STARMUD AND MOONWATER EIGHT

STARMUD AND MOONWATER EIGHT

 

letters to everyone in particular

 

            I don’t underestimate the tragic flaws that are the sins of my birth even though I think it’s somewhat drastic to go as far as to say the moonwater in my mother’s womb was a demonically contaminated waterclock running through myriad generations down to me as I am now. You may have been cleansed by the golden showers of celestial powers amusing themselves with your disappearance. Just another case of apparent enlightenment with the finality of a ghost. Or as you would say with the weird happiness of a man who delights in believing that as he said God said all things human are cursed from the very beginning. I’ve just gone along with the mob thinking that some people are just too weak to lift the spell that they cast upon life like a shadow of who they wanted to be. But now when I consider someone like you sometimes I realize that it’s like looking upon a spring orchard and trying to find something beautiful about the blossoms of a toxic tree greening into poison apples all over the trusting earth. When I see you throwing bad meat down your neighbour’s well like a spiritual toilet to hell I want to break a branch of black lightning off the tree of my darkest knowledge like the evil diviner you say I am and rip you like a tree down the middle to show everyone there are no halos in your heartwood. No prophets in your whales. No signs of growth. No ripples. No rings. And no bird sings.

If there were one thing in particular that I would mystically confess distinguished me among clarities in a pellucidly dark world it would be that I sincerely don’t feel as if I need to be saved from myself for seeing the way things really are when you turn over the stone of the world. When you shine a light in the corners that makes the slumlord spiders wince. When you tear down their webs like camouflage starmaps and the architectural groundplans of a pentagonal Pentagon with an aerial view of what’s going on. And the laughable infallibility to enforce it into what they want you to see. And right there is the precise spot of the stake you would bind me to like a heretic at Halloween. Like the Medici at the Bonfire of the Humanities burning in your Savanorolic vision of sin as you will later because it doesn’t take a demon to know that hate hates the hater first and worst.

            I am what I am. What else? It’s a cosmic excuse. A way of saying everything and nothing without incriminating yourself. But you’ll never know how it feels to be no one enough to lift the veils of Isis and look into the Queen of Heaven’s eyes as if you were looking upon seeing itself. You cling to your remains like the fossilized skeleton of a creationist beside a road that evolution never took. And when you raise your cup to the moon and drink up you see your own reflection in the sacrificial aspect of a bloodthirsty Aztec in unholy communion with the sun and the moon and the stars and turn into a snake of black cool aid at the bottom of a Jonestown grail in the jungle. You want to christen the world in your name like an ark but when it gets right down to the rescue you’re just another fairweather sailor trying to jump ship like a lifeboat hanging on to the afterlife of the Flying Dutchman. You tried to found a church on the cornerstone of your heart like a disciple of Peter who turned into quicksand when he denied the human divinity of God. You wanted to be an ark. You wanted to build a church. You wanted to bring me to my knees. But it’s hard to squeeze into the tiny shrine of a goose-necked bi-valved barnacle in a dead sea of moonstruck shadows waiting for high tide like the empty cup of an impact crater to fill it up until it runneth over like a waterclock. Or the Via Cloaca. The sewer of sewers when you’re corrupt enough to be that way. But as the mystic Hindu poet Mirabai once said in the sixteenth century to her family who were trying to take her back into the fold with a marriage fit for a proper princess of life I have felt the elephant’s shoulders swaying under me and now you want me to mount a jackass? Try to be serious.

 

PATRICK WHITE

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  

             

I LOOK INTO PEOPLE'S FACES

I LOOK INTO PEOPLE’S FACES

 

I look into people’s faces

and I see the same wound

under many different scars.

I look into their hearts

like a stranger at night

through a passing window

and I see how suffering through

the agonies of life

has ripened some

with sweetness and compassion

and others are already rotten before they fall.

I look into people’s eyes

and some are vast starlit skies

and some are the iota subscripts

of scholarly fireflies

that footnote the constellations

at the bottom of the page

with details off the beaten path

of their MLA mainstream cosmic thesis.

And some are like moons

with parenthetical crescents

with nothing in between

both sides of their smile

that isn’t a cynical aside

about the lost innocence

of a phase they’ve already gone through.

And some stare back like eclipses

that have pulled the blinds down

over their eyes

like sunglasses disguised

by a witness protection program

but you just know

they’re oilslicks on the Sea of Shadows

as they were in the womb

and in the Gulf of Mexico

the black blood of an incorporated miscarriage

that haemorraged like the pot of gold

at the end of the olaceous rainbow.

I look into people’s souls

and I see how afraid they must be of life

to hide out in the open

like an ocean

that hasn’t kept faith with its own depths

and tries to pretend it’s as airy and light as the sky.

The birds are flying through the roots.

The fish are swimming in the treetops.

