HAPPIER TO BE ALIVE THAN I HAVE BEEN IN A WHILE

HAPPIER TO BE ALIVE THAN I HAVE BEEN IN A WHILE

 

            Happier to be alive than I have been in a while. Good sleep. No dreams. Led out of oblivion by my own enzymes though the light wants to take the credit I can feel the sacred clown within me beginning to take liberties with yesterday’s profundities like a hummingbird with a funeral bell on a binge. And the best thing I like about this moment of creative solitude I’m enjoying now is that I’m the only one who’s ever missing when I go looking for myself like the last page of a book with a new beginning. Yesterday all the mirrors wanted to be windows and all the windows wanted to put their eyes out. Bonus. A lunar delinquent in the night did that with an Oedipal moonrock that made an impact like first contact with intraterrestrial forms of intelligent being. You want to see the world whole? You’ve got to look at it with broken eyes. You’ve got to let the bird out. The ghost. The host. The smoke in the chimney. You’ve got to peck a hole through the cosmic egg like a fist through plaster. Like a stone without sin through a window. You’ve got to let the sky in like a five year plan to expand your wingspan. You’ve got to get the moon drunk and then ask it to walk on the waters in a straight line. Everywhere you fly you should arrive drunk under the influence of the stars in your eyes. You should make paper boats and origami swans out of the poems you write in the morning and sail them down the Milky Way at night to a lover on a bridge beside a weeping willow that longs for the moon like a wedding ring she lost to the mindstream she’s trying to retrieve it from. I’ve tasted many earthly things over the course of an intense lifetime. Money. Power. Genius. Sex. But the best is to wake up in the morning so indefensibly alive you’re disproportionately happy about nothing.

That’s when words forget what they’re supposed to mean and start expressing themselves. That’s when language takes on a voice of its own and says like God in the Koran to an illiterate Muhammad if all the oceans in the world were ink and all the trees were pens you could never exhaust a subject with no likeness. Or to propose a simulacrum in my mother tongue. No pictographic gangland graffitti with paint can clouds ever territorially sprayed the face of the moon with anything so indelible it couldn’t be washed off like watercolours in the rain the next morning. Or blood. Or tears. But you’ve got to read it from the inside out like a gnostic gospel of pain if you want to get the deeper meaning of it like the negative space of a spit-painted hand on a cave wall at the back of your brain long long ago when you remembered you were no one and left a sign like a star on the palm of nothing at all to show where you disappeared into the Open like the immense farewell of an intimate greeting to those of us who haven’t been born yet. That’s when time drops off my body and mind like a leech in a waterclock and everything shows me what it means to have nothing to say in the first place that isn’t just blowing smoke in the face of inspiration like a fire that follows you around the circle like an autumnal equinox in the abandoned zodiac of an old story that’s making you cry. Time to make up some myths of your own to put new flesh on an old bone of the cold dragon wrapped around the north pole like the skeleton of a physcian who isn’t healing very well. New equinoxes. New solstices. Expansive canvases of space and deep passionate eyes that feel everything they see like the occult colours of stars hidden in the sunlight.

            I’ve smuggled stars across the borders of the blind for years. I’ve been a blackhole prohibition mobster at the centre of all the dark matter in the universe that controlled the galaxies like speakeasies and numbers rackets I ran on my home turf. I’ve been the cosmic criminal of an underground cartel. And then I’ve been shot down in the street by mistake like an innocent bystander under a truce of blood that covered my face like the flag of someone else’s country at halfmast. I’ve longed for a future with no regrets and a past that denies everything like a passport that can’t put a name to my face in a game of show and tell. I’ve put down roots of fire like a dragon in a well and learned to get along with the stars and fireflies and the penny wishes of harvest moons going down over the hills like somnambulists in a dream that’s as perennially true as a witness protection program.  And I’ve got teardrops running down my clown cheeks like the tatoos of a prison hitman who made his bones like a rogue constellation in an elephant graveyard that forgot the names of the dead. And I’ve been extradited from one holy land to the next like a Yemeni caravan of terrorist camels on the moon that carried their burden of proof for the existence of God back and forth like silkworm suicide vests to both extremes of the Perfume Trail. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. Everyman’s death diminisheth me. And the children and the women and the aunts and the uncles over and over and over and over and over and over again.

