YOU MAY. YOU MAY NOT COME. MAYBE TONIGHT. OR NOT

YOU MAY. YOU MAY NOT COME. MAYBE TONIGHT. OR NOT

You may. You may not come. Maybe tonight. Or not.

When it’s not cooking cosmic eggs, boiling heretics

in the hot oil of bubbling cauldrons, the hourglass

is sandpainting sidereal mandalas with stars

to empower the wind to blow them away,

bones of grey chalk watergilding my flesh in ash.

What did I say? What did I say that was so unorthodox

all the bells of your body were left speechless

at the sight of so many grails trashed like empties

from a car window like a litter of roadkill

along the side of the highway? Did I transit

the zenith of the burning bridge of your last loveletter,

or should I have jumped, or fell, or cannonballed in

to make a bigger splash in the blood vats of your heart?

Maybe a meteor to render your old lovers extinct?

I watch the cold windows until they begin to percolate

in an unexpected thaw of disciplined sorrows.

It’s getting late. Your absence, a glacial waterclock

followed by a lot of patronymic colons about who

begat what upon whom. I don’t want to meet your father.

I’d kill him on the spot. I don’t want to prove

to your mother I’m going to be good to you

in ways that she was not as she soaks

the blood from the carpet like gouts

of insincere candlewax. The price you pay

for three meals a day and a creative finishing school

where you can afford the kind of problems

the poor don’t make enough to imitate.

They worry about where the next meal

is coming from. You were born knowing

how far out the soup spoon was supposed

to be aligned from the begging bowl

like a shepherd moon in orbit around Neptune.

And me? I eat out of my skull on the run

whenever I’m writing poetry to the moon

in one long howl of anguished wanting.

Were the diamonds too hard? Wasn’t I

bituminous enough when I entered the dark

to show you how I could shine out of

my own inner resources like two hundred million

urns of light gathered from the firepits of the stars

by the crows that keep pecking out my eyes

like jackhammers looking for the motherlode?

And when I watched you slicing the throats

of your long-necked swans like ballet dancers

and black daffodils on an angle to preserve them longer

as cut flowers on the coffee table, didn’t I

make a Zen comment on the way you’d arranged them?

I’ve been scarred by love like a clay tablet in cuneiform

in the library of Ashurbanipal. The crow

has scratched at my flesh to show me where to bury

my dismembered body parts to guarantee

a higher yield over the ensuing light years.

The cat claw of the moon has caught my eye

more than once. Fireflies in a bird net,

I’ve cauterized my optic nerves on the constellations

of my own signage to keep my brain from seeing

what my heart was afraid to reveal to itself.

I was a blind prophet being led away by a child.

I could witness on the dark side of my seeing

the bird eating arachnids with two red stars for eyes

weaving their wavelengths into low frequency webs

like the bass strings of a slack guitar

to catch the fire of the morning dew in a false dawn

like Cherokee water spiders with hairy down

and scarlet stripes casting magical spells

like the geoglyph on the Nazca pampas

with Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka

in the hourglass waist of Orion trying to squeeze

its abdomen into a whalebone corset

before the Arabs changed its sex

into the belt of a less subtle Hunter

with a trophy line of scalps for wampum.

One of them mine. My eyes transfixed

by the paradigm of an eclipse being peeled back

like a black eyelid of time, or raven tresses

from the skull of the moon. I’ve known

the innocence of the crow when its feathers

were albino white before its failure turned sinister

as a starless night. A penury of insight

pearl diving for diamonds in a tarpit of love

that swore the new moon would last forever

like apple bloom and silver on the inside of the ore.

But sometimes the Artesian springs we plant

in the starmud of our hearts come up like black holes

and flowers of oil and what’s left of the shining

is the tinfoil of a trickster shaman substituting

his hunting magic to gratify the eyes of fools

that revel in their amorous delusions and spurn

the astringencies of enlightenment that burn

like circumpolar suns at midnight illuminating

nothing but the skins we shed to let the snake

out the box like Draco, without getting bit

by the picture-music of our own motives

trying to charm the serpent fire with backbone flutes

jamming with the downed powerlines

of our badly tuned spinal cords riffing

with the cosmic spiders writing the lyrics

of our myth of origins like electrical dreamcatchers

with toxic pincers like the tuning forks of splintered stars.

