Patrick White (September l5, l948 / Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada)

Adolescent bridal spiders webbing the doorway
with laughter and tumescent sex,
waiting for the hilarious rain.
Waitresses with overly bleached hair
and melting chocolate roots. Young men in wife-beaters
orbiting their pheromones like shepherd moons.
The air is a Venus fly trap saturated
with the violet wavelengths of an unexpurgated murder.
Sheet lightning rooting in the nervous system
of teenagers dogpaddling in the heat without a lifeboat
between the iodine logo of the antiseptic bank
and the unpainted stairs with their garish fire-doors
that ascend into hell like most of the local ghettoes
dancing with their fans to cool off,
or drinking beer in the parking lots,
or passing spliffs to potted plants on the fire-escapes.
Exorbitant flesh sticky with sweat and deodorant,
And the heritage streetlamps haloed
in a frenzy of mesmerized insects
like comets falling into the epiphanous sun at midnight.
Mosquitoes pumping their blood thinners
like punctuation into a periodic sentence.

And I observe all this trying to extinguish myself
like a cigarette butt in the ashtray of a full moon
trying to make a meteoric impact on the unknown
to see if anyone else is home, but me, and these exiles outside.
Stars in the window, but my eyes are grimy with traffic.
The clarity's smudged. The heat grows a cataract
over my third eye like a low-hanging homogenous cloud,
a curd of the moon, as I keep looping back on myself
like the fervour of a solar flare that can't escape gravity.
There are sunspots on my radiance. My meditation's not perfect.
There are the crumbs of stale dreams in the corners of its eyes.
My diamonds are evaporating in a blast furnace
and the picture music's gagging my voice with paint rags.
But here and there, in little pools of cyanobacteria,
love bubbles up slowly like thin silver necklaces
forged in the fathomless depths of this primordial soup.

Intense heat. Unusual sprouts. As they say in Zen.
Dawn on the feathers of the dinosaurs
couldn't help but make them sing as well
even when my starmud's cracked like a prophetic skull
in the dry creekbed of a dust bowl
where the toads have been hibernating
for the last seven years, and the scorpions burnt to a crisp,
add a little love to the mix, and even a blackhole
will flower like a galaxy in the cool bliss
of listening to its cosmic background radiation sing
like an ancient nightbird to its ageless longings.