DON'T BE A STRANGER, COME IN, COME IN

DON’T BE A STRANGER, COME IN, COME IN

Don’t be a stranger, come in, come in.

My house is your house. Out of the wind

for awhile, a hovel of broken mirrors

that help keep the cold out, or a palace of tears

synarthritically fused together like a glacier

of chandeliers by a candle in an igloo

slowly glazing its way to the calving sea

like the Nazi demolition of Warsaw.

When you’re dog-paddling in a shark bowl

of circling sundials, or you’re coming up from the depths,

remembering you’re a mammal, through

an airhole in an ice floe hoping your second innocence

doesn’t get clubbed to death as your first one did,

it’s only natural that the world dispossesses you

of your heart momentarily and you cringe.

This is where I’ve lived most of my life

like a poor boy that didn’t make good

in his mother’s eyes and now it’s too late, too late

to even hope I ever would. Not every sword

you fall upon like the truth guts you

quite the same, and some you don’t want to remove

for fear of what might come out that would

hurt you worse like a great black hole

in the center of the universe that’s bleeding out.

This is a shrine, asylum, shelter, lair, sanctum,

third eye of a hurricane looking back at you

like a snowblind computer screen which isn’t

quite what you expected of the enlightened,

and I don’t understand it either but here

transparency doesn’t mean you have to go to school

to learn to be a window. No sea change anyone

has to undergo like a mirage that’s just discovered

real water is the source of its eyes and the light

is an absentee father most of the time until someone

gets in its way and gives it a reason to shine.

No harm will befall you that I haven’t died for first.

But I won’t stand on the sum of all my failures

and call myself authoritatively experienced.

You’ve got to blow like a nightwind

on the apricot blossoms yourself to see

if that much beauty is as scattered as they say it is,

and we’re just a shadow of chaos lingering in the air

like the fragrance of an old song that came out of nowhere,

or creative annihilation is how we waterclock forward

into fruition like the ripeness is all windfall

into the big plunge into the abyss like Icarus

coming undone like candle-wax feathered in fire

like one too many parabolic flightbys of the sun.

No path to illumination but you can see

your way in the dark by the glow of fireflies

I keep like old insights that shine like night lights

through the eyes of my prophetic skulls

like metaphoric answers to questions that burn the soul

like a lantern held up to the stars overhead

to decipher the occult life lessons of your own starmud.

I started out afraid to write this poem but now

I see you standing in the doorway of this

my alternative, shapeshifting universe

playing transmorphically like a child on the moon

with lunar phases of its knowledge forms,

the crazy wisdom of my solitude waxes empathically

like a dream grammar coming into full harvest,

and for my sake as much as yours, I’m afraid to stop.

PATRICK WHITE