O COME ON NOW

O COME ON NOW

O come on now, you can bend space and time

more imaginatively than that when you’re

intense enough to sway the light with a glance

of your gravitational eyes. No iris in the eye

of the fire that burns invisibly all around you,

why blindfold yourself with rainbows

or paint the snail tracks of the stars on your eyelids,

as if glowing in the dark like the last window at night

to go out, were the same as lighting it up

like the Pleiades on a cold, winter evening when

you feel the stillness in the heart of time

even as it passes like crows across your lunar eyes

and everything seems like the echo of an abysmal silence

tuning the mind where the roads divide

to the tines of a snake’s tongue witching for fire?

You can put contact lenses on your retina

or replace your corneas with razor-sharp lasers,

and flavour the light like a lifesaver you’ve been

sucking on until it’s thinner than the thin ice

of the cataracts you’ve been walking on

like stained-glass windows. Hard rock, or good soil,

if a visual image sprouts roots it blooms

into a symbolic visionary with low-hanging fruits

like buckets from the boughs of a woman returning

from a well to water your mirages with a taste

of the real thing that can’t be divined by defining it.

The immensities of the universe aren’t measured

by the golden yardsticks of the telescopes

you point at it like artillery aiming through

a spider mount trained on superclusters of fireflies

crazed in a cult of light like gnats in the air at dusk.

Show me your starmaps. Show me the sundials

of your clockdrives, the six on the floor red shift

of your spectral speedometers laying rubber on the road

like the wavelengths of blacksnakes swimming like rain on asphalt.

I don’t want to read about the cliches that bond you

to your inlaws at Christmas like a high school home chemistry set

you’ve been fiddling with like a spare-time terrorist

who looks at the sky like fireworks at Halloween

masked like God by the screening myths of your culpable origins.

A genie can tell whether you love it or not

by the way you caress the lamp, and the camera

you summon like a photogenic muse to capture

reality like a firefly in a digital Mason jar

as if there were no other interpretation available

to the comparative passports you hand out

like Ellis Island to homeless refugees on the thresholds

of your borderlands, because you’re afraid

of crossing your own event horizons into the black holes

in the rhetorical arguments you propose

for blood-testing everybody’s homogeneity

to make sure their aesthetic sensibilities are consonant

with yours. Ensure they release the same dopamines as you do

when you see a drop of blood like the tear of a rose,

and what pierces your heart as the water turns into wine,

isn’t the simple beauty of it, but the enigma of its thorns.

And right away, I can tell, by the way your eyes

emerge from the darkness like stars and lamp posts

you suppose there’s some hidden secret

in the occult poetic arcana of the crazy and wise

you can seize upon like a shepherdess of wolves

while the sheep are howling at the moon in their sleep.

Some nightsea of a dark jewel that’s never

been touched by the light before like an unused eye

you’re swimming through for your life,

squalls of stars in your wake like the dust of the roads

behind you. No rudder. No sail. No anchor on your lifeboat.

All that iridescent, thin-skinned buoyancy of spirit

that leads you around like a seeing-eye dog

a blind lighthouse that caught a glimpse of two wavelengths

copulating to heal themselves like a winged caduceus

on the axis of a prayer wheel. You’re an angel

with a flaming sword outside the gates of Eden

and you’re trying to master the skills of dragons

older than fire, you’re trying to steal the moon

from the window and get away with it like an eclipse.

More power to you. That’s what I say. Let it rip

like a ticket to ride you got for parking it somewhere

for too long with the windows closed,

and an Egyptian dog-god inside dying to get out

and lap like a waterwheel at the reflection of its own mirage

among the stars, Alnilam, Alnitak, and Mintaka

in the belt of Orion, Osiris at heel like a hunting dog

chained to the chase beyond the stargates

of time shining down upon the earth for once

as if, brighter than light, it revealed more

in one sacred syllable of a nightbird urgently alone

in the woods on the broken masthead of a battered pine,

calling out to others like echoes of the same silence

the hills answer as if they were talking in their sleep

about all the stars that have drowned like flashbacks

in the housewells of the waters of life piped like bad music

through the tear ducts of your underwhelming eyes.

I’m trying to be as kind a scalpel about this as

I possibly can. Forgive the nick of the incision

that’s trying to free you from you. I just don’t see the point

of constructing poems like dams to hold back a sunami of dew.

PATRICK WHITE

LIVING ON A PLANET THAT KILLS MORE PEOPLE THAN IT HEALS

LIVING ON A PLANET THAT KILLS MORE PEOPLE THAN IT HEALS

Living on a planet that kills more people than it heals.

And the most dangerous of predators, our own ideals

turning on us like ingrown hairs, solar flares the wind

blew in our faces without any of the veils or auroral graces

that used to adorn our amazement at what our eyes

in creative collaboration with victimized ions, could do

with the last breath of an expiring sun god to make it

mystically beautiful and awe-inspiring. Just

to be a witness to it was enough to keep your mouth

shut for the next ten thousand years, the silence

before the sublimity of being in the presence

as convincing to the farmer as it was to the astronomer.

