MAD OR ENLIGHTENED

MAD OR ENLIGHTENED

Mad or enlightened the same, the universe

is an embryo of darkness born in upon itself, everywhere

its own womb breaking into the pulse of stars within stars,

and everywhere, the shining before the light, the dark mirror

showing the light its own face for the first time,

how in an eventually that is always now

it would attain flowers and eyes along the way

and become the skin of the rain as it falls to earth in April.

If I change to fire, these letters burn, blow away as ash

on the tongue of the wind; if water, then the stars put themselves out

in their own weeping like candles drowning in tears.

Every step of the journey around ourselves

is another world, another garden to plant the seed-names

we’ve shaken from autumns in other realms

and carried around like sacred jewels

we forgot in the corners of our pockets and hearts. Believe it;

when I am all stars; you are all the listening darkness

I pour myself into like a drunkard into a bottomless glass

and you raise me to your lips and drink yourself up

until you’re blinded into clarity

by all the open cages of the light.

Why lie in your own coffin, night after starless night,

if you’re not empowered by your long obedience?

Better to open your eyes on the other side

of your horizontal door, better to come knocking from the outside,

deluded vertically, than suffer this poverty of blood within

the hushed precincts of your skyless realm,

the skull-bone basilicas of your private Vaticans and law libraries.

When it wakes up in the morning

there’s no book-dust in the eyes of the light.

Before you now, in your endless beginning, the dream

you thought you had rubbed from your eyes, you

waking up like a key inside the heart of the dream.

There’s nothing you can’t unlock, even

gardens on the moon or the ancient futures of past lives

death only pruned back with shears to bloom again

in the efflorescence of your eyes, early dawns in the new arraying.

Who you are flows into who you are, all one river of seeing,

dizzy and composed in its own running, all

your own eddies and currents, swamps and white-water,

auroral maids of the mist when you fall in separate drops,

weeping’s just a waterfall, and frenzied tides of being

when you crash ashore out of your own wholeness into buddhas and bums.

In the fire, everyone’s crazy with passion and intelligence,

everyone’s smashed on the wine of an unknown guest

trying to be remembered by his friends.

What visions abound in the orchards of the blessing,

What hearts are torn out and thrown upon the fire

like planets called home by the longing of the sun? We are the white shadows

of the someone else who is walking up ahead

like the moon on the path of its own reflection.

Catch up to yourself and drown in the luminosity of your own being.

Who needs a map to the road they’re walking

or sages pointing all along the way, grey as barnboard signs,

or luminaries at night

pointing to the darkness. The pivot of the worlds points to itself.

True north is not a direction. Haven’t you guessed by now; the stars

all circle you like stormbirds drawn to a lighthouse on the coast of heaven,

too in love with your light to heed your warning about

the deep dragon grief that opens the mouth of the wound

that killed it into life, a one-edged sword of light

in the hands of a holy assassin darker than the silence

of the sun at midnight. If you listen with your eyes,

you can hear in that mournful emptiness

God calling out to God, lover and beloved,

through the echoless valley, across the waveless sea,

yours the name on the prow of the ship that breaks through the veils of the storm,

and yours the name of the storm. You are the bird

that answers the green bough; the lightning in the rigging.

You are the sigh of the silence

and the mystic pen in the hand of the saying.

Whatever worlds you dress for, fields and flowers,

or stars and hourglass elsewhere zones, you are the body of being,

and yours the gowns and robes of creation you draw from the abyss

like clothes from a private closet, dignified in your scriptures,

intimate in your jewels. And everywhere you coyly let yourself fall

like earrings of rain, scarves of fire, fragrances of light,

and watch to see who of the many lovers that are you

bends down like the sky to pick them up at your feet

and return them to you like the first crescent of the moon

rising like an eyelid out of sleep

to greet itself reflected in your face.

