MURDER ME AGAIN WITH YOUR VOICE
Murder me again with your voice,
the moon, your maculate heart, the
weapon of your choice.
I am space, light, water, air, stars
beyond your reach.
Meteor showers have been looking for my
species for years
And still I thrive like glass eyes with
real tears,
in the shadows of your amorous
extinctions.
You can snuff a thousand votive candles
out.
You can desecrate the shrine where I
bury my feelings
like the small bodies of gentle birds
beside the ashes of the dragons that
burnt out
like solar flares returning to the
source.
You stab at the wind. You can try to
ruin the sun
with a pettiness that isn’t worthy of
the moon
that sends no night bird out to look
for you
though my longing says you’ve been
missing for years.
Nothing against you, nothing especially
for,
though I thought I saw for a moment
Bailey’s Beads
peeking through the lunar valleys of
your last eclipse.
And there was a time I’d trade two of
my fingers
just to have a taste of your lips again
as they were
when the apple orchard covered your
nakedness
in the blossoms of the first drafts
that couldn’t improve on you by
revising anything.
Come the first time right, or better
not come at all
and they fell, each more perfect than
the last.
Now it’s like French-kissing a voodoo
doll
with pins through its lips that makes
everything you say
the martyr of a brutal kind of unspoken
curse.
Make it worse, if that’s all you’ve
got left to feel.
Get it out. Oxyrhyncus Jesus says
that’ll save you.
I’m an old ghost. Do you really think
you’re my first exorcism? Boo. I’m
gone
just like the mist off a morning lake,
just like a gust of stars in the lens
of a telescope
that can bring you close, or set you at
a distance
just like that piece of tinfoil you
wrap
like skin around your heart as if you
were saving
some kind of vegetable in the cold
shining
you think of as the Pleiades on a binge
of light.
Screech, shriek, rave, rake your
fingernails
down a blackboard like an ice age in a
rage,
like a glacial striations cut into
shale
and ambush the mammoth, the
sabre-tooth, the dire wolf
of twelve thousand years ago when you
stole
the water out of their mouths and
returned nothing but dust
like you take the words from mine now
that you’ve uprooted the garden of
your own.
Carve on me like a bone if you must,
break my skull
like Pangaea into a synarthritic jigsaw
puzzle of continents
and I’ll do nothing but diversify my
species.
I’ll turn the scars in my starmud
into calendars and alphabets
and wait for the next golden age like
honeysuckle
tangled in a cedar fence after a storm
that strikes at itself like sheet
lightning,
after your apocalypse has finished
venting itself.
You’re a white peony, not a wounded
rose with thorns,
though you both shed the moon in common
to get down to the withered jester’s
cap of the star
hiding like a spider under your
eyelids.
You kill me and you kill me deeper into
life
not because it’s me you hate, but
what I refuse
to hate about you as a coward who turns
her back
at the sight her own blood on her
razors and wrists
and runs like a river system on a
starmap
toward the emergency exits of the red
giants
even as they’re imploding under their
own exhaustion
who promise to suckle you on the dream
milk
of the poppies who opiate you into
believing
you’re twice as deceiving as death in
Aleppo,
racially profiling the stars in infra
red for the Gestapo.
What a silly girl you are, to expect a
firing squad
to show up for your rescue, every time
you click
your ruby slippers like Dorothy in the
Wizard of Oz
and tiny eyes emerge from the gigantic
size
of the blackholes in your deathmasks
like gnats
swept up like stars in your stillborn
tornadoes on the moon.
It takes more than a snakepit to make
someone an oracle.
However you enrobe it in incense and
drugs
and mollify your fear in an exchange of
syringes.
More fangs on a hydra-headed Medusa
than there are
crescents of the moon lactating with
antidotes
as if to say the cure is in the heart
of the disease.
Let all those boyfriends you stole like
corpses
from a graveyard, believing you were
the artistic genius
who was mistress of their vital organs,
rise from the dead
as if they’d finally learned to stand
up to you
and making a move on your surgical
flesh
say, hey, now, mistress, come lie down
with us
and see, for yourself, what a heady
lover death can be
when you don’t take your cliches so
seriously
you’ve rewired your waterlilies to
the stars
until they all sting like superclusters
of jellyfish
tasing you with the acid rain of your
own tears
like rootfires of desire blossoming
underground
without a flower to speak of or break
through anywhere
you could point to and say, there, I
grew that out of love
as if I weren’t even trying all that
hard
to stand here alone, alive, and
beautiful as I am
not as an alibi for dying, but as an
act of life
as indelible in its absence it is when
it’s here.
So go your own way with blood on your
hands
and blessings on your head as you wish.
And take a last parting shot at the
stars
if you want the last word
as you stand like a likeness of
yourself
like a commission you’ve always had
done
by every doorway you’ve ever stood in
like an easel,
and step into a smaller realm than the
one you’re leaving
as if your eyes were too small for my
windows
when you hurled yourself against them
like a housefly against a mirage in an
hourglass
being emptied and filled at the same
time.
And, yes, I will cry for you with deep
regret
I couldn’t die for you any better
than I did,
and you couldn’t live for me
just for the cheap thrill of it.
And then I’ll wipe my tears on my
sleeve
where my heart used to be
and make my comic entrance into the
next world
laughing like a sacred clown at the
sublimity
in the enlightened madness of it all
as you back up like a tragic exit into
yours,
troubled by the punch-lines in your
nightmares
you never got.
PATRICK WHITE