ANYONE CAN SAY WHAT THEY FEEL

ANYONE CAN SAY WHAT THEY FEEL

Anyone can say what they feel

but how few can sing what they dream.

You put your heart into any art

and people will follow you like a bloodstream.

In self defence against the omnipotence

of being interdependently originated,

you can substantiate your absence

to prove you’re not living in the same world

we all do, but where’s that going to get you in the end?

You can true your delusions anyway you want

but that’s not going to clear you for the truth.

The destroyed see deeper than those who survived.

That man puts a straitjacket on

everytime he says he’s arrived.

Just because it’s absurd doesn’t mean

it isn’t believable. Me sitting here

writing this to a caste of albino stars

I haven’t reconfigured into a constellation yet

because my imagination keeps shape-shifting me

like a gust of fireflies into myriad myths of origin

since I realized, cosmically speaking, one size

doesn’t fit all like a house of transformation

in an Etruscan zodiac. Or a prayer wheel.

Or the ecliptic of a mystic head band

still bound to the skull of a Druid who died young.

Fifty years, a poet, but I don’t expect

this is as mad as it’s going to get.

I’ve been deepening my ignorance aesthetically

for light years, but when I cry for things I regret

my tears are still wet, and my mindstream suggests

there was no other way of flowing at the time.

I hang on the hook of the moon prophetically

until the pain grows profound

and ten scribes in a tower write it all down.

I am blessed. I am cursed. I am hunted and ignored.

I love disingenuously to keep from being bored.

And when there’s nothing else for the fire to feed on

I offer it my body, my soul, my solitude

and the rare acquiescence of a tumultuous mind

like the third eye of a hurricane with a corneal implant.

I don’t keep the impersonality of what I feel about life

in a little drawer with a skull on a keychain

I use to master the coffin doors of the slumlords

that won’t open of their own accord

like rosebuds in a rusty locket that’s come unhinged.

I don’t pour the ocean into a teacup anymore

as much as I used to and there’s a little more wisdom

in my love lyrics I haven’t completely

taken to heart yet, but I’m trying. I stand

an intimate distance away from the things I cherish.

I’m dying as we all are, but it doesn’ t feel

as if I’m going to perish. My emotions are ageless

and inspiration’s only the whisper of a star away

and though my dark energy keeps expanding the starfields

further apart, so I have to walk further

to find a wild flower I can identify with,

the dark’s beginning to shine like a black candle

with my spinal cord dipped in serpent fire

like a total eclipse of dragon’s blood as its wick.

I rave like the vision of a sacred clown who’s become

the misfit of his own crazy wisdom, heretically so,

to live up to the standards of my own disobedience,

a saintly truant in the labyrinths of spiritual malfeasance.

A shepherd of wolves, I don’t drive the stars

up into the high fields like a small herd of scapegoats

like a hard rock on a mountain keeping

its fossils to itself like apocalyptic alibis

for the silence in the voice of the void that unwords me.

No truth ever mattered a damn to me

if it defeated people who were just trying

to get on with not knowing what to do with their lives.

No beauty ever took my breath away for long

that wasn’t emotionally siderealized

or hadn’t drowned like a sorceress on an island

in the oceans of the black rose of a new moon.

I prefer to look at the blessings of life

through a broken window more than

the polished mirror of a purified mind

blinded by its own blazing to the diamonds

that pour like stars from the eyes of weeping meteors

that have initiated the extinction

of too many, too much, without rancour

for the fragility of the afterlives in the ashes

that emerged from the inside out

into the available dimensions of a random future.

Time might observe the protocols of its waterclocks

for some who still drink from wishing wells

and hourglasses that are always pouring another

for the road, but in the intimacy of my solitude

time acts extemperaneously upon my heart

like a stranger who could always feel his way past

what he didn’t know about what could hurt him

if he ever stopped long enough anywhere to find out.

I’m grateful to the abyss for the black hole

in the centre of my life that can’t be fulfilled

galaxy after galaxy at a feast of light that keeps

my appetite for the moonrise of the mystery

intrigued and hungry. My mind was never an experiment

nor my heart the rube of experience.

I didn’t map the rain to know where to go.

I let the mountain be my goat-footed guide to the top

and when it came time to come down,

I won my wings falling toward paradise

with more joy in taking the plunge

than I relished in the angelic aviary of my arrival

where nobody jumps unless they’ve got a parachute on.

Buff the risk with a safety net or you’ll candle

like a daylily all the way down into an early grave

people used to say to me when I was a young precipice

ferociously faithful to exploring the nether depths of myself

like a comet jumping the orbitals of a dark halo

to shed a little light like a petal of the sun

on why I’d rather perish in the night like a firestorm

on a purple passage of the wind, than blossom

like the wildflower of a savage mystic

in the genetically engineered garden of a false dawn.

PATRICK WHITE