A CREED FOR THE DESPERATE

A CREED FOR THE DESPERATE

Don’t let your bones be softened by fear.

By the time you hear it the lightning has already struck.

Don’t listen for the echoes of things you haven’t said.

And stop breaking your fortune-cookie skull open

like an old prophetic head

that claims it’s been to the dark side

without being dead.

Don’t let disaster define you.

You’re not the bouquet

of a second class vinegar

hovering over a first class wine.

No crisis ever comes with its own identity

until you give it yours.

Move calmly over your own waters

like clouds in the eye of a puddle.

Walk as if you were already

following your own funeral

and lost your way to the grave.

People make much of being

but seeing is enough

to save you sometimes

from your own obscurity.

And when was there ever any security

in security

as if this flame were safer than that?

How long has the universe risked being you?

Take a chance on your own magic

and pull your life like a tiger

out of your own hat

to eat the rabbit you’ve become.

Then there’s nothing to run from.

Become the sword

and you won’t cut yourself.

Become the fire

and you won’t burn.

Become life again

and you won’t pass away

breath after breath after breath

wishing you could stay

in the negative space

of a comfortable death

that eulogizes your lies.

There are full moons

that don’t weigh

like pennies on your eyes

to keep you from seeing too much.

And there are things of the earth

that have followed you into exile

like a new birth of things you can touch

that are wholly yours in passing

like music from a keyboard

or a fire in church.

And you may be down

to your last black beatitude

and righteously uphold the sanctity

of your will not to listen

to anything but the clinking of your own chains

and the mournful whistle

of your distant dying derailed thought-trains

giving up the ghost

but you’re just sucking on the tit

of a perverse purity

and you’re milking it

like the bitter truth

for all it’s worth.

And it’s not worth much.

And you may have flattened

all the mountains

and filled all the valleys

of your flatlining event horizons

but there’s still life going on

in the crooked back alleys

of secret dimensions

you don’t know about

stuck in the house all day

like a child afraid to go out.

You look at a tree.

You see a crutch.

You look at the moon.

You see a scar.

You look at a star

and you’re lost for good wherever you are.

And it’s not really a dysfunction of your imagination

that you can look at the Taj Mahal

and see a one-room hovel with slumlords

jacking up the rent.

It’s good to look both ways

at any spiritual crossing.

But you see a stick in the water

and you think the water’s bent.

And to shrink anything as the Tao says

you must first expand it.

But I think the Tao meant the universe

not a used condom on the death’s-head

of a stillborn resurrection.

But you’d have to fall

further than you have

to understand it.

You’d have to fall

from your present plight on the world mountain

all the way down until you came to a space

where there were no more opposites in the abyss

and nothing in order

nothing amiss

nothing is meant

to scare you into being

and nothing is trying to hold you back.

What’s your lover’s mouth

if not a wound

you can kiss into healing?

You can see it that way.

Or you can harden the bruised fruit

with brittle tears

and flint knap chandeliers

to fall from star-crossed mirrors

like rain from broken glass

that hasn’t fired up a single root in years

to dream of flowers.

The mind’s an artist.

The painting’s yours.

A self portrait in the image of God

whom no one’s ever seen.

I see a black star in the bottom of a tulip

shining up at me

like the direction it took

to get to the other side.

You see a poisonous spider

like the leftover lees

of a flowerless wine

in the eye of a toxic goblet.

And you might raise it to your lips

like a lunar eclipse

but you never drink up.

And even when you do

it’s a bad guest in the house of life

that drinks from his own skull

like the grail of a grape on the vine

with one eye open

as if he trusted the wine

but not the cup.

You’re not the cure

that failed the ailing kingdom.

And you’re not the miracle

that got up and walked away

to spread the word like a bird at sea

that had just discovered a tree to perch in

you might have sinned as a crow

but now that you’ve been saved

you’re a carrier pigeon.

You can sit here all day if you want

like a buddha on his tatami mat

thinking bituminously

about burning enlightened diamonds

back into eyeless coal.

You can squat like a tree in rings of fat

smashing small thoughts

like eggs on the rocks

trying to read your fate

in their misfortune

like a chromosome

you hold in common

with all those who hate

having been born.

You can heap your afterbirth with scorn.

You can turn your eyes

into a pair of gravitational lenses

like dark matter

and wince at the stars

like cinders of light

that contradict your seeing.

