VENAL PERTH BLUES

VENAL PERTH BLUES

Venal Perth blues.

No room for arterial red.

I’m trying to get this local universe out of my bed

by spitting sunflower seeds in eclipse at the dead

in memory of her cotyledon splitting in two

like the vulva of a Venus figurine

with her bellyful of a population boom

that peopled my solitude with myriad familiars

that said they knew me once in a previous lifetime.

She was mad.

And she was nude.

And incomprehensible as fire.

And we revelled in each other’s sensuality

like two fudgicles on a hot August afternoon

when we were kids in the gutter

and had better things to do with our tongues than speak.

Such were the depths of absurdity we sank into

not caring who was the sabre-toothed tiger

and who was the starless tar pit of blameless oblivion.

I saw her spirit once under a blacklight

in a friend’s basement apartment

and saw how she greeted life with laughter

like a stranger from her own hometown

relieved to meet someone as crazy as she was

this far from anything they’d ever known before.

She entered a relationship like a demolition derby

and if your heart got bruised in the head on collision

she’d never let you put your hands on her steering wheel again.

And I don’t remember if it was the danger or the pain

that first attracted me to her

but I recall looking through her like a broken windowpane

into a savage mindscape with the biggest full moon

I’d ever howled at in an agony of lust and longing for years.

She was the darkest witch

in a coven of prime-time muses

that got behind everything she was up to

like the night gets behind the seven sisters of the Pleiades.

And at first I thought she was too high up

for the short-lived chimney spark of my voice

to ever reach her at those altitudes

as a sign of intelligent life from a furnace of desire

I was standing in like the ore of the Old Testament

to refine myself like gold from the base metal

of a soul that couldn’t forget where it came from

and wouldn’t turn its back on its own.

I wrote poetry in those days like a dragon in the rain

trying to keep my fire alive

on the lachrymose tinder of the sodden inspirations

that passed through my life like women in distress

until everything I wrote read like an s.o.s.

I sent out like a desperate loveletter

to anyone who was within earshot or not

for the princess to come to the rescue of the dragon.

And she did

once my tongue

got on the same wavelength as hers

like the witching wand of a tuning fork

and hit all the right notes through the three octaves

between lightning and fireflies

and we began to resonate

like the highs and lows of dark energy

in an occult universe whose physics were magic.

And from her point of view

I showed up like the joker

in the middle of a pack of Tarot cards

that didn’t think I was playing with a full deck.

The thirteenth floor was missing on the elevator

and she wasn’t sure she’d get off on me

but tentatively decided I was worth

coming up snake-eyes for

if she went as far as seven come eleven

when she heard that I liked to gamble.

I take great subjective overbidding risks

when my heart is on the table

and it’s winner take all

so how could I fail to fall in love

with any woman who was uncanny enough

to call my bluff and raise the stakes

like candles at a black mass

to purge my luckless soul of heresy?

An auto de fe.

No blood guilt on her hands.

She got into bed like a jihad

in the Court of the Star Chamber

and made love to the cloaked one

as if her holy war were won

long before she ever declared it

like an infidel on her way to confession.

Only as recently as yesterday

she said the apostasy of the flesh

was her profession by choice.

A kind of female crucifixion.

She’d heard a voice.

She was on a mission.

She was falling off her horse

on the way to Damascus

to start another church for sacred prostitutes.

And I said it doesn’t sound like a profession

but a religious calling to me

as she undid all her taboos

to convert me to the error of my ways.

Venal Perth blues.

No room for arterial red.

It’s hard to choose

between the farces of the living

and the legends of the dead

when you’ve lived light years beyond both

and the muse’s memory is beginning to fail

of just how crucial you were once to her fairy-tale.

And in the last twenty minutes

this lady’s changed her hairdo

like an Etruscan shapeshifter

from an Austrian ballroom chandelier

to the decapitated head of Medusa

in the star Al Gol of the constellation of Perseus

and back to a snake pit of downed power lines

expressing enigmatic paradigms of a future

that doesn’t see much for either of us

in the hydra-headed directions

we’re both going in

like the seven extra dimensions

of crazy wisdom we had to forget about

just to feel we belonged here for a while

with everyone else

who were just as lost as us.

But sometimes you’ve got to let go.

You’ve got to lose it

to find your way home alone in the dark.

And I’ve never minded being a lifeboat for somebody

but it’s time to jump ship

like one of a kind

when they start attaching tug boats to me

like an ark that just got out of drydock on the moon.

PATRICK WHITE