BY THE LIGHT I HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO GO BY

BY THE LIGHT I HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO GO BY

By the light I have been given to go by,

I can see how homeless the journey truly is.

How provisional the shrines along the way like milestones

we stop to paint like the inside of our skulls

or the caves we first dwelled in with our dead

buried under fire and the numinosity of our picture music

impregnating the womb walls of a space made sacred by fear.

The darkness bears my secrets, and in the torchlight,

in carbon and red ochre, a diary of shamans

gored by defecating rhinos speared to death.

I have imagined my way into an understanding

that is a rite of passage into a space that is

a vast abyss of intelligence, a nothingness

that speaks through an intuitive grammar of things

as if a galaxy, a star, stone, tree, raindrop were each a thought,

a sign, a word, the syntax of a growing paradigm

of creative awareness that we’re completely alone

and lost at sea like fish on the moon crawling out of its tides

as if nothing bound us, not even detachment,

nor a god that exists as a confession of the way we do,

nor any medium we work in as reflection of our presence

labouring away at an unattainable world that won’t exist

until we do, and it’s 7 to 5 against anyone making it that far.

But what a joy to emerge out of our own nothingness

like a secret we’re letting ourselves in on,

making it up as we go along like a deportable myth of origin

we can adapt to our infinite beginnings

because for starters, it has none of its own.

We were born to express ourselves like apple trees.

We were born to see and be happy marvelling at the event.

To enjoy longing for things we were never missing

and be guided by wise men we never listen to

back to a silence that has nothing to say for itself

that we didn’t already know in the first place.

Everywhere is the threshold of the return journey.

Life is either an exile, or it stays at home like a follower.

Bless the enlightened apostates of the dangerous religion

that desecrates the mind by worshipping it.

Why make a chain out of your umbilical cord

and get your head wrapped around it like a noose

because you forgot meaning was an art

and not a way to take yourself way too seriously to heart?

Why go to war with your own mind

just to administer to the needs of the suffering

when you can paint a god in blood and ashes

and decultify yourself with the creative freedom

of your imagination deconstructing the fable of your belief

that it’s the being, not the becoming, that endures.

And you can do this without even knowing how to draw.

A starmap doesn’t shine. A blue print doesn’t open a door.

If you ask a crutch to do your walking for you,

it’s going to throw you away like a miracle

at the top of the stairs of Notre Dame de Coeur.

Better to be the sacred whore of a thousand profligate gods

than the unrepentant nun of one who shuts the world out,

like art for art’s sake, to revel in her own extinction

in a mystical connubium with an unregenerate imagination.

You can burn your gates and cages in a wild field if you like

for not being able to keep the flowers in, or keep the wind

from rioting with the leaves way past curfew,

but there was never any risk of being granted what you ask

because life is the unpredictable moon rise

that deepens the calendars with a renewed humility

towards the extraordinary mutability of time.

What have you ever been that baffled your imagination?

It isn’t reason that inspires us to become a stranger tomorrow

to the self we knew today. Genuine faith isn’t

an artificial life support system to keep something alive

that should have been allowed to die quietly away yesterday.

Millions upon millions of facts like a graveyard of skeleton keys

to a door we can’t find open within ourselves

as if we’d just stepped through it to be here where we live

deciphering the shapes of the clouds as if we lived in code.

Hide your secret deep enough if you want it to be known.

Walk alone as far as you can until you can’t

if you want the world to walk the rest of the way with you.

The white demon that knows heaven and hell experientially

mentors the senses in the spiritual subtleties of the black angel

that comes like the new moon of a third eye

to help the exegetes of light see further into the dark

by blowing their candles out like flowers.

All seekers are roads looking for a map to follow.

Preludes after the fact, that set out to look for their own endings.

Be a star. And keep your afterlife behind you

like the shadow of the last form you cast upon the earth.

Be an eye that doesn’t leave any room between the moon

and it’s reflection so that the substance of life is seeing

not that you’re a distinct and separate entity

that cosmically identifies with your exclusion

but that you’re wholly within easy reach of everything

that depends upon you for its existence. Just as every leaf

you let fall in the autumn like an adage of wisdom

about how you can know the world by its fruits

first came to the tree like a smile to your face

when you realized your imagination was

the inconceivable dynamic of a creative state of grace.

PATRICK WHITE