LET GO OF MY MIND, LIKE A KITE, LIKE A SNAKE

LET GO OF MY MIND LIKE A KITE, LIKE A SNAKE

Let go of my mind like a kite, like a snake

I’ve grabbed by the tail to make a daisy chain of eternity.

Take the bit out of the Great Square of Pegasus

and pour myself out like the billions of stars in the Milky Way.

I’m hemorrhaging poetry. I’m bleeding to death like a rose.

Let it go, let it go, let it go. Blood knows its own way home.

I’m not weaving straightjackets of circumstantial vetch

into an embroidered chrysalis that never opens up.

I’m not trying to pour the sea back into the cup of the moon.

There’s more to me than I could ever drink up.

You can put a burning candle in the window and wait for me

but I’m going to follow the smoke wherever it leads

like stardust on the chalkboard of accelerated space

in a burning schoolhouse that had nothing much to teach

about the unknown in the first place. Order’s

only a special mode of chaos like a straight line

is a special form of a curve, and there are snakepits

of wavelengths that only serve as flying carpets

growing thin under the windows the dragons look through

like dark energies that can turn space to glass

like gravitational eyes bending the light to their point of view

as if fire were as good a medium as water to see through.

I’m shucking the worlds off my fur like a wolf

on the far side of the river I’ve just swum across

and I’m howling at the moon reflected in every single drop

as if I were a mad multiverse of permutations and combinations

that could be everywhere at once, above the timberline

where I can’t be hunted into extinction like a black dwarf

that knows there’s another kind of shining on the inside

deeper than the obvious scintillance when the moon

plays the lake like the nightbird of a lonely harpsichord in vain.

PATRICK WHITE