DON'T WANT

DON’T WANT

 

Don’t want no twisted fucked-up agony of a relationship

tying all my lifestreams into Gordian knots

I keep thinking I’m slicing through

to stay true to the snakepit

yoked to this deathcart of a body

that prophecied one day I’ll rule the world  

when in fact I’m only cutting my own throat

to prove to you again and again and again

I don’t want to

cross my heart and hope to die.

The cut worm may bless the plough

but that’s not the same as falling on your own sword

or slashing your wrists on the moon

or nicking small wounds in your flesh

to indulge your addiction to severance.

I don’t mind cutting the occasional birthcord

or parting the waters of the Red Sea now and then

to let the chosen ones

on their way to the promised land through

where we all drink milk and honey on the moon

as if it were flesh,

but I don’t want another affair

that aspires like a hawk of fire

to one mystical extreme of love

only to fall like a guillotine on the other.

The rarest orchids of sex

may well bloom in the shadow of an outhouse

according to the oxymoronic nature of things

but the real obscenity

is uprooting them like weeds.

I don’t want a relationship that bleeds

before it’s even wounded.

You can steal all you want from me

if you can’t accept it for free.

You can take the moon from my window

the star from my dark

the hot jewel

from the hand of my demon

the gates down from my hovel in heaven

and if it makes you happy that’s okay

because I don’t care how I’m given away

when I love someone.

I live in the Eocene of a dark abundance

at the beginning of things

and there are eras of space

between my thoughts

that are filled with strange unwitnessed stars

that keep mum about fate and fortune

and the legends of scars to come,

but I can still feel my lover’s eyes

even over all the long excruciating transformations

of the shapeshifting years between us

looking at them like a myth with chandeliers.

And the dead branch blossoms into butterflies.

And the wine takes the poison

out of the deadly nightshade of our bitter tears

and joy doesn’t taste the salt of reason in its wound.

A woman is the only window

I’ve ever seen God through

like a firefly caught in the hair of a willow

that puts the stars to shame

with every flash of light on earth

that blooms in the night of her name.

The clarity of the fool

is not lost upon the wise

but I don’t want to work my ass off

to put another woman through goddess school

to learn that not all her slaves

are masters she’s overthrown

and the tribute I lay on her temple stairs

is not the Greek horse of a tragic farce.

If I rub the lamp of her body

to free the geni inside

to grant all our wishes

that doesn’t mean

I’m just another cork

bobbing on a sea of Bhakti devotion

trying to stick it

to another message in a bottle for help.

I just want to come.

I don’t want to come to the rescue.

I’m looking for the sweet narcosis of that oblivion

that follows rapture

not another maritime disaster.

She can be doing laundry like Nausicaa

when I wash up on her shores

like some reject in the tide

or she can be the siren of the island

who’s got a father with boats and oars,

or she can be the queen of sacred whores

holding court in the temple of Isis

where the johns keep wondering

what the price is

to lift her veils

like black sails on the dark side of the moon

and kiss the enlightened eclipses of her eyelids

like the heads of holy snakes

without being bitten twice by the same vice,

and I won’t quarrel with any mask she makes of herself

even if it’s one of my own

because true love knows how

to go down on the Medusa

without turning into stone.

One breast kills

but the other heals

and there are no mirrors

in the way it feels to please her

when you know your way around.

She might wear the deathmask of the moon

but there’s always a nymph

in the heart of the crone

that doesn’t want to be on her own for the night.  

And the less you look for her

the more she will appear

like a doe come down to the water to drink

the moon from her lone reflection

or a cougar moving from shadow to shadow

without detection.

Impotence is the holly

of aesthetic desecration,

a lot of negative space in a fist

trying to get even with its thorns

by stoning Mary Magdalene to death

because she was beautiful and free

but that’s just another halo

on the horn of obscenity

trying to gore a virgin on a unicorn.

A woman is not the mudflap of a big wheel.

She’s not the witch at the end of that candle

that keeps going out

like an eternal flame

in the morgue of a black mass

that keeps shapeshifting the blame

between a goat and a jackass

for its lack of horns and hooves.

Sex might cast its spells

over the wide-eyed realms of heaven

slumming in the nightclubs of hell

in the auroral lingerie of intense pleasure

but it isn’t trying to stick pins

through the heart

of a voodoo doll gone bad

to avenge her miserable sins.

It’s a bigger magic than that.

It doesn’t foul its own coasts

trying to sell skin to ghosts.

 

PATRICK WHITE