WANT TO WRITE OR BE WRITTEN

WANT TO WRITE OR BE WRITTEN

Want to write or be written. Whatever comes first.

Want to slide down a Martian sand dune

like a hockey puck of dry ice etching clawmarks

into a copper plate as if I were trying to cling

to something I couldn’t get a grip on like a snowman

thawing. A mirror melting. I want to plough

the desert in an hourglass into a Zen garden

where the stones flourish like weeds. I want to

swim in the wavelengths of my own mirages

in a month of heat, but there’s a small, nasty voice

like a deerfly buzzing the wheelhouse in my head

that bites like a cattle prod of conditioned guilt

because I’d rather write a poem than fill out

the deadpan forms of the world. All those deathmasks

plastered over our faces like papier mache over the years

just to prove we’ve got some kind of nonrefundable identity.

Do this, do this, do this, and then, this. As if

business had become the sign of a healthy spiritual life.

Curse the opportunistic careerism of our pettiness.

I’d rather hide like a tiger in the stripes and shadows

that are cast upon him by the busy, busy villagers

tying a judas-goat to the stake of an hour hand,

forgetting that time’s a waterclock, not a traffic cop,

to draw it out like fire from a moonrock.

Tears of blood flaring like the stamens of a matchbook

brief as a poppy blooming like a solar prominence.

No auroras in its wake. No scarves of light

lingering on the air like the fragrance of a mystic insight

into the humbling depths of our own ugliness and ignorance.

Que sais je. The clearest of all corneas. The Kepler

of all third eyes in orbit around some guru of a shepherd moon.

Life’s a mystery, not a question. Don’t expect me

to answer that. You can autofill your own blank.

Or try to second-guess your way out of the abyss

you wander in as if emptiness were a labyrinth

you had to follow your daily bread through

like the crumbs of the dreams you left behind as clues

to where your freedom went when you closed the windows

on what was once as wonderfully useless as a sunset about you.

Whatever it costs. Whether they cut me down

and make my skin into wallets to cover the expense

of hanging me from a heritage lamp post like a flowerpot

nesting in midair from the bough of a one-armed tree,

hemorrhaging violet petunias, I will still

heretically insist on how crucial it is just to drift

down your own mindstream as if your only purpose in life

were not to have one that moored you like a lifeboat

to a long walk off a short pier. You can sing to the stars

or you can call for help. You can water plants

like green lanterns in the window waiting for love

to hand out starmaps to your stem cells as if

you only direction in life were some kind of photosynthesis.

It’s a dangerous calling to live creatively free.

There are always hounds barking in the distance,

coydogs yelping after the magic rabbit in the hat,

deerflies trying to land like kamikazes

on the flightdecks of your carriers in Pearl Harbour

whether they’re out to sea or not, low-flying topedoes

released like snakes from the claws of sea-eagles

trying to train them to bite other people. Good luck

in the snakepit. I’m out of it like an emergency exit.

I’m not into mindwatching from a crow’s nest

for any sign of trouble on the horizon. I’m not into

crawling across my thresholds like the rungs

of a burning ladder for the upwardly mobile.

I’d rather fall toward paradise than cling to it

like mordant ivy on a church. And truth to tell,

I’d rather search than find. Build my house

on the waters of life than a gravestone that covets

my relics like a bone-box in a Gothic cave.

Water’s always on the move like a true pilgrim

following its own thought waves like tree rings

in the heartwood of a cross of terebinth

many springs have hung the fruits of life upon.

Peace be upon the pilot lights of the prophets

who taught the spirit how to make it through

another night without freezing to death in the firepits

of cold zodiacs feathered in shrouds of ash cloth.

Rites of passage trying to thrive like fish in the desert

around the great artificial barrier reefs of the moon

that ossify like dental plack and barnacles

on the decks of our spiritual shipwrecks

in the dead seas of life we’re walking on

like root fires of our own radiance in the housewells of light.

Whether you make an ashtray or a body cast

out of your starmud, no matter, the dragons of life

burn no less hot in their urns than they do

in the furnaces and kilns of the stars whatever

prayer wheel they’re being turned upon

like the inconceivable embodied like the sun,

the moon, and Venus, in the false idols of visionary insights

that shadow the ineffable with the simulacra

of the painterly senses that know of their own accord,

like unsuccessful saints, who better?---there is no metaphor

for the light upon light, the mind upon its own waters,

until your seeing isn’t discoloured by the eyes

you’re looking into as if they were brighter than your own.

PATRICK WHITE