YOU CAN TELL BY THE BURNT OUT HALOES

YOU CAN TELL BY THE BURNT OUT HALOES

You can tell by the burnt out haloes and copper moondogs

around the match head pupils of her eyes

she’s been digging deep black holes

like a star-nosed mole a graveyard for the fireflies

gathering like a starmap of the extinct creation myths

of dead relatives at the end of a long dark tunnel

she doesn’t recognize anymore except as camouflage

for the ghosts of the lives she disguises for the living

not wanting to violate the innocence of their lies.

She nurses a darkness inside like a tumulus of petro-coke.

There’s no gold in the ore of her suffering, no blood

in the rock. Medusa’s been writing her memoirs

in glacial runes on her heart, and the ashes

of her loveletters read like the hollow urns

of charred dovecotes she’s scattered like the cinders of crows.

I can remember when she was a Pythian oracle

at Delphi, the new moon of a high priestess

alluring as a pole dancer in a snakepit at a strip joint

not this lunar crone who keeps her secrets to herself.

Queen of a street that’s grown so numb to its outrage

it isn’t nearly enough to be merely brutal anymore,

she didn’t get those fangs at a needle exchange.

First crescent kills and the last if she feels like it

heals. She doesn’t dance to the green bough

of a flute the way she used to like a moonrise

of music in the east, but if you make a firestick

of a dead willow branch, sometimes you can see

the ice crack under your feet like a wry smile

of winter on her face thawing out the longer wavelengths

of the knotted snakes in her heartwood. Love shrieks

what it used to whisper clear as a broken mirror.

And the veins of the roses have collapsed like rivers

in a map of the Sahara. She shoots the silver bullet

of an hourglass syringe like a sniper in the desert alone

under her tongue like passage through the slums of the dead.

And all her sacred syllables have gone into exile

like ostrakons she’s given up trying to slash her wrists on.

And her children despise her like a tarpit

on the dark side of their blood and she hardly

seems to care anymore whether they think of her

as prey or predator. She doesn’t have her stomach pumped

for prophets in the belly of a whale anymore

when she comes up for air like a moon with no atmosphere

she can’t cling to for long like a bubble in her bloodstream.

She’s Algol hanging like a bloody chandelier

from the hand of Perseus swinging his trophy like a bell

of depression era glass. And, yes, she’s ugly now,

hallucinogenic as a toad you’d have to lick

like the back of a stamp or the blood seal

on a loveletter to a wax museum. And if you were

to paint the agony of seeing like a tormented soul

that’s weathered her eyes on the widow walk

of a haunted lighthouse, you’d have to do it in encaustic

by a votive candle with a wick of serpent fire

that used to burn like Draco at both ends

among the dragons of desire that wrote her name

in lights that have shadowed her for the rest of her life.

What she knows about being on the receiving end

of human beings with nothing to give to an outcast

would bleed your eyes of the light like leeches

clinging to a vision of life like a scapegoat for the tribe,

smallpox among the natives, infected

by the blanket you committed sexual genocide under

relying on the immunity of your feigned innocence

to protect you as if God were on your side

as you drove her out into the wilderness

like a beautiful wound that came back

in a deathmask of scabby scar tissue to mock you

as if you could ever have made love to a thing like that.

And suddenly you seem uglier than original sin itself.

PATRICK WHITE