TRYING TO CRAWL
Trying to crawl back into myself
like a long birth canal
into a cathedral cave
to see what I really feel
about the symbols and totems
I painted in my own blood
like writing on the wall of the womb
that gave birth to the world that I am.
Picture-music.
Shamanistic grammar.
Hunting magic.
A brief man’s need
to make a lasting impression.
Carnal graffiti and spiritual tatoos.
I was here once
and here’s my hand for proof.
Its fingers are splayed
like the rays of the rising sun
and it isn’t asking for anything.
I was formed out of the mutability
of the negative space
that surrounds dark matter like light
when evolution colluded
to experience one of its experiments
as if it were looking through my eyes
at a stranger’s insight
and the face I wear in the world
were no more my own
than the reflection of the moon
belongs to the water that mirrors it and moves on.
So I went looking for my true self
and found it in everyone else
though no one ever recognized it in me
because they were all looking in the wrong direction.
Put two eyes on zero like dice
and you might be surprised
at what you can see
through the eyesockets of a skull
rolling seven come eleven
again and again
on the blind side of pain
after snake-eyes
in a back-alley up against a cave wall.
Running my luck
is my way of asking God
if she still loves me.
But even when she says she does
her answers are often hurtful and strange
and there’s more gate than garden
in the way she takes chances on me
I wouldn’t if I were her.
But I’m not trying to preserve what I’m not
from passing away
when the moonlight burns
like lime on Mozart’s skin
and I’ve got nothing
to tell the outside anymore
about the in.
I pulled doves
out of the sleeves of a black magician
having mastered every mystic eclipse
of infernal insight known to the human
that mentors the demon within
and sacrificed them to their freedom
like words on the voice of the wind
that said them with care and devotion
like butterflies in a dragon’s mouth
that had turned its roar into a whisper
and its teeth into the petals of a crazy flower
that may not have bloomed right
but gave them a place to land
and drink from the acids in my mouth
I had gentled into nectar.
Why is gratitude always a child
that dies young?
Why is it we prefer to be good
but when we’re in a bad fix
more than many defer to evil?
The pillars of pagan temples
fall like yarrow sticks
and everything’s written
in the Book of Changes
like the secret history
of fire on water
or that tale that always
ends at the beginning of things
like a ghost at the broken window
of an old abandoned myth of origin
that people have grown too clever
to believe in anymore
and walk by without looking
for fear they might see someone
like themselves
who’s been as vastly misunderstood
as life has
by the holy books that line their shelves.
Civilized people lost their tails
talking like fossil seabeds
on a mountain top
as if they were the Burgess Shales
and didn’t know like life
when to stop
or which side was down
and which side was up
as they backtracked on their ancestors.
They climbed spinal ladders of bone
they hoped would come to their rescue
before the fires of life consumed them
like trilobites and enlarged craniums
in the bigger picture of things
that pulls feathers out of the flames
like names from that lottery of words
that turns the thunder of tandem dinosaurs
into the forbidden nightsongs of random birds.
Blissed out without an ego for a thesis
in the abyss of it all
enraptured with the nature of things
as they are
when they listen
like unmovable stars
to the music of my inner vision
when I don’t fall back on a sad decision.
PATRICK WHITE
