NOTHING MYSTICALLY INTRIGUING ABOUT
MISERY
Nothing mystically intriguing about
misery
but I do the best I can with what there
is to work with
when I’m down, when I’m blue, it’s
not azure,
it’s a stormy Prussian waiting for
the sky to clear
and array a starmap of lapis lazuli
freaked
with flecks and fuses of gold. Add a
touch of cobalt
for aerial perspective to give myself a
little space
to wander in while I remember not to
short-circuit
the tarpits in the shadows of my
depression
or under estimate what’s so
extraordinarily ordinary
about the lifemasks I’ve shucked in
the mundanity
of my middens, the museums of arcane
waste
I’ve squandered over the years like
garbage on nothing.
Just because someone drove a nail
through your eye
you keep insisting is a sliver of the
true star
might wallpaper your imagination like
Matisse
but doesn’t mean you’re a one-eyed
messiah
crucified like a Cyclops by a red hot
stake
from your own fire, or that your tears
are somehow,
because of the quality of your crying,
better aged
than New York City tapwater, or the
ensuing darkness
is necessarily prophetic. Could be a
black hole
or the heavy lift of the cast iron lid
of the total eclipse
I used to remove like a shark’s pupil
to look into
what I imagined the sun must be like on
the other side
without my eyes evaporating in the
blaze with the hiss
of water droplets falling on my
mother’s wood stove
when I was a blistering kid. Uncannily
shaped
like this archaic desk I sit at now
trying to write
my way like a counterintuitive backroad
out of hell.
The train through town is trying to
howl with the wolves
but it hasn’t got the agony for it
and I’d rather
not know where I’m going despite the
exuberance
of the gnostics who indict the same
appearances
they’re enlightened by like
apparitions in shallow mirrors
though I don’t mean anymore than they
do by it.
It’s like art, love, life, the less
you know about it
the more you’ve taken it to heart. If
the whole
is in every part of what’s been
broken, then mastery
must be as well. The human brain a
ballet of cotyledons
performing swan lake on tour rising
from the stage,
flowering out of death with the
unfurling of a leaf
with a twist to it like the turning of
a page by the wind
trying to read what it wrote behind its
own back
when no one else is looking to see what
it sowed
in arable rows of boustrophic print on
the moon.
Like thornapples and rabies, I’ve
cured my own disease
at times, with home remedies that very
seldom,
if you live through them, leave you
feeling
like the happy lunatic of a creative
psychosis
inspired by a compendium of
excruciating transformations
learning to swim hydrophobically in the
Burgess Shale
as you say to evolution, physician heal
thyself,
and somehow like a snakey faith healer
miraculously
it does by killing entire species of
itself off at a time.
Where are the fireflies in this ice fog
of nuclear winter?
Why is the moon sleepwalking with the
dead?
Who’s pulling my wishbones apart like
crutches
that nothing depends upon not even my
struggle
to wrestle with the dark angel in the
way,
the prophylactic shaitan keeping me
from
harming myself in the apprentice years
of Lucifer
fulfilling the prohibitions that were
expected of him
as my railroaded emotions walk away
with a limp?
I’m screaming for red. I’m going
through
ultra-violet withdrawals from life at
dangerous frequencies.
I’m boiling like a kid in its
mother’s milk.
Who cut the tongues out of my deaf mute
cowboy mutes
and left me nothing to say in a sign
language
not even the abysmal silence up ahead
where the road
leads me into a wilderness with keener
eyes than mine
nods, empathically, and bows its head
like a sunflower
mimicing a streetlamp and says, yes, I
think I understand.
My heart’s been torn out of my chest
like a canal root of starmud at the
hands
of a Mayan dentist pulling my back room
wisdom teeth out
like the molars of astronomical temples
he had to abandon
like the calderas of extinct volcanoes
impacted
like chimney fires of lava and creosote
on a shepherd moon
marking the cards that bluff genetic
codes into signs
of thermophilic life to prove we’re
not freakishly alone
with the dark energies of quantumly
entangled light
upstaging the dawn by clinging to the
gunwale
of a lifeboat waiting to be salvaged by
a coffin.
PATRICK WHITE
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