Tuesday, May 8, 2012

SOMEONE KEEPS FOLLOWING ME


SOMEONE KEEPS FOLLOWING ME

Someone keeps following me
like the shadow of who I was supposed to be.
The dark sibling of light
whose face got turned away from the sun.
He’s the remnant of perfection that’s left of me.
He’s the one I was expected to achieve.
He’s the one I’m supposed to believe.
I’m what happened to him along the way.
And the defeat goes on and on and on.
I want to say look you were there.
You saw what went down.
How natural everything seemed at the time.
How inevitability governed everything like hindsight.
But he just stands there staring
if I were the most inconceivable thing on his mind.
He’s the son my mother should have had.
I’m the one she didn’t deserve.
He’s the blue flower.
And I’m the black dog.
He’s the favourite of the rain.
And I’m the fire hydrant that wound up in the sewer
after putting out the fire.
He wanted to live a good life with laudable accomplishments.
He wanted to do well for himself
given where we were born
and he was groomed for it
by the very people who had made him poor.
He vowed to become one of them and thought
all shall be well all shall be well
all manner of thing shall be well
and he’d know the kind of self-respect
you just can’t get on welfare.
I went slumming with anyone
who was passionate or dangerous.
I’ve always felt guilty because
I wasn’t better than I am.
I think it was something
my mother kept saying in rage about me
when I was young.
And my tough old broom pod of a granny
always agreed.
I was so much more like my unforgivable father
than my brother and sisters were
I could smell the burning flesh
of some kind of mark being branded on my heart.
O.K. I said
I’m evil but I’m smart
and there’s always poetry and art.
I’ll be self-destructively creative
and give myself up to visions in the desert
before they drive me out in May
when they cleanse the temples of smoke and incense
and they’re looking for a scapegoat
whose innocence is within question.
And that was the first great divide in the mindstream
between him and me
and after that we were two different shores
and one burning bridge.
And I was determined I wasn’t going to be the shadow
that got left behind.
So here we are forty-eight years later
and he’s asking me with those
eery condescendingly accusing eyes of his
if I think I’m as smart now as I used to be
before I started living my life like a river
instead of a highway
and as much as I love the stars
dropped out of astronomy
because everything felt starless and unshining.
You can make more money
asking stars how old they are
and where they’re going spectrographically
than you can sharing the little light you’ve got to go by
through poetry and painting.
In art
things get worse
the better you get at them.
Abandon all hope ye who enter here.
You might still think of yourself
as an oscilloscope with a wavelength for a lifeline
but here you’re off the radar.
And I lived like that for years.
Women black coffee cigarettes and books.
I wanted to guide people by example
and lead them away from me.
I embodied the estranged compassion of the damned
in everything I did
and kept myself at an appropriate distance
in the aerial and thematic perspectives
of all my works.
I can empathize deeply with people
but seldom to the point
where I let them become me.
I have a plutonium soul
and the afterlife of a nuclear winter.
I’m one of the heavier elements of life
and my intensities are as natural to me
as the stability of his carbon is to him.
And the way I express myself
is more of an exorcism than a seance.
I dispossess myself of all things human
so they won’t be hurt by what’s left.
And I endure.
And I’ve got the energy
of an angry rogue star in my genes
that refuses to pale in his sunlight by comparison.
He graces our Russian Mongol ancestry with gilded graves
and tears that run like chandeliers
down his ballroom cheeks.
I trace it in lightyears
and leave the rest to chance.
He preens his decency.
I revel in the bright vacancy
the dark abundance
of my reptilian clarity.
He sees things in a white mirror.
I see through them in a black.
He mourns the things I do.
But he doesn’t know a damned thing about agony.
He thinks he’s the one who’s real.
And he resists me like temptation.
Not to feel might be the way to feel about Zen
but I indulge the passions of an unenlightened man
because I don’t trust purity
to remember that it’s just the fashion
of a passing moment