And you wouldn’t be wrong

because you can see it that way too.

The same eye by which I see God

is the eye by which She sees me.

Two creative geniuses in one studio

painting each other in the nude.

And she shows you hers

and you show her yours

as she enflames your solitude

by not putting her name on it

though it’s a perfect likeness of you.

Your face warped into

a convoluted starless space

like the opening gala

of a staged extinction.

And your soul shrouded in lampblack

like a candle

that soils its own light

by putting on a deathmask of night

like a snakeoil salesman

selling skin to ghosts.

And there where your eyes used to be

two black holes

surrounded by random haloes of light

like lipstick on the mouths of star-nosed moles.

And look at that scar of red she’s used

to catch your ambiguous smile.

That’s the kind of genius

that leaves the asylum gate open for awhile

for everyone to get into your style

of imploding your eyes

like black dwarfs

with abstract depressionist astigmatism

as if gravity couldn’t dig a grave deep enough

or matter make a stone heavy enough

to put on your chest to keep you from rising again

or the gold of the moon in your mouth

ever prove true enough to pay the ferryman

to get you to the other side of nowhere

as if he knew somehow

you huffed life like a paint thinner

trying to escape the race a winner

by never crossing a starting line

that wasn’t already

a dark horse lamed by life behind you.

And he couldn’t be bothered with anyone

who would fix their own death

and lay a bet against everyone

their pain could outrun their compassion

and in the second heat

their bitterness the truth.

But if you want a way out

like an emergency door

I’ll let you in on a little secret.

Life doesn’t grow into death

and death isn’t waiting

to take your next breath.

And there’s an eye of liberation

in the darkest hurricane roses of despair

that frees the light like life enough to care

that all it falls upon alike

should see its own face everywhere

through a crack of black lightning

in the white mirror

where everything that appears

evaporates like a ghost off a lake

or cataracts from the eyes

of the orthodox

who couldn’t see straight enough

to thread their keys through their locks

like mystic heretics

to have known

the deepest wounds give birth

to the sweetest spears

that life has ever thrown

like light on a roadless night

or insight like a bird through the sky

that enters the sunset

like a planet following the sun

through the seven coloured doors

of the seven blind seers

who disappear in a vision of one clarity

with many more eyes

than there are lightning bolts and fireflies

whose age can be measured in light-years.

If a fraction of nothing is nothing.

Then a fraction of eternity

isn’t a brevity less than the eternal

and every fraction of anything is all.

There now that’s not too hard to follow.

The white face of the moon

veils the dark other you never see

because it’s all been timed to turn away.

The moon and its month are one day.

Things might be empty

but they’re not hollow.

And you’re free to go or stay.

PATRICK WHITE

A TRYST WITH THE MUSE AT AN UNGODLY HOUR

A TRYST WITH THE MUSE AT AN UNGODLY HOUR

A tryst with the muse at an ungodly hour.

The past creatively adapts to the moment

as readily as the future does. The bronze age flames

of your auburn hair, withered petals

of a fire flowering in the rain

that may be down, but not out.

The wellspring of a muse is always

the third eye of a woman overwhelmed by tears

at the approach of spring. Last night,

pink-lilac Mercury on the short leash of the sun,

Venus as bright as I’ve ever seen it

and nearby Jupiter dim by comparison,

Sirius southeast of Orion, then Mars,

and shortly before dawn, Saturn.

I stood for an hour at the backdoor

of the all night laundromat, out

in the parking lot behind the Chinese Restaurant,

while the streetlamps held their heads down in reverence

as if they’d all taken vows or something,

and I, cigarette in mouth, looked up

like a chimney spark in awe of a radiance

so unattainably beautiful all I aspired to

seemed merely the ashes of firefly by comparison,

a runt of light in the vastness of the fire-womb

of a busy, busy sky, while

I waited for my laundry to dry.

And the last time I can remember feeling like that

was combing my hands through your hair

as if were laving my roots in your bloodstream,

without getting my fingers burnt

walking on fire all the way

to the gibbous moon of your earlobe.

And here you are at the door again

like the red maple key

of a rainy night loveletter

that’s let itself in soaking wet

to inspire me to write it in tears.

To shed my eyes like the starmaps

of last night’s luminaries, to tear down

the old spider webs of the defunct dreamcatchers

hanging like constellations

at the broken windowpanes

of the abandoned houses of the zodiac.