PATRICK WHITE

SOFTLY, SOFTLY NOW

SOFTLY, SOFTLY, NOW

Softly, softly, now; here there is no beneath or above, no hell

for miscreant flowers opening for the moon, no ghosts

who can’t find their way back to the grave. No one

is unacceptable in this place where even the dead dig

for the blue bones of heaven, cracking

them open like fortune-cookies

to taste the light gold of the marrow. This is the kingdom

of empty cups waiting to be filled

by the black wine of union that ripened

in the skull-shrines

of a thousand drunken buddhas

begging outside a brothel door

for the same holy candle to show them the way home. People

are seldom grateful for what they don’t know

and thought is only the dog of reality

if you can catch my drift in this back-alley

where I’m dancing with a gust of wind. How lightly

you step off my tongue into your veils and shadows

dropping your masks like petals all over the asphalt

until you can’t be seen. Is that freedom or death; do you

bathe in your grave or your heart

when you remember the sorrows you’ve buried like daggers

in the wounds that widowed you? Do you tremble

like a kite at the end of your own life-line

waiting to be found by the witching-wands of the lightning;

or have you forgotten your madness, the dark jewels

in which you took sanctuary for the night

like an orphan in her longing, the crazy wisdom

that put on the costume of a dead clown

and offered herself to the blind and humourless

like a chessboard? Do you still swim naked in sapphires, raise

gardens of fish on the moon, perform

open-heart surgery on paralyzed serpents

that wake up from the anaesthetic between your legs

like a spring thaw, believing they can walk and then

come crawling back, veteran amputees

demanding crutches? Wild moon on a lonely river, night-lotus,

flesh and stars, every moment of you is origin; why doubt

your own reflection in the mirror of my voice? I’m

not selling snake-oil on the midways of eternity, filling the sails

of a slave-ship and calling it the love-boat; this is not

a wardrobe of auroras I buy up cheap in Montreal

and hawk from the back of a truck in Sunday parking lots. If the words

dance, if the wind plays lightly in the leaves, if the fire sings

and the diamonds flow and the rain falls musically

like phantom fingers on the spotted touch-me-nots, should I impugn

the graces of perception that sing, unseen, in the deep woods

because they fly without a limp, praise without a stutter?

I see in whispers; I hear in glimpses. Nameless affinities rooted in silence

bloom in the saying and fall back into themselves,

fountains within fountains, pursing their waters

to kiss the light as it breaks like glee against them. Fountains,

not pedestals. Deep sky-dwellers ride the helix of their own thermals,

their wings spread from dawn to dawn, and if they build,

they build from the sky down, not footstools, scaffoldings, and temples,

not ladders of bone at the bottom of dry wells, but tents of light

in the secret grottoes of space, supple as life.

Up is not up nor down, down, when you dream in the seed, neither

born nor unborn, yet nothing missing; creation within the Uncreate,

the intimately impersonal holy mother that is born and perishes

with us. I walk this vastness alone; who, then, to impress or pedestal

in this empty, pathless, mouthless, dark bliss of a world

where even the silence is speechless before it? If

the ignorant see the world as an open hat on a lonely streetcorner

begging for change and prizes; let them. That is their hour,

their seeing, their word. All seeing is a kind of love.

Orchids and dandelions alike. All that is loved is seen to be beautiful

but not all that is beautiful is seen to be loved. I see

a blue rose, shedding lives like petals and skies,

night skies, freaked by stars tattooed on heavy eyelids, falling

into dream and destiny. Graffiti Mona Lisa mother Bacchanal,

mad, menstruating, moon-dump bag-lady, I see you

vaulting topless over the horns of lunar bulls in ancient Crete,

or lady of the lake, royal witch-bride, bored with weddings

and vase-tamed bouquets, waiting to grasp the hilt

of magic swords whose power is older than the stones

from which they’re drawn. And there, in the window

of the thirteenth house of the zodiac, isn’t that you

plucking dead leaves off the herbs you grow on the sill, hanging curtains

you’ve pirated thread by thread from old mythologies

and woven again like the moon into light? Crow-weaver,

tell me, have you ever stolen silver from the mirror to heal a wounded vision,

or known an appetite so great, so incomprehensible

it consumed the galaxies like krill? Death is the dark inspiration,

pure energy, radiant and whole, the mute mirror that reflects nothing

that stands before it in an arrogance of forms; the face you wore

before the beginning of faces. Already achieved,

not something up ahead, a black star on a white night, the dark mother

who fills the wombs with gestures of light. Death is the ancient future

that passes instantaneously, the crone-nymph, oyster and pearl,

the miner in the ore that releases the child like a bell. The dream that wakes you

from a dream, the dead tree that gives birth to a bird. Death is

the terrifying abundance, the terrible joy of perfection falling

into perfection, the honey and the horror of the sacrificial wound. The child

that carries her mother in her womb. Death is no less life, no less us,

than a wave is water. Death has no beginning so life is never

finished. One afternoon, in an autumn garden, the air shuddered with mine

and I knew that it was already done like the stars above the flowers

of gardens to come. What death, then, to stare into

that isn’t already under your feet? Wombs, waterclocks, and coffins;

can you tell me the difference? Here’s my skull. Break it.

