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

SITTING ON THE OUTDOOR PATIO AT O'REILLY'S

SITTING ON THE OUTDOOR PATIO AT O’REILLY’S

Sitting on the outdoor patio at O’Reilly’s

in a shady corner with the umbrella down

where they abide the smokers like lepers in an ashtray.

O, bad, bad. Say the purists whose way of life

is a diet. Pot of black coffee squatting like a guru

in the middle of the table, two beer for my buddy, Simon,

I’m anchored to my chair foursquare at the corner

of Gore and the Universe, watching the leaves

on the crab apple trees in the parking lot below

the heritage fire tower shed easily in the sunshine

like passing afterthoughts. Yellow eyelids.

Knowing there are not too many years left

I’ll be able to do this. Sit and watch. In the flesh.

The numbness and strain on the novellas

of the faces of a married couple shell-shocked

by the barrage of frontline circumstances

they’ve been under most of their adult lives

as if they had to bury their hearts just to survive

like something they’d come back to later,

Roadkill. A doe and buck. Ten points, no less.

The woman with a steel factory of thick, red hair

listening sexually to a career-oriented man

in a patchy beard he trims every Thursday

chat her up as she tries to recall the last burning bush

that left a rash on the inside of her thighs.

It’s good to see love still has its enthusiasts.

Almost nautical. The canal near. The heritage lamp.

I pull a pen out of the inside pocket of my leather jacket

that makes me look rougher than I actually am,

beautiful pen, peacock blue, with heft, like a sword,

or an oar I took for free when I last went

to pay part of my rent at the real estate office

across the street with the bricked-in windows

that look like the eyes of the blind. Impervious.

And I scribble on the brown envelope that scared me

at first, but only wanted to tell me how much

I would be getting on my old age pension

and guaranteed income supplement cheque

as if somehow I’d rounded all the bases

back to homeplate and now it was time to clean

my locker out and retire my number like a lottery ticket,

Normal’s even more surrealistic than spaced out is

because it’s not expected to be, my thought for the day.

Maybe that will become part of a poem later

as I wonder, looking out my apartment window,

how I ever ended up here, or why I’ve stayed

for the last thirty-three years other than cheap rent,

the company of trees, and long, long eras in which

to perfect my solitude like one of ten thousand lakes

around here that hasn’t been named yet

for some peculiarity of easy reference. Poet Lake.

Why not? I’ll be the first to drown my book in it.

Love lyrics to the fingerling water sylphs I’ll stock it with.

How many open doors of liberation have I had

to step through in the course of my life so far

to avoid being incarcerated by what I stepped into

like the new moon on the surface of the La Brea Tarpit

in the depths, or a soul into a body that was

confused by it like starmud and spiritual window putty?

How many tears have I beaded like a rosary of water

on oil, trying to make some sense of human sorrow,

compiling a zodiac of extinct species for a coffee-table

nobody ever opened? All my life I’ve stolen

poems from my poverty like a thief that gives back

tenfold. It’s a kind of poor boy pride I expect

but at least it’s mine and I’ll stand and I’ll fall by it,

moonrise and moonset, with no bitterness or regret,

few heralds at the entrance and no paid mourners at the exit.

Patinas of lustreless brass, old gold in the Bronze Age,

and scarlet letters like a sacred vowel of life

triple x-rated by the mythically-inflated hypocrites

at the auto de fe of the maples who’d rather

burn with desire in the house of life than

eat their own ashes out of the ethical gutter

of the hand of God washed in the blood of the lamb,

I watch the shadows of the leaves falling

against a wall of warm fieldstones giving

their heat up to the approaching night

like loaves of home-made bread cooling

on a windowsill it’s easy enough to mistake

for the threshold of a vagrant homelessness

I’ve laboured at like a road with no way back

to the security of the delusion I was going somewhere

when here, just as much as there, was where

it was at all along and will be, hallelujah, after I’m gone.

lol

PATRICK WHITE