NOT LONGING FOR, NOT MISSING ANYONE, NOT WISHING FOR MUCH Not longing for, not missing anyone, not wishing for much, maybe the last half of the rent, my muse stepping out of a thicket of hawthorn, a white-tailed doe, into a clearing in my mind that doesn’t care if she licks the salt block or not. The town gearing up for Friday night, the roaring flatulence of bad mufflers throttles up like distant echoes of the bad boy dragons in the urns of ageing bikers, each of their women astraddle a horse of her own like a black leather saddle bag studded like a starmap of the pyramids on the plain of Giza as they gauge the number of points on the handlebars of each other’s chrome plated antlers underneath my window. Buck with you, anytime, bud, but loud isn’t going to outshout the whisper of the past that lives like a ghost in your ear. Man up to the fact your heart’s done a lot of hard time in solitude and if you haven’t gone mad, you’re a little more thoughtful and kinder than you ever expected to be discretely intrigued by the second innocence of the novelty. O, the racket of the screening myths of decultified fish still removing the baffles from their gills, so their four-strokes can sound like it’s their engines not them, having the heart attack. Idle, down, brother, idle down. There’s only so much time and then there’s eternity. Let the moment seize itself for a change. What do you think? The dark energy accelerating galaxies over the event horizons of your precipitous eyes into an abyss that’s been stripped of its patches like stars among rival houses of the zodiac, are trying to take advantage of the opportunity? If so, toward what end? Better to have never been born isn’t bad or best. No need to be wounded spiritually in a holy war between the Pollyanna and the pessimist in you. Be a good Roman and make room for both in that pantheon of tribal superstitions you brought home with you like skeletons in your closet, and remember to take Sophocles, cum grano salis, in jest more often like the black farce of himself that made him one of the tragic clowns of comic Athens. Sniper or snowball, this is your life alone and you get one shot at it with unlimited ricochets but you’ve got to get a lead on it like the light of a star if you want to hit a moving target on the fly you’ve spooked out of the bush like the moon as if there were no comprehensive alibis for anything. Time, death, the devil, and suffering aren’t the mercenary allies of a local apocalypse, anymore than the moon is a golden chariot on a milk wagon run on the spiral arm of a galaxy delivering bittersweets with a free razorblade and Vas Hermeticum to the alchemists in the bloodbank of a Pleistocene slum going through glacial withdrawals at the end of an ice age. Haven’t you noticed yet how all your threats have turned into sententious adages on the backs of frictionless matchboxes as if you finally put some clean oil in that short shag flying carpet of yours. Instead of kicking in doors, try valves for awhile. Why labour to bite a snake back in the throat like a wavelength you weren’t wary enough not to step on in the first place? And however you caress them love won’t make snakes purr like a highway you can train to bite other people. Hate’s a limp arrow. As if somebody fletched a spaghetti noodle and then boiled it like an old guitar string on a compound bow glued like a splint of bone to your broken heartwood trying to let it all hang out and what don’t hang pull like the ripcord on a candling emergency chute. But if I say it’s all the same to me this morning, please don’t mistake that for the hidden grail of a dead metaphor buried like the skull of a cure to the black plague that ratted out the Middle Ages. No ship to jump from. No port to quarantine with silence. No one setting themselves afire in a danse macabre of self-flagellating scarecrows crucified like martyrs by their own slave revolt. I’m listening to the rush of the wind in the crowns of silver Russian olives like the wings of a white horse grazing in the starfields of a slow, easy moonrise in this labyrinth of roads that have made a calling of my life disappearing like the keening of a waterbird into the evanescent distances of getting lost in my own eyes as if the ride, stars in the nightsky, never comes to a dead end where your tattoos wash out. PATRICK WHITE
Posted on: Sat, 10 Aug 2013 14:56:15 +0000
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