THE CATASTROPHIC INSIGHT

THE CATASTROPHIC INSIGHT

The catastrophic insight. The black hour

on the widow’s back, spirit of ice-picks,

and my blood, my nerves, split ends

of red lightning freaking my flesh

with burning rivers of fire that clings

like tar and creosote to the shrieking skin

as if sound could be cold, silence so mad

peace is a high pitched truce between wars

coiled like the mainspring of a chromosome

in a wind-up alarm clock mistaken for the heart.

Moments of aggressive impersonality,

angry houseflies electrocuting the window

with black power surges in their downed powerlines

as they die on the windowsill, the exhausted words

of some black dwarf of a world that imploded

on itself, baffled and betrayed by the sky

that one day out of the blue, just said no to the light,

no to the houseflies, no to the broken neck of the wren

against a brittle mirage of motiveless clouds

that wrote their names on a black list

that denied them their alienable rites of passage.

Vicious carbon of martyred scarecrows

who insisted they were the favourites of God,

after walking in the brilliant starfields

among the resurgent lyrics of the wildflowers,

I can sense the emergence of mini blackholes

sinking my solar system like eight balls

in a pocket too deep to be retrieved from.

I gnash at nothing as if there were an immaculate intent

behind the brutal venality of random circumstance.

I’m restrained by a straitjacket of killer bees

like a gamma ray burst of toxic thought-waves

that don’t mean anything more than the usual extinction

but reek like the post mortem effects of a curse.

Even an abandoned house that’s burnt to the ground

can give shelter to the sacred syllables

of the song birds that used to sing

from its green rafters like the boughs of my bones

before my mouth was stuffed with ashes like the urn

of the asmatographer I was last week before

I was scalded in this acid bath of a dream fever

that revels without joy in the perverse glee

of disillusioning my will to fight for life

by whispering to me like the chorus line of a snakepit,

you may be strong, you may be immunological fit,

but there’s a limit to how many times you can be bit

and not succumb to the delirious radiation of the melt down.

When your dream of amelioration turns on you

like a pet python in your sleep and presses itself

like a pillow full of fledgling flightfeathers into your face

and says the more you try to believe you can fly

the more I’ll swallow you whole in a single gulp

like that vast sky and all those stars you keep lit

like a nightwatchman of lighthouses and fireflies

along the shipwrecked coasts of your consciousness

deluded by the radiance of their rescue and warning,

the beauty of life and light stepping out of the dark

as if mind were the happy exception to the undeniable

and not the rule as perilous hope wilts like a flower

of crazy wisdom in the eyes of an ailing fool.

And I shall reply, as I do now in this poem

from the deepest watersheds of my volcanic solitude

because I’ve been alienated from the surface

all my life, let despair do what it must. I’m sick

of cringing like a bubble in the shadow of its thorns.

I’ll fly like a cinder of a dragon in the eye of a hurricane.

I shall enlist an army of heretics and lead them

in a holy war against recalcitrant hypocrites

who haven’t got the imagination to stand up

for their wardrobes and personas when depression

pulls the plug on the applause of their pollsters.

Being true has got nothing to do with being right.

Though the road I’m on be trampled

into a bog of starmud and snapping turtles

pull my wild constellations down like swans and eagles

I’ll remain shining as sidereally

as a blade of mystically surrealistic stargrass.

I’ll make a faith of my spite, a religion

of all the most cherished mistakes I’ve made

believing in life as the most inspired child of the light.

Though spurs of razorwire cut the tendons of my winged heels

I’ll morph into a clubfoot dancing with fireflies

in the condemned ball room of a homeless starmap

and I won’t think twice about the worth of the sacrifice.

Even when death holds its dress sabre

up to my jugular like the last crescent of the moon,

I’ll remain the unkempt buffoon of my upbeat futility

and smile like an eclipse in face paint as if

I knew something absurdly wise about being alive it didn’t.

PATRICK WHITE