GREAT SEX IN A BOWER OF RAZORWIRE

GREAT SEX IN A BOWER OF RAZORWIRE

 

Great sex in a bower of razorwire

and every kiss the splash

of an electrical rose

that just fell into the jacussi

as if it were committing suicide.

I remember you like the proof

of some mathematical theorem

I learned in school.

You were certain proof

I was a fool.

Foolproof then you said

but by then I was so fucked up

feeling like the antiChrist of Zen

I just wanted to be

as simple and lucid

as a horned skull that had fallen

like a chunk of the moon

into an unnamed desert

and let the stars crawl in and out of my eyes

salvaging whatever insights they could.

But you were the dangerous neighbourhood

I fell into instead

like a lost traveller’s cheque

like a miniblackhole in my brain

like a pebble into a wishing well

that taught me like a dead echo

you can’t draw water from a snakepit

even when you lower

the silver bucket of the moon

like your heart into a troubled sea.

I tried to write your mystery in comets

over the old cave paintings

of the constellations

that stuttered across the sky

like the text of an ancient windstorm

you couldn’t get out of your eye,

but you mistook them

for the writing on the wall

and the fear you nursed

like your own assassin

broke them like a code of candles

in the shattered mirror of your seeing.

Everything I wrote after that

was either a lighthouse or a searchlight

looking for you among the wrecks.

I remember stepping out of the men’s once

and seeing you across the bar

when you didn’t know I was looking.

You were that nudged-over, foam-nosed

beer-drinker huddled in the corner

of what you were trying to forget

like an ocean that wouldn’t stay hidden.

You were the long shadow

of a mountain on the moon

wondering why nothing grew

even when you watered the garden.

My dick, my heart, my blood, mind, art

all wanted to bloom for you so badly

like lightning rooting luminously

in your emptiness

just before the beginning of a world

we could both live in

without opening our eyes

like disastrous fortune-cookies

and nightmarish bottles of spider-wine.

But I was only breaking bread

with the crumbs of a dream

to feed the hungry multitudes

you sent against me like armies

to salt the ground of my being

and rubble my stars

like towers of light

torn down by the powers

of your darker night.

I wanted to touch you like rain,

like the moon touches

a wounded iris

and it breaks into flame

like a ghostly lover

that never let the fire go out.

And when there were scales

you wore like sequins

where there should have been skin,

I wanted to touch you so brightly

stars would appear in the night skies

of the blue-enameled tiles

that covered the mosques of Isfahan.

But we were serpents

that never wore

the same skin twice to bed

and it was difficult to tell

who took whose tail in whose head

when we sought to embody eternity

like two waves in search of a tide

that would ferry them all the way

to Treasure Island

where X marked the spot

where we sucked the poison out of each other

like two junkies from the same spoon

trying to shoot the moon.

You had a way of diminishing gravity

so we both could get off

whenever we wanted

to melt like frozen seas

and breathe ourselves away

into the profound inconsequence

of our letting go.

I may have fallen like a meteor

exiled from a crown of fools

for jesting with the protocols

of their imitation jewels

into the dark mirror of my own eye

like a bullet through the brain

when things turned unattainably sane

and the book of life

began to lock its doors at night,

but you wiped out the dinosaurs

for being a species that had grown

unworthy of your scars,

as you often said of me toward the end.

And tonight I confess to the stars

that hang like swords

over both of us again

in deranged configurations of pain,

without the least need of forgiveness,

that like any catastrophic event

you were abortively right

about what my non-existence

meant to you

that era of a moment

you said we were through

and you pulled the sky

over my head

like a volcano on its death bed.

And I want you to know as well

while the snaketongue’s in the bell

how much I’d want to sleep with you again

and let the flesh savage our mystic immensities

like tents in the deserts of Scorpio

stripped like flowers in a sudden squall of stars.

Time is the temperature of the world

but that fever has never abated

and whenever I dream of sex with you at night

I wake up in the morning

with strange tatoos all over my skin

that improve the indelibility of your allure.

But if I was a lizard before

now I’ve crept out of the iridium ashes

and apocalyptic micro-diamonds of your eyes,

and my scales have turned into fur

and my blood warms its hands at its own fire,

and though we’re as compatible

as creation and extinction

through some unexpected transformation

without being born again

into some afterlife of desire,

I’m being improbably true

to the greater elation

of missing you.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I SWALLOWED MY OWN

I SWALLOWED MY OWN

 

I swallowed my own personal mystery

like one snake swallows another

or a dragon swallows the moon

to make it rain on its own flame

as if it were quenching a sword

in wounded water. A sane man

wouldn’t risk his ignorance

but a madman gambles

with enlightenment

by betting his eyes

on an uncertain insight.

