magic ball around like a word and each of them casts a different spell over my vision. Some an eclipse. Some a blue moon in late October. And there are words like small birds that break their necks against a windowpane by mistaking a frame of reference for the sky. Words live. Because you do. But if you’re dead. You write like the letter of the law on marble letterhead to let us all know where your’re buried. Words get married. Words get divorced. Words have kids and live in myriad family ways. Words leave suicide notes to be found in the morning written by scarlet snails of lipstick scrawled across bathroom mirrors that feel like rejection slips from a fashion magazine. No word since the beginning of language has ever said a thing. They’re silent. Words don’t speak up for themselves. They leave that to us. Words like climbing the rigging up to the crow’s nest like a guitarist working the struts like frets or like a spider in a high wire act weaving safety nets and neural webs dripping like hammocks and powerlines from the attics of your left front parietal lobe. In the beginning was the word but it was the imagination that was the ghost writer. And still is. And ever shall be. All words have a common proto-nostratic ancestor like a monosyllabic mother tongue that grunted its way into eloquence. But verbal expression is not thought no more than a scream is. And all thought is revelation faster than the speed of light. Words move at the speed of sound. They’re too slow to keep up with the extraterrestrials. Words walk on the earth looking for an hospitable voice to play host to their homelessness. Abstractions are the insubstantial shadows of concrete nouns. If you can’t say it in colour and sound and taste and texture you’re not in a world of forms anymore. You’re a hole in the ozone that lets the gamma radiation in like a high frequency wavelength toxic with ideas that are shed like the skin of an ideal serpent that leaves its ghost in the wake of an exorcism and moves on like a star well beyond the signs of life it leaves behind. Every word is a graveyard of metaphors. In every word is a house of the dead where it keeps the prophetic skulls it consults once a year like the tangible meaning of its origins. Comet. Comma. Comb. Coma. Or ball ballistic ballet bolemic. All petals of the same flower. All birds on the same prayer-wheel. Straw dogs, masks of the Dogan, voodoo dolls and sacred effigies heaped on the fire after the festival is over and the gods have been propitiated like powerful emotions. Venus figurines with bulging bellies as if they had something real to say about creativity. Hunting magic, yes, negative handprints and extinct rhinos defecating on dead shamans in deep trance states, but always on the wet walls of a fertile cave-womb with clitoral monoliths at the main entrance like the labial crescents of the full moon giving birth to architecture. Bury your dead under your hearth fire if you want to see how the living inpsire the dead like a phoenix to rise again out of your ashes. Words are like stars and the history of light. By the time they get here, they’re always light years behind the original insight that’s penetrated deeper into space than anything that can be measured in words can know by turning a spectrum into a bar code. Words can serve a purpose when the need arises. They can be the bearers of water and the hewers of wood. But at night in the slave-camps when the sugar-cane is cut it’s a different music than that which animates the workaday world. Words let their hair down and pound the ground of their being with dithyrambs of unfettered feet until they drown in their own sweat to free themselves of the chains and the whips that keep them in line like the imperial rhetoric that knows how to march but isn’t much good at dancing itself to death. Words are wanna be musicians with scratched guitars on their backs hitch-hiking down the Highway 7s of my breath. They stand outside the liquor-store and busk for chump change. They introduce their sorrows to strangers in the rain. Some words soar and plunge like dragons and red-tailed hawks, but most are just the same old broken propellers that have been trying to fly for years as if weathervanes had feathers and paperclips had wings. Words are pine-beetles. Words are chainsaws. Words cut whole forests down to re-paper the living room with scenic views of autumn trees. Words return the bodies of dead dignitaries in long memorial thought trains like Abraham Lincoln to Illinois. A man is just the expansion of the vocabulary of the boy who’s still trying to get his point across. Words wound. Words heal. Words repel and words beguile. But whether they’re telling the truth or not they’re no less real than the tapping of the rain on the windowpane or the dead branch that’s taken up the pen to scratch its life story out in water and glass as if words gave meaning to the incomprehensible by seating it like a guest at the head of a table of contents. Words enter the mystery and disappear like birds among the stars. Words give eye-witness testimony in defense of your ears when they