TWO ROADS

TWO ROADS

Two roads diverged in a tongue of fire

and I rode the snake as the middle way

all the way up my spine

to the cold palace of the north star

that had gone out like the candles

of the old powers

that used to brighten

the dark towers of a free mind

to see if I could light it up again

by coiling myself like the fuse

of the last supernova

that will ever go off like a brain

to fire the darkness up again

like a dragon before rain

wounded by the lightning spears

of his own injurious stars.

I’m as sure as Sisyphus about things

and it’s difficult to always tell

whether I’m a fire-wielding snake with wings

or meatloaf in an eagle’s claw

ascending beak to jaw

into the heavens

like the farce of some cosmic law

that follows all my sevens like snake-eyes

whenever I blow on the dice

and pray for illuminated elevens.

My blood is tainted with the night.

My blood is an iron rooster

that crows at dusk

like a blind weathervane

in all directions

trying to wake the wind up

by breathing into the mouth of its cave

this fire that burns like a voice in a furnace.

No one likes a real dragon,

their eyes are too intense,

and few have mastered the grammar

to read their scales like books

that were revealed in a dream

long before the world woke up

to its own lies

and needed shallower eyes to see.

They move like the bell and bulk

of an irreversible solitude

swinging on a chain of thorns

that snarls like a saw at the root of things.

But the scourge of the sage is an enlightenment

that will find you like a jewel in the ashes

and pick you up and hold you in the light

of its own shining

like an eye darker than the night

you’ve been busily mining

with the pick-ax of the moon

in the slagheaps of a leftover ghost.

And you will hear

the distant ocean of being

roaring in your own ear

when you put your skull up to it

like the only shell you’re going to find

on this bitch of a moon

and listen to what still lives within.

So many waves with eyes and faces, its true,

and so many suns in so many drops of dew

and the constellations that arise

like stories and rumours about you

aren’t fixed; they’re beads of mercury

that bled out of a haemmoraging thermometer

when you drowned like a lifeboat

on the way to rescue yourself

in the squall of a your last dreamfever.

It’s true, there are so many ways

to become confused

about a clarity

that has no confusion or clarity in it

and feel like the crumb of a dream

that scratches your third eye into tears

hoping to wash yourself out of the seeing

so you can receive the whole world

with all its death and suffering and beauty

with all its sorrow and desire and longing

and the radiance of its aspirations

with all the terrible generosity of the abundance

that it unjustly squanders on some

even as it uses the ribs of a child

that are showing through

like crescent moons

as a calendar of famine,

so you can embrace

the world without distinction

in the midst of all its compassion and brutality

as all that’s left of you

after the great extinction.

PATRICK WHITE