I see judas-goats chained to the stakes of their ego-Is

like sacrificial tiger bait devoted to their cunning.

I see the anti-muses that shadow Mt. Helicon

like black holes

in the death valleys of human imagination.

And I wonder how they ever got here.

What bend in space led them to this twisted place

like a forsaken road

they keep taking

like a wormhole through time

into the womb of a stillborn universe

where the moonlight burns their embryos

on pyres of lime

beside the dry creekbeds

of nameless rivers going nowhere?

Along their flowerless banks

I see the rib-cages of dead snakes

that went witching for water

with tongues and tines of Kundalini lightning

that ran up their spines

like time through a waterclock

and the hulls of empty lifeboats

that died in the desert

at the bottom of the mirage

they drowned in

hoping to find themselves

among those who survived

by learning to swim through sand

like fish in an hourglass aquarium.

I’d rather walk on stars

reflected in the shattered mirrors

of my last self-image

than repay

the generosity of my solitude

with mass ingratitude.

I listen to people’s voices

and they all seem like the same echo

with many different mouths.

I’ve tried to respect

the mystic specificity

of the thousands of fierce individuals

I’ve met over the years

but the more I’ve learned

about myself and others

the more I see the same mind

in many different skulls.

The same genius of inspired water

that poured an ocean

of sentient awareness

into everyone of our cells.

Union differentiates.

Separation binds.

I look into people’s faces

however young or old they are

and I see infinite spaces

moonlighting as time

on the nightshift of the stars.

I see horror and compassion .

I see butterflies sipping the nectar of diamonds

like honey in the promised land

and maggots born in shit thriving on shit

like the janitors of the dead

because everything grows best

in the soil it was born into

like karma in the fortune-cookies

of wombs and eggs and cocoons.

I look into people’s eyes

like sad stars 

through the generous end of the telescope

that brings the far near

like impact craters

and I see how some people

cling to the memory of themselves

like underground seas

in frozen lockets of water on the moon.

I look into people’s secret shrines

they build like birds

in the eye of the storm

looking for salvation.

And I can hear the echo of their prayers

bouncing back off hydrogen clouds

like a nineteen twenties radio show

thousands of lightyears away

as if they just said them yesterday

and the universe as usual

threw the words back in their face

like the cosmic background hiss

of snowflakes on a furnace

going out like stars.

I’ve seen the innocence of fireflies

making halos

and the blood-rose weaving thorns

around the massive blackholes of death

as if they were merely a pinprick in a voodoo doll

that got into white magic by mistake.

I’ve looked into the nuclear blaze of madness

like an A bomb with shades on

and seen the flash and shadow

of embryo silhouettes

spit out like cave paintings

on the firewalls of the fusion wombs

that give birth to the heavier elements

it takes to survive.

But the water’s not mad

just because the moon’s a lunatic.

The mirror might seem

just as angry as you are

but it doesn’t feel a thing.

Learning wisdom is learning space.

It doesn’t eat flowers

and the weeds don’t sting.

It takes everything it embraces to heart

and nothing’s left out

from the very beginning.

Like the whole of the moon and the sky

in every eye of water

that’s ever looked into me

and seen that everyone

is the heart of a mystery

whose lucidity

is their only true identity.

Its our seeing that makes the flowers open

and the stars shine.

Its our hearing that gives the wind something meaningful to say

and the grass something to whisper about.

Whatever you touch

walks in your skin from thereon.

Whatever you taste

be it roses and nettles

or sulphur and wine

or the sour-sweet radiance

of the stars on your tongue

you’re the flavour of the day

in everything.

It’s your nose

that gives the burning leaves

in the urns of autumn

the spectral fragrance of chrysanthemums

that are barely holding on.

And it’s your mind.

Your heart.

Your blood.

Your body.

Your imagination.

Your intuition.

Your wisdom.

Your ignorance.

Your darkness.

Your light.

Your spirit

enlightened or deluded

whatever you think or feel

is abundantly missing

or dream you’re waking up to

that makes the world real

in every mystically specific detail

of who you are.

Who else?

I look into myself

as far as the stars at the edge of my seeing

fourteen point five billion lightyears away

and I can see how much time and space

how many species of life

generation after generation

have been born to give birth and die.

All the roses swept from the stairs of our hopeless tomorrows

because they were a tribute to love

meant for someone else.

All the spontaneous joys

that cast their long random shadows

like occasional fireflies of insight

across the lunar mindscape

of this afterlife of sorrows

where every church is the gravestone

of an unsuspecting god.

I look into my own seeing

like light upon light

in the vast expanse

of an unknowable night

and I’m cosmicly astonished

by how many worlds within worlds

eyes within eyes

minds within minds 

lives within lives it takes

to make a single habitable human being

meaning everyone of us sacred fools

fit as a genius

for the crazy wisdom

of a creative life

in a self-inspired universe.

 

PATRICK WHITE