DISAFFECTED DISENCHANTED DEPRESSED
Disaffected disenchanted depressed.
Toxic insight into the nature of what’s worse
than the way things really are among humans
for thousands and thousands and thousands of years
when you look behind the scenes
of the morality plays that pass for the truth.
It’s all true
or nothing is.
Keep trying to write my way out of this
like an emergency exit at the end
of a long hall of mirrors
that are sick of looking like me.
Trying to remember what I meant
fifty years ago when I devoted myself
to this excruciating discipline of vacating myself
to be whatever I was called upon to be
to live a life of poetry
from the inside out
as if it had nothing to do with me.
Bright vacancy.
Dark abundance.
The ferocity of my childhood
prepared me for the nightside of the street
and I learned to see in the dark
what there was to be afraid of
and long before rapture
it was terror that enhanced my awareness.
The gods eat their children.
Injustice wills what shills for the divine.
Tolerance is a defense mechanism for the sublime.
The people are krill.
The people are the algae of the sea.
The people are thermophilic bacteria
seven kilometers down in a diamond mine.
The people are the voodoo dolls of the rich.
The rich stick pins in the eyes of the poor
until they’re blind enough
to convince the people they’re stars.
Can’t go on like this.
Coming apart like a oilspill.
Haemmoraging like an eclipse
gored on the horn of the moon.
Mithras Tauroctonus.
Maybe I’ll bleed wheat yet.
Fat chance.
They’ve got asylums for those into self-sacrifice
where the serial killers act like spiders
charged with the care of the butterflies.
And right next to the eternal flame
there’s the eternal mouth
trying to explain all this blood
that keeps flowing from the same old watershed
like one long last eloquent sentence of the dead
that runs on like a periodic incommensurable
without a point.
It’s a forgone conclusion
that the future is already a thief.
And somebody’s thrown bad meat down the well of the present
like the moral tone of a hypocrite
preaching to the furious ones
how to hate their neighbour
and blame it on love.
Got to find a hole in the ice.
Come up for air.
Break through to the other side of the mirror
and hope there’s no one standing there with a spear.
Not all the cosmic views are beautiful and radiant.
There are blackhole insights that are so universally devastating
the third eye is all pupil and no iris
and everything you see is as dark and indelible
as cannibals saying grace over what they’re eating.
Even the dragons have nightmares in this darkness
and the sharks that are circling like sundials
are afraid to go to sleep.
I stare into it with three hundred million year old reptilian eyes
because that’s what poets do.
They go down on the Medusa without turning into stone.
They break themselves like twigs and trails
and cracks in the planet
when the wilderness gets lost in them
to say they were here once
where you’re standing now
alone with the Alone
like an alien
lightyears from home
and ever since it’s been habitable.
Better to look into the darkness like a pioneer
than an exile.
The stars don’t drive their light out into the night
deprived of a door a window and a threshold
to survive on shadows among the homeless.
Even from the bottom of a deep well
you can see the stars in daylight.
Embrace the night
and the creatures of darkness
even when your eyes shatter like glass
and you can’t see your features in anything you’re looking at.
There’s more than just the Big Bang
and Steady State theories of the universe.
The first is actively mad
and the latter passively depressed.
But you can take a tantric point of view
and combine the two
into a crazy kind of wisdom.
You could see how the light
depends upon you for its seeing
and that you’re the original insight
that embodies it in being.
That the clear light of the void is eyeless
and illuminates nothing
until you open yours
to lavish the night with stars
and be the place they’re going
as they look back at you
ahead of their future
waiting for you to put a face to their knowing.
Life is a perennial insight into a temporary mystery
that looks through
our extraordinary eyes
to see what’s unattainable about us.
Listen to the universe as if it were speaking to you in your own voice.
Look and see.
Listen and hear.
You don’t need to polish the mirror
to make the darkness brighter.
A crow is a crow
not a dove in hiding.
You don’t need to denounce one
to reveal the other.
They’re not opposites.
They’re twins.
Like creation and apocalypse.
They’re simulacra.
And the valley of the shadow of death
is the exact likeness of the holy mountain
that casts it like a deathmask over a mirror
to remember its own reflection.
If you’re looking at stars with tears in your eyes
maybe that’s the only way
you can teach fire how to swim.
If you’re drowning like a nightsea in your own weather
maybe that’s just the way
you feather your waves like birds
and teach water how to fly.
If the stormclouds have left you starless
and your luck plays dice with your knees
and the cure is begging favours from the disease
maybe the dark waves all around you
pulling Icarus who flew too close to the sun
by his winged heels
down
are just water’s way of teaching you to walk on water like the moon
by lighting it up
and blowing it out like a lamp
a firefly
a star
a mirror
a mind.
Appearances are not the illigitimate children of reality.
A blackhole falls on its own light like a sword.
But one’s not a hero.
And the other’s not a suicide.
Maybe they’re just the pupils in the eyes of space
sacred wounds
keyholes in time
trying to see for themselves
what things look like on the other side.
Maybe there are times when the black mirror is brighter than the white
and infinitely deeper than a star in the night
that can only take it back so far
into the darkness that gave birth to it
before it runs out of light.
Maybe this depression is nothing
but the crone-mask of the dark mother
she puts on like the moon
when she’s sick of her webs and her veils
and giving birth to lifeboats
that don’t know when to lower their sails.
