TEMPERING THE CARBONIZED STEEL OF MY HEART

TEMPERING THE CARBONIZED STEEL OF MY HEART

Tempering the carbonized steel of my heart

in a drainage ditch hissing like a snake pit

to make it impervious to the pins the colour-blind lepidopterists

keep sticking in it as if it were a voodoo doll

for the projections they keep putting on it

like death masks of their own making.

Tired of hauling corpses like dead weight up the mountain

on a fragile lifeline where they hang

like mummified spider trophies on a thread of fate

swaying precariously in the wind while I drive

my heart like a piton into rock to secure a footing.

Why is compassion reserved for the weak

who just want to fall backwards into the abyss

taking the strong with them who endure

greater agonies in climbing than they do in falling off?

Enough is enough. Time to cut bait

and throw the little fish back into the depths

like minnows of the moon bottom-feeding on shadows

though they aspire like the vernal equinox

to a constellation of their own where everybody

can see them shining like the Circlet of the Western Fish in Pisces.

Sick of lighting other people’s fires and blowing on the flames

until their star is blazing, and then having them turn around

and throw acid in my eyes that burns like white phosphorus

through metal, even under water. All my life

I’ve pulled one shipwreck after another into my lifeboat

only to watch them punch holes in it to sink us all

behind my back as I was trying to swim through stone.

Why is that? Why do people cut off the hands of those

who were trying to help them like Che Guevara in Bolivia,

and kiss the asses of all those who are sitting on their faces,

who squat enthroned on the garbage can lids they’re living in?

I don’t make cages of gratitude for the doves and the crows

I’ve opened the door for so they can sing for themselves

when they get out of the egg and see how vast the sky is.

And I’m not a warden of aviaries trying to brain wash the parrots

into saying the same things I do to myself

when there’s no one else to talk to in the dark.

I’m not passing out little executioner’s hoods

to trained falcons perched on my arm like cuckoo clocks

timed to go off like i.e.ds at midnight at the stroke of doom.

Shakespeare might have been happy enough to teach the alphabet

to grammar school boys for seven unknown years,

but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have been happier

writing a comedy of errors of his own. I’m not

drawing any analogies here to my own state of affairs,

but if you ask and I say yes. I will. And I do as if

it were just as important to me to see you learn to address

your own potential as it is crucial I apply myself to mine,

why should anyone try to make me the dupe of my own ideals

just as a little black dwarf of a punk who thought himself

the legend of his own matchbook did yesterday on Gore Street

when he asked me politely, hey mister can you spare a cigarette

and not wanting him to go through nicotine withdrawal

because I remember what it’s like, I gave him a handful,

one to smoke now, and the rest to tuck behind his ears,

and the next thing I hear as he returns to his buddies is

hey, did you see how I hustled that old man over there?

Two days of intense heat at the end of May,

the next time he leans on my generosity, that black fly’s toast.

Just because the lion lies down with the lamb, and the lamb

gets an attitude that abuses the parity of all sentient beings

doesn’t mean the lion’s forgotten it’s got fangs and claws

and knows how to use them, or that the golden fleece

can presume upon the dragon that guards it with its own teeth.

And if I were a sheep in the company of flame-throwers

I’d worry about getting my wooly parts singed if only

in the name of strategic self-interest if I weren’t capable

of anything else higher than the grass I’m grazing on.

I’ve been a sacred clown ghost dancing with Sitting Bull

just before Custer’s last stand, and I’ve been demonically possessed

by the best consiglieres hell has to offer, powerful familiars

with surgical minds as sharp as scalpels, black holes in space

the galaxies plunge into without hesitation as if they were jumping

from paradise into a mystery older than light, and I’ve made

my way out again with my own prophetic skull in my hands,

howling at the moon for the agony of this death in life experience

that might have broken me and my harp like a wishbone

that didn’t have anything to sing about anymore,

but the deep cover singularities that exist in the darkness

of everyone’s heart, whether they’re looking for God particles or not,

and never been so twisted by any space I’ve ever been in

as to practise emotional espionage against my own feelings

or turn back on myself like a solar flare that festers

in its own light like an incestuous ingrown hair.

When Blake wrote that the tigers of wrath are wiser

than the horses of instruction, do you think he said it

with his tongue in his cheek? Or jumping through hoops of fire

in a flea circus with stagefright on tour through the boonies?

If someone offers you a clear, cold drink of water for free

from his own wellspring in a desert sweating mirages,

and you spit it in his face like acid rain on the flowers

after its’ been polluted in your own mouth, what do you think

your chances are of not dying of thirst beside a fresh water lake

when all you had to do was roll over and drink the whole thing

in a single gulp, instead of pissing into the swimming pool

we’re all trying to stay afloat in, as if you were an oilslick

sticking like an eclipse to the waterlilies in the last oasis

you’re ever going to get another chance to frack

before the desert hangs you out to dry on your own bone rack

like a fish fry still trying to fly through the smog

of your own smokehouse like a ghost long after

you’ve been cooked on the pyre of your own matchbook?

PATRICK WHITE