SOMEONE KEEPS FOLLOWING ME

SOMEONE KEEPS FOLLOWING ME

Someone keeps following me

like the shadow of who I was supposed to be.

The dark sibling of light

whose face got turned away from the sun.

He’s the remnant of perfection that’s left of me.

He’s the one I was expected to achieve.

He’s the one I’m supposed to believe.

I’m what happened to him along the way.

And the defeat goes on and on and on.

I want to say look you were there.

You saw what went down.

How natural everything seemed at the time.

How inevitability governed everything like hindsight.

But he just stands there staring

if I were the most inconceivable thing on his mind.

He’s the son my mother should have had.

I’m the one she didn’t deserve.

He’s the blue flower.

And I’m the black dog.

He’s the favourite of the rain.

And I’m the fire hydrant that wound up in the sewer

after putting out the fire.

He wanted to live a good life with laudable accomplishments.

He wanted to do well for himself

given where we were born

and he was groomed for it

by the very people who had made him poor.

He vowed to become one of them and thought

all shall be well all shall be well

all manner of thing shall be well

and he’d know the kind of self-respect

you just can’t get on welfare.

I went slumming with anyone

who was passionate or dangerous.

I’ve always felt guilty because

I wasn’t better than I am.

I think it was something

my mother kept saying in rage about me

when I was young.

And my tough old broom pod of a granny

always agreed.

I was so much more like my unforgivable father

than my brother and sisters were

I could smell the burning flesh

of some kind of mark being branded on my heart.

O.K. I said

I’m evil but I’m smart

and there’s always poetry and art.

I’ll be self-destructively creative

and give myself up to visions in the desert

before they drive me out in May

when they cleanse the temples of smoke and incense

and they’re looking for a scapegoat

whose innocence is within question.

And that was the first great divide in the mindstream

between him and me

and after that we were two different shores

and one burning bridge.

And I was determined I wasn’t going to be the shadow

that got left behind.

So here we are forty-eight years later

and he’s asking me with those

eery condescendingly accusing eyes of his

if I think I’m as smart now as I used to be

before I started living my life like a river

instead of a highway

and as much as I love the stars

dropped out of astronomy

because everything felt starless and unshining.

You can make more money

asking stars how old they are

and where they’re going spectrographically

than you can sharing the little light you’ve got to go by

through poetry and painting.

In art

things get worse

the better you get at them.

Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

You might still think of yourself

as an oscilloscope with a wavelength for a lifeline

but here you’re off the radar.

And I lived like that for years.

Women black coffee cigarettes and books.

I wanted to guide people by example

and lead them away from me.

I embodied the estranged compassion of the damned

in everything I did

and kept myself at an appropriate distance

in the aerial and thematic perspectives

of all my works.

I can empathize deeply with people

but seldom to the point

where I let them become me.

I have a plutonium soul

and the afterlife of a nuclear winter.

I’m one of the heavier elements of life

and my intensities are as natural to me

as the stability of his carbon is to him.

And the way I express myself

is more of an exorcism than a seance.

I dispossess myself of all things human

so they won’t be hurt by what’s left.

And I endure.

And I’ve got the energy

of an angry rogue star in my genes

that refuses to pale in his sunlight by comparison.

He graces our Russian Mongol ancestry with gilded graves

and tears that run like chandeliers

down his ballroom cheeks.

I trace it in lightyears

and leave the rest to chance.

He preens his decency.

I revel in the bright vacancy

the dark abundance

of my reptilian clarity.

He sees things in a white mirror.

I see through them in a black.

He mourns the things I do.

But he doesn’t know a damned thing about agony.

He thinks he’s the one who’s real.

And he resists me like temptation.

Not to feel might be the way to feel about Zen

but I indulge the passions of an unenlightened man

because I don’t trust purity

to remember that it’s just the fashion

of a passing moment

that buffs its own reflection in a doorknob

and passes judgment on the poor

with the stiff bliss of a happy slumlord.

His universe is Steady State.

Mine’s a Big Bang

empowered by a dark energy

that keeps accelerating my fate

into the void ahead of me

so by the time any kind of insight arrives

it’s always too late

to be news.

Right door.

Wrong address.

He’s the cornerstone.

I’m the quicksand.

He’s the habitable planet

and I’m the menacing asteroid.

He promotes evolution

and I’ve always got a rock in my hand

as big as the moon

to bring about a change in who rules

the windows and the mirrors

on the other side

of what they expect me to be in passing.

I’m the radical zero

who thinks it’s foolish

to try to make something out of nothing

given it’s already a given

and he’s the commonsensical whole number

that takes account of things.

