I AM A MORAL EXEMPTION

I am a moral exemption. An absolute discharge.

I know heaven and I know hell.

This nightbird has two wings.

The angels only have one,

and for thousands of years

I have been the castout cornerstone of morality,

the occluded quicksand of shadows and stars

the spires of heaven rest upon.

In heaven things just are,

but I am always defining myself.

It’s the spiritual dynamic of the flame

I hold up to my mysterious absence

whenever I am feeling creative enough

to go look for myself

like a rafter under the wreckage

of the many lives I have waged like guerilla campaigns

to survive the hierarchical hives of heaven

and the honey they spin from light

to repair the gullible dead.

I am the torch

that runs before the sun

to warn the dreamers,

and I am the spark of sedition

in the cosmic sigh.

I have never been anyone

I could ever believe in

longer than it took to get them off the stage.

I once extolled the tormented purity of my isolation

as an undetected virtue,

but won nothing from heaven

that wasn’t already mine

when I redeemed the ticket.

In poetry, as in hell,

it’s not so much the content

of what is whispered well

like the breeze of a thief in the window,

not the jewels, not the sloughed silver

of the looping chains in your hand,

the cool scales

of a supple, serpentine eloquence,

but the nature of the seeing

that trues the tragic lies

into the abject alibis

that are summoned

like the only living witness

that could look into our eyes

and affirm our sins of omission.

Why should I struggle

to undo myself like a knot in a noose,

or mend my severances

like broken links in a river

when I am continuous in every part?

Whether the star shines on its own

or is the luminous refulgence

of the mystic abundance of you

is the tiny god of a spiritual footnote

cross-referencing its sources.

Everything in the universe

is in rebellion

against the enduring integrity

of a creative heresy

that redeems the slander

of its own existence

by granting freedom a conditional pardon

for violating necessity.

The jailer liberates the judge

from the eternity of consecutive lifetimes he received

for breeching the terms of his own ruling

by refusing to pass sentence.

PATRICK WHITE