The bird’s already out singing you like a handful of joy

hurled well beyond itself into the dawn, and in the morning market

among laughter and apples

the phantoms array their illusions.

PATRICK WHITE

JIMMY, CAN YOU HEAR

JIMMY, CAN YOU HEAR

in memoriam: Jim Morrison

Jimmy, can you hear the scream of the butterfly now;

can you see the colour of agony in its blood,

the horrible beauty of its wings that were always

a crazy hinge looking for a gate to anywhere? Who listens to you now,

brother, if there’s anything more than bone and hair

to fret and string the music out of

like a spider sizing webs? Thirty-four years longer into this, Jimmy,

and even the flowers are screaming their mineral rage at the sun

that dazzles them like a dealer they can’t escape, white light,

white blood, bleaching them into the mouthless madness

of their decline into ribbons of dirt when all they wanted

was root-room in the starfields. Brother, are you dreaming;

do you care, awake and dreaming, perhaps, do you see; the heart

is a spiritual junkyard posing as a hospital with twelve beds

and a terminal prognosis that goes on forever like a priest

on death-row? Did you die with an erection? Did you ever need more

than your last thought; apocalypse and ecstasy

shuddering out of the soft cranium of your cock

into that sweet, unlonging smile

that troubles the living with the joys of the dead? Oblivion

the ancient snake that follows you through the blue desert

under three moons

writing your poems in sand, innocent as God. You always meant

to make your death last forever

by announcing it like a prophecy you threw over the fire

like a night sky full of strange legends and forbidden stars.

The rest of us accidentally lived our way out of it

as far as this ripple of the moment into the sexless, sensible revisions

that tried to turn your Roman wilderness of pain

into a petting zoo, mystic-heated wine

into angel-meds. Every new creation the dawn

is a nurse with a straitjacket; and even the birds

are trembling on the hydro-lines

waiting to be issued an improved flight-plan. People live

in the crack between life and death

like overlooked blades of grass. Even if

you tattooed the truth to their foreheads with a sewing machine

and gave them a mirror to read it,

grapevines would still turn into razor-wire

and the maggot grow fat in the liar’s rose. Coal is as far

as a real feeling gets to diamond for most; the rest play

at being alive. There was never enough time to waste

debunking illusions to phantoms; less now

that each of us approaches alone the vastness and the nothingness

of everything that used to touch us like fingertips.

Let the fire god come looking for fire

among all these neurotic extinguishers, young and old alike,

and he’ll snuff his own flame for lack of anything to consume,

nothing worth burning, no spirit in the ashes; even the bitter water

that put it enviously out, sedated in a ghetto of clowns.

Dying, the body haunts the soul, not

the other way around. You see backwards into the future

and remember it as if it were from the past; the light

shines inward into a visible silence

that spreads out overhead like a new sky

articulating its urgency as virgin stars

no eye or name has stained with saying or seeing.

Who more than nothing or no one could lift the veil

in this brief eternity before and after

the beginning? And this is not the only end.

You could die like a spiritual mutant

dazzling the peasants

with shit they don’t understand.

PATRICK WHITE

ONE SIDE OF MY FACE

ONE SIDE OF MY FACE

One side of my face what the world

looks like on the inside,

a mindscape I’m walking through

that changes shape whenever I do.

And the other just a clay bust of the moon

that somebody keeps working on

like erosion in Death Valley.

But tonight I’m tired

of looking for signs of life

where there are none.

The air is as smudged with cigarette smoke

as the dirty winter windows

I’m staring numbly through are.

Infra red aura of the town lights

reflected off the big-bellied clouds

as if something were burning

across the highway as those

who are awake yet listen

to the Doppler Effect of the sirens

to know if they’re still safe or not.

A pastel green wall

through an open window

across the street from here.

But I haven’t seen anybody in it

for nearly a year since I moved in here

where every second thought

ends in so what ?

Like a cynical kind of cowboy zen

that’s had it up to the proverbial

with koans and haikus

that provide you with spurs to enlightenment

but no winged horse

that isn’t already a corpse

lying by the side of the road like roadkill.

My mind soars like a turkey-vulture

when my heart

wants to swim like a swan

down river with the stars of the Milky Way

as I did one suicidal May in a six man raft

with no rudder or guide

in the spring run off of the Ottawa River

to raise money for

the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario.