lie to themselves about what they’ve heard. If the universe is in a grain of sand then what’s in a word if not the whole story of creation in a nutshell? Words make the man. Not his clothes. As soon as he opens his mouth and discloses how patchy his mind is as if he were wearing the colours of three gangs at once. A word can be the raven at your door or a nightingale in a hawthorn tree. They’re chameleons of your mood. And when you need them to be they’re mirrors you hold up to nature unadorned in broad daylight, and later that night when you’re alone in the dark, they’re looking glasses into your soul with cosmetic lights you can turn on and off like your name on a marquee in front of a theatre. And the audience that goes inside. Anyone can stumble across a word like a seashell on a deserted beach and put it up to their ear and expect to hear the ocean. But how many can listen attentively enough they can hear what the stars are saying as well or what the sky means to a bottom-feeder in a palace of water or the afterlife of the birds that evaporate out of it like messages in a bottle addressed to the sun? Listen to a single word like a bee to a flower, like a bear to honey, like a gold-digger to money, like Seti to extraterrestrial life, like a mother to a child in the middle of the night, and you’ll overhear everything down to the seediest detail. You can read God’s mail like a private loveletter to the world by steaming the envelope of a single word open, and then licking it shut again, ask it to hold its tongue while all the others are talking behind her back. Words are a worse addiction than alcohol and meth-amphetamine whether you withdraw in Zen silence or go on listening to the sound of your voice like a mermaid on the rocks. Your hypothalamus never forgets. What a rush it was the first time you made love to words like a slim volume of poetry at a book launch and they showed you your name in print on the prow of a shipwreck on the moon. And I like the Buddhist point of view. True words are any words that heal. And false words are any words that wound. So if you tell a lie and it heals, it’s true. And if you tell a truth, and it wounds, it’s false. I like the compassion of this. And then there are times when I think, no matter what they do or convey or suggest, whether they’re handing out names to the animals and flowers in the Garden of Eden, or running numbers on the zodiac, words are always innocent. True to life. Even at the scene of a murder, no one ever interrogates the knife. You keep your word and you’re martyred by integrity. You break it. You’ve just punched a fortune-cookie in the mouth. You lose your wife. And your kids won’t back you when you run for public office. In the beginning was the word? I don’t think so. In the beginning was the voice. It said yes. It said no. It said maybe so. And everything was inconceivably believable after that. Implausible, but true. Even in the long shadow of the Tower of Babel right here in PsychoBabylon Ontario words are the polyglot interpreters of the dumb deaf facts. Even though the signage of blind numbers purports to be the mother tongue of the creative matrix of the universe these days the dilemma is easily resolved by saying she had twins. A girl and a boy. Word and Number. Number and Word. To attend to the gender politics of it. Just the same. An infinite number of petals opens and one flower blooms like a word. Eyes open like the goblets of poppies to the light and the rain and at night the moon slips a coin under their tongues and places both sides of two harvest moons on their eyelids to keep reality from waking up from the best dream it’s had in years. See what I mean? You wouldn’t be able to see through the veils of the mirages on the moon if it weren’t for words. Even if someone were to call out your name into the Grand Canyon of all abysses after light years of listening to your last known wavelength, looking in black holes, shaking down echoes and showing the stars your picture like the missing thirteenth house of the zodiac out of its straitjacket, you’d still be left standing there like the torn wind-battered rigging of a shipwrecked jack pine on the precipice of a dangerous silence that thought it heard you screaming in your sleep but couldn’t quite make out what you said after that, if it weren’t for the way words have got your back and know when to keep your mouth shut. It would be easy to eloquently wax on about the incommensurably inarticulate distances of silence and time that a word has to cross like a nightbird of insight between your mind and your mouth, but who needs to run on about their life story like the dangling participles of pi? I cross my Ts like a superstitious parrot on a perch. I dot my i’s like bullet holes through a mailbox on a post at the edge of a long lonely country road full of snakey S curves that come at you out of the night like assassins of sidereal insight into a snakepit of sacred wavelengths. And all you can say is. O! As if the moon just came out from behind a cloud. And you turned your wheels in the direction of the spin just in time.

