I DON'T WANT TO EMBROIDER THIS STRAITJACKET OF KILLER BEES

I DON’T WANT TO EMBROIDER THIS STRAITJACKET OF KILLER BEES

I don’t want to embroider this straitjacket of killer bees

with threads of blood, honey and toxin. I can’t stand

the agony, but I don’t want to lie nostalgically

about what’s happening to me as it is everyone

to dull the pain with the delusional sugars

of an artificial paradise where all the stars are tinfoil.

Sooner succumb with integrity, than subsist

in the shadow of a lie that buffs the experience

as if churning coke in a hive of angry wildflowers.

Half mad with pain I’ve become so accustomed to,

enculturated by out of the corner of my third eye

as if this were a state of affairs normal as oxygen

for everything that lives, and everything, even the rocks

I’ve been pushing up this hill since I was born

like Sisyphus to build a pyramid out of an avalanche

of meteoric cornerstones that keep getting away from me

like the quicksand and mercury that have tainted my sacred pools,

I don’t want to lose my marbles in this game of Russian roulette.

I don’t want to give up like gravity on any habitable planet

and come unravelled like a lunar cloud of unknowing

or an atmosphere evaporating into the abyss

of a vast space as if I couldn’t hold on to my breath long enough

to bubble up from the bottom again like a pearl diver

with a new moon in his hand and a knife in his teeth

he bites down hard on to ensure its not a counterfeit smile.

Anyone can walk their mile standing up

but who knows how to fall for light years

and never come to a stop within themselves

where their hearts are exposed to the stingers of the stars

that approach them like tattoo artists on a binge.

Whether I’m waning or waxing, or just being taken in again

by a snake oil salesmen promoting a dragon of bliss

with stitches in his eyes, I don’t want to be unhinged

like a gate that thinks it’s a bird without a flight feather.

O I dream, I speculate, I ruminate and scry.

I wonder what it would be like to live in a world

where nothing cries out for anything it’s missing,

or counts its blessings on a rosary of tears and skulls

that know all ninety-nine names of God, but not the one

she likes to go by when she’s slumming with you personally.

It’s far too crucial to me, to the spiritual footing

of this palace of stars I’m trying to raise like a tent in the sky

of an hourglass sharing drinks with itself

like housewells in a mirage inspired by life in the desert.

It’s easy to be kind-hearted to your delusions,

but it’s altogether another mode of upended discipline

to be brutal about enlightenment until your eyes thaw

and your glacial heart begins to move on its own melting

and unnamed fathomless lakes are gouged out of your mindscape

like a new cosmology of seeing that perfectly reflects

your being like stars in a firmament of illuminating flaws.

PATRICK WHITE