But the cheap thrill

of risking my life for virtue

has worn off like chalk on a pool cue

and if light is the function

of the body of the lamp

right now I feel like

a blackhole with a bad complexion

that’s gone snowblind

in the glare of a computer screen.

I figure if I stare back long enough

sooner or later

one of us is going to blink

and discover what’s on the other side

of what the other one thinks

it’s looking at

when it puts an hourglass

up to its eye like a telescope

to know what time it is

and how many light years there are

between solitude and exile.

Between staying in and going out.

The tin gas pipes crackle

like ice breaking underfoot

or a bird in the chimney

trying to peck its way out

of a black cosmic eggshell

that’s as starless as hell on the inside

and tarred and feathered on the other,

assuming, of course,

it ever does crack the koan

in the liberty bell of enlightenment

and emerge with the wingspan of a dragon

into a room full of cigarette smoke

and patchouli incense

rising like the ghost of a white horse

as if someone who just fell off

the cutting edge of the flat earth

were trying to get on again like Icarus

waning in a wax museum on the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

LOVE COMES IN UNASKED LIKE A FLASHFLOOD

LOVE COMES IN UNASKED LIKE A FLASHFOOD

Love comes in unasked like a flashflood to a dry creekbed and suddenly there are toads that have slept for seven years, raising their randy voices to the stars like bass clefs of the earthbound who’ve just discovered water on the moon. Crazy dream with first violins that bloom like wild columbine. Magnetic tangerine with sunspots. Encyclopedia of prophetic birthmarks. Every blink of the eye yarrow sticks thrown down to read the Book of Changes. Reluctant fireflies appear after the sword dance of the lightning to gentle its fear of the dark with nightlights in the long shadow-filled halls of the heart. You taste the wine. It gets drunk on you. Someone lays cool herbs that shine from the inside out like albino fish in the sunless depths of a long eclipse, and you wake up out of your coma of normalcy, and it’s not the same planet that left you to die by the side of the road. There are wiverns singing in the locust trees and thorns that had lodged in your heart like the last crescents of the moon it was easier to leave in than it was to pull out, are dipping themselves in the inkwell of a rose like arrows dipped in the antidotes of loveletters with no known cure. Suddenly you’re a junkie and someone mails you the key to the medicine-chest of the Amazon like love potion number nine. And you come to love the sword like the wound between you and your beloved because when you lie down with the dead and you’ve broken your blade, your vow, your taboo, like a threshold that is more obeyed in the crossing of it than standing in the doorway, because love is inspiration and inspiration abhors obedience the way nature despises a vacuum, when you get up, everyone wakes up with you with the taste of a dream in their mouth they didn’t think to have this side of the grave again. Golden apples from the orchards of the western Hesperides. Candles in vulnerable corners, braver than stars, tilting at black holes in the center of galactic windmills. Waterclocks going over the falls in intimate kayaks like splinters washed out of your eyes in the tears you shed by yourself in the back yard in front of the grape hyacinth under the black walnut that has kept the abandoned garden hanging on under its wing for years. And you confess quietly under your breath, because you are you and everyone, how hard it is to believe something true and terrifying as love for the moment, when your longing takes its tail in its mouth, and the circle remains unbroken for eternity become palpable as flesh and blood, and dares you to risk being happy, or deepen your death with cowardice and regret you didn’t jump toward paradise in a windfall of singing apples at sunset.

