WAIT. WAIT. WAIT FOR IT TO COME

WAIT. WAIT. WAIT FOR IT TO COME

Wait. Wait. Wait for it to come,

the mad folly of my creative destruction.

Bleak the flowers in this ruinous garden

and my psyche speaking in tongues

like gates someone left open banging in the wind.

Bring on the storm. Uproot the lightning.

I will not run. I’ll stand here steadfast

as an amputated stump in this open field

with a ghostly feeling I can grow my arms back

like a faith healer sitting like Stonehenge

in solstitial silence at the last broken window

snarling at the fixed stars that keep drifting

in and out of the asylum like a seance of fireflies

that’s turned into an angry mob

looking for stars to martyr for not taking

their fanatical starmaps as literally as they do.

I’m an heretical astrologer tied to the axis mundi

of my own imagination. I read my doom,

cowled in candlelight like the skull of the full moon

scrying the entrails of a wounded bull

garlanded in laurels like a loveletter to the gods.

My end without exit. My beginning without a door.

My backbone bent like a rafter from shouldering

this dance floor that’s crippled me for life.

Should I paint my skin blue? Should I get a tattoo?

Should I carve a more fashionable deathmask

out of my heartwood and learn to lie like a man

acquainted with the truth? Should I go into battle naked

like a beserker sporting his own vulnerability

in the face of an enemy outraged by the insult?

I’m beating on a pinata of killer bees.

I’m cauterizing my nerves with the synaptic

welder’s arcs of the stars until I’m numb as an alloy

of water and blood at the point of a sword

that’s about to cut my throat like a ouija board

that’s run out of answers and alibis for everything.

I’m jester to the divine sense of humour

of a moody goddess trying to decide if she’s a crone

or a nymph. Too late for autumn. Too early for spring.

She falls through the cracks of time

like an old age pensioner. She is the muse

that takes the new moon from under my tongue

and throws it like a penny into a wishing well.

Good luck. I’m done. I’ve worn my bones out

like dice in a gambling den long enough.

Seven come eleven or snake-eyes,

it’s all come around like Russian roulette to me.

I’m dissipating my intensity in the supernal immensities

that don’t give a damn whether I exist or not.

The hurricane’s out of the aviary. The singing-master’s

dropped out of the choir of crows of the black mass

in the ashes of the infidels cherishing the leftover relics

in the sacred shrines of their fire pits, surrounded

by the boundary stones of their spiritual opulence.

I’m tired of mistaking a faithless face in a broken mirror

as an ultimate insight into life. There’s nothing orthodox

about a labyrinth of cul de sacs. Nothing infernal

about a scapegoat driven out into the wilderness

by the sins of the tribe to graze on burning bushes.

I’ve read the gnostic allegory of my life

to loose-lipped interpreters in burning libraries

all over this country from one coast to the next

without being hexed like a nightbird

by their symbolic superstitions. And I’ve listened

for vital signs of life in neglected cemeteries

where no one’s making love on the graves

to tempt the silence out of hiding its genius

like a birthmark under the headstone

of a prophetic paperweight with no voice of its own

to speak of were the wind not a shepherd of leaves

looking for greener pastures for its lost sheep.

I’ve done it right. Nothing less than everything

all the time. I’ve kept it all together like a night sky

that goes on forever like a crow with an eye

to the shining. I fletched my eyebeams like arrows

with the feathers of ospreys to bring down the stars

like messenger pigeons of the light with rumours of home.

I’ve broken the seal of my blood, like a scab on the moon,

or the immaculate sunspot of my word, to liberate

the mystic singularities at the bottom of a black hole

that promised them a better life on the other side

and hung a lantern in the tunnel of an oncoming thought train

that knew it could, knew it could, knew it could,

but didn’t. What more could you ask, what

moiety of my life hasn’t been devoted to the absurdity

of conducting sky burials in an orbiting observatory?

I’ve sung for my supper, sex, money, fame and meaning.

I’ve raised my voice like an axe on behalf

of people on the receiving end of the stick

and I’ve brought my winged heels down hard

on the skulls of slack snakes on railway tracks

when it became clear as an X-ray to me

they weren’t fledgling dragons and the babies

were as toxic as the adults. Retreads on black asphalt,

most of their books, shedding their skins

as if they were laying rubber on well published roads

lined with critical road kill. Everybody underestimating

the monstrosity of a mythically inflated ego

with the mass of a black dwarf that’s imploded

on itself like the withered daylily of a weather balloon.

Imagine the rapture of frogs in the rain

blissed out on the highbeams that will crush them

like chocolates with strawberry hearts.

And everybody grieves like a sieve

for the mystic mishaps of the lesser vehicle

But poetry isn’t a joy ride for petty thieves,

and there are dangerous hitch-hikers, thumbs up

on the backwoods highways at night out in the starfields

poaching the horns of unicorns to sell on a black market

that doesn’t believe one miracle’s ever enough.

I may have been eclipsed by my own enlightenment,

but I can still shine. I radiate. I emanate. Every meteor’s

got its radiant. And there are always stars in a poet’s eyes

he hasn’t got around to naming yet like diamonds in the rough.

My life might ring as hollow as an empty silo,

and yet I’m fulfilled. I’m ripe as the red end

of the spectrum, a windfall in the Hesperides,

all flavours of the lifesavers in the sunset.

My fear hasn’t aged. My grief. My love. My imagination.

Strange recollections from dissonant hours,

I regret having mismanaged the retroactive exorcism,

of my childhood, but things get better the less they matter.

Even a shipwreck on the moon has oceanic powers

over the way the waters of life ride out the storm.

I take liberties with chaos and risk more than I have to lose,

bracing for the fall with an incommunicable form of the blues

that reconciles me to the unattainable by revealing

what’s most human about me isn’t a still life with apple piety,

not what I excelled at, but the bruise I achieved when I fell.

PATRICK WHITE