STUPEFIED LIKE THE MOON THAT STAYED IN THE RING TOO LONG

STUPEFIED LIKE THE MOON THAT STAYED IN THE RING TOO LONG

Stupefied like the moon that stayed in the ring too long

and took one too many blows to the heart as the knees

of the Pillars of Hercules are beginning to buckle and my legs

have turned to rubber but nothing’s bouncing back

like a lacrosse ball banked off my prophetic skull

like a wake up call in a game of billiards

nobody’s put any spin on, chalking their pool cues

as if they were standing in front of a blackboard

like a long shot everybody’s betting on

to pocket the eight ball in the far left blackhole.

Alarming as it was at first, I find myself slipping into

the occasional bubble once and awhile like

an alternative universe, and just sitting there

staring back at the world numb as the lens

of a glass third eye embedded in the rosette

of a plaster hurricane. A bit catatonic,

and if not a peaceful recess from the world

as if it were something I were dying to get back to,

at least a truce to gather up the dead like roadkill.

No opinion, judgement, reason, word, or rapture

of blissful ignorance and miserable wisdom,

Neither empty nor full at either end of the hourglass,

feels as if I’ve sat here on my lotus for a thousand years

like a meteoric foundation stone with a Martian lichen

for a brain, as if that were as far as the Rover got,

and Curiosity would just have to go it alone from here.

Cul de sacs, dead ends, and wombs, moments out

of time when you put your starmap down like a sketchbook

and stop looking for your likeness among the stars

as if things couldn’t get any stranger than they already are.

Is this ageing? Is this some kind of spiritual Benz

breaking effervescently like nitrogen bubbles

in my blood like a moonrise that came up

from the depths of its own dead seas too fast

like the great white whale heading for the Pequod?

No one ever really knows until it’s way too late.

O, Mama, tell me again about the future I dreamed

of having before I was awakened by a world

that got in my way like a gatekeeper demanding

obols and boar’s tusks minted from gold dust

I panned on the moon to watergild my deathmask,

especially the part about living up to my own

expectations in life. Haven’t I stood my ground,

starmud caked to a rootless tree, never

taken my eye off that star that’s been wandering

beside me all these lightyears, leaving firepits

in its wake it’s made out of the crowns of the thorns

in the locust trees burning at their own stakes?

Consumed in the auto de fes of distant starlight breaking

through the pyres of dead branches it’s placed

like a laurel around the feet of a lighthouse in a desert

firewalking its own lunar mirages of oceanic consciousness,

did I not light a candle in a shrine of unconsecrated sky burials

following creation myths of their own making

as if they were breaking trail for offroad zodiacs

instead of going by the book and covering their tracks

like a life in the shadows of posthumous pyromaniacs?

PATRICK WHITE