Tempering The Carbonized Steel Of My Heart

Tempering the carbonized steel of my heart
in a drainage ditch hissing like a snake pit
to make it impervious to the pins the colour-blind lepidopterists
keep sticking in it as if it were a voodoo doll
for the projections they keep putting on it
like death masks of their own making.

Tired of hauling corpses like dead weight up the mountain
on a fragile lifeline where they hang
like mummified spider trophies on a thread of fate
swaying precariously in the wind while I drive
my heart like a piton into rock to secure a footing.
Why is compassion reserved for the weak
who just want to fall backwards into the abyss
taking the strong with them who endure
greater agonies in climbing than they do in falling off?
Enough is enough. Time to cut bait
and throw the little fish back into the depths
like minnows of the moon bottom-feeding on shadows
though they aspire like the vernal equinox
to a constellation of their own where everybody
can see them shining like the Circlet of the Western Fish in Pisces.

Sick of lighting other people’s fires and blowing on the flames
until their star is blazing, and then having them turn around
and throw acid in my eyes that burns like white phosphorus
through metal, even under water. All my life
I’ve pulled one shipwreck after another into my lifeboat
only to watch them punch holes in it to sink us all
behind my back as I was trying to swim through stone.
Why is that? Why do people cut off the hands of those
who were trying to help them like Che Guevara in Bolivia,
and kiss the asses of all those who are sitting on their faces,
who squat enthroned on the garbage can lids they’re living in?

I don’t make cages of gratitude for the doves and the crows
I’ve opened the door for so they can sing for themselves
when they get out of the egg and see how vast the sky is.
And I’m not a warden of aviaries trying to brain wash the parrots
into saying the same things I do to myself
when there’s no one else to talk to in the dark.
I’m not passing out little executioner’s hoods
to trained falcons perched on my arm like cuckoo clocks
timed to go off like i.e.ds at midnight at the stroke of doom.

Shakespeare might have been happy enough to teach the alphabet
to grammar school boys for seven unknown years,
but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have been happier
writing a comedy of errors of his own. I’m not
drawing any analogies here to my own state of affairs,
but if you ask and I say yes. I will. And I do as if
it were just as important to me to see you learn to address
your own potential as it is crucial I apply myself to mine,
why should anyone try to make me the dupe of my own ideals
just as a little black dwarf of a punk who thought himself
the legend of his own matchbook did yesterday on Gore Street
when he asked me politely, hey mister can you spare a cigarette
and not wanting him to go through nicotine withdrawal
because I remember what it’s like, I gave him a handful,
one to smoke now, and the rest to tuck behind his ears,
and the next thing I hear as he returns to his buddies is
hey, did you see how I hustled that old man over there?
Two days of intense heat at the end of May,
the next time he leans on my generosity, that black fly’s toast.

Just because the lion lies down with the lamb, and the lamb
gets an attitude that abuses the parity of all sentient beings
doesn’t mean the lion’s forgotten it’s got fangs and claws
and knows how to use them, or that the golden fleece
can presume upon the dragon that guards it with its own teeth.
And if I were a sheep in the company of flame-throwers
I’d worry about getting my wooly parts singed if only
in the name of strategic self-interest if I weren’t capable
of anything else higher than the grass I’m grazing on.

I’ve been a sacred clown ghost dancing with Sitting Bull
just before Custer’s last stand, and I’ve been demonically possessed
by the best consiglieres hell has to offer, powerful familiars
with surgical minds as sharp as scalpels, black holes in space
the galaxies plunge into without hesitation as if they were jumping
from paradise into a mystery older than light, and I’ve made
my way out again with my own prophetic skull in my hands,
howling at the moon for the agony of this death in life experience
that might have broken me and my harp like a wishbone
that didn’t have anything to sing about anymore,
but the deep cover singularities that exist in the darkness
of everyone’s heart, whether they’re looking for God particles or not,
and never been so twisted by any space I’ve ever been in
as to practise emotional espionage against my own feelings
or turn back on myself like a solar flare that festers
in its own light like an incestuous ingrown hair.

When Blake wrote that the tigers of wrath are wiser
than the horses of instruction, do you think he said it
with his tongue in his cheek? Or jumping through hoops of fire
in a flea circus with stagefright on tour through the boonies?
If someone offers you a clear, cold drink of water for free
from his own wellspring in a desert sweating mirages,
and you spit it in his face like acid rain on the flowers
after its’ been polluted in your own mouth, what do you think
your chances are of not dying of thirst beside a fresh water lake
when all you had to do was roll over and drink the whole thing
in a single gulp, instead of pissing into the swimming pool
we’re all trying to stay afloat in, as if you were an oilslick
sticking like an eclipse to the waterlilies in the last oasis
you’re ever going to get another chance to frack
before the desert hangs you out to dry on your own bone rack
like a fish fry still trying to fly through the smog
of your own smokehouse like a ghost long after
you’ve been cooked on the pyre of your own matchbook?