BY THE LIGHT I HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO GO BY

BY THE LIGHT I HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO GO BY

By the light I have been given to go by,

I can see how homeless the journey truly is.

How provisional the shrines along the way like milestones

we stop to paint like the inside of our skulls

or the caves we first dwelled in with our dead

buried under fire and the numinosity of our picture music

impregnating the womb walls of a space made sacred by fear.

The darkness bears my secrets, and in the torchlight,

in carbon and red ochre, a diary of shamans

gored by defecating rhinos speared to death.

I have imagined my way into an understanding

that is a rite of passage into a space that is

a vast abyss of intelligence, a nothingness

that speaks through an intuitive grammar of things

as if a galaxy, a star, stone, tree, raindrop were each a thought,

a sign, a word, the syntax of a growing paradigm

of creative awareness that we’re completely alone

and lost at sea like fish on the moon crawling out of its tides

as if nothing bound us, not even detachment,

nor a god that exists as a confession of the way we do,

nor any medium we work in as reflection of our presence

labouring away at an unattainable world that won’t exist

until we do, and it’s 7 to 5 against anyone making it that far.

But what a joy to emerge out of our own nothingness

like a secret we’re letting ourselves in on,

making it up as we go along like a deportable myth of origin

we can adapt to our infinite beginnings

because for starters, it has none of its own.

We were born to express ourselves like apple trees.

We were born to see and be happy marvelling at the event.

To enjoy longing for things we were never missing

and be guided by wise men we never listen to

back to a silence that has nothing to say for itself

that we didn’t already know in the first place.

Everywhere is the threshold of the return journey.

Life is either an exile, or it stays at home like a follower.

Bless the enlightened apostates of the dangerous religion

that desecrates the mind by worshipping it.

Why make a chain out of your umbilical cord

and get your head wrapped around it like a noose

because you forgot meaning was an art

and not a way to take yourself way too seriously to heart?

Why go to war with your own mind

just to administer to the needs of the suffering

when you can paint a god in blood and ashes

and decultify yourself with the creative freedom

of your imagination deconstructing the fable of your belief

that it’s the being, not the becoming, that endures.

And you can do this without even knowing how to draw.

A starmap doesn’t shine. A blue print doesn’t open a door.

If you ask a crutch to do your walking for you,

it’s going to throw you away like a miracle

at the top of the stairs of Notre Dame de Coeur.

Better to be the sacred whore of a thousand profligate gods

than the unrepentant nun of one who shuts the world out,

like art for art’s sake, to revel in her own extinction

in a mystical connubium with an unregenerate imagination.

You can burn your gates and cages in a wild field if you like

for not being able to keep the flowers in, or keep the wind

from rioting with the leaves way past curfew,

but there was never any risk of being granted what you ask

because life is the unpredictable moon rise

that deepens the calendars with a renewed humility

towards the extraordinary mutability of time.

What have you ever been that baffled your imagination?

It isn’t reason that inspires us to become a stranger tomorrow

to the self we knew today. Genuine faith isn’t

an artificial life support system to keep something alive

that should have been allowed to die quietly away yesterday.

Millions upon millions of facts like a graveyard of skeleton keys

to a door we can’t find open within ourselves

as if we’d just stepped through it to be here where we live

deciphering the shapes of the clouds as if we lived in code.

Hide your secret deep enough if you want it to be known.

Walk alone as far as you can until you can’t

if you want the world to walk the rest of the way with you.

The white demon that knows heaven and hell experientially

mentors the senses in the spiritual subtleties of the black angel

that comes like the new moon of a third eye

to help the exegetes of light see further into the dark

by blowing their candles out like flowers.

All seekers are roads looking for a map to follow.

Preludes after the fact, that set out to look for their own endings.

Be a star. And keep your afterlife behind you

like the shadow of the last form you cast upon the earth.

Be an eye that doesn’t leave any room between the moon

and it’s reflection so that the substance of life is seeing

not that you’re a distinct and separate entity

that cosmically identifies with your exclusion

but that you’re wholly within easy reach of everything

that depends upon you for its existence. Just as every leaf

you let fall in the autumn like an adage of wisdom

about how you can know the world by its fruits

first came to the tree like a smile to your face

when you realized your imagination was

the inconceivable dynamic of a creative state of grace.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LIGHT DOESN'T TALK TO THE FLOWERS ANYMORE

THE LIGHT DOESN’T TALK TO THE FLOWERS ANYMORE

The light doesn’t talk to the flowers anymore

the way it used to. I can feel a lot of shadows touching my face

as if it were written in braille. Acid in the rain.

