THE CHAOS OF MY UNRAVELLING SELF

THE CHAOS OF MY UNRAVELLING SELF

The chaos of my unravelling self, a snake pit

of dissonant wavelengths that yesterday the moon

wove into a flying carpet, and then undid again.

Or maybe I jumped. I don’t recall.

Knowing isn’t the same thing

as making sense of it all

as if you were rewiring a zodiac.

Sometimes it’s wiser to know

a lot more about what you don’t

than it is the little that you do.

More room for the stars.

The mystery doesn’t feel so cramped.

If you’re a river you’ve got no choice

but to trust the way things fall out

and when’s the last time you heard a fire

asking for a starmap? A garden

might be a menu but most of the earth

bears what it will, and the clouds

don’t ask the wind for directions.

Everything in existence is either

the will of a star or the whim of a flower.

Longing or enlightenment the same,

two sides of the same windowpane,

one floods the room with moonlight

and the other looks out in silence at it.

A good night is when you throw the moon through it.

No more distinction between outside and in.

The aviary sings differently when there’s no cage

or your voice leaves the door open

for the birds to come and go.

Same with words, thoughts, emotions.

These are the waves of an oceanic universe

responding to its own weather.

Halcyon, the stars in its eyes,

or a holocaust of nautical widows

frozen in time like upstairs windows.

Whatever it is, God, light, life, love,

shape it how you will out of bone or obsidian,

out of the transparent medium of your spirit,

out of the tusks of the telescopes you’re poaching,

and cherish what you need to believe

like a child of your own, if you want

your family around you when you die,

but if there’s more rogue in you than rabbi,

more salmon going against the flow of the bowl

than there are goldfish, set out alone

into the waywardness of your solitude

without making an art or discipline of the abyss

by apprenticing it to your emptiness as if

you’d finally found something to belong to

that inconceivably exists, the shadow of nothing.

Be the prince that paupered his humanity

without really knowing what that was

until he walked out on himself one day,

and said enough of that. Sick of staying

within the lines, or breaking crayons

filling in the emotions of a chameleonic colouring book.

Understanding is simultaneous with living,

if you’re quick enough, and if you’re not

insight still travels faster than the speed of enlightenment

because it travels as light headed as you do.

Old Zen walnut. Seek it, it runs. Run from it,

it follows. Better to walk with it like a wolf

or a star peering through the crowns of the trees.

Live politely estranged from the curiosity that wonders

who you might remotely be. If it suits you.

If it’s a kingdom you don’t need to rule over,

acres of homelessness with a burnt out fireplace

left standing like some blackened fieldstone shrine

the birds still build their nests in like a larynx

in the throat of the wind that can sing, but can’t write.

I never wanted to live like the book of total knowledge,

volume L. Knowledge has always seemed

more of a shovel to me than a door. You can

dig a garden and bury a corpse with the same tool.

Such is the paranoia of human ingenuity

we go to war with ploughshares in the defence of swords.

The painted asses of infuriated clowns.

Underground radio broadcasts of insincere love codes.

When you’re the way, what else can anyone offer you?

But don’t belittle yourself by mistaking it for madness.

PATRICK WHITE