Lady In The Rain Surfing Her Excess Dopamines

Lady in the rain surfing her excess dopamines
like foreign exports her neurons can’t afford to reabsorb
because she’s intelligent, bored and lonely though
she revels in friends the hilarity of their smiles
is way too severe to be trusted, a moshpit for the Taliban.

She snorts comets of stardust as if life were
no more than a biochemical powder when you squeeze
the tears out of it like an aquifer of Sodom and Gomorrah
without a desalination plant. And for the moment,
and the moment is eternally inclusive as an interreflective jewel
in the net of Indra, interoriginally elaborating
mutual fractals into blazing chandeliers of edgy insight
into this anodyne of power and joy that makes her feel
she’s healing like a naked god that just got into
her deathbed with her, and he were her creator and she
were an abysmally deep solitude greater then he could imagine.

I prefer constellations, myself, but this isn’t
an anti-drug commercial or a self-help manual
for people who think they’re doing just fine.
I’m an asmatographic cartographer compiling
an encylopedic starmap for lost fireflies who are apt
to mistake themselves for chimney sparks
when the wind is whipping across the glazed snow
like a downed powerline venting like a spinal cord
on a Fender Stratocaster whose nerves have finally snapped.

Born in a furnace like the urn belly of a dragon
that miscarried, what else can you do but stick
short straws in the black, bitter bread of your starmud
to see if you’re done, or the oven gave birth?
Way past feathers in the scales of my self-worth now,
what does it matter the price you put on your head
like a wanted poster when no one’s looking for you anyway?

Solitude’s not so tough once you threaten
to walk out on it if it doesn’t stop whining.
Draco on the nightwatch like one half of a chromosome
winding around a winged caduceus, when the need arises
to know something about the better half I’m missing
I watch other people sleepwalking in a dream
I’m spiritually well-mannered enough not to wake them from
like the prophetic voyeurism of a metrosexual Teresias
that hasn’t noticed that he’s gone blind and is led
by a seeing-eye girl that died young like Beatrice.

When you want to study the life of the mind
it’s always wise to begin by taking your name off it.
If you’re intelligent enough to be grateful for being alive
it’s inevitable you’re going to die haunted by the feeling
as hard as you tried, you couldn’t help wasting it,
and, oxymoronically if you’re stupid and spoiled
you’re going to rejoice like a ponzi scheme in your success.
Long after your death they’ll still be talking about you
like an oversight with a Dixie cup of coke on your desk.

But my preferred folly is strictly a matter of taste
and that’s as much motive as anyone needs to make it through life.
I efface myself and take the low place like the persona
of a sea on the moon that receives the rivers and sewers of life alike
and I greet what I can’t avoid like the universe that says
it would recognize me anywhere in my crowded solitude.

Sometimes we live like thieves in a refugee camp,
hovels among the Taj Mahals that don’t commemorate
the Mogul loss of anyone we’ve loved, hoping
we can pass our moral squalor off as patrician poverty
exiled in the slums and favelas above the city of God
with an aerial perspective on the angel fleets docked like yachts
that bloom and wither like stalks of the birds of paradise,
and hell invariably adopts an oblique attitude toward heaven,
looking down on what it can’t hope to aspire to.

Others keep absinthe on tap like the heavy water
of a Wormwood Star in a housewell that glows in the dark.
They live as if they were wreaking a slow vengeance
on their own self-destruction, snakes with their tails
in their mouths who’ve lost all track of the eternal recurrence
of time as it eats them all the way up to their heads.
Where the roads part in life they crack
the wishbones of the harps in their throats
and make a wish that seldom comes true or gets sung.
It’s not the words of the song they want to impart
so much as their voices and tongues that are listening
for an encore of applause from the echo of a mother
that abandoned them on opening night in an empty house.

Isn’t it wild how many people are trying to stay close
to people who didn’t love them by practising their mistakes
as if that were the only way they could embody them
in their absence, or when lovers break up they both
walk off with the salvage of the other’s shipwreck
like crooked lighthouses lamplighting in a storm,
astrolabes of fireflies faking fixed latitudes
off the coasts of consciousness like whole galaxies
of phantom sea stars prying the lids off an oyster bed
where the dead in their coffins sleep with pearls on their tongues
to pay the ferryman and grave robbers off with coin of the realm?

Compassion isn’t the default anti-dote of any venom
known to humans. Born with winged heels humans love to get high
on fletching themselves like the arrows of toxologists
whistling like the deathsongs of warbonnets in the aviaries
of the toxicologists who have been trained not to be insulted
by massive insults of any kind like hypodermic snake bites to the brain.

Lady in the rain trying to keep her powder dry
as the whites of her eyes in the doorway of a Masonic Lodge
that serves, once a week, as a gateway drug
into the occult occupations of the mysteries of life.
So many ruined temples like columns on their knees,
gods and goddesses unhoused by what they seek from themselves
as they drink from their skulls like the begging bowls of their grails.

Compassion might not be a panacea, nothing is,
not even death in life or out of it, whether it be
merely the mirage of the moment cast by the shadow of time,
or the fever of the nightmare you’re suffering in a dream
like the decapitated history of the acephalic iambs of humankind
dancing on its own volcanic grave with a serious limp.
One way or another, there’s always a hidden crimp
in the sundance of the lapwing that gives us away
like a false alibi at the dawn of a noetic eclipse.

Just the same, and that’s the whole point of these metaphors,
lady in the rain snowploughing a mirror you’re
trying to keep your pain from crying on, my muse tonight,
my lovely simulacrum across the street, stopped
at this station of life before you wander off into the darkness
of a party town trying to get down like a church bell
from a steeple that’s giving it nose-bleeds, compassion
remains, like water, the most cultivated taste in the mouth
of these hermetic deserts where the vipers leave scars
in the sand like signs of an oscillatory intelligence
looking for the Rosetta Stone of its own wavelengths among the stars.

On your way, there you go, wraith of blow. May
there be no dead air in the music of the day ahead of you,
and the masters of tenderness not lose heart
turning away from the rain on their windows
as if they had to weep harder than that to apprentice themselves
to the lost art of compassion thawing the wounds
of those who’ve grown callous about life
like a peasant princess holding herself for ransom
in the glacial palaces of the feudal ice-age in her eyes.