I was on my way to the homeless oblivion of my bed

as if I’d found a heating grate to sleep on

to keep me warm for another night.

As I once saw a man in old Montreal

after a poetry reading at Concordia,

curl up on his cardboard flying carpet

as if he’d run out of places to go,

friends, family, lovers he used to know

and pulling the shadows up over him

let himself by swept up on the concrete shore

like a dead starfish on his own private island.

Every time you step across my event horizon

you break another taboo of mine, your voice

slips into mine like a watersnake into a moonlit lake

and you become the connubial chanteuse

of an unspeakable solitude with something to say.

It’s always been this way with you.

A fire-bird flies into the room at night

like inspiration through an open window

just as I’m about to put out the lights

because the music’s over and the dancing girls

of the candleflames have completely disrobed

and stand naked in gowns of wax at their feet.

And just as I’m about to leave my seat in a dark theatre,

you come in the guise of an usher

to show me the way out of curtain call

like the moonrise of a crocus in the snow.

And I can hear you from way off

like a ghost being summoned

by an empty lifeboat in the fog.

Like a fragrance of life returning

to the apparition of my spirit

when you kiss me and it feels

like someone doing cpr on my deathmask

to prove I can’t hide from you anywhere

even here, where I’ve said

who I thought I was in my solitude

and buried my name in the night

like a silver star-shaped locket

deep in the palm of your fathomless hand

for you to remember me by before I drown

again in again in the eyes of Isis

like a sailor who sees a different life

flash before him every time

he goes down for the night

and can’t get Venus off his mind.

Because even in the empty parking space

of my deathbed in a dark room

lying there like a crystal skull

that’s gone prophetically blind

in the shroud of the black sail

I’ve taken down like the tent

of a wild iris in mourning down by the river,

even when my eyes fail

before the unattainable,

I can feel through my fingertips

you coming on to me like a stripper in braille.

PATRICK WHITE

THESE LATE NIGHT SESSIONS WITH MYSELF

THESE LATE NIGHT SESSIONS WITH MYSELF

These late night sessions with myself

that crowd the world out

to make room for me to be alone

delinquently with myself

while the rest of the town sleeps,

barring a cabbie, a cop, the grocery clerk

that works at the all night Mac’s Milk.

Can’t sleep.

My pillow’s a hive of killer bees.

I’m swarmed by the lethal trivia

of high-maintenance anxieties.

The picture-music’s running the rapids

in a jazzy clash of high hats

and I was hoping for something like Paul Simon.

The medium waits like a seance

for me to appear

like the message that was summoned.

Something resonates like a wavelength

from a tiny point in space

and calls me home like a Martian rover

though I can’t say for sure where I’ve been

like a shadow at noon

I know the sun shines at midnight

when I’m together enough again

to remember what I’ve seen.

And when the dawn makes the fieldstones

of the bank across the street

blush with pink

like some shrink’s idea of a more quiescent prison,

I’m pinching the wicks of all my feelings

like candles in the morning

just to see if I’m still awake or not.

Between now and then

I’m watching a poem evolve like a chromosome

that’s trying to make me up on the go

in a game of snakes and ladders

as one enzyme opens the door to six others

like a Chinese puzzle box

or a Higg’s boson particle accelerator

and after awhile I’m looking at the genome

of a mirror image of myself

that refuses to recognize me.

As if a dragonfly

crawled out of the chrysalis of a fortune-cookie

and spread its wings to dry

like a winning lottery ticket

that just went through the laundry

in effusive elations of wind and sky.

One grey thread

of stray cigarette smoke on my shoulder

and I accuse myself of having a love affair

behind my own back

with someone more exciting than I am

when I wasn’t looking

and walk out on myself swearing

I’ll never trust anyone like me ever again.

Vagaries of unconditioned consciousness

feeling the first continental shudders

of seismic archetypes

slipping their continental plates

like a bad clutch on a fault line

pushing their seabeds up to the surface

to expose what lurks beneath

on the highest slopes of a mountain top

just to call the poker-playing stars’ bluff

as they lay their constellations down

like the losing hand of a Japanese fan club.

In the timelessness of this aloof hour

when it feels as if I’m the only one left alive

to know how the town died in its sleep

and there’s no one out on the desolate street to tell

no one to call,

awareness is all

as I drift off disembodied into all my past lives

to ask them if they’ve got any clue

about where I went

and what I’ve been doing for the last ten years.

