A MAN OF NO CONSEQUENCE

A MAN OF NO CONSEQUENCE

A man of no consequence can dress the way he likes. Can think what he thinks. Say what he says. Feel what he feels. And write the way he writes. And a woman with the soul of a nocturnal wildflower doesn’t have to live like a potted plant. She doesn’t need to sweep the stars off the stairs or wipe the blood off the bannister she can ride all the way to the bottom if she wants as if there were no end to her childhood. She can rest easy in herself like the sea. She can approach any of the myriad mindstreams that flow down into her life like a neophyte priestess at the Eleusinian Mysteries and not need to say a word of it to anyone. She can be the lone celebrant of the birthright of her silence. She can summon covens of nightbirds to secret groves of her occult sexuality and no one’s going to show up like a monkish match head and burn the whole forest down like all of womankind at the stake. And if a man of no consequence loves a woman of no consequence they put their heads and their fortunes together like two zeroes and everything is amplified a hundredfold like waterlilies no one ever sees but the stars that try to be so much like them. They don’t need to astound anyone with rainbows to change the mood of the mirror. They don’t try to waterproof their reflections like the heavy burdens celebrity lays on the playful buoyancy of bubbles like heavy slabs of indelible concrete on the sidewalks of fame. Who they are isn’t a name. And what they feel isn’t that easy to put a thumb of light on when there’s no one on stage.

Do you really want to be a rock star trophy chick in a zoo of wounded logos? You’re a good stripper. You work the pole like a serpent works the tree of knowledge until the whole snakepit is tempted to take a bite out the apple of your ass and begins to shed money like sexually frustrated autumn leaves hoping you can turn them green again. Your body is the full moon of an incantation over a cauldron of hormones. Like Circe you can turn sailors into swine. But doesn’t the trouble always start when you try to turn them back into men? And they bruise your heart by leaving you waving goodbye like an island at the end of a long pier you walk like a plank on a pirate ship, drying your tears on the skull and crossbones they left you for a souvenir? You’re no female buccaneer. And I’m not the secret starmap to your buried treasure where triple X marks your G-spot.

A man of no consequence without a lifeboat has nothing to fear from a witch when he washes up on her shores like a drowned sailor whose only attachment is to a gold earring to pay for a proper burial that isn’t unseemly in the eyes of his gods. He doesn’t fall in love like a lifeboat full of sharks scrambling to get out the water because it’s got people in it. A man of no consequence is just as happy ploughing his acre on the dark side of the moon as he is mending his nets to go fishing for a living by casting his constellations like birth signs over the lunar shadows schooling in the dead Sea of Tranquillity. It’s more than enough of an enlightenment to him if he can make his way in the dark by the light of a candle of love that the fiercest wolf on the wind can’t blow out. He doesn’t fall in love to blind others with his blazing. He doesn’t enter a dark room full of blind star-nosed moles groping among the roots of their feelings to get something to blossom like a galaxy flashing its bling like the supernovae of a pimp to his paparazzi. Love might be a hidden jewel that wished to be known but you’re coming on as if the light coming out of the dark were just another clever form of false advertising for a celebrity line of make-up. And it doesn’t really matter if a man of no consequence looks at the full moon in total eclipse face on or squints through a mask darkly to save his eyes, he turns the light around and looks for the first hint of a star in the darkness deep within. Intense heat. Unusual sprouts. A man of no consequence looks over the seed in his garden like a scarecrow until it begins to put out small tendrils of love that grow effortlessly with a little light and a little rain into the harvest wines of an unearthly rapture shedding the skins of earthly grapes. You can tell by the rivers that flow like lifelines on star maps down into the deltas of his eyes that a man of no consequence is spontaneously civilized enough to know what moves the waters of life in a vaginal canal to bloom like the moon and what acids of desire boil over like a snake pit of downed power lines spitting into a wishing well in lieu of rain to put them out like root fires the lightning started. A man of no consequence can stand like a prophet in the furnace of a firefly and light up the whole universe with the candlepower of his love without aspiring to any greater magnitude of radiance or reputation than the wavelength he’s already on. He doesn’t look for a brand name on his myth of origin. A dandelion’s as good as an orchid to him. He just plants flowers. And the hives with their ineluctable honey come like mysterious queen bees in progress through the kingdom of his habitable planet like propitious comets that are the envy of the starfields.

PATRICK WHITE