ADOLESCENT BRIDAL SPIDERS WEBBING THE DOORWAY

ADOLESCENT BRIDAL SPIDERS WEBBING THE DOORWAY

Adolescent bridal spiders webbing the doorway

with laughter and tumescent sex,

waiting for the hilarious rain.

Waitresses with overly bleached hair

and melting chocolate roots. Young men in wife-beaters

orbiting their pheromones like shepherd moons.

The air is a Venus fly trap saturated

with the violet wavelengths of an unexpurgated murder.

Sheet lightning rooting in the nervous system

of teenagers dogpaddling in the heat without a lifeboat

between the iodine logo of the antiseptic bank

and the unpainted stairs with their garish fire-doors

that ascend into hell like most of the local ghettoes

dancing with their fans to cool off,

or drinking beer in the parking lots,

or passing spliffs to potted plants on the fire-escapes.

Exorbitant flesh sticky with sweat and deodorant,

And the heritage streetlamps haloed

in a frenzy of mesmerized insects

like comets falling into the epiphanous sun at midnight.

Mosquitoes pumping their blood thinners

like punctuation into a periodic sentence.

And I observe all this trying to extinguish myself

like a cigarette butt in the ashtray of a full moon

trying to make a meteoric impact on the unknown

to see if anyone else is home, but me, and these exiles outside.

Stars in the window, but my eyes are grimy with traffic.

The clarity’s smudged. The heat grows a cataract

over my third eye like a low-hanging homogenous cloud,

a curd of the moon, as I keep looping back on myself

like the fervour of a solar flare that can’t escape gravity.

There are sunspots on my radiance. My meditation’s not perfect.

There are the crumbs of stale dreams in the corners of its eyes.

My diamonds are evaporating in a blast furnace

and the picture music’s gagging my voice with paint rags.

But here and there, in little pools of cyanobacteria,

love bubbles up slowly like thin silver necklaces

forged in the fathomless depths of this primordial soup.

Intense heat. Unusual sprouts. As they say in Zen.

Dawn on the feathers of the dinosaurs

couldn’t help but make them sing as well

even when my starmud’s cracked like a prophetic skull

in the dry creekbed of a dust bowl

where the toads have been hibernating

for the last seven years, and the scorpions burnt to a crisp,

add a little love to the mix, and even a blackhole

will flower like a galaxy in the cool bliss

of listening to its cosmic background radiation sing

like an ancient nightbird to its ageless longings.

PATRICK WHITE