that buffs its own reflection in a doorknob
and passes judgment on the poor
with the stiff bliss of a happy slumlord.
His universe is Steady State.
Mine’s a Big Bang
empowered by a dark energy
that keeps accelerating my fate
into the void ahead of me
so by the time any kind of insight arrives
it’s always too late
to be news.
Right door.
Wrong address.
He’s the cornerstone.
I’m the quicksand.
He’s the habitable planet
and I’m the menacing asteroid.
He promotes evolution
and I’ve always got a rock in my hand
as big as the moon
to bring about a change in who rules
the windows and the mirrors
on the other side
of what they expect me to be in passing.
I’m the radical zero
who thinks it’s foolish
to try to make something out of nothing
given it’s already a given
and he’s the commonsensical whole number
that takes account of things.
He says he’s not perfect
to be arrogant about his humility
but that’s only a shadow of what he lacks.
I try to carry my own weight
because I don’t expect much
in the way of serious intelligent help
but he gets around
like a corpse on everybody’s backs
as if he were the stranger who came to the rescue.
He’s the crutch who leans on legs to hold him up
whenever he walks on water without oars.
I’m the bottom-feeder that he abhors.
But I can take a handful
of the muck and decay of my starmud
and turn it into waterlilies.
I can make my perishing into something beautiful.
I can use death like a spontaneously renewable resource
and make things live
through the transformative power of my art
that are totally blameless
whether they be light or dark.
He comes on like a lifeboat when he’s talking to women
as if he were walking by the sea.
He doesn’t know how to go swimming without an ark.
Women are attracted to me
like blood in the water
when they’re out far enough
to be thrilled by sharks.
I’m the zoo on the outside of the cage
that blunts its teeth on the bars.
He’s in it for the documentary footage
and a few convincing scars.
The sheep hunt tigers into extinction
and the goldfish are trawling
for grey nurses and great whites
to make sharkfin soup.
Even in hell
there’s a sense of proportion
almost a moral aesthetic
that goes unspoken
until someone spots a jackass
trying to lead an eagle around on a leash.
The distastes of a demonic imagination are not petty.
The taboo of the maggot
is not the rule of the whale.
So get behind me my shadow my brother self.
Don’t flash your lighthouse in my eyes
when the stars are out
as if I’m the one
that’s a few magnitudes shy of shining.
It would do you a lot of good to be a little bit bad
but then you’d feel too close to me for comfort
and forget who you are to everyone else.
I’ve never needed anything more
than the dust at my heels
to show me the way down.
I jump
and sometimes
I’m descending into heaven
and sometimes I’m plunging toward hell.
But what can you say about a man
standing at the edge of the bottomless abyss
of his own draconian absence
waiting for the flightfeathers of stray angels
with spare parachutes
to fall out of the sky?
I know you look so far down at me
from that overview
you’ve exalted like a balcony
that got it’s start in life as a pulpit
you suffer from vertigo.
But I could have told you little brother.
I wouldn’t want to alarm or harm you in any way
but I could have looked you straight in the eye
like a bemused king cobra
flaring over your nest like an unpredictable eclipse
or an umbrella somebody opened in the house
and diverted the luck of their lifeline
from the original course of its flowing
into a starmap for dice
pitted with eyeless blackholes
like the sockets in ivory skulls
lost in this wilderness alone
where nothing reminds them of home.
Alea iacta.
The dice are thrown.
You may be a better threshold than I am
but I’ve been crossed by the Rubicon
and I could have told you little brother
without even so much
as the penumbral shadow of a lie
to fall into your milk like a dragon.
I could have dipped
my other wing into your cup
as an antidote to clarify what ails you.
And as you drank up
I could have told you little brother.
The first shall be last
and the last shall be first
and it’s not a good idea when you’re here
to antagonize the lowlife
with your insufferable highness
from your upper story balcony
as if you were always trying
to get something out of your eye
like me
who burns like a cinder
just to see if I can make God cry
to hear why
I would have told you little brother
even snakes can fly.

