CITY ROSE

CITY ROSE

City rose, you don’t bloom like the other flowers

the sun coaxes into unclenching their fists, you unfold

like an ocean at night lingering in your dark depths

behind a veil of fish hooks swaying

with the bullwhips of the kelp to the pulse of your tides.

How suburbanly garish you look all trashed out

like the black farce of a substitute for love.

A poet and a prostitute. Doesn’t get much more skinless

than that. We’re both walking through the world naked

in a blizzard of thorns blunting themselves

against our ice-age hearts in an interglacial warming period.

Dying on the instalment plan to make a living,

there’s a glint in your eyes like moonlight on a knife,

and you’re armed to the teeth with fingertips and lips

and hourglass hips and here you can have my sword

even before I surrender as you know you can

when you walk into my life like an eclipse of the moon

with mascara running down your cheeks

and ask me if I still love you as I ever did

and I say, lady, you’re an innate releasing mechanism for me.

I sublimate you into poetry like dry ice.

I may be the bullet. But you’re the trigger.

And what’s a voice without a tongue but a gutted gun?

How could I ever use you on myself when the day comes

if you weren’t here with me in this wilderness

dancing for my head like a mirage in the skull

of a vast abyss that’s gone on dreaming all this

like a boy with a book under the covers way past lights out?

You give me that funny look like I’m half mad

or I might be making light of you, but your spinal cord

resonates like a guitar strung with powerlines

on the same wavelength as the crystal in your dreamcatcher

and I know your listening for disturbances in your web.

And I remember when two roads diverged in a yellow wood

like a wishbone the separated the song from the bird

and that night you came pleading to me out of the rain

to let you into my homelessness, and I took you in

like a wet kitten with claws and needle sharp teeth

that never knew when to let go of my heart

like a piece of raw meat you were always snarling over.

And you weren’t exactly the noble enemy

I always hoped would eat it, more a foodbank as I recall,

but you can’t always choose the heroic sacrifice

you give yourself up to, and I gave it up to you,

saying to myself you don’t always need to believe

in the witchdoctor to take advantage of the medicine,

and I’m always moved when your sunflower

turns toward me like a full-faced friend into the shining

and I’m the one who feels I’ve been following you

like a starmap to the dark matter shaping the universe.

But tonight the rose is bruised. You’re crying

like a broken window pane over the death of the wind.

Your eyes are funeral bells and your body language

is indecipherable, and I don’t know what’s hurt you so deeply,

and it’s only worse when I guess, but there’s

a dragon in the heart of the firefly I’m trying to be

that’s got a scorched earth policy toward anyone

who tries to lay their hands on you for any reason

other than lust. And though I’m an intimate of the oracle,

I never ask. You franchise your body like a fast food business

with crooked books, but I’m not your spiritual accountant

just because I died before you did and I don’t

think of the unknown as something impenetrably mysterious.

You, for example, whenever you discover

the young woman in you that isn’t looking

for vengeance upon herself for lying about

the things she wanted to be to her dolls.

Voodoo dolls or not. With marbles or buttons for eyes.

And you abuse her like a country mouse for reminding you

how you used to live off the crumbs of everybody else’s dreams

but now you’re a cultivated rose of bling and tinfoil

that wins all the garden shows they weed in Eden

like the bad girls from the good, but, off-stage

when there are no lights shining on you, and the rose

wipes her lipstick off like blood on her sleeve,

I’ve seen you mesmerized like a stone bird on a fountain

staring into the eyes of a snake pit of venomous regrets

for the way you abuse your innocence as if

it were subject to experience and time, all used up,

too much scar tissue over the wound that kept its mouth shut

like dawn over the ashes of a dollhouse you burned to the ground.

Did you ever go back in for your dolls?

It’s not too late, you know. It’s never too late

to stop treating yourself like a straw dog at a black mass.

It’s not a religious ritual. It’s just a bad habit of misperception.

And however much sulphur dioxide there is in the acid rain

of your tears, the rain still doesn’t fall in pentangles

and the stars and the wildflowers in the abandoned fields

still don’t attend opening night rehearsals

to improve their appearance on the catwalk of the zodiac.

They’re still walking the same old fence they always were

like gold medallists on a balance beam at the Olympics.

And I can see that the moon, as it does in you,

still dies inside them like a swan at a ballet except

you come to the climax of the dance dressed in Satanic black.

