IT DOESN'T MATTER WHO I AM NOW

IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO I AM NOW

It doesn’t matter who I am now among these white dragons of energy

sleeping all around me like hills of snow, longing for a heart

that hasn’t been run through with a sword or fried

in the fires of its squandered passions. As I pass and passing is an art,

the silent art of learning to prefer death, alone

with the tongueless eloquence of a vast departure, as I pass

I keep a journal of faces in the windows of longing hung

with sidereal curtains

to elucidate the perfect isolation of my enlightened crimes.

I wrote myself off a cosmos ago; everything I do, a reflex of emptiness,

even the shining a cry of torment out of space, an unnamed wound,

a fountain-mouth that has sung itself away like the birds,

a leaf on articulated waters, an idiot moon that has sighed away its seas.

Within me, night; within me, mysteries I keep as pets

to amuse the children who come with their inquisitive eyes

and tortured dolls to learn if hope is the truest of fallacies. I read my own ashes,

some slapstick sage, embarrassed by their innocence

into an impromptu clarity, brick roses, embarrassed

to be anything at all. Out of the depths of my own inconsequence, the dark shale

of my awareness of life, the indecipherable chronicle of my life

that whispers strange fossils into the moment like curious doors

to the exhausted shrines of time, I laugh at myself as an antidote,

a mystical serum, as I teach the unteachable by arraying

the sacred fraudulence of my own unverified life.

I listen like the shadow of an assassin behind this eyeless translucence

for the sound of approaching footsteps, the groan of worn stairs,

the musical rain of keys, to startle the bones of their dragons

out of death, to cannibalize their lies and rob them of their radiant chains

in a sudden assault of light. I sell them forged passports to nowhere

to befriend their endless seeking like the wind

that erases their footprints home. I offer them everywhere

as a room for the night, my heart the stone beneath their head.

Sleep, gently, babies, in the arms of the dream

that covers your faraway hills like a summer sky freaked with legends.

I am the unworthy nothing that loves you best; the ghost of the grain

I break like bread and salt with stars

to entice you to the unsuspected windows of your own inner seeing.

Rogue dragons wake in the blood, root gods thaw

and send a shudder through the branch, spinal lightning

strikes the cold stone of the brain and the castle falls

that ruled forbidden fields. Are you afraid of your freedom, your exile

your ancient throne? Is the vastness too much, the solitude, the curse;

do you tremble before the armies of your own defeat, regretting the gods

and delusions you overcame to arrive at this moment

faced through tears by the mad messiah of suicide

who has come too late to witness your lonely redemption?

Are you snarled in the void by nets you cast for golden fish,

mesmerized by the points of emptiness that come

with pins in their mouths to trick you out in a wardrobe

of designer straightjackets, your heart, the rock that killed the bird,

your blood, an igneous delirium, drunk on the wine of razor-wire

consecrated by the grave in a ritual condemnation of a lonely prisoner

eating spiders in solitaire? Here

from the medicine bag of this black dwarf

prompted by dragons that elude you, I offer you

a way out, your own slave-price, a hole

more merciful than the knotted ankh of your noose, a road

beyond your walking, this jewel

from under a pauper’s tongue. The crow returns

to this ark of clowns, a continent in its beak. If you want to know

the clairvoyant insanity of the firefly that engendered this world

out of the void, compelled by a silence of light

in a beginning that never began and has never passed, now, still

the mother of itself; if you want to know that which creates and destroys you,

the uncreate which sustains you in the reeling fever

of all those strange emotions and hazardous thoughts

you call you and mistake for something, if you’re still secretly

looking for water in the mirror, your face a dead divining rod,

listen, though you don’t understand what I mean. Go.

The dragon dreams. Look under his eyelids. What does he dream?

If you want to live forever. If you’re alive enough to know.

PATRICK WHITE