Carding the snow out of your hair as if you were dying it over a sink in front of a mirror, you apologize for coming over this late, but you just couldn’t wait to confide in somebody, you were in love with a younger man and it made you feel like a queen cobra that’s having an affair with a flute player that makes all the right moves and isn’t afraid to kiss Medusa on the lips. And for the first time in a long time it’s easier to hold back your toxins than it is your tears. To wear that old boa of swans’ feathers you’ve kept in the closet since you gave up stripping in vaudeville and started wearing scales with low heels to maintain your sense of balance in an afterlife beyond theatre. And you’re afraid to make a fool of yourself like a graverobber breaking in to a cradle to steal the golden death mask from the face of the living. And you say you’ve aged. You’re not a raving beauty anymore. There’s more ore than diamonds in the mine. What do I think of the colour of your lipstick? Too timid? Or does it make you look like an emergency exit in a conflagration of poppies that are trying too hard to keep the fire alive? You can remember when your flesh was as tight as a plum, but now you say it sags like a used condom, a prune, the flag of a dead daylily at halfmast, someone taking down the sunset at the end of summer like a sail that’s finally reached port like an empty lifeboat that had to throw everything in loved overboard along the way to nowhere. And I notice you’re smiling a little wider and more often than you used to like the chrome bumper of a curvy fifties cadillac gleaming in a showcase window. And it’s disarming and cute and strangely charming to see the old snakepit you used to say you were, growing girlish about your hairdo, to see Medusa rooting flowers in her locks, trying to look wilder than the zoo you’ve kept yourself in for the last fifteen years. And you ask me, and I can see the tenderness and vulnerability of the question in your eyes and the anticipated answer you fear like a truth that bruises and bullies your lies. Am I beautiful? And I say, lowering my voice to the whisper of a sacred syllable that makes all the difference between life and death. Yes. You are beautiful. And if it’s the end of summer for you, though no season is younger or older than another, and each of us have to taste death at least once a day to know what hour it is, I say not all the flowers bloom at once, and those that bloom last are more beautiful in our eyes because they don’t hold back. They give it all they have to give. They don’t throw themselves like morning doves and loveletters into the fires of autumn as if the moon rising among the delirious willows had turned its head away from their beauty, its ear from their lyrics, like the urn of a skull full of ashes. Lady, put your make up on like Babylon, deadly nightshade or the lapis lazuli of the guardian bulls of the sacred gate into the daughters of night dancing like tendrils at an occult initiation into the sorcery of veils. Take that hourglass off your back, and cast your nets wide as the dreamcatchers and constellations of a starmap like the blueprint of a black Taj Mahal deeper than night in the esoteric teachings of the undeniably sensual. Both sides of the moon. You say they’re wrinkles, hieroglyphs in a dry irrigation ditch that used to be the Nile, but I see the deltas of a myriad rivers flowing into the mystic night seas of your deliriously enlightened eyes. And that cold stone of a moon you rolled over your tomb in a borrowed grave, now a giddy pin ball bouncing off the stars, as bells and whistles go off in a riot of lights, and you’re laying your soul out like dresses across the bed, not knowing which of them to wear. Wear the one that makes you feel like a snake shedding your skin as if the moon were renewing her virginity in the grave of her lover when the candles close their petals for the night. Remember that pole dancer that could once wrap her body around the winged axis of the earth like a snake that could heal or hurt? Have you made caged birds of all that passion and power? Are you still the sibyl of that coven of doves that used to rise up to the stars like ashes out that fire you danced around naked in the wilderness? Have you stepped down like the goddess of an abandoned temple, afraid of letting love lay its tribute on your stairs? And no, your ass doesn’t look like the rump of a galleon in the Spanish Armada. You’re still a sloop of a woman. You’re still an English fire boat with the figure of a mermaid that can lure an invasion fleet up on to the rocks anytime she wants. And if you’re afraid to be wicked in the name of delight, what are you evil in the name of, if it isn’t love?

PATRICK WHITE

SALT TRUCKS OUT ON THE STREET

SALT TRUCKS OUT ON THE STREET

Salt trucks out on the street. Black ice.

Noah’s wife salted like Carthage.

The town encased in a glass patina.

The storefront windowpanes are jealous.

Orange pygmy snowplows

seeding salt and gravel on the sidewalks.

Ladybugs about their business.

Butter on a black mirror smeared

like a palette of streetlights and logos.

One misstep and you’re on your ass again.

The night is sumi ink.

There are no revisions.

Who didn’t expect

to die on the highway tonight?

Whose heart breaks like a poppy

glazed by the freezing rain?

Who's been broken off

the brittle tree of life

like a twig that snaps underfoot

to give the nightbirds under the eaves a warning

and the presence of something foreboding away?

Accidental, trivial, random, happenstantial,

how much that was imperatively crucial

perished for nothing tonight

like the driver of a tractor-trailer

that jack-knifed on the backroad to Plevna,

haemorrhaging alone miles from the nearest farm

while the ice fell from the aspen trees

like eggshell light bulbs

and forsaken chandeliers?

I stare blankly through a veil

of freeze-framed tears

crudely woven on the loom of the bug screen

at the subatomic causes

of astronomical catastrophes

and think of the collateral damage

of something so slight as a drop in the temperature.

Three degrees warmer and you would have lived.

But just as wet and three degrees colder

and you would have lived.

No malice. No mercy.

No one to look over the fallen sparrow.