And that’s just the scarlet letter of a dead alphabet

you’ve carved into your forehead with a fingernail,

not the Rosetta stone that’s going to open you up to yourself

like Egypt with the eyes of a mood ring. O yes,

I know how many thresholds you’ve crossed,

how many taboos and cracks in the desolate sidewalks

you’ve stepped on to break your mother’s back,

but she wrote her alibi on a gravestone a long time ago

and she’s well beyond anything you can do to disappoint her now.

Born into sin, isn’t death a drastic enough measure to take

to clean the slate with the tears that should have been shed

while we were alive? The roots that should have been

watered with stars, the hands that should have been revered

like gnostic gospels even in a time of persecution and exile.

Maybe the blossom was betrayed by the roots

and the fruits were ruined. Who can say for sure

whether the tree’s a strong rafter or a coffin door,

or you’re just punching holes in your own lifeboat

to be spiteful, but I suspect you’re tired of sinking by now.

Three bells and all’s not well. And you remember

how you wanted to fly with the effortless beauty

of an arrow straight through the heart of a falcon prince

who came when you called out like a night bird

for someone to hold you against the dark like a door

love leaves ajar like the place in the book

where you left off reading and started dreaming again.

You’re taking a bath in the squalor of your own grave to renew

the ambiguity of your innocence as if you were

holding your breath underwater until you turn blue,

but there’s an expiry date that doesn’t matter if you’re late

and you don’t need a passport to walk through the gate unchecked.

The mindstream doesn’t cling to what it reflects.

It clarifies itself like flowing diamonds in its own running,

like crystal skulls thawing like honey in a blast furnace.

You can project yourself imaginatively like clean water

on the moon, and still feel the rain is a message

to someone else more like a watercolour than you are an oil

but before you begin painting in pain again,

look in the mirror. Isn’t that mascara running down your face

like a black willow rendered in sumi ink by a sad geisha

or is that just you washing off another eclipse

like a dirty window you’ve got to break to look through?

The light will find you all on its own if you stop

using the night to cover your eyes with shadows

when there’s something you don’t want to look at

that shines like a waterstar in the face of a sewer

blindfolded to the beauty and grace of its own imperative to change.

Be that as it may. Just because the exit’s false

doesn’t make the entrance unreal, and I can see how

you’re looking out the window for something

to fix your gaze upon like a reflection from a bridge

you let go of like the hand of someone you loved

to wear this blossom of a painted life mask

like a screening myth for the reason you let her drown.

Hurt, and lovely, and sad, battered down

like an orchid in the aftermath of an unexpected storm,

you make me want to cry for everything in existence

all at the same time, for what happens to us here.

I feel my vulnerability in yours. Half-insane for a moment

looking out the same window you are I become the pain.

I embody the sorrows of the trivial and sublime alike

and there’s no one to scream out to who isn’t wounded themselves

and I’ve died repeatedly not to make a philosophy out of love

just to satisfy death with a verifiable alibi for what

I was doing while I was alive, and none of it

lessens the sum of our suffering by a single tear.

We can put cushions around it and bank it up with dolls

and throw a warm blanket over it and kiss it

goodnight on the forehead as somebody else should have done

when childhood was wholly the timing of the content,

and go to bed with a will like a broken arrow

and a heart bruised like the blue rose of a starless sky

waiting for some small light, even a firefly of insight,

even a black hole on the negative of a starmap back to our eyes

to emerge from all this like Venus sinking down

over the darkening hills of her eyelids as if to dream

in the solitude of her beauty of rescuing her voodoo dolls

from the fire she threw them into, casting spells

like the shadows of moonless nights on earth

when pain had no value, and love was of little worth.

But in the face of it. Staring it in the eye

like a star or a reptile, trying not to lie like a placebo

to the spiritually hysterical about to give birth to the new world

out of their apocalyptic expansionism, not minting

cosmic keys to things that are not necessarily locks,

mustering my dusky yellow blood into the fire sage of a dragon,

and foregoing my penchant for self-destructive optimism,

the deepening of the terrible silence of our suffering

is the only reason I can come up with that our burning doves

don’t come back like loveletters we write like waterbirds on the wind.

There’s a silence within that is slowly ripening into the new moon

of the black pearl we’re making of the dirt in our hearts.

It’s not a third eye, or a rosary you can say the names of God on,

not even a sacred syllable of a secret that keeps to itself,

but something distinctly human that sacrifices its suffering

on the dark altar of the absurdity there’s no metaphor

to cling to like the lifeboat of a shipwrecked paradigm.

