THE BLACK ANGEL

THE BLACK ANGEL

The black angel in my blood tells me it’s time to die, go, disappear

from myself into the next loveless oblivion

like rainwater down a snake’s hole. The black angel

in my heart laughs and reminds me how worthless I am

to any of these who keep dying like rivers in a desert

everytime I look to see if there’s anything real to drink

behind the mirage of their smiles. Look how they all salt their own gardens,

killing anything green that had a chance to grow

with their incessant no no no to anything

that isn’t a straitjacket they ripped off one of their mental dolls. My heart

says die, my heart, too hurt to cry on any more fires, says die

and be done with all these shifting sands and lies

that look like life but turn out to be nothing more than nothing more,

black match heads trying to bloom in the dark, extinct flowers

cut off at the root of being by their own refusal to open.

No is their own rejection; no is the mirror returning their own reflection

like a passport at a border to a face that isn’t enough

to be admitted in, to cross the threshold, to enter, flowing,

the sea. And yet they all say they want to know, want to be

more than the adolescent outside the dollar-store, peering

penniless through the window, over

the monkey-bars of a baby buggy. My God, how they cheep in their shells

at the chance of any real sky outside the cramped confines

of their postered walls. But show up like a crack,

show up looking anything like liberation and growth,

and everyone chickens back into the coop, wingless and terrified

in the shadow of the hawk high overhead

riding the wind for the joy of it. Frauds and imposters,

day-old dainties in a bakery-window singing lead

in a choir of flies. And the demons within me scoff,

and the black angel comes forward out of the miscarried dream,

carrying the dead child that gave its life to believe in them

and asks me if I’ve had enough of their toxic ordinariness,

their insistent tainting of the secret wells it took so long

to divine on the moon with a broken water-wand. Idiot children

peering out of the shattered windows of an abandoned orphanage

like tiny eyeless idols waiting the return of a huge blind god

that can’t see to sign their creation. And it isn’t judgment, it isn’t

any lack of compassion or understanding

that wants to thaw their glass tears and heal

the home-made tattoos that puncture their hearts

with dirty needles of ink, it isn’t feeling above or beyond them

that turns the life-boat into a floating hearse crammed with moaning ghosts;

it’s watching them look for salvation among the sharks

that devour them one by one

in a frenzied graveyard of fins. Tonight, so alone, so dispirited, so

uselessly empty, a suicidal clown in a tentful of humorless junkies,

I weep into my own hands like a man

trying to wash off his own face in the acids of a private hell so complete

death is the only rumour of a messiah

these black winds whisper in the ashes

of everything I wanted to be. What’s the use of love, what’s

the good that comes of wasting a lifetime learning to care,

learning to give and killing yourself off to give more,

giving away your eyes, your heart, soul, hands, blood, time, talent,

until exhausted and immaculately impoverished

you don’t know what you’ve got left to give

when everyone’s smearing lipstick on their rectums

and sewing their mouths shut

so nothing real or true gets said

when they tell you how much they appreciate

the generosity of your death

and ask for more before you’re buried in their bull.

And I listen and I listen and I listen with my ears and mind and heart

until their small doomed stars are splinters of glass in my own eyes,

their pain mine, their healing mine, their fate my own

until the dagger’s buried in the wound of my own being so deeply

I alone am left to the business of dying over and over again

in this solitude of regenerative hell

where to ask for a drop of blood in return, a touch, a smile, a last embrace,

one word of genuine love

to ease the fear of the passing

is to be refused with honey and cunning, is to learn, bitterly

that all you gave as a gift

is taken in theft

and fenced in the seedy pawnshops of their pedestrian greed.

Look, there’s my heart in a greasy window, over-priced, almost

the cost of a new one with a guarantee, and there

by the chipped plaster of a mantlepiece wolf

howling at a nicotine moon, the soul

I squandered like a sudden flashflood

on a dry creekbed that said it was going nowhere.

PATRICK WHITE