Tears of dry ice in the housewell. Weathervanes

knocking at the door to get out of the storms

they used to revel in, and the storms themselves,

no kamikazes riding a divine wind against the Mongols,

at best, a mango-flavoured tempest in a Japanese teapot.

And even Zen can’t put an edge on the full moon

to cut through everything like a harvest being threshed.

No songs from the birds that used to wake me up in the morning,

only these spiders weaving their smokey laryngeal webs

like a voice that got stuck in the throat of a chimney

when it forgot, when you sing from the heart,

you don’t need a medium or a seance. Not even an art

that’s interested in what you’re saying unless

you’re obeying a grammar of headstones that don’t know

what you’re talking about until it’s not worth

bringing up anymore in anybody’s language

whether the metaphors are living or not. Words in a bonebox.

Locks and bars on our eyes. Dumb-bells stuck through our tongues

like someone was doing voodoo on the leaves

or the baton of a drum major in a parade

that’s never going to come, afraid to leave home on its own.

Since I was a boy in the late Cretaceous,

I’ve always wondered about the timing

of the asteroids and comets and why

they had such an impact upon the dinosaurs.

But I hear they were already on their way to extinction

because of the earth’s own volcanic activity,

and, at worst, the asteroid just accelerated

the flywheel of birth and death a bit.

Bad spin on an antiquated myth of origin.

Better luck next time, but right now the mammals

have evolved so far beyond that they’re destroying themselves

in a long, slow nuclear winter of attrition

that’s putting a pillow over everybody’s face

like the cloud cover of a screening myth with an air force

that buffers the light with our own ashes

and much prefers smouldering to ignition.

What did Berryman say in a letter to Wang Wei,

centuries after the fact, just before he jumped from a bridge

into an ice-covered river with the Pulitzer Prize in his hands?---

O to talk to you in a freedom from ten thousand things.

Be dust myself pretty soon. Not now. Or words to that effect.

But just the same, it’s hard to get into the skull

of the man anymore without the flame of a candle or a dragon

to see where you’re going in case you nudge an atom the wrong way

and bring on another astronomical catastrophe inadvertently.

Minefield covered in snow like a pioneer cemetery

buried on the hilltop of an avalanche with a view of the valley below.

Dangerous, too, to move among the stars freely

like a rogue planet without a starmap, causing perturbations

in the orbits of the shepherd moons on an exploratory flyby

to see if there’s any kind of intelligent life you can identify with.

The nights are getting darker. The stars are moving further apart.

Sooner or later everything tends toward empty space

until there isn’t even any room left in it for itself.

And nothing ever dawns upon you there but endless entropy

and time comes to a sudden halt where spaces runs out

and the bones of the fossilized stars are left like empty chairs

in a dark auditorium with bad acoustics.

I’ll write it on the wind now, while I have the chance.

I’ll write it like a fire in smoke at a ghost dance.

I’ll write it in blood and tears and rivers and stars.

I’ll write it in scars and wounds as deep as roses.

I’ll write it on the skins of the snakes that I’ve shed

like serpent fire running up the lunar thread of my spinal cord

like a lightning rod tattooing the clouds of unknowing

with the insights of fireflies into the mysterious darkness of life,

who know that one glimpse is enough of a Big Bang

to satisfy even the blind who go looking for their eyes

with their eyes like a windfall in a thunderstorm of picture-music

though they’re still hanging on to the same old lifeline

like an umbilical cord between the backdoor and the barn

in blizzard of stars and butterflies. I’ll write it in light.

I’ll write it on the eyelids of eclipses and occultations alike.

I’ll write it on the foreheads of the mute rocks

in runic striations of glaciers retreating north in tears,

I’ll write it on my bones before I’m buried under the hearthstones

with a big rock on my chest like an asteroid

rolled over a cave to make sure I’ll never rise again

like Jesus and Muhammad said I would if I was good,

or Ali Baba and the forty thieves muttering their shibboleths

on the thresholds of an artificial paradise, in case I wasn’t.

Now is the light. Now is the loving and the living.

Now is the hour for the hidden nightbirds to raise their voices

in the sacred groves of the moon to celebrate

the brevity of their own longing for the unattainable

blossoming on the dead branch of their aspiration.

There’s only so much time, and then, in a moment or two, forever.

The heart sings awhile like a red-winged black bird on a green bough.

