YOU TAKE THE SOLITUDE OUT OF POETRY

YOU TAKE THE SOLITUDE OUT OF POETRY

You take the solitude out of poetry.

You rob nobility of its grief.

You pursue an earthly excellence

like a posse, you hang poetry

like a horse thief with wings on its heels.

The nightbird no longer sings

about the way it feels to lose its voice

in an aviary of half-hearted appeals

begging bird seed like begging bowls

from the dawn. Something’s gone

from the light, when you deny

a moonrise its black pearl. It’s true

that orchids bloom in the shadows

of outhouses, and waterlilies in swamps,

but if you only want the star and not

the mud its rooted in like a brain,

the shining’s tinfoil, and it never rains,

all your Chanticleers are bronchial weathervanes.

The highest, most difficult path

isn’t for petty people. The trail

isn’t well worn or warm to the touch

of your bare feet firewalking the ashes

that bite like thorns of the reflexive wavelengths

of the red shifting snakes in the aftermath

of greater spirits. Even horned reptiles

can’t fledge an arrow with scales

without first turning them into feathers.

The snake’s got to achieve its wings

if it wants to fly with oxymoronic dragon sages.

If you suffer your dismemberments

like a picket fence losing its palings,

it doesn’t say much for the lion gate.

Maybe your sacred grove

with its toxic unicorn is nothing more

than a twig of kindling and a bundle

of firewood for a homeless oil drum

cooking stolen barnyard birds

stuck in their own throats like wishbones.

It’s well known Apaches don’t pluck chickens

to make war bonnets, and it’s hard

to convince paper lifeboats on the moon

they can still float, after the captain’s

jumped ship like a plague rat in 1348

and the defection’s beginning to catch on

like a popular meme of what it really means

for a flea circus to act great and black and tragic.

Celebrity bubbles keep rising like weather balloons

until they burst with a big bang

of narcissistic mythic inflation,

parachutes tangled like Medusan jellyfish

in their own powerlines, come back down to earth,

candling like condoms, wind socks

and withered daylilies off the charts

of their heart throbs on life support

that never got over the analeptic shock

of you letting them down like a dandelion

that roared as if it had a mane and teeth

to back it up when all else failed in diaspora.

Poets into gleemen, gleemen into entertainers,

entertainers into court jesters, court jesters,

into fools, fools into idiots, idiots

into morons, morons into experts, and experts

beating on a pinata of paper wasps

like Chinese lanterns and burning box kites

that don’t yield honey or wield their tiny stingers

to tilt quixotically at windmills and real dragons.

And then come the donkeys to the well

to see the well looking back at the donkeys

like the shameless celebrities who are famous

among crows and nightingales alike

for not being able to sing even so much

as a riff of an honest lullaby to themselves,

late at night, and they’re alone, and nobody

applauds the braying of a jackass at the moon

in front of a make-up mirror in the green room.

You can go to a Grateful Dead concert

and huff laughing gas like a muse.

You can moshpit your way to the front

of the crowd elbowing other people

out of the way to a seat on the celestial omnibus

that isn’t leaving for anywhere in particular

for a couple of thousand light-years yet.

You can piss on everyone’s parade

like the golden showers of Zeus

tinkling like a horse-haired glockenspiel

on their watercolours of starmaps in the rain.

You can act as if you’re mad when you’re sane.

A nasty being with a beautiful soul.

But you take the black hole out of poetry

you’re Orphically afraid of descending into

and try to fake it like a tunnel of love,

you rob the river of the sea, the road

of its homelessness, the bloodstream of its heart,

the galaxy of the sense of direction it’s had

from the very start like a prayer-wheel

turning into the wind like a jinxed Sufi

at the crossroads of where it all begins and ends.

You take the ore away from the gold.

You take the coal away from the diamond.

You liberate the star from its dendritic chains

of black matter in the darkness, the mystery

from the occult, the history from the bloodshed,

the eyes behind the mask you wear

like a fancy poultice at a costume ball,

the arsonist from the mouth of the fire swallowers

you surround with emergency exits and alarms

and stumpy fire hydrants waiting in attendance

like an ambulance upon a fire engine,

the poison in one fang for the sake

of the antidote in the other, you’re only

milking the crescents of the moon like a snake trainer

with a bird bone flute to bite other people

without taking a risk of dying of the spit

you drink out of everyone else’s mouths

like house wells you’ve been fracking for snake oil.

You want to die a trivial death, a volcano

buried in the caldera of a firefly, flaunt

your sex appeal in front of a jealous muse sometime

and try to convince her you’re as real

as the falsies in your padded bra

you’re palming off as poems. Or cod pieces

in the dancing leotards of prosthetic anacondas.

And she’ll show you soon enough

she’s not an inflatable doll on a long shipwreck

and you’re not the swan she’s going to stick

the copulative sibilant of her neck out for, when

the the double-bladed axe comes down

like the crone phase of the moon

on a chopping block of a real fox

inside the razorwire of a chicken coup

born running from the shadows of hawks.

