YOUR RAGE YOUR FURY YOUR FEROCITY

YOUR RAGE YOUR FURY YOUR FEROCITY

Your rage your fury your ferocity. Just flammable methane bubbles you’re blowing in a vulnerable atmosphere. Blood splatter when they break like roadkill and insects on the windshield of a driverless car. Not supernovae. Not deep sky viewing objects hung aloft your desecrated mangers trying to suck a few more wise men into believing they’re on the trail of something hot. I listen to you talk like a fifty calibre machine gun on the back of a Toyota pick up truck. You never take the shot at anyone personally but two people are always wounded and one pronounced dead on arrival as collateral damage of the ricochet. O, poppy mouth, you’re still a bad dealer dipping too deeply into the opioids of your own product. And the flags of your gypsy fires, even when you’re dancing naked, are always flying at half mast for someone you killed by accident in a drunken collision with dinosaurs who didn’t understand how much you’ve grown beyond them like a mammal. But I’ve seen you inspire ingenuous flute-players like a muse who irradiated sex and inspiration, and once they were enthralled by you and completely smitten like stone, I have seen you pick their hearts up by the tail and throw them into a snakepit and say let’s see if your music can soothe the savage breast of these oviparous wavelengths of sick genius. You come on like a blood diamond in an engagement ring betrothed to the stars but anyone with nightvision goggles on can see you’re a crystal rock among the asteroids. You’re global warming in a spoon. You’re a mini black hole in the solar system. And though you’re as prophetically edgy as a Pythian priestess you’re always a comet shy of recognition. Bitter, isn’t it, to be so wonderful, and still have people greet you like a Burmese python in a Florida swamp? I was born under the sign of Hermes Trismegistus and I can tell by the way you’re trying to wrap yourself around my winged staff like a pole-dancer to swallow the dove atop it whole you’re not a real healer. Just because you strip for prominent doctors like a caduceus shedding its skin doesn’t mean you’re into medicine or know the occult meaning of the sign of the winged messenger perched atop the axis mundi ascended by the stairwell of two copulating snakes entwined like bannisters and chromosomes. You might be the apple in the eyes of a convention of oculists charmed by what they see, but to me you’re just another medium that likes to kill the messenger who speaks from the deepest darkest wisdom of his heart. Beware the wings on the heels of the trickster who might gentle you like a morning dove with sweet promises of peace and love and inspiration until you feel tempted by his vulnerability to make a move on the birthmark of his innocence. Sometimes the nightbird that sings to you opens its talons like the crescents of the moon and strikes like an eagle. And it ascends to the heights it intends to drop you from on the crystal rocks down below like the constellation Draco wrapped around the north pole like a dragon that cannibalizes snakes that don’t know how to fly straight like a truce of broken arrows among the stars.

PATRICK WHITE