YOU CAN TEACH THE MIND

YOU CAN TEACH THE MIND

You can teach the mind

but you can’t teach the heart anything

about the way it’s come through everything

like a theme of the ocean through a bloodstream.

The crabs clatter like sleepwalking clocks

across moonlit beaches

holding up the crescents of their claws

like lunar castanets

to dance the time away

with their own shadows.

Walking the road

you become the road

and no one gets anywhere

until only the road arrives.

Petty people toy with small destinations

they call themselves.

Be a great river

and follow your own veins and arteries

down the mountain

through the plains and valleys below

to the vastness of the sea that conceived you.

And when the sea reflects the stars

don’t look for your place in the waters

as if you were reading a starmap

when every drop of you

is distilled from a vine of the light.

When you turn the light around

and pour the mooncup of your existence

back into the river it scooped you from

to ease a stranger’s thirst for stars,

and everything seems empty and forsaken,

and the dream is quaking in the turbo-charged air,

suddenly you disappear

and the sea is everywhere

effaced by its own longing to share.

If you hate the world,

it will go to war with you.

If you love it inordinately

it will ignore you.

Better to be the fire

and not be burnt by your own flame;

better to be the sword

that kills you into life

and not be cut by either edge.

And if you’re a bell

so stuffed with choirs

you can’t sing,

or a liar pimping constellations like bling

in the blaze of your own thing,

you should know

there is no hell for you,

no truth that’s going to sting

that hasn’t already been bored to death

by your significance.

There is no inclusion

no exclusion in clarity.

If you examine closely

the coinciding of thought events

that you misrepresent as your mind,

the whole of the sea is in every wave

and the water isn’t startled

when the fish jumps.

Walking by that sea

everything the world

ever stole from you

is returned by grateful thieves.

PATRICK WHITE