WEARY OF THE WORLD TONIGHT

WEARY OF THE WORLD TONIGHT

Weary of the world tonight. Can’t stand the lies.

Some drunk loud-mouth out on the street

wants all the girls to know he’s there,

My noise is bigger than your noise.

Someone playing a guitar badly in a doorway.

A homeless cat cries, lets out a howl

of torment as if its sinews were being keyed

as tight as guitar strings about to snap.

Out of the window that hasn’t said anything yet:

you touch that cat again, slugger,

and I’ll be right down with an axe

to give you a gender change. He looks up

startled. But all bullies are cowards

trying to deny it to themselves

while wearing their sister’s underpants.

The cat makes a quick getaway

through a dark heritage alleyway.

Supercharged like a fire hydrant full of blood

throbbing through my temples, and demons

I haven’t seen in years smiling darkly in the mirrors

my shadow always regretted like left-handed virtues

that got the job done. Demonic compassion,

colder than intelligence, with a deep

poetic sense of of infernal irony

whereas a muse ago in this specious present

I was longing for a small hobby farm

on the dark side of the moon, now

I’m a dragon eating waterlilies down

by the banks of my mindstream

quietly letting go of itself

like an unmoored lifeboat full of emptiness

drifting no where in particular I want to be

except here where I can shed my humanity for awhile

among the living and the dead

who don’t care what I am and am not

as long as I’m not a threat to them.

Darkness, my solace, moon, my longing,

Star, warmer than any fire I’ve ever

sat around to exorcise my ghosts,

you, who’ve danced like my third eye

with the other two still chained to their irises,

the poetic lucidity that mentored me

in the ways of light and taught me

the creative rapture of the fish

that still swam like flashs of insight

to the surface of my oceanic tears,

I don’t know how many light years

either of us have yet to shine or cry over,

but tonight, come down from your unindictable heights

and sit with me like the intimate stranger of a candle

in my eyes, in my soul, in my blood,

be the small flame that trembles in my breath for awhile,

be the sole illumination of my spirit for awhile,

ease my bodymind with the elixir of your radiance

emanating from the inside, and let me

be born again of that fire that burns within me,

purge my starmud of these urns and bones and black dwarfs

that weigh me down like disappointed bells

and feisty mastodons in the tarpits of my heart

that sink deeper the more they struggle to get out.

And I don’t even care if you’re the last firefly

to transcend my cosmic solitude like a wavelength

of the transmorphic singularity at the beginning of time

that woke the valley up with the roar of a dragon

in that elemental morning of mad genius

that’s be the dawn of every moment ever since

in this chiliocosm of energies and forms

flashing out of the mystery of the questions we ask

about the inconceivability of being here to ask them.

No purpose. No meaning. Except the one

we all live vaguely as ourselves like a nebularity

out of which we might precipitate stars

of a different order of shining beyond what we can see.

Sit with me awhile as if we both had the same nature.

And you can look at the world and me through my eyes

and I’ll look at you through yours as if I were seeing you

from the inside out, and there were ashes in my heartwood

even before I began to burn, as in yours,

there were the urns of heavy elements even

before they were born of their own afterlife.

Be that moment within me when time breaks into light

and even the shadows, like sunspots, shine

in their own right, and nothing is disturbed,

not even the silence that is intensified when the fish jump

or a dog is barking hills away at what approaches

out of the dark, and the waterbirds in their onceness

might seem to fly away, but have been here from the start.

Fill my life with the unimaginable splendour

of all those nights you’ve looked down upon the earth

and witnessed the horror and the wildflowers

in the same breath on a cold windowpane in winter

etching the light like an artist with an eye for life

or the praying mantis of a small telescope in the summer

its legs spread like a doe about to drink from her own reflection

or one half of a collapsed bridge to the other side

of everywhere at once. I don’t ask for bliss or enlightenment.

Just show me how you make the shadows luminous again.

Even on a starless night, how to mourn like the eyeless rain

even as it renews the leaves and roots of the constellations

of the wild asters with their violet plinths and yellow suns

burning fiercely as a distant relation of your myriad myths of origin.

Do that for me and I’ll show you how to intensify

the darkness into a diamond chrysalis of transformation

like a deeper mystic bliss in life, enhanced by the ores of pain,

as your light is by the night, or the flying stickshifts

of the dragonflies put the waterlilies in park for the night

as if they’d just got out of a car by the side of an unknown road,

not to find out where they are, but just

to gape up at the stars in the midst of decay

and let the wonder of it all heal me as it always has

by showing me how to make a cradle out of a grave

or the long, slow art of a human out of a wounded heart.

PATRICK WHITE