FREE ALREADY

FREE ALREADY

Free already and it doesn’t cost a cent

if you’ve got the courage to live it.

It’s the high price of maintaining your chains,

iron and golden, the ones

that have convinced you they’re lifelines,

the ones that moor you to the bottom like anchors,

the ones you collect like silver umbilical cords

looped like rosaries through the eyes of your keys

to various spiritual experiences

you once occupied like celestial rooms

that enervates you,

the ones you think you look good in

when you’re blinged out like a constellation

for a sleazy night on the town,

blood-chains, daisy-chains, thought-chains,

the chain of your vetebrae

that connects your ass to your head,

and the chains that are holding you up like a bridge

streaming with rush-hour traffic,

that lift you up and let you down

like a valve over the moat of your heart

that’s chained like a kite to the wall of a dungeon.

It’s thinking the chains are solid,

elemental and necessary

that binds you to them

in a linkage of circumstance

that weeps like solder all over the real.

You’re hammering out iron ellipses

on the anvil of your heart

you’ve poured your blood into

like a sword of light you’ve melted down

like the stone you drew it from

to chain the music to its notes

like a wharf to a gaggle of lifeboats

knocking their empty heads together

in a squall of bad weather.

And you’re blinding real water

in an eyeless mirage

if you chain yourself to freedom or the void

or bind yourself to the exigent absurdities

in the abyss of enlightenment

mistaking nullity for the way

to delete the dark incumbent

you carry around like a sail

you keep breathing into

as if a nose-ring could enslave the wind

or the looms of the spiders teach the angels to weave.

PATRICK WHITE