LIVING MY WAY

Living my way through these dark nights

trying not to be idiotized by the media

because there are so few real stars around,

like a shattered window, and glad of it,

I prefer to elaborate more enquiring delusions,

let the spiders weave dreamcatchers

around my dark jewel of blood

to keep the nightmares out

that conjure me like a mode of being

that frightens them

to a seance of long distance calls

that never pick the receiver up.

I don’t know what I’d say anyway if they were to ask.

That words roll like flypaper off our tongues

trying to catch a star,

that nothing is false because nothing is true?

Most people conceal a foreboding

even in their deepest jubilation

like an eclipse up their sleeve

to trump the blue harvest moon

of their immutable nature

betting against themselves

so busy looking for wealth

they’ve forgotten how to be rich.

Why paint your window

and when you’re asked if it’s raining,

not know, or insist

when the dead come

to legislate the here and now of the living

it isn’t seasonal, that the birds won’t be back

to jack the lies out of the eyes of your iron bells

like September?

And you may be lost

in this desert of stars like dark matter

staggering from one severity of subsistence to the next

as if you were the only certified cheque

in an encyclopedia of bad paper,

but you don’t know, you don’t know, which way to go

in these enormous spaces

until there’s real water

in the begging bowl of your most desperate oasis

and you are no longer the dupe of your own lunar seas.

I don’t look for myself like a sail, black or white,

on a tide of shadows anymore

or think I’m the unobserved phase

on the far side of the moon

that heretically hexs the crops.

I danced like fire at the martyrdom of that scarecrow

and unspooled myself like smoke

to breathe in the cool bliss of an enlightened ghost

that isn’t spooked by fingerprints

left at the scene of the crime

that reveal everyone’s identity

under the same perp’s happenstantial alias.

Well beyond culpability, judgment, blame, sin,

no swans on the river

under the hooded axes of the moon,

I have witnessed the innocent confess to the guilty

things that advance like a blade of silence through a demon’s heart

and the guilty, true to the innocent, forgive them for the scars.

And I don’t know if its a la mode among planets

to twist your orbits this way into infinite figure-eights

and revolve around the sun like sand in an hourglass

as if your desert could be timed,

or I’ved inverted the anhk

and thrust my neck through it like a noose

to hang like a constellation from a Judas-tree

that is truer to its betrayal

than I ever was to my sincerity,

but I’ve spread my wings,

I’ve closed my book of webs

and revel in these gusts of stars

in this afterlife of smoke

that sweeps all these thresholds away.

There’s nothing to be. Nothing not to be

when you’re out of the loop,

or more precisely, the loop is out of me.

PATRICK WHITE