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