TOO INTENSE, TOO DEPRESSING, MY THIRD EYE

TOO INTENSE, TOO DEPRESSING, MY THIRD EYE

Too intense, too depressing, my third eye

the monocle of a Cyclops, a three hundred year old

methane hurricane rose exfoliating on Jupiter,

a gravitationally warped contact lens

that fits like a jellyfish on the mirrors

of the Hubble Telescope in a decaying orbit.

I’m willing to put up with a few thorns

to kiss a rose wearing black lipstick to mass

or sit under a blooming locust tree in the morning

that’s got bigger stingers than the bees that swarm it

ever thought possible, and from a crucifix

so forbidding, watch the honey humming sweeter

than the mellifluous light of a thousand sunsets

that alloyed themselves to copper back in the Bronze Age.

The moon can be the blossom of an apricot.

The moon can be a switchblade. Nobody

likes a real dragon for the same reasons

the tribes were afraid of their shamans.

There’s nothing altruistic about their wisdom.

The apple tree doesn’t look upon its windfall

in late September as a hamper on someone’s doorstep.

Some days I’m as sensitive as a sledge hammer

on the horns of a garden snail. Others

I could fine tune a spider web to the stars

or charm my way out of a snakepit

with the metronomic swaying of the suspension bridge

running up my spine between mutually supportive extremes.

As above so below. Sometimes I fall

from such erotic heights it makes even

the trembling lip of a precipice feel nervous

as I plunge by like a comet with its feet

on the handlebars of a Harley on fire

trying to blow the flames out by opening it up

on the highway like the mobile pyre of a sky burial.

I see blood on the snow and a savaged pheasant.

I don’t see a scarlet ribbon falling from your hair

as if the wind were unwrapping a present.

There’s starmud clotted on the inside

of my prophetic skull but that doesn’t tempt me

to turn it into a flowerpot on a birdcage of a balcony

overlooking the hanging gardens of Babylon

and I’ve never enjoyed popping anyone’s

supersensible iridescent multiversal soap bubble

buoyantly traversing the muck of the swamp

like the spiritual afterlife of a waterlily

that’s cut all ties to what the living are rooted in.

You can stuff your pillowcase with leaking hand grenades

as far as I care if it helps you get a good night’s sleep

and keeps you intrigued with the quality of your dreams.

A hard stone under your head at the side of the road

is often softer than a wet pillow that’s been crying all night.

Too intense, you bray? You sure as hell aren’t.

Took me twenty years to learn to say that with conviction.

I know pyramids with a greater sense of urgency than you have.

Befriend your own death. You’ll wax intense.

You’ll ghost dance with lunatics under the full moon

rising like a white buffalo mother over the seance of your fires.

You can afford to lavish an emergency or two

on the onceness of your life without putting snow chains

on the ambulance in a firestorm of ice-age fireflies.

As for depressing? So’s half of every wavelength.

The valley’s as deep as the mountain is high.

The way things usually go if you don’t see me

with a nose bleed, I’ve probably got the bends

and there are little bubbles of euphoric nitrogen

breaking in my blood stream like my narcotic relations

with laughing gas that would remind me of you in a way

if it weren’t for that long wake of broken mirrors

trailing away behind you like Halley’s comet

when it fizzled in 1986, or Isadora Duncan’s scarf

caught up in the wheel of birth and death

like a loose thread of fate or a snake unspooled

from the axis mundi of a voodoo doll in the arms

of an unlucky world turning over a new card.

Depressing? I’d rather be a sincere disease

than one of the spin doctors of a breezy happiness.

The dragons are unbearable enough

but the fireflies can be just as terrifying

if they don’t understand the nature of their own enlightenment.

My eyes aren’t deranged by the things they see,

though my heart might scream and my dreams

might be painted on the inside of my skull

in carbon, blood and red ochre, my hunting magic

tucked away at the back of a cave where I bury my dead

under the hearthstones, their bones,

symbolic kindling for a fire that never goes out,

and the shadows of all this might have

a thicker skin that you do, but long ago

I discovered the best place to hide was out in the open

and the longest guarantee of making sure

no one knows what you’re up to, is stand before them naked.

They see what they see as far as they’ve

been given a light to go by. Some have optic nerves

wired to their hearts, and they celebrate

the gentle fireworks of life like fireflies.

And some have the eyes of dragons

soldered to the motherboards of their brains

and they’ve been looking at things for such a long time

from a sidereal point of view, they’ve turned

into constellations, cold, beautiful, old, and vast.

PATRICK WHITE