I CAN FEEL THE RAGE INSIDE, A GAMMA RAY STAR

I CAN FEEL THE RAGE INSIDE, A GAMMA RAY STAR

I can feel the rage inside, a gamma ray star,

burning through me like a cigarette heater

through the upholstery of an over-used couch

with enough chump change in its pockets

to set up shop as a parking meter. No fire in your voice,

your song isn’t flammable, you didn’t get

the inside out, your leaflet of a poem doesn’t turn red

in the fall. There’s nothing seasonal about the dead.

But run for office, you might get elected

for all the cheesecake issues and anthems

you stand up for like a reflexive erection

that’s never died, in the Elizabethan sense of the word,

for anything you could bring to consummation.

You should be racked by inspiration just once but well

for treason against the muse. You should have the screws

put to you to get you to open your mouth

and let something out like a scream so high-pitched

it’s beyond earshot, though the voice is undeniably yours.

I see a lot of tattoos that are very fashionably done,

but where are the scars, where are the wounds,

where is the full face of the harvest moon

pitted and cratered by the creative impact

of a meteoric life with its radiant in the Pleiades?

Did you paint that persona of a deathmask

in your own blood, or did it just come that way?

Did you carve it out of the heartwood of a bleeding cedar

on the sacrificial altar of an Aztec table saw,

or is it some kind of medicinal bark

you brought back to remind you of your travels?

And I could go on. But it’s a waste of time.

And you’d go away, please, thinking the dragon’s unkind,

when all it’s trying to do is throw the moon

through your window, vandalize you with a little Zen,

fire up your maple trees as if they were burning heretics.

Get you to trust your own instincts, instead of

relying on books about the way things should look

for advice. You ever sword dance barefoot with razorblades?

Anyone ever ripped your heart out and ate it,

saying grace as a compliment to your nobility

as they chewed on it like gum till it lost its flavour?

There’s always an absence in the truth of what we’re living

as if we were missing something crucial. Beauty

is more deeply revealed by a compassionate action

than a contemplative world in a walled garden

where vagrant states of being fountain and flower

in the third eye of the firestorm sweeping over you

like autumn burning its memoirs. Do you know

how much light you can generate like Venus in the Pleiades

just before dawn, by deepening your shadows

to enhance its luminosity? Enraptured by the darkness

within you like the infernal perfume of a flower

that blooms in fire, you’ve got to break more

than a few taboos like chains on a gate

guarded by angels with flaming swords

if you want to get back to the garden

you and the snake were exiled from

for taking Adam along for the ride of his life.

What kind of a temptation could it have been

if it didn’t bring sin into the world like a deciduous tree

among the evergreens? Be honest with your evil

and you’ll never be called upon to lie to the truth.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU LOOK AHEAD TO THE SLICE OF LIGHT AT THE OPENING DOOR

YOU LOOK AHEAD TO THE SLICE OF LIGHT AT THE OPENING DOOR

You look ahead to the slice of light at the opening door

and you’re tempted to look back at what

you’re not going to be anymore once you walk through it

without knowing whether it’s an entrance or an exit.

A station of change. A bardo state that slipped between the lines

of the Tibetan Book Of The Dead you’re karmically

sowing your way through to synchronize your seed to the harvest.

Dawn soon. False or otherwise blanching the nightblue

like any other day of life upon earth, into the starless hue

of waking up from the mystery of being alone in the dark

shining into a vast solitude of hidden insights

like the eyes of shy animals warily observing you walk

through the woods like a nightwatchman without a lantern

looking for a light to go by like lightning and fireflies.

In vino veritas, mystically speaking, I’ve been intoxicated

by the grails and skulls of life like a drunk for so long

I speak in the oracular voices of my own exhausted honesty.

I squandered my potential on the actual, applying

my imagination to the surrealistic factual aspects of life

like an oyster bed on the moon pearling whole new worlds

out of a grain of starmud. If work is a form of worship

as the Upanishads say, I’ve laboured long and hard creatively

like a heretic at play in the flames of the staked-out starfields.

And the shadows I’ve cast upon the earth like scarecrows

to look after things in my absence have never depended

upon a light source that wasn’t sublimely human.

I’ve reflexively responded like a shapeshifter

to any fixed image it’s been imperatively suggested

I was created in the name of to mimic like a dead metaphor

I was living like the lyric in the heart of a man

with nothing left to lose when I breached the boundary stones

of the usual taboos like a labyrinth of seawalls, locks and dams

in the liberation path of an emotional tsunami

of oceanic awareness after every earthquake that shook

my foundation stones into an avalanche of quicksand

sliding down the unstable slopes of the world mountain

like an otter down the mudbanks of my own mindstream.

Compassion’s a ruby. Innocence, an emerald. Insight,

a star sapphire. And I wore those like the corona

of an eclipsed crown on the head of a pauper prince,

but it was the diamonds that intensified out of the darkness

like coal in the furnaces of the star clusters I beheld

like luminaries in the black mirrors on the far side of my eyes

that intrigued me the most as an adamantine example

of how to live my life in the midst of decay

with feet of clay and my head among the stars

like the catalytic agent of my own transformations,

the mercury and sulphur of the royal quaternion

of the philosopher’s stone I was enthroned upon

like a beggar king with a dynastic history of self-abdications.

I got down in the dirt under my fingernails

where Neruda says the poetry is. I planted

the withered crescent moons of zinnia seeds

in the furrows of my brow like terraced gardens

I ploughed with the needle of a boustrophic lp

like a palindrome that sang the same

whether you were coming or going either way.

A Satanic message from the angel in the mirror

trying to play both sides of the fence in reverse.

Like the moon, I’ve never lingered in the window

of enlightenment for long, without looking

for an unlocked, backdoor I could enter with effortless ease

like a thief returning what had been taken from me.

PATRICK WHITE