WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES YOUR HARD DRIVE

WHEN LIGHTNING FRIES YOUR HARD DRIVE

When lightning fries your hard drive

and you’re trying to weave a flying carpet

out of snakey wavelengths that took

millions of light years before you were born

to get here. So you feel you’re doomed

to live the eternal recurrence of the past.

Don’t forget about me. I’ll be your friend.

I’ll be your all night window. I’ll be

the third eye of your hurricane.

The occult template of your moonrise mirage.

I’ll be the antidote to your travelling nightmare

and we’ll stay up all night, drinking coffee

and smoking chain letter cigarettes

as we watch the moon through the window

painting her toe nails above the bank.

And if you want to hear wise and profound things,

poetically put in response to the dichotomic genius

of your own spiritual dilemmas,

or just let your hair down like Medusa

and kick back at a black mass of lost wisdom,

I’ll be your friend. Your Wizard of Oz.

I’ll liberate cages and cages of morning doves

and arise to the occasion in hot flashes of insight

like fire from the ashes of the Library of Alexandria.

I’ll put my stones and swords away for awhile

and blow on a forge of stars that stay cool

as nocturnal waterlilies blooming along the banks

of the Fall River in early autumn.

I’ll be your Merlin. And I won’t teach you

the one forbidden thing

I don’t want you to know.

You can just look at things. Or not.

Like alla prima mindscapes I’m painting impromptu

in picture-music on the lyrical night air.

But if all you want to do is bring over some poems,

I’ll listen like Seti to the first verifiable signs

of extraterrestrial life. I’ll listen like a hacker

that’s just broken into an encrypted web-site

through a black hole into the next universe.

Your choice. Or we could just sit there

nibbling on the silence like fish

that have surfaced to feed on the moonlight.

But if you’re feeling a little sanity deficient these days,

I’ll talk to you about the extreme chaos

of conditioned consciousness in such aromatic words

you’ll think a thousand hummingbirds

were swarming the towers of your hollyhocks

like ruby-throated endomorphs and opioids

that just found the sweet spot on your neural receptors.

And by the end of my mystic lucubrations, believe me,

you won’t be drinking black cool aid in Jonestown

or stand there frozen in time, your knees

buckled like Stonehenge trembling

like a calendar girl before a total eclipse

at the winter solstice you don’t think you’re ever

going to get over like a beginning

that just can’t get past itself.

I’ll paint you naked and blue

firewalking on stars like a Pictish tattoo.

We’ll take a moonboat out for a test run

and I can be the sail and the rudder

and you can be the wheel of the zodiac

and we’ll sail around omnidirectionally

among enlightened islands in the mindstream

and we won’t run aground on the reefs of syntax

like a dead language looking for a loveletter from anyone.

And I’ll whisper things you should have heard

in the logic of metaphoric dream grammars

long before the light left, like a Druid

in an old growth forest mentoring a night bird.

And when lightning fries your hard drive

like an ancient oak in July on a Thursday

I’ll be your friend. I’ll make all those

taboos and curses pinned to your skin

like eclipses in a scenic calendar

fall away like leaves

Or we could stay where we are and shine

in the depths of our own bioluminescence

like the new moons of two black pearls

that would rather keep their prophecies to themselves.

PATRICK WHITE