MEAN-PEOPLED MIND CLUTTER
Mean-peopled mind-clutter this morning
edging my rebirth into myself
like a prophecy that never comes true
with little hicks of razor-wire
that think they’re an improvement on thorns.
I wish I was sitting in the middle of a crossroads
with nothing on my mind but a few stars
and a lost sense of direction
that was happiest not knowing where I was going,
or what I wrote in the dust for the wind to read
with a crazy finger.
I don’t want to make an effort to be generous and kind,
I don’t want to make an effort exhaustively once again
to take the high path like some bumbling goat
and try to understand
why the moon butts heads with the mountain
or why all the wildflowers
turn into little bouquets of matches
that go off like solar flares
whenever I ask for a light?
I much prefer the immeasurability of a woman
to the measure of a man,
but there are acids in the rain these days
and glass tears that burn like windowpanes
and lethal illusions of angelic translucency
that weep like box jellyfish
because they haven’t got a backbone.
And it isn’t the moon that weaves and unweaves itself
on the looms of the great themes anymore
but the memes of a hydrophobic pettiness
that arises like the mahdi of a holywar in an hourglass
to defend nothing against nothing like sand.
But I don’t want to judge.
And I don’t want to not judge.
And it’s not as if I expect everyone I know
to be a magus or sybil of lucidity,
and I learned a long time ago the hard way
you can’t turn swine into buddhas
on a steady diet of pearls
or summon fish like a seance
back to the corals on the moon.
I’d rather implore the transformative abundance
of the black hole I keep like a coin of cyanide
under my blue tongue just in case
to turn me inside out like a pocket
to prove I’ve spent myself like a star at the bottom of a well
shining up at nothing,
and I’ve been a great fool,
but no one who reached out to touch me
with night in their fingertips
and light on their lips
ever got burned.
Maybe it’s just another way
of launching an appeal like a nameless lifeboat
against my demonic innocence,
and believe me,
I know myself like the sea,
or celestially seasoning the moon
I steep in my tea,
but I’ve come to conclude
like a man in the nude
there are people whose emotions
are homeless killer bees
that have never tasted honey
that even hell won’t waste a hive on
let alone a human heart.
PATRICK WHITE