That everything’s been left relentlessly unexplained

as if only the silence were pure enough to receive our sorrow

the way our roots can’t conceive of the fruits of their labour,

or the sea receives the rain like a mirror of eyeless tears.

Sweet one, sleep without redressal. in the quietude

of what appears to include you in its innocence

like sugar in apricots when the locks fall away like ripe fruit.

The rained out peonies weeping their eyelids away

like phases of the moon by the open gate always

look ravished by the wind’s indifference to bliss.

The nightwatchman’s in the next room playing

solitaire with the scars of a wound as old as the stars.

PATRICK WHITE

HOUSE FULL OF SPIRITS

House full of spirits, suffering ones, dead flies

punctuate the way

your lives have settled

on the windowsills of an indifferent eternity;

as foretold, the wind

has raked up your footprints like leaves,

and your smile no longer denudes the rose,

not even a rag of flesh

to sop up your exquisite tears.

And still, no one understands your pain,

no one sits around your heart,

the raging blue fire of your fragrant grief

trying to water your eyes like gardens.

And the brides move like waves

without a sea, the shadows of young horses,

and love that promised so much

down on its knees at the end of a wharf

that never led anywhere,

thistled into hatred and smouldering suicide,

and blood that rattled its chains at the moon,

and the years passed without remark

as if the measure of a life

were a butter knife and a French carnation.

Late at night, when the town sleeps,

when every thought

falls like the feather of a passing bird

or a pellet of bitter rain against the weeping glass,

as if the unrighteous were being stoned

by those without sin, I feel you

looking for your passage back through me,

as if you would adorn my voice

with the phantom bells of a forgotten joy

you never told anyone about,

as if you would add the ghost down

of your aimless autumn

to the warmth and moisture of my breath,

and flavour the air

with the subtle auroras, the secret dawns

of your quiet dispersals,

the petal of a blind candle

shedding its light

with every exhalation.

Take what you need,

the sorry cargo

of what you are able to carry;

and even if I don’t know what room

I am the door to,

what window I look through,

use me as your small hunger suggests,

the feast and silo of your unknown needs,

the penumbral gardens of the world next door

that never turns the music up loud.

I will leave myself out

like a portion of the garden

after harvest

for the birds who must winter forever

on a dead branch stiff with time.

And I will not ask about you;

I will not look into your eyes

as if I leaned over the wall of a well

to listen for how far the pebble I wished on

more out of habit than faith

had to fall before it drowned

in the shapeshifting starmaps of your watershed.

Be what you are, the fragrance

of the lingering rose in stale lace,

the hesitation in the shadows of intenser forms,

I ask nothing of you

and expect even less.

I have my own solitudes to cultivate,

the business of being human to get on with,

and beasts at the gate

who stutter like hinges,

energies darker and older than coal,

begging me to be the one

to carry my corpse the rest of this journey

that lies still in its coils

waiting for the last breath,

the last murmurous pulse

to quit my poor body.

Even among faces and hands,

even on the abandoned street

nodding disarmingly

at the suspicious outcasts

ostracized by plaster rooms

and hooded for hanging

in the doorways that I pass,

I am driftwood on a remote and lonely beach,

the bone of a thousand island storms,

each a transfiguration of my heart

rounded out in the brutal tides

and undertows of sorrow.

And the hands of the clock

don’t point at numbers anymore

but shine radiantly in all directions

as if the hour were a vivid gypsy

trying to dance the truth away.

And no one knows more

than the old, wooden office chair

I’m sitting in

as if I were enthroned by the life

of my own mind,

what it is I’ve been doing all these years

stuffing symbols like fortune cookies,

the vulva and wombs

of chromosomatic destinies

every one of which I’ve had to eat and live

before I could read the whisper of blood

that it was written in.

I could have made chairs,

I could have fixed shoes,

nailing on new heels with tacks and stars,

buffing the night with a spin of a brush,

I could have proposed propositions

about propositions,

and been a teacher, I suppose,

toiled at something simple

and recognizably purposeful;

nibbled nocturnally at a salad of money

when the garden was left until the morning

to the shy and the discrete.

But I was a rage

of arrogance, lies, and delusion,

I was black lightning that sneered at repose,

and any notion of the heart was justified

that stoked the furnace with the dead.

And I had to know what love was

and the damp star under the leaf

of a woman’s body,

and oblivions that tasted of honey and chalk,

and the suggestive familiars of a darkness

rich with the ores of a stranger’s voice

feathered with the light

of unknown constellations

extinct as the dice of a crucial gamble.

