MAD PEOPLE TRYING TO IMPRESS ME

MAD PEOPLE TRYING TO IMPRESS ME

Mad people trying to impress me with the quality of their souls.

Ego-slurry alienated radioactively from the rest of the world

trying to compensate for the meltdown of their lives

by glowing bioluminescently in the dark like the tiny zodiacs

of their watches allotting one star each to all of their signs,

or colourless fish in the depths of the seas of their own awareness

that have no need of the sun to shine by their own lights.

No river’s flowing the wrong way to the sea whether

it goes underground, evaporates, flexes its flowing

in the froth and fury of whitewater turned rabid, plunges

over a precipice into a misty ghost of itself or

trickles down through the faults of old earthquakes

to lie dormant for two billion years in its own watershed

like a dream waiting to wake up in a different hourglass

than the one it drained to the lees of life. And here comes

a cloud in a bong that’s troubled she’s not more of a river

and keeps looking for a lover that will fulfil her like an ocean

she’s dying to drown in. Modes of water all, glaciers

calving into the sea like nervous breakdowns,

or a drop of water trying to leap from the fiery tongue

of a burning leaf in the fall she can’t put out

with how beautifully she reflects the moon in every tear

that hangs on the moment like a glassblower stretching a point.

Fifty years, a poet, it’s not hard to relate to their shapeshifting

or see the fear in the eyes of the paradigms that transmutate

like a seance without a medium into a chaos of evocative stars

that blur and illuminate the nebulae of their vision of life

by the way they associate metaphorically with a darkness

indelibly schooled by the shadows of night into one

apocalyptic revelation after another going off like fireflies

as if they were blasting caps in a beaver dam

they wanted to blow up like terrorists to liberate their mindstreams

like a rush of dopamines in the fractured creekbeds

of their starmud exhilarated into life again like frogs

singing in the climacteric of a seven year flashflood.

Extremeties of heart and mind quantumly entangled

in the disorder of conditioned consciousness, and I’m

no less susceptible to hearing voices in the genius of the rain

suggesting wild irises and extemporaneous lilacs

to the insanity within me that makes a petty life great.

In the company of rootless trees, what’s to get right,

what’s to get wrong? The lightning doesn’t lead

a moving target and birds aren’t the first draft

of the dawn I’m carrying like a sheaf of poems

under my arm to see if they’re in tune with the croup

of shore-hugging swans and astigmatic peacocks

changing their prescriptions like world views every two years or so.

Like powerlines every octave’s a stave of wayward words,

crows, wrens, swallows, bolos of old running shoes,

even when they’re a snakepit hissing on the ground

or just humming to themselves in a summer rain,

as long as you’re singing you’re not sane or insane,

timid as a whisper or so sure of yourself you leave

the whole universe in doubt. Weird as it sounds,

it’s going to work out, I swear, like a jam session

between you and the stars, Vega on the electric harp,

Orion burning its axe like Jimmy Hendrix and o

go quietly, my soul, into the mosh pit

of the Day Glo Abortions singing galactic lullabies

to the cacophony of black holes eating the light

out of the eyes of the picture-music that echoes

in the nightclubs of anarchic Neanderthals

teaching the nightingales to sing like blood-stained buckles.

Chaos isn’t a miscarriage of the dancing star in my soul,

the diffraction patterns of a spider on acid

messing up its webs like mandalic ripples

to empower neo-expressionist bass runs

that like to colour outside the orthodoxies

of its dreamcatcher casting the nets

of starstruck constellations far and wide

as if it were dragging the great sea of awareness

for the corpses of the dead it can haul up

into the empty coffins of the lifeboats on a shipwreck.

Estranged friends, I cherish the negative intimacies

you’ve shared with me over the intervening lightyears

like a blizzard of fireflies trying to make the darkness visible

deep inside the occult priestcraft of your temple telescopes

scrying the stars like eyes in the back of your head

where the shadows enlighten your paranoia

of being left out in the dark alone with no one

to see how bright you are when you shine

like a starmap of lighthouses in the gravitational eyes

of your intensities, bending the light like Beckham and Einstein.

Old pond. Frog jumps in. Splash. Basho

jumping to conclusions like the sacred syllable of a haiku

that’s gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond

the boundary stones of the prophetic skulls

that set an acephalic limit to the taboos

of the wandering scholars among the mad and homeless

born to bloom like wildflowers and mushrooms

beyond the fence of cultivated gardens

that don’t make any more sense than the untampered seeds

the wind scatters like weeds driven into exile

for tasting the wheat, pomegranates, fly agaric and apples

of the forbidden windfalls under the fruitless tree of knowledge

even the bees couldn’t churn into honey

in the asylum of their hives without a black queen

to colonize the stars like the crazy wisdom of a dark mother.

Freedom isn’t bound like a motive to itself

and the abysses of love we fall into like diminished I.Q.s

remedially reading the writing on the wall

by plunging deeper into the darkness beyond

the blindness in the blazing of a one-eyed midway

might be the portals to another universe

more lucidly irrational than this turmoil

of common sensical chaos labouring to order itself

like an elephant graveyard of gateway precedents

poached like tomb robbers for the tusks of the moon.

Who isn’t a lunatic, each after their mystically specific fashion?

Enlightenment isn’t bound by the heretical vows

it makes to its own disobedience, just as the mad

aren’t the repeating decimals of cosmic incommensurables

running on forever like rapids in the waterclocks

of their mindstreams as Heracleitus reminded us,

if you were paying attention, you can’t step into twice

anymore than pi can build a bridge to the other side

of this shoreless river of life or your third eye can visualize

through its tears what it’s like to have the stars

kicked in your face by the bullies of random chance

because some are born to walk upright on their knees

and others, more wisely, have taught their crutches to dance.

PATRICK WHITE