He says he’s not perfect

to be arrogant about his humility

but that’s only a shadow of what he lacks.

I try to carry my own weight

because I don’t expect much

in the way of serious intelligent help

but he gets around

like a corpse on everybody’s backs

as if he were the stranger who came to the rescue.

He’s the crutch who leans on legs to hold him up

whenever he walks on water without oars.

I’m the bottom-feeder that he abhors.

But I can take a handful

of the muck and decay of my starmud

and turn it into waterlilies.

I can make my perishing into something beautiful.

I can use death like a spontaneously renewable resource

and make things live

through the transformative power of my art

that are totally blameless

whether they be light or dark.

He comes on like a lifeboat when he’s talking to women

as if he were walking by the sea.

He doesn’t know how to go swimming without an ark.

Women are attracted to me

like blood in the water

when they’re out far enough

to be thrilled by sharks.

I’m the zoo on the outside of the cage

that blunts its teeth on the bars.

He’s in it for the documentary footage

and a few convincing scars.

The sheep hunt tigers into extinction

and the goldfish are trawling

for grey nurses and great whites

to make sharkfin soup.

Even in hell

there’s a sense of proportion

almost a moral aesthetic

that goes unspoken

until someone spots a jackass

trying to lead an eagle around on a leash.

The distastes of a demonic imagination are not petty.

The taboo of the maggot

is not the rule of the whale.

So get behind me my shadow my brother self.

Don’t flash your lighthouse in my eyes

when the stars are out

as if I’m the one

that’s a few magnitudes shy of shining.

It would do you a lot of good to be a little bit bad

but then you’d feel too close to me for comfort

and forget who you are to everyone else.

I’ve never needed anything more

than the dust at my heels

to show me the way down.

I jump

and sometimes

I’m descending into heaven

and sometimes I’m plunging toward hell.

But what can you say about a man

standing at the edge of the bottomless abyss

of his own draconian absence

waiting for the flightfeathers of stray angels

with spare parachutes

to fall out of the sky?

I know you look so far down at me

from that overview

you’ve exalted like a balcony

that got it’s start in life as a pulpit

you suffer from vertigo.

But I could have told you little brother.

I wouldn’t want to alarm or harm you in any way

but I could have looked you straight in the eye

like a bemused king cobra

flaring over your nest like an unpredictable eclipse

or an umbrella somebody opened in the house

and diverted the luck of their lifeline

from the original course of its flowing

into a starmap for dice

pitted with eyeless blackholes

like the sockets in ivory skulls

lost in this wilderness alone

where nothing reminds them of home.

Alea iacta.

The dice are thrown.

You may be a better threshold than I am

but I’ve been crossed by the Rubicon

and I could have told you little brother

without even so much

as the penumbral shadow of a lie

to fall into your milk like a dragon.

I could have dipped

my other wing into your cup

as an antidote to clarify what ails you.

And as you drank up

I could have told you little brother.

The first shall be last

and the last shall be first

and it’s not a good idea when you’re here

to antagonize the lowlife

with your insufferable highness

from your upper story balcony

as if you were always trying

to get something out of your eye

like me

who burns like a cinder

just to see if I can make God cry

to hear why

I would have told you little brother

even snakes can fly.

PATRICK WHITE

INFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

INFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Is it true

the most compassionate people in life

are the ones in the greatest danger?

That the most generous

will lose their hands to the ones they fed?

That the bravest will be hunted down by protected cowards

and when the last of the heroes are dead

and the dragons who inspired them

are the advertising themes of amusement parks

those with the smallest balls

will give themselves the biggest awards?

Is it true

those who are creative

chafe the destroyers like anti-matter

and give the intellectuals diaper-rash of the mind?

That just to open your eyes

to watch the stars and fireflies

is enough to make other people feel blind

and insist you black them out

like pearls in an air-raid?

What’s a starmap to a mole?

What’s a lamp that shines in braille

to someone without fingerprints?

Is it true that beauty summons the worm

as a material eye-witness to its ruin?

That genius is devoured

by cannibalistic Neanderthals

into homoeopathic magic

for the power of its brain

to turn thought into protein

with a high creatine content

that can make your dick strike twelve anachronistically

so you can go on knapping flint

for the next hundred thousand years?

That genius is a freak in isolation

that gets its own back

for being pecked at

like a phoenix among chickens

by opening Pandora’s box

like the atom at Los Alamos

like the genie in the lamp

and making a Trojan horse of its gifts

gives them everything they want

because anything as red

as Van Gogh’s hair and beard and ear in Arles

must be either a phoenix

or a fox with chicken-pox.