Enamoured of the eloquence

of the rarest paradoxes and absurdities,

considering the nature of the sea

I lived beside, and the moon

that edged her crescents on the anvil of my heart,

and the agony of being alive

that I could not overcome, the unanswerable emptiness

that always stands like the last syllable

at the deltas of the silence,

before I enter the unimpeachable abyss of its wisdom

like a falling tower

trying to bridge the infinite

by skipping mystic stones out over the sea,

and the way I always splinter into tears

like the eyes of a message in a glass bottle

that bobs at my feet to tell me I am lost and cast away,

what else could I be, born

with this talent for autumn, but a poet?

PATRICK WHITE

FEEL LIKE THERE’S A BEAST

Feel like there’s a beast in the darkness

eating my eyes.

I’m a moon-bull

at a crossroads of solar swords

down on it knees

hemorrhaging like a poppy.

And there are constellations

I’ve never heard before

playing the harp of my horns

with pensive fingertips.

How strange this rag of life

soaked in tears and blood is.

Everything dies like a snowflake on a furnace,

a rock on an autumn mountain,

no two the same.

There are nights, there are

vigils of darkness

when the mirror can no longer bear

the weight of this feather of fire,

this vision of life

that estranges the spirit

of those who love it most

like a funeral bell

that once drank to the folly of love.

I am a snakepit of lightning

knotted in a glacier of ice

and every emotion

is the undertow of the tide in a sea of eyes

on the cold skull of the moon,

every thought, a stone lifeboat

inundated by the waves

it’s convinced it’s saving from drowning.

Once I was the dupe

of my own ideals,

now I am the master of none.

This far into the abyss

you forget the name of the god

you died in the name of;

you have squandered your certainty

on greater and greater risks,

the enciphered lotteries of mythic necessity,

only to discover,

though you traversed eras like deserts

that made a skull of your faith,

the donkeys have eaten all the mangers,

and there is as much radiance in the eye

of the dead serpent on the road

as there is the eyelash of a star.

A tear is not a fountain of seeing,

nor a drop of blood, a rose.

How rare the sword in its silence

among all these chatty scissors at war

trying to cut along the dotted lines

of their border highways

crammed with refugees

they once called lovers,

the horizon slashed

and bleeding like a letter.

I want to calculate the half-life of pain;

the pillar of ore it calls home;

the elemental devolution of its atomic evictions

into the leaden passion of a base metal.

I want to know what I’ve turned into.

I want to know what’s making the stars

throw down their spears of light at my feet

though my heart’s out in the open

like a voodoo doll

waiting for a donor transplant.

I want to see myself

opening a door in the mirror

to someone with absolute eyes

irrevocable as yesterday’s rain.

Let the star know

the flower it engenders;

let the rose

taste its own honey.

Blind in a dream; blind,

what light roots in the darkness

that I should want to

throw off this robe of blood like a sky

to slip through the eye of the needle

that binds the seams of this world

like a bird

with the single thread of a life in its beak,

washed out of God’s eye

like a firefly snuffed

in a torrential downpour of stars?

Why am I

always one heart too many

over the threshold of the truth

I had to leave home to discover?

Am I a hoax in tears

or a tear away from a gate and a rafter?

Let the wave know the sea

that packs its caravan on the moon,

let the silence of the waking abyss

write indelible preludes

with a last kiss

that goes on forever

like the white autumn wind

in a turmoil of seeds

that demonically exceed

the life they’re after,

flower by flower,

death by death

like the pulse of a bell

setting the doves free

in the towers of farewell.

It’s the eloquence of a tree

to say what life is

when the full moon ripens

in its leafless branches

and the heart beats

like a windfall of silver apples,

though I have tried,

but love is a bridge

on a finger of water

that not even the moon

can slip off like a ring

when the wind rises

like a gaping fish

to swallow the chimes and eyehooks

of its matriculate ripples.

And with each breath of the night

I took and returned,

I have aspired to succeed

at every failure I was ever inspired by.

I raised every sail,

crossed every wave,

every eyelid, every petal

of the sea of life

in the heart of the rose

only to drop the first crescent of the moon

like an anchor

in the furnace of a dream.

PATRICK WHITE

I LIKE THE FEEL

I LIKE THE FEEL

I like the feel of the new heels on my cowboy boots.

I like the feel of breathing in joy like oxygen,

of moving from one small joy to another

without pomp or pageantry

like the constellation of a black swan

on a midnight mindstream

drifting through the small torches of the stars

that won’t go out in any kind of water.

