MY SOLITUDE BLUNTED BY DIVERGENT PSYCHES

MY SOLITUDE BLUNTED BY THE DIVERGENT PSYCHES

My solitude blunted by the divergent psyches of too many split ends. The strong rope unravelled into a million weak threads of downed powerlines and neural disconnections. Messiahs on meds asking that the bitter cup be taken from them as they despair of ever being able to express their martyrdom in paint for a forty buck a night muse of morphine that smiles upon them like Mary Magdalene. I seek the silence of the stars out in the dark fields beyond the lights of Perth. I crave their radiance. I expose my veins to the light sprinkling from the tips of their fangs like happy syringes to hit up on the vastness within and how close we all come to eternity without ever experiencing it like fish that are unaware of water. If space is expanding does time go along with it as well? Does time really stand still at the speed of light or does it just slip into the coma of another thoughtless waterclock that carries everything with it downstream? I feel like one of the untimely incommensurables of my own lucidity getting by without a starmap or anywhere in particular it wants to go like a sign of the times with equinoctial black holes that ate the spring and now the autumn of my life. At home with the damaged outcasts of an expedient extravagance that adapted them like seagulls and crows to the generosity of garbage as a survival tactic that made them feel they were getting away with something like slaves right under their tormentor’s nose, I am anciently at home with all things nocturnal like a pariah of dark energies who shuns the spotlight so as not to be blinded by his own blazing and be ambushed on the bright side of things. I face my own extinction like a timber wolf mourns what happened to the moon. And the people I run with know what a leg-hold trap tomorrow can be for the cow they savaged today in the time-honoured way of life to survive on itself. I stray up out of the valley as often as I can on my own after a day of hunting down below just to get the streetlights out of my point of view and keep the omnidirectional edge of my focus on the wild side of things by renewing my acquaintance with stars like Rhea’s milk flowing out of a Cave in Crete where she suckled Zeus into the Road of Ghosts as the Ojibway called the Milky Way and kept him from being swallowed like a swaddled asteroid by Chronos. My mother almost saved me from my father, but I was not breast fed. My teeth came in too early. Long before I was littered like Rome and both sides of my personality were abandoned by my father to a she-wolf’s tit, I swear I was the Egyptian wolf religion Lycurgus brought back to Sparta like a law-giver to straighten things out there by telling everyone to steal all you want but just don’t get caught. I suppose I could have lived like a fat maggot on carrion, or taken one of my frayed life lines and gotten wrapped up in a political career like a tapeworm naturally selected to live securely in the bowels of life with high priced consultants to chew my food for me. But I preferred to pull the sword out of the stone with my teeth like a porcupine quill for myself and take one of these old mountains for my throne rather than be spoonfed Gerber’s bullshit in a high chair. I’d rather be one of the zodiacal misfits not invited to the calendrical table of domesticated knights each with a sign outside a house of their own. I’d rather drink blood from my own skull in a year of drought than holy water from a grail the ailing kingdom is propped up in bed to sip from like soup spit out of a faith healer’s mouth like a cobra or the Taliban into the open wounds of my eyes. I shrug the acid rain off with a twist of my body and inflate my fur for snow. I like the ferocious clarity of the air up here. I’ll get back to the pack later with its lead female and big strikers nipping at the size of the balls of their juniors who keep contesting their place in line. Up here where the ice cracks through the unmarrowed bones of the mountain like a miner into motherlodes of gold I like to clear the coalbin of my head until all that remains of the original impact down below are grains of meteoritic diamond that bear a slight resemblance to the stars that do not so much as shine by a light of their own as snarl.

And O my good bad aberrant brothers and sisters with your precipitous insights into where you have to stand at the edge of the known world to get the best acoustics if you want to be heard like a madman in mourning by the moon above the world mountain Sisyphus is trying to re-roll the last avalanche up. As if even this absurdity of the turning season had an undiscerned purpose you had to be right out of your undefined mind to be privy to. There’s a stark dignity to a bone the flesh has been stripped from like a white-tailed buck in deep snow. Something romantically savage about the emptiness in the eyes of a skull that fell like a bead off the foodchain like the secret name of the god that first threaded it with blood like a rosary of alternate new moons and eclipses of the heart. Here killing for sport and recreation or ideology and desecration isn’t the same thing as killing to pass the flame of life on like a theft of fire from a lightning strike. Maculate mutable blood caked on the maws of the predators sticking their noses in the vital organs of haemorrhaging roses is a scarlet letter closer to the truth of the way things are up here than all the Valentine’s candy that rots the teeth of the sheep in the valley. There’s way more compassion in a sharp knife and a quick kill than there is in being tapewormed to death in the cattle barns and dairy farms of human kindness. Or to have your heart gouged out while you’re still alive like an Aztec sacrifice to a god who’s got his hands full forging passports in an embassy of scapegoats looking for asylum in their afterlives from crimes against humanity the victims are expected to redress on behalf of those who dispatched them like a priestly Stockholm syndrome in reverse.

O my fierce companions baring your lives like the fangs of broken mirrors, your delinquency is not a sword dance under lofty chandeliers that have reserved a space under the table of life for you, not an underground legend of cosmic necessity in a comic farce of star-nosed moles. Raise your muzzles like telescopes to the stars and howl out loud to let them know you’re gathered here in all your crazy wisdom waiting for the snow hare to break cover and run like Lepus kicking up stars at the heels of Orion. Let the world lavish its affection like a leash on house broken lapdogs nosing the stumps of a clear cut forest of fire hydrants for any signs of life they might hesitate to pee on like a truce it wouldn’t be too circumspect to break. I see your gashes. I see how you twist in agony and chew your legs off like Huike at Bodhidarma’s cave seeking liberation. I know how you eat your own hearts for courage. I see your scars. I see the strong medicine of the antiseptic tongues you apply like lunar poultices and bandages in the way you seek solace from one another without making the other vulnerable and weak. You are not the ghost amputees of an ancient dismemberment that defaced the wilderness at the hands of a serial killer among missing messiahs. You are not lurking in a dark wood to ambush a cynical poet karmically waiting to be summoned by a beatific vision of a muse who died long before he got a chance to touch her. Yours are the lineaments of fire not smoke. Desire, hunger, hunting, longing, freedom, grief, and life all burn in you like the rogue stars of a constellation that refuses to be fixed to the usual wavelengths of blood on the snow that hang halfmast from a flagpole in front of a creative finishing school for dead metaphors and symbolic acts to extract nature red in tooth and claw out of the hard cold facts of an explicitly illicit existence.

PATRICK WHITE