PATRICK WHITE

THE MOON ISN'T RENEWING HER VIRGINITY

THE MOON ISN’T RENEWING HER VIRGINITY

The moon isn’t renewing her virginity

in the snakepits of the hypocrites

faking the wavelengths of their radiance

like the black dwarf of an imploding commune

that flared out like graverobbers in the dark

desecrating a cemetery of rainbows.

I’ve watched the silver shovel of your tongue

go through all phases of the moon, from full

to new, as if you were laying your Tarot cards

out on the table for an autopsy on the Hanged Man.

This one’s suspended by one leg with a real rope

around his neck. You’re decked out in dreamcatchers

and spider silk like the butterfly bling of a pimp.

What are you selling? Peace, love, and happiness

at the expense of all else? You chirp you love everyone

but you’ve never loved people enough to learn

how to hate them honestly. There heretics burn

but you’re attuned to harmony like a snaketongue

of black lightning is to a tuning fork or a lyre

to the laryngeal cords of a cheesecutter.

You’re a wedding cake full of worms. You’re

a wishbone with one hip lower than the other

like the short end of the stick, a black capped chickadee

on the lowest rung of the crutch. You emanate.

You radiate. You resonate. You alert

your sleeping brother like a fire alarm

to the god waking up within him, but you exclude,

you forget, you reject the real shamans

dancing in the shadows of their solitude with a limp.

If you cram any more beauty into your eyes

soon you’ll be able to open a jewellery store.

God knows how you can love the silver

and hate the ore that poured itself out

like wine for you as if it were bleeding to death

like wild grapes going sour in your mouth.

There’s more salvation in drinking

from your own skull, than sipping

like a hummingbird from someone else’s grail.

You’re just baling a moonboat with a black sail

and a bucket the bottom hasn’t fallen out of yet.

Dew blooming on the tips of the tongues

of the stargrass, yes, but you can’t conceive

of the watershed of the abyss it was drawn from.

Your moondogs don’t snarl enough to guard

the farmyard from the predators that surround you.

You’re water gilding Dachau with a silver lining

whenever you look at a black cloud pluming

into the night sky like a fumarole

of mystically unique people going up in smoke

and white wash the dark side of things

desecrating their suffering by remarking

how wonderful it is their ashes kiss your eyelids

like gentle snowflakes of human flesh and bone.

Your third eye’s got a cinder in it like a stake

driven into the iris of a Cyclops. You denigrate

the black ops that rescued the rest of the flock

from the cave, like a shepherd moon

that’s never known an eclipse it didn’t resent.

The blood and dirt under the fingernails of the moon

aren’t the terraced gardens of an Incan ruin.

If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack

of sunbeams make sure you don’t stick it in the eye

of that voodoo doll you carry around with you

like the strawdog of a scarecrow at a harvest ritual

that’s eventually going to go up in heretical flames

like Joan of Arc, the witch, not the saint,

once her white magic grew irrationally ineffectual.

Most people look for the light to see in the dark.

Rinse the night from your mirroring consciousness

and you throw the stars out with the womb water

of Aquarius. In the urn of what’s left, not

the translucency of self-cleaning jewels

as if your eyes were constantly buffing

their own windows with vinegar

and yesterday’s newspaper full of atrocities

that wipe the filth like sunspots off your shining

like a patina of print on the faces of the chimney sweepers

scraping the creosote and shovelling the ashes

of the fireflies out of the furnace. Not enlightenment.

But the putrefied residue in the alembic of a bad alchemist,

trying to mine gold from lead like a thief of honey

from an ant heap of spectacles, and gleaming ingots of teeth.

PATRICK WHITE