I'M TIRED OF SHINING

I’M TIRED OF SHINING

I’m tired of shining for the blind, enduring

all these mystical sunspots

mesmerized by their own downtown darkness.

Insanity, my lover, show them one of your lunar fangs,

let the serpent queen smile, the wolf-baron snarl;

the real kings establish their thrones

above the timber-line. No. No. No. No. No. No.

was never a foundation-stone for anything.

When the rocks weep it’s quicksand.

Overcoming delusion to open the fly on enlightenment

is just the next pilgrim wave on its way to some sacred beach.

Beyond beyond I live alone in my infernal solitude

gnawing the ruby marrow out of gold bones

that used to belong to a legless sage. Kitten, this is

the other side, black paint

on the back of the light-fields mirroring this world of things,

the emptiness that makes you you, thinking itself

into its own creation like a snake

that’s got it’s tail in its mouth and a wardrobe of old skins

sloughed like bad tattoos into a library full of holy books.

Baby, this is where the fire puts out the rain

that falls upwards towards the roots and the fish.

This is where the wisdom of the phoenix

is an urnful of ashes dreaming of wild poppies

opening their red mouths in astonishment like bliss in the blood.

No one has lived here since

before the beginning of time. Still heart, listen,

softly, softly, now, to the emptiness taking its first breath,

filling its lungs up with dawn, breathing out the dusk.

Here we come and go through our eyes, hear

with our eyes, think with our eyes, every step of the way home

stumbling drunk on the wine of our eyes, every forsaken mile

the crossroads of our seeing. What does this mean?

The tigers were created before the tapeworms. Pygmies

have little dicks and when they think

they’re hooked like worms on the question-marks.

I can tell by the way you lower

the bucket in the well of your eyes you know.

Sorry for your sex life but things grow.

Besides, there’s lots of space, lots of room under the weeping willow

for a garden full of little tombs. Space doesn’t care,

imperturbably getting to the point. Neither do I

knowing there’s no need to weed the inconceivable. Baffling,

isn’t it; this rash of galaxies you keep trying

your home-remedies on, your whole mind

a poultice on an agony of light? I was like you once,

until I filled the black sockets in the skull of the dice

with eyes that opened sky by sky, petal by petal,

like a beautiful woman waking up in the windows of the shining.

Delusion is enlightenment, the moon spread out on the waters.

Do you doubt it? Then doubt it.

But until you can walk this bank of the river

that flows singing to itself through the night,

without leaving any footprints on your own face,

what you call consciousness is an ape

choosing its own ignorance like a piece of coloured glass

it’s snatched from someone else,

a smear on the revealing. Learn to read

that which has never been written

as your own intimate journal

and all the attics and trunks

of all your hopes and longings, all your fears

that your confusion is your only certainty

will turn their light around

and show you who’s standing like a lover

in the shadows of your eyes.

Most people drift all their days and nights

like empty lifeboats through the hordes of the drowning,

bewailing their lack of direction

to the endless sea that confounds them. You

fence your mental coastlines with erect lighthouses

that call you to your wreckage again and again on the rocks.

And me? I’m tired

of slipping these spiritual razor-blades

into the candy-apples on the tree of knowledge

for all these Eves who keep coming to the door like Halloween

and ringing the bell on the inside

to be let out of themselves like children

afraid of their own unconvincing masks.

Curse or kiss me as you must,

but who’d thread the eye of the needle

with the spine of the serpent

if there wasn’t a wound to patch? Try to get real;

the other side is not

the other side

once you’ve arrived like junk mail

on the threshold of your own homelessness.

PATRICK WHITE