SOFT EASY TEMPERATE MORNING
Soft easy temperate morning.
The black walnut trees
are laid back in themselves like idle guitars
as their leaves pick out random notes on the wind
like the ghosts of old songs
they wrote a long time ago.
Bliss is joy with just a touch of sorrow
to deepen the taste of happiness
like two sisters of emotion
sharing the same spirit.
One a river.
The other an ocean.
PATRICK WHITE
YOU’RE SO INTENSE
You’re so intense you said
as if my whole being
were some kind of behavioural offense
but all I could say back was
you’re definitely not.
You hate it when it’s hot.
You don’t know where to look
to find life or water on Mars.
And whenever it gets too deep or dark
you huddle like a candle in the shadows
of a hundred billion stars.
I know fireflies and chimney-sparks
that don’t need a window to burn in
the way you do
like a lamp in a cowl of soot
a canary in a cage in a coalmine.
They give it all up to the night.
They shine.
They bloom.
They burn with insight.
They’re the nightlights in the long dark hall
that seems to go on forever
like that narrow mind
you’ve been walking in your sleep
past the admiring portraits
of the artificially blind
who dream in braille
of eclipses yet to come
that will weigh like stones upon their eyelids.
Intense?
Too intense?
What does that really mean?
I take my delusions too seriously?
I’m a child?
I’m immense
and there’s a dark energy within me
that’s still expanding space at an accelerated rate
that puts the whole universe
like a petal to the metal
in a game of chicken
with a precipitous abyss
that urges creation to take the risk
win lose or draw?
If I don’t come on
like the unified field theory
of a universal law
that can be summed up
in a beautifully simple mathematical formula
it’s not that it’s not in my nature to fit.
It’s just that I fit in like a heretic
and there’s never much room
for someone who blows blackholes
in the space-time continuum
that can’t account for the dark heart of black matter
that outweighs the white feather of light
they put on the scale of dead things
like the wingspan of phoenix fledglings.
How can you measure the intensity
of the half-life
of a radioactive underworld?
Is oxygen less intense than plutonium
or water any more
at peace with itself than fire
because its hydrogen isn’t flammable?
If I’m not waiting for enlightenment
to take an intense delight in the world
just as it is
shining against a cool background
of universal bliss
just as happy over there tomorrow
to be alive in that circumstance
as it is now here in this
what’s it to you
what’s it to me
if I can see the Taj Mahal in a hovel
and all you can see is a shovel?
I’d rather be passionately deluded by the mystery
of being here at all
and drown my sorrows
like torches I put out
in a sea of stars
to see them more clearly in the darkness
than stand like a lighthouse all night long
on the coast of your personal history
among all those shipwrecks waiting for dawn
on the bottom of an artificially lit aquarium
with the instincts of a fish on life-support.
You advance cautiously through life
like a sacred syllable
that’s looking for the right mouth to say it
but I dance on my way to war with the angels
who never kill you deeper into life
with the same sword twice
for having enough wisdom
to ignore their advice
and that’s what you hate me for.
I can walk on fire like a phoenix
who can speak to the demons like friends
in a language far from home
that everyone understands
is the mother-tongue
of what an exile in ashs says to himself
when he’s standing in the dangerous doorway
of stranger things to come.
I just don’t sit there on the sidelines and suffer.
I’ve learned to overcome my fears creatively
by pulling the sharks into the lifeboat
to save them from the humans
who can smell them
like shark fin soup in the water
from miles away.
When my voice isn’t scattered
like ashs from an urn at sea
it’s a burning bush
a prophet in a furnace
trying to keep his cool
a black spider in the bottom of a poppy
trying to read its fate in the dispassionate lees
of a goblet of fire
it drinks to the bottom of things
like a rare butterfly with scarlet wings.
Worlds within worlds within worlds.
Irridescent bubbles in the multiverse of hyperspace.
Parallel lives simultaneously happening
like the perfectly inter-reflecting jewels
in the cosmic net of Indra.
Mark one jewel and they’re all marked.
And at the slightest gesture of a thought
they’re all estranged from one another everywhere
like the stars that have followed them into exile
without ever knowing if they’re ever coming back.
All our impossible choices actualized
whether we make a decision or don’t.
Are you not amazed?
Are you not astounded
down to the last sorry bell of your soul?
Doesn’t the wonder sometimes get so deep and sweet it hurts?
