WHEN IMAGINATION AND REALITY ARE ONE

WHEN IMAGINATION AND REALITY ARE ONE

When imagination and reality are one

and there’s no recourse for civilization

to distinguish between them by usage and consensus,

and the light of the stars isn’t condemned

to a life of hard labour as a torch in a coal mine

looking for diamonds you can drink by the grailful

until you’re as satiate as oblivion, there’s no doubt

the mind is an artist riffing on the new strings of the rain

or painting it in picture-music like a poet or a scientist

who look deranged to those who’ve averaged out

the crucials of the mindscape like the odds of a lottery,

convinced as they are like pilgrims walking

from one end of their sacred asphalt driveways

to the other, that one size fits all, and that these

enlightened journeys without destinations

are just circles that haven’t been squared yet.

But if you’re off on your own,

making roads with your walking you’re the first

to set foot on like the moon of a spaced-out planet

you’re trying to turn into something habitable,

remember it’s an act of compassion not to lock the door

to the available dimensions of the future when you leave.

Remember that all six of your senses

live in the world you creatively visualize

like the aura of the life that surrounds you

like an ongoing masterpiece of incompletion.

Without them you might be a master of making trees,

but, hey, man, where are the birds?

I don’t hear anything singing.

There’s nothing to taste or touch or listen to.

No appearances to deceive your consciousness with.

When your eye’s got an idea of the kind of star

it wants to be, before it’s learned to see, it never shines.

Wondering what flora to root where in the expanding abyss

of the night before you, scatter the stars across the firmament

as if you were sowing the unknown seeds of the wildflowers

that scuttled themselves like arks

in the cracked creekbeds of your neocortical starmud

and waited patiently like hibernating frogs

for the conditioned chaos of the rain

to come like a flashflood of life-nourishing insight.

And when you’re annihilated

by the mystic terror of your own freedom

jimmying with the G-spot on your prison locks

to get them to open up like a coven of doves

that want to release their omens like feathers on the wind

that can scry and fly where they want,

don’t linger in the doorway of your liberation.

Hesitation is the flypaper of light.

Stare straight into the eyes of the Medusa

until she’s the one that blinks first in the savage snake pit

and the stone bird of your heart thaws like a volcano

potting islands in the draconian heat of its bloodstream

and the Gorgons start dancing to the music of their classical hair-dos

as if they could hear the wavelengths

of a pan flute lapping nearby like water.

Kiss the serpent fire on the head

if you want to honour the shapeshifter

that sets your dark energy free to assume the form

of the world that moults the chrysalis of your imagination

that reassembles the rubble of the last gasp

into a house of transformation that fits you

like a bubble of supple skin where you alone

are the myth and physics of its origination.

And whatever world provides you with the mindscape

of your exploration, you recognize by the style

it’s painted in as everywhere a work of your own

signed by the wind in the left hand bottom corner of the sky.

Hard to tell the wells from the fountains

in the mingling mindstream that flows like life lines

into the frayed deltas of your palm. And what madness

hasn’t always alloyed its backbone to the swords of the sane

defending their indigenous traditions of soft metal?

Don’t stare into your cauldron as if you were trying

to read the future by the lint in your belly-button.

Actualize your magic and stir the womb a bit like a master of departures

with an intuitive genius for unitive metaphors.

Mix the paint on the palette into necromantic shades

of new underworlds weeping jewels on the roots

of the fireflowers bearing forbidden fruits

they’ll carry by the armful with them out of the garden

like refugees running from an abandoned embassy

that used to give them shelter from themselves with impunity.

No limit. You can live in as many worlds as there are

grains of dust and pollen, where you’re not allergic

to the stars, and the constellations come like the empty baggage

of a book that hasn’t written a word to anyone,

nor appointed an alpha like the book end of a beginning

to balance the long vowel of omega at the other extreme

to let you know when it’s all been said, and it’s time

to lay the cornerstone of a myth of origin of your own,

a pebble in the random tide of providential events,

that doesn’t need more than one leg to stand on

like a heron hunting fish in the bestiaries of the moon

that’s finally given up its dead like a graveyard of Orphic skulls.

Imagine your way like smoke through the eye of a keyhole

into spaces you create by your very being there

to summon them from the abyss, a carillon of dragons

on a holy day of reptiles when the lowest are blessed with wings,

or wall yourself into an aesthetically sealed garden

where the rain perennially washes the blood of the children

who finger-painted the flowers on your thin skin off,

and luxuriate in your fastidious appetite for insignificant details.

Mind is an artist. Able to paint the worlds as a sin of omission,

a sum of destructions, or the negative space of a hand

breaching stone with a spiritual tattoo on its palm,

indelibly invisible as nothing for whom nothing is out of reach.

Make heaven. Make hell. Who you are is where you live.

Nest in a bell like a bird under the roof of your mouth

or root like lightning in a cloud you left unweeded.

Out of the random ignitions and annihilations of dark matter

bombarding your senses like anti-photonic fireflies

emerges a world of shadows into the light

of your imagination like the rising of a new moon

engendered out of you restoring yourself to it

like a lost atmosphere that got carried away by wings.

You can say things into existence word by word

or you can talk them to death in the silence

that follows the ghost of ideas like darkness follows us.

Or you can let the night bird deep

in the solitude of your heart sing

your fervent yearning for a companionable world

into being sweeter than the immensity of your creative freedom

to long for it as if what were missing

would always seem somehow more real than what was not.

PATRICK WHITE