IF YOU'RE BRAVER THAN I AM

IF YOU’RE BRAVER THAN I AM

 

If you’re braver than I am

it’s only because you’re more desparate you said

and I broke down laughing in tears

as you were tripping on mushrooms

and I was starting to peak on acid.

Why should you love me at all you asked

and I said I like to take subjective risks

and I can still light up at the smile you gave me

because you thought I thought you were dangerous.

Have you stayed dangerous over the years?

Did you ever find enlightenment?

Or have all those Doors of Perception we stepped through

way back then to expand our cosmic conciousness

by crossing all our thresholds

and dotting all our taboos

closed like space behind you?

Have you made your return address a point of view

you can live with

and turned those beautiful Hispanic eyes

into late night windows

that don’t see anything that ever goes down in the neighbourhood?

Is your seeing still ambidextrous

or have you shut your eyes to the world

so they’re more wall than window

and there’s only one way of looking in?

Sometimes I think that night I dropped acid with you

on China Beach under the stars

estranged by the flames and shadows and smoke

of a cedar fire eager to burn its first heretic

I got so high I’ve never come down

and though forty years have passed

I’m still nineteen back there somewhere with you.

Even my mother used to say in frustration

when she couldn’t win the argument

that I had a way of turning things upside-down.

That may well be so

but I’d still rather be an oxymoron

that can see all sides of things at once

like a multi-faceted jewel turning in the light

in front of a mirror

that doesn’t know which one of its infinite profiles to choose

and doesn’t

than suffer the Great Reversal of the Hourglass

and end up walking on my head

and thinking with my feet

just so everybody would think I was normal.

I’m still nineteen back there somewhere with you

and the fire we lit that night

like something ephemeral

among so much that was eternal

keeps flaring up in me like a phoenix that’s never gone out.

Clarity doesn’t turn a lie into the truth.

And enlightenment might be so blissed out

it celebrates its own ignorance

because everything is perfect just as it is

but I still think there’s more sincerity in the search

than there is in the finding.

I still think life is a mystery that surpasses its own wonder.

I still think every moment contains the whole of space

without beginning or end

like a water droplet contains the whole of the sea.

I still think that whenever people touch one another gently

they leave their fingerprints on the window

like constellations on the sky

that prove our identities are as indelible as light.

I still think there’s something more alluringly mystical about action

than there is in the undynamic peace of contemplation.

But the best is to make love as we did that night

as a tantric mode of creative annihilation

that showed the drugs we were on

like flying carpets

what it was like for once

to get so euphorically high on us

the next time they saw us coming

they’d just say yes.

 

PATRICK WHITE