WHILE THE GREAT BLUE AGENCY WHALES

WHILE THE GREAT BLUE AGENCY WHALES

While the great blue agency whales sift us

like the metadata of krill through their baleen wiretaps,

and the rainbow in the iris of my eye is identified

like a fingerprint grown suspicious of its own reflection,

and it dawns on me there’s somebody else out there

that wants to know who I am as badly as I do,

I just want to disappear like an albino crow

in the snow for awhile, go mystically snowblind

in the blazing of a billion diamonds on a nightcreek

exploring its way through the woods like a tributary

of the Via Galactica, that milky road of ghosts.

The life of a fish is conditioned by the quality

of the water it swims in, same as any medium,

We’re either a loveletter to a stranger down river

or a message in a bottle pleading for rescue from ourselves

bobbing along the mindstream like the prophetic skull

of the image we used to entertain of a self.

By their fruits ye shall know them was always

good advice, but just as do unto others

as you would have them do unto you mutated

into do unto others before they do it unto you,

tonight, looking straight into the third eye

of a spy satellite that’s been following me

disguised as Spica flickering through the trees,

I say it out loud, without popping my ps,

if things don’t get worse, and they will, of course,

history is going to look back upon us and ask

who we were, and all we’re going to be able to answer

is a collection of laminated deathmasks in a wax museum

as we slowly forgot what our living faces

looked like to one another once. The silence.

The Wonder. The mystic shadows that we cast

like Venus on a moonless winter night,

the crowsfeet around our silver eyes like laughlines

cracking the mirror up like an ice storm

when we feel it’s all been one long, endless joke

at our own expense, and herein lies wisdom.

Neither nostalgic for an old-fashioned kind of ignorance,

nor enlightened by the eugenic photo-shops of the orthodox,

miasmic as I am, evanescently veiled by the solar flares

of my own unique insight into the feminine atmospheres

of whatever right-brained planets and moons

I happen to be orbiting at the time, imprecisely

focused as I am on my peripheral vision

of the mystic specifics of these retroactive flashbacks

of future memories without the precedent of a prophetic past,

I resist being fossilized prematurely in the Burgess Shales

in some Cambrian sea floor of a corporate data bank

as if I were being forensically interred for eternity

like Opabinia or Pikaia, or some remnant fingerprint

of a sacred syllable that once lived its life

like a prayer in progress albeit whispered under its breath

in the accent of a dead language, a hierogylphic

on the hard drives of whomever’s listening in.

Some people were born into the open enough

to express life. Covert others merely to overhear it

like shadows keeping an eye on the light that cast them down

they’ve dedicated their lies to spying on like spin-doctors

looking for the disease in the heart of the cure.

Ask any fanatic. Certainty is the mother of doubt.

The one returns to the many, and the absolutes

grow relative as paranoid second cousins.

There are ferocious, predatory octagonal buildings

that have developed new sensory receptacles

to archive the asylum of junkmail that constitutes

human consciousness like an ip address for a seance

into espionage in an era that doesn’t even trust the dead.

Or as the Zen master said, just look at the extreme chaos

of conditioned consciousness. The more

you listen in the louder we can hear the silence

of what it is you won’t come out and say

like an echo in the labyrinth of that seashell

you hold up to your ear like a hearing aid

trying to record everything the ocean says

like the sonic bells and whistles of nuclear whales

under the Arctic ice-caps thawing out

like a northwest passage through the cataracts

of a global warning not to wear rose-coloured contacts

when you’re pearl diving for new moons among the corals.

Best place to hide is out in the open. So, come on,

take a look. My life is an open book skimming

my thought waves like a kingfisher on a halcyon sea

of oceanic awareness after the Titanic went down.

You can board my brain like a shipwreck

at the bottom of the Burgess Shales. And you can tell

which way the wind is blowing by the lack of my sails.

Somewhere in this abyss of water you’re bound

to come across the eyes you want to look into

as if you were doing a spectroscopic analysis of my tears,

and it were compassion to wipe them away

like a swab of dna red shifting into the longer wavelengths

of extinctions to come that will make

the most infamous eclipse on the worst day

of the Middle ages pale like a new moon by comparison.

It only takes one mood ring of a chameleonic shapeshifter

to bring out the lion in a lizard, and fill the wax museum

with the Mayan ruins of itself. In the slightest of interactions

the compendious motion of an entire universe

past, present, and wondering what’s to come of it

as the stars get further apart like constellations

on a mythically inflated unbounded balloon of a universe.

Who’s going to be left to talk to like another neuron

along your axonic way, as you listen to what they have

to say about having covert access to everybody’s lies

when you’re virtually trapped in your own hydra-headed server

like the straitjacket of an expert who’s heard it all before

bottom-feeding like a microphone on the fossils

of who we were zodiacs ago when life went crazy

as a genius in an arms war of the senses and things

were revealed without confession or innocence

like Hox genes deciding where to place our eyes

on both sides of the great divide of our noses

wiring security cameras in the hairs of our nostrils

as the watchers watch to see who’s looking at them

instead of breaking genetically modified bread

with the hysterically distracted circus mob calling for the blood

of martyred lions burning in the manes of their own

solar coronas glowing brighter than the dark haloes

of the black holes in the conservation of data principle

the darker it gets like a blindfold in front of a firing squad

when the light turns around like a double agent on itself.

PATRICK WHITE