Who wants to live like the leftovers
of the things they think they know
when they could put their lips together
like membranes and bubbles in the abyss
and kiss whole new worlds into existence
where you could live in one
flatlining like a star in the Arctic
without an event horizon
and I could live on the further shore
of some poetic mindstream somewhere
and burn like a black sun
that could open your loveletters
like alien flowers with sidereal perfumes
that inspire the fireflies
to get carried away
and turn the lights on
in all the rooms at once
in this house of life without a return address
where everyone tries to stay
very quiet and still in the closet
like old shoes
that came to a dead end
when they lost their feel for the road.
And if I don’t take a stand
on the quicksand foundations of the known world
or prefer the emotional life
of a cornerstone
that’s trying to keep it together
in an avalanche
down the world mountain
it’s not a dress rehearsal
for a sexual advance
that doesn’t stand a chance.
I’m not trying to decide who you are
by taking account of what you’re not
by buffing the stars with black matter
to explain the mass of your gravitas.
I may be a comet
in a dark halo
far outside the solar system
but I’m not trying to make a pass
that will light me up like angel
that shines by a reflected glory.
Some stories are better told at night
than they are by day
and I’m not the red sky in the morning
that comes with a warning
that leaves the sailors with nothing to say.
I’m not channeling echoes of my next life
through a wormhole
in the space-time continuum
of past events that deranged my galactic core
in such a way
I can look forward to yesterday
as if I were remembering tomorrow
from far away.
I can see all sides of things simultaneously
like water in a river
that knows how to bridge the opposites
by flowing past them with a mind of its own
that doesn’t follow the dead maps of the fallen leaves
like rootless trees into the unknown
looking for a new place to call home.
But a biodynamic peace
with the way things never are twice
that leaves lots of room for change
is not the same thing as a truce
with the still-born children of entropy
who never talk in their sleep
about a day to come
that will wake them up
like an earthquake
shaking the bedrocks of chaos
like pebbles out of a shoe
that died by the side of the road
without ever having left home.
I’d rather fly alone through my immensities
than try to swim through your densities
like a fish made of stone.
I may be an alien event horizon
on the wrong side of town
but I know how to read between the lines
when the sun’s going down on the colour blind.
Nature will always reflect
any law that stares into it
long enough
to believe it’s true
but the best you can say about anything
is
not two.
PATRICK WHITE
So even if I shine alone
in a sunset that’s lost heart
in what it had to live through
so a few stars in the immeasurable dark
can settle old scores of the heart
with new reasons
to change with the seasons
YOU’RE SO INTENSE
You’re so intense you said
as if my whole being
were some kind of behavioural offense
but all I could say back was
you’re definitely not.
You hate it when it’s hot.
You don’t know where to look
to find life or water on Mars.
And whenever it gets too deep or dark
you huddle like a candle in the shadows
of a hundred billion stars.
I know fireflies and chimney-sparks
that don’t need a window to burn in
the way you do
like a lamp in a cowl of soot
a canary in a cage in a coalmine.
They give it all up to the night.
They shine.
They bloom.
They burn with insight.
They’re the nightlights in the long dark hall
that seems to go on forever
like that narrow mind
you’ve been walking in your sleep
past the admiring portraits
of the artificially blind
who dream in braille
of eclipses yet to come
that will weigh like stones upon their eyelids.
Intense?
Too intense?
What does that really mean?
I take my delusions too seriously?
I’m a child?
I’m immense
and there’s a dark energy within me
that’s still expanding space at an accelerated rate
that puts the whole universe
like a petal to the metal
in a game of chicken
with a precipitous abyss
that urges creation to take the risk
win lose or draw?
If I don’t come on
like the unified field theory
of a universal law
that can be summed up
in a beautifully simple mathematical formula
it’s not that it’s not in my nature to fit.
It’s just that I fit in like a heretic
and there’s never much room
for someone who blows blackholes
in the space-time continuum
that can’t account for the dark heart of black matter
that outweighs the white feather of light
they put on the scale of dead things
like the wingspan of phoenix fledglings.
How can you measure the intensity
of the half-life
of a radioactive underworld?
Is oxygen less intense than plutonium
or water any more
at peace with itself than fire
because its hydrogen isn’t flammable?
If I’m not waiting for enlightenment
to take an intense delight in the world
just as it is
shining against a cool background
of universal bliss
just as happy over there tomorrow
to be alive in that circumstance
as it is now here in this
what’s it to you
what’s it to me
if I can see the Taj Mahal in a hovel
and all you can see is a shovel?
