LOST IN THE GUTTER
Lost in the gutter, skeleton keys
that used to be people before
they ran out of doors to open.
How many thresholds back from here
to yesterday? And those eyes,
such dark jewels, where can I
get a pair of sharky shades like that?
Ghosts dance around a burning oildrum
where the prophets are boiled in
alcohol
for not saying anything of much worth,
like a poem no one wants to steal
the hubcabs off, or a rainfall in
November
too late to do the flowers much good
or the working girls on the corner
like cotyledons in hot pants. Indoor
orchids
under tungsten grow lights in the snow.
When the mystery wanes unadventurously
and what you see in life asks too much
of your eyes at dusk and moonrise
to look for a black box that isn’t
a voice-over of the stars’ untimely
demise,
but might be the genuine you singing to
yourself
in your sleep like a hermit thrush
trying to accompany its own silence
with something sweet and sad that
beguiles
your melancholy for awhile, the jester
too deep to ever take himself
seriously,
the apostate mystic enters a
surrealistic circus tent
redolent with the cheap thrills of
enlightenment.
He walks around like the ground of
being
with a sacred limp believing he’s
experienced
a meaningful death much more profoundly
realized
than the nocturnal longings
of the wounded street gurus
busking outside the liquor store
like a cult of uncut koans on a Friday
night.
What an estranged world this is
that has such exiles in it. Intense
heat,
unusual sprouts, and this era’s been
unbearable.
Something mean about the water
we’re depleting like our own
housewells
of oxygen as we kick the issues to
death
for fracking on someone else’s
astroturf.
O look, a finger puppet show of gang
insignia
spray-bombed like Kufic writing on the
wall.
Why is it always the literate who are
the last
to learn how to read that? Tomorrow
comes
soon enough. And yesterday’s an
obituary
with spelling errors. And as for this
moment
together with you in the abyss, you’ve
got
an imagination. Make it up for
yourself.
And I mean that as a gift, not an
insult
to the unkept promise of your native
intelligence.
Madame Maudlin with her magic phials
of snakeoil and tears guaranteed to
restore
your sense of pity like a purgative at
the end
of all these endless tragedies, says
there isn’t a watershed in the world
deep enough
no matter how far it got her down like
Atlantis
she couldn’t buoyantly bubble up from
like something obnoxiously effervescent
about her nature. And you notice her
breasts
on the marquee of the matinee, and you
know
right away, that’s a double feature
of her
dogpaddling on the moon with mythically
inflated
waterwings making flightplans for Leda
and the Swan
like one of her runaways and a john.
What kind of a coma is it to live
dissociatively
in a society where even the emergency
opioids
can’t numb you to the recurring
nightmare
of orphaning your dream of a better
life from sex
like an unwanted child you’re trying
to keep clean
by driving it away from yourself like a
scapegoat
into a wilderness with the sins of a
tribe on its back?
Street wisdom is the occult science
of demonizing the innocent by exalting
the deviant as a special form of the
straight and narrow,
the fledgling rain targetting the tree
rings
and rootfires in the heartwood of its
own arrow.
Here comes another heroic prologue
from the Bronze Age to make a coward
of the text. When you receive a
loveletter
you’re always the envelope trying to
read
what’s been written on the inside of
your eyelids
but send one that unfolds like an
encoded flower
and you’ll always feel as if you were
putting
your emptiness to good use, your
silence
to the task of deciphering your third
eye in solitude.
Ever weep and not know why like a
waterclock
trying to keep pace and pulse with a
time zone
as big as oblivion overflowing the
abyss of your heart
like the bucket wish of a watershed
appealing
like a housewell to the rain to bail
you out by
filling you up until your skull cup
runneth over
like a gutter on the moon that cuts
through your heart?
Among the lost arts, suffering is the
most
ferocious form of compassion the
imagination
of a human being can be disciplined in
without any effort on our part at all
because
we were all born with a genius, if not
the motive for it, or the experience,
from the very start.
In the gutter you can always hear
a sincere young woman singing the blues
like edgy moonlight through a broken
window
and later, no crossdraft in a hot
apartment,
huddle in the cement threshold of the
doorway
where she lingers in the cool of the
night
like the smoke of a rebel cigarette
posing
like the portrait of a ghost for an
empty picture frame.
In the gutter you’re a drop of
emotion
in an ocean of chaos and Lady Luck’s
the patron saint of talent, and for
city blocks
as far as you can see through the
blazing of the blind,
people are either waiting to be
discovered
among the bullrushes like illegitimate
children
exiled from their own promised land,
or orphaned on the steps of the temple
with blue ribbons in their hands
that meant something much less venal
once
than a dynastic return to a pimped-out
innocence
riding like a gold rush through a slum
trying to stay an avalanche of starmud
ahead of itself,
or the greater vehicle of a medicine
chest
of pharmaceuticals hatching out like
cosmic eggs
of crackhead serpent fire living the
dream
it was cursed by when it got what it
asked for,
anathematized by the backfire of the
blessings
we don’t bestow upon one another as
if
even here in the gutter where nothing
matters
given how random forever is, and love
just as seldom and rare as the
opportunity presents itself,
o, yes, yes, yes, let none deny it, it
especially does.
PATRICK WHITE
