UNLIKELIEST OF INCLINATIONS

UNLIKELIEST OF INCLINATIONS

Unlikeliest of inclinations. Poetic madness

in the face of common sensical catastrophe.

I’m writing this for no one’s sake, not even

my own, a gust of stars in a back alley,

vertiginous dust devils of skirling snow

nipping at my winged heels like frost-bite.

Routinely annihilated at the crossroads

of celestial equators intersecting skewed ecliptics,

the surrealistic mystic in me dances in protest

at the nave of a jinxed prayer wheel

mistakenly enlightened by a yellow daffodil.

I could have been a lightning rod. I could have been

a weathervane, a sundial, an astrolabe , an astronaut,

an astronomer measuring the eyelashes of the stars

in a spectrographic analysis of the tree rings

in the heartwood of the light. As it happens

I’m squatting in the thirteenth house of the zodiac

dodging wrecking balls like a punchy boxer

whose sea legs keep being swept out from under him

by black ice that wants him to take the fall.

Adjust according to circumstances laying bets off

against the smart money I won’t make it

out of this coma to show up for the next round.

If so, I want my coffin to be a cabal

of underground resistance to the death of me.

I want to thrust my clenched fist through the duff

of everything that’s ever unfeathered me in life

like a mushroom in a sacred grove of black swans

waiting for the plumage of new moons to break

into a flightfeather of white light that isn’t mocked

by pink-eyed albino crows driving the fire

of foxes into deep snow to peck their eyes out

like militant evangelists of the colour-blind.

One moment I’m riding Pegasus bareback

with Deneb and Albireo spurring me on

to greater heights than I’ve ever soared before

and the next I’m devoted to this discipline

of turning my insides out lyrically like a pinata

hanging like a medicine bag from a black walnut tree,

bleeding siloes of Virgoan starwheat out of the wound

of a lunar bull Mithras Tauroctonus is sacrificing

like a cornucopia for waiting scorpions, dogs, and snakes

whose symbology is lost upon me like the arcane taste

of alien sensibilities who don’t speak

the same dream grammar I do without an accent.

No end of the doors or the million ways

you have of saying nothing when you approach

your folly like a priest instead of a sacred clown

blowing the pollen of mountain flowers

like gold dust from the palm of your hand,

or gusts of stars roosting in your eyebrows

like chalk starmaps ageing at a blackboard.

I see you trying on lives like different meanings

to pre-determine what pleases the mirrors best,

as if you didn’t so much express as calibrate

what moves you most like the tantric pique

of a yogic paperclip disguised as a praying mantis.

There’s no conviction to your absurdity

so your peacocks lack the courage to sing.

Your lions roar, but the victory goes to the blackflies.

Are you still hunting pygmies with harpoons?

PATRICK WHITE

PEACE IN THE SADNESS THAT ALWAYS OVERTAKES ME

PEACE IN THE SADNESS THAT ALWAYS OVERTAKES ME

Peace in the sadness that always overtakes me

this time of night. Distance and time in the silence.

The darkness breathes subliminal fragrances of the past.

Intensities relax and grow expansively immense.

The stars look down on my eccentric solitude

and deepen my emptiness with a strange longing

to shine with the same cold fury of creative turmoil

their unattainable radiance has always inspired in me.

It may well be no small thing to counterpoint

the beauty of their brilliance with my paltry daub

of mortal starmud whose every aspiration ends

in the expertise of an apostate clown trying

to embody the first principles of his sacred folly

without breaking into tears of face paint as if

I were talking to dream figures in my sleep

while I was still awake, and inseparable as I am

from the stars down here by the river where the town

doesn’t weed the stray whispers out of the light,

none of us can explain the oddity of our presence

in the midst of each other like psychic phenomena.

And it isn’t likely I’ll know before I die

whether I’ve wasted my life and theirs or not.

I wonder if Jupiter ever feels like a loser

for letting the sun down like a brown star

that didn’t quite reach critical mass

to shine as a binary companion at the dance

instead of sitting it out on the periphery

like a wallflower in perpetual bud too shy to be asked.

So my mind, as old as I can remember, has

been allegorizing the abyss with surrealistic romantic facts

to reach out like a bridge across the mirage

of a blackwater mindstream in a desert of stars

as if there were someone to relate to

in the clear light of the void less impersonal

than the Planck lengths of speculative graffiti

trying to attribute a narrative theme to chaos

I could humanize like a candle in a lonely room.

Idle ruminations of a restless night owl

with blood on its talons like the last crescent

of the waning moon roosting in the leper colonies

of the inundated birch groves on the far bank.

Most of my life it’s been an excruciating labour of love

to bind the world to me in a collagen of metaphors

that nucleates my cells and atoms with mythologems

of the multiverse in the heartwood of every one of them.

I’ve even come to appreciate the quantum entanglements

of delusion and enlightenment as complementary opposites

that have engendered my oxymoronic awareness

of their coincident contradictories of inharmonious synchronicity

and acted out the crazy wisdom of the fool accordingly.

A liberated discipline of free association

I keep rolling my prophetic skulls like dice

against the odds of my meteoric amino acids

ever having tallowed me like flesh around

the wick of my spine mining liquid nanodiamonds

out of the ore of these spent match heads in Antarctica.

I paint my interior dialogue with the cosmos

in vivid vowels but the consonants still count

as earth colours I can rely on to ground the effect

of lightning rooting in the wetlands of my starmud.

Creatures rise out of the dark lagoon like breaching trees

and I’m subsumed in these visions of their passing away

as if there were nothing more noteworthy about evolution

than someone realigning their body with the angle

of what they’re adjusting to in their sleep.

What random act of inconsequence dreams of us

when we’re not there to second guess the outcome?

Colloquies of madness, poetic cosmologies

extrapolated from supra-dimensional improbabilities,

I’m still amorphous enough to accept the world

on its own terms as if it had all been created anonymously

to intrigue the lunatics who focus on it as if

it meant something as significant as music

to the incoherent lyrics of their longing to hear

a voice answer back that isn’t the echo of their own

in this delirium of mystery where the nightbirds sing

simply because the stars are there to inspire them

and Sisyphean dung beetles navigate their stones up the hill

like a solar system by the spectral radiance of the Milky Way.

PATRICK WHITE