I CAN SEE HOW YOUR BRAIN
I can see how your brain
freezes like a stone in the mindstream
when I talk two or three wavelengths beyond red
and there are pictures going through your head
that play you like a strange song
on a mechanical piano
you used to know
when the child in you was alive.
You live inside your crainium
like the fruit of a nut
afraid to be a tree
but this is not the siege of Jerusalem.
You’ve lived so long inside your coffin
you think it’s death to open the door
and distribute the life
you’ve stockpiled inside
to the refugee you were
before the war defiled you.
You’ve consumed the body
and shrunk the head
of the cannibal who consumes you.
And it’s a great pity
you don’t understand
the more you horde
the more you starve
and it’s your own tongue
that exhumes you
like an unspoken word from the grave.
The messiah showed up like spring
but there was nothing to save
and now you can’t hear the birds sing
or feel the wind ride the wave
like the air on your skin.
You crush the carbon
you pluck from life’s fires
and spraypaint your hand like graffitti
all over the walls of your cave,
defining the negative space in black,
but I can see clearly
through your imprimative design
you’ve left out the nail and the lifeline
that could have shown you the way back.
Five fingers of an empty space
that can’t grasp anything
that I can look clear through
like a window to the rock underneath
that will come through the glass one morning
like a mountain with teeth
like a dragon to the bait of the moon
like an army to a well
like a thorn to an inflated sky
like tears down the cheeks
of a stone woman
who thought she couldn’t cry,
like streams down
from the frozen crown of the fountain
that’s been posing as the mountain
she couldn’t wash out of her eye.
PATRICK WHITE