But this morning for a moment I’m free. The light has no history. The children have enough to eat. Corruption is a monostome that has to eat the shit that comes out of its own mouth and the landlords are sleeping homeless in the streets in winter over heating vents they can’t rent to anyone. The generals’ hearts are satisfied and the all the gains of war are ruined by singing and dancing. Pippa passes and God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. Seven come eleven. The dice are loaded on my side by the joy in my eyes that plays the long shot and wins. The phoenix the dove and the dragon are at peace in me. And even the crow is burning like silver on the shoulder of the moon. Tears are running down the cheeks of the mirrors who can’t stop laughing at what the Wizard of Was looks like naked to the Morgana la Fay of Now.

                Sometimes it’s good to get out of the flow by going over the edge of your mind like the single drop of a waterfall that’s as self-contained as the world it reflects like a secret identity of its own. But it’s better to be the nothing behind the mask that sees through it all. In a world where the wise are good losers and the fools are bad winners and the booksmart are placing sad bets on the politicians they’re running like another drugged horse in the race to lead the people by the nose into a victory wreath like a quarterhorse into a plough-horse’s yoke it’s good to be abundantly nothing without beginnings and ends. In a forgotten starfield somewhere down over the hill where the older constellations give names to the newborn fireflies. In a long look back at the future like a road you’ve already taken to a place that was run out of town like one too many destinations settling down like refugees with outlaw friends. It’s good to be left like boots out in the hall to your own resources and walk away from it all with wings on your heels without a flightplan to anywhere like an occult understanding of the night that isn’t blinded by a close-up of a star in its own light. It’s better to be the medium than it is to be the message. Hermes Trismegistus. The thrice-blessed. It’s better to leave the party like the happy ghost of a grateful guest that counts its blessings among the dead than overstay your welcome like a bad host at a needy séance. It’s better to be a demon with good spiritual manners that doesn’t insult the feast by not eating than it is to be an angel without an appetite that doesn’t know how to break bread with the devil. Or eat with a long spoon when there are strange letters without Rosetta Stones in the alphabet soup of a liar. And flies in the Holy Grail of an anointed oilwell that greens the kingdom with corporate cash like Frankish kings at the cathedral of Reims who sold Joan of Arc to the English. When you’re in hell among the chaopolitans of cosmic Rome it’s good not to act like a rural homesick hick from Eden with an accent as thick as an Adam’s apple. When in hell do as the damned do and start a church of your own. From little acorns great oak trees grow like bones. From a single grave. Gothic cathedrals of stone.

            As for me and my house to borrow a title from Sinclair Ross. I’m so happy this morning that I’m as lost and alone as water everywhere. That the sunlight streams through me like a broken window in an abandoned home no one’s died in for years. That I’m awake in a dream that sleepwalks like the high tide of a lunar ocean over the watershed of my tears without its feet touching bottom. Without thorns in its paws. Without the cause and effect of the scars and the wounds that war in the womb like an unholy crusade over who did what to whom first and will born guiltier than the other for it. It may have been the moon’s bird, the crow, superstitious as silver, that taught humans how to bury their dead deep inside themselves as if they were a murderer like Cain whose gift was not acceptable to God, but it was a morning dove in the white-gold sunlight, free as this joy that doesn’t care if I’m worthy of it or not, breathing itself into life like pure oxygen just for the love of it, that taught them to dig them up again. Like old loveletters slipped under the open doors of deathrow like the slim hope of a second chance that didn’t come too late or in vain.

