STARMUD AND MOONWATER SEVEN

STARMUD AND MOONWATER SEVEN

 

letters to everyone in particular

 

              The fool might see what’s crazy about wisdom and the sage might see what’s wise about madness but they both enter enlightenment from both sides of the sideless gate into the open the moment they realize that even when things are whole they’re not complete. Even though it’s tomorrow. Yesterday isn’t finished yet. Even though the clock’s still running time has stopped. Because time is space and space isn’t going anywhere and space is time and time goes on forever when one sits still the other is always changing. When one’s the navel of the still point of the turning world the other’s the wheel that hits the road like the circle of the full moon paving a straight way on the waters she walks to the end of herself.

But Terence this is stupid stuff to crib from Horace and anyone who is serious about life shouldn’t waste their time on the disconsolate unified field theories of ghostly old men obsessed with the beginning of things that never end. Who goes looking for new friends at a seance? It’s a crime to be alive when the dead legislate for the living. That’s why it’s important to govern yourself. The dead follow the letter of the laws of their origination to the grave they drag everyone else down into like a blackhole or a pharoah afraid to go it alone. But the living disobey the dead word of the slumlords of the cemetery and keep the lights on well past curfew like spiritual chandeliers in a world full of lightbulbs trying to equip the stars with on-off switches as energy-saving devices that could reduce the cosmic deficit of a universe that squanders itself on everything with flare and life and energy. At the feast of life it’s better to pick up the tab for the whole table than it is to merely leave a tip. It’s better to drink the wine-dark sea down to the lees in the bottom of your moonskull in a single gulp than it is to sip. Only those who know how to live generously know what a precious jewel gratitude is. You can’t free the dark buddha you’ve been holding hostage in exchange for your real self by liberating your chains. The iron ones will hold you as fast as the gold. Better to be the missing link that everything follows like a species on the brink of extinction than be led around by the nose-ring of a halo like a bull in the china shop of heaven.

Get a grip on yourself by all means but remember that even when you do it’s no more than a bit in the mouth of the wind. It’s the seahorse that takes the ocean out for a ride like a wave that can’t be broken not the other way around. If you listen to the lyrics of the songs of the mermaids long enough backwards looking for subliminal messages that might keep you from going down with the ship. If you’re just another revolutionary reversing the rich like a poor man who says to the Queen Bitch It’s your cake. You eat it. If you write long loveletters in moonlight to the mermaids on the rocks in your mindstream as if they were inhabited islands away over your event horizon and could hear the echo of your sos in the bottle of your breaking voice over the sound of the music. If you say to your lover let me help but you really mean take care of me and come on like a flashy storefront when you’re truly an empty warehouse. If you think the mooncrow and the sundove of happiness perch anywhere else but on the green bough of life that is rooted in peace. If you think you’ll live to see the orchard blossom by planting pygmy apple trees in quicksand. If you pass on all your thoughts to the young like the used hand- me-down-skins of snakes that have moved on without holes in their socks to the bling of better things. If you fall in love like a drug with every new dealer you meet but you never find that high your looking for because there’s no consummate desire to be fulfilled when you’re addicted to addiction. Sisyphus was a junkie shooting rocks that rolled him like a stone uphill like a mountain and down like an avalanche. If you speak your mind without interdiction like a babbling tower in PsychoBabylon as if everyone could hear the same voices you do. If there isn’t the slightest discretion between you and God that you haven’t walked through like a spider web in the morning as if you had no respect for dreamcatchers trying to make a living to get by on the meagre jewels of the dew that come their way like eyes in the night. If you’ve made a habit of your changes like reuseable cocoons. If five petals open and the same flower blooms that you admired yesterday. If tomorrow comes like the answer to a question nobody asked about the lifespan of reality and the afterlife of delusion. You’re just another phantom drinking stars from the hands of a compassionate mirage that’s trying to revive you. You’re the mystic mud puddle at the end of a grailquest that tries to clarify chaos with confusion. Even when the stars are bright enough on their own to see by you’re still the lost shepherd of shadows the black sheep have strayed off the beaten path to go looking for.  

But if I told you as I do now. Stop looking. What’s missing from your shadow when you’re standing alone in its absence at night? You’d interpret that to mean something dumbfoundingly abstruse and start looking for the full moon of enlightenment like an eclipse with a flashlight. Like a key with an excuse.

 

 

PATRICK WHITE