NOT INTERESTED IN THE BRAND NAME OF YOUR AUDIENCE

NOT INTERESTED IN THE BRAND NAME OF YOUR AUDIENCE

Not interested in the brand name of your audience.

Poetry makes its own up on the go, resonates

with the stars and the fireflies, mysteriously

marauds its own sacred shrines for the relics

of holy metaphors that can be melted down

into new sensibilities. And you, when you lose

your faith in your herbs ability to heal,

is it you that lets the medicine down,

the exhausted wavelength of an imploding star,

or is your magic just not strong enough anymore

to know when to keep its mouth shut, its grammar

like the secret name of a god, not a public convention.

It’s irrelevant to me if you blood your abstractions,

mythic deflation stabbing them through the heart

to keep it from pumping the colour out of the rose

and hanging them upside down over a bathtub.

Or that your insecticidal severances have been

so cleanly disposed of like the wings of butterflies

in the mandibles of seriatim ants. The reek

of formic acid. And it’s hard not to notice

that your gypsy nettles don’t dance to music.

You’ve got your head stuck up the eye of the needle again.

Must cost you a fortune in locksmiths.

And why, when you make a confession

of all your sins of omission, does it always sound

like you’re ratting someone out? Or you’ve got

a deathmask on you’re always threatening to take off

like a crab carapace in a tidal pool with a detached claw

trying to intimate the great sea of awareness beyond

that’s never heard of you, into making waves

even a shore-hugger buried in a puddle could handle?

You can make a cult of your doubt and cynicism,

snakes on the ladders and stairwells of your pretensions,

but I’m not going to be initiated into it. Just because

I was born in a sewer doesn’t mean I bathed in it

every time it rained. A metaphor is a metaphor

that’s looking for something to compare itself to

and picture-music isn’t a drum roll at the unveiling

of a new logo for the hysterically futile fans

of your dysfunctional aspirations to make a big splash.

As if the pond were never big enough for the frog.

Your words don’t touch my heart, change my life,

make a serious attempt on my life, derange me,

do anything to me, just lie there

so disconnected from my spinal cord

they’re clear cut yarrow sticks that have never heard

of the Book of Changes. Lean-tos and collapsed tents

in the shadows of Stone Henge. No moon. No Taj Mahal.

You’re an architect of flowers, but you don’t come

with any instructions for assembly. Or even a bag of tools

to flint knap your costume jewellery into arrowheads,

you could always hurl at a turtle on the run, since

it’s obvious there’s nothing wildly alive in the woods

that has anything to fear from a poet who can’t handle a bow

anymore than he can a lyre strung from his own gut.

No urgency in your work. No necessity, risk, danger.

Nothing lethal in the windowsill jungles you explore.

Nothing driving you like the inconsolable dead

into the unmarked grave of a black hole

that never bottoms out like a death in life experience

giving birth to a whole new universe of not two

every morning you wake up in it grateful for the chance

to teach your club-footed absurdity to dance with the bones

of distinguished skeletons who are experts

at knowing how to necro-romanticize the abyss.

When words talk to words about words

it’s not because imagination has run out of poets

who aren’t unsayable or self-destructive enough

to sacrifice their voices bleeding for the unattainable

so that every poem is history written by the losers,

it’s because there’s no visionary flash back

when you drown in your own reflection

in a narcissistic labyrinth of mirrors. No crash and burn

in your elegaic encounters with what you’re missing.

Your absence doesn’t leave a mark on the world

as you seek corporate applause for your trained individualism

tweaking your neuronic synapses with the reflexes

of early amphibians, one foot on shore, one in the boat

just to play it safe, a wishbone bridging both mediums

like a witching wand twitching over a watershed

with a dislocated pelvis that makes you dance with a limp

like Giovanni’s frog jumping between electrodes,

or as I remember, growing up, little girls playing hopscotch

on a sidewalk chalked with the outlines of corpses

with photo ops of the brand names on their toe tags.

PATRICK WHITE