QUIETLY AND LIKE A THOUSAND OTHER TIMES

QUIETLY AND LIKE A THOUSAND OTHER TIMES

Quietly and like a thousand other times,

I want to go. I don’t know where. It doesn’t matter.

This moment now is as homeless as it gets.

You can have all the entrances, I’ll take the exits.

Been so long I don’t trust what happiness

would turn me into now, though I think

it’s just as stupid to despair. I’ve let go

of the crows and doves of my emotions,

the quantum insanity of my thought experiments,

and if I ever had dreams, they’re lost atmospheres by now

like a childhood among the asteroids

that happened astronomically to someone else.

I started out on a qrailquest, a maculate clown,

a partial fool, and though I stayed in the shadows

of my right-brained peripheral vision, more

a magic circle than a halo, I kept my third eye

out for it in passing. Strange how time mutates

the journey without losing the narrative theme

of the original psychodynamic. Now

I’m drilling for oil on the moon like the watershed

of a full eclipse and I’m no more averse

to the darkness as I was to the light. Either way

there’s more sincerity in being lost than in being

insufferably found. However rough the storm

who ever comes to the aid of a lighthouse

with a heart as empty as a lifeboat and says

hey, get in, we’ll be swept out to sea together

where the earth can’t threaten either of us anymore?

Doesn’t happen. Much. There’s something fatuous

about security that takes your edge off like a keel

and leaves you bobbing on an inner tube way out

of your depths and your legs dangling

like participial jellyfish out of the mouth of Satan

like Brutus in the coldest ditch of Dante’s Inferno.

For lightyears I’ve practiced the furious discipline

of a purposeless art, and betrayed myself

in the name of compassion for the beautiful absurdity

of celebrating the immensity of my own impoverishment.

I passed the test I set for myself like a stranger

at a dangerous gate to prove I was still sincere

in my own eyes. And even when I suspected a trap,

still, I was a wild shepherd of wolves in the wilderness,

and I hopped the fence. Intense as a wounded exile.

As soon as anyone starts explaining themselves to me,

I immediately hear the bells of faithful alibis.

Unfamiliar demons arise like infidels of the truth

and I’d rather follow last night’s wolf moon down

below the treeline, than cry over another fool’s lies.

Not bitter, not overjoyed, my curiosity amused,

given how little hope there is for any of us,

I’d still rather err with the largesse of dragons

who know more about shining and burning

than the fire blossoms of a thousand Chinese box-kites

looking for the ley lines on tinfoil starmaps

that never lead anyone astray creatively, least of all,

stop longing for the more subliminal phases and shadows

of Venus on a moonless winter night at perihelion.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference

between artifice and a genuine sacrifice

but it’s a matter of taste whether you want

bubbles in your poetry breaking the surface

like effervescent sacred syllables at a seal hunt

coming up for air, or add your breath

to the nucleation of new worlds in hyperspace

by going along with the drift, the gist, the flow,

the probable concourse, the aniconic fractal,

the supersymmetrical elaboration of the rococo,

loading every rift with ore like John Keats,

or the wound of a rikku teacup at a Chanoyu

ceremony for the taste of Zen with mended gaps of gold.

If you’re still too distinct to tolerate life with a smile,

at least try not to wince, and pray for a day

when your facial expressions are not in the name

of trying to better anything that isn’t spontaneous.

You can call it mind, form, matter, and then,

you can reverse the spin into the opposite

thought, the annihilant emotion, and achieve

spiritual immolation in a rapture of nirvanic self-destruction.

Nihilism when it isn’t in vogue as fashionable sentiment

looks at the world and says it’s empty as if

something were there that isn’t anymore, an absence

that let the meaning leak out through their pores.

The little green apples of disappointment are sour

but if you hang around long enough, the return journey

is sweeter than the first, and disappointment

gets drunk with the wasps in the decaying taverns

plying the windfalls of dusk with nectar and ambrosia.

When things go supernova creatively, it’s not the end

of anything. It’s just one prelude over the line

like the Big Bang before it was wired for sound

like one hand clapping and all the lights going on

when you enter the house of life late at night

like a stray thought in your mother’s head

that nudges one stray photon into a collaborative avalanche

of interdependently originated genetic chain reactions.

You can be an inert gas and light up like a flavour

of neon or argon, with a fixed address

at the candy store of a highway motel, or more

significantly radioactive like a heavy metal

you can shine like an enfant terrible orphaned

by your own catastrophe in the name of art

as the potted plants wither on your lethal windowsills

for the lack of deuterium, and the waterclock

glows in the dark like a small zodiac on a stopwatch.

There’s no lack of fraudulent embassies ready

to forge a false passport with a name and a face

into countries that don’t exist without a border and a map,

but in all the years of my transits and zeniths, nadirs

and pain thresholds, gates, doorways, taboos,

dares, taunts, threats, holy wars and peaceful defeats

without any regrets, I’ve secured my passage

by exploring spiritually poetic realms without

a lack of identity in a universal mindscape

that doesn’t have one separate from everything else

for fear I’d give myself away as an imposter.

Why sip from the waters of life when

you can gulp the ocean whole in every drop?

Quick, quick, said reality to the passenger pigeon.

Humankind cannot stand too many birds.

PATRICK WHITE