DEEP ENHANCEMENT. DARK WOUND

DEEP ENHANCEMENT. DARK WOUND

Deep enhancement. Dark wound. Ancient pain.

Estranged childhood. I hurt. I hurt. To no good purpose

at the end of things. No timing. No content.

And the body mourns the broken wings of the words

that once rose to the occasion like startled waterbirds,

the wind in a prayerwheel that didn’t know what to ask for.

And the heart, stubborn enthusiast, homely shrine

the gods don’t enter into anymore, used razor blades

scattered like the pages of an unbound holy book

that cut all five jugulars of the fatted calf

that bawled like a guitar at the use its innocence

was put to like a musical sacrifice to the tone-deaf silence.

And the mind, that Mephistophelean shadow

that lives in the wake of the dead angel that said

she died for my sake until I saw who showed up

at the funeral. All those black umbrellas, bats in the rain.

Achievement without consolation. Fulfilment

the scam of a false idol. My clothes are soaked

with the tears of ghosts that blew in my eyes

like smoke from a burning sundial. Bad house guests

in the ghost town of the zodiac I once lived in

like a gold rush in the mindstream of the mountain

singing to itself as if the stars were listening

to heal the ache of an old fault line in its heart

that sends a shudder through its foundation stones

like an avalanche across a narrow road winding

its way between a high place and the certain death

among the ice-floes of a jade-green northern river

coiled like a green mamba below. Sad to see

the roadkill of a wolf that had no other place to walk

below the timberline of the life it was hunting for.

Dangerous to stop. The bus hurries on toward Prince Rupert.

Another poetry reading. How long ago was that? Where

I’ll howl at the top of my lungs like the death lament

of my lupine melancholy in a lunar solitude where

my voice carries through the deranged emptiness

of a vacuum that’s come to abhor its own nature

and the most highly disciplined severities of insight

aren’t communal enough to cope with it like a happy face

on a moonrise instead of the usual prophetic skull.

Blue Flower. Black Dog. Sunbeam and nightfall.

Hydra-headed snake fire. Death to release it.

Death to try and hang on to it all. The agon of life.

The struggle to live. The struggle to die.

As raw at the entrance as the exit is refined.

I struggle with the angel in the way like a mind

that lost an eye to the ferocity of the encounter

trying to see past the halo into the black hole of the vision

it was grappling with like a choke hold

on the throat an experienced shapeshifter

that keeps eluding my grasp of the light

like fireflies without starmaps in a hoax of dark matter.

Between the mountain and the river, where

to be held up is to be cast down like an ostrakon

into the abyss where the victors live in exile

throwing their bodies like gauntlets of roadkill

along the side of whatever road they’re on as they

raise their voices in a deathsong like a challenge

to the quixotic echoes that stand in their way

threatening to bring this house of life down

like a handful of starmud on the impromptu graves

of the losers brilliantly infamous for fire walking

their spinal cords like acrobatic spiders unravelling

their silken safety nets like unnamed constellations,

across the moats of the mountains, scapegoats on a drawbridge

that lets its guard down a thousand times a life too often.

PATRICK WHITE

JUST GO. JUST GO.

JUST GO. JUST GO.

Just go. Just go. I don’t want to do an autopsy

on your voodoo doll. Leave me to the asters and stars

on my long walks into the fields and woods around here.

It was your fault, your fault, as you keep pleading.

I’m glad you see me now the way you couldn’t before

but the roses keep bleeding and candidly, lady, I’m bored

with the abysmal misery of trying to understand

why you look like the Taj Mahal but act

like a hamburger stand where they pat the meat down

with dirty hands. You did what you did,

now be done for good and bad with it. Let’s not

look upon it as a mistake you made, but

as a creative opportunity for us to separate

the salt from the fresh waters of life in our tears.

I don’t think I was cut out to be an organ donor for love.

Full measure and a bit beside. Enough, or too much,

as the poet once said. I gave you all I had to give

with a full heart and an open hand. You were great

in bed, a demonic mystic with a hunger for sex,

but the blood-caked altars remind me of guillotines these days,

blocks to swan on at Tyburn and Smithfield,

and if I thought putting mine on the black market

might bring about a change of heart in you,

the river might flood, the wheat grow taller,

the scapegoats stop boiling their kids in mother’s milk,

I might be more inclined to take a message to the gods,

stimulate my stem cells into reconstituting my body parts

like a Promethean liver eaten like roadkill on the rocks

by turkey vultures circling like undertakers on the fly.

I suppose you expect me to cry or something

and I will, after my own fashion, when this glacier

retreats like an ice-age my species has been adapted to

for way too long. I’ve been flint knapping new moons

like shards of obsidian into spearheads with a razor-edge,

and I may have mastered the art of hunting bigger prey

than I am, but the dreams of the Neanderthal

that has been living on inside of me against the odds

has left me a little flakier than a shaman in a cave bear’s hide

and I’m weary of singing in the false dawns

of the genetically engineered beginnings you keep

offering me as an alternative to my imminent extinction.

The death songs don’t sound the same

when they’re accompanied by a backup band

and a drum machine that never misses a beat

to be real enough to roll with the pulse of the moment

when the heart begins to jam with the rhythm of life

too close to last call to take another request. So please

just go, just go. Shut the lid on the coffin

of my guitar case and save your change for someone else.

I’ve stretched the membrane of my heart out

far enough for you to jump on like an animal skin

that thought of itself as more of a drum at a ghost dance

than a trampoline on the rebound when you

finally came back down to earth like a shooting star

I’d wish on like a lucky scar that might not disappoint me

like the last time you shattered my glass house like a Perseid

throwing the first stone at what you were capable of,

the dregs of a comet that didn’t burn hot enough

to burnish your golden chariot in the emotional crematorium

where the slag of a slum’s been mined out like love.

I buried the yellow canary that used to warn me

you were coming like the Wailing Wall

beside the Dome of the Rock in a bed of Jerusalem artichokes.

Take your body with you when you go. Take

your lips and your hair, your hips and your breasts

and the mammal magnetism of those dresses you wear

as if they were being modelled on a catwalk by the floor

beside someone else’s bed, and I’ll walk skinless

through the world awhile and feel everything again

like a wild aster in the acid rain of a significant climate change

it’s a lot easier to adjust to without you, than it is

to explain to my solitude looking for signs among the stars,

fireflies burning in all these ice-age Mason jars

I’m releasing like the Pleiades from the urns of my eyes,

chimney sparks in a gust of wind, lights out over

the sea at night, and when you’re gone, lightyears up the road,

these first magnitude starmaps I’ll use to start a fire

I’ll sit around, and listen to the wind rustling

through old creation myths like leaves well into autumn,

and try to identify the sound of a tree falling

in an old growth forest when there’s no one there to hear it

and the Canada geese are heading south like hearses of the spirit,

hello and farewell, included in the same calling out

to the silence and the distance between one absence and the next.

PATRICK WHITE