And I don’t know why I’m wounded

deeper than tears by joy

whenever I witness any undoubted example

of human excellence

and penumbrally share in the triumph

remembering how truly astonishing

a human being can be

when compassion and insight

are the fruit and roots of the tree.

So much in the world I abhor,

horrors and sorrows and atrocities

that violate the elemental dignity of life

as it expresses itself in a human so deeply

even the silence cuts out its tongue

as an offence against

the unspeakable decency of the darkest abyss

when it stands before evil.

Like a golden fish in a polluted stream

slurried by a nuclear reactor

into a cancerous elixir

I have ingested every toxic meme

of a sick society in a feverish dream

and I cannot help but think and feel and live

whatever’s written on the water

to soil the stars

that thought they were out of reach

and make manic depressives

of the waves that spoil the beach.

A child of my times, the Zeitgeist, the Holy Ghost,

and the jinn at every well

like the forbidden fires of holy explosives

wrapped in folds of smoke,

I see through the glass darkly

like everyone else

who paints the eye of their telescope

with the shepherd moons

of despair and hope

and reports their observations as the truth

to whomever might be listening.

I can humble the night with my darkness

when the light goes out

and I have fought for years

with the child that I am

not to feel guilty or vulnerable

whenever I was taken unawares

by some happiness

that spilled over the rim of the black hole

that indelibly kept my cup full.

Now I rejoice in the emptiness of things

as useless as rocks and people

and feel a great tenderness for anyone

who needs to feel anything more.

I like the way your gate is hanging by a hinge.

I like the dead bee on the pyre

of the late-blooming fire

that consumes it like a last kiss.

I like the way my portrait’s turned toward the wall

like a delinquent outside the principal’s office

listening for footsteps down the long, empty hall.

Lightning in the lighthouse

or fireflies on the moon

I like the way my Zippo snaps shut

like the beak of a turtle at the feather of the flame

it rose like an ancient moon from the muddy depths

to pull under.

I find joy in the slightest,

in the cast away and the spurned,

in the tiny birds that have learned

to glean the dragonflies

off the car radiators

and the way people like to be found

like hubcaps at the side of the road

holding up a mirror to the beauty

of the wild irises

like a new logo

they hope will catch on.

When you haven’t been saved from anything

there isn’t much left to save you from

or any point in trying

to save the ashes from the fire

after everything’s gone up in smoke

so why ox yourself

to the unbearable yoke of a cross

trying to grind bread out of starwheat

when the children you labour to save like seed

have already died for the night

with nothing to eat?

Who needs to turn themselves into a broom

when they’ve drunk their mirages dry

to sweep the deserts off the stairs

of an afterlife in an empty asylum

that talks to itself like the moon?

I don’t care what kind of bars

silver, gold, iron or bone,

spiritual or corruptly marrowed

by the tainted terrestrial

you want to put on the window

to keep the stars out like thieves at the gate,

I’m already in.

And you’re way too late.

I like to live my life

as if I were getting away with something.

I like being weeded out like a key

to a door that time forgot to close

like the coffin lid of the nightwatchman

who kept an eye on things like a flashlight

looking for his flashlight,

his mind for his mind.

I like being less and less of me

like a rogue sunset that sheds its roses

like a watercolour of its eyes in the void

to see more clearly into the emptiness

there’s nothing to be in this nothingness

that isn’t a last lifeboat without oars

and no one in it to rescue

jumping ship in a turbulent dream.

Illusory cures for illusory diseases.

And once you’re restored to clarity

does it really matter

what the medicine means?

I like the tear in my wounded blue jeans.

I like the autumn dyes that set your hair on fire

like the Gatineau Hills

risking everything

as you squander your leaves like rain-cheques

in the overly salubrious poker-faced casinos of Quebec.

I like the day I was let out of school

with eternity for a recess.

Why spend your life

panning your own mindstream

for the fool’s gold of the iron pyrite rule:

Do unto others before they do unto you,

when you know as well as Wall Street

things aren’t what they seem?

Look how an apple tree lives.

It gives. And it thrives

by just expressing itself

like a bouquet in the hand of a bride

that walks like a bridge to the altar

and marries herself in her own eyes

to the earth she’s rooted in

holding her green arms up

to the orchards of the Hesperides

that blossom among the stars

like holy ancestors.

I like the way the comets stray

like hair across her face

and the way she twists her mouth

like driftwood in the sun

to blow them away.

