Kinder Hallucinations
Poetry, my ragged mistress, naked with golden sap dripping from her fingers
Offered reprieve from the bonesaw nights of self cannibalism.
As that last shot reached my mainline, she came through the room.
(I could always spot her by the way she walked, like an old lamp with a warm light.)
You’ve been doing it wrong, she told me.
You’re asking the wrong questions:
Do not ask the beast to quit eating.
Feed it, by dreaming it a storm to be wild in.
Do not feed it a low-hanging fruit.
Deprive it only of the pair left to its misery.
Rotting fruit, to be sure, is forbidden,
But by forbidding, God lifts her skirt and winks.
Poetry, my ragged mistress, clothed me in a sheet of silk. Pulled the moonshine from my eyes and planted stars in its place. Poetry bathed me, cradling my head in the water. Her fingers in my hair like a halo, she spoke:
So let us eat fruit. And by our eating let nectar rot our teeth with kinder hallucinations:
The moon you see is a funny egg!
Who waves at its stupid children sitting below, asking, ‘what does it mean?’ Those children are not great thinkers, or great sufferers, or great lovers. They are the billions of mustard seeds trying to convince themselves that they are not heaven. Heaven does not take place on a cloud, but in the belly of a giant whose name is the mind. The mind is a mouse chasing a cat through a song.
Music is not poetry, but poetry is music. Like a songbird is a symphony without lies. And lies are not poetry, but neither is the truth. The truth is almost honest. Poetry is never honest but honesty is poetry, a wayward junkie’s tears are honest, but they are not the ocean. The ocean is a far bigger drop of honesty: The tears of the thousands of junkies, on buses, in boxcars, in offices and schools, in soup kitchens and churches, in hospitals and rehabs, the collected weight of them, that is the ocean. The passing of cruel metaphors like a knife in the gut of everyone who ever loved, the sweet song that sows the wound, that is poetry. A kinder hallucination, aching to be born again in better weather, but bleeding for a foggy sun all the same.
Call the sweet sorrow by its name. It is the broken promise of an apple who never spoke, and certainly never swore. It is the language of liars and lovers and lovers who lie in love, whispering the word, poetry. Its name is the grass and the skin, and the skin whose soul is alive enough to feel the grass. Waking in a dream and walking with sleep, that is poetry. One weeping body blooming and becoming the body of all who have wept. That form, like a forbidden fruit, forged the truth of the earth in a phrase:
I understand you. Lie with me, and we will tell truths as we lie.