PATRICK WHITE

THE DARKNESS

THE DARKNESS

note: Azazel was the name of the scapegoat the tribes of Israel would transpose all their sins to and drive out into the wilderness once a year. May, at the time of the cleansing of the temples, if I remember correctly. Over the millennia, Azazel was personified into being a Renaissance demon of broad experience and knowledge, master of all evil, and eventually Satan’s standard bearer. Over the last forty years he has come and gone from my poetry as the persona of a kind of anti-self that allows me to address themes on the dark side of my nature with a certain clarity of ironic insight into my own and the human condition that was otherwise unavailable to me. At first encounter dark, troubling, and dangerously clear, after all these years, to use Shakespeare’s phrase, he has become more of an affable familiar to me. And for those of you who are huddled around your night light afraid of things that go bump in the dark, I am no more Satanic, at least to my knowledge, than I am a born again Christian.

The darkness.

The darkness of a child.

The darkness of a child who isn’t old enough

to know what darkness is

yet it clings to his skin

like something that won’t come off.

Marked.

For what?

By whom?

The darkness that made his childhood seem

like a foregone conclusion

he was fundamentally bad

just like dad

though he never got the chance to call him that.

Flint-knapped like a chip off the old block.

O yeah before I get too confessional

I guess I should mention

the night rain is shedding its scales

like pine cones and snakes

in the tar pits of the mud puddles outside.

There.

Atmosphere.

Now we descend down into the interior

where the metaphors emerge from back alleys

and flash knives of insight

that seem to move like moonlight on water.

Shark fins waxing romantic about death.

Dangerous.

But it keeps your wits sharp.

Danger is an antidote to death.

Danger slides its stone along the blade

of an event horizon

like the wingspan of a sword

and the last word of the cutting edge

is drawn across your throat

to see what you’ve got to say for yourself.

Not much

when you’re giddy with insecurity

and all your cornerstones have turned to quicksand

and it’s hard to take your fate seriously

when you can electrically imagine

the page three sluglines you’ll make in the morning

given the immediacy of the moment

as if you’d just found a cobra coiled under your pillow

like a jack-in-the-box serial killer.

Flint-knapped like a chip off the old block

Azazel remembered his father hitting him

and with every blow he was sure his father

was flaking off bits of diamond

from a raw chunk of coal.

Childhood hopes of getting the better of his old man

by his own hand raised to strike

like a psychotic god above him.

A kind of childhood judo that taught him

to use another man’s demonic energies against him

by playing the part of the victim

that ran his abuser to ground

and pulled him down into a darker nightmare

than anything he had the imagination

to wake up from afraid of what he’d become.

Things turn round and round and round

like the little red lighthouses on top of a cop car.

Azazel cultivated his mind like a stolen switchblade

in the waterclock of bedrooms

he kept being poured out of

like a primordial ocean

of experimental life forms

as his single mother moved from house to house.

Each the womb of a different incarnation.

Azazel mastered them all

like the tantric tulpas of a Tibetan rinpoche.

Like the naguals of Yaqui Indians on peyote.

Dark abundance.

Bright vacancy.

He was the unhinged Janus-faced doorway of both.

He had the mood swings of a chameleon in a paint-store.

He knew how to outdo the Etruscan shape shifters

like a snake pit of kundalini fire.

If this feels strange to you

you can always enquire

but Azazel’s baby teeth

were the calderas of sacred volcanoes

he put like keepsakes under his pillow for the snake fairy

to swallow them whole like the moon.

Azazel in his youth

embodied the shadows of excellence

thinking love and approval might follow their example

and a light would come out of the darkness

and shine kindly down upon him

and everybody would see that he was just a kid

who liked stars because nobody else did.

