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The Boy In The Fire

My blood a riot of flags
celebrating the liberation of a country
I no longer belong to,
that has revoked my passport
to a library of prophetic skulls, I address
my solitude like a bullet, like a mushroom
at a gala of mocking roses, realizing
it’s too lame to dance, too deeply lost
among the visions within
to flirt with thorns and razor-blades.
And it’s sad the world gets in the way
like gravestones and footnotes,
that the new skies I’m wearing as corrective lenses
are bitter with rumours
of sidereal defections, that time,
bows my head and forces me
to drink to the lees of my own reflection,
the dregs of brutal truths
that fall like petals of blood
from the virgin sheets
of emergency marriage beds.
Reeking of sundials, like an era that has past,
or a century without a manger
to show for all its heroic disclaimers,
I am yet well pampered
in the brothels and hareems of anxious ghosts,
the nunneries that cake salvation on
like make-up and swear
they will carry me to term
and see me born again
in the abandoned theater of their wombs,
the last echo of a spiritual actor
trying to decipher the hieroglyphs
of an ancient climax that eludes him,
if only I would return with them to the darkness
after I’ve ravished them like a comet.
Some thoughts are born without eyes,
some feelings without mouths, and there are rivers
sterling with stars
and the charred harvests of the moon
that go mad in the desert
gagged by the ferocious hermetics
of a godless wind
leeching its likeness
from an ancient face
it can’t wash off the water.
Like a mountain
that spews its rocks across a highway,
aging is learning to make an orthodoxy of insanity
by slaughtering the priesthoods of your youth,
maintaining the equipoise
of a fearful acceptance
even as you gnash your teeth in the void
of a terrible attainment.
Not spurned by the hours
or baglady days, not
denied pasture in the starfields of night,
a legend of passage
among luminaries born enlightened,
as the years grow vast, joy
runs out of heartroom
looking for doors
to hide behind and jump out
in ambush, delirious with surprise.
All the old spots
are crammed with wraiths and shadows
and the taste of the lightning is flat,
the tongue of the thunder, a wet match,
the storms that overtook you with exhilaration
on your overindulgent crusades
to heretical shrines,
reformed muses
in a habitable choir of dissonant mirrors,
new hymns for old hymeneals.
And what can you say to the young
learning to eat one eclipse after another
at a feast of shadows that never ends
in the whirling of the dervish clock?
Though they shine, they appear like sunspots
on the greater brightness
that surrounds and blinds them,
so much of their lives
tossed out like trash from a passing car,
unknown jewels to themselves
crazed in the light of a dawn that doesn’t see them.
Robbed of beginnings on the road
that entices and waylays them,
let them dance to the funeral bells
in the echoless valley of sorrows
that dogs them like the future
that waits on their bones. Soon enough
another generation of strangers
will kick through their aberrant faces
like a black wind through autumn leaves,
rebuffing the long melancholy of the fall
with a joy too stubborn to be reproved.
It’s enough if now and again, for a simple hour,
a moment or two out of eternity,
they wear the vague halo
of a black hole, a feeble reprieve,
and the night doesn’t taste of suffering.
By the time they’re old enough
to be grateful for all
they do not know
the secrets grow vicious
with answers
and the mysteries
that were the empires of the wise
wither like wines without rapture.
So I keep faith with the silence of the sea,
the dignity of rocks,
the serenity of the sky, sitting
well past midnight
with a whispering candle
and a newly washed corpse
the universe isn’t big enough to bury;
and I say nothing, think nothing,
ask nothing
of the darkness within
that dwarfs the darkness without
and makes of the sun and moon,
two coins
not heavy enough
to refute my eyes or convince my heart
this afterlife that pans me from the mindstream
like a miner looking for gold,
a crow gathering silver,
a mad jeweler
plucking stars from the wind,
or a god worlds from the flowing,
isn’t just waiting for something
that will never happen, isn’t
just knowing that it will,
isn’t just the boat of my blood, full
of moonlight and illegal refugees
bidding farewell to a wharf of bones,
or a cross without a flight plan,
but another survivor
of the birthless beginning
that abandons me
like a changeling, a crutch, a genome
on crippled stairs turned circular
in a wilderness of burning ladders.
Any moment now
the night will give me a name
and the wind that drank my eyes
come like a drunk
singing on his back beside the road
and opening the encyclopedia
of forged passports
and club-footed interpretations
that calls itself the world,
point to the broken columns
of an erudite temple of sand
and tell me,
smashing the false idols
of the mirror and the hourglass,
the glass retort of my putrefaction,
this is not who I am.

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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