I’m a snowman waltzing in an ice storm

under the brittle chandeliers

of the brutal stars of the first of December.

Warm blood in a cold northwest wind

there’s a scent of wolf in the ravenous air

and a death panic in the hearts of the rabbits

who risk a nightcrossing of Wilson Street

out in the open under the noses

of the dozy heritage streetlamps.

The ice age perils of Pauline

tormented by Oil Can Harry.

Where does the dream begin

like a myth of origin

that keeps you awake

second-guessing

when the next firefly of insight

is going to appear in your rear-view mirror

as if you were being followed

by the ball lightning

of some great revelation of reality

that promises to return your eyes to you

as soon as it’s opened them to what isn’t there.

I’m sleepwalking like the Bolshoi Ballet across Swan Lake.

I’m miming the sidereal signage

of blind men with prophetic vision

like a journey man among master seers

with hundreds of billions of stars in their eyes

looking for a planet that’s human enough

to cry like this one sitting alone at a desk

for the enormities of starless sadness

that underwhelm the trophies of those

who’ve lived a life of risk

and were victorious long enough

to be able to squander a living on their own defeat.

Picture this.

A bull elk being run to death

through deep snow,

the cold air slicing its lungs

like frozen strawberries,

turning to face a wolfpack

rack to fang

to wound them into

respecting their noblest prey

with a last act

of self-destructive defiance,

incite a little wolf fear

in those who fear none

to return the compliment

water to water

blood to blood

heart to heart

as if all parties realized

from the very start

it doesn’t mean much

but it accounts for everything

and that’s the way it’s supposed to go down.

PATRICK WHITE

THE RAIN TONIGHT

THE RAIN TONIGHT

The rain tonight

a gentle carillon of afterthought

pensively lingering like eyes in the window.

The town unusually quiet

even for two a.m.

Asphalt with the albido of a wet rat snake

or a black bull

and blades of garish light

thrust through its back

like the swords of the streetlamp matadors

poised over its haemorrhaging

like solar daffodils

about to deliver the coup de grace

to the new moon.

The farmlands and the pot patches flourish.

Everything’s wearing the mirror of everything else

like skin

and the leaves

pour their hearts out

like spouts without pitchers.

Black beads of rain

falling from the rim of my gangster hat

I might look like a gun

but inside

I feel like a boy

who just shot a bird with a slingshot.

All my life I’ve carried the bloodguilt

of someone else’s crime

without knowing

what was done to whom and why.

It’s as if I have always lived

through six decades of this strange life

like a child

trying to make up

for something I didn’t do.

If my mother was the Virgin Mary

my father was

forty days alone in the wilderness

of a Vancouver Island logging camp

with the devil.

I never used to think

the sins of the father

were visited upon the sons

because it seems so savagely unfair

to damage their innocence by mere association.

Stalin McCarthy and Paul Pott come to mind

and if this is the work of God

then he’s got spiritual rabies

and we’ve all been bit.

And I’ve wondered as well

if the sins of the sons are visited upon the fathers

just as cruelly.

For what was done to my mother?

For what was done to me

and my brother and sisters?

For something I did in a previous life

that casts its shadow over this one?

Because consciousness is an agony of atonement

for lifting the veils of faceless gods

and realizing there’s no one there but you

for crossing the thresholds of hymeneal taboos

for stealing fire from extraterrestrial life

and feeling like Prometheus with a venereal disease

that keeps attacking his liver

like the moodswings of crackhead deathsquads?

I’ve always preferred the black holes

of the darkened midnight windows

staring bluntly out into the night

like mirrors in a coma

in an intensive care unit

unaware of what they reflect

to the more self-assured view from the inside

that presumes that it knows what it’s looking at.

Heretics pariahs outlaws underdogs fuck-ups

flawed beyond all human recognition

the crushed the lost the abandoned

the genocidal poverty

of those who are buried in the mass graves

at the last economic cleansing

they had to dig with their own hands

those who don’t know how to do anything

whatever atrocity is perpetrated upon them

but hang on to their innocence

like a doll with one eye that doesn’t blink anymore.

Those who eat their own ashes

out of tiny urns

like a junkie at a methadone clinic.

Those who were children until they turned six.

Those who have worked sacrificially all their lives for nothing.