But he was born on the wrong side of a promise

and no matter how well he kept it

he was mistaken for a threat.

Two cosmic eggs.

One a bird.

The other a reptile with wings.

When he’s hot he’s a dragon.

When he’s not

the earth goes docile

and sinks into a coma

like the Pythian oracle at Delphi

trying to divine the seven kinds of ambiguity

by cutting every one of their hydra-headed prophecies off

with a knife

as if she were gathering flowers

and arranging them into Medusan bouquets.

Too late to accuse.

Too late to convict.

Too late to forgive.

The hour of stone is upon us

like a sundial at the graveside of time.

Azazel woke up from his childhood

like a dream in which he died

and tried to live on the nothing that was left.

The rain outside has stopped.

Just mirages in store-front windowpanes.

The streets belong to the wind

talking to the leaves

as if they’d just had their tongues torn out

like the sacred syllable of the kataba worm

in a tequila bottle that spoke with an accent

but broke just like everyone else

when it was empty

having delivered the message

and there was no money on the return.

Ut pictura poesis.

Azazel always wanted to paint poetry

not photograph it.

Even on the astral plane

you’ve got to have some kind of a likeness

before you begin the search.

Metaphors have always seemed

too fanatical and absolute for his taste

once he understood Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

was the best alibi at the time the atoms could come up with

to explain their whereabouts.

Similes give you more of a chance.

Cut you a little more slack.

Suggest.

Don’t say.

Insinuate.

Don’t copulate with equals signs

like parallel lines that never meet.

Metaphors staple wanted posters all over town

among the rusty thorns

and wounded corners of paper

of those that were taken down

like Jesus removed from the cross of a telephone pole

advertising a local play

with dramatic significance

and then making a universal getaway

like too much ado about nothing.

Azazel is inspired to write

obscure occult holy books

people can keep beside the bed

to secure their footing in the dark

like night lights and supernovae.

Sententiae from the dark side

for people living in eclipse.

Azazel has oxymoronic lips

that answer the prayers of broken stone

that have no where else to turn.

He’s no more concerned

about what form is to content

than he is in what ashes are to urns.

Burn he says to the fireflies

if you’re serious

then scatter on the wind like Sufis

in a state of annihilation.

Don’t bring a cult of weathervanes

to the crossroads of creation

to ask them the direction of prayer

when it’s nowhere and everywhere at once.

Ah, Faustus, why this is hell;

nor are we out of it.

No entrance.

No emergency exit.

Just this space dilated like a black hole

in a gravitational eye

that bends the light

to its interpretation

of whatever this might be.

Help yourself to as many thresholds as you need

to build your stairwells up to heaven

like thermals under your wings.

But if you choose to go by ladder

don’t put your full weight

on the burning rungs

for fear of falling through again

every time you get a leg up on your ascension.

Remember when you get to the top

there’s no extension.

People who are religiously inclined

start out with a good beginning

that utterly fails

because they don’t know when to stop.

Get off the celestial omnibus

and whistle the rest of the way home in the dark alone

as if a happy man were impregnable to predators

and a sad one doomed to tragic circumstances

outside the box that we all return to

without a forwarding address

whether we’re cursed or blessed.

Fear can make a coward of a man

but it’s his joy that makes him vulnerable.

A street artist learns to draw

by making chalk outlines

around corpses on the sidewalk

with no regard to composition.

He topples the still lives

and let’s the shell casings fall where they may.

Azazel learned human anatomy the hard way.

Astronomical catastrophes make a big impact.

He saw what happened to his mother.

Women were punching bags and prostitutes.

He knew what happened to himself.

Men were volcanic dissolutes in handcuffs

that tried to forge your cell tissue

into the steel they say it takes to be real

by putting their fist down

like a hammer on the anvil of a mushroom.

