TARRED AND FEATHERED BY YOUR OWN WORDS

TARRED AND FEATHERED BY YOUR OWN WORDS

Tarred and feathered by your own words

or basted and rolled in stars until you were sugar-coated

on everyone’s tongues, you remain a stranger to yourself

just the same. Nothing further from home than fame.

Notoriety just another unconvincing disguise

for your emptiness. A deathmask that never quite fits.

I remember the day I gave away all of my books

like a life raft I’d built to get to the other side

of the sewer that aspired to be a clean mindstream

to a coke-bound woman who needed them

more than I did to sell for drugs. Book awards

I’d won as a welfare kid in grade school.

I let them go, I let them go, I let them go

like a dragonfly emerging from its chrysalis.

I wanted to see what was standing on the other side

of me and them. Rid myself of my compendious identity

by exorcising the library of its most infamous ghosts,

mine among them. I shed them like scales

of snakeskin that hadn’t evolved into the flightfeathers

of birds yet. A whole cemetery of well articulated gravestones

shelved like a jury of hung witnesses setting their own precedents.

After light years of isolated incarceration in the scriptorium

when the midnight sun burned within me like candlelight

and I was consumed by the blazing like a moth

going crazy among the stars, I wanted to live

under the law of my own imagination even if it were

to have none. Walk skinless in the world, clear

of the mummies at last, like a wild rose in autumn

carrying its own ashes in a green urn with the withered star

of a jester’s cap on top like another clown nobody

knew very well, least of all me. No inside. No outside.

No forwarding address that could haunt me like a bill

I owe to the past. No medium trying to find my own voice

among the myriads of those that I’d summoned.

A whisper of earth worms in the grass and a wall came down.

No more gates that ask you to abandon everything

when you leave your soul on the threshold

like the windshield of a spiritual vehicle with starmud on it.

The mystic turned inside out, happy to be earthbound

to a specific time and place. To see his own face

like a lifemask carved out of accumulated projections

like a hologram of the pineal gland when the third eye

is sitting for its own portrait. If you stare long enough

at anything, it will begin to look like you after awhile.

I stopped peering into the dark, looking for signs,

when I discovered I was the revelation I was waiting for.

Presence of mind. Hamlet was right. Awareness is all.

Ghosts in the mirror, pale fire to the blind,

won’t burn on the moon however you blow on the flames

like a dragon with a ferocious sense of compassion.

But ripeness will come in time like a windfall

of glowing embers to a winter solstice that longs

for the heartwood of what it remembers of the life behind it.

Dismembered like a wardrobe for disobeying the sumptuary laws,

I let my Orphic skull bob all the way

like a black walnut to any uninhabited island

that had never seen the new moon rise before.

I came ashore as if I’d just been keel-hauled

down to the bone on the hull of my own lifeboat.

And though I’d slipped my moorings, I was

still singing like the cries of the waterbirds lyrically

that knew of the long night sea journey ahead

I had yet to go before I was wholly beyond myself

and everything that was said that was worth listening to

after that, took on a life of its own hardly distinguishable

from what the dead thought they were going through.

I was interdependently originated by everything else.

In this desert of stars, I stopped chasing mirages of light

and started drinking real water from my own two hands

as if I were holding them up to the mouth of humankind.

The man or woman who knows, aren’t the ones

who understand. Until you’ve deepened your ignorance

of the mystery of life and your thought waves

are crashing in a rage of breakers against the sea walls overhead

you’ll never know the ease of those who drown and drift in it

like the unpredictable undertow of a black hole

draining the stars like water in a Sufi whirlpool.

You’ll remain a shore-hugger and all your crystal skulls

will cry themselves to sleep at night like tidal pools

cluttered with the relics of those who died at sea.

And all your creativity observe the protocols of salvage.

And all that light turn into a false dawn

scrying lightbulbs in a lantern as lost as you are

until it’s lit up by the fireflies and stars that shine

brighter for the wayward stranger, than someone

who clings to the path like the last

remaining wavelength of the blind

to see where they were going like an optic nerve

that didn’t have the axons it takes to wander off without a guide

through your own mountains and valleys

shaped out of the starmud along the banks

of your own mainstream in the course of time

like a waterclock passing the word around

like the Milky Way from mouth to mouth,

that we’re all drinking from the same watershed

as the dead with tears in their eyes, who took a different route

and those with stars in theirs that their tears just can’t put out.

PATRICK WHITE