BLAND PERFIDY, YOU WILL NOT MASTER ME

BLAND PERFIDY, YOU WILL NOT MASTER ME

Bland perfidy, you will not master me. I shall

cultify my resentment into a an insurrection of one

and feed you like keys to the fireflies in the zoo.

And the black lions savage you like a fake rose of blood.

I shall write about the colours of the flowers you abused.

The lethal spreading of your goodness like manure

over a garden that hasn’t bloomed since childhood.

The way you’ve gagged the mouth of the sun

with toxic clouds that don’t remind you of anything.

Distractive lie, polluted moonlight, I shall

turn the oranges on your breakfast table

you write about in grisaille, into the black dwarfs

of imploding stars, ambush your newsreels

and sword dance on your grave in a wreath

of stinging nettles just to hear you howl once

like a real poet when I rip the stitches out of your heart.

How will you angle your toes like a misstep in a dance

when you hear the harpsichord of shattering glass

as I throw the moon through your window

and watch it bleed like a beer bottle in a street fight?

Nuclear winter in a wasteland, the dawn

of a new species of fire with poetry in its glands.

A violet wind will sweep you like mirages off the sidewalk

into the dunes of the shad flies of North Bay,

and even the thieves who’ve come to melt

your gold death mask down into nose rings

won’t bother to exhume your pyramid

like a publishing house not worth breaking into.

By the immutable coincidence of the contradictories

because you did not breathe life into the drowning

and fed your mouth in the mirror before you

even heard the child-faced birds dying in the trees outside,

I shall use your skull as a doorstop in a hurricane

to keep the backdoor open to the weatherfronts of the furies

that are mustering under your windowsill,

black holes without an event horizon.

And the unapproachable night air we let out

of your mythically inflated tires will be saturated

with the oracular apostasies of hostile prophecies,

and your proverbial drop out and crawl all the way back

into your anthology of nepotistic verdicts

that are afraid to tell the judge what they really think.

I see how you slaughter the playful intensities of life

by throwing bad meat down the wells of the muses

and the effluvia of your poems contagious as radioactivity

slyly insinuating yourself into the drinking water.

The spider I wear like an eye patch on my third eye

wants to get you out of the way of the sun

like the slag and cinders of orbiting dirt

you kick in everyone’s face like a meteor shower

that fizzled out even before it took the plunge.

Someone’s got to tell you like a warning from your shrink

you’ve got the emotional wingspan of a scenic calender

for places to be when you’re reading out west

they give away for free in a real estate office.

I want to chew on a wad of your heart to see

if its’ really gum or not, and if it is

I’ll cut it out of my hair with the same scissors

you use to clip and paste the spinal cords of your poems.

I want to stick C-4 to your incisors

as if I were blowing up a bridge in preoccupied Toronto

and see if anything explosive might come out of your mouth.

Fire-swallower in a circus morgue, hic sunt dracones,

snakes with wings, flame-throwing wiverns

angered by the desecration of their shrines

and fangs like flowering scalpels rooted in their jaws.

Gratuitous infirmity. Termites in the foundation.

Too much straw in the haystack to go looking for

your needle of identity pointing true north

to a vast pristine land of squalor and drugs.

The quicksand cornerstones of your unzippered fixes.

Moonrise and sunset on the blacklists of your eyelids.

I should compile a hive of killer bees

and when I’m talking to you without a grant

charge admission to the Eleusinian Mysteries

of how to write without a camera or a mirror,

and start a buzz that would leave you

with nothing unmagnanimous to say

about the dangers of pouring curdled honey

into a wound as raw and vicious as you are dull.

PATRICK WHITE