WON'T MEAN MUCH IF YOUR EYES AREN'T OPEN IN YOUR BLOOD

WON’T MEAN MUCH IF YOUR EYES AREN’T OPEN IN YOUR BLOOD

Won’t mean much if your eyes aren’t open in your blood.

If the stars can’t see you because you don’t know how

to read them poetry in the small cafes of your heart

accompanied by spoons and plates and broken goblets

of the cheap house wine that smash just like love affairs

dashing your skull against the rocks, hoping the mermaids come back.

If you can’t hear in the parking lot of a raucous industry

the colours of your emotions, you’re a deaf chameleon

and who could make you listen to what you can’t listen to

even if you had enough people who loved you around you

to want you to try to listen to your own tears when you cry?

Your ear on the same wavelength as a corrugated tin roof,

maybe you can see what I’m trying to say to you

if you close your eyes, and just listen to the rain without

trying too hard to make a big effortless effort to be

auditorily enlightened by the racket of your delusions.

I can’t remember when my life stopped being my own

and I went to bed one night, and I was as human as my toes are

and I awoke, I was merely the afterbirth of a visionary

I didn’t recognize, as my eyes were being igneously wrung

from a cope of dark ore like stars out of the distant hills.

Not a lot of self-respect from the beginning, maybe

it wasn’t that hard becoming everyone and everything else,

and I was a prime candidate for effacement

but when I looked into the mirror of my

ten inch, equatorially mounted, clock-driven, reflecting telescope

I used like a canning jar to capture and mount stars and fireflies

on a black velvet starmap, all I could see

was this abyss staring back at me that couldn’t say

where I’d gone, but the last I thought I heard

was that I got a job as a janitor in an hourglass

sweeping mirages out of a desert of private school stars.

I say what I see as it occurs to me spontaneously.

And I’m compelled to say it without hesitation

so the vision isn’t tainted by the colour of the jewel

it’s passing through, from one eye to the next, ad infinitum.

No light pollution in the shining, though there’s something

about the idea of purity that continues to appal me

because I never had so much against chaos from the beginning

and I sense a deep hatred of all that is soiled and flawed,

in which case, I’d rather be an outlaw than one of these monks

who disdain me because I can’t help seeing their discipline

as uncreatively redundant. Eventually, if they’re blessed,

all our faces are going to fall off by themselves

like the scabs of sunspots that healed the wounded light

like a wildflower shedding its petals like nurses’ caps

and deathmasks frozen like a moment in time meant

to last forever though we go on being estranged by them forever.

Uncanny transformations of the solid into the real.

Maybe it’s time to let the mindstream flow as it will

and let the burning bridges of our delusions cross us for a change

to get to the other side of a life that’s only got one bank

and it’s as clear as space, we’re not even standing on that.

Hang on. Let go. It’s just your hand opening and closing

like a door in a dream, and you’ll find your falling

just as fast as you ever were and if you were to ask your eyes

they couldn’t tell in this vastness whether your were falling up or down.

When you’ve dismantled all you’ve desired,

post neo-deconstructionism sets in like spiritual rigor mortis

and you can’t tell if you’re sleeping with the living or the dead

when you haven’t got your mask on. You can wear holes

in your shoes, and windows and carpets, pacing

like a waterclock of the heart in an hourglass of waiting

like a boy at the edge of the curb with his elbows on his knees

and his face in his glum hands, waiting for a parade

with sacred clowns throwing away free candies

like stars along the route of the mystic Milky Way.

Just be sure to keep your eyes open like a spring thaw

so the light can recognize you like the flower that brought it

to full illumination this time last year like a candle

that keeps blowing its petals out so you can see

the black matter of what you are not deeper

into the eyeless dark than you’ve ever bloomed before.

PATRICK WHITE