PATRICK WHITE

AND THE WILLOWS DOWN BY THE BANKS OF THE TAY

AND THE WILLOWS DOWN BY THE BANKS OF THE TAY

And the willows down by the banks of the Tay

whisper through their veils

like ladies of the lake

where autumn walks like fire on the water

or the marriage bed of a Viking funeral ship

as the sun goes down like a ferry

into the underworld of the west

and all these words of passage I say like birds flying

high over head with the souls of the dead

I lay down like swords in tribute to the river

as if I were returning tears to the mirrors they came from.

Maple leaves scratch like the quills of bat-winged scholars

at the parched manuscripts

lying everywhere at my feet

trying to trace their ancestral bloodlines

back through a lineage of zodiacal kings

while the Library of Alexandria burns.

All scholars are arsonists at heart

as flammable as naphtha in birch bark.

If God were to talk to anyone now

right here in Perth Ontario Canada

it would still be through a burning bush

that would sound like the voice

of the phoenix in the sumac.

Mystic immolations of an Arab spring

spreading its wings for a poet or a prophet

to jump up on Pegasus or Buraq

and fly as if you had a star under your saddle

and not a spur or burr of discontent

that makes you feel tongue-twisted and petty

beside abject comparisons with Icarus and Aaron.

Stars soon to add some glamour to the sky

as the willows turn their weeping veils

into the shawls of grieving widows.

I’ve got nothing in particular to cry for

but I admire the eloquence of those

who’ve still got something to lose

like daylilies that can’t afford a face-lift

or the shell of the baby turtle on its back

like the sun disc of a Mayan calendar

that was destroyed by boyish malice

before it could live long enough

to be old enough to be doomed

by its own self-fulfilling prophecy.

Autumn is a seance of long-forgotten fragrances.

Oceanic elixirs and and sad sad wines

trying to keep their chin up

like wild grape vines against the weather

that sends their bruised amphorae to the bottom

with heavy eyelids and tunnel vision.

The air is sweet and thick and pendulous

as a bell in a burning church

that’s been to one too many funerals.

Bring on the night

like the deepest inspiration of the light

in the nightbird’s breast

and let the lost harvests and unfulfilled longings

that stretch for light years out over the abyss

like the strings of a cosmic guitar

or the harp I made from the wishbone

stuck in my throat like a sacred syllable

that goes witching for water on the moon

in the watersheds of my voice.

Bring tears of blood to my eyes

raised up out of the well of my being

and holding my horned skull up to Jupiter in Aries

let me drink to the hidden beauty of the singing

and all those oceanic veils of seeing

that fall away like the eyelids of roses

the starmaps of asters

from a beautiful woman’s face.

Old enough now to celebrate

things I know I’ll never know again.

Young lovers jay walking across a busy street

hand in hand as if

the other were the other’s missing link.

The wide-eyed stargazers

with no scars or bruises on their telescopes

elevated now by their amazement to sidereal heights

who will later be deepened by it

as the darkness grows more sublime than the light

and radiance sways into ripeness

and the candles go out one by one

to clarify the long autumnal way home

like nightwatchmen just before the break of dawn

having done their rounds

sit down at the crossroads

where the celestial equator

intersects the ecliptic at the equinoctial colure

and opening the gates of their lanterns

let the stars and fireflies out of the mason jars

that were the only light they had to go by

that kept the others lit.

Even as the utilitarian chandeliers

of the streetlamps come on

like a constellation of runway suns

that light up in unison at midnight

to give our long departed gods somewhere to land.

PATRICK WHITE

AND SHOULD YOU THINK I NEVER THINK OF YOU

AND SHOULD YOU THINK I NEVER THINK OF YOU

And should you think I never think of you

out here like a space probe

in the great indivisibility of the abyss

sending post cards back from the edge of nowhere

to no one in particular

you’d be as wrong as you usually were.

I think of you. I remember. I recall.

You were the chandelier of the unattainable

and I was the flying carpet in the hall.

Intimately specific images of unassuming moments

Watching you slip off one your heels

with your arm braced against a brick wall

to check for pebbles.

Or that time after another fight

you stopped the car at the end of the dirt driveway

and got out to pull up your t-shirt

to show me your breasts like a superlative

you knew would keep my attention

until you came home from work that night.

