YOU WHO CAN FEEL

YOU WHO CAN FEEL

You who can feel the unborn future in your veins

giving breath to the dead.

You buried in the hollow-cheeked mirrors

of your prophetic skulls

that keep you like a secret to themselves.

You who risk disclosure

of the intimate details

of your ruinous solitude

and live under the whip of your self-discipline

and never cry out like a wounded rose in the night

to reveal the pain you’re enduring

just to feel you’re alive somehow

in a way that’s hard to imagine.

Listen.

Merlin’s at the window again

and the wind and the leaves are stirring

and there’s a panicked madness in the air

as if someone just took a bite

out of the psychotic apple of the hawthorn

like the last chance to cure themselves of hydroponic rabies

like the coincidence of the contradictories

in a madman’s view of reality

as the black magic of quantum mechanical physics.

The cauldrons might vary in shape and size

from mighty amphorae on the bottom of the sea

who are as faithful as clay to the wine within

to the slim syringes that come unravelled

like little red ribbons of birthday blood.

But the fire and the vision remain the same

like lightning and rain above the graveyard willows.

The starless starless rain

and all those eyes it’s never going to open

like the loveletters of the irreconcilably estranged

to the deranged modalities of the legendary shapeshifter

that moves like the oviparous thought waves

of a sacred viper in a desert of stars

as if it were music to their hearts and minds and ears.

Starless eyes

black as shark

and all these bleak flowerless tears

running down the glass cheeks of the windowpane

reflected in the storefront glory of the rain

behind the veils and chandeliers of toxic jellyfish

hanging like the head of Medusa

in the place of the dreamcatcher

that committed suicide

when it got caught lying to itself

about what it saw when the lights went out.

You who have chewed through your umbilical cords

to free yourselves of the trapline

by giving up a little to get away with a lot

I commend you on the severity of your enlightenment

and the alacrity of the shortcut you took

to come to this feast of clowns

so ill-prepared to break bread with you.

O dark presence at the gateless gate

I ask you to unhinge convention

and spare the innocent

your lack of discrimination.

I see the rags of the defeated

flying at half mast to remember

the ghosts of their surrender

the day the names of their gods died

in the mouths of refugee children

who’ve only known vipers of white phosphorus

not manna from heaven

to fall upon them in their exile

like word from above

in lieu of a myth of origin

that would take them in as one of their own.

Merlin’s at the window again

drawing kingly thoughts like metaphoric swords

out of the meteoritic damage

he did upon impact to his brain

just to get a few protein molecules started here

like Frankensteinian knights of the round table

seated like signs of the zodiac

in exoskeletons of Jurassic armour.

Comes a time to trade your scales in for feathers

and plume the serpent like Quetzalcoatl

and promising to return one sunny doomsday

like a comet to a prophetic s.o.s.

get away

just get away

as fast as you can

anywhere you don’t have to receive

what people are willing to sacrifice

just to keep their lurid imagination

of who you are supposed to be appeased.

Leave them on their knees

in front of the corpses of their servile children

who played musical chairs around the altar

of the pointless martyrdom

of their parents’ worst fears

just to see who got pride of place

at their own execution.

Leave with tears in your eyes

like these windows if you must

leave like a kite someone let go of

leave like a bird before the snow.

Seek a space for yourself

that nobody knows of

in a nondescript constellation of black holes

with no appetite for the light

or the configurations on a starmap

that takes a mutant’s view

of the wingspan of your shining.

Merlin’s at the window again

under the cloud cover of his own unknowing

trying to divine those fireflies of insight

that set the lightning off like blasting caps

in the beaver dams around here

that keep the waterclocks from flowing on time

like the valves of a heart

without a lockmaster

to elevate the mindstream

with commonsensical winches and gates

into the creative mystery of the salmon pools

of crazy wisdom.

On the half-burnt pyres of the maple groves

smouldering in their own immolations

like bodhisattvic protests

to the Chinese occupation of tantric Tibet

fire eats the flesh and heartwood of the tree

like the rainbow bodies of enlightened rinpoches

but leaves the bones

like relics of the true cross

to a sky burial with lots of homeless birds.

O there are measures of madness

that are more spatial than lunar

that cast a wider net than moonlighting fishermen

to draw the stars up out of the depths

of their own darkness

where they’re blind to their own shining

because life like death and time

is a carrying on and a ferrying forth

like a radiance without eyes

into the void we come from

like lightning and rain

like fire and water

like insight and compassion

like apple bloom and ripened fruit

that can bring tears to a windowpane

that taste like sad elixirs

welling up in the eyes of an inscrutable magician

that knows it will be light years

of visionary wandering in the heart of the storm

before anyone realizes

the flash of the lightning in the eyes of the rain

dispels the shadows in a world of forms

that tempt us to back track on ourselves

as if retrogression in a decaying orbit

were some kind of planetary advance.

You there with your insect night vision

green as the seeing of a praying mantis

and you who wash your hair in fire

and you with your gasoline breath

and matchstick mouth

and you with the ion eyes

who stare blankly into the darkness

like a hole in the ozone

and you with the mailbox heart

shaped like a wholesome loaf of homemade bread

that eats its fill and makes you feel so empty.

Don’t let other people put words in your mouth

like bills and loveletters and junkmail placed

like sainted syllables and sacred wafers on your tongue

that say paradise is only a suitcase away.

Perdition is the human condition

that sent a death threat to itself

with the return address of a suicide note.

Symbols mutate into the tragic farce

of an unsalvageable religion

that took its lighthouse of a legend

way too seriously not

to be blinded by its own blazing

or listen to the warning bells go off

even as it ran up on its own Rock of Ages

fighting with the Taliban in the wheelhouse

about whose hand should be on the rudder of the ship of state

like another maggot who sticks his head

up out of the corpus delecti like a microphone

to announce he’s running as the butterfly candidate

to stand up for the rights of the corporations to be people.

Kneel down to this

and they’ll stick their steeple up your ass.

PATRICK WHITE