YOU’RE FREE TO BE FREE
You’re free to be free.
You’re free to be bound.
Attachment too is a Buddha activity.
Unborn
there’s no need to begin.
No beginning.
No end.
Draw your own conclusions
but don’t be a small snake
and get swallowed by a larger.
Move on according to your own wavelength
and let go of everything
like a myth of skin
like a tatoo you just had removed
now that the romance is over
and time’s fallen out of love with eternity.
Separation where there should be love.
Modernity’s the ultimate divorce.
We’ve disinherited the planet.
And all our children
are spiritually illegitimate.
Boo hoo
plays a little blue violin
on the streetcorner
outside the bank
and runs to buy a rock
he can crank like music
with the small change
of compassionate passers-by.
I’m alive now as I ever was
and I’m not a time-traveler from the sixties
having been here all along
but I was young in that generation
and if we were better than anybody at anything
I think it was
we didn’t lie to our imagination.
But I wouldn’t bet on it
knowing the mind’s greatest virtue
is not that it remembers so much
but that it knows so easily how to forget.
Smoke is not the historian of the fire.
Shadows are not the ink of the light.
Thoughts don’t know if there’s a mind
anymore than you know
if there’s a god
and your feelings have never heard of a heart
that makes a damn bit of difference.
Each of these things has a life of its own
but death doesn’t know anything about life
and what is there for life to live through
that can only live through itself
like water being a fish
that you could possibly experience as death?
Does the fish swim out of the water?
Does the bird fly out of the sky?
The great sea of awareness sheds its sky like skin
and swims on through itself.
You can’t pour the universe out of the universe.
Water finds the witching wand
like seeing finds the star
that’s been following it.
You are what you are what you are
and that’s not a consolation
not a victory or defeat
not Buddhas at your feet
or the chains of your leftover freedom.
It’s not Merlin killing stones with chemical Excaliburs
or the curse of a heavy life even Atlas couldn’t lift.
It’s the mystic specificity
of your own irreversible life
flowing down the mountains of matter
saying you into existence
every moment of it
like water talking to itself in the womb.
And time speaks with a human voice
about the sadness of its passing
and the eye that seeks the seer
looks in all the best directions
for the jewel of its enlightenment
like a mirror held up to space
looking back at its own unshapely face.
And that’s who we are
when we don’t stop to think about it.
We’re not lumps of intelligence
in the dark matter of it all
or crude approximations
of futures that never happen.
Our lives our lies our truths
our sorrows and joys
our love and disappointment
our foolishness and wisdom
our compassion and savagery
the things we keep faith with
and the things we betray
everything we are
and everything we are not
aren’t the masters of the medium of us
as if we were the stuff
the universe worked with
to shape small statues of itself
like a terracotta army it could take to the tomb
as a precautionary keepsake or momento mori.
We’re not the story of heroic elements
transcending themselves
around a periodic table.
That’s just another scientific fable
about the subjugation of Tiamat by Marduk
and how humans were made out of the filth
of her dismembered son Kingu
to serve the gods like faithful dogs.
White dwarfs shrinking heads into blackholes
as if oxygen could be enslaved by hydrogen
and her bitter tears turn into water.
And hydrogen beget helium
and helium begat carbon
and carbon beget us
like a polygamist at an orgy with oxygen.
Cowards coerce power with superstition
like mind maggots replacing the seeds
in the core of the apple of knowledge.
True gods don’t need to be served.
And real love doesn’t demand you do anything.
PATRICK WHITE
