PAID THE RENT

PAID THE RENT

Paid the rent. Roof over my head for another month.

Car bills coming up, and contraband cigarettes;

got to feed myself, provide what is needed,

address myself to elemental concerns,

keep my body clean, my clothes, the house, the sheets,

my wits about me on the streets,

and my heart wary of vagrant urgencies

that take a bride like an ambulance to an emergency

just for the ride, and ends up dedicating themselves like a bloodbank

to a wound that isn’t in the book

and won’t be healed,

though I apply the moon like a poultice,

like a scar with a dark side that’s always concealed.

Even who I thought I was,

more life behind me than ahead,

no more than a passing flaw of feeling,

gusts of birds in the groves of a sacred delirium

where the fools make fun of the saints

and it takes ages to understand

why the blood writes and paints

what the spirit sees of a world

that stains the grace of its mystic absurdity

by forgetting how to play with God, the faceless one.

And things are done that rot like bells

and torture and war and rape and winning sells

peanuts in the Colosseum

and no one knows who I am

because they’re clinging like frost

to their own faces

in dangerously intimate places.

And that’s okay; that’s okay too

because I’m just an empty lifeboat passing through

the eye of a dream that won’t wake anybody up,

just another prophetic crack in the cup

that proposes a toast to its host like a grail

as we fail and fail and fail our way through life

all the way to the top of our decline

like a parachute tangled in a powerline

that didn’t know how to jump toward paradise.

And I wouldn’t advise anyone giving or taking advice,

but I will go out and encompass the day like an accident

that didn’t happen to me,

and there will be moments like mini-blackholes

that will grain my image into the ferocious clarity

of a face that bends space like a lens

to cloak the offence of my rarity

among these others who are less

than mysteriously me.

And I will confess in lonely parking lots

that are abused like hookers

that life is a shabby affair with a disaffected angel

with one wing in and one wing out

of a censored bed on a movie-set

that can’t disarm the camera.

But why defame the rehearsal

if life goes on tour without you,

tired of the timing of the same old lines

and reruns of a mind that was never released?

How many suns, how many moons,

how many shadows cast by Venus ago

was the air sweet, and the light elated

by what it shone down upon

that grew eyes to turn the shining into seeing,

and revelled inconceivably in being

with nothing amiss in the mirrors of bliss

that had never been stained

by a suicide note in smudge-proof lipstick

before it opened a vein with a flick of the moon

to let its blood off the leash like a kiss

with a passion for going all the way?

I doubt if there’s ever been such a day,

but it will do me no good

to widow away the grief

by treating belief to a candle or two

that don’t cast the same shadows I do

when I’m trying to make sense of death

with ghosts on my breath,

and gates in my heart that gape at the fact

that none of us are ever coming back

to expose the disparity

between the living and the dead.

And the day is proving horrible

and the little light I hoped

to lamp my way along with

is caught by the wing like a star in a spiderweb

and I’m doing everything right

according to the detective in me

but I’m beginning to suspect a clause in my DNA

has defected like an eye through a loophole in felicity

and there’s no way left that even I can be me

and endure this agony that waterboards

everything I have to say

about all the things I haven’t done

and worse, much worse, to come, to unconfess

when I’m indicted like reasonable junkmail

on the threshold of the wrong address

that picks me out of the line-up like a refugee

even though the sun pulled an eclipse over its head

and rendered its blazing blind to rob the dead

who lie like bad credit in wounded wallets

trying to make the downpayment on an afterlife.

And who knows? Maybe there’s an afterlaugh as well

peached and primed with salt and slime for the cynics.

Or maybe I should spend the last twenty years of my life,

if there’s that much left of myself to pass on,

surfing women like channels to find one I’m on.

