A GOOD DAY TO ENJOY BEING LOST, ADRIFT

A GOOD DAY TO ENJOY BEING LOST, ADRIFT

A good day to enjoy being lost, adrift.

A monarch butterfly skirts the heritage stone

of the bank across the street for good luck.

Hectic palette, it’s good to see the badge

of your shadow smudging the gridwork

of predictable brick. You made it through

the pesticides, the milkweed’s been good to you.

Small relief, tender loveletter may no one

ever scrawl return to sender across your envelope.

May no one ever tamper with your pollen.

Sweet rapture of not giving a damn for a day

and meaning it. I’m an offroad aster, a wayward

English ox-eyed daisy that’s thrown off the yoke

of all the burning bridges I’ve crossed, trying

to grind the chaff in the hand of the sign

I was born under into broken loaves of starwheat

cooling on the windowsills of my ersatz ideals.

It didn’t take me long to learn by living me

to be afraid of everyone else. That every moment of life

was death-defying in extremis, a high wire act

on a spinal cord stretched like a single filament of a spider-web

between one abyss and the next. I’ve been a poetic wino

dizzy with mystic vertigo, slumped up against the door

of a stranger’s threshold that kept sweeping me off the stairs

like a mirage of junkmail, leaves and stars

that could foretell by the agony in my eyes

I was born to live a life in freefall as I have,

no hell below me, no heaven above, and earth,

the shakey footstool of an unstable mountain

on the back of a turtle that seldom sticks

its neck out for anyone who can play

self-fulfilling Orphic threnodies on a tortoise shell harp.

Choreographers who know how to teach totem poles

to dance to the picture-music of the sacred fires

that still burn, branded by spring, in the tree rings

of the heartwood they refuse to pile like pyres

around the feet of native martyrs singing death songs

at their own sky burials. Life’s a bird bone flute,

a syrinx, a lute, a harp, a cithara, a guitar, Lyra

in the summer sky, not the trumpet of a dying swan.

Good day to let go of my mind like a kite

or a weather balloon, give up beating on

this old drumhead of a trampoline like an erratic pulse

and jump six times higher on the moon

like the photon of a third eye of a spy satellite

in a chromatically aberrated orbit that sheds

more light on the secrets of life than it keeps to itself

like private data deep in an unsightly black hole.

I don’t want to candle out like the parachute

of a daylily the higher I rise into a spiritualized atmosphere

wigged out by its haloes and comets. I don’t intend

to wait like a dragon in a wax museum for someone

to show up with a wick to give a little spine

to the votive candles in a shrine of gummy prayers.

I’m going to take charge of events like a fisherman

caught in a Pacific storm, and take my hands

off the wheel of birth and death in this great nightsea

of awareness and roll with the dice on the swells of chaos.

Seven times down, eight times up. Such is life.

Even if I’ve got to chart my course through life

like a starmap of snake-eyes, I’ll make a constellation

of matchbooks that will set the zodiac afire

like an arsonist inspired by the cult of his own

heretical martyrdom. I’d rather burn sincerely

for something I don’t believe in than give my assent

to the false confession of a poem I didn’t write

from the inkwell of a heart I threw at the devils in white

like blood on the snow of a savage sacrifice

of a life that arises from life, not the death wish

of a cold, cold rose with thorns of ice on its frozen eyelids.

A good day to cherish the innate heresy

of creative freedom I was born into like the natural medium

of imaginative extremes I keep violating

like a snake with wings on a burning ladder

of hierarchical taboos laid out like crosswalks

with traffic lights to supervise the way we came back

like shepherds down from the mountain at night

with a flock of judas-goats in painted tiger-stripes

and sheep we fleece for their carnivorous clothing

along the same path we’ll labour back up in the morning,

like pale stars that bleach their torches in the eyes

of albino crows with silver irises for moondogs

and a skull’s way of looking at things that makes you shiver

when there’s no one else in the room but you

and what you’re becoming as the older you grow

the more you realize, how little you have to do with it.

A good day to sit enthroned in my own brain coral

like a gleeman in the absence of a dynastic bloodline,

free to laugh at myself as the urge overcomes me,

or cry like a ghost of rain on a spreading root fire.

Good day to take my deathmask off another man’s face

and throw it away as if neither of us ever

looked good in it, and the mirrors lied behind our backs

as if our hearts were blind to what our minds were up to.

Intellect blossoms. Compassion is a moonboat

with a cargo of windfall apples riding like a low-hanging branch

on the waters of life, as the stars pilot it into port.

No born again cuckolds pushing the eggs out of my cosmic nest.

A dragon with the wingspan of space, time can’t keep up

with the pace of the stars I keep panning out of my ashes

like nanodiamond insights into meteoric splashdowns on the moon.

Good day to stay crazy and let wisdom follow suit.

Good day to go down to the river and watch the beaks

of the white-throated waterlilies open like the mouths

of baby birds that burn with hunger to be consumed

in the fires of their own appetites, young candles

preening their flames like the feathers of falling stars

that forego their fixed place in the great scheme of things

every time a child makes a wish upon them,

and the serpents at their heels puts the plumage

of the highest on the lowest and in a union of opposites, flies.

PATRICK WHITE