And then the eyeless silence of the stars

who have looked down upon nothing for 14.3 billion lightyears

and watched the fireflies dancing to the music

of their own tiny hearts, lockets of light, of insight,

that open like seeds and eyes sown into the abyss

to let all winged things, and even star-nosed moles can fly,

out of the cages of their earthbound solitude like dragons

taken down like occult books from their hardwood shelves,

with the wingspan of constellations singing in the night to themselves.

PATRICK WHITE

HAUNTED BY LONG SORROWS

HAUNTED BY LONG SORROWS

Haunted by long sorrows like a ghost

in a lighthouse on the moon with no one to warn

stay away, stay away from me,

I’m a radioactive dump site, the slag of stars.

A snakepit of downed powerlines

dancing without a snake charmer

to the backbeat of dark energies

that sweat me like a dragon in heat.

The moon is the urn of the ashes

of a nuclear reactor. My sister muse,

and, little sun, that shines at midnight,

look kindly upon my total eclipse.

I am not your deathmask, but I burn,

I burn like white phosphorus in the starcluster

of the Pleiades. Infernal incense

screening the smell of a scorched heart

that’s always in camouflage when it prays

in the shrine of a furnace to a fire-god

to put out the flames, put out the flames,

the drapes of the poppies are burning

like Molotov cocktails. Am I still as safe

as I was thirty years ago in a house

that’s burned to the ground? Or is this

another terrorist attack on my embassy?

The eyes in my crystal skull that change

dimensions like the lenses in a telescope,

are thawing like glaciers of the last ice-age

and the windows are crying earth-shaped

pears of glass in a flashflood of global warming.

Someone lend me a fire axe and I’ll chop

the head of the moon off like a hole in the floor

we can all fall through like followers of Lucifer.

Venus takes a swan dive in the morning

on the day of enlightenment. Sometimes

taking a fall for the sake of the other guy

is the only way you have of standing your ground.

Drive me out into the wilderness to cleanse your sins.

Pelt me with doomsday asteroids. Ever wonder

what the scapegoats are preaching in the desert

to the vipers and the scorpions that glisten

like the bling of hot jewellery lost in the hot sands

of the sun? Tar me in asphalt and feather me

like a pillowcase that has nightmares about flying.

And I’ll return with the pearl of a black dwarf

between my teeth like an implosion of light

deepened into a dark master of esoteric gravity.

And I’ll pull you down like a moonbeam by the ankle

into the dark mirror of the lake like a snapping turtle

anchors a swan in the starmud on the bottom.

I’ll show you the life that thrives out of reach

of the light. We’ll make a pilgrimage of the smoking fumaroles

of your subconscious, and I’ll show you

the whole zoo of surrealistically sentient life forms

mythically inflated like the giant squids and krakens,

sea cucumbers ten times their surface size

living on the hydrogen sulphide of your magmatic desires

like the R-complex of rotten cosmic eggs

that leave an evil aftertaste in the mouths

of the snakes, dragons, and crocodiles

that spit out their yolks like gamma ray bursts

of bad sunshine sublimating the dry ice of your eyes

into the tears of a ghost at its own exorcism.

Like a massive planet in an outer orbit

on the horns of a dilemma, I’ll purge

the black halo of comets you wear like a corona

in an eclipse, and clear your solar system

of that laurel of thorns wrapped around your head

like a galactic turban of razor wire

uncoiling like the spiralled wavelength

of the God particle of a snake in the mystic fire

of another martyred heresy that set you free

at the stand up pulpit and pyre of my own auto de fe

to aspire abysmally higher than the death of desire.

PATRICK WHITE

THREE FLAMES, MY GOLDFISH DANCING LIKE STARS

THREE FLAMES, MY GOLDFISH DANCING LIKE STARS

Three flames, my goldfish dancing like stars

in a telescopic lens with a narrow field of view.

Eerie slate blue in the blank windows

across the street, as if they once had eyes.

Blind prophets in the dawn. What do they see?

One poet on nightwatch sitting in an apartment

by himself with the lights out, listening

to what the silence has to say about everything,

nothing, the way the sky is beginning

to keep its stars to itself as if

the great liberties of shining

they took with the night are practising

the greater discretion of candle wicks

that someone lights up and someone blows out

and they end up bending back on themselves

like solar flares, or ingrown hairs,

or tiny black monks concealed under the cowls

of this holy hour like shadows of noon in the sun.