 

PATRICK WHITE  

HAPPIER TO BE ALIVE THAN I HAVE BEEN IN A WHILE

HAPPIER TO BE ALIVE THAN I HAVE BEEN IN A WHILE

 

            Happier to be alive than I have been in a while. Good sleep. No dreams. Led out of oblivion by my own enzymes though the light wants to take the credit I can feel the sacred clown within me beginning to take liberties with yesterday’s profundities like a hummingbird with a funeral bell on a binge. And the best thing I like about this moment of creative solitude I’m enjoying now is that I’m the only one who’s ever missing when I go looking for myself like the last page of a book with a new beginning. Yesterday all the mirrors wanted to be windows and all the windows wanted to put their eyes out. Bonus. A lunar delinquent in the night did that with an Oedipal moonrock that made an impact like first contact with intraterrestrial forms of intelligent being. You want to see the world whole? You’ve got to look at it with broken eyes. You’ve got to let the bird out. The ghost. The host. The smoke in the chimney. You’ve got to peck a hole through the cosmic egg like a fist through plaster. Like a stone without sin through a window. You’ve got to let the sky in like a five year plan to expand your wingspan. You’ve got to get the moon drunk and then ask it to walk on the waters in a straight line. Everywhere you fly you should arrive drunk under the influence of the stars in your eyes. You should make paper boats and origami swans out of the poems you write in the morning and sail them down the Milky Way at night to a lover on a bridge beside a weeping willow that longs for the moon like a wedding ring she lost to the mindstream she’s trying to retrieve it from. I’ve tasted many earthly things over the course of an intense lifetime. Money. Power. Genius. Sex. But the best is to wake up in the morning so indefensibly alive you’re disproportionately happy about nothing.

That’s when words forget what they’re supposed to mean and start expressing themselves. That’s when language takes on a voice of its own and says like God in the Koran to an illiterate Muhammad if all the oceans in the world were ink and all the trees were pens you could never exhaust a subject with no likeness. Or to propose a simulacrum in my mother tongue. No pictographic gangland graffitti with paint can clouds ever territorially sprayed the face of the moon with anything so indelible it couldn’t be washed off like watercolours in the rain the next morning. Or blood. Or tears. But you’ve got to read it from the inside out like a gnostic gospel of pain if you want to get the deeper meaning of it like the negative space of a spit-painted hand on a cave wall at the back of your brain long long ago when you remembered you were no one and left a sign like a star on the palm of nothing at all to show where you disappeared into the Open like the immense farewell of an intimate greeting to those of us who haven’t been born yet. That’s when time drops off my body and mind like a leech in a waterclock and everything shows me what it means to have nothing to say in the first place that isn’t just blowing smoke in the face of inspiration like a fire that follows you around the circle like an autumnal equinox in the abandoned zodiac of an old story that’s making you cry. Time to make up some myths of your own to put new flesh on an old bone of the cold dragon wrapped around the north pole like the skeleton of a physcian who isn’t healing very well. New equinoxes. New solstices. Expansive canvases of space and deep passionate eyes that feel everything they see like the occult colours of stars hidden in the sunlight.

            I’ve smuggled stars across the borders of the blind for years. I’ve been a blackhole prohibition mobster at the centre of all the dark matter in the universe that controlled the galaxies like speakeasies and numbers rackets I ran on my home turf. I’ve been the cosmic criminal of an underground cartel. And then I’ve been shot down in the street by mistake like an innocent bystander under a truce of blood that covered my face like the flag of someone else’s country at halfmast. I’ve longed for a future with no regrets and a past that denies everything like a passport that can’t put a name to my face in a game of show and tell. I’ve put down roots of fire like a dragon in a well and learned to get along with the stars and fireflies and the penny wishes of harvest moons going down over the hills like somnambulists in a dream that’s as perennially true as a witness protection program.  And I’ve got teardrops running down my clown cheeks like the tatoos of a prison hitman who made his bones like a rogue constellation in an elephant graveyard that forgot the names of the dead. And I’ve been extradited from one holy land to the next like a Yemeni caravan of terrorist camels on the moon that carried their burden of proof for the existence of God back and forth like silkworm suicide vests to both extremes of the Perfume Trail. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. Everyman’s death diminisheth me. And the children and the women and the aunts and the uncles over and over and over and over and over and over again.

But this morning for a moment I’m free. The light has no history. The children have enough to eat. Corruption is a monostome that has to eat the shit that comes out of its own mouth and the landlords are sleeping homeless in the streets in winter over heating vents they can’t rent to anyone. The generals’ hearts are satisfied and the all the gains of war are ruined by singing and dancing. Pippa passes and God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. Seven come eleven. The dice are loaded on my side by the joy in my eyes that plays the long shot and wins. The phoenix the dove and the dragon are at peace in me. And even the crow is burning like silver on the shoulder of the moon. Tears are running down the cheeks of the mirrors who can’t stop laughing at what the Wizard of Was looks like naked to the Morgana la Fay of Now.

