FOR EVERYONE IN PERTH UNDER TWENTY-FIVE WITH A FEW SPECIFIC EXCEPTIONS

FOR EVERYONE IN PERTH UNDER TWENTY-FIVE

WITH A FEW SPECIFIC EXCEPTIONS

Crazy children, willful as broken glass,

Your hearts, at best, burning arks

Of extinct animals; at worst, bad meat

Down a fresh water well: where are you going

Under so many true norths? You stumble

Like drunks off your own living roads

Into the stagnant ditches of your reeking delusions.

Perhaps I should be kind, talc your mental diapers,

Change the dressing on your festering emotions,

Abide the radiant honey your orchard hour

Pours over the dog-shit to convince yourselves

There’s a better, holier world than this

You can find no branch in, living or dead,

To perch and rest your failing wings.

Spare me the apology for your hourglass apples;

I expect more of you than most of you can bear.

Learn to fly the dragon in your own abyss;

The furious intensification of your own vital bliss.

Let the mud settle in the rain mirror.

Stop judging. In all directions from the center

Of the mind-star, it’s nothing but you,

Time, space and the dead ant on the black rose.

Is the left less than the right, the dark not

Mother of the light? Not good, not bad, not two,

How cool can you be in a used straitjacket

Even if you embroidered it yourself

And call it a pillowcase? Wake up

From the dream of your vicious isolation,

Your chronic lack of a world. What’s this

That hangs from the tip of your nose

Like the bag of dew that holds the whole of the sky

And the whole of the moon at the end

Of a hunting heron’s beak? You are

Creation; you are destruction; for you

In the time of yourself, the white stars

Array themselves as the climbing constellation

Of the wild clematis; the moon lays down

A ladder up and dead seas are sexed with fish.

Stop pretending your life is not you in all

The terrible blessings and doomed verses

Of yourself; in every event and detail, you

Meeting you, turning the pages of yourself.

All the pages, one book; all the waves, one

Emptiness, one sea; all the petals opening,

One flower; you, thirst and wine, bread

And hunger swallowing the galaxies like space.

When will you ever live up to yourself

If not for now? One night

You will drag death over you like a landscape

And blow the stars out like funeral candles

And enter the dark ageless depths of yourself.

Why not now, while this luminous body perceives

Infinite eyes blooming in the sky-fields

Of your radiant blood? Why not die now

To the lie that’s been devouring you like a serpent

Swallowing a bird’s egg long before you were born?

Show me your sky-face; show me your star-face.

Why cramp your wings inside a skull?

Get out and see how vast the sky is, you are.

The other side is this side. You can’t get from there

To here by hobbling around like a bridge on crutches

Trying to leap the mind-stream. You can’t even get

From here to here, shaking your feathers in a shell;

Even the wind, even the freedom of flight,

Until it’s released, an embryo of seeing,

Is a farce of phantoms painting dream-veils,

Not the star-bread and night-wine of real being.

How can you miss it; the truth is written

On the inside of your eyelids like a hand print

On an ancient cave wall. Not hidden or subtle

In its openness, beyond dusk and dawn,

Though the morning dove is swept by the wind

From its spring willow, and the gravedigger

Sings while he buries the bones of the sun,

Heaven, a ghetto of sinners, hell, the fire of saints,

Beyond acceptance and rejection, not two,

The whole of the unattainable truth in all

Its flawless perfection is everywhere and always

Only you, not so much as the moon on water apart

Or the waves of fire that play your cold auroral heart

Beyond this madman’s silence or that raving sage’s art.

PATRICK WHITE