Blue fire in your eyes, for years Ive watched you smiling everywhere against the odds of the secret you carry within you, the pain you carry within you like a broken mirror waiting for the moon to rise as if you were a thousand lakes, each waiting for the pearl that would answer their darkness from within. I was always afraid of your edges, the way you pretended to mistake my face for a mask, as if I was always up to something, as if you could hear the whisper of the assassin behind the door before anyone else could, as if your pain had taught you to be quick and clever, to double-back like a choir of tigers, the ghost of a supple cougar, and ambush the hurt you were certain would follow any overture of flowers, the waterlilies rigged to go off like dismembering mines, and the globes of the cherries that hung like streetlights and chandeliers, like tears long held back, covert bruises, and kisses long denied, small, black, radioactive planets charred by the wary shadows of Eve. And I never thought you could see more in me than a passing newspaper hurled at your door like another bone of the world, another slug-line, another playbill sporting the plague-mark of another macabre extinction. And you almost convinced me I was, you were so curt in your convictions, so ready to diffract the light of the stars, to bend their shining into their emission and absorption spectra, to show under the lens of your polished glass sky the subtle skeletons of death that proved their wings were ladders. It would be obvious to compare you to a field of burning wheat, to point to the fish that rudder like eclipses through your blood from a safe bridge above your flowing; and you were right when you said it would take a long time before I could write a poem about you: its taken eleven years of being suddenly startled by your beauty as you showed up randomly in the wrack and ruin of here and there like a wild sunflower that strangely survived its own innocence in the ashes of a sacred grove. I have never not been shocked to see you like a window coming around the corner, like a loaf of gold in a hungry nation, a star cluster out of the reach of my autumnal fingertips, a sky too far for touching, and the light of the life that animated your beauty something clear and vital and lyrical that exceeded even you, something that shone out of you as if the lantern couldnt see the shadows that danced in its fire, what measure of darkness was stunned by its poppy. I know beauty well enough to fear the black fire of its unattainability, the terrible preludes of possession that arrive like temporary reprieves and suicidal postcards, the brutal bedside confessions that wire the heart to an electric throne that dims the lightbulbs with a shudder of night. And I have preferred my palace of ashes to the diamond hovels of impoverished beginnings, remembering how my scars turned into an untranslatable alphabet, every letter the cartouche or coffin of forgotten royalty embalmed in the dirty rags of time, the tars and feathers of farcical birds trying to hatch pyramids that crystallized like salt in a desert after the lifting of veils and rivers and tears. I have stood like a ghost at the gate of a house I was born in and admired the beauty of roses that went on blooming long after I had planted them and disappeared to let them flourish in the rain and the sun. And I have felt the thorn of moonlight press into my flesh like a slow fang charged with a fatal elixir, cold infernoes of ferocious transformations and endured my own afterlife like a road and a wounded wheel threshold after threshold of black ice as my heart tried to crawl back to the tide like an iron crab. I have cultivated exotic solitudes that couldnt say my name without laughing, and heard the wind lament my most cherished intensities. I am no stranger to death or the eerie emptiness of laying myself down on the table like the only joker in a full house to ever make a guest appearance. But I am too stubborn for regrets or I havent been convinced of their necessity yet, and why should I belittle so much joy and excruciation as the mistakes a river made in its running as if it could correct its way back to the sea? Think of it. All these stars and not one in the wrong place. But I grew sick of the useless pain and the misery and the grief, the cosmic effort to open a simple seed, boundary stones hurled at the heart and the hard bread of broken smiles and the ghost food of the ego-feasts that mistake mystic vision for a lighthouse and run themselves up on the rocks to be cherished among the wreckage like emotional salvage; and I had nothing more to give, I had nothing more to say or celebrate, my shadow confessed to an eclipse it was a loser, my blood bleached itself white and packed itself like a fire hose under a switch and a small glass window that read in case of emergency, surrender, and I learned to apologize for all the wars Id won, and finance monuments to my defeat, depict myself as less than what I never had a chance to know I was just to keep the rose from putting its eyes out on its own thorns. And I did a good job of it; I learned to ,love unconditionally, I learned to ,love without ,love, I learned to ,love without me. I forgave and understood everything; I shuddered in pain and understood, saw how we all die eventually, how the candles of beauty and truth in this terminal vastness are so rare and precious, even unjustly they should be cherished, not allowed to go out in the heart even if death and betrayal took all, even if every breath of a desolate lover turned into a knife on the wind, an arrow of spite, not to let the rage to