CONSOLATIONS OF DARKNESS AND SOLITUDE
Consolations of darkness and solitude.
No stars.
No fireflies.
Just the low sound of the town
breathing like an air conditioner in its sleep.
The trains are silent.
The highway is empty.
The streetlamps
haven’t found anybody
they can show the way home.
The stores are as despondent as sunflowers at
Consolations of darkness and solitude
I attend upon my body
like a ghost at a seance
I keep being called back to
when I wake up from the dead
and come back to my senses
like the road less travelled by
to its old neighbourhood.
Where are the stars?
Where are the fireflies?
I’ve been gone so long
I don’t expect to be recognized
by my own windows and mirrors.
When I’m shining
I’m the kind of moonlight
that comes in through the backdoor
while everyone else
is being interrogated by their paranoia
through a two way mirror in a dream
that doubles as a movie screen.
If truth’s a test
than let’s see
if a polygraph can pass me
when I’m the only one I answer to
dogpaddling in this vast night sea
like a message in a bottle
that isn’t meant for anyone
that isn’t on the same wavelength.
And if not
there’s always the cosmic resonance
of my own sentience
to fall back on for strange company.
The voices of all the afterlives
that haunted me before I was born.
The hearts of the people are martyred by survival.
The heretics are arguing over how big the tent has to be
for a spiritual revival.
And the revolutionaries
are showing off their guns to little girls.
The dealers keep their secrets to themselves like pit bulls.
None of it makes for much of a conversation.
You can pick up a seashell and put it up to your ear
anytime of the day or night
but you can’t hear the ocean
and none of the mermaids know how to hold a tune
worth dying for.
The roar of a lone skate-boarder
on a deserted street.
Me whistling to myself on a dark road.
And now an approaching train
mourning its own passage
before it’s arrived.
I am reminded of all the teenagers and drunks
it’s already killed
but there’s art on the sides of the boxcars
all the way from
like prehistoric studio caves on tour
that gives me an uncanny sense of what age this is.
Where are the stars?
Where are the fireflies?
Why do I feel I’ve accomplished something significant
when I jump the crossbars and stop lights at the railway track
and really give the train something to scream about?
And it occurs to me
maybe as a tribute to their ghosts
waving their lanterns
far down the tracks for me to step back
that a suicide is just someone
who didn’t get out of the way
the way they were told to.
They bit the bullet
instead of dodging it
wounded less by its exit
than its entrance.
There was a picture here for awhile
and a toppled vase of flowers
to commemorate a young man
who was killed on these tracks
when he slipped into a drunken coma
on his way home from a party.
What can you say to anyone about death
when someone loves you like that?
Consolations of darkness and solitude.
Sky-blue chicory along the roadside
blooming eerily in the streetlights
as if the colour had gone out of its eyes.
No stars.
No fireflies.
PATRICK WHITE
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