I’d rather be passionately deluded by the mystery
of being here at all
and drown my sorrows
like torches I put out
in a sea of stars
to see them more clearly in the darkness
than stand like a lighthouse all night long
on the coast of your personal history
among all those shipwrecks waiting for dawn
on the bottom of an artificially lit aquarium
with the instincts of a fish on life-support.
You advance cautiously through life
like a sacred syllable
that’s looking for the right mouth to say it
but I dance on my way to war with the angels
who never kill you deeper into life
with the same sword twice
for having enough wisdom
to ignore their advice
and that’s what you hate me for.
I can walk on fire like a phoenix
who can speak to the demons like friends
in a language far from home
that everyone understands
is the mother-tongue
of what an exile in ashs says to himself
when he’s standing in the dangerous doorway
of stranger things to come.
I just don’t sit there on the sidelines and suffer.
I’ve learned to overcome my fears creatively
by pulling the sharks into the lifeboat
to save them from the humans
who can smell them
like shark fin soup in the water
from miles away.
When my voice isn’t scattered
like ashs from an urn at sea
it’s a burning bush
a prophet in a furnace
trying to keep his cool
a black spider in the bottom of a poppy
trying to read its fate in the dispassionate lees
of a goblet of fire
it drinks to the bottom of things
like a rare butterfly with scarlet wings.
Worlds within worlds within worlds.
Irridescent bubbles in the multiverse of hyperspace.
Parallel lives simultaneously happening
like the perfectly inter-reflecting jewels
in the cosmic net of Indra.
Mark one jewel and they’re all marked.
And at the slightest gesture of a thought
they’re all estranged from one another everywhere
like the stars that have followed them into exile
without ever knowing if they’re ever coming back.
All our impossible choices actualized
whether we make a decision or don’t.
Are you not amazed?
Are you not astounded
down to the last sorry bell of your soul?
Doesn’t the wonder sometimes get so deep and sweet it hurts?
Who wants to live like the leftovers
of the things they think they know
when they could put their lips together
like membranes and bubbles in the abyss
and kiss whole new worlds into existence
where you could live in one
flatlining like a star in the Arctic
without an event horizon
and I could live on the further shore
of some poetic mindstream somewhere
and burn like a black sun
that could open your loveletters
like alien flowers with sidereal perfumes
that inspire the fireflies
to get carried away
and turn the lights on
in all the rooms at once
in this house of life without a return address
where everyone tries to stay
very quiet and still in the closet
like old shoes
that came to a dead end
when they lost their feel for the road.
And if I don’t take a stand
on the quicksand foundations of the known world
or prefer the emotional life
of a cornerstone
that’s trying to keep it together
in an avalanche
down the world mountain
it’s not a dress rehearsal
for a sexual advance
that doesn’t stand a chance.
I’m not trying to decide who you are
by taking account of what you’re not
by buffing the stars with black matter
to explain the mass of your gravitas.
I may be a comet
in a dark halo
far outside the solar system
but I’m not trying to make a pass
that will light me up like angel
that shines by a reflected glory.
Some stories are better told at night
than they are by day
and I’m not the red sky in the morning
that comes with a warning
that leaves the sailors with nothing to say.
I’m not channeling echoes of my next life
through a wormhole
in the space-time continuum
of past events that deranged my galactic core
in such a way
I can look forward to yesterday
as if I were remembering tomorrow
from far away.
I can see all sides of things simultaneously
like water in a river
that knows how to bridge the opposites
by flowing past them with a mind of its own
that doesn’t follow the dead maps of the fallen leaves
like rootless trees into the unknown
looking for a new place to call home.
But a biodynamic peace
with the way things never are twice
that leaves lots of room for change
is not the same thing as a truce
with the still-born children of entropy
who never talk in their sleep
about a day to come
that will wake them up
like an earthquake
shaking the bedrocks of chaos
like pebbles out of a shoe
that died by the side of the road
without ever having left home.
I’d rather fly alone through my immensities
than try to swim through your densities
like a fish made of stone.
I may be an alien event horizon
on the wrong side of town
but I know how to read between the lines
when the sun’s going down on the colour blind.
Nature will always reflect
any law that stares into it
long enough
to believe it’s true
but the best you can say about anything
is
not two.
