Brutal Blue Of Twenty Below

Brutal blue of twenty below,
a serial killer with angelic eyes.
The light slashing off the snow
like sabres in full gallop reaping throats.
Even the windows going through
a mini nirvanic death-in-life experience
to catch a glimpse of the fireflies
of enlightened diamonds
that let them warm their hands awhile
around their blazing, hoping
they’ll catch on and be back soon.
O sweet one, hurt one, wounded blue rose,
your eyelids have turned brittle in the cold.
Your heart’s a baby mammoth
caught in a glacier
that’s exposing you to the wolves.
Your tears flow like slow rivers of glass
all the way to the sea that rejects them
like holy oil on the wrong forehead.
Blood on the snow, lipstick on kleenex,
a haemorrhage on the bedsheets
at four in the morning,
a flag of the rising sun
flying over the miscarriage of a virgin birth.
You’re the Pearl Harbour that sank
your volcanic battleships in a sneak attack
in a sea of shadows on the moon
and now you’re waiting for the birds
to seed them with new life
like islands stuck in port for the duration,
waiting for prophetic skulls
to wash up like coconuts on shore
where you go bobbing for the head of Orpheus.
And you’ve learned that your body
can only say so much
and you’re stuck in the doorway
like a word in your throat
for something you can’t quite
put your finger on like a braille starmap
of where to go next,
a morning dove
in a chimney,
out looking for land,
smoke without fire,
that won’t sully your shining with creosote.
And it seems your life’s gone on ahead of you
into the starless abyss of a forwarding address
and left you as homeless as a loveletter
in an abandoned mailbox
that’s beginning to get the feeling
no one’s going to answer you back.
And even though you’ve mastered
several zodiacs like Druidic sign language,
the finger ogham of L.A. Gangs,
to make yourself well understood to the mob,
you keep being reborn facing west
and you don’t know how to turn
the baby around in the tomb.
Your singing voice is baffled
by the dawn that rises at midnight
like the silence of a zoo with open cages
where someone let out all the animals out
like nocturnal animals to fend for themselves.
And it’s not hard to miss
the forty days and nights of flood in your eyes
you’ve been lost at sea
like an ark washed out of your tears.
And now you appear here like Morgana la Fey
trying to con Merlin out of his art again
by thawing you out of that pillar of ice
you’ve been locked into
like a butterfly in an ice age
that’s booked like Alice in of the Looking Glass.
But I’m not the Mad Hatter, Merlin
or the Wurm-Reiss interglacial warming period.
Nor yet an aristocracy of trees
in the democratic grasslands
of a Saharan savannah
where the deserts come
like crude beasts slouching toward Jerusalem
for the restoration
of their delusions and mirages
in a worn-out hourglass
with eyes in the sides of their heads.
And even the crazy wisdom
that drips from the tongues
of enlightened clowns like rain
from the gutters of a house
that’s been stuffed with too many leaves
from the book of the trees with knowledge
can sound like utter foolishness
by the time it traverses the universe
to bridge the gap
between your mind and your ears.
So I’ll just suggest you start listening
to that small, inner voice of yours
that’s been speaking
softly to you for light-years.
You know, the one you keep ignoring
like a candle among the illuminati
whenever you can’t take your own advice
and go looking for mentors and gurus
like a first magnitude star
seeking the advice of flashlights.
Stop looking at stardom from the outside
and turn the light around
until you come to the omnidirectional edge
of the known universe
and then instead of balking
on the threshold of the gateless gate
take your shoes off
as if you were going swimming
and plunge that torch
you’ve been carrying for so long
into the fathomless darkness ahead
like a sword you’re tempering
in the great night seas and watersheds of life,
not the wishing wells
you’ve been exorcising like steam
trying to cool your demonic magma
into the islands of the blessed in the mindstream.
Be brave. See what the oldest stars see
on the growing edge
of the expanding universe.
Nothing but darkness before them
and nothing for a lifeboat
a starmap or lighthouse
but the shining they brought with them
like those bioluminescent fish
that find their own way of illuminating
the sunless depths of the sea
where each is their own north star.
Here you deepen the darkness more
with your eyes open
than you can with them closed
like coffins in a graveyard of eclipses.
Here the light of one star
doesn’t fall upon another
to enlighten it like a wounded flower
at the side of road in a tragic attempt
to catch the eye of what’s passing it by
only to render itself ripe for the picking.
The clear-eyed light of the void
is as invisible as space
and hidden as time
under an executioner’s hood
whose blood runs bluer than death
when something gets in it way
like the lightning flash
of the double-bladed axe of the moon
falling on the nape of your neck
to separate your head
like a prophetic skull
from the long wharfs
of its earthbound mooring.
