THE GREY RAIN RIFFS ON THE WINDOWS

THE GREY RAIN RIFFS ON THE WINDOWS

The grey rain riffs on the windows

as if it’s been listening to too much rap.

Fragrance of gasoline blooming in the gutters.

People all look like daffodils in baseball caps.

Wish I wanted something enough to buy it again,

and it’s been a while since I’ve been with a woman

who wanted anything for me. I’m inside here

dethorning the intensity of the black rose

imploding under its own mass as its core

condenses in a withered star like a heart

whose light’s run out. The fire in my blood

took it all one nightshift further than red

and now I can see in the dark like a black hole.

Nightvisions in broad daylight. I can see the stars

shining through the smudged pearl of the sun

trying to glow its way through the clouds.

I can see the skulls of insurrectionist dreams

deep underground in the cults of my cells

trying to assess the direction of the bomb blast

to insure the maximum damage. Not all roads

are trying to make friends with people

who walk them like cowpaths littered with road kill.

It’s better to be lost as the lesser of two evils

when clarity scorches the heart radioactively.

Dissociation, Deconstruction, Disintegration,

I’ve evolved like a language into a grammar

of oxymorons just to keep my thoughts and feelings

together in a syntactical world of unpunctuated scalpels.

Alloys of a stronger metal are not estranged

like copper and tin from the cutting edge of the sword

by the colour of their skin or religion in the Bronze Age.

Love comes at me in the darkness of these depths

like a crossroads of light from all directions at once

by which I know the radiance that’s found me

is not just another flashlight that’s still looking.

And there are Sufis whirling like weathervanes

in blue woollen robes, and enlightened Zen masters

gently picking the fleas out of their chest hairs

and thanking the thieves for leaving the moon in the window,

and demonic demons with the insight of black diamonds

all telling me you lose control if you hesitate in the moment,

or stand up, sit down, walk, or run, but whatever you do

don’t wobble. And I plunge into the galaxy with both feet

hoping to make a big splash in the red tide of the stars

and I either drown in the light, or I end up

blowing hyperbolic bubbles into a bulky multiverse.

I haven’t turned my senses into lenses,

starmaps, and spectrographs, but I’m not blind

to what’s living under my eyelids in a chaos

of crazy-wisdom playing picture-music

in a band of clowns, just to get a good laugh

out the oracles that are prone to never

take their own advice so seriously

they couldn’t change their minds.

You can’t refit a round suggestion

into a square meaning, and it’ cruel to try.

I have long wavelengths of thought

that burn like iodine and salt in sea kelp

but I don’t whip the eyes of the tide

just to get things flowing like tears my way.

I don’t throw acid in the faces

of tomorrow’s beauty queens learning to read

the writing on the wall as just the wall’s way

of threatening you into letting it protect you.

I don’t boil kids in their mother’s milk

and I don’t practise the kind of spiritual judo

that uses a person’s best ideals against them.

Especially as I get older, I would rather be

obliterated by wonder and gratitude

that I got to be all this without any effort of my own

than have my awe underwhelmed

by petty renditions of the black farce

that welds some people’s eyes shut like

an eclipse stronger than the original bond.

But there again, if you’re happy being a scar, mend.

What could it mean to the stars

if you can’t see them during the day?

And I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again

to those of you who have taken a more radiant path,

blazing is a kind of blindness too

that keeps you from seeing the diamond in the coal.

Yesterday oxygen was alien ore as toxic

as the love apples of superstitious tomatoes

two hundred years ago it was death to eat.

And it’s poignant to remember that any ground

you plant your flag in like a flower without a root,

like a placard without a rally, is

a charged particle field that reverses spin

synchronistically like a revolution

in an hourglass relationship with what it overthrew.

Consciousness is necessarily bifurcated by its blossoms

into two points of view, but deeper down

in the bloodstream of its darkest roots

it doesn’t make a distinction between an I and a You.

Subject and object aren’t separated

by a skin of water empty as the mirage

of a bubble within and lustrous as the stone

that broke the window without. This world

isn’t happening to you from the outside

and you’re not making it up within like a lie

you can tell your children about being alive.

No one’s wholly wise who still possesses a mind.

No one’s totally ignorant if they give

a red cane to a blind traffic light to see it coming.

I don’t trim the wicks of my comets

as if they were candles at a black mass.

I can breathe fire like Draco at the North Pole,

but when I’m not axially aligned with the earth

I can look into the eyes of my fiercest dragons

and see at the bottom of a telescopic well

millions of fireflies lost in a labyrinth of mirrors

looking for an insight into the nature of life

that would true all the others like crystal eyes

caught in the eleven dimensional net

of enlightened lies where time and the timeless intersect

and synderetic sparks ricochet like spiritual eagles

off the slopes of mountainous eras of grace.

PATRICK WHITE