WON’T MEAN MUCH IF YOUR EYES AREN’T
OPEN IN YOUR BLOOD
Won’t mean much if your eyes aren’t
open in your blood.
If the stars can’t see you because
you don’t know how
to read them poetry in the small cafes
of your heart
accompanied by spoons and plates and
broken goblets
of the cheap house wine that smash just
like love affairs
dashing your skull against the rocks,
hoping the mermaids come back.
If you can’t hear in the parking lot
of a raucous industry
the colours of your emotions, you’re
a deaf chameleon
and who could make you listen to what
you can’t listen to
even if you had enough people who loved
you around you
to want you to try to listen to your
own tears when you cry?
Your ear on the same wavelength as a
corrugated tin roof,
maybe you can see what I’m trying to
say to you
if you close your eyes, and just listen
to the rain without
trying too hard to make a big
effortless effort to be
auditorily enlightened by the racket of
your delusions.
I can’t remember when my life stopped
being my own
and I went to bed one night, and I was
as human as my toes are
and I awoke, I was merely the
afterbirth of a visionary
I didn’t recognize, as my eyes were
being igneously wrung
from a cope of dark ore like stars out
of the distant hills.
Not a lot of self-respect from the
beginning, maybe
it wasn’t that hard becoming everyone
and everything else,
and I was a prime candidate for
effacement
but when I looked into the mirror of my
ten inch, equatorially mounted,
clock-driven, reflecting telescope
I used like a canning jar to capture
and mount stars and fireflies
on a black velvet starmap, all I could
see
was this abyss staring back at me that
couldn’t say
where I’d gone, but the last I
thought I heard
was that I got a job as a janitor in an
hourglass
sweeping mirages out of a desert of
private school stars.
I say what I see as it occurs to me
spontaneously.
And I’m compelled to say it without
hesitation
so the vision isn’t tainted by the
colour of the jewel
it’s passing through, from one eye to
the next, ad infinitum.
No light pollution in the shining,
though there’s something
about the idea of purity that continues
to appal me
because I never had so much against
chaos from the beginning
and I sense a deep hatred of all that
is soiled and flawed,
in which case, I’d rather be an
outlaw than one of these monks
who disdain me because I can’t help
seeing their discipline
as uncreatively redundant. Eventually,
if they’re blessed,
all our faces are going to fall off by
themselves
like the scabs of sunspots that healed
the wounded light
like a wildflower shedding its petals
like nurses’ caps
and deathmasks frozen like a moment in
time meant
to last forever though we go on being
estranged by them forever.
Uncanny transformations of the solid
into the real.
Maybe it’s time to let the mindstream
flow as it will
and let the burning bridges of our
delusions cross us for a change
to get to the other side of a life
that’s only got one bank
and it’s as clear as space, we’re
not even standing on that.
Hang on. Let go. It’s just your hand
opening and closing
like a door in a dream, and you’ll
find your falling
just as fast as you ever were and if
you were to ask your eyes
they couldn’t tell in this vastness
whether your were falling up or down.
When you’ve dismantled all you’ve
desired,
post neo-deconstructionism sets in like
spiritual rigor mortis
and you can’t tell if you’re
sleeping with the living or the dead
when you haven’t got your mask on.
You can wear holes
in your shoes, and windows and carpets,
pacing
like a waterclock of the heart in an
hourglass of waiting
like a boy at the edge of the curb with
his elbows on his knees
and his face in his glum hands, waiting
for a parade
with sacred clowns throwing away free
candies
like stars along the route of the
mystic Milky Way.
Just be sure to keep your eyes open
like a spring thaw
so the light can recognize you like the
flower that brought it
to full illumination this time last
year like a candle
that keeps blowing its petals out so
you can see
the black matter of what you are not
deeper
into the eyeless dark than you’ve
ever bloomed before.
PATRCK WHITE
