THEY'RE TRYING TO MAKE ROSARIES OF MY MOLECULES

THEY’RE TRYING TO MAKE ROSARIES OF MY MOLECULES

 

They’re trying to make rosaries of my molecules

but the way I see it

Jesus was nailed to a cross

and then the cross was nailed to Jesus.

Morality is the degeneration of wisdom

and wisdom shows up like a streetsign

that confirms you’ve lost your way.

But I don’t want to be lined up

all in one direction

like magnetons and weathervanes

or Canada geese making waves in the wake of airplanes.

I don’t need a Jerusalem a Vatican a Kaaba or a magnetic north

to tell me the direction of prayer

because I’m not asking for anything more

than here and now

and that’s more than enough

of an afterlife for me

and I’ve already got that

because there’s no birth or death in the moment

and as for the rest

if there’s anything more to feel with

I’ll get through it as I always do

creatively.

I’m already drinking

from the ginger fountain of Salsabil

in jana with houris

whose lips are roses

and skin is pearl

who never seem to bore me.

And in seventh heaven among angelic swans

idling in the stillness on the rivers of joy

like Cygnus in a summer sky

streaming down the Milky Way

or the Road of Ghosts if you’re Ojibway

or Rhea’s milk down her breast

in a cave in Crete if you’re Greek

I’m already floating like an origami paper boat poem

I made from an apple blossom

full of moonlight

down the mindstream

of my own dream

of where I might be going.

And though I’ve been known

to climb mountains like a B.C. salmon

summoned from the depths of the sea

to procreate in the siren pools

and inspired wellsprings of the muses

that soma sema kill me into life like a seed

over and over again

through many lives

I’m not the kind of paddlewheel that abuses the flowing

by entrusting my fate to a lifeboat

when I already know how to swim

through my own medium

by letting things come

and letting things go.

Or if you like

more deciduously

I harvest my life like a windfall

that will keep me dead drunk

through the long winter before me

in a goosedown bed

with a woman who’s got my head

on her shoulders

like the Atlas Mountains

that no one’s ever conquered.

The way I see it  

we’re all irridescent supersensible soapbubbles

everyone a unique universe in hyperspace

smeared in a covenant of rainbows

floating above the birth muck

of our own starmud

with a lethal vulnerability

so I drift well clear of the thorns and horns

of those who want to gore me into damnation

or the humbler modes of mythic deflation

that come like science and salvation to my door.

I adore the radiant lightness of being

in this parachute of skin

I’ve worn thin as a flying carpet

jumping from higher and higher heights

toward a paradise

that looks like the earth from the air.

And if I have any say in the matter

I’ll free-fall this way forever

as I have for certain women

who were forged

like swords on the moon

for a noble death

in the name of a mystic passion

that will romanticize my ruin

into a myth of origin.

I’ll sit on the banks of the Ruknabad with Hafiz

that flows through Shiraz in medieval Persia

and discuss the roses and moles and ghazals

on the cheeks of all the slavegirls

who didn’t take our hands

for all the gold in India

or the new capitol

of the Mongols in Samarkand.

I’ll wait with the Buddha

under the Bodhi Tree

for Venus to get up

like the morning angel of light

who’s just lain with Lucifer

as she once did with Mars

and before him Vulcan

the bitch

like absolute perfect enlightenment

with a smile on her face

that disarms space

like real water in an oasis

deep in a Martian landscape

without a trace of delusion.

Or I’ll just live my everyday confusion

while I’m alive to know it

as that element of unpredictability

that ignores the standard model of the universe

and ascends to chaos spontaneously

like mist off the mirror I’m walking on.

And it’s not hard to imagine

madness as a kind of religion

that gives asylum to the lightning

from packs of hunting weathervanes

with their noses to the wind

when you see what the sane ones are doing.

The strong rope that binds

has been unwoven

into a million weak threads

just as Muhammad said it would

and the moon undoes at night

what she wove by day

and no one among the righteous hypocrites

knows who the faithful are among the heretics.

When the shepherds of the black camel

build tall buildings in the desert.

When a tree shall be planted in Israel

in which no birds sing.

When men dress like women

and women dress like men

and sex degenerates into impotent promiscuity

and then the day of the red-haired one-eyed liar A Dajal

who will sway many with his miracles

for a thousand years

and then the day when his day is done

and then a day

when the last man on earth will be Chinese

and he will grovel in the dust at his sister’s feet

and consummatum est. It’s done.

Histrionic stage directions

for our dramatic exit from existence.

For all the talk of peace

things always end

like a bad party in religion

but how easy it is to imagine one

where prophecies aren’t always

the fossils of things to come

and heaven isn’t a kingdom

and babies aren’t cursed at birth

and a garden doesn’t grow treacherous apples

and the jihads and the crusades

the genocides and pogroms

the Darfurs the Auschwitzs,

the Sabra and Shatilas

the Sawettos and ghettos and gulags

the Bosnias and Gazas and Warsaws of the world

aren’t nails driven through

the heartwood of compassion

to save the chainsaw from the tree.

Only slavers think that freedom isn’t free.

I don’t want to cut out God’s tongue

and call it a creed.

I don’t want to smear

my own shit on the mirror

and claim I’ve corrected perfection

with my anal infallibility.

I don’t want to molest the minds of children

with a Republican spin on creation.

I’m pro-life when it comes to imagination.

I don’t want to vote on the way things began.

And if you’re looking for a unified field theory

or a God-particle in a hadron collider

or the unimprovised explosive device

behind the Big Bang

circling like a drone

to see what terrorist group

is going to claim credit for it

I’ll show you one

that’s not a religion.

I call it a human.

And it explains everything.

 

PATRICK WHITE