GET THESE GOLDEN NETS, THESE CHAINS, OFF ME

GET THESE GOLDEN NETS, THESE CHAINS, OFF ME

Get these golden nets, these chains, off me,

these dreamcatchers, cobwebs, suspension bridges

swaying like sticky spinal cords across the shoreless abyss.

I’m smothering under these pillows of sunset

you keep pushing in my face to soften

the impact of my meteoric heart

trying to induce a new species

out of my own extinction

that might accord me a retroactive purpose

for having lived like a root

in the dirt of their flowering.

More compassion spent on lies

than truths, the sun might come up

in the morning and pour honey

all over its head like bees in the dawn,

but it isn’t the same for active volcanoes.

Half the world waiting to receive

what the other half wants to take from them,

via positiva, via negativa, sure

all roads lead to Rome eventually

like most rivers make the sea

but haven’t you noticed the mystic path

is cobbled like a calendar with the lunar skulls

of birds and gurus all along the way

who mistook the windows of opportunity

in their third eye, for the real sky up ahead?

I know you believe time heals all things,

and day after day, this implacable pace

can be construed as some kind of advance,

and even the dust on the windowsill

will be redeemed as the pollen of windblown stars,

if someone would only give love a fighting chance.

May it be so, sweet one, but life isn’t

the agenda of the blossoms, it’s in

the corporate boardrooms of the roots

trying to put a good spin on death

like the propaganda of decay. But even

castigation has lost its joy in life

and the sages that might have saved us

yesterday, are muttering like madmen to themselves

in murderous alleys that end

in cul de sacs of laughing children

without any idea of how absurd

it really all is for them as well as the homeless

they stab in the back in their sleep

for ratting life out like the black plague of their dreams.

Even if I had no legs, I wouldn’t want to spend

the twenty or less autumns and springs of life

I have left, if that, walking on water with golden crutches

like the principles of the dilemma I stand on,

I stole like oars from a lifeboat on a shipwreck

that had no more use for hope. I don’t

want to cook the books of my cosmic home recipes

and make a diet a messianic way of life

that greets the moneylenders at the door of the temple

and feeds the people the tongues of doves.

I was born into life raw as a new wound.

The same insights that touched your eyes like fireflies

were runically striated across mine

by surgical glaciers without any anaesthetic.

A street gang flashing its smile

like an iconic switchblade of moonlight

trying to leave its mark on life like scar tissue.

I’ve seen diamonds on the fingers of adamantine saints

turn back into infernal coal bins of ungratified desire

as soon as someone blew the candles out like photo-ops.

I’m wary of good people these days.

I’ve mythically inflated the illusion of my isolation

up into a rogue planet of habitable solitude

where nothing’s ever wrong or right

but endlessly intriguing in an interstitial kind of way

like a fish that swam out of the sea

or a bird that flew out of the sky

to adapt myself to the inchoate spaciousness

of a new medium of transformational events.

I’ve jumped the synaptic gap

between the earth and the heavens,

like the sound of one hand clapping

at its own performance, the sonic boom

that ruptures the eardrum of the sky

like a clown shot out of a cannon

without a safety net to disqualify the risk.

Whether I’m Zen duelling in the snake pit of the Id,

or studying the logic of the lightning

in the mirrors of prima donnas putting on their make-up,

to let the trees in the open fields know

where it’s going to strike their nervous systems next,

I don’t cling to things like a bat in the burdock

or a monk enduring the earthly ordeals

of his immaculate detachment like spiritual velcro.

I live in a world without handles, where the atoms

free associate into elements of their own choosing

and base metal can as easily be seen

as the grey dawn of gold, rather than

the long, hard discipline of learning how to be

self-destructive creatively and calling it a sacrifice

to the new moon on the altars of occult learning.

I don’t sail my poems down river like

paper-mache swans in a labyrinth of locks

trying to make their way gracefully to the sea

without waiting for a gate to swing open

like a crane on a backwater loading dock.

I shed them like the blossoms of the moon on a lake.

I can’t dance to engineered versions of this lunar ballet

that can’t walk on water without

feeling vertiginously out of its depths

whenever the road leads through a black hole

like the easiest way around the mountain of the world.

Slavic enough to take the whole burden

of the integrity of pain upon myself

as one of the eventualities of suffering

it’s as crucial to live through as it is not to,

I still reserve the right to shake my fist at the sky

like an extra gang railroad lineman

at four every afternoon before I fling a shovel

like an inkwell at the decapitated sun,

all the fruits of my labour you shall know me by

surrealistically Sisyphean as the tracks I’m laying

keep on decoupling my thought trains in the wilderness

as if this were as good a place as any to jump off.

PATRICK WHITE