Not the big things you’d think I’d remember.

Not the great revelatory enlightenments

of the dark matter at hand

when everything was either perfectly tragic

or tragically perfect between us

under the stars in the frosty hay fields

reverting to the wild by acclamation;

but little flakes of snow and ashes

or moonlight flint knapped off

the blue anthracite of a midnight lake

trying to shape a spearhead of insight

into the Clovis point of a diamond.

Feathers and petals and leaves of things

that were hardly noticed when they fell.

The feeble shadows cast by Venus

across the snow on a moonless night

when nobody was looking

because they were all inside

huddled around a fire

like blazing mesmerized by its own blindness.

Breathless shadows born of Venus.

You don’t even need to have your third eye open

to know how beautiful and rare that is.

Things on the wind that blow up like leaves

scratching at the door like cats

to be let in out of the cold.

Memories that suddenly fly into my field of vision

like bats out of the dark baffled by the porchlight

only to end up stuck on the burdock

like martyrs to the cause

and birds that break their necks

against the false skies in my eyes

with the dull thud of softballs

thrown against the wall of a house

and fall to earth like ricochets

off knightly suits of body armour

forged out of old shell casings

to hide the evidence of my vulnerability.

At least from me for a while.

And I’ve got wounds that are deeper than that

I know will never heal

and moments of vital bliss

I’m living on like a ghost in a lighthouse

that didn’t take its own advice

when it put its lantern out

like a candle beside the bed

to go all the way with a mermaid

and not get burnt.

Now I’m a nightwatchman of the stars

with a big enough flashlight

its eyebeam reaches all the way to Mars

to make sure there are bars on the windows

and locks on all the doors.

PATRICK WHITE

EVERY DROP OF RAIN AS COLD

EVERY DROP OF RAIN AS COLD

Every drop of rain as cold

as a kiss on the forehead

of a dead baby in its coffin.

And I’m soaked through to the skin.

This rain can’t afford any more flowers.

This rain drives things in

instead of bringing them out.

Except for the madmen with nothing to lose

and right now I’m one of those.

My clothes clinging like a wet parachute

that candled on the way down

and got hung up on a powerline

instead of blooming

like morning glory on the vine.

I’m a Medusan jellyfish out of my depths.

I’m holding my head up like Caravaggio

to the Duke of Naples

full of regrets that it’s me in the flesh

and not one of my stand-in doubles.

I’ve got the whole of Stewart Park to myself.

No teen agers billowing from behind bushs.

It’s hard to keep a joint lit in the rain.

Just an hour

just an hour

to break the severe discipline

of living in pain

and counter-intuitively go utterly insane.

For good.

Never come back.

Never be what you should

because it doesn’t leave enough room for solitude.

For imagination.

For the spirit to forget it’s the spirit

and just lay down in the wet grass

like any other ordinary human in agony

in the crosshairs of the lightning

and spreading its wings as wide as my arms

ride freefall in front of the Confederate snipers

trying to shoot the stars out

like Kevin Kostner in Dances with Wolves.

Twice.

The first time in earnest.

The second in jest

just to prove that death

is only an evil clown

that people take too seriously.

Despair’s the back door to liberation.

A cold bath on the dark side of the moon.

Joy’s the doorbell at the front.

The happy debt-collector that comes once a month.

Apres moi le deluge.

No arks.

No two of every kind.

No doves sent out to look for land.

Just this shipwreck at the bottom of the sea

looking up at the sheet lightning

of its broken rigging

making neural connections between

the synaptic gaps in the grey matter of the clouds

like a panicked damage assessment

to see if I went down with the ship like a real captain

or one of the rats who jumped into a lifeboat

and threw the baby overboard

like a cradle in the treetops.

A cold wind burrs my skin

like the swan song of a sadistic lullaby.

I lie here obedient to nothing

because I refuse to die

until I’ve lived what I was born for.

And everybody who’s ever given up on themselves

like a bad drug that doesn’t make you happy knows

it wasn’t this.

PATRICK WHITE