Pain was a kind of physics

I had to take off like shoes

at the doorway of my own singularity

if I wanted to transcend

the incidental origins

of all the momentous thresholds

that parted and drifted away from me

like the wake of an empty lifeboat.

I ate my own personal history

like the bitter bread

of dead stars in a black hole

and time burned

like the temperature of the world

and the feverish dreams

that broke like blisters

and the aloof, cool moons

that sometimes dropped

their eyelids like blossoms

as if one thought shy

of assenting to my lunacy,

afflicted me alike

with caustic decisions

that made me weep like sand.

I was trying to put down new roots

in a mystic desert

that bloomed in mirages at night

and longed with every grain

and breath of its being

to turn its salinity into light

and for once

astonish the stars.

I wanted to honour human suffering

as something noble

and I was willing to labour

at living in vain

to believe in my aspirations.

But I drew pain down upon me

like the sea its own rivers and rain

and my heart imploded

like the black dwarf

of the wormwood star of Chernobyl.

Space turned to glass,

I was swimming through glass,

and the trees glowed at night

in the violet light

of a moon without eyelids.

And there was no one to talk to;

not even the silence would listen.

Oblivion looked into oblivion

like one blank mirror into another

and went on replicating itself like a word

in the mouth of a voiceless forever.

Night after night passed

like a species of used-up life

looking for extinction in a tarpit.

I’d fix my seeing

like an astrolabe to a star

and go down with my ships

like a navy in quicksand

whatever course I set.

I sought shelter

in the shadows of myself

as if the darkness

could contain me like a loveletter

someone forgot to send

but I was indicted by a wound

that even the emptiness couldn’t mend

for a lack of content.

I deluded myself that if

my innocence cross-examined itself

truthfully, eloquently, long enough,

the jury was certain to hang itself

for all the things I haven’t done.

I entered a fingerprint from my childhood

into evidence as exhibit A,

but my identity

was considered as irrelevant

as yellow tape at a crime scene

where the victim lies wrapped like a gift

to the god of Halloween

whose candles burn down

like a temple on a birthday cake.

Until only one unimploring pillar

is left standing

with nothing to uphold

but the great black flame

of the indifferent sky

that sweeps people and stars

like dirt from the stairs

and among the grand

and tiny dreams of creation,

bluffs an uncanny dignity

from the silence that falls

like eyelids and night

over the homeless faces

of the mindless graces

that inspire our devastation.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I SWALLOWED MY OWN

I SWALLOWED MY OWN

 

I swallowed my own personal mystery

like one snake swallows another

or a dragon swallows the moon

to make it rain on its own flame

as if it were cooling a sword

in wounded water. A sane man

wouldn’t risk his ignorance

but a madman gambles

with enlightenment

by betting his eyes

on an uncertain insight.

Pain was a kind of physics

I had to take off like shoes

at the doorway of my own singularity

if I wanted to transcend

the incidental origins

of all the momentous thresholds

that parted and drifted away from me

like the wake of an empty lifeboat.

I ate my own personal history

like the bitter bread

of dead stars in a black hole

and time burned

like the temperature of the world

and the feverish dreams

that broke like blisters

and the aloof, cool moons

that sometimes dropped

their eyelids like blossoms

as if one thought shy

of assenting to my lunacy,

afflicted me alike

with caustic decisions

that made me weep like sand.

I was trying to put down new roots

in a mystic desert

that bloomed in mirages at night

and longed with every grain

and breath of its being

to turn its salinity into light

and for once

astonish the stars.

I wanted to honour human suffering

as something noble

and I was willing to labour

at living in vain

to believe in my aspirations.

But I drew pain down upon me

like the sea its own rivers and rain

and my heart imploded

like the black dwarf

of the wormwood star of Chernobyl.

Space turned to glass,

I was swimming through glass,

and the trees glowed at night

in the violet light

of a moon without eyelids.

And there was no one to talk to;

not even the silence would listen.

Oblivion looked into oblivion

like one blank mirror into another

and went on replicating itself like a word

in the mouth of a voiceless forever.

Night after night passed

like a species of used-up life

looking for extinction in a tarpit.

I’d fix my seeing

like an astrolabe to a star

and go down with my ships

like a navy in quicksand

whatever course I set.

I sought shelter

in the shadows of myself

as if the darkness

could contain me like a loveletter

someone forgot to send

but I was indicted by a wound

that even the emptiness couldn’t mend

for a lack of content.

I deluded myself that if

my innocence cross-examined itself

truthfully, eloquently, long enough,

the jury was certain to hang itself

for all the things I haven’t done.

