WILDER TIMES THAN WE THOUGHT THEY WERE IN THE MOMENT

WILDER TIMES THAN WE THOUGHT THEY WERE IN THE MOMENT

Wilder times than we thought they were in the moment,

savage intensities cultivated in the name of art,

the children of the bourgeois afraid of violating

the mystique of genius as if there were a lumpen proletariat taboo

like a magic circle drawn around it, cordons of spinal cords

at a premier of the polymorphous perverse

melting down like emotional nuclear reactors

irradiating Pleiadic insights of white phosphorus

like jelly fish trying to plug into the scene.

First magnitude stars that weren’t quite sure

whose legend they were shining in

as long as there were something Icarian about it

and infallibly tragic, as if to be destroyed by your gift

were certain proof you were a snakecharmer

with a talent dark enough to curse your own blessing

in the sacro-sanct way sacrificial heroism

is a judas-goat for the gods to coax them out of hiding.

What addictions, what madness didn’t we tolerate?

No weirdness, no twisted perversity of fate

unacceptable in order to keep up the morale among ourselves

that our own derangements were liveable humans.

Stoic sobriety with a touch of the infernally noble

as long as there were enough star power

to be derived from it extemporally to fool yourself

you’d been to hell, you’d conversed with the gibbering ghosts

in the underworld, and now you were ascending from Hades,

empty-handed, except for an abalone inlaid guitar,

a voice, a repertoire of songs you used to sing

from coast to coast like a ghost at your own seance,

or if you were a poet, three books under your boa skin belt

like wampum, a wounded heart channeling Horatian odes

to staunch the bloodflow like a hemorrhage of fire.

We lived as if we were always spitting into the face

of librarians moved by poetry enough to write about

making raspberry jam in their amazingly savoury kitchens

and that wasn’t very right or nice of us, regardless

of whether they deserved it or not, but it would be

less than frank not to admit how alarming it would be

not to be able to muster a cobra of spit the same way now

to punish the eyes of the snake-oil salesmen

with a taste of their own medicine for fouling

the housewells of the muses with all that bleach and brine

they scour their poems with as if they were keel-hauling them

on the hull of the moon out of fear of drinking

from the same skull cup as everyone else on the nightshift

deep in the mines of their starmud working with

a candle and canary to bring the occasional jewel to light,

out of fear of getting some life under their fingernails

or contaminating their lips with human elixirs.

At least we killed like tigers, not tapeworms,

though needless to say, because that’s the way the world is,

we did more damage to ourselves trying to stand out

like someone real from the mob of the middling and maudlin

to suffer the black farce of our former radiance

lightyears later in this ventriloquial dawn

where wooden dummies have mastered the art

of throwing their heartwood around like the voices

of decoy waterbirds in front of a hunter’s blind

trying to bring the words of those who can fly

down to their level of poultry and pettiness.

Every quarter asked, every quarter given,

a disastrous expression of compassion,

but when you’re trying to live with largesse

as if you had a soul that was more mammal than reptile

of course you’re going to err on the side of generosity,

your winged horse spurred on by pussywillows and burrs

until you’re thrown off by a star under your saddle,

the dupe of your own unaccountable gesture

as you ride off into the sunset with Don Quixote

feeling like Sancho Panza tilting at the futility

of counter clockwise windmills on lifelight savings time.

Too many swine. Too few pearls unwilling to be trampled

like the grapes of wrath getting indignantly drunk on us.

Don’t offer your tears and sacred oils to someone

with a drinking problem. Though I encourage you

to ignore my advice so you can be what I mean for yourself.

Incandescent ingratitude. As if genius

took its tragic lifemask off, stepped out of its skin,

tore the curtains off the windows like the northern lights

and showed you the blackhole of the ego in the spider web

that spun a myth of origin like a starmap that knew

only a few chords and barred its Fs as an excuse for music

that maintained the world began with an arachnid

but kept that fact hid from the frenzy of friends

around the streetlamp of a public image on the radio.

