NO MYSTERY IN THE STIGMA OF THE MISERY

NO MYSTERY IN THE STIGMA OF THE MISERY

No mystery in the stigma of the misery, regret rebounds

as cynicism and disgust, the way it is with us,

every emotion a life study in a death mask,

every thought the pose of a moment that eludes us,

and the stars hair-braided into the tresses of the willows,

and the bridges we burned like the Milky Way so

no one could cross after us into the abyss,

the prodigal homelessness of our return address,

as our tracks are swept away on the Road of Ghosts,

actions of strategic gestures of peace with ourselves,

a truce, at best, with the dangerous stranger within

that plays host to the dead as if he were one of the guests,

as the ideals we die for demonically bless the means.

The labyrinth lost in us, looking for an exit sign,

the planets spinning their wheels in our starmud,

intractable kings of the hill waiting for the equinox

to light up our bones like kindling in our barrow tombs.

She’s not at peace with herself because she remembers

nothing she hasn’t repeated to her friends like an ally

that doesn’t know who or what she’s fighting against,

seldom for, anymore, that nothing makes any sense

and her life’s spread out like a Tarot pack on the floor,

pondering the destiny of sex with the ex of an old lover.

Nobility among the humble trivialized into the whim

of an action hero trying to live up to the movie

made of him like a two minute trailer

in a Bronze Age scarred by copper and tin.

He’s a voice coach in a choir of echoes

half a note off the ghosts of the nightbirds

that used to send a cold chill through the woods

before the agony of their unadulterated longing,

the infallible sorrow in the depths of the hunger for love

went extinct as yesterday’s moonrise.

His eyes are always busy as a security camera

but see nothing that’s unusual about him

except for the way his ego is always mistaking

his reflection for someone who might be sexting him.

Window-dressing and mannequins of expendable democracy

looted by the firelight of rioting thieves

demanding the same private rights as the key

to the executive washroom the slumlords

and feudal bankers hold over the heads of the peasants

like a watercloset over a common moat.

There in the red emergency exit light,

crumpled like a potato sack up against the door

that only opens one way, would you believe

that junkie used to sing as if she were having

a heart attack on stage like a sparrow hawk

shrieking into a microphone at the top of her lungs

as she went after every note like unsuspecting prey?

What do you say? It’s plagued me most of my life

as if my heart were insufficient, and compassion paled

in comparison with the damage done, irrevocably real,

as the mind takes account of successive images

and mouths some idiotic abstract mantra

about the collateral damage of the tragic element

in a comedy of errors in the eye of the beholder

looking upon the aesthetic desecration of idols

in the modern era like fourth century Christians

gone heresy hunting in the name of the Lord.

Maybe it’s time to upgrade my pagan superstitions

into benign cosmic theories about quantum foam

as if the universe were frothing at the mouth in a fit

of hydrophobia adrift on the waters of life.

Eye-witness to the suffering of others there’s

so little I can do anything, nor have the right, about

love beyond desire has its will bent

by its own redoubtable impotence as its first line

of self-accusatory defence. How many times

have I simply wanted to reach out and touch

the despairing silence in someone’s eyes

with a image of beauty, indelibly undisguised

without its deathmask on and no sign of perishing

from one breath to the next that might reveal

the hidden jewels in the slag of the ore they’re

buried in like exiles in a darkness far from home?

Cults of shadows dance around the lanterns

of the nightwatchman slowly being ground down

like a lens that gives him something to focus on

that’s more starlike than mere reflections

in a window no one looks out of anymore.

Every intention has its effect, but the effect

seems drastically out of touch with the ailment

it was meant to cure and the good deed elaborates

into superficial paradigms of the sacrificially complex.

You end up speaking like a hex of God

upon the freeborn waters of life at an altar with a knife

you don’t know whether to gut yourself with

or drive through someone’s heart like a righteous kill

as you ask out of a lingering sense of feasible compassion

that anyone’s will, other than your own, be done

as it isn’t right now with heaven’s hand

over the mouth of hell like an enculturated cellphone

meming the iconic oracles of the last prophetic skull

we listened to as if our lives together depended on it

like a happier estrangement than anything

our imaginations could have fervently wished for.