As civilization progresses into an improved savagery

and people grow more bovine in their living rooms

as the one-eyed liar at the nadir of the third eye

entrances them into believing they’re still

grazing in the starfields of genetically modified astroturf

they were raised on, slowly, from a moon cow’s point of view

it’s beginning to dawn on people that civilization

is nothing but the history of war since Sargon of Agade

first turned the plunder of cattle and women

into the military imperialism of the few against the many

by staying like a parasitic cosmic egg laid

on the pineal gland of a host caterpillar so civilization,

mimetic word, a cattle prod, an axe, and an abattoir,

is coming to be seen for the death trap that it is.

Muddy Waters, there’s anotha mule kickin in yo stall.

I grew up in an impoverished neighbourhood

where the garbage cans were full of people

but I swear, and I’ve seen a lot I wish I hadn’t,

I’ve never seen so much rot, corruption, and ignorance,

lacking even elementary street smarts, as I do

in the portly politicians and their fanatically overkempt hags

that make you feel so sorry for their hairdressers,

and the tailors that have to fit them like a hidden agenda

of hate and greed, oozing through the seams

of their shapeshifting, deformed-fitting suits.

Makes you want to stick the old peace sign of the sixties

down your throat and throw up. Or pack up

a small tent, like a refugee or an emigrant

and get in line with the rest of the waterlilies

who’ve finally given up on trying to turn

the festering swamp into something redeemably beautiful

and would rather be homelessly lost among the stars,

floating down the Milky Way with wild black swans,

than sit like the eggcup of a crown on the skull

of a false prophecy missing more than one link in its evolution.

And if you think not to be appalled by the stink of the world

is a kind of experienced wisdom, a seasoned outlook,

then I might suggest that you’ve aged like offal

complicit in the contagion of worms in the grass

where the children play on the swings. And your last best hope

is that your eyes have retained some of the original innocence

of the fool that you used to be,

before the Medusa turned them to stone

and the colour flaked off like the irises of violated covenants.

Radical in the sixties, I was into self-creative destruction,

tallowing sand candles out of napalm and beeswax

that went off like fifty calibre lipstick shells in your face.

I occupied. I dropped out. I blew my own mind

more than once just to make sure the bridge was burning

by the time I got to the other side of my own mindstream

and no one was following me like another blistering ideal

that got thrown like acid in the maculate face of the full moon.

It was easier to believe in everything back then

than to make peace with myself even now,

though I know it’s just one illusion dead set against another

and I’m sitting naked in the Himalayas alone at night

trying to hatch a new cosmic egg for myself

or at least a new cosmology for this glass third eye

I’ve ground like a lens or the mirror of a reflecting telescope

with gritty carborundum down to within an angstrom of perfection

just to be on the same wavelength as quicksilver and diamonds

when it comes to seeing things that don’t easily disappear.

Now I can see the stars dancing clearly from the inside out.

I’m looking for an abandoned observatory on the top

of the world mountain standing on the shaky cornerstone

of a snapping turtle, and I’m not being driven out this time,

exiled among exiles, like some scapegoat beaten

like an objective correlative for what is most ugly in humans

that don’t sacrifice themselves for their own sins.

I’ve been leaving of my own accord for the last thirty light years

of this wilderness experience for the wind knows where.

And I still care. And I still help the waywards of life

that blow across my path like losing lottery tickets

and one winged butterflies trying to fly

like the unbound page of a book with half a wingspan.

I still fight with words and actions that have been blooded

like Damascene swords in the sacred forges of my infernality.

I’ve gone on exploring the elusive dark energy

of my expansiveness long after the universe went out

and sight stopped being a kind of love as lucid

as the imagination on a good seeing night for the sky bound.

But as my compassion has grown deeper, more holistic

and mystically specific simultaneously so has the sadness

of feeling so many suffer the indistinguishable pain

of simply being alive to endure the agony

of cauterizing their cosmic wounds with the very stars

they wished upon a heartbreak ago when the waterclock

broke like an ice-age dam and the baby mammoth

was washed away like starmud in a glacial flood

of Pleistocene tears. And life seems so randomly perilous

in the way it maims and kills the body and the mind,

it seems even the wise and the sublime die as surrealistically

as the sarcastic mentors of trash and trivia

trying to distract our attention away from our dilemma

with cheap thrills and punchlines about the meaning of nothing

so we can’t feel the house burning down around us

until we’re reminiscing in our urns,

as if we were still haunted by eyes in the dark

like some lingering significance to our demise.

Lachrymae rerum. Sometimes I think the mute rocks

don’t just speak, they weep like stars

for the things they’ve seen like the headstones

of prophetic skulls in a cemetery of ancestral asteroids.

An abandoned observatory, yes, the jewel in the lotus,

and a large garden where I can grow my own constellations

like esoteric zodiacs of asters and sunflowers

and a lover I can bed down with like an equinox

when our celestial equators intersect our ecliptics

at the equinoctial colures of our cosmic G-spots

and we can implode like supernovas in each other’s presence

just for the pure joy of immolating ourselves in bliss

to renew the tenderness of the fireflies who know

there are no limits to how far we can take this.

PATRICK WHITE