LIFE IS AN ORDER OF CHAOS INTERACTING WITH ITSELF

LIFE IS AN ORDER OF CHAOS INTERACTING WITH ITSELF

Life is an order of chaos interacting with itself.

Look at how much awareness has to take for granted

as if the body were the patron of the mind

to have the time to think of what I’ve just said.

On our own we’re wavelengths unravelling

like loose threads in a flying carpet that waxes and wanes

like the phases of a watersnake on the moon

that lays its light down like an undulant sword in tribute to the lake

that receives it like the hour hand of a many-headed clepshydra.

Together we make particles of ourselves.

We’re a compilation of perimeters we’re always

violating like boundary stones in an asteroid belt

in order to grow out of the visions and skins

that restrain us in this world of forms

like the normative straitjackets of ill-defined things.

Dictions change, the slang, the patois, the demotic,

the dream grammars in the abyss of little deaths

we experience as sleep that makes us visionary illiterates

on the scaffoldings of dark matter we climb up on

to paint an image of what we can see of ourselves in passing

of a world we keep failing to live in in order to survive

our own insights without losing our minds with

nothing to show for it but the mystery of why we couldn’t.

And the timing of our ignorance is as crucial and enlightening

as a recidivistic dawn that blinds us with its blazing

by rephrasing the aniconic lyrics of the birds that sing to it.

Everyone frames their shadow and nails it to the wall

like a degree that measures the expertise they have

in the discontinuous history of themselves

or the future memories of prophetic mirages

irrigating the deserts sands of an hourglass that never floods

or greens the harvests they thrive upon like a death wish

for something more than life as they know it to grow beyond.

Last night I was brave enough to remove the face

my death mask was wearing like a hidden secret

I wanted to keep to myself. Tonight I’m laying

my hands on my heart like a faith healer

without the courage to sacrifice the gods to it

like a cure all for what ails my human divinity.

No honour among thieves, no truth among frauds

to make their lies feel real against the odds they might be.

Auspicious constellations reveal the ambiguity

of my metaphoric initiations into the clarity

of my quantum entanglements in the mystery of a life

that recognizes me indifferently in the signs of what

I’m becoming liberated from like everything I’ve ever known

or second-guessed about the waywardness of my seeking self

never so much at home in the world as when I’m lost.

PATRICK WHITE