TRYING TO SHINE TO BLIND THE VOODOO
DOLLS
Trying to shine to blind the voodoo
dolls
sticking sharp pins of insight dipped
in stinging nettles
into my eyes like burning thorns that
won’t wash out
even when the blue rose of the sky
puts her face in her hands and cries
her heart out.
Made my Icarian ascent to the sun
like a kamikaze pilot in reverse trying
to be positive
about the self-destructive aspirations
under my thawing wings, now
I’m trying to keep my balance on my
spinal cord
stretched like a highwire suspension
bridge
across an abyss that keeps expanding my
insignificance
as I juggle planets with my feet I keep
dropping
like my head in a guillotine made for
mercy.
I want to say this is the dung-heap,
this is the dogshit,
these are the maggots that thrive in
the corruption of it
like toxicara worms that get in your
eyes
and under your fingernails, and burrow
like small black holes through your
heart
and let all the light out of your life
like a slow leak
somewhere in the pipeline of the
universe
that’s fracking me inflammably like a
watershed
and I’m trying so hard to snow all
over it
with the highest ideals of
understanding and compassion,
every mystically specific flake
sidereally designed
to ameliorate the repulsive and obscene
by cloaking it in white like an albino
hypocrite.
For light years I used to believe if
you
threw flower seeds in it, you could
work it
like starmud blooded by a battlefield
of torn corpses
into a bumper crop of zinnias and
sublimely poignant stargrass.
Marvellous transformations of an
outhouse
into the lunar beauty of the nocturnal
Taj Mahal
making the black mirror, like the lost
sheep, more beautiful
in a universe where love and light and
life so often seem
mere mutations of the darkness.
Didn’t really want to make an
ideology of a wild guess,
that would only add to the mess of
cultish concepts,
and not really born to sow stardust
into the ploughed wound of a worm,
nevertheless, I drew a gold sword
out of a philosopher’s stone
and plunged it through the base metal
of my heart
to suffer all those little deaths in
life
and those liberating space twisting
indelible excruciations of cosmic
transformation
that wrought this discipline of
disobedience
I practise like an art into the absurd
freedom
of the crazy wisdom that’s needed to
make
a start somewhere, somehow, however
small
by adding my crystal skull to the
shining
like the sacred syllable of a drop of
water
off the tongue of a silver leaf in the
moonlight
that listens to it fall like a cross
between a good word and a tear on deaf
ears below.
So I throw flower seeds on it in
passing, the way
I throw all my loose change into a
guitar case
trying to sing for a living against the
impossible odds
of a dungheap laid like the corrupt
cornerstone of things,
the ship of state expurgating in public
like a sick whale
spinning the Parisian potential for the
screening myths
of expensive, narcotic fragrances of
rot on the Perfume Trail.
Say it isn’t so, Joe, but there you
go, it is.
The terrorist oilwells are planting
i.e.d.s
of inflammable water in the faucets of
everyone’s kitchen,
so we can all burn to death
drowning in our showers in the morning
trying to chill things out
with corporate hellfire and brimstone
and legions of demon lawyers that give
lying a bad name.
Been trying not to get so down I get
knocked off my axis like Neptune
ducking down below the celestial
equator
and be dragged down into my own depths
by the snapping turtle of the world
that’s founded upon it like a totem
on a gantry.
Barring the occasional eclipse to keep
the calendars tuned to the prophecies
of doom
ranged against the small beginnings of
the new moon
that might squeak through the third eye
of the needle
just like mammals did at the end of the
late Triassic
as the insignificant consequence of a
cosmic event
that upgraded scales to feathers and
fur to skin
as wolves turned into whales. Creative
destruction
evident in extinction and evolution the
same.
I try to keep my spirits up like a lead
kite
by approaching it all as if it were
delightfully and horrifically absurd
spontaneously
but an unmeaningly free and creative
medium nevertheless,
and even if it isn’t etc., the most
intriguing of delusions
it’s taken me light years to adapt to
without sitting in perpetual judgement
on the immensity of the darkness
that intensifies the nebularity of my
enlightenment
with starclusters of insights that
flower
like a mirage of fireworks in my
dazzled mind.
Even if it’s no more than a flash of
light out of the void
richocheting off the facet of a grain
of sand,
or a firefly trying to stand up to the
lightning,
or slim volume of igneous poems
wedged like a matchbook between tomes
like anthers of fire with phosphorus
pollen
that will spread like wildflowers when
it finally blooms
like foxfire in the ashes of an old
growth forest.
Even to stand like a lighthouse on the
moon,
having lost its sense of purpose, and
yet,
still keep the fire in the tower
burning as if
there might be a storm the way things
change
and there could be a shipwreck, some
nights
are so strange they’re like waves or
cats
that leave things like dead moles and
snakes
on the threshold of the far shore of
your door out of here,
I’ve tried to keep on shining like a
candle
trying to stay awake at a black
starless mass
trying to make things dark enough to
make an appearance,
and even when I haven’t managed it,
and all my shepherd moons are scattered
like black sheep
by the snarling wolf of my mystically
liberating nature,
suddenly showing up like the skull and
crossbones
among the angel fleets grazing on the
waves,
I’ve elevated waterlilies of
constellations
that sat below the salt in the lowest
place of all
to the zenith of my dreams like
starmaps in transit
I’ve kept alight in a nightwatchman’s
eyes for years
as he makes the rounds of the zodiac
like a candle still burning in the
lanterns of his tears.
PATRICK WHITE
