Great Sex In A Bower Of Razorwire Poem by Patrick White

Great sex in a bower of razorwire
and every kiss the splash
of an electrical rose
that just fell into the jacuzzi
as if it were committing suicide.
I remember you like the proof
of some mathematical theorem
I learned in school.
You were certain proof
I was a fool.
Foolproof then you said
but by then I was so screwed up
feeling like the Antichrist of Zen
I just wanted to be
as simple and lucid
as a horned skull that had fallen
like a chunk of the moon
into an unnamed desert
and let the stars crawl in and out of my eyes
salvaging whatever insights they could.
But you were the dangerous neighbourhood
I fell into instead
like a lost traveller's cheque
like a mini blackhole in my brain
like a pebble into a wishing well
that taught me like a dead echo
you can't draw water from a snakepit
even when you lower
the silver bucket of the moon
like your heart into a troubled sea.
I tried to write your mystery in comets
over the old cave paintings
of the constellations
that stuttered across the sky
like the text of an ancient windstorm
you couldn't get out of your eye,
but you mistook them
for the writing on the wall
and the fear you nursed
like your own assassin
broke them like a code of candles
in the shattered mirror of your seeing.
Everything I wrote after that
was either a lighthouse or a searchlight
looking for you among the wrecks.
I remember stepping out of the men's once
and seeing you across the bar
when you didn't know I was looking.
You were that nudged-over, foam-nosed
beer-drinker huddled in the corner
of what you were trying to forget
like an ocean that wouldn't stay hidden.
You were the long shadow
of a mountain on the moon
wondering why nothing grew
even when you watered the garden.
My sex, my heart, my blood, mind, art
all wanted to bloom for you so badly
like lightning rooting luminously
in your emptiness
just before the beginning of a world
we could both live in
without opening our eyes
like disastrous fortune-cookies
and nightmarish bottles of spider-wine.
But I was only breaking bread
with the crumbs of a dream
to feed the hungry multitudes
you sent against me like armies
to salt the ground of my being
and rubble my stars
like towers of light
torn down by the powers
of your darker night.
I wanted to touch you like rain,
like the moon touches
a wounded iris
and it breaks into flame
like a ghostly lover
that never let the fire go out.
And when there were scales
you wore like sequins
where there should have been skin,
I wanted to touch you so brightly
stars would appear in the night skies
of the blue-enameled tiles
that covered the mosques of Isfahan.
But we were serpents
that never wore
the same skin twice to bed
and it was difficult to tell
who took whose tail in whose head
when we sought to embody eternity
like two waves in search of a tide
that would ferry them all the way
to Treasure Island
where X marked the spot
where we sucked the poison out of each other
like two junkies from the same spoon
trying to shoot the moon.
You had a way of diminishing gravity
so we both could get off
whenever we wanted
to melt like frozen seas
and breathe ourselves away
into the profound inconsequence
of our letting go.
I may have fallen like a meteor
exiled from a crown of fools
for jesting with the protocols
of their imitation jewels
into the dark mirror of my own eye
like a bullet through the brain
when things turned unattainably sane
and the book of life
began to lock its doors at night,
but you wiped out the dinosaurs
for being a species that had grown
unworthy of your scars,
as you often said of me toward the end.
And tonight I confess to the stars
that hang like swords
over both of us again
in deranged configurations of pain,
without the least need of forgiveness,
that like any catastrophic event
you were abortively right
about what my non-existence
meant to you
that era of a moment
you said we were through
and you pulled the sky
over my head
like a volcano on its death bed.
And I want you to know as well
while the snaketongue's in the bell
how much I'd want to sleep with you again
and let the flesh savage our mystic immensities
like tents in the deserts of Scorpio
stripped like flowers in a sudden squall of stars.
Time is the temperature of the world
but that fever has never abated
and whenever I dream of sex with you at night
I wake up in the morning
with strange tatoos all over my skin
that improve the indelibility of your allure.
But if I was a lizard before
now I've crept out of the iridium ashes
and apocalyptic micro-diamonds of your eyes,
and my scales have turned into fur
and my blood warms its hands at its own fire,
and though we're as compatible
as creation and extinction
through some unexpected transformation
without being born again
into some afterlife of desire,
I'm being improbably true
to the greater elation
of missing you.