IT'S ONE THING TO BELIEVE IN GOD

IT’S ONE THING TO BELIEVE IN GOD

 

It’s one thing to believe in god

but it’s a much lonelier crusade

without a Jerusalem

to go looking for a god

without a guiding star

that believes in you as you are.

Mind is more like space than a thing

and it’s the nature of space to liberate

and who could possess it

and who could conceal it

and who could wound it

and who could heal it

and when the ignorant ask

for proof of its existence,

looking for fossils of dragons in the air

who could reveal it?

And what the ashes speak of isn’t fire.

One man hears a voice

and gets up from his table

and goes and stands

in the doorway of himself a long time

listening to the stars that beckon him

to wander out into the darkness

beyond his windows

but he’s afraid of what he might meet

and eventually retakes his seat

and adjusts his unease like cutlery,

but others hearing the same voice

will flare up like startled waterbirds

and burn like swans of white phosphorus

sailing their paper boats

like Cygnus down the Milky Way

or poems on the mindstream,

while others graze on the shadows

that have overgrown the roads

that once stretched lightyears

beyond the reach of the lamp

that busies itself with the enlightenment

of guided tourists

through an inner sanctum

that gathers its own to it

like a pilgrimage of moths.

Three waves of the same reality.

Three snowflakes on a furnace.

Three voices in an ancient abyss

trying to clarify the silence.

I am not cynical enough

to condemn the lies

that humans must tell themselves

to avoid their own tears.

On this dark shoreless sea of truth

we wouldn’t be here

if someone hadn’t learned

how to make love in a lifeboat

with lies for oars and lies for stars

and lies for reasons to hope.

But even if you’re as demonically sophisticated

and aloof as a lifeline

in a palace of patrician stars

that have grown chaste

in the pursuit specific desires,

you’re still just another refugee

on the Road of Ghosts

that leads everywhere away like the smoke

that mothered the flames

of your ancestral fires.

You can still breathe

without having faith in the air,

you can still see

without making a creed of your eyes

you must believe

by shutting them off from the light

and squinting at sin

through a keyhole in the night

that keeps changing hearts

like cellphones and locks 

that won’t let you in.

Your hypocrisy is a little demon

compared to the world-destroying universe

that kills without losing its innocence.

The righteous of any religion, philosophy, ideology

can’t point at anything with a clean finger

and the first article of belief

is a confession of your own negligibility.

Boot-camp for the spirit

to derange one delusion into another

by putting another mask

like a change of heart

on its facelessness.

Better to stay clear, and free, and dark

and know without binding yourself to the fact

that you’ve never been anyone from the very start

except what you’ve invented

guided by misguided teachers

to insist upon as yourself.

Mind can’t be framed by eleven dimensions

in a hall of distinguished portraits.

Without form

without colour, taste, texture, sound,

it isn’t the beginning or end of anything,

and when it goes looking for its source

it holds a mirror up to space

to the furthest limits of its seeing

where there is no light, no face, no being,

and it must be said

if you’re convinced

you’re already dead

no not-being either.

PATRICK WHITE