I CIRCUMNAVIGATED MY EYES

I CIRCUMNAVIGATED MY EYES

I circumnavigated my eyes

to wash these ashen rags of grief off

like the torn sails of the Magellanic Clouds.

I knew how deeply I was lost

when I set my starmaps afire

because they got in the way of the shining,

to give them a first hand experience

of lighting things up for themselves

like arsonists playing with draconian desire.

Took me years to get the last shadow

of your misdirected spearhead out of my heart,

make white noise out of the snarling chainsaw

that accompanied you like a seeing-eye dog.

At first the intensity of the pain

clued me forensically into thinking

the sheer immensity of your crime of passion,

the number of times you stabbed me through the heart

meant you loved me more than you cared to let on

but then I noticed all your knives were smiling

like scalpels that had just blooded the moon in my eyes

and I could see the savage delight

you took in my Orphic dismemberment

like an artist in a surgical theatre of vivisected hearts.

Incisions I’ll remember for the rest of my life

like paper cuts from a black belt in loveletters.

I forgave what I could and deliberately

misunderstood the rest to let you pass

without being noticed by the demonic lighthouses

that kept watch along the coast like candles

at a black mass for a continental shift in perspective.

I think I was still half in love with you

when I was assessing the drift of our separation

in light years, and the grief, at times, when it didn’t seem

potentially lethal, was almost suicidally beautiful,

but as my afterlives dragged on like retrogressive epicycles,

as you did when you pulled the stars out by their roots,

I let the garden return to the wild

and laid out a defensive position of black holes

the dead who once bloomed here

never need worry about being exhumed from.

And I remember standing on the trajectory of a bridge

throwing the bones of my body parts off

like the pages of a calendar scored by a sword

in a cutting edge experiment with oviparous clones

born like mystic comas from spiritual replications

of the same cosmic egg you could never break out of

even after I defused myself like the supernova

of an unexploded terrorist who was once wired to you

like the memory of an old risk that wasn’t worth the cause

or the collateral damage it would have done

to the startled innocence of the bystanding stars,

not to mention the traumatic disheartening of the sun

in having to realign its shining with midnight

like a firefly in a dream on a flowerless, terminal ward.

You were the anti-enlightenment that occluded my identity

as if I’d never been there in the first place,

and that would have been fine, I would have

happily lived for you as a better lost cause

than the one I was waging like an unholy war of one.

I would have burned in my inexhaustible solitude

like a discipline of devotion refining my passion for you

into a sword worth falling upon in the name of your integrity.

It would have been a privilege, a tribute, a blessing

to have had you there to give it all up to,

knowing you can never lose what you freely give away,

to get behind your dream like a demonically fulfilled familiar.

Capo, and consigliere, but the power went to your ego,

forgetting that arrogance makes you unguardedly stupid

and stupid will get you killed faster than evil,

but you didn’t need my advice to assist you with that.

Not to be. That’s the last plea of exoneration

from people who don’t know the damage

they’ve done to each other without even trying to.

The inert delusions of neon gas that highlights

the stations of the heart where we stopped

along the way for a garish night

of PyschoBabylonic heartbreak gone berserk

and solar flares ionized the gun-metal, electrical fragrance

of flowers going supernova in space as if

they were ripping the veils and spiderwebs off

the gutter wisdom of the upper atmosphere gone slumming.

Even if I didn’t need to, from playful firefly

to dragon sage with dusky yellow blood,

I would have transmogrified myself for you,

an oracular shapeshifter delighted to accommodate

the most delicate lineaments of protozoic desire

to keep you from bottoming out like the Burgess Shale

into a motile labyrinth of genetic cul de sacs

waiting for your traffic jam to turn green again.

Not to be. The gavel of whose will?

The officious seal of whose blood?

Better to be loved than righteous, feast the heart

among friends and lovers rather than

nibble on the bitter weeds of your isolated sanctimony.

You were always trying to salvage

perfection from its flaws, dehumanize it somehow

into nanodiamonds you wanted to genetically replicate.

Pollen of crystal flowers in a menagerie of bees

that turned their hive into a kiln of glass honey

that shattered like tears at your feet when you wept.

Who isn’t an approximation of the person

they hoped to achieve, who isn’t the fraud

of their own accomplishment, more disbelieving

in themselves than those who applaud with envy

the strawdog that gets thrown on the fire

after it’s served a ritual purpose no one

quite understands? Hard to find a rose in the wild

that isn’t supple and pudgy, blighted and marred,

soiled by life, armed and scarred, dust on its leaves.

You wanted to excise the imperfections

as if you were editing my emotional life.

I was always the diamond in the rough

you were going to send like a foolish jewel

to a multi-faceted finishing school

where they scrubbed your ancestry out of you

like bituminous coal off your immaculate, adamantine record.

Trouble is when you let that happen

you’re not rooted in life anymore,

you scrape the poetry of living

from out under the moon’s fingernails.

And there’s no way you can plough a mirror

and throw a seed in it and expect it to sprout

however you exalt and weep over it.

Life may be a black hole,

but it’s not an infertile ditch

of mercury trying to pass

for a thread of silver in the moonlight

through the eye of a needle wider than the Hubble

popping bubbles like worlds in the multiverse.

I offered you dragons, but you wanted me to be

a hyena with great table manners whenever

we were eating the leftovers of a lion

at your mother’s place, and I was always

the savage you picked on to say grace

as if the words would somehow burn in my mouth.

And I suppose I could have been seated

at the appropriate place at the table below the salt

and not eaten before those you considered alpha dogs did,

and torn my share of meat from the spoils

of the psychological leg-hold traps set for everyone,

and honed my night vision to take down

an albino baby rhino on a National Geographic documentary

to reveal that scavengers know how to hunt on the sly

nocturnally. Maybe you would have seen me

in a different light, maybe it would have become

easier in time to become what you had in mind for me

but I can shift hearts and minds as easily as forms

and when I assumed I was you for a moment

I could see, after the hyena, you had me

lined up like a chimpanzee in a cage

with needles taped to my shaved head

as I expired in my solitude like visiting hours

with pain the only nurse on the night shift

working over time in the lab of a perfumery

to make the abattoir you made of the roses

I used to bring you, smell more like blood than flowers.

And that’s when my sense of empathy

began to grow eyelids so I could turn it off at night

to identify with the dream figures

that didn’t wake up with me when I did

and I began to evolve an affectionate sensitivity

to the exquisite features of compassion inherent

in painting life masks on the emptiness

to amuse my own inconceivable sensibilities.

PATRICK WHITE