IF YOU LOOK UPON A PUDDLE OF STARMUD AS A DEGENERATE THIRD EYE

IF YOU LOOK UPON A PUDDLE OF STARMUD AS A DEGENERATE THIRD EYE

If you look upon a puddle of starmud as a degenerate third eye

you’re a retinally detached fascistic mystic that runs

enlightenment into the ground the way Round-Up cowboys weeds.

Your nervous system hasn’t rooted very deeply

in your spiritual topsoil and that’s a heavy bell of a blossom

to bear on your back as long as you have

without coming to fruition like the moon on a dead branch.

By the lack of their fruits we shall know them as well.

Five petals open. One flower blooms that was raised

like a loveletter in a slum, not a green intellect with gripe

the sugars of life never ripen into compassion like light and water

ageing the root fires of desire into windfalls of dark abundance

quantumly entangled like black matter in your bright vacancy.

I’ve walked up and down your hall of mirrors

and never once recognized myself in your dismissive laughter,

tree rings don’t ripple through your heartwood

and I can tell by the way the wild irises burn their eyes

in your acid rain, they’re just paint rags of that masterpiece

of a mirage you keep trying to wash the face of the moon off

as if it were a stain on your void bound clarity

and everywhere you labour like a glassblower on the nightshift

to reweld the scars of the crystal skulls you keep

smashing on the ground in case of an eclipse then

walking on the splinters like the thorns of frangible stars

as if your enlightenment path were some kind of painful short cut.

Little vehicle, I’d rather be a busker on the stairs

with an empty guitar case and a crutch midway between the entrance

to the inner sanctum of the temple and the mob on the midway

than be the kind of barker you are like a spiritual junkyard dog

guarding the spare parts of all the carcasses

of the golden chariots you used to cruise through Sunday slums

like a pimp trying to get people to look out of their windows

while thieves of fire stole the wheels off Ezekiel’s ride.

You want to redefine the nature of light with the brilliance

of the blazing that blinds you, but the wavelengths

aren’t co-operating with the spectroscopic analysis

of your chromatically aberrated chameleons, are they now?

I don’t want to make a moral issue out of it, it’s not.

It’s just this is the floating world and the bubbles

in your misperception have no buoyancy,

your shipwrecked swim bladder isn’t much of a lifeboat

for people drowning further out than you are

to haul themselves into out of a greater depth

than you’ve ever been over your head in before.

Fathomless the emptiness of compassion

that leaves enough room for everyone to find a space in it

without throwing anyone’s homeless corpse overboard as dead weight.

At 11:11 you’ve got fifteen minutes before they close the doors

on the motherships of the elect come to gather

its imprinted chromosomes up like memory cards

from pre-recorded cellphones hacking into a cosmic database

before the dakinis delete the bag ladies like viruses

on the faulty downloads of a spiritually fictional movie house

that hasn’t seen its name in enough mystic insights

to start a zodiac in a desert of stars of its own like Las Vegas

without blessing criminal money in a Vatican bank

bleaching out the bloodstains of Caesar’s scarlet robes.

Compassion is a lack of standards that never gives offense

to anyone in the way it loves flesh and blood unconditionally

knowing there’s only so much time to be wrong or right

and then there’s forever, and forever might not be long enough

to make up for all your oversights here among the indefensibly human

because you want to meditate on jewels without illuminating

the ore of the ugly mandalas they sweated them out of their suffering

like evergreens weeping through their pores for a better life

than the face-value you keep placing on theirs like unwanted poster children.

There’s a drunk slumped in the doorway of enlightenment

you can linger in for ten thousand lightyears like a koan

you can’t step over like a threshold until you see other drunks

no less inebriated with their love hate relationship with life

looking over him to make sure he doesn’t choke on his own vomit and you,

finally waking up like a chandelier from your spiritual crystallography,

you take your inestimable masterpiece of spiritual conceptualism

and use it tenderly like a paint rag to wipe the Buddha’s mouth.

PATRICK WHITE