I REFUSE

I REFUSE

I refuse to persuade any emotion to a poem

like a horse I can lead to water but can’t make drink.

If it’s a straitjacket it’s a straitjacket.

When its a wet suit it’s a wet suit

to go swimming with stars in. Tea leaves.

Yarrow sticks. Tarot decks. Incinerated match books.

I listen to a poem as if it were a response

to what I’ve said, and didn’t say.

I like the counter play of voices and mine

one among them, the whole tree full of birds,

and the chatter of black squirrels in the walls.

Midway between a car starting up and a stanza break

when I write, I feel like a thief that stole the prison

under the warden’s nose, and broke out through the window,

exhilarated by the bliss of getting away with my freedom.

I’m on an island alone with the moon.

And it doesn’t matter if I was marooned

or just washed up here like a wounded paint rag.

My spine is smoke. I drift tribes away from the fires

that send me like a message to the stars

without knowing what it is I’m going to say to them.

Until I get there like a crane-bag full of alphabets

and a couple of mystic words I’m keeping to myself.

Siderealized. Space speaks through its mere presence

like a field of unnamed wildflowers. Star clusters.

And there’s a solitude you can’t help answering

that gets deeper every time you open your mouth.

You stop fooling yourself about time the moment

it’s realized there is none. You break the bones

of the sturdy ladders of all-well-and-good-but.

You crush the fossils of the crutches you once crawled upon,

take off your spurs, turn your scales into feathers,

and the wind comes along and fits wings to your heels.

Things stop being solid and become real. So

when I write everything writes along with me,

every leaf that falls upon the river like a map

changes the course of the flowing and I let it

and every fallen tree’s got its hand on the rudder

and I say if not that way, where?

And the waves all answer in unison, here.

And even the loneliest guitar that ever sat under a willow

and thought of the home that wasn’t there to go back to anymore

can feel crowded when myriad words begin

to introduce you to their relatives by close association,

and shades in the closets of the chameleons

that rainbows haven’t worn in a thousand years.

You can see things through gravitational eyes

that telescopes have never dreamed of, and all the time

you’re lost at sea in a derangement of stars,

you’re pulling bodies into an empty lifeboat,

asking each of them as they begin to breathe,

if they knew where they were, because I’m sure

we’ve all been here before. And everyone

sat still as teeth in the mouth of a seagoing dragon.

Play. Full. Intensity. Sublime absurdity. Big Mind

full of chaotic potential, dark and yet to be the future

of everything, not exceptional perfections of lucidity.

Little Mind absorbed in playing with matches

that blossom in fire like the enlightened water stars.

Flare and dazzle. Ptolemaic translucency. The snow man

melts right down to his eyes in the heat of the picture-music,

peacock blues and greens of auroral acetylenes

and no one knows what it means, except it means deeper

than any answer could conceivably convey.

Here work is a form of worship, and the gods pray.

Mind is a gift. You just undo the ribbon of your chromosome

and let things out. Doves, dragons, and the occasional phoenix.

Or your own voice the tiger that wakes the valley up in the morning

with the roar of a vatic lily. The early breezes stir

and the dew trembles like an amateur on a spider-web.

Constant beginner, how could there be a precedent?

An exploration? An insight into what wasn’t there

until you saw it flash across the waxing moon if even

for a nanosecond, the God particle that created you

without having anyone else in mind but you, the becoming

that always worries about the end it never reaches,

the mystic specificity of the unfinished paradigm?

If you don’t feel like an idiot from the very start of a poem

you’re not showing enough respect for yourself.

If you don’t know where you’re going, that’s a good sign.

You’ve left everything behind the next world doesn’t need.

And the memories will come of their own accord

like waterbirds setting down upon a lake, they’ll reflect

what they only are for a moment as creative as the past,

and then they’ll return like vases and urns to the mantle

to resonate with the stillness of objects, and you’ll be the one

that’s deeply moved. The fireflies and lighthouses

will see eye to eye, and things will come to you

and ask you why you’re crying, and you’ll them

because I wasn’t expecting you to show up like open gates.

And this is an aesthetic madness, a crazy wisdom, an antidote

to being afraid to get out of your coffin once you reach shore.

Here the word beauty isn’t the verbal fossil of the living tree.

And truth is a virgin sword that’s never cut anything

or slept between two lovers like a vow that can’t be kept.

Here you’re the hydra-headed genius of your own horror story.

You can grow heads upon heads until you’re delirious

with intellectual conception, and live in a snake pit

waiting to be bit back by your own black lightning,

or you can take the dandelion path of a parachute

the sky mends with patches of your own skin on the line

and land somewhere gentle as the eyelash of an unknown warrior.

The important thing is to let go. Even of the letting go.

Reacquaint yourself with the dream grammar of the dead

who’ve been gone for millennia from the bodies they left

before alphabets were born of man’s hatred of women

when the sun comes up and the moon fades like soap in the daylight.

Be the nightbird. Be moon. Be shadow and light together.

Include the unlikely similitude without judgement

into the pantheon of your enduring monument to people or the gods

and if someone tells you there aren’t any, make a few up on the spot.

Mermaid and witch, warlock and sorcerer alike,

all drink from the same well, but in each mouth,

a different flavour of life, mirages of blood, wine, and water.

