SOME PEOPLE GO LOOKING FOR HAPPINESS

SOME PEOPLE GO LOOKING FOR HAPPINESS

Some people go looking for happiness.

Some prefer power or beauty wealth and fame.

Some crave intensity.

Some seek peace.

Some search for food and shelter.

Some want to die with a good name.

Everybody takes their lead from the way they came.

And everyone says they’re looking for love

though no one knows what it looks like.

They try to fit their thoughts to their words

like skin they can touch

that doesn’t scar like the moon

or shed like a petal too delicate for the senses

but most just end up trying

to mummify the mindstream

by laying thousands of years of starmaps

down on troubled waters

like autumn leaves

that don’t know where they’re going.

Eventually everything’s swept away

in the undertow of a dark ocean

that only smells sweet from a distance.

And longing shifts like infra-red into the blackness.

And bones on the moon are the only signs

that life once perished here.

Orphic skulls whose jaws dropped

like gates before their own gaping prophecies.

Time flows like a non-existent future into us

and it fills us with a hunger

for everything we’ve lost

or feel somehow was always missing.

One of the cardinal features of the emptiness

we are conceived again and again out of

is there’s nothing behind its face

you can fix like an identity to space.

For fourteen billion years

the universe has been nothing

but one long beginning without end

making everything up as it goes along

out of nothing

like a man whistling down a long road

far from home

late at night

to let anything that might be listening in the darkness

know he’s there

so nothing can take him by surprise.

And every step he takes

he steps across a threshold like a star

just coming into being

whose light goes off in all directions

looking for blind water it can turn into eyes.

Bosons hadrons leptons neutrinos wimps and quarks

the deeper you look into the matter

the more you realize

out to the furthest galaxy and beyond

seeing is being

and being is all fireflies.

And every one of them

is true north of nowhere.

Some people follow their own beginnings

like laws into the future

hoping to become someone else

that doesn’t recognize them anymore

for who they were.

The peduncle’s lost in the ensuing phylum.

Their future’s rich

but their past is always poor.

The planet doesn’t spin on its axis for them.

It’s hinged like a door

that only opens one way

though it’s a two-faced god

that begins them like last year.

But the leaves of autumn

aren’t the laundered money of spring

because if our fulfilment

weren’t already behind us

we wouldn’t be here

trying to true the last to the first

of an unfinished multiverse

like the best to the worst

as if red were the past of blue.

Stop thinking birth is the past of death

or spring is the future of winter

as if they weren’t the same breath

and one breath of life weren’t enough

to keep the fireflies glowing in your ashes for eternity

and everywhere you look

you will flower like a vine

that divines its way to the wine

by ripening the grapes of gratitude.

You will understand

for all that you have grasped

and brought to fruition

your most exalted aspiration

is a heap of dead branches in the spring

burning like leaves of fire

still reaching out for the sun

and you will hear the mind-mirror whisper to itself

like the wind on far off waters

Narcissus is drowning in his own reflection

like the flashback of a life he left unlived

but everything is immersed in me

like a mind

like a sea in a fish that ran aground

on the uncharted landfalls of its own teaching.

And the wine will flower in your mouth like a grail

that’s given up preaching

and finally found its own voice

like a bird returning to a tree at nightfall

to call out in its solitude

to the stars as they appear

we are here we are here we are here

where we belong

at peace with everything we’re missing

everything we long for

everything we are and are becoming

that overtakes us like music from within

transforming the silence into song

the water into wine

small beings into a big space

looking into the passing face

of everything’s that’s mortal about us

with our eyes fixed upon the divine

not to see it in any one place

but with the presence of mind

to be wholly and impurely not that not this

without anywhere a trace of ultimacy

in this world that we take for a sign

we are here we are here we are here

and things are as they are

not as they must be.

Nothing got here legally.

What’s the expanding universe

if not a refugee in its own country

somehow exiled from itself for reasons

only it can express?

Citizen Universe

show me your papers

your paintings your poems

show me how you dance on your own

show me how you put your children to sleep

show me how you bar an F chord

show me what you weep for

what you delight in

what you esteem

what you despise

what you ignore

what darkness of yours

feeds that inferno of stars above you

burning its constellations like passports

that aren’t going anywhere

show me the black mirror

that says you don’t belong here

like some misplaced night of the full moon

not marked on any calendar

show me the law of being human

that says this little piggy has one

and this little piggy has none

show me where it’s written

the guest shall turn strangers away

from his host’s generosity

like a dog at the door

that bares its teeth at the table

show me the home-made honey

of your wisdom

show me the dead lamps

of the apocalyptic fireflies

that designed your chaotic cosmology

by plagiarizing the light

to prove the stars

don’t reserve

a space in the universe

for any insight of yours.

Nothing got here legally.

No one followed a coyote or a law

to cross the border

into this insurgency of being

no one checked the colour of your eyes

or profiled the light

to see if they were fit for seeing.

You don’t need a constitution

to verify your liberty.

Well before you were born

you were free and ever shall be

to belong here as we all do

to pursue what makes us

sad mad bad or happy

the way we all got here

the way we all get through

the way we’re all alone here together

with one another as we are with you

as we are with her and him and me

as we are with everything

as we are with ourselves

when we don’t know who we’re becoming

when we don’t know the stranger on the bridge

watching the water flow

that’s waiting to greet us on the other side

in the only way the unblighted heart of reality

we’re all looking for

like blood on a grail-quest for our humanity

accepts the darkness that seeks us out

like a miraculous elixir of insight

so the kingdom won’t fail

so the garden doesn’t ask us

for a green card to know and grow

in the only way we truly belong here

in the only way we know how to be

so the lifeboat we’re all in

like the same boundless mind

is always as full

as it is empty

so no one gets left out at sea

like a wave that couldn’t be saved

and no one gets in

who doesn’t know how to swim

the way we all got here

and continue to be

all these thresholds of the sea

that steps across us

even as we move like waves

breaking discipline with our own continuum

creatively.

Just to be here.

Just to crawl up on the shore of a new medium

like a refugee planting flowers

we brought from home

hoping we’ll still be here

to watch them bloom.

PATRICK WHITE