HUMAN IN THE HEATSCORE HOTEL

HUMAN IN THE HEATSCORE HOTEL

Something to feel human about, the forsaken lips of the ruined roses

wishing they had more eyelids, chipping the old skies off their toenails

to paint the new ones on, black, with peacock inflections of stars,

and this in the name of a lover who may or may not come,

and this a flowering for its own sake in a high field

where the scarlet trillium blooms for no one. And there is

a junkie at three o’clock in the afternoon wrapped in dirty sheets,

c.d.’s all over the floor, overlapping ripples of rain, rubber and fit

beside the bed, fang and snake, scheming in a fever of pain

of rolling new rocks up an old hill, only to watch them

run down again, Sisyphus on crack cocaine. Upstairs

the carpenter-cooks party all night long, dope and beer,

hoping the women that have followed them home from the bar

for more and more and more are soft cement they can pour

into the concrete forms and beds of their abandoned dream-homes.

By the morning, the Taj Mahal on quicksand, and the empties

are the spent artillery shells of small town howitzers over-run

by the enemy from within in an undeclared war against boredom.

And it would be cool to be able to say something wise

to the punk rocker painter next door, learning to play

the guitar, laying down tracks on spools of black cassettes

that rage at the world for being more angry and fucked-up

than he is. He wants to pour lighter fluid all over his stageable heart

in front of an audience of brain-dead, zombie cannibals

who gather once a year like a meteor shower in church

to pay lip-service to a shy, wide-eyed apocalypse on methadone,

though he’d settle for a blow-job from a loyal hooker

with a dragon rising out of the crack of her ass like dawn

to prove she’s exotically unconstrained by sexual taboos.

No one is radical enough to overthrow death for love anymore,

and the heart is a cold furnace full of the bones of birds

that mazed their way down the chimney from the April mangers

they built in the tin mouth of the serpent that swallows them whole

and chaos is the latest straitjacket to try and outguess the wind,

and there are designer logos, toe-tag name-brands, sartorial Nazis

trying to reconfigure the constellations into fanatical shopping-malls,

and desecration is the newest aesthetic to smear its shit on the wall

before we’re all retooled to the prescient sensibilities

of a nanochip in jackboots converting the myths to motherboards.

People are hurt; they’re scalded; they’ve forgotten how

to give birth to the moon from their wounds; how

to wipe the world off on the thresholds of their transformations,

how to enter a burning house and walk out with wings.

And they squander their suffering on spiritual junkfood,

their blood flows in the old cracked creekbeds of habits

that sleep in the hardened mud like hibernating toads dreaming

of flash floods; they’ve forgotten the original path of their own flowing

can turn into apples and fish and chandeliers of water

that there are foundries of the spirit that can pour them out like stars

able to call life forth from the stone, mind from the eye

of a dead volcano. They die of thirst beside virgin lakes,

fester in stranded tidal pools beside the sea, afraid

of the unsinkable lifeboat of their own vital depths

flinging out waves like umbilical cords to pull them in.

They never get out of the egg, the net, the black cocoon

to see how vast the ocean is or how much room there is

for dragonflies and red-tailed hawks. Every kiss, an eclipse,

the shadows of tumorous spiders squat on their hearts

waiting for nurses with keys to lethal medicine chests

like butterflies. Everyone is drained and silked away

like mummies on trophy plumb-lines, fictions of tar,

and the spiders are no more real than the mysteries of the web

that congeals them. When the nightmares eat the stars

light is born in the belly of darkness; waterlilies

return to the swamp to clarify the mud they feed on.

Every suicide affirms the inviolability of life,

Every paradise gets drunk on its own serpents.

Everyone’s nothing less than everything all the time

including the hunger, the longing, the fear, the sorrow;

the constellations are as intimate as private tattoos

and there are fountains within that have eyes

ripe with blue roses and astounding summer skies.

And nothing’s missing and nothing’s out of place

or wrong and even the delusions have a part to play

in the quicksand hourglass that crawled like a sphinx

out of the midnight deserts of time: could it be

a mirage of palms is a prelude to water as smoke

is the feather of fire? Illusions, too, have integrity.

What fool thinks the universe never lies? A truth

that wounds is false; a lie that heals is true

and the moon is a silver herb that nurtures both.

Something to feel human about, a middle-aged man

watching a bored young woman paint her toes

as she changes from a lamp in the arms of her journey

into a message in a bottle for help and then

the lighthouse, the exfoliant heart, the pillar of fire,

and a seabird cruising off the coast of this poem

lavish with its lightning insights into the storm of ashes

he’s afraid he’s become, alone, broke, indefensibly numb,

trying to grow a vision in the eye of a hurricane,

a garden in the urn of his cosmic cremations, a green leaf

on the dead branch of a conductor’s baton

that gropes its way through the world like a blind man’s cane

or the antenna of a suddenly illuminated ant consumed in the blaze.

And he remembers other more radiant days,

when he wasn’t the troll under the stairwell

who knows the footfall of every tenant in the building,

when he forgave people for his own human nature

and every poem was a prime time documentary feature.

But what’s the point of pouring the ocean into a teacup

or divining water on the moon when tears are enough

to green a seabed with a million forms of life, his own

included, as he tries to write with clarity and art

the things he might say to himself alone in the dark

and the things he must say to survive his own heart.

PATRICK WHITE