                Sometimes it’s good to get out of the flow by going over the edge of your mind like the single drop of a waterfall that’s as self-contained as the world it reflects like a secret identity of its own. But it’s better to be the nothing behind the mask that sees through it all. In a world where the wise are good losers and the fools are bad winners and the booksmart are placing sad bets on the politicians they’re running like another drugged horse in the race to lead the people by the nose into a victory wreath like a quarterhorse into a plough-horse’s yoke it’s good to be abundantly nothing without beginnings and ends. In a forgotten starfield somewhere down over the hill where the older constellations give names to the newborn fireflies. In a long look back at the future like a road you’ve already taken to a place that was run out of town like one too many destinations settling down like refugees with outlaw friends. It’s good to be left like boots out in the hall to your own resources and walk away from it all with wings on your heels without a flightplan to anywhere like an occult understanding of the night that isn’t blinded by a close-up of a star in its own light. It’s better to be the medium than it is to be the message. Hermes Trismegistus. The thrice-blessed. It’s better to leave the party like the happy ghost of a grateful guest that counts its blessings among the dead than overstay your welcome like a bad host at a needy séance. It’s better to be a demon with good spiritual manners that doesn’t insult the feast by not eating than it is to be an angel without an appetite that doesn’t know how to break bread with the devil. Or eat with a long spoon when there are strange letters without Rosetta Stones in the alphabet soup of a liar. And flies in the Holy Grail of an anointed oilwell that greens the kingdom with corporate cash like Frankish kings at the cathedral of Reims who sold Joan of Arc to the English. When you’re in hell among the chaopolitans of cosmic Rome it’s good not to act like a rural homesick hick from Eden with an accent as thick as an Adam’s apple. When in hell do as the damned do and start a church of your own. From little acorns great oak trees grow like bones. From a single grave. Gothic cathedrals of stone.

            As for me and my house to borrow a title from Sinclair Ross. I’m so happy this morning that I’m as lost and alone as water everywhere. That the sunlight streams through me like a broken window in an abandoned home no one’s died in for years. That I’m awake in a dream that sleepwalks like the high tide of a lunar ocean over the watershed of my tears without its feet touching bottom. Without thorns in its paws. Without the cause and effect of the scars and the wounds that war in the womb like an unholy crusade over who did what to whom first and will born guiltier than the other for it. It may have been the moon’s bird, the crow, superstitious as silver, that taught humans how to bury their dead deep inside themselves as if they were a murderer like Cain whose gift was not acceptable to God, but it was a morning dove in the white-gold sunlight, free as this joy that doesn’t care if I’m worthy of it or not, breathing itself into life like pure oxygen just for the love of it, that taught them to dig them up again. Like old loveletters slipped under the open doors of deathrow like the slim hope of a second chance that didn’t come too late or in vain.

 

PATRICK WHITE  

STARMUD AND MOONWATER NINE

STARMUD AND MOONWATER NINE

 

