Monday, August 26, 2013

A LITTLE THOUGHT IN A BIG SPACE

A LITTLE THOUGHT IN A BIG SPACE

A little thought in a big space, I’m falling
through my own immensities here at my desk,
one of my Icarian propensities for plunging into things.
My voice intimidated by the violence of the silence within.
I’m on the dark side of my eyes.
No one’s ever been here before.
No window, no wall, no door,
I’m on the threshold of my homelessness again.
I’m looking at stars, but I feel like rain.
I’m talking to ghosts that I don’t remember.
Might be the wrong medium, but it’s the right seance.
I don’t even know what I’m doing here myself
but it seems I’m free to go or stay as I wish.
I’m wearing my shadow like a candling parachute
that didn’t step back from the edge in time.
No point in pretending you’re an airborne dandelion
when you feel like a rock with a message
someone just threw like the moon through a mirror
disguised as a sky the night birds keep flying into blind.

No one asks your name here on this pyre of a sky burial
if your birth certificate says you were born in fire.
Desire anything you like. It was all written in smoke
before you came. And these words that are saying me here
have been out of the aviary of the lantern for light years.
Who knows where the light goes or what if falls upon?
Trying to shine in a dark time without taking anything away
from the lunar eclipses that aren’t in need of enlightenment.
Don’t know if I’m a solar flare, a firefly, a matchbook,
or a lightning bolt that keeps stressing my starmud out
by sneaking up on it from behind and overdoing things a bit.

If you find yourself trying to pry the flowers open
with a crowbar or a koan, and it’s nightfall, it’s
time to turn your hourglass in for a waterclock
and see how the stars emerge out of nothing
as soon as you deepen the dark with a more acute sense of timing
that let’s everything happen spontaneously by itself.
Even if you’re the lighthouse of your dreams
that doesn’t mean you’re the nightwatchman
keeping his third eye on you in the shadows
like a theft of fire you can get away with
this second time around with only a warning.

If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.
And if you did, whining about it in your sleep
isn’t going to help and who’s Spartan enough these days
to stash the fox under their tunic to keep
from being caught while it eats them alive?
If you want to be a dragon you’ve got to learn
to swallow people’s hearts like hot coals as if they were chocolates,
without wincing. The stars don’t come out
like emergency candles you’ve been saving
for exactly this kind of situation. And if
you really want to know the truth about illumination,
try and blow one out. Quick, now, look
and see immediately into the clear light of the void
what it’s like to shine without a metaphoric reflection.

The stars here don’t hide their nakedness under a cloak
of black holes and dwarfs that take it all in
but give nothing back like the second hand clothes
of serpents shedding their skin. One size fits all
like a bubble in a watershed of dark worlds
dazzled by how much a single eye can contain
whether it’s hanging from the lip of a flower in the fall
or going down the drain in spring. I know
you hit it like a snowflake on a furnace
and do your damnedest not to cry. Thing is
as unique among billions as you think you are,
there’s not a star in the sky that isn’t a rite of passage.


PATRICK WHITE

HOLDING IT IN, THE PAIN, THE DOUBT, THE SOLITUDE

HOLDING IT IN, THE PAIN, THE DOUBT, THE SOLITUDE

Holding it in, the pain, the doubt, the solitude.
Caging my wild heart out in the open where the stars live,
and the bars are all on the inside like toppled pillars
still holding up the friezes of a few high ideals as much
out of habit, as to show a lot of class
in the way you fall to your knees like a bull
in a tauromachia of the zodiac with seven sunbeams
like acupuncture needles or porcupine quills in your back,
as your ear is cut off like Van Gogh’s and thrown
like a rose of blood to a lady in the crowd.

Living in the lunar half light of all my uncertainties.
Trying to see things I’ve been dying for most of my life
not as expiring consolations on a terminal night ward,
night lights in the morgue, flowers beside the bed,
soft, white shoes whispering down the polished halls of the dead
so they could get a good night’s sleep, knowing
there were more nightmares in their lives
than the hard pillows of the world
they lay their heads down on as if
they were getting used to their gravestones.
Stripped of meaning like the frayed ends
of my thinning neuronic synapses pared to the bone
without any insulation to bear up to the next lightning strike,
that would make even the weathervanes shriek like rust
with the pain, the pain I’m holding in, on trust
it’s going to transmogrify itself into something
death-defyingly creative, the art of a noble calling,
like a snakepit of gamma ray bursts as if space and time
were hemorrhaging like a miscarriage of the heart.

Biting the bullet, eating the pain like an organic vegetable
that’s good for you, hoping the character it builds
isn’t Frankenstein, or the missing link in the madness
of some other species of suffering keeping its distance
because it can’t believe it’s descended from you.
My heart numbed by laughing gas, an ice age of novocaine,
I’m still trying to pull the thorns out with my teeth
like a physician who knows how to heal himself
but if the truth be told, feels more like a toxin
than an antidote milked from the fang of the moon,
a junkie slumped in an abandoned back alley easy chair
like a lotus-eater among the feral cats inclusively alone
to nurse his despair into dreaming of no better life than this one.
I’m still trying to pull the sword out of the stone,
a syringe out of the arm of a lion, the last hinge of the door
that’s hanging like a lapwing without a wingspan anymore.
Down on myself like a meteor shower trying to exchange
one hundred and thirty-five million years of dinosaurs
for just one warm-blooded moment with a mammal.
As new a day to me as it is to a baby, and I’m doing my best
to live wholly and now in the moment,
without losing my appetite for time
or letting the starfields be overgrown by underbrush,
but when there are more scars and skeletons on your dance card
than there are wounded new moons making a recovery
on the rebound, you can feel like the abandoned ark of a barn
scuttled on Mt. Ararat like a love cruise that wants its money back.
And time is just a snake-oil salesman that heals nothing.

Space turning to glass. Time in convulsions
having tasted a little of its own medicine
and the light that broke this morning like a halo of hope
around the rim of the black hole that had swallowed me live
I was being so cooly detached about, though my heart,
voodoo doll it may have been in the past, beat as fast
as the rain stitching up the seams of the mirrors on the street
as if they were on the same wavelength as a surgical sewing machine,
until it realized this false dawn was as dark as the last
and all it was doing was patching up the ghosts of the past
with clouds of unknowing that had no secrets to reveal
and pathetic fallacy aside, knew nothing about the way I feel.

Trying to be a human who healed more than he wounded.
Trying to be a man that his jeans aren’t ashamed to wear.
Trying to be a Zen hard rock strong enough to climb the mountain
than come down on everyone like an avalanche of cornerstones
giving up like Sisyphus on pushing another moonrise up the hill
even when I’m swimming through quicksand
or paving a way that others might follow as lost as I’ve been
on this long, dark, strange, radiant road
that isn’t just another starmap with pit stops,
that isn’t the asphalt of spiritual La Brea Tarpits,
or a labyrinth that ends in a cul de sac of glass ceilings
like the crumbs of the dreams of a habitable planet
I saved like a rosary of near-earth asteroids
just a few fly-bys outside the Van Allen Radiation Belts
I wore like a bodhisattvic warrior without any scalps
to bring things back together that have been too long apart.


PATRICK WHITE