QUIETLY AND LIKE A THOUSAND OTHER TIMES
Quietly and like a thousand other
times,
I want to go. I don’t know where. It
doesn’t matter.
This moment now is as homeless as it
gets.
You can have all the entrances, I’ll
take the exits.
Been so long I don’t trust what
happiness
would turn me into now, though I think
it’s just as stupid to despair. I’ve
let go
of the crows and doves of my emotions,
the quantum insanity of my thought
experiments,
and if I ever had dreams, they’re
lost atmospheres by now
like a childhood among the asteroids
that happened astronomically to someone
else.
I started out on a qrailquest, a
maculate clown,
a partial fool, and though I stayed in
the shadows
of my right-brained peripheral vision,
more
a magic circle than a halo, I kept my
third eye
out for it in passing. Strange how time
mutates
the journey without losing the
narrative theme
of the original psychodynamic. Now
I’m drilling for oil on the moon like
the watershed
of a full eclipse and I’m no more
averse
to the darkness as I was to the light.
Either way
there’s more sincerity in being lost
than in being
insufferably found. However rough the
storm
who ever comes to the aid of a
lighthouse
with a heart as empty as a lifeboat and
says
hey, get in, we’ll be swept out to
sea together
where the earth can’t threaten either
of us anymore?
Doesn’t happen. Much. There’s
something fatuous
about security that takes your edge off
like a keel
and leaves you bobbing on an inner tube
way out
of your depths and your legs dangling
like participial jellyfish out of the
mouth of Satan
like Brutus in the coldest ditch of
Dante’s Inferno.
For lightyears I’ve practiced the
furious discipline
of a purposeless art, and betrayed
myself
in the name of compassion for the
beautiful absurdity
of celebrating the immensity of my own
impoverishment.
I passed the test I set for myself like
a stranger
at a dangerous gate to prove I was
still sincere
in my own eyes. And even when I
suspected a trap,
still, I was a wild shepherd of wolves
in the wilderness,
and I hopped the fence. Intense as a
wounded exile.
As soon as anyone starts explaining
themselves to me,
I immediately hear the bells of
faithful alibis.
Unfamiliar demons arise like infidels
of the truth
and I’d rather follow last night’s
wolf moon down
below the treeline, than cry over
another fool’s lies.
Not bitter, not overjoyed, my curiosity
amused,
given how little hope there is for any
of us,
I’d still rather err with the
largesse of dragons
who know more about shining and burning
than the fire blossoms of a thousand
Chinese box-kites
looking for the ley lines on tinfoil
starmaps
that never lead anyone astray
creatively, least of all,
stop longing for the more subliminal
phases and shadows
of Venus on a moonless winter night at
perihelion.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell the
difference
between artifice and a genuine
sacrifice
but it’s a matter of taste whether
you want
bubbles in your poetry breaking the
surface
like effervescent sacred syllables at a
seal hunt
coming up for air, or add your breath
to the nucleation of new worlds in
hyperspace
by going along with the drift, the
gist, the flow,
the probable concourse, the aniconic
fractal,
the supersymmetrical elaboration of the
rococo,
loading every rift with ore like John
Keats,
or the wound of a rikku teacup at a
Chanoyu
ceremony for the taste of Zen with
mended gaps of gold.
If you’re still too distinct to
tolerate life with a smile,
at least try not to wince, and pray for
a day
when your facial expressions are not in
the name
of trying to better anything that isn’t
spontaneous.
You can call it mind, form, matter, and
then,
you can reverse the spin into the
opposite
thought, the annihilant emotion, and
achieve
spiritual immolation in a rapture of
nirvanic self-destruction.
Nihilism when it isn’t in vogue as
fashionable sentiment
looks at the world and says it’s
empty as if
something were there that isn’t
anymore, an absence
that let the meaning leak out through
their pores.
The little green apples of
disappointment are sour
but if you hang around long enough, the
return journey
is sweeter than the first, and
disappointment
gets drunk with the wasps in the
decaying taverns
plying the windfalls of dusk with
nectar and ambrosia.
When things go supernova creatively,
it’s not the end
of anything. It’s just one prelude
over the line
like the Big Bang before it was wired
for sound
like one hand clapping and all the
lights going on
when you enter the house of life late
at night
like a stray thought in your mother’s
head
that nudges one stray photon into a
collaborative avalanche
of interdependently originated genetic
chain reactions.
You can be an inert gas and light up
like a flavour
of neon or argon, with a fixed address
at the candy store of a highway motel,
or more
significantly radioactive like a heavy
metal
you can shine like an enfant terrible
orphaned
by your own catastrophe in the name of
art
as the potted plants wither on your
lethal windowsills
for the lack of deuterium, and the
waterclock
glows in the dark like a small zodiac
on a stopwatch.
There’s no lack of fraudulent
embassies ready
to forge a false passport with a name
and a face
into countries that don’t exist
without a border and a map,
but in all the years of my transits and
zeniths, nadirs
and pain thresholds, gates, doorways,
taboos,
dares, taunts, threats, holy wars and
peaceful defeats
without any regrets, I’ve secured my
passage
by exploring spiritually poetic realms
without
a lack of identity in a universal
mindscape
that doesn’t have one separate from
everything else
for fear I’d give myself away as an
imposter.
Why sip from the waters of life when
you can gulp the ocean whole in every
drop?
Quick, quick, said reality to the
passenger pigeon.
Humankind cannot stand too many birds.
PATRICK WHITE
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