PATRICK WHITE

INFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS


INFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Is it true
the most compassionate people in life
are the ones in the greatest danger?
That the most generous
will lose their hands to the ones they fed?
That the bravest will be hunted down by protected cowards
and when the last of the heroes are dead
and the dragons who inspired them
are the advertising themes of amusement parks
those with the smallest balls
will give themselves the biggest awards?
Is it true
those who are creative
chafe the destroyers like anti-matter
and give the intellectuals diaper-rash of the mind?
That just to open your eyes
to watch the stars and fireflies
is enough to make other people feel blind
and insist you black them out
like pearls in an air-raid?
What’s a starmap to a mole?
What’s a lamp that shines in braille
to someone without fingerprints?
Is it true that beauty summons the worm
as a material eye-witness to its ruin?
That genius is devoured
by cannibalistic Neanderthals
into homoeopathic magic
for the power of its brain
to turn thought into protein
with a high creatine content
that can make your dick strike twelve anachronistically
so you can go on knapping flint
for the next hundred thousand years?
That genius is a freak in isolation
that gets its own back
for being pecked at
like a phoenix among chickens
by opening Pandora’s box
like the atom at Los Alamos
like the genie in the lamp
and making a Trojan horse of its gifts
gives them everything they want
because anything as red
as Van Gogh’s hair and beard and ear in Arles
must be either a phoenix
or a fox with chicken-pox.
Sometimes you have more to fear
from the keys
than the locks.
Is it true
that a friend is a random event
in a space-time continuum
that’s got no room in its impersonality
for loyalty or sentiment?
That the heart has replaced the golden rule
with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
and everyone’s looking for love
like a Faberge Easter egg
that’s already hatched its ugly duckling
sans fairytale?
Or the Czar’s family?
I asked Annie
as we were landing in Toronto
from the West Coast
like a waterbird with its wheels down
on a tarmac lake
is it true
that everything we thought sincere
has been exposed as fake?
That forever isn’t worth
the loveletter
it’s written on
for twenty minutes
because of temporal inflation?
Is it true
that all roads
that lead to Rome or Ottawa
never return the way they came
like arrows and fishooks and Vercingetorix?
That justice is a celebrity fame-game with ratings
brought in by a jury of mirrors
selected by the reflections of their peers
to convict the innocent
for their sins of omission?
That the God-particle
everyone’s looking for
like something they can’t get out of their eye
might not be
trying to make a point at all.
It’s hard to get a fix on
just how fundamental you are
in the scheme of things
when you’re stuck in the starmud
up to your knees
looking for your keys like koans
you swallow like pills to feel real
but hey
no big deal
but I was meaning to ask you
is it true
that we’re wounded by death
and life is the way we heal?
I know how you feel
about what’s real
but you can have all the money you want
and that still doesn’t mean
you’ll ever really know
what it means to be rich
without having to steal.
You’ve got the disease
but none of its symptoms.
Is it true
that the most successful grow
by never accepting a challenge
that wasn’t a bigger failure than the last
and call the summits of their Himalayan defeats
experience and progress?
Answer no.
Answer yes.
Answer yes and no.
Or just nod your head diagonally
like the sum of the squares of the opposite sides.
Because the questions were less rhetorical
than sincerity being facetious
I don’t expect people to answer the doorbell
or read every piece of spiritual junkmail
that shows up on their doorstep
like a flightfeather to paradise
on the wings of a seagull.
If you’re wounded deeply enough
there’s no resentment in the pain.
You just play with your brain
like an angry child plays with the eyes of a doll.
You control your rage like a nuclear reactor
or Chernobyl goes cosmic
and you throw a tantrum
that expands like the universe.
You can polish the mirror all you want
and call it clarity
until your sleeves are as threadbare
as the carpets under the windows
you’ve been staring through
as long as it take to turn your eyes to glass
but enlightenment’s on the dark side of the mirror
like a star is
like your eyes are.
Like waves on a lake
that takes things as they come.
Myriad deaths in a single birth.
Life on earth.
Intense heat.
Unusual sprouts.
A Zen sententium worth consideration.
But the clear light of the void
isn’t radiation.
It’s a lucidity
with nothing to illuminate.
It’s the Uncreate that plays creatively
in the absence of itself
like a child alone with its imagination
making the world up as it goes along
taking the Inconceivable
and making it believable.
Giving airy nothing
a local habitation and a name
as Shakespeare did
and dandelions do in the fall.
As I am now
by asking if it’s true
you haven’t noticed yet
how it’s always the overprivileged
who send the underprivileged off to war?
Death in the hearts of the governors.
Death in the hearts of the profiteers.
Death in the hearts of the generals.
Is it true
this spider-web shines
like democracy in the morning
star-spangled with dew
but late at night under the streetlight
it’s tearing under the weight of its own greed?
That obese spiders who once pulled the strings
of a sticky mandala to eat well
ripen like the dead weight of toxic fruit
hanging from the branches of a dead tree?
This web is not a constellation.
This web is not a starmap.
This web is not a bloodstream
that gives back what it receives.
This web is not the lyre of a siren