Or if all is delusion, absurdity, and despair

and only those too fearful not to, care,

and the air is noxious and the water obscene

and the earth too bilious to bear,

and meaning only the thorn of the facts

and the beauty of the wounded rose is treated

like just another heart attack,

and powerful leaders are seated on skulls

throwing leftovers like people behind them to gulls

hovering in the widening wake of their sterns

as the national garbage barge drifts rudderless downriver

like a corpse in the Ganges

snatched like laundry from the line

by sacred crocodiles,

why shouldn’t I dispose of myself like surgical waste

or crush cigarettes into my arm in self-disgust

until I am all sunspots and craters on the moon

or master all the tongues of PsychoBabylon

slashing drastic alphabets with cuneiform razors

into the moist, starmud tablets of my flesh

like the tight mouths of new moons

unspooling the same old shit.

Sometimes I think I must be out of it

to still be here, to hang on, not to let go,

like those autumn leaves that cling all winter

like gnostic gospels in the snow

to the only tree they know.

Time isn’t an abstract concept

when it’s happening to your face

and space is closing up behind you like holy water

that washes you off like a bloodstain

and heals itself

by vetting your name to forget you

like an unwelcome tenant at an old address.

And the day is a Nazi firehydrant on standby

in a blizzard of ashes from the chimneys of Auschwitz,

and even the fires in the mouths of the lion furnaces

are disgraced by the taste of the human deformity

that waters its womb with glass

and bubbles with eyes that are blown and cast

like fanatical jewels through storefront windows

that shatter like icestorm chandliers

and scapegoat constellations,

or the only eye-witness to a murder of mirrors,

or nations.

Who lacks so much light at noon

that they withdraw like black holes

into the bloodlines of their shadows to hate

everything their glory can’t illuminate?

The candle in the lamp can’t soil the eye

and the sun burns all day without soot

and the flowers may keep

the bees like golden chimneysweeps,

and creosote turn to honey in the mouth of the hive,

but genocide vents like money and no one is left alive.

And of this infectious darkness is the day composed

and my spirit in the background

nothing but the universal hiss

of the deaths of millions, and hardly a tear,

except for the pathetic mercy of thoughts

that come down one by one like blunt windows

and the eyelids of the quicker guillotines

that couldn’t stand to look at the horror

of what a species with a view can do to advance pain.

And there are skulls like sterile moons among the vegetables

that blight the food the starving grow to feed me

and atrocities in the bank that certify my cheque

and wash the blood off with diamonds

that shine with the lustre of rain

in the gutters of pain.

And it occurs to me in a shopping mall

in a flurry of wayward consumers

that there’s always a quota

of people somewhere in the world

who must labour and live and give and die like aphids

for every ant here chatting up the cashier like yogurt.

But those are not cherries in your cheese, my friend,

they’re body parts in death carts, crushed hearts

in the makeshift morgue of your pantry.

And the day takes an evil, surrealistic twist

like asphalt and licorice and the odour of snakes

and I don’t have what it takes

to pull up stakes

and find a new grave for the vampire

and every princess I meet has already been kissed

and every rib of the child I used to be

is the rung of a burning ladder

that hasn’t grown enough to rescue me.

And I’d put my hand on the news and swear

I’m not the man in the videocam nightmare

in the jackpot airport

with the backpack on,

tweaking his pixels with lightning

to avenge the death of his mirrors,

but there’s no end, no end, no end

to this labyrinth of bull-leaping shadows

that threads me like blood through the eye of the needle

to mend what I didn’t tear

like this day’s black sail

that spiders across the web lines of my horizons

at a slip of a stitch in time

to poison my voice with moonlight and lime.

And it isn’t as if I haven’t tried to cool

these feverish jewels of seeing

in the eyes of the dragon sages

and worn out my share of straitjackets

and picked the psychological lice

out of my golden fleece on the funny farm

as if I were panning for mountains in the mindstream,

looking for the dicey cornerstones of the lost worlds

that have slipped from my shoulders like an avalanche

or the stools I’ve kicked out from under me

when I found a good branch

to upstage the star of the posse

like the understudy of a dying art

that knows its part, and hangs on every line.

PATRICK WHITE