All the deep, soul-searching questions

make peace with all the elusive answers

they’ve been searching for like a battered bird

the eye of a storm. And the lies of life prove

vastly less intriguing than its truths.

Every firefly of insight, a dragon breathing

in the distance, exhaling chimney sparks

like a furnace in a dream talking in its sleep.

Plumes of smoke dissipating in the air

from the fumaroles of gentle exorcisms,

ghosts trying to get back to their graves

before the day starts to take itself too seriously.

The numinous aftertaste of all the afterlives

I wanted to live in my mouth, one’s as good

as another, and I’m beginning to exalt

a little in living this one as a creative endeavour

that’s been trying to achieve me all along,

not the other way around. At least

it amuses me to think so though I’m not expecting

a masterpiece. The same eye by which

I see the star is the eye by which the star sees me.

Interdependent origination. Cosmic intimacy.

All these broken mirrors that have given birth to my face.

All these Cepheid variables drumming on the hide

they tanned from my heart like the pulse

of an enraptured ghost dance around a blazing fire.

Listen to one solitary night bird and you can hear

the whole choir singing backup to the human condition.

Compassion is the sweetest sadness when the stars

bend down to kiss the burn like a sunspot

soothing its feet in the lunar shadows of the mindstream

on a long firewalk across the cool sands of a new moonrise

over the Sea of Tranquillity. Why walk

when you can row your way across or fly

like a waterbird through the skies of a million eyes at once?

Mark one jewel and they’re all marked for life.

Whisper to the willows in starlight

and you can hear the booming of the abysmal echo

on the far side of the universe like life in a small town.

When life isn’t copulating in the brothels

of a false dawn, it’s the prelude of a longing

to impart your heart to someone like a secret

you couldn’t reveal to anyone else like a humming bird

that’s caught the ear of the holly hocks.

You enter the dream without knowing

what you’re going to wake up to.

The empty silo keeps the hunger alive.

It’s the full harvest that blows the candle out

beside your death bed. Fulfilments of failure.

No one’s a sailor until they’ve drowned

running aground on the lunar reefs

of an enchanted island you washed up on

like a lost cause doomed to be found in the morning

like the guiding light of a dead starfish

still shining out of habit in a dawn that pales

by comparison when a sorceress sets her easel

up on the beach and begins to sketch

a starmap of you that’s an exact likeness

of the vision you had of her just before you died.

There’s always another side to a black hole.

Turn the emptiness of the hourglass over

like a drink you’ve finished crossing the bar

and it’s a different world with different stars.

PATRICK WHITE

PATINAS OF DISTINCTION

PATINAS OF DISTINCTION

Patinas of distinction trying to green the terminated poets.

Death drools its cruel elixirs. Perfume

from ambergris, whale vomit for those

who have the stomach for it, dung

under the snow, then come the squabbling sparrows

to tend upon God in her rehabilitated ruins.

Literary forensics putting flesh back on the skull.

Red threads of blood in the nests

they build for themselves like pyres of cosmic eggs

in the tree where the poet hung

like a poached bird, a plumb bob of the depths,

a pendulum in a still life with choreographed knives.

The cooing pigeons who write with flight feathers

plucked from fledgling suicides. Water has a voice

of its own, the blood, the wind, three octaves

of fire. Here come the uninspired

with insulation, rebar and cement.

And even road kill’s got an undertaker.

A telescope’s more of a work of art

with a poetic vision of the stars

all waiting to greet you like long lost relatives

and friends, at the end of a dark tunnel

than the barrow tombs of all these

blind, star-nosed moles grubbing

among their damp root fires

to add their smouldering voices

in Braille like singularities

to a dying tradition of black holes.

Equinoctial careerists of their fair-minded lies,

they damn the solstice for taking

more of a stand in summer and winter

like a Stonehenge of the light

and lament the evanescence

of spring and fall that sheds them

like roseate petals of snake skin

that strike the heart like toxic sins of omission.

The sheep are hunting the tigers to death

and there are maggots in the moonlight

like toxicara worms eating the hearts and eyes

out of Mozart and Liszt to see what they saw,

to see what they did, but maggots

never turn into butterflies, and in time,

their lives are fined for fouling the footpath

like commas of excrement in the aftermath

of all the winged heels that stepped in it

like Sylvia Plath in a hive of killer bees

making a grand entrance of her exit

like the black queen of the uninhabited planets

in the corona of the starcluster in Cancer.

PATRICK WHITE  

SNOW ON THE STREETS

SNOW ON THE STREETS

Snow on the streets grooved by tires

into a bar-code. A band burning its first c.d.