Here the solid becomes real,
and the corpse of thought
is reanimated by insight
like a nightlight in a morgue
like a canary in a coal mine
like a firefly with a longer lifespan
than the flash in the pan of a starmap
that thinks it’s the beginning of a gold rush
when it’s just the same old iron pyrite in chains
that you walked in here with
your your heart up your sleeve
like a dreamcatcher
in a broken windowpane.
I’d give you the answer
to life and death and love if I had one
that wasn’t just another
rusting weathervane on the roof
trying to lay a windproof cosmic egg
with a cast iron flight plan
to improve the direction of prayer.
But what would be the use of it
even if I had one that wasn’t seized
upon the axis of the turning world
like a bird wheel that’s lost its bearings?
But you’re a pretty girl with cold blue eyes
this winter sky that drives its icicle
through your heart like a sword
you keep deluding yourself
you’re falling on like a samurai
to uphold the honour of your defeat
at your own hands in Tokugawa Japan
is jealous of.
So I’ll tell you what I tell myself
not for love, or art, redemption,
or a polyp’s place
in the Great Barrier Reef of history,
not out of ignorance or enlightenment
when the silence snatches my name
right out of the mouth of my solitude
like a baby hawk in a crown of thorns
tearing the heart out of a morning dove
like a locket of blood; say
what I say when no one is listening
to the rain on the roof with me
and there’s only a homely echo of longing
in the valleys of death I’ve passed through
like the blade of bird slashing through
the air of its wounded passage.
There is no message.
There is no meaning but that
you make for yourself
on your way to finding one.
Ignorance and wisdom
write and paint
in the same creative medium.
The heart is a fire alarm
for arsonists and poppies alike
Tattooed snakes on a scaffolding
of burning ladders aspiring to dragon fire.
Angels in the ash buckets
of Icarian over-achievers
who fell to their deaths
from the skyscrapers of heaven
like an accidental gargoyle
from a demonized Gothic church.
Just to be walking around on the earth
huddled in your flesh and bones,
or swimming with stars
through the white-water
of your own mindstream,
or salting your own good nature cynically
until the baby gets turned around in the womb
and you look upon birth
as nature’s way of keeping death going.
You can curse. You can bless.
You can live like a heretic in joy.
Or die like a saint in rage.
From a single wavelength of thought
you can grow a thirty foot oracular python
you end up consulting
about everything you do
as if it had already been done
by somebody else with a bigger snake than you.
Or don’t blink until the stars do.
No matter. It’s your face.
You can wear it anyway you want to.
But just to be here, do you understand?
To have passed through
so many lion gates already
that were only meant for you to enter by,
whether you came in through
the backdoor or the front
or through the window like moonlight,
or a thief that did b. and e.s from the inside out.
You’re indebted to the roads you’ve walked.
You’re indebted to the things you’ve seen,
the elements, the moon
and what it revealed to you,
and you’re way in over your head
in what you owe to the ocean,
trees, stars, the children who
came and went like fireflies
before and after you.
They’re all the embodiment of you.
And you, you’re all
that they’ve achieved to date
and they’re neither guilty
nor innocent of you.
Because everything in this universe
is complicit with everything else
including the judges,
and that means there’s no one
to answer to
but your own questions
and when you do
you’re only ratting yourself out to you
like a woman hanging out laundry
singing an illicit love song under her breath.
All this and everything that’s missing
the physics, the math, the art,
the myth, the mystery,
the lyrical picture-music of your mind,
all the wisdom, the ignorance,
the cosmological theory of you
shape-shifting through your own space and time.
This is the starmud you were born of.
This is the chaos and order of you.
This is the harmony.
This is the dissonance.
This is the house of pigeons
that would rather be haunted by doves.
This is assent. And exile.
This is the lost and found of existence.
This is where you come to claim yourself.
And this is where you give it back.
This is where the losers
aid and abet the winners
by wanting to be one of them
and when they can’t even manage that,
hope, at least, they’ll inherit their afterlife.
Now take everything I’ve said
and throw it up in the air
and let the wind winnow
the chaff and the grain alike.
What will root will root.
And who knows what bloom
will come of that?
When you’re ploughing
and sowing the moon
as I am here with all these words
I occasionally look up from my labour
when my blade strikes a rock
and remind myself
from a lunar point of view
at the other end of the telescope
I’m looking at you through
just to be walking around on the earth
making tracks in the snow
no one’s ever walked on before
is proof positive
you’ve got the right stuff.
And even to live in vain here is enough.