PATRICK WHITE

FOXFIRE BLOOMING IN THE AFTERBIRTH OF THE ASHES

FOXFIRE BLOOMING IN THE AFTERBIRTH OF THE ASHES

Foxfire blooming in the afterbirth of the ashes

that engendered it, green violins of unaged bracken,

the timeless lyrics of life reviving an old songbook

grown hoarse as paddlewheels and swans

making their way upriver by the lights

left on in the ghost towns of familiar ports of call

where breathless singers busked by the wharves

and watergates of the straightforward stairwells

anyone with sea legs ascended like a special form of a curve,

the uncarved block of the ten thousand things

the womb of an unborn guitar attached by its strings

to the abyss in the heartwood of a song that will

never be heard like the wind whistling

through the umbilical cords of a suspension bridge

swaying like an empty cradle in a forgotten lullaby

as if life burns its bridges, not just after, but as often,

before it crosses them to the other side of nowhere.

The words run off track, scuttle on the sandbanks,

dodge the light like fish along the shore, lose

their bearings in a gust of starmud from the bottom

up to the abandoned crow’s nests listing to the left

of the angel fleets like the masts of old growth forests

that put to sea like the skull and crossbones

buried in a piratical cemetery like the teeth of dragons

sown among nautical gravestones keeping one eye open

on the lighthouses waiting for salvage

to wash up on the beach in the red sky

of a false dawn in the morning that gave

sound warning to sailors in the know to pass by.

I say what I mean but the meaning’s drowned out

by the uproar of words with a voice of their own

that pass like carrier pigeons with a message

for their ears alone, the medium, an ink-soaked scribe,

blue as the glyphs of Picts, taking the minutes

at a seance I’m never asked to participate in

regardless of how I tattoo the inside of my eyelids

with the Etruscan zodiacs of the dreamscapes

and shapeshifters gathering at the transmorphic bend

where the river turns like the mindstream

toward the deepest watersheds of its collective unknowing.

The wind behind them, how many have set out

like beautiful schooners in full bloom to be

abused by their lives like garbage scows

after their sails were taken down like shark fins?

Set out to chart the stillness on the dark side

of the moonrise and run aground on the mountainous reefs

of lunar corals like sundials and astrolabes

taking the measure of their own shadows

in the shallows of the floodplains scabbing

for the lack of any volcanic depth to the pre-eminence

of their immanental extinctions. If the head

of the fish is rotten the tail will follow

like a thought wave in the wake that encompasses it all

in a heartbreaking farewell from the deck

of a shipwreck to the last lifeboat to leave the island.

Sooner or late the fire will run out of heretics

and no fat to keep them burning, the lanterns

the orthodox hold up like candles to the sun

to see in the dark will grow thin, dim, and lean

as the lights of the city of God disappearing

over the horizon of a black hole with no regrets.

Gravity the tugboat of the tides our lifelines

are anchored to like barnacles on a rock

we buried at sea, tears we shed at Gravesend,

all hands aboard, moonset to the west

of the unthinkable, sinking nevertheless.

Her pillow is soaked with snot and tears.

Her nose is running like a garden snail

that smears her stiff upper lip. Not the agony

in the garden, but still, a bitter cup to drink from.

He quotes his duty as a cover story

for following the psychological profile

of his desire into the misunderstood bedroom.

Garlands on the altars of love and disdain,

and everyone’s partially wrong enough

to be wholly right, and blame it on the zeitgeist

of the witching hour that has come upon them.

I walk by the Tay River like the grave of an old lover

some nights when the stars are blazing overhead

in the country dark, the infra red aura of the town

glowing infernally on the indifference of the clouds

as if it were putting lipstick on the mouth

of a drunk clown in a coma as a puerile joke

to mock him into laughing insincerely at himself

when he wakes up to wipe the smile off his face.

I’m isolated by the surrealistic absurdity I feel

in the mass appeal of the inexplicably funny

when the joke’s on anyone but this black farce

of common humanity like a punch-line in a morgue.

No epitaphs, but a gesture of living at its best,

Graffiti on the box-cars of our coffins laid to rest

after a few hollow laughs at the corpse’s expense,

the last call and curfew to top up our emptiness

as we steal the Buddha’s purse to buy the Buddha’s horse.

Those are the Buddha’s words. Mine have run their course

like a rootfire in the tunnels of star-nosed moles

digging like archaeologists for a future in the ruins

of their solitudinous starmud baked and glazed

into bricks of lapis lazuli left in the sun at midnight

they can aspire to like the past tense of the light

flashflooding like time and the Pleiades

through the circuitous labyrinths of their black holes.

PATRICK WHITE