PSYCHOBABYLON WOULDN’T TRADE ONE REAL
STAR
PsychoBabylon wouldn’t trade one real
star of his implausibility in
for the smallest flake of that tinfoil
spiritual life you’re passing off
as an iron pyrite cure all.
PsychoBabylon knows the serenity of the dragons
who’ve learned to make peace with
their own fires
even when they’re bringing the rain
to temper the swords
they forged in hell to kill people back
into life
who’ve stuffed their pillows with too
many feathers
and not enough scales to be credible
even to the shadows they cast,
not to speak of the torment they put
their dreams through
trying to divine and sign them like a
message from the dead
for their eyes only. PsychoBabylon
suppley practises
a discipline of subtle tenderness and
recurrent doubt
in the face of his ambiguous
revelations of what it’s all about.
PsychoBabylon might tilt at the hull
with the mast of his moonboat
from time to time, thinking he’s
whaling with the Kwakiutl,
but he doesn’t turn his lions loose
on the blackflies of insinuation
knowing their prowess depends as much
upon
the quality of their enemies as it does
their friends.
And surely it’s the folly of flowers
and stars that have led him
to certain incongruous conclusions
about life that constitute
enough of a starmap of independence to
go his own way
like a rogue planet sustained by the
dark abundance
of his own homelessness as if every
orbit he jumped
like the looping threshold of the
mystery of life discharged
another photon of light on the black
matter of space and time at hand.
PsychoBabylon would rather light
candles and fireflies in the abyss
with his incendiary insights than blow
them out
with the kiss of a fraudulent angel who
traded her harp in
for a fire-extinguisher foaming at the
mouth like a rabid cloud
to smother the protected species of
hell in the first snowfall
of a nuclear winter. PsychoBabylon
doesn’t demonize
the third man on the match for smoking
in No Man’s Land
in front of a firing squad looking for
scapegoats as a way
out of the irreconcilable dilemmas that
keep breaking them
like wishbones and the horns of the
lapis lazuli bull harps
strung between the crescents of the
moon like spider webs
disguised as dreamcatchers apprenticed
to Venus fly traps.
Sick people go to hospital. Bad people
go to church.
PsychoBabylon heads out to the woods by
himself with a noose
as often as he does a telescope. He
risks a wary kindness
toward everything he sees, and even
more excruciatingly
he doesn’t replace the thorns of the
wild rose bush
with the fangs of the rattlesnake
coiled under it
that struck him in his throat in the
middle of a song of longing
like a rat snake in the nest of a
nightbird whose blood
has just turned to moon rock in a
transfusion of toxins
to counteract the mystic elixirs of his
enlightened lunacy.
If you can’t hold the prophetic skull
of the moon
in your own two hands by now, without
fretting it
into foretelling a lie, PsychoBabylon
blues his view of you
in the aerial perspective of his
compassionate distance
as the victim of your own siege works
when you’re the first
to start throwing stones at the windows
of your own crystal palace
because where there used to be
chandeliers of stars
radiant enough to open up the chakras
of the dead
now there’s nothing but a mobile of
swords above your head
and all the tongues of serpent fire you
split like cedar shakes
to go witching for enlightenment in
your celestial watershed
are now swimming on a different
wavelength like a holy book
someone read in passing, and like a
folder of soggy matches
that smouldered, but never flared,
threw into a cosmic ditch
along with the angelic road kill and
the rest of the spiritual junkmail.
PATRICK WHITE
