WILD DRUNK NIGHTS ON BANK STREET
Wild drunk nights on Bank Street
in half a company of comeback poets
and the other half too young
to know what there was to lose.
Winter blues and booze
and the headlights of the evening cars
diffracted through big wet snowflakes
as we stumbled from bar to bar
between Mexicali’s and Noddy’s
among the clockwork throngs of people
we were trying as hard not to be
and they were doing everything they could
not to be us though they envied
our wives and girlfriends
because they were prosperous
and thought of themselves
as a lot more deserving than us
who were obviously not.
Hangers-on without enough life of their own
to put their own show on the road
waiting to see what new circus act
would bring the house down tonight
and the quasi-liberal businessmen
sneering under their breath
like a secret agenda at an open forum
who thought of a vagina as an empty wallet
and sat there all night long
flashing their cash around round after round
like fly fishermen
waiting for something to take the bait
though it was they who were hooked by the gills
reeled in
and left flopping at last call
at the bottom of the love boat.
Romeo trying to rip Bonnie off Clyde.
Blood banks coming on to Dracula’s bride.
You had to be spontaneously self-destructive
to sleep with women like that.
You couldn’t keep one rabbit in your pants
and the other in your hat
for back-up.
Nothing less than everything all the time.
Pot, coke, wine, beer for breakfast, whiskey,
and risky women with neo-romantic anti-selves
who followed us to jail
with taxis and bail after every barfight
whenever life abused the art it imitated.
Oases in the third eye of spiritual storms,
everyone trying to make something big
out of their exponential futility
we partied long and hard into the night
to exorcise the exilic solitude
we shared in common with those
who had also been cast out by their own hand.
After Rimbaud’s dissociation of the sensibilities
what could you do for encore
except take ruination a step too far?
Neo-surrealistic deconstructionism
with a mystically sexual twist.
How to live with a lunar view of life
in the half lights, shadows, and uncertainties
the moon cast through the trees across the road
in a solar culture that leeched the colour out of your blood?
Hang by your legs from the bannister on the balcony
of the thirteenth floor
to prove how much more drastic
life was than death
as down is to up
when you’re sitting in front of a typewriter
wondering if the empty bottle was dark enough
to hold your message of light
like fireflies in your mouth
without swallowing their myth of origin whole.
Total eclipses abridging all the phases of the full moon
in one flyby of a night lyric
like a bird on the wing
crying out in its lonely passage
how sad it is to be so far from home
time doesn’t speak your language anymore.
And your words fall on deaf ears
like junkmail on the moon.
Intensities on the nightshift
poured the gold out of the ore of our pain
as the muses appeared like broken windows
with tragic world views
to give us something to squander
our imaginations on
like stars in the dark
coming up with constellations of our own
to better express what we were not a part of.
Zodiacs for maniacs off the beaten path
of the straight and narrow firewalk
most of us were too enraptured by the night
to stop breaking the taboos of light
like fortune-cookies koans
and severing ostrakons of insight
to stay in the same orbit for long.
And when the cupboards were bare
in the huge cheap apartments of the Glebe
where the uncertain prophets lived
with their dakinis and sybils
in the belly of the whale
before the gypsies were gentrified
by the real estate agents
who liked to slum at our parties
because scum has more heart-felt fun in the flesh
even in a Petrie dish looking for a cure for itself
than someone who owns the earth
without ever having felt the squish of starmud
oozing up like his own biomass between his cloven hoofs
because his clothes are afraid of getting down and dirty;
when there was nothing to eat
and the heat was turned off
we didn’t burn our stamaps
and look for a ride home.
We didn’t gouge the eyes out of a winged horse
with spurs of Spanish silver
when the stars got hard and brittle
and burnt out like lightbulbs
that couldn’t handle the lightning.
We didn’t eat each other in a feeding frenzy.