Sometimes you have more to fear

from the keys

than the locks.

Is it true

that a friend is a random event

in a space-time continuum

that’s got no room in its impersonality

for loyalty or sentiment?

That the heart has replaced the golden rule

with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

and everyone’s looking for love

like a Faberge Easter egg

that’s already hatched its ugly duckling

sans fairytale?

Or the Czar’s family?

I asked Annie

as we were landing in Toronto

from the West Coast

like a waterbird with its wheels down

on a tarmac lake

is it true

that everything we thought sincere

has been exposed as fake?

That forever isn’t worth

the loveletter

it’s written on

for twenty minutes

because of temporal inflation?

Is it true

that all roads

that lead to Rome or Ottawa

never return the way they came

like arrows and fishooks and Vercingetorix?

That justice is a celebrity fame-game with ratings

brought in by a jury of mirrors

selected by the reflections of their peers

to convict the innocent

for their sins of omission?

That the God-particle

everyone’s looking for

like something they can’t get out of their eye

might not be

trying to make a point at all.

It’s hard to get a fix on

just how fundamental you are

in the scheme of things

when you’re stuck in the starmud

up to your knees

looking for your keys like koans

you swallow like pills to feel real

but hey

no big deal

but I was meaning to ask you

is it true

that we’re wounded by death

and life is the way we heal?

I know how you feel

about what’s real

but you can have all the money you want

and that still doesn’t mean

you’ll ever really know

what it means to be rich

without having to steal.

You’ve got the disease

but none of its symptoms.

Is it true

that the most successful grow

by never accepting a challenge

that wasn’t a bigger failure than the last

and call the summits of their Himalayan defeats

experience and progress?

Answer no.

Answer yes.

Answer yes and no.

Or just nod your head diagonally

like the sum of the squares of the opposite sides.

Because the questions were less rhetorical

than sincerity being facetious

I don’t expect people to answer the doorbell

or read every piece of spiritual junkmail

that shows up on their doorstep

like a flightfeather to paradise

on the wings of a seagull.

If you’re wounded deeply enough

there’s no resentment in the pain.

You just play with your brain

like an angry child plays with the eyes of a doll.

You control your rage like a nuclear reactor

or Chernobyl goes cosmic

and you throw a tantrum

that expands like the universe.

You can polish the mirror all you want

and call it clarity

until your sleeves are as threadbare

as the carpets under the windows

you’ve been staring through

as long as it take to turn your eyes to glass

but enlightenment’s on the dark side of the mirror

like a star is

like your eyes are.

Like waves on a lake

that takes things as they come.

Myriad deaths in a single birth.

Life on earth.

Intense heat.

Unusual sprouts.

A Zen sententium worth consideration.

But the clear light of the void

isn’t radiation.

It’s a lucidity

with nothing to illuminate.

It’s the Uncreate that plays creatively

in the absence of itself

like a child alone with its imagination

making the world up as it goes along

taking the Inconceivable

and making it believable.

Giving airy nothing

a local habitation and a name

as Shakespeare did

and dandelions do in the fall.

As I am now

by asking if it’s true

you haven’t noticed yet

how it’s always the overprivileged

who send the underprivileged off to war?

Death in the hearts of the governors.

Death in the hearts of the profiteers.

Death in the hearts of the generals.

Is it true

this spider-web shines

like democracy in the morning

star-spangled with dew

but late at night under the streetlight

it’s tearing under the weight of its own greed?

That obese spiders who once pulled the strings

of a sticky mandala to eat well

ripen like the dead weight of toxic fruit

hanging from the branches of a dead tree?

This web is not a constellation.

This web is not a starmap.

This web is not a bloodstream

that gives back what it receives.

This web is not the lyre of a siren

that called people to the rocks of a new continent.

This web is not an electric guitar.

Is it true

the interminable buzzing of panicked flies

stuck to its strings

like masses of people

waiting to be consumed

is not the music of celestial spheres?

Empathic ingestion of agony over many years

like a fish trying to identify with heavy water

by adapting to it like a sick mother

who passed on her genes like Love Canal.

Is it true

you can die tending the ill in a hospital?

Carnage without redemption.

Eye-soup.

Severed feet.

Outrage imploding into black dwarfs

that warp space like a child’s mind

into believing God is best served by the blind

than those who can read for themselves

before they martyr her body like a judas-goat

to God’s great design

for the faithful dead

who expressed their gasp of divinity

in a holy war

a marketable crusade

a deniable genocide

a mass grave

a defensible border

that doesn’t know who gave the order

to drop cluster bombs

and white phos

on the hospital

when it ran out of bandaids

and watch it flower like a white dahlia

or a belly-dancing jellyfish

with poisonous tentacles

spreading out like the spokes of a beach umbrella.

