LIKE THE HEADSTONE OF THE MOUNTAIN COMING DOWN

LIKE THE HEADSTONE OF THE MOUNTAIN COMING DOWN

Day four: any typos or complaints should be immediately

referred to the exhausted management. lol

Like the headstone of the mountain coming down

like the avalanche of a deposed crown

into the grave of the valley that’s been dug for it

like a housewell in the watershed of a mindstream

flowing on in the degenerating orbit of a Perseid meteor shower

replete with a potential extinction event heading for the Gulf of Mexico.

Like numbered ping pong balls at a cosmic church playing Bingo.

I’m trying to spike the punch bowl with a little laughter

in these wine dark seas I’m adrift on like a drunk sailor

in the depths of all these sweet, sweet tears whether

they’re black or white, empty as the farce of a sacred clown

or full as the hidden harvest in the body of a new moon.

Who cares at this point whether it’s an sos or an lol?

One is a good as the other for a last call sign

from a shipwreck with an oxymoronic sense of humour

laden with a cargo of farewells like a heart with a pulse

of cosmic ups and downs. Steady state or expanding

like space faster than light in a race of accelerating dark energy

to get to an unknown destination no one’s ever heard of before

like the leftover Shangri La of a spiritual ghost town

with an overgrown garden out back seeded with dragon’s teeth.

If tears do more good for the living than the dead,

I doubt if a little laughter in the mix of underground rivers

is going to do much harm to the way we get out of our minds

like angels slumming in the demonic nightclubs of paradise.

When you’re as crazed as I am sometimes the only way

you can sober up is by splashing a prayerful of

counter-intuitive wisdom in your face as if you were

about to meet a dark, dark mother of a goddess at a barn dance.

Let the picture music rip, let it rip, let it rip as if it

were only the cosmic backbeat of rock and roll

with an occasional rim shot on a heady full moon

as if its eyes had just fallen out of the sockets of a skull

full of love like the crown jewels of the comets from a dark halo.

Let’s dance moondogs around the sun and roam

like a pack of wild street angels patched by rainbows

in black leather like a covenant in a turf war we made

like sunspots with the maculate shining we made to midwife

the rebirth of the sun rising over the lunar mountain tops

and sealed with a blood oath running in our veins

like a mindstream rowing like a one-winged royal lifeboat

merrily, merrily, like a pageant of black swans on the Thames

of a terrifying dream that ends like a nightmare we’ve

just been woken up from in time to realize it never ends

as we go over the precipitous waterfalls like a waterclock

that’s lost sense of what hour it is like Thelma and Louise

laughing in glee at the liberating thrill of the descent

like a jump school for dandelion seeds learning to pack

their own parachutes out of the rags and bandages

they cut out of the death shroud of Turin like

the crumpled bedsheets of poetical mummies in love.

Let’s all fall together like a mammoth hunt toward paradise that’s just

discovered they can fly like Dumbo the elephant

by the wings of their ears riding the thermals of picture music

like a new mutation of a red-tailed hawk on the rosary of chromosomes

making wheelies on the double helix of our dna

like the bead of a new moon that’s just been added

like a sacred nickname for love we’ve been empowered by,

the secret of the dark mystery we could never keep to ourselves

not even now as we’re staring into oblivion when you would think

we would learn to shut up and stop laughing as we’re putting

these lucky pennies of past full moons on the eyelids of a death mask

that’s beginning to look more and more like us waxing and waning,

ebbing and neaping like the pulse of lunar tide in a skull cup

of sorrow and joy like a lava flow of new islands and lifeboats

on the flatlining plains and coronation calderas on the Sea of Tranquility.

As if we all wanted to be buried in a cremation of bones

on a pyre of nightskies with all our spurs, crowns, dancing shoes and boots on

like the stairwells in the whirling castles of stars in Corona Borealis

where the elephants that never forget go to die in a Celtic graveyard of stars.

Laughing like kids sliding down the bannisters of some kind

of crazy-wise afterlife in their wake and living and loving

the ride so much they can’t wait to rise from their graves like the moon

from the madness of their dreams and nightmares and do it all again

as if they left just enough of the door of a total eclipse ajar

to let the light in like Bailey’s beads shining through the valleys

of the mountains that toppled into them like a cult

of truant grave robbers playing hookey from the wheel

of life and death they’ve been chained to for awhile,

and not wasting a moment of the Ixionic joy of it.

We danced our way in through the entrance to life

and though we’re less innocent than we used to be

let’s treat death with the same respect, and dance

our way out through the exit if we can. Impress Nietzsche

in chaos if that’s possible, cheer him up a bit: yes, we gave birth to a dancing star,

we didn’t squander the dark mother’s fire womb behind all this,

we didn’t waste it on anything less than poetic ecstasy

from beginning to end. We blooded our abstractions

and made a friend of every hungry ghost we ever danced with

until they were made of flesh and bone like us again,

fallible visionaries trying not to step on anyone’s toes

like a mountains of compassion grinding it out like strippers in a mosh pit.

Yes, our lives were an open book. Nothing to hide. And we were born with the eyes for it.

PATRICK WHITE