Become the mirage and stop hallucinating

there’s a reason for everything they can’t discern.

There are eyes deep in a poem that are looking out at you

to see if you want to get close, whether you can intuit

the logic of metaphor whispering behind the door

through the keyhole on the inside, or you’re stuck

in one long periodic sentence like the logic of syntax

laying tracks across the continent like a ladder of cautious thresholds,

expecting to reach the sky, without any risk of falling.

Fall and you’ll find out you can grow wings on the way down.

Fall and the first thing you say will be the sound of bliss

freed from its cage to shriek in a language of its own

that surpasses the teacher like a sonic boom

that doesn’t sit at the feet of the thunder in awe.

Real freedom, the most terrifying liberation of them all,

doesn’t come up in an unkempt garden like the placard

of a flower that doesn’t know what it’s there to protest.

Reality? Illusion? Valley and crest of the same wavelength.

When you see the mindscape from the outside in

you’re cutting gems with your eyes. You talk about

reality and objectivity as if your were in a solid state.

When you write from the inside out, turn the starmap over,

the light around, nothing is more acceptable than another.

All facets shine. Even the abysmal inner spaces

that dwarf the heart into singularities that seed

the bottomless depths of blackholes that tunnel

like star-nosed moles into new worlds

like the other half of the hourglass of this one

seem no different than from here to the store for a loaf of bread.

Nothing’s lost, effaced, expunged, or strictly given up

right down to the last detail of starmud in your make-up.

The sea learns not to fear its own weather, and the moon

ebbs and neaps with the tides, and the fish thrive

in the way it edges the waves with the flash of a sword

it’s laid down upon the prodigal waters as a sign of itself.

The mystery is the mystery of the wonder

that stands before the beginning and after the end

of a poem that spans the mindstream like a bridge

that let’s you see your own reflection on the flowing

inseparable from the water, more indelible than

blood is to skin. Less significant than who’s standing beside you.

Or the fact that life is a river with only one bank

and no one’s going to make it across in their secret lifeboat

without hauling everything into their inexhaustible emptiness.

Once you stop trying to figure out the universe,

and explain it to the rest of us, you can learn to play in it

like stars without curfews when the crows come home to roost.

The worst is bound to you in inestimable measure to the best.

Gather up your sorrows like old manuscripts

and fling them like leaves out to the stars on the wind.

Put eyes in your weeping and follow your tears

all the way back to the ocean that gave you them

and said water shall see, in the depths and the heights,

the whole of me as the mystic ocean of awareness

that eclipses the blossoms in the black mirror of the mind

to show you the darkness is not homeless

and no more than you can stain space with your blood

does it need to be washed off in the stars like Aldebaran

or our footprints in the red tides of the Pleiades.

You’ve held that tidal pool up to your face long enough now.

The lobster claw like an amputated crescent of the moon.

The grey nacreous dawns of Chinese-silk harder than porcelain.

The evictions of seashells like empty fortune-cookies

and koans with nothing more to tell, the nervous fish,

the dead starfish that jimmied the locks on the vaults of the clams.

O shore-hugger, when have you ever not felt discarded

by all those things you never took a risk upon

for fear of losing what you know and being washed out to sea

into the greater danger of being vividly alive beyond?

You may live in a marine cemetery but you know nothing about death.

You think because the mirror’s broken it stops shining?

Because your missing a claw, you can’t be made a constellation?

You live among your cupboards and empty cups

like craters on the moon, and your eyes are full of wariness

the sun’s going to come out one day, hot and intense

and you’re going to evaporate or there’s going to come

one overwhelming wavelength that’s going to steal the pot

like a man gathering money with both arms in poker,

and, just like that, you’re gone. And what are you

going to do then, cling to the mountain tops like snow

for fear of falling, for fear of the echoes of your calling

sweeping through the valleys below, looking for you,

like eagles and sparrow hawks for something running away?

What a waste of good birds. Step out into the open.

Spread your own wings like Cygnus or Aquila.

Encompass what enlarges you by conceding to it

as if they were your own inimitable spaces you were

flying through with prophetic serpents in your talons

as you raise the lowest up like homely bread

to manna from heaven that tastes of the stars that leavened it.

Spare the scalpel of reason a swordfight with the thorn

of your heart trying not to spill blood out of season

because you’ve declared a holy month on the moon.

And don’t try too hard to impress nothing

with the poetic depths of your vacuity, as the world

rushes in to fill the spaces between one lifeline and the next.

There’s a sacred emptiness in the heart of everything

and it’s built a temple out of the ground of your being

to receive your gifts like flowers and stars you lay upon the stairs.

And there’s nothing from black walnuts to unified field theories

to explain this phenomena that isn’t also the noumena

of your own mind listening to a voice older than your ears.

There’s a shining in the least of things that could dazzle the stars

were you to take the blinders off your life,

that carapace off the heart of the world turtle you stand upon

like the cornerstone of the cosmic eggshell

that’s been free of the encumbrance for fourteen billion lightyears

like a gift that gave itself freely away like an inexpressible secret

in the private lives of the wistful mirrors that reflect it.

PATRICK WHITE