that called people to the rocks of a new continent.
This web is not an electric guitar.
Is it true
the interminable buzzing of panicked flies
stuck to its strings
like masses of people
waiting to be consumed
is not the music of celestial spheres?
Empathic ingestion of agony over many years
like a fish trying to identify with heavy water
by adapting to it like a sick mother
who passed on her genes like Love Canal.
Is it true
you can die tending the ill in a hospital?
Carnage without redemption.
Eye-soup.
Severed feet.
Outrage imploding into black dwarfs
that warp space like a child’s mind
into believing God is best served by the blind
than those who can read for themselves
before they martyr her body like a judas-goat
to God’s great design
for the faithful dead
who expressed their gasp of divinity
in a holy war
a marketable crusade
a deniable genocide
a mass grave
a defensible border
that doesn’t know who gave the order
to drop cluster bombs
and white phos
on the hospital
when it ran out of bandaids
and watch it flower like a white dahlia
or a belly-dancing jellyfish
with poisonous tentacles
spreading out like the spokes of a beach umbrella.
The aesthetics of atrocity.
The age of desecration.
Is it true
the next best career move for evolution
like an unknown writer
listening to his legend gossip among rumours
like a suicide note without a table of contents
is unnatural extinction?
The mystery in the riddle of the sphinx
after all those years of sand and stars
is what would she have asked
if we weren’t there to answer.
Is it true
that Saturn’s shepherd moons
have turned into human coyotes
jumping borders like orbits
in the Van Allen Belt
where the asteroids are broken by drug rings
thawing rocks in a crack spoon
to defy the laws of gravity
with deified norms of depravity?
I might be a vague social democrat
walking a Zen plank
like a blindfolded political platform
who doesn’t need a party
to spell out
or sell out
what I believe
but it’s easier to write a folksong
about a successful thief
than a man or woman
for whom love was an art
that transcended its inspiration
and compassion the root of all understanding
and when death approached
because it’s hard to be alive and real
at the same time
embraced it as a great relief.
Is it true
that more similes turn into outlaws
than metaphors do?
That when Jesus asked
the little children to come unto him
he wasn’t speaking in tongues
behind sacred firewalls
for polyglot child molesters everywhere?
The pen might be mightier than the sword
like a mammal is to a dinosaur
but I have my doubts about a bullet
and electrically detonated C-4
wired to a lab rat like the black plague
and holy warriors
with the radioactive half-lives of dirty bombs.
Suras and psalms.
Gardens with underground rivers.
And fruit trees by flowing streams.
Shalom.
Salem.
Muslim.
Jerusalem
Islam
And Bethlehem the House of Bread
that breaks into peace
when it’s shared
like a common word
from the pelican fountain-mouth
of the same mother tongue.
Peace brother.
Peace sister.
May you live to be
forever young and free
of walled partitions
and the double helices
of chromosomatic razorwire
uncoiled like vines
around your secret gardens
where the waterlilies bloom in gene-pools
and the grapes are bleeding
like a miscarriage of sacred wines.
When the Great Lucidity appears
like a star of wheat in the Virgin’s hand
and shines down
on everyone’s shelter for the night alike
no mangers in the beginning
no arks at the end
may we all understand
that the blood-oaths of enemies
are not stronger than the bonds between friends.
May you know the enchantments of life
when it doesn’t belong to anyone
as well as you know the horrors
of disowning it now.
Or as I imagine they would say in Zen.
The pen is the sword.
It’s just a voice with words.
A lamp that gives its light away
like an extravagant genie
you don’t have to blow out to see
but you should
if you want to write good.
Black glee.
Bright vacancy.
Too much pain.
The agony of the seed realizing
the harvest was in vain
not worth what had to be endured
to live it all again.
Eleusinian ergot on the grain.
Is it true
heaven prefers
the hallucinogenically insane
and the sun only comes up
when a cock crows like a weathervane
or a God-struck lightning-rod?
On the return journey
which is more amazing than the first
you get to pass backwards
through all the stations of your life
you progressed forward through.
A prodigal innocence
that resonates with experience.
A dream reflected in a mirror
like a waterbird
dragging its wake through the clouds
like a knife ploughing a wound
through the envelope of a loveletter
no one can wake up from but you.
And no one can take away
because everything is trued by time
to the path you took
just by walking on the earth
alone on a dark night in the starless rain
when you removed the world like a mask
that proved false to your faceless pain
and you realized
how much closer a stranger is to you
than you are to your unrecognizable self.
Though pain may be prophetic
when your heart hangs on a hook
like bait on a question-mark
great suffering doesn’t reveal anything
you didn’t already know.
It doesn’t stay.
It doesn’t go.
It’s a nothing that exists.
It’s an existence that’s nothing.
A gust of fireflies
from the mouth of a dragon.
But what does come as a surprise
like dusk overtaking the window
are the numberless eyes
that emerge from the depths of your darkness
like grapes ripening on the vine
like fish coming to the surface
like urgent diamonds
growing like mushrooms
in the long night of an abandoned mine.
Numberless eyes.
Myriad stars.
Light-years of memories.
And is it true
every one of them
is a myth in the making
each an enlightened Zen master
with nothing to teach
who insists
it’s not the stars that are shining
it’s your mind?
That they’re all within reach
all the time?

PATRICK WHITE