LADY IN THE RAIN SURFING HER EXCESS
DOPAMINES
Lady in the rain surfing her excess
dopamines
like foreign exports her neurons can’t
afford to reabsorb
because she’s intelligent, bored and
lonely though
she revels in friends the hilarity of
their smiles
is way too severe to be trusted, a
moshpit for the Taliban.
She snorts comets of stardust as if
life were
no more than a biochemical powder when
you squeeze
the tears out of it like an aquifer of
Sodom and Gomorrah
without a desalination plant. And for
the moment,
and the moment is eternally inclusive
as an interreflective jewel
in the net of Indra, interoriginally
elaborating
mutual fractals into blazing
chandeliers of edgy insight
into this anodyne of power and joy that
makes her feel
she’s healing like a naked god that
just got into
her deathbed with her, and he were her
creator and she
were an abysmally deep solitude greater
then he could imagine.
I prefer constellations, myself, but
this isn’t
an anti-drug commercial or a self-help
manual
for people who think they’re doing
just fine.
I’m an asmatographic cartographer
compiling
an encylopedic starmap for lost
fireflies who are apt
to mistake themselves for chimney
sparks
when the wind is whipping across the
glazed snow
like a downed powerline venting like a
spinal cord
on a Fender Stratocaster whose nerves
have finally snapped.
Born in a furnace like the urn belly of
a dragon
that miscarried, what else can you do
but stick
short straws in the black, bitter bread
of your starmud
to see if you’re done, or the oven
gave birth?
Way past feathers in the scales of my
self-worth now,
what does it matter the price you put
on your head
like a wanted poster when no one’s
looking for you anyway?
Solitude’s not so tough once you
threaten
to walk out on it if it doesn’t stop
whining.
Draco on the nightwatch like one half
of a chromosome
winding around a winged caduceus, when
the need arises
to know something about the better half
I’m missing
I watch other people sleepwalking in a
dream
I’m spiritually well-mannered enough
not to wake them from
like the prophetic voyeurism of a
metrosexual Teresias
that hasn’t noticed that he’s gone
blind and is led
by a seeing-eye girl that died young
like Beatrice.
When you want to study the life of the
mind
it’s always wise to begin by taking
your name off it.
If you’re intelligent enough to be
grateful for being alive
it’s inevitable you’re going to die
haunted by the feeling
as hard as you tried, you couldn’t
help wasting it,
and, oxymoronically if you’re stupid
and spoiled
you’re going to rejoice like a ponzi
scheme in your success.
Long after your death they’ll still
be talking about you
like an oversight with a Dixie cup of
coke on your desk.
But my preferred folly is strictly a
matter of taste
and that’s as much motive as anyone
needs to make it through life.
I efface myself and take the low place
like the persona
of a sea on the moon that receives the
rivers and sewers of life alike
and I greet what I can’t avoid like
the universe that says
it would recognize me anywhere in my
crowded solitude.
Sometimes we live like thieves in a
refugee camp,
hovels among the Taj Mahals that don’t
commemorate
the Mogul loss of anyone we’ve loved,
hoping
we can pass our moral squalor off as
patrician poverty
exiled in the slums and favelas above
the city of God
with an aerial perspective on the angel
fleets docked like yachts
that bloom and wither like stalks of
the birds of paradise,
and hell invariably adopts an oblique
attitude toward heaven,
looking down on what it can’t hope to
aspire to.
Others keep absinthe on tap like the
heavy water
of a Wormwood Star in a housewell that
glows in the dark.
They live as if they were wreaking a
slow vengeance
on their own self-destruction, snakes
with their tails
in their mouths who’ve lost all track
of the eternal recurrence
of time as it eats them all the way up
to their heads.
Where the roads part in life they crack
the wishbones of the harps in their
throats
and make a wish that seldom comes true
or gets sung.
It’s not the words of the song they
want to impart
so much as their voices and tongues
that are listening
for an encore of applause from the echo
of a mother
that abandoned them on opening night in
an empty house.
Isn’t it wild how many people are
trying to stay close
to people who didn’t love them by
practising their mistakes
as if that were the only way they could
embody them
in their absence, or when lovers break
up they both
walk off with the salvage of the
other’s shipwreck
like crooked lighthouses lamplighting
in a storm,
astrolabes of fireflies faking fixed
latitudes
off the coasts of consciousness like
whole galaxies
of phantom sea stars prying the lids
off an oyster bed
where the dead in their coffins sleep
with pearls on their tongues
to pay the ferryman and grave robbers
off with coin of the realm?
Compassion isn’t the default
anti-dote of any venom
known to humans. Born with winged heels
humans love to get high
on fletching themselves like the arrows
of toxologists
whistling like the deathsongs of
warbonnets in the aviaries
of the toxicologists who have been
trained not to be insulted
by massive insults of any kind like
hypodermic snake bites to the brain.
Lady in the rain trying to keep her
powder dry
as the whites of her eyes in the
doorway of a Masonic Lodge
that serves, once a week, as a gateway
drug
into the occult occupations of the
mysteries of life.
So many ruined temples like columns on
their knees,
gods and goddesses unhoused by what
they seek from themselves
as they drink from their skulls like
the begging bowls of their grails.
Compassion might not be a panacea,
nothing is,
not even death in life or out of it,
whether it be
merely the mirage of the moment cast by
the shadow of time,
or the fever of the nightmare you’re
suffering in a dream
like the decapitated history of the
acephalic iambs of humankind
dancing on its own volcanic grave with
a serious limp.
One way or another, there’s always a
hidden crimp
in the sundance of the lapwing that
gives us away
like a false alibi at the dawn of a
noetic eclipse.
Just the same, and that’s the whole
point of these metaphors,
lady in the rain snowploughing a mirror
you’re
trying to keep your pain from crying
on, my muse tonight,
my lovely simulacrum across the street,
stopped
at this station of life before you
wander off into the darkness
of a party town trying to get down like
a church bell
from a steeple that’s giving it
nose-bleeds, compassion
remains, like water, the most
cultivated taste in the mouth
of these hermetic deserts where the
vipers leave scars
in the sand like signs of an
oscillatory intelligence
looking for the Rosetta Stone of its
own wavelengths among the stars.
On your way, there you go, wraith of
blow. May
there be no dead air in the music of
the day ahead of you,
and the masters of tenderness not lose
heart
turning away from the rain on their
windows
as if they had to weep harder than that
to apprentice themselves
to the lost art of compassion thawing
the wounds
of those who’ve grown callous about
life
like a peasant princess holding herself
for ransom
in the glacial palaces of the feudal
ice-age in her eyes.
PATRICK WHITE