PATRICK WHITE
So even if I shine alone
in a sunset that’s lost heart
in what it had to live through
so a few stars in the immeasurable dark
can settle old scores of the heart
with new reasons
to change with the seasons
DOGPADDLING IN THE WIND
Dogpaddling in the wind
with the black walnut trees.
My thoughts sway with the breeze
and whatever I’m feeling
I’m at ease with the way things are
and are not
for the moment.
But it’s a relative truth
not an absolute way of being.
I don’t expect it to last.
It’s not the kind of peace
that comes with a past
that’s rooted in anything.
Among the great perennial acts of grace
that flower like goldenrod and loosestrife
all through these abandoned fields
that have returned to themselves
like veterans of foreign wars
on someone else’s doorstep
it’s just a blade of grass.
But I’m grateful.
I don’t know to whom or what.
God’s more of a political party now than a candidate.
But a vote for one is a vote for all of them
and as the Arabs say about the secret garden
I try to enter heaven by the right gate
and for me that’s always been the backdoor.
Blueweed chicory vetch Queen Anne’s Lace
rough-fruited cinquefoil
enamel buttercups
and three kinds of clover
blooming along this road I’m walking on
like a snake flowing through Eden
as the late afternoon air settles its dust
and cools into an eye
of blue-green peacock sky
at the first sight of Venus
taking the long way around the sun
high in the west on her own.
And a little further along the ecliptic
the first crescent of the moon
thinner than a sword-edge of Damascene steel.
An eyelash of the radiance
that fell from the night
while it was trying
to feel its way into stars
emerging out of the abyss
of an intuitive inspiration
that spoke to the light of the darkness inside
through a crack in a mirror
that once was blind
but now can see again.
Sometimes I think all the stories we make up
about the origins of creation
are just the mythical hindsight
of why we bear
the unbearable pain of living
that would drive us undeniably insane
if we didn’t have a lie or two to fall back on
even if it’s merely to marvel
that the immensity of so much
over such immeasurable reachs of time
could mean so spectacularly little.
Call it imagination
but it’s really only the genius of wonder
that pictures things on the inside
to give what’s dark and unknown
a place around the fire
like strangers far from home.
It’s a kind of spiritual hospitality
that lets the world in
like a nightstorm
through the windows and the doors
of our eyes our minds
our hearts our pores
even when it tracks emotional starmud
all over our immaculately deceptive floors.
Nothing stays clean for very long.
The meaning gets soiled in matter.
And compassion’s always been
an outrageously messy affair
that seldom picks up after itself
when there’s no one around to care.
I pick up an old hand-painted sign
that’s overturned in the matted grass
at the foot of a basswood tree
that’s hung on to the nail
like somebody’s word.
Private property.
Trespassers keep out.
Violators will be shot.
But there hasn’t been anybody
around here for years
to hear the open gate tell it
as if the woods had ears
and there was nothing to worry about.
Somebody once owned a grain of dirt
in the oceanic enormity of a place
that dwarfs the stars
like homesick bodhisattvas
with the boundless space
there is yet to enlighten
before we can all enter paradise
like gardeners bedding down with hunters.
In the meantime
life waits like a loveletter
in a mailbox full of bullet-holes
for somebody that was meant
to read it and understand it
without knowing who it’s from.
PATRICK WHITE
PATHETIC LITTLE BOY
on being told by a young poet
he’s going to commit suicide
Pathetic little boy
you’re always around me somewhere
whining about the lack of meaning in life
as if you’d been deprived of some ancestral illusion
the lack of which
makes you the ontological bastard you are.
You’re dying like a fish
beside a freshwater lake
but you won’t roll over and drink.
I’m not trying to be gratuitously cruel
or cut you with compassion
but sometimes I listen to you
and think I’m talking to a spider
that has run out of life-lines
like thread
to weave its own webs.
If you were the first to look up at the stars
we still wouldn’t have constellations
because you couldn’t connect the dots.
If you were a dreamcatcher
you’d starve to death in your sleep
or lose your jewel
to one of your own traplines.
As it is
you’re a mirage
in a desert of blowing sand
that’s leaking pyramids.
When life comes looking for the meaning of you
what are you going to say
when it opens you up like a fortune-cookie
to read your genome
like a bit of good luck or wisdom for a day
and there’s nothing but an i.o.u.
or an afterlife pointed like a ka-gun
at the belt in Orion
without a mummy to see it through
like an eye at the crosshairs that crucify you?