The aesthetics of atrocity.

The age of desecration.

Is it true

the next best career move for evolution

like an unknown writer

listening to his legend gossip among rumours

like a suicide note without a table of contents

is unnatural extinction?

The mystery in the riddle of the sphinx

after all those years of sand and stars

is what would she have asked

if we weren’t there to answer.

Is it true

that Saturn’s shepherd moons

have turned into human coyotes

jumping borders like orbits

in the Van Allen Belt

where the asteroids are broken by drug rings

thawing rocks in a crack spoon

to defy the laws of gravity

with deified norms of depravity?

I might be a vague social democrat

walking a Zen plank

like a blindfolded political platform

who doesn’t need a party

to spell out

or sell out

what I believe

but it’s easier to write a folksong

about a successful thief

than a man or woman

for whom love was an art

that transcended its inspiration

and compassion the root of all understanding

and when death approached

because it’s hard to be alive and real

at the same time

embraced it as a great relief.

Is it true

that more similes turn into outlaws

than metaphors do?

That when Jesus asked

the little children to come unto him

he wasn’t speaking in tongues

behind sacred firewalls

for polyglot child molesters everywhere?

The pen might be mightier than the sword

like a mammal is to a dinosaur

but I have my doubts about a bullet

and electrically detonated C-4

wired to a lab rat like the black plague

and holy warriors

with the radioactive half-lives of dirty bombs.

Suras and psalms.

Gardens with underground rivers.

And fruit trees by flowing streams.

Shalom.

Salem.

Muslim.

Jerusalem

Islam

And Bethlehem the House of Bread

that breaks into peace

when it’s shared

like a common word

from the pelican fountain-mouth

of the same mother tongue.

Peace brother.

Peace sister.

May you live to be

forever young and free

of walled partitions

and the double helices

of chromosomatic razorwire

uncoiled like vines

around your secret gardens

where the waterlilies bloom in gene-pools

and the grapes are bleeding

like a miscarriage of sacred wines.

When the Great Lucidity appears

like a star of wheat in the Virgin’s hand

and shines down

on everyone’s shelter for the night alike

no mangers in the beginning

no arks at the end

may we all understand

that the blood-oaths of enemies

are not stronger than the bonds between friends.

May you know the enchantments of life

when it doesn’t belong to anyone

as well as you know the horrors

of disowning it now.

Or as I imagine they would say in Zen.

The pen is the sword.

It’s just a voice with words.

A lamp that gives its light away

like an extravagant genie

you don’t have to blow out to see

but you should

if you want to write good.

Black glee.

Bright vacancy.

Too much pain.

The agony of the seed realizing

the harvest was in vain

not worth what had to be endured

to live it all again.

Eleusinian ergot on the grain.

Is it true

heaven prefers

the hallucinogenically insane

and the sun only comes up

when a cock crows like a weathervane

or a God-struck lightning-rod?

On the return journey

which is more amazing than the first

you get to pass backwards

through all the stations of your life

you progressed forward through.

A prodigal innocence

that resonates with experience.

A dream reflected in a mirror

like a waterbird

dragging its wake through the clouds

like a knife ploughing a wound

through the envelope of a loveletter

no one can wake up from but you.

And no one can take away

because everything is trued by time

to the path you took

just by walking on the earth

alone on a dark night in the starless rain

when you removed the world like a mask

that proved false to your faceless pain

and you realized

how much closer a stranger is to you

than you are to your unrecognizable self.

Though pain may be prophetic

when your heart hangs on a hook

like bait on a question-mark

great suffering doesn’t reveal anything

you didn’t already know.

It doesn’t stay.

It doesn’t go.

It’s a nothing that exists.

It’s an existence that’s nothing.

A gust of fireflies

from the mouth of a dragon.

But what does come as a surprise

like dusk overtaking the window

are the numberless eyes

that emerge from the depths of your darkness

like grapes ripening on the vine

like fish coming to the surface

like urgent diamonds

growing like mushrooms

in the long night of an abandoned mine.

Numberless eyes.

Myriad stars.

Light-years of memories.

And is it true

every one of them

is a myth in the making

each an enlightened Zen master

with nothing to teach

who insists

it’s not the stars that are shining

it’s your mind?

That they’re all within reach

all the time?

PATRICK WHITE