PATRICK WHITE

HOW MANY WAYS CAN YOU DIE IN A DAY?

HOW MANY WAYS CAN YOU DIE IN A DAY?

How many ways can you die in a day?

How many ways do you want to?

As if things had been settled once and for all.

No one to say farewell to anymore.

Grey, this anonymous day that does not

serve me well, though you can never tell.

Sometimes the worst is for the best. Fat chance.

No more excuses. No more alibis. No more

reasons for why dying seems so much

more sincere than living this waterclock

of a life constantly shooting white water rapids

without an oar or a raft when everything’s on the line.

More a drainage ditch than a device for telling the time.

Too late. Too late. Too late. No flowers in the fields.

No stars in the sky as a sign of things to come.

I look around. Circumspectly numb. Is this

wisdom, or just the calm before the storm?

All the snowmen are gone. Am I the last dolmen?

Tired the rocks. Of never having anything to build on.

Weary the air. Of this labyrinth of ins and outs.

And sad, sad, sad, this sea of oblivious awareness,

almost sweet, that accepts us as a matter of course.

The pursuit of an earthly excellence, even achieved,

isn’t much of a success in the world’s eyes.

You can hope, though I’ve come to understand

that hope like despair is often more of a curse

than a blessing. Like those little blue clearings

in a grey sky that somehow seem to make things worse.

Me? I turn to something like this poem

when I’m alone in the abyss in the absence

of any other way to exist except as a gesture

of absurdity, and maybe with no suggestion

of changing anything, an existential protest

against circumstances that progressively don’t resist

but insist nevertheless on a form of repressive tolerance.

On the principle that if I know the name

of my enemy, when my enemy is merciless,

a word, a single name, an atom, a photon of insight

is enough to empower me to transcend it.

But even that’s growing a little thin these days.

No insulation on the heart of the dragon.

No up or down to it anymore, just one long flat line

like a horizon with no rolling hills

bluing in the distance cyanotically like frost bite.

Stern the windows like moral lessons left unlearned,

grimed by the weather and the world. Real estate offices

decked out in flags as if they were the last

true nations on earth. Can’t even bury your dead

by the side of the stream where they caught minnows

in the early spring run-off every year as an excuse

to get outside, without somebody holding their hand out

pleonaxically for more and more and more.

I want to slam the coffin lid on their fingers

and make them gnaw on a crystal skull immune

to maggots. Let the maggots go hungry for awhile

and shrivel up and die like emaciated commas.

Further out at sea, ineluctably, the flood pours over me

caught up in the undertow of the providential tides

I took at the full but are now sweeping me away

like a mirage in a desert, salvage under the flying carpet

of this derelict shore. I’m somnambulistically

piloting myself through the reefs of a waking coma

and it’s better the less I feel what’s happening to me

than it is that I do. Soma sema. The body a tomb.

What could Orpheus bruised like deadly nightshade

by the glare of the unnuanced day, in for the night,

with less than he left with, possibly hope to attain,

his eyes adjusting to the darkness within, his voice

to the dread silence that wears it like a death mask,

but the right to exhume his own remains in a land

of dark jewels like the tears of the dead, without

looking back at where he’d displaced his own

prophetic head like a skull in the firepit of a moonrise?

Ably said. If the cold doesn’t go through your bones once,

how can there be apricot blossoms in the spring?

But what happens if the ice age keeps repeating?

Do these latter day dire wolves gather waiting

for the vintage blood, that tastes of fear and panic,

for a baby mammoth to thaw its way out

of a glacial crevasse that’s breaking water like a mother

that gave it the best she had without meaning to?

All these post-mature, amniotic fluids are turning to glue.

The waterclocks are slowing down. The lockmasters

have swallowed the skeleton keys of our ups and downs

like anchors in drydock. The hull of my moonboat

is being refitted with coral on the bottom, and sharks

in the nightshift cafeteria are playing ping pong

with my rudder and a fishing net in a valley of shadows

between the sundial and the sun, not one burning bridge

between here and forever, to stand on and watch

the river run between one extreme and the other

like a balanced approach to life that took the initiative

into its own hands like the ghost feeling of an amputee.

Orpheus remembered by dismembering his poetry.

What would the white-robed priests say about

exstasis then, if he ate of the little tree, the fly agaric,

amanita muscaria, ephedra, rust on the wheat, the apple,

haoma, or any one of a number herbal options,

and became as one of the gods of vulture capitalism

circling the sky burials of neolithic Turkey

where the victim is always a poor substitute

for the sacrificer? A scapegoat fattened on food stamps.

Or the ambrosia of macaroni and cheese.

O Great Artificer, explain that to me. How it

comes about that it isn’t the meat, the ram, the lamb

that reaches your nostrils, but the piety of the event?

Do we die and go to a foodbank for the poor

as unwanted at the end as we were at the beginning,

scraps off the altars of other people’s religions?

Do our bodies rise up to heaven like incense to you?

PATRICK WHITE