You’re a casualty, you’re a tragedy,

you’re a victim, a bitter fact, an act of God

in a godless universe

that’s anything but self-evident

to those who can’t see in it

either a blessing or a curse

or believe the worst

always works out for the good, better, best

of a cold front that was just passing through.

Who added their emptiness to the abyss tonight

as if they were returning their lives

like shattered windshields

to the frozen watersheds

they took them from

as their broken bodies freeze to the pavement

until they’re discovered in the morning

and chipped away

like a statue by Michelangelo

who could see form in stone

and where the cracks in the marble lay

like fault lines and dangerous stretches

of asphalt highway we fall through

when the earth gapes

and swallows us whole

like a snake you can’t train

to bite other people

that eats its own reflexively.

I’ve tried to reconcile absurdities.

I’ve tried to measure the worth of a human,

noble and ignominious alike,

against the indignity of the way we die

but the scales limp with a heavy foot

as if they’d had a stroke

that paralysed them on their left side,

and left them with no feeling on the right.

PATRICK WHITE

ONE DAY YOUR MOUTH

ONE DAY YOUR MOUTH

One day your mouth just opens

like a rose or an eye or an oyster

that bloomed in the night

when you weren’t looking

and whispers things you should have said

in the defense

of your own innocence

and didn’t, things

that should have been defended with fire

but were washed away with tears

and the bitter acids of high ideals

like a poem in the rain.

I lie, but never out of fear;

and when I lie it’s always

an attempt to heal, to clean, to dress

that gash of a murderous fact

or remove the thorn, the claw, the fang

the sickle of the crescent moon

from a wounded heart

that hasn’t tasted life enough to know

why the blood is made of iron.

I mingle a little shadow in with the light,

a little wine with the vinegar

when the truth has no eyelids

and the bitter cup is full of bleach; I let love

sweeten the green apple

and err on the side of compassion

when the windfall needs a face-lift.

I don’t grow gardens

in the dirt under my fingernails

or drive a golden chariot through a slum,

but a few geraniums on the windowsill

can’t hurt the view.

And what can come of trying to pour

the ocean into a tea-cup

when all that’s needed

is a quick rinse in a bird-bath,

or a few drops of holy water

through a sieve? Terminal

literalism and contagious symbolitis

are the snake-oils

of fraudulent medicine-men.

The truth is a scaffolding

to climb up on and paint

and I never sing in the same tree twice.

But I steal, from everyone, chronically,

dreams, visions, glimpses, insights,

the little jewels of wisdom

that fall from their signet rings, plunder

whole mansions of emotion

in a single night,

a cat burglar on the fifteenth floor

of a tower of moonlight, seeds,

feathers, leaves, flowers,

names and faces, I’m a thief of fire,

a pickpocket and klepto-crow

with a passion

for the silver things of life,

a b. and e. artist with an ear

for encrypted vaults

where they keep the safety deposit boxes

like black holes crammed with stars,

a grave-robber looking for afterlives

to fence to the living, a professional booster

who can walk into any solar system

in a t-shirt

and amble out with a planet.

I once sold Mars in a bar

to a drunken movie-star,

but I’ve never wanted anything

that wasn’t mine, or the wind

couldn’t get its hands on,

or I wouldn’t receive if I asked,

like certain hearts that have accused me

of being in possession

of stolen property. Even the poems I flog

are hot, but like the rain and the sun

I lifted them from

I give to the rich and poor alike

with an empty hand

and the budding daffodil

of an open mike, stealing the Buddha’s purse

to buy the Buddha’s horse.

And it’s true, I’ve been violent,

cracked a few skulls, deviated

more than one septum, but only

when attacked or cornered

or on behalf of the weak and hapless,

gone out to the parking lot

and given as good as I got,

stood up and got counted

then quickly dismounted my rage,

turned the page, not

my cheek and in a week or two

when the swelling’s gone down

and the teeth marks on my knuckles

haven’t turned into aids,

like any cosmic ape or alpha chimp

with gargantuan glands

tried to play the sage

and walk away with a cosmic limp

and eons of blood on my hands.

But as I said, I lie,

and now that I’ve written this

to set the record straight

thinking I had good cause

to touch up my portrait a bit

I confess

between the cracks and the flaws

and the lines around my eyes

I can see another face

that isn’t a disguise

beneath the layers of paint

staring out at me

like a demon in the heart of a saint

who knows what I am

and scoffs at what I ain’t.

PATRICK WHITE