I DON'T SQUANDER MY TIME SEEKING OUT DESIGN FLAWS IN CHAOS

I DON’T SQUANDER MY TIME SEEKING OUT DESIGN FLAWS IN CHAOS

I don’t squander my time seeking out design flaws in chaos.

I celebrate the intelligent randomness of a creative universe

predicated on the spontaneity of the copulative verb

that never interfered in my being here in the first place.

I don’t make a precedent out of the missing links

in my ancestral antecedents. Nothing remotely dynastic

about a periphrastic genome talking like evolution

in its sleep, tinkering with the alphabet blocks

of the dream grammars of Ugarit in the penumbrally

dark ages of forgetting I ever knew how to write.

I don’t make totem-poles, obelisks or imperial columns

with wrap around plaster and bandages of flypaper

commemorating the victors of mummified wars

to impress wax and clay, flesh and blood,

with the cuneiform scars of spray-bombed graffiti

on the empty cattle cars sent to relocate

subjugate mother tongues in the full stop

at the end of the tracks that run on time

like Mussolini hanging by his heels from a lamp post,

pendulous as his place in history, or a periodic sentence

that gets around like a mindstream, not a highway,

through the shadows and the moonlight in the woods at night

circling back on itself to throw its pursuers off its trail

like the sixth patriarch of Zen, pointing out,

there’s no need to enlighten your mindlessness

because when you take nothing from nothing,

robe or begging bowl from nothing, the sum remains

nothing missing from zero, no gap between the arrow

and the target, broken or in free flight, lame

in the Bolshoi Ballet, or faster than the speed of gravity.

You have to go a long way to discover your childhood

never left home, you’re looping backwards

into the indolent youth, alone on the rock of his thought

trying to imagine how he ever got to be you.

I’m making retrograde progress through all the stations of life

I passed through on my way back here like a prodigal stranger

on a homeless road to nowhere I’ve ever been before

like a snake that takes the omega of its tail

in the alpha of its mouth, so the first sacred syllable

it utters is the last it will mutter on its deathbed,

unborn, unperishing, so no one can tell where things

begin and where they end, as you climb up

this ladder of thresholds out of the blackhole

it’s scary for the light to be buried in implausibly alive.

Everybody’s trying to survive the gift of life

they’ve been given to make their way in the world

like an object lesson to those who refuse to listen.

I practise an offroad discipline of disobedience

in the wake of this compass leg of my journey

trying to walk like crutches on a runway of water

I’m trying to take off from like a ring-necked loon

that doesn’t care if you understand why you’re arrested

by the fading echoes of its lonely ululations or not.

The picture-music is empowered by the suffering in a voice

that estranges thought like a misfit at its own funeral.

If you’re not reading the chapbooks of the butterflies

as sensitive as the pistils and stamens of the wild poppies

with scarlet letters on their foreheads, like a mad man

that doesn’t give a damn about poetic reputations

getting in the way of a more intimate love affair

with the elusive truth that’s never signed a loveletter

that couldn’t be denied in public, you’re still illiterate.

You’re etching runes on your eyes like the striations

of glacial glassware you were as afraid in the ice-ages

to smash up against the cave wall like a prophetic skull

you were drinking from to celebrate the grand opening

of your spiritual fingerpaintings trying to identify

the vague nature of the in you’ve got with God

like the candelabra of a handprint anyone

can see right through like an artificial third eye at first glance

as you are now looking for a meaning that doesn’t

dance on your grave like a troupe of wildflowers

you never asked to sweep you off your feet.

You never learned to sit down on the ground

under the shedding leaves of your perfectly bound books

and have a good laugh at the idiocy of your insights

into the nature of a life that doesn’t exist except

as a surrealistic circus tour of sacred clowns

practising their priestcraft like mendicant monks on the road.

Back to the robe. Back to the begging bowl.

And even if you’ve got it all together, I defy you to lift it

like your head off the pillow of the deathbed

you’re dreaming on like a frog on a stone lotus

trying to make a big splash in this belly-flopping pond

of a world that exalts itself like a pearl diver

in high places it takes a lifetime to climb up to

before you plunge into an oyster bed on the moon

that’s always been tight-lipped about the secrets

you can pry out of her like birthmarks slashed

across her delicate, thin-skinned wrists by

the shuck and jive of the knife you’re using on her smile

like the optical illusion of your bifurcated consciousness.

Try another lens. A gravitational eye at the far end

of your telescope that bends the light in aberrant conformity

with the radical departure of your own seeing

off the beaten path of less wayfaring moonbeams

so you don’t ending up telling me the way it seems

is only the proxy appearance of an understudy standing in

like a deathmask for the way it is when everywhere you look

is opening night for the imagination playing tricks on the mind

on the streetcorner of Gore and the Universe

when every step of the journey that doesn’t leave home

like starlight, is another yellow stripe down the spine

of a crosswalk of freshly painted thresholds like dance steps

waiting for the lights to change from red to green

as if autumn got a leg up on the turn, counterturn

of the strophic epodes of the spring waltzing with the wind

like willows in the gowns of a Viennese ballroom

under the imperial chandeliers of falling stars

you can put in your pocket like chump change

and save for a rainy day as if life didn’t depend

upon its own extravagance to survive

the famine of metaphors in the lean lightyears

of your face-painted eyes with their glass blown tears.

Shakespeare: would he had cut a thousand lines

playing midwife with his own umbilical cords.

Mozart: too many notes, too many birds in the tree

celebrating the dawn spontaneously all at once.

Butterflies: no end of the books and canvases

displayed in the rogue galleries of the oyamel forests

of the Yucatan, sustained by the manna of milkweed

in the long exodus across the chemical deserts

of North America like a promise made and broken

then swept under the quota of prayer rugs like a price tag.

PATRICK WHITE