We were pragmatic divines
with our heads in the stars and our feet on the ground
we went next door and borrowed a cup of sugar
and lived the rest of the week on symbols and signs.
Not better.
Not worse.
Ignorant of the blessing.
Unaware of the curse of those days and nights
and those mystically anaemic sunsets
that fell between the red brick houses
and always reminded me of Eliot’s dying dactylic fall
that pauses and turns around like footsteps in the hall
before some dangerous doorbell
sets off a false alarm
and puts the wick of the lighthouse
that’s sick of taking its own warning out for good.
Necessity should not be abstracted by hungry ghosts
who have no stomach for the fruits of life.
How idiotic to be afraid of making a fool of yourself
when half the magic of living the dream
is being led to real holy water
by a mirage of your own making.
Amputated stumps by the side of truncated roads
mistaking their new branches
for the flying buttresses and crutches
of a cul de sac cathedral
that wouldn’t risk its dead end orthodoxy even for God.
All root.
No blossom.
No fruit.
If you’re not willing
to overcome your convictions
to transcend yourself in a shapeshifting multiverse
to add your moment of excruciation
like the singularity at the bottom of the black hole
in the middle of your seeing
to the human divinity of the transformative whole
I ask you how could galaxies and starfish and sunflowers
have ever come into being
if there wasn’t something curved
about your golden squares?
And aren’t those windows
somebody threw something through
whether from the inside or out
somehow always more believable
than those who haven’t been broken by the moon
to keep from killing the birds
who fall for the shills of sky
that never evolved a wingspan
wider than the beautiful proportions
of the cosmic egg they never made it out of?
Who could imagine then as I do now
the immensities of innocence
behind the blind discipline
of the inspired disobedience
we sacrificed to a life in art
we raised like our own assassin
each after our own fashion
to keep from dying like a lie
in the shadows of lucid taboos
that slept with one eye open
like dragons at the gateless gates
of those with spine
and serpent fire enough
to have all the wrong stuff
for all the right reasons.
Groping our way from poem to poem
painting to painting
album to album
blind star-nosed moles
among the root-fires of the cedars
we wrote so no one could understand us.
We sang so no one could hear us.
We painted so no one could see us.
And we lived in such a way
that no one else could be us
without destroying themselves
like an art that takes
an apprentice years to perfect
and a master a whole lifetime longer to wreck.
Even young I saw through the ruse of originality.
Originality the greatest plagiarist of all.
Takes the low place.
Takes the sea bed.
And let’s everything run down into it
like a million mindstreams all at once.
Originality in an interdependently originated universe
is a measure of how open you’ve been
to the influence of everything
and whether you’ve ever creatively collaborated
with jello telephones and the psychopyrodynamics
of schizophrenic dragons on crack
ferociously obsessed with a paranoid fear of fire.
And there are beautiful things too.
Not just the grotesque and weird
the labyrinths of wormholes in space
people crawl in and out of
hoping in one of these worlds within worlds
to die a maggot and be raised up a butterfly.
Physics is the cruelest science.
Nature the hardest art of all.
But sometimes all you’ve got to do is look up
and the bullets go right through you like stars
arranged into firing squads all shooting blanks
as if no one one of the signs of the zodiac
with their finger on the trigger of the moon
wanted to be cursed by the fact
they killed an albatross with an arrow
fletched with its own flight feathers.
Don’t boil the kid in its mother’s milk.
Or Cygnus in the Via Galactica.
You’ll turn a martyr into a heretic
and you’ll starting writing the first cantos in terza rima
of your Anti-Divina Comedia
and you’ll long for women you can’t have
to delude you onto the rocks
like the daughter of a mermaid raised
in a sacred grove of crucified shipwrecks.
Beautiful things.
Evanescent moments of bliss.
As if you had a secret assignation
with the mystery of the universe
turned into tangible flesh
and you and your six senses and her
were going off to get drunk somewhere
you could let everybody down without regret.
PATRICK WHITE
