I DON'T KNOW HOW TO BE ANYONE ELSE

I DON’T KNOW HOW TO BE ANYONE ELSE

 

I don’t know how to be anyone else.

I confess my ignorance.

I am more possessed than possessing.

I’m a ghost haunted by humans.

I’m not some maggot of a blackhole

eating my way through space.

Between heaven and hell

I prefer the earth.

A little to the left of the salt.

People are more mammalian there.

A higher quality of laughter.

Better taste in the protocols of compassion.

A good place to hide out

when you’re tired of running

from the enhanced versions of yourself

that keep rolling out on the runway

for you to take a test flight in

without an ejection seat.

Who is there to share

the meaning of your life with

when even you can’t see through it like a glass darkly?

I’m fond of the light.

It’s the flower of clarity.

but what could it mean to anyone else

that you are who you are?

They might love or abhor

their interpretation of you

but that’s a theme of theirs

not yours

from many lifetimes back

and it says more about them than you.

Every accusation is a confession.

But we’re like stars.

By the time we’re revealed

we’re somewhere else beyond the light.

And how could I explain all this darkness to anyone?

It’s an illusion that we know what our words mean

when they say us out loud

like a secret we meant to keep to ourselves.

And who’s to say what’s happening

beyond these event horizons

that keep losing you

like the road you were on

before it turned into this one?

Walk one road well

and you walk them all at the same time.

There’s no need to choose to be confused.

So I stick to my lonely homely mystic self

like a poster for a play

that got tired of waiting for an opening night

and tore itself down from the wall

like a bad review of yesterday

and went my own way without a script.

Or I could be seventeen again

on acid in San Francisco in nineteen sixty-six

and any minute I’m going to come down now

and discover my old life

like one long dark strange radiant trip

someone else took before me

and didn’t come back.

And I’m still waiting for a postcard

from the edge of nowhere

from someone I haven’t seen in a long time

and probably won’t ever again

though I hold him with affection in my mind

like a blossom that never let go.

And over the long forever

of this afterlife ever since

I’ve tried to forget what he saw

that made him disappear

but he was the only poet I ever met

whose suicide was sincere.

 

PATRICK WHITE