RAIN AT FIVE IN THE MORNING. CAN'T SLEEP.

RAIN AT FIVE IN THE MORNING. CAN’T SLEEP

Rain at five in the morning. Can’t sleep.

Too many shards of broken mirrors

of the way things are in my mind.

Not enough windows to look through

for a star or two between the clouds.

No one on the streets. And the doorways

keeping their thoughts to themselves.

The pipes of the gas furnace creak

like an octopus with arthritis

and the aquarium filter leaks

like a mindstream on the rocks

not the lyrics of a fountain with a dolphin’s mouth.

My eyes observe the protocols of seeing

into the sturm and drang of my awareness

like a lighthouse, but the dragon’s awake

scalding my heart until my blood seethes

like the toxic glands of a cold-hearted reptile

in a cauldron of volcanic mistakes

reversing the spin of the spells I cast

that had more of an air of forgiveness about them

than is seemly for a curse but still too much

the smouldering of the Druidic glais

dedicated to the ashes of the Burning Man

to be a blessing in the eyes of the beholder

who sees his own features in it, good or bad,

depending on how raw or cooked he is.

My subconscious mind surfaces

like the dorsal fin of a sundial

to circle the lifeboat I’m in

like a prophet in the belly of a killer whale

trying to knock a seal off an ice floe.

I’ve disciplined my karma like a martial art

but my heart is a miasma of provisional compassion.

Dead dog’s dream self snarls like a junkyard

of bad performance poetry behind an electric fence

I wove out of the optic fibres

of a discarded dreamcatcher

hanging from a rearview mirror

in the middle of a windshield

swimming against the flow of things

like a salmon up the mountain

in the slipstream of its own wake.

I keep my rage on a chain and a muzzle.

I keep my sorrow to myself like a child

I never wanted to grow up to be me.

I can be a heretic devoted to the freedom

of my own creative apostasy

as a decultified mode of poetic disobedience

but there’s a gleeful buoyancy

in the experience that bubbles up

within me like a tar pit liberated from itself

that says touch even this lightly

in your passage through here.

Listen to the wind in the trees

with your nose as well as your ears

but follow the stars like a shepherd of wolves

hunting in the same high fields

their fires graze upon themselves,

not the wheeling of the world’s wavelengths

in these earthbound coils of renewal and extinction

crushing the life out of me like a beached Leviathan

suffocating under its own weight, or oracular pythons

with their tails in their mouths like the last word

of anything left to say on their deathbeds.

My despair is still contaminated with hope

and the lucky long shots that ricochet off chaos

but still hit the target like the master stroke

of a random God particle, haven’t done anything

to improve the aim of my hadron collider.

The secret of life is confided only to those

discrete enough not to tell it to anyone else.

They wear it on their sleeves like silence.

Their tongues are not candles in the niches of their mouths

they keep blowing out with every breath they take

looking for emergency exits in the fire traps of their shrines.

And woe to the hypocrite that tries

to love me unconditionally as if I didn’t have

a mind and a heart of my own to see

what a ploy it is to climb a burning ladder

up to heaven, only to let people down conditionally

like a fire-escape in a cheap hotel

that stops half way to the ground.

PATRICK WHITE