THE NIGHT WITH THE PERSONALITY OF AN INDELIBLE INK BLOT

THE NIGHT WITH THE PERSONALITY OF AN INDELIBLE INK BLOT

The night with the personality of an indelible ink blot

that just leaked into my pocket no doubt trying to print its own money

as a fast lane to prosperity as the dumptrucks, snowploughs, snow blowers,

front loaders raise and lower their blades and buckets

like weightlifters with a grunt and a thump, authoritatively

clean the streets of Perth like an occupation army after curfew.

Too many windows looking back at me with nothing in their eyes

but half-priced mannequins wearing black sequined dresses

like the scales of wet rat snakes anticipating the spring.

Signs of attrition everywhere, no stars, every third store

empty or on the verge of economic seppuku, two in the morning,

purged of people, I’ve lost interest in trying to befriend

the fire hydrants, garbage bags, crosswalks and traffic lights

that never stop talking about the importance of having a function in life

as a measure of human worth while I’m going incalculably mad

irradiated by too much chronic sanity hermetically sealed

in a downscale upstairs apartment like a mason jar of firefly jam

put up in the meltdown of autumn by people who know how

to look ahead to yesterday in the eternal recurrence of tomorrow.

I’m writing poetry in self defence. I’m bailing my heart out like a lifeboat

trying to stay afloat in a squall of undermining metaphors

that want to kick the stool from under my feet like the sealegs

of a man trying to drop anchor on suicide watch trying to weather it out.

Bring on the rocks. Bring on the mermaids I once heard singing to me

in an avalanche of meteors that buried my species alive.

Of what use am I when I’m the Mohican omega of my kind? I survive.

Driven out into the wilderness to live among the scapegoats and the prophets

on honey and locusts, staghorn sumac, bitter choke cherries frozen in the snow

and not even a local Salome to go dancing with every Tuesday night

before I serve my head up to her on a platter to prove she has no reason

to be jealous of the menage a quatre I’m having with the three sybillant muses

of my solitude, silence and stillness. It’s only a lyrical fling

with the freedom to despair as I please without consulting anyone

since I was nineteen. I’m beginning to look up to myself when I’m down.

Go ask the river I nose my way along like a lone bush wolf

looking for muskrat in the cattails. No waterlilies walking on water

like jumpy stars in a telescope, I can bloom like the sail on an iceboat

skimming a patina of moonlight on the thin ice of a lake about to break

like a fortune cookie with no risk averse wisdom inside. Luck

of the abyss, I guess, because necessity says when you’ve got to jump

you’ve got to jump and you’ve got to get it right seven out of ten times

if you want to live on the razor’s edge that close to your jugular.

No odds on your side but the counter-intuitive fact

you haven’t got as much to lose living on your own

as you do when someone you love is walking out the door

because she can’t be famous in your shadow or live off the superflux of nothing

like a mystic with a fat soul. But over the intervening light years

of shining over my shoulder into the dark behind me

I’ve come to appreciate the constancy of the discontinuity of love

like the ever-fixed mark of an asteroid belt as the north star of a sonnet

whose height has to be taken with a plumb bob in a dry wishing well.

As above so below. It keeps me from being embittered by the truth

after these last fifteen years in hell paying for the virtues of my youth

bleeding out like the oceans in the rose of a matador gored on the horns

of garden snails with floral sensitivities. Now I carry two swords

like the hands of a clock in the sash of a samurai

living up to the Zen code of a warrior jester with a laughable hope of delusion

and when the hour comes around again to draw straws at midnight

I emotionally eviscerate myself on the shorter blade to save face

in the long run of so much pain I have to take a short cut

through a heritage cemetery to get to where I’m going on time.

Ah, if only it were the dark, dark, dark, of another starless winter night in Perth.

And not the measure of a man opening his heart up like a pinata

to see what his life was worth after years of living dysfunctionally

like a nightwatchman in the black holes of nirvana, trying to keep the lights on

in an eyeless space with big dreams of never waking up again.

PATRICK WHITE