Writing Graffiti On The Blue Walls Of Heaven Poem by Patrick White

Writing graffiti on the blue walls of heaven
to bring them back down to earth.
Seven come eleven in reverse
I'm rolling my skull like snake-eyes
against the odds of finding my afterbirth
buried on the dark side of the moon.
Cygnus transits zenith and I've
desanctified a small cross
I retrieved like a corpse from the river,
a mere splinter of a skeleton, poor thing,
to remind myself where I
begin and end like a crosswalk over
one Rubicon after another.
But great bridges
from little crosswalks grow
like rainbows at midnight
and you never know
when the wind's going to blow on your luck
like a butterfly cupped in your hands
and you're going to bump into
the Egyptian sky goddess Nut
doing Yoga on a medicine ball
and things are going to change.
Things are going to get real strange.
I'm going to knock all the stars
out of the night sky like crown jewels
so they can stand eyebrow to eyebrow
with the eye-sockets of my skull
and see what I see from the inside,
and rearrange them all into
renewable constellations of fireflies
that never wear the same myth twice.
Who hangs their dirty laundry out
on the clothes rack of the zodiac
to dry in the sun
like poppies poems and blood
for the neighbours to see
as plain as their bias
on the sheets of the night before?
I'm not going to kiss and tell.
I'm a gentleman from hell.
You can ask Nut.
You can ask Isis.
You can ask the Irish beauty
at the Bank of Montreal,
I approach love like a crisis
without a glossary of headlines.
I burn but I keep it underground
like a root-fire among the cedars
or a furnace full of stars
in the basement of a school
for prophetic janitors that want to learn
how to sweep their ashes
up off the floor after them
like martyrs to a good cause.
And I don't know what ails me
when I'm hexed most of the time,
angst, ennui, boredom
but there's a long distance look
in the third eye of my cellphone
and the crumbs of a leftover dream
in buttons of braille on the menu.
But on the dark side of the moon
there are no wishing wells
for the dark caprice of a cynic
to drink from on his own
like vinegar or hippocrene
from enlightened lunar skulls.
It's not wise to trust your misfortune
to any moon, new or full,
that's forgotten how to blush
when she remembers
she's not just a banshee
at a broken window
in an abandoned house
but a fertility goddess as well.