I entered a fingerprint from my childhood

into evidence as exhibit A,

but my identity

was considered as irrelevant

as yellow tape at a crime scene

where the victim lies wrapped like a gift

to the god of Halloween

whose candles burn down

like a temple on a birthday cake.

Until only one unimploring pillar

is left standing

with nothing to uphold

but the great black flame

of the indifferent sky

that sweeps people and stars

like dirt from the stairs

and among the grand

and tiny dreams of creation,

bluffs an uncanny dignity

from the silence that falls

like eyelids and night

over the homeless faces

of the mindless graces

that inspire our devastation.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOT JUST THE NATIONS

NOT JUST THE NATIONS

 

Not just the nations

but the whole planet

is reaping and eating

a perverse harvest

of hot coffins for cool people

like the indigent fire

of the crematorium next door.

I don’t think the sky’s going to fall in

or accept every invitation

to the backyard barbecues

of all the apocalyptic chicken-littles who do,

but I do think the air’s

going to cramp around our fat throats

like merciless hands 

when we’re dragged

to the chopping block

to be severed like the split ends

of a short circuit

that mistook itself for intelligence.

And as for our humanity.

Imagine. Two thousand years

of Christianity

and Christ is still being greeted

like extraterrestrial life

scrolling down from the sky

like a search engine with all the answers.

And there are spiritual snake-oil salesmen

pimping out the constellations

like hookers and websites

all along the Milky Way

only too happy to sway with the flute

of your weeping pleading and prayers

by taking you by the hand and the wallet upstairs

where sin begins your undoing

by teaching you how to fall

toward paradise

like something serpentine

in the gathering voice of the divine.

Fanged oracles with lightning tongues

like witching wands

looking for signs

in a tatoo parlour.

The amends doesn’t justify the ends

and eternity swallows its own tail

up to the head

and in a single, final gulp

disappears.

But it’s as easy as water to see

that it’s always this moment

and this moment

is all you ever were, can, and will be

out to the furthest stars and beyond

and down to the frenzied nano-heart

of the tiniest gnat of an atom

trying to patch space

like a mad seamstress

in the sunset air

when the past isn’t missing

and the future isn’t yet to come.

And this moment

is not younger or older than that moment

because you can’t say where it ends or begins

and space is not volume enough to fill it

and time can’t root its theme in it

and old men don’t sit out

in the shade of the summer trees

as if they were washing

the dust and stars of the world off their feet

at the end of the long road

in unknown tides of deep thought

about what might endure

and what might not.

Isn’t it clear

after all these thousands of generations,

and the pyramids and the churches and the prophetic skulls

and the brides of the living who annul them,

that the only place you can live forever is now

in this very moment just as you are and aren’t

and that there’s only one flower in paradise

that blooms alone like the moon at night

and roots in your eyes forever?

Sometimes it burns the heart

to turn the jewel of being in the light

and taste the anguish of your own death in its fires

and feel the mute, bell-weight

of the moon under your tongue

like the unassessible agony

of the dead that endure

without a rite of passage

like roots deeper than truth,

the brevity of the living

in the old fountains of youth

that no one goes looking for anymore.

And it may be that death is merely a shadow

that’s wandered too far from home

as night comes on, and life

a little radiance in a huge darkness,

the last star of the morning 

washed out of our eyes

by the light of the dawn.

But the masks you put on

like views of the world

to accessorize your feelings

never wear the same eyes twice.

And if you were to ask the nightstream

that flows by your feet

what it was looking for

it might answer

in an ancient dialect of water,

water, just as the mind

is a longing for mind

that pours out of itself

to search the worlds within worlds

that it creates as a sign of itself in its flowing

like lilies and willows along the bank of a river.

Everywhere in its shallows and falls and depths,

its passage is the threshold

of the homelessness

deep in the heart of all forms

that array their worlds for awhile

like stray concessions

to an inexhaustible longing

they know will never be fulfilled.

If you want to know

what my mind looks like

from the inside,

or yours, or hers or his

look at the world just as it is.

Scrape the faces you keep

painting on the mirror

hoping one day one might

accidentally mistake itself for you

and seduce you away

from the evolving agony

of not knowing who you are.

Let the paint flake away from your eyes

like autumn leaves 

down to the heartwood

of the tree that has stood

like a many armed traffic cop

trying to redirect the wind

like a vagrant violin

and listen to your seeing like music.

Picture-music bluing the distant hills

like the secret emotions of angels

hovering over an unknown grave

they’ve kept coming back to for years

like the ghosts of unsummoned oceans

gathering in tears,

true to their hopelessness.

 

PATRICK WHITE