WHAT AN IMPASSE, QUIET MOMENT, COME TO THIS

WHAT AN IMPASSE, QUIET MOMENT, COME TO THIS

What an impasse, quiet moment, come to this

deeper than a bell in the dead of winter. Grime

on the grey windows as if I were living inside

a sooty lantern, consuming the flesh of my body

in fire that will make me indelibly invisible

for generations to come, to each, the prelude of a ghost

that produced abundantly out of nothing

windfalls of the imagination that shook me like a tree.

I lived like a slag heap of ore for the sake of the jewels within.

Amino acids in a meteor with a genome

falling out of the abyss like a star you could wish upon

and risk getting what you really wanted

though you weren’t honest or courageous enough

to believe it at the time. Starwheat for the soul,

bread massaged by human hands, black pearls

with the lustre of a thousand new moons

you’d forgotten about your life, the dark beginnings

of something splendid that died inside of you

like creosote on the chimney pipes that creaked

like the arthritic boughs of tin trees in a firestorm.

The snow outside draped over the phantoms of buildings

like ragged cotton dust covers over the furniture

of the abandoned town as if the owners

always intended to come back one day. Time

squatting on the property like juniper and thornapple

in an overgrown field returning the way it came

like a prodigal that made it home lightyears too late.

Leafless municipal trees stripped of their legends.

I know more about being alone at night

than the moon does when everyone’s asleep

grinding their teeth like millstones geared

to the endless waterwheels of their mindstreams

going round and round without a stop, a top

or a bottom as if it were crucial to be homogenous.

Everyone trying to stand out in the crowd

like a retinal response to the black hole

in the middle of their moondog iris like a pupil

they’ve never put up to their eye to look through.

Witching the abyss for water with branch lightning

is a much more dangerous calling for wizards

that have more in common with solitary dragons

than they do with the scintillant eyebeams

of magic wands chirping in fountains of stardust

that spring out of the optic fibres of whatever

they look upon, like a rosary of dew lying

about the death trap of the spider web it’s ensnared by

in the false dawn of a mandala that makes

everyone feel better by lulling them with the opioids

of the lotus-eaters who never got off the island

to see how vast and exhilarating the sea of life truly is.

When the starmaps stop at the edge of your eyes

and you’re not disobedient enough to cross the threshold

you eventually die in a cul de sac of sticky constellations.

Shore-huggers in the tidal pools of your stagnant tears.

No need to go to a war of lenses over it. The karma’s

as instantaneous as the charismatic depravity

of the electromagnetism of your name. One day

when you’ve donated it like a black walnut

to scientific research lab for tax deductible lobotomies

someone’s going to cut deep into the sweetmeat

of your brain, to see what you thought about life,

and what it was like to live for the stain

of a little bit of fame so wholly indoctrinated

like a polyp into a tradition of dead coral,

you gave up thinking lyrically about life and light

in words, and began, at the behest of a patented gene,

expressing it wholly in a grammar of corporate logos.

Fashionably unreal as the Cambrian outbreak of icons

for Exxon and Monsanto, Shell and Microsoft in

in the auto-hagiography of your Burgess Shale.

If the spirit of making a gift of a gift within you is dead,

I suppose the only recourse you have left

for the corpse you’re passing off as the real you,

is a deal and a sale and the hysterical jealousy

you can arouse like a muse in an escort service for that.

A cosmetic surgeon playing Pygmalion with his Botox wife,

not a healer that ever brought anyone back to life

by transfiguring the shape of the universe they dwell in

by reminding them it only takes a little bit of starmud

aged in their tears to mould a face of their own

to the reflection of the infinite spaces contained

by their hearts and minds, eyes, smiles, and grimaces

perfectly fitted to human flesh and blood and skin

like a mirror that looks at them from the inside

to determine the colour of their eyes,

by what they’ve seen, what they’ve dreamed

what they’ve lived for, what they’ve loved,

and what they haven’t dared to look upon before

with a passion so intensely perennial and clear

it will be their eyes that will go out of fashion

long before the stars ever realize that what

breaks out of the darkness into light above

finds the source of its shining looking up at them

from down below and gauges the lifespan

of the radiance of their seeing and depth of being

by how many new moons and lightyears ago since that last was.

PATRICK