The dead branch on the ground

the wind broke off the tree

still talking and dreaming of blossoms and fruit.

Those whose secret shy plan it is

to survive their lives

by staying out of their way

by taking the long way home from highschool

like a sword-swallower

who got one stuck

in the stone of his heart

he’s not strong enough to pull out

to make himself king of the castle.

Parsifal on a grailquest to save the ailing kingdom

mounts his mule backwards

like a court jester

inciting the laughter of Don Quixote

and the bitter tears of King Lear

that fall like the rain tonight

and make the light run like blood

down the street drains

like a miscarriage of the pot of gold

at the end of a rainbow

that had let go like a watercolour

of a sunset at midnight

someone painted in cadmium red carlights.

I embrace all of these

as if we were all the anti-matter of humanity

ghettoized in the new privatized leper colonies

of the twenty-first century.

It’s hard to love the whole person

when they’re nothing but body parts

but I try.

I get orgiastically drunk on inspiration

in the company of the pagan muses

but when I sober up

I feel the Christian muse of guilt

slip its cosmic cuckoo’s egg

in among the others while they’re dreaming

and one by one push them out of the nest

like alternative universes.

That’s when I write

like a snakepit looking up at the stars

wishing I had great vans of leather

tanned from all the eclipses I’ve shed like skin

and my words had the wingspan

of the inspired serpentfire

of kundalini dragons

when I see what happens to the flightfeathers

of innocent birds.

And then the rain begins to sing a strange lullaby

to a skull in a danse macabre

and it strikes me sometimes like a black mamba

in the back of the neck

as my hair stands up electromagnetically

that these aren’t the lines of a riverine poem

flowing along on its own

but whipmarks slashed across my back

like a flagellant on a long dark pilgrimage

of blue bubonic shadows

to the shrines of implacable death.

As if Perseus spurred on his winged horse

with a cat o’ nine tails

made out of Medusa’s severed head.

As if Hamlet were the wiseguy of a killer ghost

that put a contract out on everyone

including his son

to avenge his death

and wrest his marriage bed

from the hands of his brother

as if they fought over the same toy.

The night wears its darkness

like a hooded figure in a doorway

like a plague-rat behind the arras

like a black Isis in full eclipse

behind these veils of rain

that I am not yet nothing enough to lift.

It’s not true the shadow falls

between the conception and the reality

because they’re not two

and whether you slash at the river

or dedicate swords to The Lady of the Lake

whether you’re burning heretics at the stake

standing up

or kings lying down

at half-mast on a death boat

you can’t separate one tiny little tear of a raindrop

from its fathomless watershed.

Thesis antithesis synthesis

two profiles and a frontal

of the same face

the same waltz

dancing alone

with its own shadow

to the picture-music

of mind-bending space

like the rain tonight

that sees more in the spring

that it does when its drenchs the earth in autumn

with the fading hopes

of sad seasoned eyes

that have seen too much.

But I’m not a rootless trees

trying to use my homelessness as a crutch.

I like my spatial relations with the world

just as they are.

And the provisional integrity

of not buffing the clarity

of what I see in the mirror

whether it’s fireflies in August

and moist stars hanging low

over the summer hills

just ripe for the picking

or an eyeless death in the void.

I risk the seeing

I expose my eyes to the dark energy

outside the field of vision

to burn the negative into white

so people can see what they feared

in the light.

So what was unknown and evil

could be shown

to be intimately their own karmic nemesis.

That the demons they feared the most

were the ones

they had done the most injury to

by condemning their innocence to exile.

That they are stalked and assassinated

by the shadows they dispossessed

like Tartars and Kalymyks

in a paranoid purge of Stalin

to walk and talk as if they didn’t have any

and it were always high noon.

I forego my own righteousness

to defuse the black lightning of my judgement

by taking the thunder out of it

like a detonator.

I’m the first

to walk myself like a road in the morning

to look for improvised explosive devices

my psyche might have buried in the night

getting carried away

by the insurgency of this recurrent dream

that keeps rising up against me

like the mahdi against Kitchener in Khartoum.

Of all the agonies of hell

the worst is

the oxymoronic intensity

of being doomed by an excruciating irony of hate

to abuse the internal discipline

of my infernal nature

to try and do some good

in a godless world

that never stops crying

like the rain tonight

over the Dufferin Road Cemetery

that’s gone on dying collectively

long after the last mourner has left.

