PSYCHOBABYLON WOULDN'T TRADE ONE REAL STAR

PSYCHOBABYLON WOULDN’T TRADE ONE REAL STAR

PsychoBabylon wouldn’t trade one real star of his implausibility in

for the smallest flake of that tinfoil spiritual life you’re passing off

as an iron pyrite cure all. PsychoBabylon knows the serenity of the dragons

who’ve learned to make peace with their own fires

even when they’re bringing the rain to temper the swords

they forged in hell to kill people back into life

who’ve stuffed their pillows with too many feathers

and not enough scales to be credible even to the shadows they cast,

not to speak of the torment they put their dreams through

trying to divine and sign them like a message from the dead

for their eyes only. PsychoBabylon suppley practises

a discipline of subtle tenderness and recurrent doubt

in the face of his ambiguous revelations of what it’s all about.

PsychoBabylon might tilt at the hull with the mast of his moonboat

from time to time, thinking he’s whaling with the Kwakiutl,

but he doesn’t turn his lions loose on the blackflies of insinuation

knowing their prowess depends as much upon

the quality of their enemies as it does their friends.

And surely it’s the folly of flowers and stars that have led him

to certain incongruous conclusions about life that constitute

enough of a starmap of independence to go his own way

like a rogue planet sustained by the dark abundance

of his own homelessness as if every orbit he jumped

like the looping threshold of the mystery of life discharged

another photon of light on the black matter of space and time at hand.

PsychoBabylon would rather light candles and fireflies in the abyss

with his incendiary insights than blow them out

with the kiss of a fraudulent angel who traded her harp in

for a fire-extinguisher foaming at the mouth like a rabid cloud

to smother the protected species of hell in the first snowfall

of a nuclear winter. PsychoBabylon doesn’t demonize

the third man on the match for smoking in No Man’s Land

in front of a firing squad looking for scapegoats as a way

out of the irreconcilable dilemmas that keep breaking them

like wishbones and the horns of the lapis lazuli bull harps

strung between the crescents of the moon like spider webs

disguised as dreamcatchers apprenticed to Venus fly traps.

Sick people go to hospital. Bad people go to church.

PsychoBabylon heads out to the woods by himself with a noose

as often as he does a telescope. He risks a wary kindness

toward everything he sees, and even more excruciatingly

he doesn’t replace the thorns of the wild rose bush

with the fangs of the rattlesnake coiled under it

that struck him in his throat in the middle of a song of longing

like a rat snake in the nest of a nightbird whose blood

has just turned to moon rock in a transfusion of toxins

to counteract the mystic elixirs of his enlightened lunacy.

If you can’t hold the prophetic skull of the moon

in your own two hands by now, without fretting it

into foretelling a lie, PsychoBabylon blues his view of you

in the aerial perspective of his compassionate distance

as the victim of your own siege works when you’re the first

to start throwing stones at the windows of your own crystal palace

because where there used to be chandeliers of stars

radiant enough to open up the chakras of the dead

now there’s nothing but a mobile of swords above your head

and all the tongues of serpent fire you split like cedar shakes

to go witching for enlightenment in your celestial watershed

are now swimming on a different wavelength like a holy book

someone read in passing, and like a folder of soggy matches

that smouldered, but never flared, threw into a cosmic ditch

along with the angelic road kill and the rest of the spiritual junkmail.

PATRICK WHITE