I CAN FEEL MY THOUGHTS
I can feel my thoughts tearing my mind
as if it were a piece of paper.
As if space had a zipper.
I’m playing Russian roulette
with cosmic bubbles in hyperspace
and I’ve got a hole in me.
A puncture.
And I’m leaking out.
I need a new universe
that’s never heard of lifeboats and arks
to acommodate all the dimensions
and inflections of my afterlife
there is no room for in this one.
The grapes are wounded
on the thorns of the barbed wire
that runs up my back like a spine.
Metal stars that don’t shine
like neo-romantic legends
that bloom on the vine
The right flowers
but the wrong lifeline.
My blood.
Their wine.
The full moon at lunar perigee.
Bigger than it’s ever been for the last two decades
and more illusive
than its bluesy encore in October.
because the ice is late in leaving.
There’s nowhere to land.
Cataracts on the shattered mirror.
There’s a sadness in the passage of life
whether it’s coming or going
that transcends the complexities
of what we think we understand
of the grand and beautiful
with the homely immensities of knowing.
Shards of sky in the funeral home parking lot
I keep falling into
taking a shortcut home
like a lost waterbird
with deranged magnetons
trying to fly through windows and mirrors
and spring rain on the unresponsive asphalt.
Someone’s torn out the eyes of the stars
and all I can see
are the black snake-sockets
in the skulls of the leering dice
leading me on through this white night
like the blind luck
of a negative of a photographic starmap
of the thirteenth house of the zodiac
the sun never enters for fear
of infectious eclipses
crossing their heart
like white paint on a plague-door.
Someone’s ripped out the tongue of the wind
like the dead language of a leaf in autumn
and every superstition is listened to
as if it were good advice.
God I miss the fireflies and the loosestrife
and the timelessness of long country roads
that don’t care if they ever go anywhere.
But now isn’t then
and I’ve given up approximating
what’s been bereft of reality
as if I knew.
Is anyone out there?
Would you answer me if you were?
Leave the bottle.
Leave the message.
No one’s coming to the rescue.
The skulls of all of yesterday’s selves
turn into the dice of the moment
and the moment keeps coming up snake-eyes.
I paint.
I write.
But the heavy water of my tears
isn’t intimate enough
with the plutonium intensity
of the rogue reactor my heart has become
to keep myself from melting down.
It’s easy enough
to second-guess yourself
into being someone while you’re alive
but it’s a lot harder to know
who they’ll be burying when you die.
I expect more lies have gone south than truths.
Or if you’re into transmigrating soulfully with the dead
like the Ojibway Pythagoras or ancient Iranians
in the bodies of
in late September
when the asters come up
like expressionist constellations
to challenge the classical traditions of the old
and you’re an oxymoron like me
who prefers two wings on his angels
in a coincidence of the contradictories.
And sometimes three.
Then you could always look back on your youth
and ahead to your death
as if life were a hole in the truth
and you can’t fall into love with one
without assenting to the other.
But if you’re completely honest with yourself
nothing does any good.
It’s like a star looking back on its own light.
By the time you see it
it’s somewhere else.
Life is always changing.
Life is a shapeshifter.
A dream-breather.
Vertumamnis.
The river’s turning.
Morpheus.
The great serpent of desire
Kama-mara
playing the flute
to charm herself
as she swallows her fangs like swords
and eats her own fire.
And it’s one of the strangest
mystic twists in life’s crazy wisdom
a reflection in a warped funhouse mirror
the simultaneity of two spaces in one
that seeing is being
and like the moon on water
like enlightenment and life
they don’t submit to the knife
so you can’t seperate the shadow from the light.
In order to know yourself as you were.
In order to know yourself as you are.
The original star.
You have to be someone else.
I look back over the years at what lives
and what dies
and how all the lies come true
and all the truths turn false
and all I can feel is a sorrow
so deep and beautifully devastating
in the heart of my most adored illusion
that all I can hear
is the sound of my tears
letting go of my eyes
as if it were their turn for a change
to do the falling.
As if they longed like the waters of life
like broken windows
that finally put their fist through the view
to be someone else.
As if the only way
to be truly me
is to be truly you.