Those that have power to hurt

but will do none

pay the steepest price for their compassion.

I take my finger off the trigger of the moon

and annul the contract

like a spider-mount

undoing the crosshairs

of its telescopic insight

into the eyes of human nature

when it doesn’t think anyone else is watching.

The sins of omission in hell

are the virtues of what was not done on earth

by those for whom dismantling themselves

like a high-powered rifle

focused like a blackhole on the light

is not natural.

There’s more empathy

in letting your hunger

transcend your appetite

by turning the light away from yourself

like a dragon that didn’t swallow the moon

to make it rain tonight

than there is in exhausting your potential

by indulging it like an eclipse.

Lions don’t hunt flies

because you’re known

by the quality of your enemies

as much as your friends.

Ultimately there’s no distinction

between the means and the ends.

The injustice of slaughtering the innocents

outlives the death-sentences

that pass for the lifespans of the slayers.

I hold the angry dragon within me

like a glacial lava flow

up to the darkness before me like a torch

and then I put it out

like an island in the rain tonight

and leave it to the birds to give it a name.

Compassion

is as close as I’ll ever be

to anyone.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES YOUR HARD DRIVE

WHEN LIGHTNING FRIES YOUR HARD DRIVE

When lightning fries your hard drive

and you’re trying to weave a flying carpet

out of snakey wavelengths that took

millions of light years before you were born

to get here. So you feel you’re doomed

to live the eternal recurrence of the past.

Don’t forget about me. I’ll be your friend.

I’ll be your all night window. I’ll be

the third eye of your hurricane.

The occult template of your moonrise mirage.

I’ll be the antidote to your travelling nightmare

and we’ll stay up all night, drinking coffee

and smoking chain letter cigarettes

as we watch the moon through the window

painting her toe nails above the bank.

And if you want to hear wise and profound things,

poetically put in response to the dichotomic genius

of your own spiritual dilemmas,

or just let your hair down like Medusa

and kick back at a black mass of lost wisdom,

I’ll be your friend. Your Wizard of Oz.

I’ll liberate cages and cages of morning doves

and arise to the occasion in hot flashes of insight

like fire from the ashes of the Library of Alexandria.

I’ll put my stones and swords away for awhile

and blow on a forge of stars that stay cool

as nocturnal waterlilies blooming along the banks

of the Fall River in early autumn.

I’ll be your Merlin. And I won’t teach you

the one forbidden thing

I don’t want you to know.

You can just look at things. Or not.

Like alla prima mindscapes I’m painting impromptu

in picture-music on the lyrical night air.

But if all you want to do is bring over some poems,

I’ll listen like Seti to the first verifiable signs

of extraterrestrial life. I’ll listen like a hacker

that’s just broken into an encrypted web-site

through a black hole into the next universe.

Your choice. Or we could just sit there

nibbling on the silence like fish

that have surfaced to feed on the moonlight.

But if you’re feeling a little sanity deficient these days,

I’ll talk to you about the extreme chaos

of conditioned consciousness in such aromatic words

you’ll think a thousand hummingbirds

were swarming the towers of your hollyhocks

like ruby-throated endomorphs and opioids

that just found the sweet spot on your neural receptors.

And by the end of my mystic lucubrations, believe me,

you won’t be drinking black cool aid in Jonestown

or stand there frozen in time, your knees

buckled like Stonehenge trembling

like a calendar girl before a total eclipse

at the winter solstice you don’t think you’re ever

going to get over like a beginning

that just can’t get past itself.

I’ll paint you naked and blue

firewalking on stars like a Pictish tattoo.

We’ll take a moonboat out for a test run

and I can be the sail and the rudder

and you can be the wheel of the zodiac

and we’ll sail around omnidirectionally

among enlightened islands in the mindstream

and we won’t run aground on the reefs of syntax

like a dead language looking for a loveletter from anyone.

And I’ll whisper things you should have heard

in the logic of metaphoric dream grammars

long before the light left, like a Druid

in an old growth forest mentoring a night bird.

And when lightning fries your hard drive

like an ancient oak in July on a Thursday

I’ll be your friend. I’ll make all those

taboos and curses pinned to your skin

like eclipses in a scenic calendar

fall away like leaves

Or we could stay where we are and shine

in the depths of our own bioluminescence

like the new moons of two black pearls

that would rather keep their prophecies to themselves.

PATRICK WHITE