              The moment you say you hate your life you make an object of it. Something outside yourself. You reify it. You make it a thing. It’s the same when you say you love it. You make it an enemy or friend. Either way you’re on the receiving end of something else’s powers. But life isn’t something from the outside that happens to you like a rock through a window or a fifty dollar bill at your feet. That happening is you. Life is you and you are the whole of life out to the furthest star you’ve ever wished you were someone else upon. It’s like trying to take the light out of the water when the sun is shining. It’s like trying to separate the moon’s reflection from the lake. It’s like trying to separate the sea from its weather or space from time. Or a thought from a mind. If your life happens to a self as you assume it does then does the seeing happen to your eyes, the hearing to your ears, the tasting to your tongue, the touching to your fingertips? Does the saying happen to your voice? Show me an outside that isn’t experienced within. That is always This. Mind is the habitable environment in which you exist. To the fish its water. To the bird its sky. You can tell there’s life in the water. That water lives. Life in the sky. That the sky’s alive. By the way they swim and fly. It’s the same with you and the world. You and everything. Phenomena are noumena. The container is the content of the mind. The cup is the wine. Because you can’t pour the universe out of the universe or into it. Everything’s as full as it is empty all the time. Tat tvam asi. You are that. So what’s to accept or resist? You can open your hand or you can make a fist for or against yourself but it’s still the sound of one hand clapping in either case. You’re a wave out of water. You’re a mirage trying to overcome the delusion of being lost in a desert. You’re an abyss that’s sick of being empty. That bitches at This like a game of snakes and ladders in the apple tree of knowledge as you try to climb up out of the snakepit on an umbilical cord to heaven where you hang like a worm waiting for butterfly wings and rockers that are patched by angels. You love the lightning when it flowers with celestial powers but you still don’t know that the lightning is rooted in you. You don’t know how to sit beside your own mindstream until the wild irises have forgotten your name and not even your own reflection can tell the difference between the two of you when you’re not. That’s like saying it’s all one then working hard to make it so as if it weren’t. Or holding up placards like flowers for the reform of perfection. You’re trying to be clear and pure enough in your translucently stainless way to be happy but what’s pure about purity is that it doesn’t make the distinction. Its That never foul- mouths This by reeking of perfection in an abbatoir. The star doesn’t need to chase after its own light to see the way things are. The wound doesn’t go looking for a scar that heals

or turn one down because it doesn’t feel right.

              You tell me you’ve lost yourself. But that’s like saying the wind lost its way through the atmosphere or space got so lost in time it’s never going to find a way out of itself. You’re looking for yourself in the lost and found of your own mind. Your lighthouse with your lighthouse. Your firefly with your firefly. Your flashlight with your flashlight. The return address of your way home from inside your own windows and doors. The night doesn’t go looking for a north star to align itself with the darkness. The night encompasses everything without direction. That’s why the stars always know the time without consulting a calendar or clock. First light in this last hour of Is born of what it dies from without beginning or end.

              But if you really want to know where it’s at. Stop chasing blossoms for their sweet promises of fruit and get back down to the roots.  Forget these words as soon as you’ve heard them, like seeds in the fall, and see for yourself. You are not broken or flawed or lost because there are no weeds to be cast out in the garden of your own human divinity like a god with starmud on his gumboots who gives his name to the flowers, his name to the stars as if they were all his children. As they are. All yours before the arising of signs when there was no one there to claim or shame or blame them for being someone else.

 

PATRICK WHITE

             

 

             

DISAFFECTED

DISAFFECTED

 

Disaffected with what I am most passionate about.

Sick of observing the collaborative subtleties

between a curse and a blessing

as if they were two fangs of the same snake.

You may feel you’re the same person at night

as you were in the morning

but it all depends on how space bends the light

whether you’re the answer to a dream

or just another good guess at what you might have been.

Couldn’t care less whether you consider me

a winner or a loser.

The only difference I can see

is that the winners do their crying out loud in crowds

and the losers weep alone at home.

There’s nothing you can’t achieve

in front of a microphone

and there are fruits of minor talents

all over the ground

like a windfall of knowledge

on how to spoonfeed their highchair audience

apple sauce

to prove it.

Like a star in the darkness

before the arising of signs

I like to keep two steps ahead of my shining

because the only place I ever felt at home

around a fire of my own in the night

was the profound thoughtlessness

of my unambitious genius

looking into the flames

like the first draft of the best book ever published.

My zodiac hasn’t been re-zoned for residential housing

since I burnt down the neighbourhood

to improve the view of what’s beyond

my event horizon

when I’m not home.

Mama may have.

And Papa may have.

But God bless the child that’s got its own.

My idea of living the life of the mind

is not a cannibal poet

serving up skullbowls of brain

that tastes like someone else’s insight.

Better to walk in the dark than in a false light.

Better to sit still and know than raise your voice

as if you were raised like a boor

who didn’t know enough

to take your mouth off at the door

when you enter into a covenant with silence

by walking on words

like a fisher of men

who takes one look at their souls

and throws them back in.

 

PATRICK WHITE