be done forever with caring, with hurting, with radioactive solitudes that tainted the heartwells with vicious reason, forsake the slightest victory of tenderness, forgo the least memory of human intimacy in such an implacable night. But the darkness forgives no one and the light is a vicious testament to how many wounded there are in the world, how many injured and broken, torn down like doorways at the end of a hall no one walks down anymore, destroyed from within by a dream that could barely say its name to anyone who asked why it wept. So many injured, hurt, condemned by the silence of forgotten smiles that have dispersed their seed in the dusk of a vernal ephemerality that no more acknowledged their passage than a broom the destiny of dust. And theres a part of me that cares yet, however many lashes of the mind assault the heart like an island with the salt of reason and a tide of serpents, even now my eyes crack in the heat of so much suffering, so much transformative fire, the butterfly in the furnace of the dragons mouth. But I had to grow tougher than space to survive, to teach fire how to walk on the dead seas of a vast moonscape pocked with the astronomical impacts of a childhood I lost like a leaky atmosphere, I had to convince the world I was at least as real and irrelevant as it, that I could breathe in the randomness the cold drafts of a faceless abyss. I was a fraud out to prove his own sincerity, and there are saints that would wince, ferocious hermits in glass deserts, hallucinatory purities of nothingness that would tremble to undergo the talons of the furies that afflicted me like barbed stars on a chain that refused to indulge itself with any key, any liberation that smacked of peace. And this is not a confession, not an accusation or retrospective opprobrium; nor does the withered branch cling to the wraith of a blossom any longer than it takes the frost of an early winter to melt like an orchard. I applaud the intensity of my mistakes, the depths of my madness, the unsustainable enlightenment of my rage; how every victory was shadowed by my own insistent mortality, the doggish constancy of my own fallibility. And there were perversities within me, the dark haloes of my occlusive sanctity that wanted to lead the night like a willing virgin through the intimate stations of the far fields beyond the blazing billboards that urged a delusional frenzy to seed her like a blind fish in the gutted depths of an eyeless normalcy. I wanted to dare my own horror into submission, risk without counting the sugar-coating on the placebo of my inherited humanity in the impersonality of the void that never paid any heed to the furious courage of my expansive folly. What nonsense it all seems like now; the renewable virginity of a junkie that bled like a candle to shoot the moon under the tongue of a pointless habit. Who did I think I was, fool that I was to believe all these brutal masks of frost were only waiting for the sun, that the collective ashes of the ancient urn-burial that calls itself society would rise to the blue phoenix that woke up drunk in the recovery room eating its own heart just to prove it didnt need one to remain true to its own transgressions? In a fever of creation I enhanced the quality of human idiocy. An oracle, I revealed the shallow roots of the sacred fires and lit my cigarette and warmed my hands over the eternal flames that snapped shut like the eyelids of windproof zippoes. Like wardens the sun and moon walked the ramparts above, high-powered rifles, the heretical compasses of misdirection, and I saw how even the stars, the cool rush of the established constellations were nothing more than the subtle tracks of a long-term addiction that could afford its own vice, random derangement in the name of nothing; the whole of creation nothing but a black rock cooked in a spoon, the severed filament of a wingless embryo of night enthroned in the tomb of a shattered lightbulb. Ecstasy became the ghoul of a horrid withdrawal steeled to my isolation and I reveled in the severities of my spirit, the hospital furnace of a raging heart that disposed of my gangrenous body parts, the febrile infection of the disgusting dream that cooed like a madame in the brothel of a ruined magnolia where I finally lay down with my spirit, enshrined in the blood and mud and lust of an incubator in hell where I was delivered prematurely to the night, the immaculate conception of an inspired whore that didnt try to reform the fire in the mirror that burned like a face. Now no one can recognize me, and no one can account for the injudicious happiness of a condemned soul that can scatter its ashes like stars across the sky for the wind to dance, a road of ghosts to nowhere. And the days and the nights rain and shine, rise and fall, and blood, and time, and the curse and the blessing of their carrying forth into a carrying forth like the eye of a waterclock, occur as they occur without blame or salvation in a freedom that doesnt know Im here to witness the improbability of their existence, the improbability of you and I sitting down on the concrete stair of the bookstore where you work, like two thorns removed from our own hearts, free of the shadowless viper and the black rose that taught us to bite and swallow and I swear, the spontaneous irony of your laughter was sweeter than water lapping the startled shores of two islands on the moon, both of us joyously distinguished in a confusion of doves and crows by what we had denied. - Patrick White
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 22:12:43 +0000
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