I'VE TRIED TO APPEAL

I’ve tried to appeal to your nefarious side; if I couldn’t marry the white, marry the black bride. But you reek of artificial colognes that could almost pass for the real emotion, too much ambergris, not enough ocean, and I’m sick of a mannequin’s devotion. Even under the sartorial skies you’re draped in, your whole life is a prosthetic device, the limbs of a disjointed tree, Frankensteinian reproduction of a fully assembled amputee. Staked to a lightning rod in a department store window, you never go anywhere that isn’t on display, your butterfly and your comet, under glass. But I couldn’t live your way; as if I were the only needle, and everyone else were hay. I like the wooden spoon of your shapely ass, but where’s the cake, where’s the batter? You see? All bowl. No matter. The Mad Hatter without a tea party to go to. It’s time for a makeover that isn’t a makeover; new stars, new symbols, time to thumb the features of a new face out of a supple space with a new feel. I have lived my way through enough illusions, to prefer the real, the clarity to the cloud. I want a science of becoming that isn’t the art of scrying the breadcrumbs for a unified field theory of bread; and a heart that isn’t a black apple placed at the eastern doors of the dead. I want a sky big enough to host the stars in my head that have hived their honey into light to serve the bees that sip from the spoons of the flowers. I want to sit in the dark for a couple of hours alone, marrow in the bone, and discuss with God the possibility of a world of my own.

PATRICK WHITE