IF YOU REALIZE ME I’LL REALIZE YOU
If you realize me I’ll realize you.
And maybe we could make something
come true for a while
we both could believe in
keeping in mind that space isn’t skin
and we’ve still got to pay the rent
on the metaphor we’re living in
like mystic honey in a killer-bees’ nest.
And I won’t try to heal you
if you don’t try to heal me.
If you don’t play the wounded muse
I won’t look for inspiration in your pain.
And worse than indifference
if you don’t reproach me for the chaos
that is the crude ore of my quest for stars
I won’t look upon your delusions with compassion.
If you don’t ask me to outlaw the clowns
of my traveling circus at the edge of town
if we were to get serious
about having some fun
I won’t show you where God is buried
without a headstone.
No river’s flowing the wrong way to the sea
we’re all going to make in time
mindstream after mindstream like waterclocks
with our tails in our mouths like serpents for eternity.
Madness is an eternal recurrence
with intense moments of lucidity
it scrapes out of the darkness like the stars
of an old passion that never went out.
So if you don’t think of me
as if I were insane
and you were not
I won’t hold you responsible
for the dream in which we are and are not
caught up in the life themes
of what we seem to each other
when we make one gate
from the crescents of the moon
there’s an infinite number of ways to walk through
without needing passwords for love
when we haven’t got any clothes on.
People turn to sand and water and clouds
when you try to grasp them.
When space tries to keep time on a short leash
traveling at the speed of light
the dog runs away from home
like a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest
and learns to eat at the backdoor of a neighbourly absolute
that doesn’t dispute what it’s learned to ignore.
An open hand that doesn’t expect anything
receives more than a fist that does
and it’s a weak human
that mistakes freedom for disobedience
and transformation as a betrayal
of the loyal chains that kept it all together.
So if you want peace between the constellations
like different houses of the mafia
blackhanding their contracts
like blood-sealed eclipses
to keep the body count low
and spin the public like a planet
knocked off its axis by a meteor strike
you’re tampering with the wrong species.
Cold consolation for the dinosaurs
but I’m the new hotshot mammal on the block
not the ashes of a truce I made with stolen fire.
I don’t ember long in the ruins of old extinctions.
My eyes aren’t creased like a fossil record
in the permanent press of time.
And who needs to squeeze diamonds
out of the darkness like stars
when we’re already shining for free?
So if you don’t turn our beginnings
into myths of origin
I won’t nail your saviours to a cross.
Today you suffer the win.
Tomorrow I suffer the loss.
But we can be two eyes in the same head
when we want to be
without arguing over
whose dream it’s going to be tonight.
Joy was already old when delight was a girl
but if you were to ask them their age
they would say
how old is a circle?
So if you were to agree that time is mortal
and eternity doesn’t fancy itself
anyone’s afterlife
we could both live free in the moment
where beginnings transcend their ends
like perfect flaws in the schools of perfection
that don’t know how to pass through the cracks
in their own reflection
without blaming the mirror.
We could fall through each other forever
toward paradise
parachute after parachute
and never candle our reserve in the perishing
like a daylily that’s fallen down drunk beside its grail
and given up the holy ghost on its own threshold.
I could see the extraordinary
in the most ordinary things of you
like a lipstick cartridge left on the kitchen table
ejected from a hunting rifle
like the gold bullet
I used to point at my head
like the lead of a base metal
until I was transformed by the red rose within
when you offered me your lips like painted petals
and I accepted the wound.
And I could summon the fireflies
from their fogbound valley like stars
after a storm
and ask them to tailor your earthly likeness
into a constellation
that would be the envy of all the zodiacs
sentient life forms anywhere
have ever held their fortunes up to like a mirror
martyred in a blaze of starmaps.
If you were moved by the courage it takes to be me
and I were in awe of the solitude
you had to maintain to stay free
we could be great heretics together
and fulfill ourselves by breaking each others’ rules
about not having any
and let the fools enlighten the Buddhas for a change
about how to make small talk
when you’re deeply deranged.
You could be the one in the many
that didn’t return like a bad penny
and I could be the one
you picked up off the street for luck.
And way beyond the billboards for a better life
and the lies and the lies and the lies
that keep breaking down
into subatomic minutiae
like senate hearings
looking for the God-particle of the truth
they’re investigating for proof of their existence
we could create one of our own
like a night within a night
that belongs to strangers
alone with the Alone
whose shadows aren’t slaves of the light.
I could say your name
as simply and beautifully
as a unified field theory
laid out before me in bed like your body.
And we could bend space with our toes
like bed clothes
and the dark matter of the issue at hand
could lend a little gravity
to our electromagnetism
until we exploded primordially
into a climactic universe
too far gone to explain
why we had to go beatifically nuclear
to ground our pain in the joy of the curse
that keeps us demonically earthbound.
You could be my unholy treasure
and I could be your lost and found.
PATRICK WHITE
