Sunday, May 16, 2010

IF YOU REALIZE ME I'LL REALIZE YOU

IF YOU REALIZE ME I’LL REALIZE YOU

 

If you realize me I’ll realize you.

And maybe we could make something

come true for a while

we both could believe in

keeping in mind that space isn’t skin

and we’ve still got to pay the rent

on the metaphor we’re living in

like mystic honey in a killer-bees’ nest.

And I won’t try to heal you

if you don’t try to heal me.

If you don’t play the wounded muse

I won’t look for inspiration in your pain.

And worse than indifference

if you don’t reproach me for the chaos

that is the crude ore of my quest for stars

I won’t look upon your delusions with compassion.

If you don’t ask me to outlaw the clowns

of my traveling circus at the edge of town

if we were to get serious

about having some fun

I won’t show you where God is buried

without a headstone.

No river’s flowing the wrong way to the sea

we’re all going to make in time

mindstream after mindstream like waterclocks

with our tails in our mouths like serpents for eternity.

Madness is an eternal recurrence

with intense moments of lucidity

it scrapes out of the darkness like the stars

of an old passion that never went out.

So if you don’t think of me

as if I were insane

and you were not

I won’t hold you responsible

for the dream in which we are and are not

caught up in the life themes

of what we seem to each other

when we make one gate

from the crescents of the moon

there’s an infinite number of ways to walk through

without needing passwords for love

when we haven’t got any clothes on.

People turn to sand and water and clouds

when you try to grasp them.

When space tries to keep time on a short leash

traveling at the speed of light

the dog runs away from home

like a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest

and learns to eat at the backdoor of a neighbourly absolute

that doesn’t dispute what it’s learned to ignore.

An open hand that doesn’t expect anything

receives more than a fist that does

and it’s a weak human

that mistakes freedom for disobedience

and transformation as a betrayal

of the loyal chains that kept it all together.

So if you want peace between the constellations

like different houses of the mafia

blackhanding their contracts

like blood-sealed eclipses

to keep the body count low

and spin the public like a planet

knocked off its axis by a meteor strike

you’re tampering with the wrong species.

Cold consolation for the dinosaurs

but I’m the new hotshot mammal on the block

not the ashes of a truce I made with stolen fire.

I don’t ember long in the ruins of old extinctions.

My eyes aren’t creased like a fossil record

in the permanent press of time.

And who needs to squeeze diamonds

out of the darkness like stars

when we’re already shining for free?

So if you don’t turn our beginnings

into myths of origin

I won’t nail your saviours to a cross.

Today you suffer the win.

Tomorrow I suffer the loss.

But we can be two eyes in the same head

when we want to be

without arguing over

whose dream it’s going to be tonight.

Joy was already old when delight was a girl

but if you were to ask them their age

they would say

how old is a circle?

So if you were to agree that time is mortal

and eternity doesn’t fancy itself

anyone’s afterlife

we could both live free in the moment

where beginnings transcend their ends

like perfect flaws in the schools of perfection

that don’t know how to pass through the cracks

in their own reflection

without blaming the mirror.

We could fall through each other forever

toward paradise

parachute after parachute

and never candle our reserve in the perishing

like a daylily that’s fallen down drunk beside its grail

and given up the holy ghost on its own threshold.

I could see the extraordinary

in the most ordinary things of you

like a lipstick cartridge left on the kitchen table

ejected from a hunting rifle

like the gold bullet

I used to point at my head

like the lead of a base metal

until I was transformed by the red rose within

when you offered me your lips like painted petals

and I accepted the wound.

And I could summon the fireflies

from their fogbound valley like stars

after a storm

and ask them to tailor your earthly likeness

into a constellation

that would be the envy of all the zodiacs

sentient life forms anywhere

have ever held their fortunes up to like a mirror

martyred in a blaze of starmaps.

If you were moved by the courage it takes to be me

and I were in awe of the solitude

you had to maintain to stay free

we could be great heretics together

and fulfill ourselves by breaking each others’ rules

about not having any

and let the fools enlighten the Buddhas for a change

about how to make small talk

when you’re deeply deranged. 

You could be the one in the many

that didn’t return like a bad penny

and I could be the one

you picked up off the street for luck.

And way beyond the billboards for a better life

and the lies and the lies and the lies

that keep breaking down

into subatomic minutiae

like senate hearings

looking for the God-particle of the truth

they’re investigating for proof of their existence

we could create one of our own

like a night within a night

that belongs to strangers

alone with the Alone

whose shadows aren’t slaves of the light.

I could say your name

as simply and beautifully

as a unified field theory

laid out before me in bed like your body.

And we could bend space with our toes

like bed clothes

and the dark matter of the issue at hand

could lend a little gravity

to our electromagnetism

until we exploded primordially

into a climactic universe

too far gone to explain

why we had to go beatifically nuclear

to ground our pain in the joy of the curse

that keeps us demonically earthbound.

You could be my unholy treasure

and I could be your lost and found.

 

PATRICK WHITE