And I like the blaze

of the supernovae of enlightenment

who give it all back to the night

like a blood transfusion,

a hemorrhage of light,

and even more,

these small illuminations

that arrive through the night and day

like anonymous stars and flowers

beside a death bed in a private room

where only the dying know what to say.

Stars above the mountain.

Flowers in the valley.

I like the way the moon’s punked out in the alley

between the church and the funeral home.

I like the way I refuse to assume I know where I’m going

like a newly-hatched garden snake in the spring

or a stream setting out on its own

with nothing for a creekbed

but its own flowing

and how I always catch myself like a fish

rising to the hook and allure of a new direction

as if that were the truth north of not having one.

But let the goldfish nibble at the moon as they will

and swim through the tops of the trees

even as these fire-birds are flying through my roots.

I like the feel of the new heels on my cowboy boots.

I like playing the fool with my own molecules

as if I were madder than plutonium

at having to break my balls like a kick in the nuts

with my own pool cue

everytime I give the game away

hoping somehow that will make me

as sane as lead in the table of things.

I see hell. I live in hell. I breathe hell.

And this pillar of I enshrines and embodies it

like the corpse of a murdered river

flowing through darkness

without any recourse or redemption

for its suffering.

No elixir. No grail. No lapis philosophorum.

No celestial gold to climb the ladders of fire

out of the dungeons of hydrogen

or missing link that breaks the chains

of the slaves in the hold

that labour in vain to endure.

Life isn’t fair or unfair.

Pure or compounded.

Civilized or savage.

Eternal or brief.

Loving or hateful

nor all of these together.

The sky isn’t just

the daily news of the weather

and the sea isn’t just

the tragic rage of co-conspirators

doing their worst to fall on their own swords

as if they could be turned

like waves against one another

and though it is immaculately kind of us to say so

the earth really isn’t our mother

if you go back far enough.

The earth is more of a nurse these days

trying to suckle

a hydra-headed wound

in a nightshift emergency ward

at the full moon

with plastic udders of blood

hanging from a cruclfix on wheels.

For every demon that jumps from heaven

an angel rises from hell

and I like the way

I’m learning to fall toward paradise

without a parachute

like a one-winged samara trying to angel on

with these seeds of loaded dice

riding the luck of the wind

like a wounded albatross

looking for new ground

at the foot of an empty cross.

As much has been gained as was lost.

I like the way time weaves the manes

of the sheepish dandelions

into the emergency ghosts

of a thousand scattered parachutes.

I like the way every conclusion about life

rights itself with its opposite

like a compass or a keel

and there are addictions

so intensely beyond the obvious dark mirrors

and shared needles of true north

trying to snort the stars

to light up the room like a legend

on a neon movie marquee,

unschooled states of mind

so powerfully clear and whole

your being is shot up like a tree in the lightning

that God wants to use for a voice-box

so that the tree is known by its fruits,

the taste of its words,

the joy of its birds,

the blossom of the moon on the dead branch

the butterfly on the green

like the whole notes and stops on the flute

of a snake-charmer

collaborating with the muse of a cobra

on a new song

two minutes long with a hook.

I like the way life goes on in the dark

beyond the painted eyelids of the billboards

running for re-election as a theme park

to improve the fibre-optics of their umbilical cords.

Even as the truth turns out

to be more of a lock than a key

that can be turned in your mouth like a word

to set you free of yourself

like a long thought-chain

that plugs the world into your navel;

and beauty is a pimped-out carnival

of surgical exaggerations and defects

that wear the look of lost luggage

under the sagging circus tents

that taxi down the runways of the rejects;

and the evil that is done in the world

cloaks the oceanic eye of awareness

with the cataract of an oilslick

that giftwraps everyone like water

in the same starless snake-skin

they tattoo their corporate logos on

like a new translation of the Rosetta Stone

in the demotic tongues

of the illiterate mobs of PsychoBabylon.

Even in this deepest eclipse of hell

that swallows us whole

like the eggs of the moon in a nest

and is running out of eyes to darken,

even here there are still small lighthouses of joy

that shine through the cracked skulls of these coasts

and haloes of fireflies

that still iris the eyes of the black holes

that are too deep for anyone to put down roots

or go witching for water with lightning

screwed into the eyesockets

of their spineless lightbulbs

playing peek-a-boo

in their see-through birthday suits.

Let evil offend or amend its own statutes.

I like the feel of the new heels on my cowboy boots.

PATRICK WHITE