Garbage bags humped against the parking meters

like terraformed drunks in an albino mindscape.

I want to sleep. But savage clouds are fuming

with moonlight. Oblivion’s sweet, my little death,

gentle as a snowflake but the prelude to it

is pierced by cauterizing anxieties

like a needle park for voodoo dolls.

I’d rather be a butterfly, a pinwheel

spinning on an axis through my thorax

but you can’t have it all. I tilt away from the sun

at perigee and try to stretch the night out

like a budget of meds for the month.

The dark’s a cool poultice that draws

the infection out of my dreams. It

sublimates my sorrows like dry ice

that skipped the tears. I don’t want to get wet

in an ice-age. Crucified by icicles

that drip like syringes in a limestone cave.

I smear my face in red ochre, blood

with desiccated binders, oil pastels,

and lay my prophetic bones under the firepit.

I place a great stone on my chest

like the weight of the world

to make sure I never get up again

but pain is a homeless ghost

and I don’t think, even with my knees

popped under my chin like an embryo

every part of me is going to fit

my place at the table like a grave.

I throw a few cornflowers in

and wander off with my spirit

like a thought wave that’s tagging along.

I chip away at my heart

like an obsidian lunette

with a bone that’s edging it

into a phalanged Clovis point

for a throwing spear to penetrate

the mammoth of the wooly moon.

I think I’m going extinct.

I’ve culled too many stars.

The herds are thinning over my head.

The green of the traffic lights

that turned yellow in the fall

drops its single, blood-stained berry in the snow.

As the birds and the bards say

of the chokecherries, ripeness is all.

Snow-blinded by this white page,

and blazing is a kind of blindness,

I want to leave something behind

for people to follow like the tracks

of a wounded caribou writing

in the cuneiform Braille of my starmud

you can read with your fingertips

like a hungry clan that hasn’t eaten for a week.

I don’t want to be sought or thawed out by anyone

who isn’t burning my fat in their lamps

or sewing my hide with a splinter

of my femur, threading my sinews

through the eye of a needle

stitching me up in an emergency room

like the mouth of a wound

that’s had its say, and holds its tongue

like the exhausted flavour of silence

masticating a wad of pitch and pine gum

like the sacred syllable of the spear point

I was trying to make an era ago

before I got stuck in this one like a tarpit,

an exile returning on a migratory journey

to the prodigal museum of my homecoming exit.

PATRICK WHITE  

ALL THE DUFF AND DETRITUS OF MEANING IN MY HEAD

ALL THE DUFF AND DETRITUS OF MEANING IN MY HEAD

All the duff and detritus of meaning in my head.

Turmoil of celestial sediments in a tormented creekbed

of starmud. Images and symbols, glimpses and insights,

effluvia of indelible impressions that focus

a whole lifetime into a locket of tears, mingling

in the waters of life like the tributary of a deeper feeling

entering my mindstream like a first violin

in a symphony of picture-music conducted

by the silence of owls with blood on their talons

singing Allah hu, Allah hu, Allah hu under their breath

like a Sufi dancing like the axis of a galactic umbrella

at the crossroads of enlightenment and extinction. I don’t mean

to be thematic about all this. It’s more a synthesis

of happenstantial contradictions and random nuances

in a matrix of suggestive wavelengths having sex

in a lunar snakepit like a triple x porn flick

wasted on a blind prophet who had already seen too much.

The sting of the most beautiful sorrows

ages like wine in the catacombs of your heartwood

if you let it sleep a long time like a passage of poetry

you never understood, but could taste its hidden harmony

as if you were drinking life straight out of your skull.

A rapture in the absence that lingers like a ghost of smoke

on a bridge that burnt a long time ago,

where it hopes to meet you again, though it knows

it can’t, the timing of our departures less crucial

than the content of our arrivals. The stars

pale in the dawn. Venus in Virgo. And the Pleiades.

Funny how we try to hang on to what we’ve already let go of.

So many lovers, friends, intriguing enemies, gone.

Dream figures that didn’t wake up with us

in the same surrealistic play of dark energies we did.

Farewell is always the shadow of a sad hope

standing in the doorway staring out

into the terrible emptiness of threshed fields in autumn,

weeping like a watercolour in the rain

back into the river we drew it from. And the wisdom

that comes like an afterlife, meagre consolation

for the excruciating transformations we endure

to adapt a little happiness to it like an exile on foreign soil.