You suffer the world
through all fourteen stations
of its thorns its whips its nails
its tears in the garden
and plant yourself like a lightning rod
on your hill of skulls
waiting for a revelation
but I’ve never even seen a thief
condemned or redeemed
let alone a messiah
hanging from you
like a meaning with a spinal column
or even a good guess that suffers like a human.
Life is a tiger not a metaphysic.
What reason do you need to get up in the morning?
Here’s a tip.
You’re looking in the wrong direction.
The meaning you’re looking for
every meaning any meaning
like the northwest passage to Cathay
will always be behind you
like the widening wake of a ship
parting its veils in passing.
But don’t start following your own butt around
like shrieking seagulls
looking for a hand-out from history
when history itself is looking for a way home
that doesn’t take death for a course correction.
No matter what anybody says
about the first word
before the arising of signs
there was mind
and it didn’t need to be understood
like a hidden secret that wished to be known.
There was mind
and it wasn’t bad or good.
It wasn’t lucid or absurd.
It didn’t think that life was food
and eat itself up like experience
to wake up hungry the next day
wishing it weren’t this way
as if there were always something to long for
it wasn’t.
Everywhere life is
it’s in the presence of itself
and there’s no getting out of it
because everywhere it looks
it stares itself in the face
so just as you can’t separate
the moon’s reflection from water
anymore than you can find a backroom in space
or deprive a window of a view
you can’t pour life out of itself
without life catching itself
in its own hands
like blood and wine and water
returning like the Nile to the mouth of things
that tastes like the ashes of Alexandria
discussing how many feathers of fire it takes
to make a phoenix with three wings that flys.
The only way you can rinse
the bitter emptiness
out of the skull cup
you’ve been drinking from
like a mirage that’s been flattering water
with imitations
is by filling it up with the real thing
like an Artesian spring
that flowers in its flowing
whether you laugh or weep
or just rejoice in knowing
that water has roots that go deep.
You tell me you’re looking for a meaning
you can believe in
but I might suggest
you’re in for one hell of a surprise
when you realize
there are meanings
that haven’t been born yet
that are longing to believe in you
the way an embryo believes in the womb
that makes room for it in life
like a waterclock
that counts the days
and bears the burdens of time
like the Maya in Tikal
waiting for the ecliptic
to intersect the celestial equator
at the solsticial colure of the last festival
just before the clock strikes
December twenty-third two thousand and twelve.
You’re a baby sea
mispronouncing your own waves
like a vocabulary that belongs to someone else’s voice.
Now here you are in this huge abyss
of an empty department store
that used to be a thriving mind
wandering through the aisles
as if you still had a choice to make
between nothing and nothing.
You’re gloomy and doomy and down
and there’s nothing you’ve found to soothe
that diaper-rash of a mind
that chafes like a bum
that so badly needs a mother and a change
to talc your cosmic tantrum with absorbent stars
you’ve forgotten
that nothing can mean anything
it hasn’t already become.
You can ask reason what it all means
when the geese pass high overhead at midnight
like loveletters and death-sentences
meant for someone else
and reason will stand mute before you
with a broken wishbone stuck in its throat
like the crescents of the moon
above an empty lifeboat
drifting to shore on the current.
It may be the devil’s last lie
to say that he doesn’t exist
and God’s that she does
so everyone’s either going out
or coming in
on a low or a high tide
like a pulse or a thought or a feeling.
But reason and logic
are scorpions that sting themselves to death
when they’re surrounded by fire.
Black candles that commit suicide
as a way of healing
what they can’t put out.
They curl up into toxic interrogatives
and make their points
like the talons at the end of their tails
that sting them to death
for being so illogical and unreasonable
they need to prove they don’t exist
with honour
like many subatomic particles.
A passion for life is a tiger
but the art of life is a serpent
with its tail in its mouth for eternity
that knows how to make a good end
of beginning where it left off.
But the love of life?
Ah
that’s something different altogether.
That’s the great sea of awareness
that loves its own weather and waves
truer than any law
and well beyond reason
through the fire and the water pillars
of chaos and cosmos
that open their gates like the wings of a bird
with a chance for enlightenment
as vast as the open sky before it
that clears its voice of everything
before it can truly sing about nothing
and mean it.
You can turn toward reason
as if it were a way to advance more laws
to enhance your ignorance
but deep in its heart
logic already knows
it’s the science of chance.
Better to sit alone in an empty room
and let your imagination approximate things
by averaging out the crucials
of impossible worlds to come
that are booked for creation
like the handprint of what is solely
and wholly human
in the heart and mind of this one.
