SCORCHED FUTURES

SCORCHED FUTURES

Scorched futures adjourn the skull’s medley of escapes

when hell tunes the vibrant spinal cord

to one translucent black note. I don’t expect

to be believed by any but the insane inoculants of the hour.

Call it what you will, evil, error, sin, ignorance or ego; it wears

a planet of masks and a great white smile

to get around like blood amongst itself; sometimes barely visible wolves,

often, the cracked cup of the one you love

lying face-down like a wilderness, dead at the table,

blue copper sulphate slipping silently from the corners of the mouth

like a serpent or a doctor leaving a doomed house.

These days you can look through a library of mirrors

for uncontaminated eyes and see nothing for years

but an eerie oatmeal normality that belies

the pain on the shadow of the face

condemned to terminal row for life, asking silently

to be delivered from itself like a posthumous letter of regret.

Now the wounds are deeper than the deaths,

great cosmic slashes that plunder the swollen womb of its birth-stars

and render the mother still-born and dark. Death

knocks and a greater terror opens the door.

And this foolishness hasn’t got a name, a characteristic.

There is no way to distinguish the sneer from the smile.

Call it your life but you don’t know what it is

when the darkening hills open their mouths like fish

and swallow the sun, the moon, the stars. Shadows written

on pages of light, and you, an illiterate.

The river dreams it has no banks; space finally gets the point

and a million unreal worlds fall like leaves

from an imaginary tree full of the moments

of birds, a clock of birds, each an hour and an aeon, over

before they begin. Late for your birth and too early for death,

you make a life to pass the time; you draw your face

upon the waters of illusion with your finger; the face lingers

and the waters keep moving. Somehow you feel

left out, left behind, abandoned by the flowing.

Eventually you drown in your own face to ease

the irresistible current of your own longing to belong.

Is this illumination, arrival, or suicide?

Maybe the sea will receive you like a word

it whispered into its own ear; maybe this is your afterlife

and you’re too enamoured of the dream

to wake up in paradise. Or maybe this is the clearing of the throat

we call hell and all the songs are broken, all the wings are ruined,

fractured guitars, idiot lighthouses stammering to the storm.

Goat-junk, even the holiest. And now there is this emptiness left,

this debtor-zero that goes from door to door

asking if anyone in the house owes it anything,

its eyes, two begging bowls, its heart, a panicked furnace

eating lethal salads of incriminating Nazi documents,

the bitter herbs of withered victory gardens.

You’re trying to finance a movie of your fingerprints; you’re

lost and yet you’re standing at the crossroads like a street sign,

your emotional life, a traffic-light

in a cemetery where even the ghosts can’t give you any direction.

So what are you now; what address would you offer the stars

that have pulled you over for delirious living?

Everything, a huge lie, corrective vision, a lifeboat full of sharks.

That’s when love blooms like a white star on a dead branch of the night

and too desperate to obey, you bite into

the black apple of your own heart, trying to stir

your dispirited cauldrons of boiling vinegar

into the golden foil of joyous ciders. Don’t you see;

this time around

it’s the star that goes looking for the magi; it’s

the garden that gives names to Adam and Eve; it’s

the sinner that saves the messiah.

PATRICK WHITE