Ego. That paper dragon that likes to play with matches

creatively, a brush dipped in paint, a nib in blood

that flared up like a bouquet of sulphurous little chapbooks

straining to convince you their personality is black magic

once you get past the alibi of words that smack

of saccharine and formic acid, ants and stinging nettles,

and taste how shallow and unclever a cynical lack

of sensitivity to things ego doesn’t understand is,

to that mess of neurotic avarice that sticks like gum

that’s lost its flavour in the tresses of a flypaper muse

as it lackadaisically strums the guitar like a Ferrari

warming up, to disguise the fact, if you go by the work,

it can’t really play and the wheel hasn’t been invented for it yet.

Dramatic brawls at midnight, out on the street,

at the top of our lungs, embodiments of nemetic karma

defending principles willing to settle the score here and now

if you were crazy, drunk, or daring enough to risk

losing more than you ever had or intended to give

to substantiate your reality with fists that would later bloom

like bruised crocuses and waterlilies lyrically inclined

to deadly nightshade and moody orchids in an eclipse.

But most edged the Texas toe of their cowboy boot

up to an unseen line drawn in the stars like a Tropic of Capricorn,

that said for all your talk of figs and horns, a coward

goes this far and no further for self-preservative reasons

that have been canning him like jam since childhood.

More than one night I lay in the dark sobering up,

proofreading my name in the sooty contrails

of bic lighters on the ceilings of Ottawa city jails,

Orphically exalted to have left my mark

in an underworld anthology that didn’t depend

on a political jury of friends who elected things into print

as if they were pensioning off candidates for the senate

with two free copies, fifteen minutes max

at a mass reading, a minute on the local news

and enough notoriety to incrementally con

a few more false friends they might have been

wrong about you, and accordingly adjust

their parallactic affiliation with your twinkling.

My elders, the ghosts of older owls, the afterlives

of stars that had burnt out romantically on alcohol,

who spoke like legends of themselves in a refugee camp

for broken chandeliers and abused constellations

performing off Broadway like the loveletters of a mailman

who delivered them like the wind in a tree in the autumn,

since imprinted like the cambium of last year’s spring

in the hall of famous tree rings that have stopped growing.

Honoured with urns. But for awhile, precociously,

peers of mine, fish dying of thirst beside a freshwater lake,

artificial respirators crying out for back-up parachutes

because they thought it was poetically cute

to always be the one who was rescued from themselves.

Ego grease. Black farce of a circus on tour

with drugstore carnies, clutching at straws

like the rungs of a trapeze someone was always

falling from like a star you caught and put in your pocket

like a safety net that counted on your friends’ sense of timing

to save you from your own web like the spindle you made of fate.

Metamorphic larvae in the coffins and cocoons,

the lifeboats and chrysales these shepherd moons

moved into as if they were on a grand tour of the zodiac.

Pageants of wrecked talent showing up like queens

of stage and screen, who adorn your table

by letting you sit at it with them below the salt like a foodbank

as they told you lies about the famous fireflies

they used to cavort with like radical root fires.

Memories of the last literary scene I ever wanted to be in,

eyeless images of overcast dreams, the business

of art spinning the lack of imagination into

some tear drop of a bauble for public consumption

that made evaporation look deep by comparison.

Treacherous metaphors. Nasty similes

that thought they were teaching you a moral lesson

through petty betrayals of the trust you placed in them

against your better judgement, only to ignore

with Olympian indifference the kind of dung heap wisdom

that tried to disenchant you from ever trusting your likeness

in another again like the alienable bonds of mutual opportunism.

Old men now, many dead at the hands of their vices,

nine dog paddlers for every synchronized swimmer, prima ballerinas

that could really write and paint, sing and dance once,

crucible steel hammering out the slag of their impurities

like sparks that shone for a moment like starclusters

that hung in the air and then disappeared

into the great reservoir of one-eyed mirrors.

I can remember when that bag lady was a rose.

I can recall when his charm partially concealed and compensated

for what is so obviously feeble about him now

as he waxes mellifluously nostalgic, trying to squeeze

a drop of honey out of his stinger like the good old days

when he used to hang himself from the green boughs

and dead branches of poetry like a pinata of killer bees

coming on like a kite or Black Hawk sneakers tangled

like bolas and medicine bags in personably contemporary powerlines

you can still hear humming and hissing

like a red shifting snakepit gone long in the tooth

whenever it rains on the ashes of a smouldering guitar

trying to serenade the moon under her Medusan window.

PATRICK WHITE