And as for what it all means
when alpha goes looking for news of omega
and comes back with a lot of world views
trying to grow skin over a wounded planet
dying to make peace with its scars:
Here.
Write this down in your book
after you’ve taken a real good look at the stars.
After you’ve been abandoned like a dream that came true
in a sweeter mysterium than you ever imagined
could emerge so easily
out of the turbulent urgency of the confused being
that tries to clarify its seeing
by washing the stars off with mud.
After you’ve lost everything for good
as time does to the vacant space
that used to be the old neighbourhood.
After you’ve opened all the eyes in your blood
like wildflowers in a high field
that let its horses run free a long time ago
and you’ve finally realized
you can see no further than you did
when the gates and flowers were closed.
After you’ve sacrificed all your stain-glassed windows
to a lucidity that’s colour-blind
and doesn’t traffic in rainbows
or gold necklaces
that can replace that lack of spine
that stretches from your ass to your mind
like a giddy suspension bridge
you haven’t got the guts to cross over.
After you looked upon war and murder
injustice agony famine and death
gluttony and its starving disciples
the doctor who treats the human body
like bad meat with a disease on its breath
and throws it down his neighbour’s well
as if the means justified the ends
like swords made from ploughshares
or the cannon that kills like a bell
that was more useful in hell
commanding things
than it was calling the faithful to the prayers
of the transcendent underlings
that have abandoned the underworlds
of their lost origins
like monks that eat roots in the desert
they dig up like lightning bolts
struck down by the trees of heaven
as their way of growing up and getting even.
After you’ve made an acute body count
of human suffering
and plundered your next incarnation
like a corpse at midnight
for all its vital organs
all its body parts
to donate to a dismembered child
who will see more through your eyes
than you ever did
as a hidden donor
who kept what you saw to yourself.
After you’ve wept yourself to the end
of beauty and grief
and bliss and wisdom
and madness thinks you’re too strange
to ask for asylum anymore
and takes the necessary meds religiously
to be moved up to the next floor
with a deranged view
it can understand suspiciously
in the old way of paranoid things
that practise blind-folded disciplines
of self-control
in front of a firing squad.
After you’ve met God like an autograph
and returned to your past superstitions
more than a little disappointed
with the latest edition in hardback
of his best-selling holy book.
After you’ve floated up to the surface again
like an innocent witch in water
like a heretic mammal
airing its brain in a more rarefied medium
than the more orthodox fish with stiffer fins can swim through
and you’ve been unmastered by the atmosphere
of the alien planet you’ve made of the earth
and drifted out into space
leaving all the spheres of yourself behind
like water and stone and wind and light and mind
and there’s nothing but endless space before you
so dark and cold and sublime
it creates stars out of time
without meaning to
that shine down on nothing
like the bright vacancy
that emerges from the dark abundance of you
like a firefly of insight
reflected in a drop of dew
that burns like the eye of a phoenix
with a vision of something new.
After you’ve endured all your ordeals and blessings
like rites of passage on the wrong page
and come through oxymoronically
into the wrong age
to do any good
like the echo of a distant prophecy
that came true too late to make a difference.
After you’ve realized all this is delusion
and implausibly enlightened
the source of confusion
by swimming against your old mindstream
as you learn to fall up
out of reach of convention
like a salmon with a deathwish
it will fulfill like an ocean
in the name of creation
to keep things going on
through generation after generation
of your fingerling afterlives
flowing with the current downstream.
After you’ve lived through
all the ills of society
regenerated out of the lost children
abandoned like original sins of omission
by the side of the road that walked out on them
when it realized it was raising its own assasssins.
After you’ve discerned
spiritual and physical health
two waves of moving water
are not deceived
by the way you labour to keep
everything the same
like youth and wealth
and rocks in the river
but knowing how to change
without hurting yourself
wrestling with the angel in the way
who always wins to make you stronger
though I suspect that’s seldom true.
After you’ve come to understand
we’re all living this dream of lucidity
in the eye of the lie
that’s living us
on the dark side
of all the things we can see
that will soon disappear
like lunar scars
and the clarity of stars
from the two-way mirror
of everything we’ve been.
After all this and that and more to come.
Consider this.
Take a long look
and write this down
like a flower you can stick in your skull.
A soft clapper in a hard bell:
You had a tongue before you had teeth.