I spread bread crumbs on the snow for the birds.

I hang meat on the clothesline for the wolves

when winter turns against everything that lives.

I wrap burlap on the roots of the rose the way

I used to bundle the scarf of my daughter

on her way to school when her breath

was a wraith on the air of a dispossessed exorcism

yet to come, and I would be the one she disposed of

as if the parents, not the children, were hostages to fortune.

So be it. Walk on. Bite the bullet. Swallow the loss.

Look at it through the eyes of an experienced star

speculating on what all the light comes to in the end.

What it all amounts to when the shining itself

must bud and bloom and fall. I love like a mammal

but I grieve like a reptile. I don’t show any feeling at all.

My blood returns to absolute zero. Entropy

as a kind of self-defence. I whip the air with my tongue

like lightning for some real or imagined offence.

By day, I scrounge for the sun on the rock of my skull.

By night, I wait for comets and meteors down by the river

like the eclipse of an advent calendar marked for extinction.

I can blaze like a dragon sage. But I live in a coma

like a neuron star upstaged by a comedic deathmask

and my mind is leaking out like anti-freeze through my hair.

PATRICK WHITE

AWAKE AT SIX A.M.

AWAKE AT SIX A.M.

Awake at six a.m. The clock ticks, nicks,

flintknaps little pieces of my life off,

a French executioner’s sword quicker and neater

than the sloppy axe of the moon

naping the strike. I swan on the block

to the drum roll of a panicked palpitant

among kitchen utensils. I’m the crucifix

of Cygnus in the Summer Triangle,

arms outspread. I’m severed like a carrot.

I’m the headless horseman. An acephalic shallot.

Someone yanks me up out of the earth

and holds me up by a gout of hair

like a prize turnip with a characteristic look

of freeze-framed despair on my face

as if it had just been amputated.

I had a snake transplant. Now I’m Medusa.

The star, Algol, in the grip of Perseus.

The ghoul of my own solitude, I can heal

or I can enflame the disease with an unclean needle.

Beware. In case of no urgency. Break glass.

My torso sits at its desk and tries to write.

Headless as the rest. A skull, a book,

an ashtray and some candlelight, coffee

and a keyboard clotted with sticky nicotine

and the finger sweat of a thousand poems.

Stem cells and salamanders come to mind.

Regenerative urns scattering my ashes

like sunspots on a Flemish complexion,

crows in the dusk. My hands feel

like a pair of mouldy gloves, newly exhumed,

but they do the work of twenty spiders.

Ten silkworms gnawing on a mulberry bush.

Prussian blue with an aura of gegenshein,

I wonder if the windows ever wish they had eyes.

I can see right through their deathmasks

with my X-ray insights. The thrum

of the emergency helicopter lands nearby

like a dragonfly on the hospital’s lily pad.

Nightshift angels bloom like nurse’s caps.

The war memorial is wounded by felt poppies

dressed for the weather this time of year,

like a haemophiliac that never stops bleeding

for the boys of summer who went off to war

wielding their ploughshares like swords.

Good-bye Jerod. Good-bye, Joe. I see you

baling corpses like strawdogs after a bayonet charge.

I grieve like chlorine. My tears burn like mustard gas.

My grandfather died spitting up blood

on a sheet of newspaper beside the bed.

Is it any wonder I’m staining this unexpurgated page

like a Rorschach test conjuring up the simulacra

that bear an interior resemblance to me

to see if I can put my head to rest

like a jellyfish parachute candling

in its own tentacles like unbound spinal cords

of serpent fire striking reflexively at the unwary air?

Take this bar code of a chromosome off my heart.

This emission spectrum with genetically modified

Fraunhofer lines, these frayed deltas of life

in the palms of my hands. I am not

a product of my times. I won’t be sold

like the child of a Goth for dogmeat,

though the vultures are in a holding pattern overhead.

I’m not road kill. I won’t be culled

by a hunting license north of highway 7.

I’ll give myself to the wolves furthest from my door.

Let the Aztecs go to war if they want a human sacrifice.

I’ll die by my own wits like a lunatic

raising a skull cup of blood to the noble enemy

of the god I deprived of my barbarous piety

as she does me, food, love, money, sleep, respect

and this flickering head I’ve made a candle holder of

so the light can weep for hours until it burns out

like Aldebaran or Antares in another false dawn

that wires me bloodshot flowers. Eyeless carnations

freaked by the scarlet crackling

of another seismic breakdown

of incommunicable excruciations.

PATRICK WHITE