ALL THE GOOD REASONS THAT GET IN THE WAY OF WRITING

ALL THE GOOD REASONS THAT GET IN THE WAY OF WRITING

All the good reasons that get in the way of writing,

baby needs new shoes, and you’re conscientious and diligent,

will kill you faster than the bad ones

that brought you to the edge of your mindstream in the first place

to dip your skull like the cup of the moon

in the wellsprings of your own imagination

instead of always sipping spit from other men’s mouths.

I’m not saying don’t do what you must do

to be a decent human being, or as close as you can get,

but when you’re creatively underwhelmed

by the rising Rockies of Circumstance

losing their footing like an avalanche of cornerstones

coming down on you like a barrage of asteroids,

you better find a mountain gear deep within yourself

to power you out of the way of your own collapsing mindscape.

Don’t come to a reasonable truce with the ashen exigencies

of the underwhelming reality love married you to,

or pontificate like a hollow urn on the tragic absence

of even so much as an echo of yourself to make a comeback

or tell me you squandered it all like apple bloom

when everything I’ve read of what you haven’t written

smells like smoke from a distant pyre on the wind.

Remember the fire. Even if you have to burn underground

through the occult roots of the cedars, or bury yourself

powdered in red ochre under the hearthstones

of your prophetic forebears erasing your picture-music

from the cave walls like graffiti under a bridge

between this world as it never is when you look too closely,

and the one that’s working on you like spiritual water on limestone.

Remember the fire. Remember the discipline

of disobedience that tempted you to steal it in the first place

like a Spartan boy with a hot fox, as it

eats you from the outside in without you saying a word

lest you get caught ratting your deepest secret out in agony.

Or regenerative Prometheus chained to a rock like a salamander

born in the fire of his own afterbirth. Know this.

Lightning doesn’t strike the roosters of fire

that crow like weathervanes pinned

like a medal from an old campaign to the axis of the wind

as if the dawn were some kind of triumph over the night.

Cradle that fire in your hands like a bird that’s fallen to earth,

or a lamp of holy oil in a niche of unanswered longings,

a candle in a hurricane of boarded up windows,

the light of your own mind, casting shadows of time

like a sundial with a wilder imagination

than its usefulness might at first glance suggest.

Nor will it do to catch a falling star and put it in your pocket,

or pour gold down your throat like the Parthians did Crassus

and expect to shine like a lighthouse in a diamond mine

with the voice of an oracular canary in a cage.

You’ve got to live inexhaustibly

what you’re going to write about first

if you want to burn down the Library of Alexandria

in a gamma ray burst of creative annihilation

because you can only master as much life

as you’ve surrendered to like a heretic at the stake

or a pine cone germinating the seeds of enlightenment

like a zen hermit in a forest fire. Don’t take

all the beautiful green swords flaming like wild irises

whose beauty you fall upon like an honourable death

and abuse them like the palings of a gate or a fence around paradise.

Even if you’ve only got a firefly of talent

left in the caldera of an extinct volcano,

a spark in the firepit of a burnt out dragon,

a smouldering ember from last night’s fire in the stove

on a cold morning when the windows are blazing with ice,

you must be crazy and wise enough oxymoronically

to be the benign tyrant of your own Golden Age

like Pericles of Athens, with a politically incorrect

lover for a muse you look upon like the Parthenon

as if she were a phase of the moon. Even if

you love the swaying silver of the wind

over the heavy-grained harvest breaking water

like a bell under a redundant blue moon,

don’t shrink from threshing it if you want to

share it like bread with people as hungry as you are

to eat the heart of the king of the waxing year,

like Wodin made a sacrifice of himself to himself,

or life thrives on itself like a soccer team

that crashed landed on a mountaintop,

or the cosmic eggs of turtles feeds a manger of seagulls,

and the grass eats the grazer, and the grazer eats the grass.

Or if you’re too sensitive to compassionately take life

in order to give it, sharpen the edge of your golden sickle

on the whetstone of the moon, and express your mercy

as Muhammad suggested, with a quick kill

you can hold love responsible for like a spiritual alibi

if you’ve got genius enough to heal it like a inspired liar.

You have to be part salmon. A battering ram

swimming upstream against the flow of circumstance

like the gate of a water castle you’re besieging

to lay your blunted sword down in tribute

among the sacred pools of life that gave it to you

at the beginning of your song, like fire from their eyes

to wage a holy war of one on their behalf

you’re doomed to lose like a conflict that progresses

from one defeat to the next against ever stronger adversaries,

angels in the way, shaitans obstructing the path for your own good,

who realize, too late, with every encounter,

you’re growing stronger than the best reasons

could have anticipated strategically.

Be a good apple tree, lyrically seasoned and epically strong

as Lao Tzu and the Druid aptly described you

like the sacred syllable in the heartwood of the letter Q,

and express yourself completely without intending

the betterment of anything, though all do,

from wasps and birds to bears and humans

with the beauty of your blossoms, the wisdom of your leaves,

and the generosity of the sacrifice that laid you out

like a windfall of dice enshrining the eyes that can see

like seeds in the sibylline books of the apple

the risk they’ll need to take tomorrow like a fire swallower

of the sun and the moon to keep their planets shining

from the inside out in the Goldilocks zone

of a light that’s been sweetened immanentally

by a dangerously habitable life holding up

a lantern in the dark that disappointment, defeat and struggle

could no more put out than a volunteer fire brigade of waterclocks

for the best of reasons could put out the stars in an arsonist’s heart.

Set the world afire like a flame that writes on the wind,

poppies flaring uncontrollably across your field of vision.

Burn like a two-eyed passion for everything

you can see and be on the earth that consumes you

in the equinoctial fires of your vernal immolations,

not a magnifying glass that intensifies the sun into

the capricious focus of an idle boy on a cruel afternoon

shepherding ants like prophetic semi-colons into a furnace.

PATRICK WHITE