THE UNREFORMED LIFE OF A POET THICK WITH SCAR TISSUE The unreformed life of a poet thick with scar tissue. What did I write forty years ago? O ya, la, la, the live ones sing, la, la. Always knew it meant more than I could discern at the time but it’s lasted as I have a lot longer than either of us thought we would. If you persist in your ruination sincerely enough light years from here, creation gets quantumly entangled in your root fires and things begin to bloom like a moonrise you never suspected was a flower down on its luck. I don’t care where you’re hiding, everybody’s got something to fear, but I know you can hear me though I’m not asking you to show yourself, stay where you are. I’m not the answer to all those secrets you keep up your sleeve like an aviary of parrots you’re trying to teach to talk, but have you ever given any thought to being here at the indulgence of a dark mystery you embody in flesh and blood, starmud sullying the light on the waters of life with hermetically unstable intelligence? I gave my word to the X on my spotted heart I’d fall on it like a sword in the name of the most dangerously compassionate art that demanded nothing less than everything of me all the time like a renewable Promethean sacrifice chained to the altar of a rock by a long, dynastic bloodline of hot-fingered thieves of fire. My votive candle of self-immolation. Though I’m compelled to say ashes are ointment on my eyes now that my tears have boiled away into the more vaporous emotions of less revealing gnostics lost on a sea of awareness without so much as a moon or a lifeboat to stand on. It seems it’s got to be this way somehow for reasons that happily elude me in my pursuit of the perfect illusion to offset my sense of being an enlightened eclipse among fireflies trying to throw a blinding light on the best of my intentions. If that accounts for anything. Wolf, when I’m noble, bush dog when I’m not, I can change totem poles like a shapeshifting dolmen when the moon is new and I’m scavenging my way into an ongoing exploration of the life of a human with an unwieldy mind that keeps toppling on its axis like Neptune bobbing bottoms up like a duck, or a waterbird, to put it more gracefully, into its own reflection. Is this narcissism, or the slippery slope to solipsistic idealism in the first person singularly alone in a peculiar universe? It’s never been a purpose of mine to make a precedent out of my absurdity like a law of life that doesn’t inspire people to disobey it freely so they can come into their own. Nobody else can do your flowering for you and expect you to grow to fruition. The green, bitter apple in the chilly dawn of its fair beginnings is sweetened in time by the loss of its blossoms, and the erotic pulse of the windfalls of autumn. Pain. Was there ever a poet worth reading that wasn’t a worthy candidate for what they hated the most until they were house-broke into being the accommodating host of it, instead of the nervous guest? Work with it like a cat kneading a pillow into a loaf of bread or a white-tailed buck trampling the grass into a deerbed for the night. Take a hands on approach, and grab it by the throat like a hydra-headed python with nowhere to anchor its coils like an oracular genome that gives the secret of its extinction up like the open-mouthed blossoms of the hollyhocks swaying to the bird-bone flutes of the wind. It’s ok to be a snake charmer with a silver tongue as long as you don’t milk your own fangs to anoint yourself in snake oil instead of serpent fire or die of smoke inhalation in a vain attempt to put it out. Burn, baby, burn. You can’t be beatified until we see if there are any ashes in the urn worth scattering among the stars like flames that played you like the patron saint of dragons that remained true to the heretical alchemy of their nature like the angels that eventually evolved their flightfeathers out of the repitilian sky burials of their hereditary scales. Angels bear the souls of the dead south and west like geese and undertakers in folksy vests with a timepiece like a goldwatch that stopped ticking cremations ago when the ground got too hard to mine it like a grave and death had to take to the air like a transmigration well before the invention of back-hoes that permitted people to be buried late in the year closer to home. PATRICK WHITE
Posted on: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 14:48:32 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015