Solitude, My Friend, Let’s Get Out Of Here

Solitude, my friend, let’s get out of here.
Sick of looking at the same old deathmask
in the mirror like this afterlife I’ve carved
out of my heartwood like a straw dog
I cling to with too much affection. I forget
who said the mind is an artist, able
to paint the worlds, but it’s true. What
you see in the world is always a self-portrait
of what you look like from the inside.

Some colour within the lines like a choir of crayons
and others mix up a palette of homeless hormones
as if they were putting icing on a wedding cake
they were trying to keep the flies out of
like a seven-tiered ziggurat keeping an eye on the stars,
or a painting knife that slashed at the canvas
like an image of grace that wanted to paint its face
in scars of thick, dry pigment irresistible
as wet cement to a kid before everything goes solid
as ancient starmud on an effluvial flood plain on Mars.

Solitude, you’re the mast I bind myself to
whenever I hear a woman singing through an open window
as if the only way for a heart like mine
to have a long-lasting love affair with life
is to shapeshift my way like rites of passage
through all the stations of being water goes through.
Ice, fog, rain, clouds, seas, glaciers, rivers, mud-puddles,
water droplets, dew, lakes, tears, locked
in the comas of comets, frozen watersheds on the moon,
in these bodies we’re always leaking out of as if we had
more exits than entrances, and never last
and never least, this mindstream I like to sit
with you by like wildflowers in the sunset,
and drown my thoughts as if I were restocking
ten thousand lakes with the stem cells
of small-mouthed bass and northern pike
just to keep the game I’m playing with myself
dangerous and honest. Whether you exhibit or not

all visual art was born with the eyes of predators
painting their hunting magic on the walls
of their caves as if they’d found a way inside
their skulls to petition the great mother
with the mystic signage of their sacred gratitude.
Add a bird bone flute or two and it’s the picture music
that still echoes like a subterranean dream grammar
quoting the chapter and verse of mandalic metaphors
like the farewell of a waterbird to a fledgling arrow
of an albatross arcing through the sky like a paintbrush
with the taste of blood in its mouth, and its wingspan
unfolding like a book of sorrows too deep to curse.

Solitude, my friend, let’s get out of here.
I’m tired of counting the dead on the abacus
of my tears, black as new moons on my spinal cord.
Anywhere you want to go just say the word
and I’m there. Let the dark evaporate like a black hole
if Stephen Hawking is right, and if he’s not
we’ll work out some kind of cosmology along the way
of smoke and mirrors like a working telescope.
Make something up out of the ashes
of our former insights like a habitable planet
that doesn’t rely on the reflected light
of a middle-aged star for an exterior light source.

Let’s wander down that road no one’s ever
given a name to, forever further than we can go
like a new universe breaching the waters of life
with a birthpang of light that doesn’t wash
the baby out with the bathwater in the normal course
of love and life like a cradle or an ark
in a Red Sea of bloodlust that keeps saying to itself
apres moi le deluge. Let’s keep things in perspective
and make it huge enough to let parallel lives
meet like rivers mingling their way into each other
like the slim threads of one big tapestry
of marine life in a membranous multiverse.

Let’s go write crop circles in the abandoned fields
that read like the journals of the farm wives
that once lived around here as if there were
more intimacy in their solitude than there was
in the estranged company of their communion with town.

Let’s make a starmap out of the broken windows
that we’ve looked through as if someone
smashed their crystal skull like tears on a rock
scarred by glacial striations of the last ice age
that taught us to dance around a fire at night
to keep warm under the palatial chandeliers of the Pleiades
as if we had something to aspire to in life
that was higher than us. And it might sound weird
to someone who’s never haunted a house of life
they haven’t lived in, like a shrine to their own solitude
founded on a tradition of chaos that kept
the whole thing afloat like an empty lifeboat
anyone was welcome to crawl into anytime
they needed to without a passport to the moon.

Out of nothing, my solitude, we have both been made,
and that makes us wholly compatible
with the best and most abysmal in life,
this vapour of patchouli incense in the nostrils of God,
the smell of burning tires like black haloes
around the necks of humans nailed like crosses
to their bodies and minds like an excruciating witness
to their life and times. O who’s to say awareness
isn’t a miracle because they live like a lab rat
under a periodic table? If only with you, my solitude,
just to be here, however long it goes on
explaining itself with every thought and emotion
you’ve ever had it’s that close. A breath of stars

on the air at night, as if someone were breathing
inside you, every moment, the inconceivable absence
that fits you like the skin of an iridescent,
supersensible spherical mirror of a soap bubble
of intelligence, or a contact lens at one end
of the Hubble wearing glasses among the celestial spheres
to focus the multiverse and all of hyperspace
into the endless immensities of one single life

in any form, whether it’s candled out like a black dwarf
or blazing like the Pleiades, because one
flash of life across the nightsky of your deepest intuition
and you’re the stem cell that envisions
all the others like people and trees, fish, birds and animals
that all speak the same dream grammar as if we all see
through the same eyes, we’re the arcane wisdom
of an abyss singing to itself in the dark
as if it were well understood by virtue of our solitude
it spoke the same language as us, whether
we’re here to hear it or not. I’ve got you, my solitude,
like the cup-bearer of the muses, topping me off
as I watch the full moon tangled like a nocturnal waterlily
in the waterfall of the willows rinsing the stars
out of their hair into the river like bubbles of light
pierced by a thorn of joy in the cool abyss of the night.