It listened to the world through a sense of taste
long before it learned to speak for the mind
behind it all
like a lawyer for an aging godfather
who wants to die alone at home in his sleep.
And life was sweet.
But words soon rose up against thoughts
in the power-vacuum after he did
and assumed control of the rackets
in different parts of the neighbourhood.
Now you hedge your bets through a bookie
and things that were clearly out in the open
are well hid
like justice and corruption.
Now it’s a death-sentence
for your thoughts to be caught
wearing the wrong colours
cruising the street for words.
The peacocks war with the parrots
and life is so messed up
raptors evolve from birds.
And guns come out like stars
in the darkling heat of the evening sky
to make chalk constellations on the sidewalks
of those who die.
And the innocent
are afraid to be innocent
and the guilty weigh their relative hearts
against a feather of absolute doubt
and buy off Anubis
with his weight
in money guns
compaign funds
votes and drugs.
And everyone lets out a collective cry
and knows why
they’re the victims of district thugs
but they write it off as absurd
and then take sides
to see who’s winning
who’s the bat
and who’s the ball
when a word takes a swing at a thought
and knocks it out of the park
like a cosmic home-run
that’s one for the record.
Bread and circuses
but who watches the watchers?
Who pimps out the metaphors
behind closed doors
like executive advertisers
trying to sell coke to Santa Claus
as a way of getting it up for Christmas?
You want to know what it all means?
Trying to understand the world as it is
is trying to understand your own mind.
Fire looking for fire.
Water looking for water.
The star looking for light.
The mind looking for the mind.
You looking for your flashlight
with your flashlight.
You’re already so deeply in on the know
what could possibly be hidden
what could be secret?
Everything you do expresses it.
Everything you say
gives it away to everyone.
The secret is you.
The meaning of things is you.
You’re whispering into your own ear
but you’re not listening
because you don’t like what you hear.
The wind’s gone tone-deaf.
You’ve forgotten how to tell
the names of the trees
by the sound of their leaves
and it’s a bad Druid that doesn’t know
which crescent of the moon to use
or which tree
to harvest the moon like mistletoe.
But make of it what you will
because it’s all true
and when everything’s out in the open
it’s the mystery of the world
and when it’s a secret
the secret is you.
Just a matter
of opening and closing your eyes
and believe me little brother
you’re not the only one
who’s waiting to know
when you’re going to let yourself in on things
before we all have to go.
But write this down before I do
as if you were sketching your face in a mirror.
Death is so self contained and well-defined
it’s a singularity at the bottom of a blackhole
that’s distinguished by its lack of characteristics.
It doesn’t exist.
It doesn’t appear.
There’s no room in it for anyone.
It isn’t open.
It’s a black sun.
It turns the light around on itself
and shoots itself in the gut
like a bullet-wound in space
it takes for a navel
when it can’t find one.
There’s no place in it
that isn’t its own face
turned inside out
so there’s no room in the mirror
for doubt
when you can’t see
who else it might be.
But life is always
open to interpretation
like a shapeshifter
a lightning bolt
a firefly
a whiff of smoke
elaborating the mindstreams
that flow down the world mountain
into the great themes
of why we’re here
where we come from
and where we’re going
that return to the oceans of awareness below
like an answer their questions
have lived their way into
like the silence between the lines
that speaks of things
deeper than signs can fathom
or the mind put a face to
just to remember.
Short breath of the wind.
Long breath of the wind.
Birth.
Death.
Where does it end?
Where does it begin?
Go ask the New England asters
blooming among the goldenrod
what it all means
and they’ll tell you immediately.
September.
This brief wink of a season now
when you’re all the time that’s left
to harvest what you’ve been sowing
to take its place
from one full moon to the next.
And here’s the reason if you need one
to unman oblivion
with another interpretation.
The life of meaning?
The meaning of life?
The first is enlightenment.
The second deception.
Deception wants to get
to the bottom and end of things
as if the mystery could be grasped
like the end of the story
and the rest were history.
But enlightenment leaves everything undone
as it is
because life has never finished anything
it’s ever begun
and doesn’t make an end of anyone
as if there were a point to the conversation.
PATRICK WHITE
Life has never finished
anything it’s ever begun.
that make a good end of beginning
where they left off.
imagination room alone empty
The secret art of life.
Make a good end of beginning where you left off.
I ask my imagination.
I sit in an empty room alone
and ask my imagination to approximate things
by averaging out the crucials
