MY WORDS TASTE OF THE FLAVOURS OF THE LIVES I'VE LIVED

MY WORDS TASTE OF THE FLAVOURS OF THE LIVES I’VE LIVED

My words taste of the flavours of the lives I’ve lived.

I cauterize my wounds on the stars. Runes, cuneiform,

scars, I’ve even found a way to use spiderwebs

like the fridge magnets of an exoteric alphabet.

Everything’s written in sand, in water, on the wind.

In the cursive script of the Kufic treeline. So many leaves.

So many mother tongues. Ciphers of the nightcreek

whispering to itself sleepwalking through the woods.

I may hold flowers now, and the fragrances of petunias

and coleus waft down the street, polluting the carbon monoxide,

but my heartwood, though scorched, is still steeped

in the firewater of a whiskey barrel I was once

keel-hauled over like the hull of the moon for being

a drunken sailor absent without leave. I indulged

my madness in the spirit of a dragon that couldn’t

hold anything back. I didn’t smoulder like a man

who expected to be the victim of an adage, I burned.

In the perfection combustion of my inspiration

I left no soot on the wings of the discoloured butterflies.

Sincerity was wild and angry, sacrificially cruel,

the sacred thorn that rent the third eye of the rose.

If you weren’t living and dying as ferociously as you could,

you were a fool. An inquisitor with a dunce cap

in the corner, or a balancing act with a fear of heights

with your head in a noose and your feet firmly planted

on a two-legged footstool. Sorry for the roar

of overconfidence, of course, I am, most of it was bluff,

but it seemed like a necessity at the time

and a lunatic’s got to do what lunacy does

to renew its blood oath to the moon on the edge

of a sword it pulled out of the stone of its own heart.

It wasn’t about eviscerating the living on the altars of art.

It was a severe initiation into my own estrangement

into the occult mysterion of poetry that makes you feel

more unworthy the deeper it enters your bloodstream

like a dream of darkness and stars, as you bond

like a blowtorch or a comet welding your eyes

to the darkness and the stars as a rift in your skull

opens like an observatory on a lonely mountain

to the immense intensity and solitude of it all

and your mouth is pryed apart by the voice

of a wound as old as inchoate creation itself.

I look into the abyss, watershed, void, dark abundance,

bright vacancy of the emptiness ahead of me

as space accelerates locally into a starless night

and I haven’t blinked yet at the darkness growing inside

like a new moon burying the bones of its dragons

at a sky burial under the gravestone of a constellation

shining like the ashes of a firepit you won’t find

with the aid of a starmap, and I wouldn’t call it

a change of attitude, or the recantation of a false confession

I never made to ease the torment of my mean-eyed inquisitors,

(they never had a clue about what to ask me anyway)

but I approach the genius of my left-handed solitude

with more gratitude than I once did, and my sense of wonder,

though it never put on airs, gapes in humility

at the gravegoods that grace the wake of this horrific beatitude.

PATRICK WHITE