NOT A THING TO SAY

Not a thing to say about anything and I don’t know what it is that I’m feeling so hopeless about but I’m trying to be intrigued enough by the misery that I might find the cure in the heart of the disease and shoot one fang of the moon into me to undo the death in the other. And there are macabre bruises on my solitude that I can’t explain and ways I hurt that I suspect are suffered in vain. And the lies tell me to the lies that listen, and the biggest lie of all falls for the truth. Or, the big lie eats the little lie and the little lie better come clean. Weary. The pain, dull. The longing, acute. For what; for whom? I’m dogpaddling in my own enzymes, my amygdala and hypothalamas in idle, no dopamines overloading my neurotransmitters as I send out sparse messages from my face that always end with a digital smile, just in case the aliens take offense easily. Though that’s a little slimey and facile. Just the same, what use would I be to anyone if I weren’t worthy of some of the blame some of the time for the great cosmic crime of being me, the rag I use to sop up my self-pity when I pour too much of myself into the empty looking glass, hoping a face will appear in the flash of the lightning that shatters the seer, that isn’t the understudy of mine. But the muse gags on my ashes everytime I burn for her in the crematorium of another star and when I do her portrait in blood, she pyres the painter like a chimney-sweep to burn off the karmic creosote in the chains of the lives I’ve dragged through hell like a comet for her before. Prehistoric artists sprayed carbon over their hands to invest the cave with their presence; people around here shatter the dry plaster like a skull and jam their feet into the walls, leaving treadmark icons in their drunken rage that prove the jest of unimpressed Neanderthals. Torn down. Depleted. Thinking every bell of early columbine that rings on the mossy rocks, will later swing back like a wrecking ball through a wedding cake, I stay down; heaping the floppy arms of the dead around me, I pretend that I’m dead until time stops fixing the hour hand like a bayonet to probe the corpses for life and walks out on the opening night of my pantomime among the silent transports of the ghouls who swarm me. I’m not much of an actor, but among the shadows of the dead, anything that moves is a hit.

PATRICK WHITE