Citatepedia^®.com

PsychoBabylon Wouldn't Trade One Real Star

PsychoBabylon wouldn't trade one real star of his implausibility in
for the smallest flake of that tinfoil spiritual life you're passing off
as an iron pyrite cure all. PsychoBabylon knows the serenity of the dragons
who've learned to make peace with their own fires
even when they're bringing the rain to temper the swords
they forged in hell to kill people back into life
who've stuffed their pillows with too many feathers
and not enough scales to be credible even to the shadows they cast,
not to speak of the torment they put their dreams through
trying to divine and sign them like a message from the dead
for their eyes only. PsychoBabylon suppley practises
a discipline of subtle tenderness and recurrent doubt
in the face of his ambiguous revelations of what it's all about.

PsychoBabylon might tilt at the hull with the mast of his moonboat
from time to time, thinking he's whaling with the Kwakiutl,
but he doesn't turn his lions loose on the blackflies of insinuation
knowing their prowess depends as much upon
the quality of their enemies as it does their friends.
And surely it's the folly of flowers and stars that have led him
to certain incongruous conclusions about life that constitute
enough of a starmap of independence to go his own way
like a rogue planet sustained by the dark abundance
of his own homelessness as if every orbit he jumped
like the looping threshold of the mystery of life discharged
another photon of light on the black matter of space and time at hand.

PsychoBabylon would rather light candles and fireflies in the abyss
with his incendiary insights than blow them out
with the kiss of a fraudulent angel who traded her harp in
for a fire-extinguisher foaming at the mouth like a rabid cloud
to smother the protected species of hell in the first snowfall
of a nuclear winter. PsychoBabylon doesn't demonize
the third man on the match for smoking in No Man's Land
in front of a firing squad looking for scapegoats as a way
out of the irreconcilable dilemmas that keep breaking them
like wishbones and the horns of the lapis lazuli bull harps
strung between the crescents of the moon like spider webs
disguised as dreamcatchers apprenticed to Venus fly traps.

Sick people go to hospital. Bad people go to church.
PsychoBabylon heads out to the woods by himself with a noose
as often as he does a telescope. He risks a wary kindness
toward everything he sees, and even more excruciatingly
he doesn't replace the thorns of the wild rose bush
with the fangs of the rattlesnake coiled under it
that struck him in his throat in the middle of a song of longing
like a rat snake in the nest of a nightbird whose blood
has just turned to moon rock in a transfusion of toxins
to counteract the mystic elixirs of his enlightened lunacy.

If you can't hold the prophetic skull of the moon
in your own two hands by now, without fretting it
into foretelling a lie, PsychoBabylon blues his view of you
in the aerial perspective of his compassionate distance
as the victim of your own siege works when you're the first
to start throwing stones at the windows of your own crystal palace
because where there used to be chandeliers of stars
radiant enough to open up the chakras of the dead
now there's nothing but a mobile of swords above your head
and all the tongues of serpent fire you split like cedar shakes
to go witching for enlightenment in your celestial watershed
are now swimming on a different wavelength like a holy book
someone read in passing, and like a folder of soggy matches
that smouldered, but never flared, threw into a cosmic ditch
along with the angelic road kill and the rest of the spiritual junkmail.

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!