Beat
Thursday, 23 March 2023
| Nichola Chadwick
Beat
drums me down somewhere
trapped against dry rasping walls
the penultimate corner before the floor breathes its last
and yawns into a colourless despair without plaster or pillars, a stretching succourless space
perfect for a sucker like me, delighted as I am with desolation
I am clean of hallucinatory fevered veins but all the same
looking up from the bottom of myself in perverse bliss
Until the 42nd song of praise makes the bile rise
Where are you?
You’re a busy bee
matter and space and disastrous races clamouring for your time;
but don’t you dwell outside that ticking circle?
There is where human rhyme dismembers all comprehension of Divine intention
so we bare our teeth in injured snarls at the aloof Outside
with impotence faltering down our cheeks
looking wide and raw into the nothing
begging for the something promised
I have lifted my eyes so many times
I have repented and presented and waited for the Ghostly Gift
What is you and what is not you?
If life is just life then you’re just paper
Where are you?
Why are you so far away?
You are there, where we are not
you are here, so some say
so you were, so some said
in a beaten land bruised by foreign hands
You came
with ever burning flame
with sandaled feet and sweaty brow
you came to lift up the beaten ones
and give an Outside hope and power
Where are you now?
Why is what you were so shattered?
Now your power diffuses, confuses and demands showy chatter
Now you are Outside, sheltered by the haze of time
cluttered by critical hallucinations
unreachable and irreproachable
Now you are only cobbled in poor human rhyme sieved from the Outside beyond time
only accessible through dull ink and paper pressed nice and thin to fit within it
all the truths thicker than the things we see and somehow must imbibe alone
deciphering contradictory inscriptions through time travelling cerebral encryptions
Where is your Outside power now?
Bring the Outside here
help me shed some contrite tear
for my blissful beaten mind unbeating and my wasting hands
are unmuscled and unboned upon a faux-leather tome
the paper body that contains the ever-burning flame,
never warming, never lighting
But when the Timeless One did step into time
when he was warming, when he was lighting
when he flickered–
those snatches of cold and dark
were the most wretched, ravenous, resonant spark with the human heart
When God was flickering out, he said
eloi eloi lama sabachthani
When God was flickering out, God said
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Oh God, my God, why have I forsaken you?
You, the untouchable Deity flaming with the brightness of all existence
you beat yourself further into the darkest corner farther than any of us
you shivered yourself into a sputtering coal and switched out the lights,
you dropped through the floor of reality; sobbing, silent, breathless, helpless, friendless
looking up through the bottom of all you had made, distraught and alone and afraid.
But you, your love blazed up, broke through, you flared an inferno of limitless life
you stretched down a hand to me, trapped and beaten against the floor
Looking up, looking up, looking up, looking up
But your hand is lost in heartfelt haze and dust and mazes throughout the ages
This could be ever warming, this could ever lighting
if you are here
Would you be here?
If I clasped up uncomprehending brain halves together to scream one totalised strain
that you return
Not as you’ve promised, not for the end and the beginning of
everything we cannot understand
No, not for that, and
not as you say you did, at the end and beginning of
slaughterous chosen histories and corrupted murderous mercies of the Years of Our Lord
not for that, for that would be to say you didn’t do enough
and the underdone appearance has used us ever since
No, I won’t say that exactly
but to give me the time of day
and show me what you did is still being done
I am beaten into a corner by the ritualised idea of you
and I am in need,
in deed
in need.
________________
NOTES
“Beat”
ie.
(beaten down)
“beatific, blissful”
Jack Kerouac
You know, this is a really beat generation ... More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and ultimately, of soul: a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself.
John Clellon Holmes, ‘This is the Beat Generation’,
The New York Times Sunday Magazine, 19th November 1952.
Nichola Tatyana Chadwick offers vast, compassionate visions of symbiosis, paralysis, sub-cultural bridging and heralding. Her poetry has been published in Phantasmagoria Magazine, n-Scribe and fourW thirty-three: New Writing, and exhibited at the George Paton Gallery. She is the winner of Sparklit Australia’s 2022 Young Australian Christian Writer Award and lives on Wiradjuri land.
Image credit: Western Wall, (Hebrew Ha-Kotel Ha-Maʿaravi), also called Wailing Wall, in the Old City of Jerusalem. Photo by Rob French.