As if it were you here alone by yourself
fighting for your life after
with a painting knife in one hand
and a viper of a poem by the neck in the other
trying to take cheap shots at your art
as your blood turns cadmium yellow deep
and the sunflowers bow their heads and weep
at the futility of these excruciating transformations
I keep going through
like a small boy’s notion of being the hero
who puts on a mask like Zorro
and faster than light
with the sword of a painting knife
or the toxic arrow of a Mongol rainbow in reverse
a spitting cobra
loosed from behind like the line of poem
from a galloping horse
falls on and by it again and again
as if his life were the wounded zero
that came to the rescue of the endangered one
by making everything ten times more immense than it is.
I put wings on the snake.
I put wings on the horse.
I put wings on the fires of life
and watch them rise like a phoenix
that has no fear of flying too close to the sun
or plummeting to its death like Icarus.
If you want to learn to fly without wax
you’ve got to be sincere.
Tar and feathers don’t have enough
of the right stuff
to make it to the moon and back.
I ride the dragon.
I swallow the moon
and speak in the tongues of prophets
that regurgitate whales
to turn the vomit into perfume.
It’s raining eyes outside.
I ride the light like Einstein
on his way home from his work as a clerk
in the Swiss Patent Office
and stop time on the drop of a dime
to lengthen my life interminably
like a repeating decimal
that refuses to be defined by its limits.
I summon the corpses of the absolutes
buried in the graveyards of relativity
to a seance of vandals
that knocks them over like headstones
that are too slow on their feet
to win the argument.
The worst way to try to understand an artist
is to believe whenever they say something
they know what they mean.
Stop listening to them
as if you were talking to the dead.
You’ve got to be on the same palette as the painter
to understand the psychology of green.
Colour is food for the hungry.
Colour is the fire of the burning bush.
Colour turns one face to the public
and the other to the stars
like the moon.
Colour works until
and then takes a rest in a gesture of shadows.
Colour is the secret password
that the blood says to the heart
when it’s too late to stay open
and it asks what thing come thus
and the blood flashes its familial mood ring
like an angry chameleon
and says
there’s room in there for both of us.
Red’s always willing to take a chance
and be the first to leave home
but ultramarine blue enjoys the love-life of a Druid.
And if black looks dangerous
to the righteous greys
that’s only because they’re estranged from themselves.
Black is at peace with who it is
like a life-changing experience
that can’t be shared
because there’s no birth or death in it.
Black doesn’t act like a rainbow
when the rain makes love to the sun.
And it doesn’t despair when the colours run
like painted tears
and autumn leaves
in a downpour.
Black is the last mirror
your eyes will ever look for themselves in
before they break into clarity
realizing there’s no one there but them
to be whatever colour they want to be.
Right now I’m full of creative admiration
for the chromatic aberration
of ferocious chandeliers of fireflies
and the wet dreams of reflecting telescopes
who have both eyes open in orbit
and burn with the wonder of life
as if they just spotted a naked woman
bathing in stars
to wash off last years’ constellations
like the smell of old loveletters to the light.
But every time I try to emulate them aurorally
it’s everything I can humanly be
to see that I’m this uber-romantic toss-up
between a full eclipse of the moon
and a death-wish with a geni.
It puts the whole of me into every picture
where I feel I’ve always belonged.
I live in a the foursquare tent of a canvas home
I can set up anywhere like an easel
that’s been driven out into the desert like Azazel.
where I live from one mirage to the next
by painting them to look like real water.
But then I’m scraped out
like a drastic colour
when the well runs dry
at the beginning of every spring
and there isn’t enough viridian around to cry
or burnt sienna left to try.
And my geni can tell
by the way I’m abusing Prussian blue
how sad it is to be born
with the soul and eye of an artist
who revels in mixing his complementary passions
so every orange has its blue shadow
and every stiff-dicked bananna
the stillness of its violet afterlife.
Now the iris of my eye
is the random halo of light
around a blackhole
but it’s deep inside
where they can’t be seen
where the colours come to die
one by one like elephants
remembering a mindscape
they passed through many years ago
like a night of pthalo blue
and Payne’s gray
when they weren’t hunted into extinction
by a blacket market
for the warmth of their ivory whites.
And life was a master
who stepped into the on-site studio
at the last moment to rescue the fresco
from catastrophic banality
and make it live
by knowing exactly
when and where
with great abandon
to put the highlights in.
PATRICK WHITE
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