WRITERS STRIVING SO HARD TO BE UNLIKE ONE ANOTHER

WRITERS STRIVING SO HARD TO BE UNLIKE ONE ANOTHER

Writers striving so hard to be unlike one another

as they’re looking for new similitudes between themselves

and the many in the one, the one in the many,

everyman writing the autobiography of his loss of identity.

Everywoman etching hers with her fingernails

like grafitti on a glass ceiling breaking

like chandeliers of rain along the fault lines

of a shift in continental plates. Captain of a dreamliner

I set myself adrift like a lifeboat a long time ago.

I sing to my own silence whenever I want to be heard.

Savagely vatic, a wry surrealist with mystic outcomes

I rely on too much, I can see the horror and the humour

in the sublimity of the black, morality farce

that gets laid over your face like a death mask

people can recognize you by like a patina of soot

on the thin chapbooks of the butterflies sipping

from a Venus fly trap like the wellspring of the muse.

Young, in a room that doubled for a shrine,

I had a dark genius for making people mad.

Later, as islands emerged out of my magmatic rage,

my fist relaxed and I acquired a grace for making them cry

but that was still the lunar achievement of a journeyman

watergilding children walking skinless through the world,

wrapping their tears in the iridescent sheen of the nightsky

like a lullaby that had compassion for their dreams.

Master of nothing now, working in the creative freedom

of an abyss that entices me out of myself

like nature into the vacuum of an unknown medium

when I’m not a genie on call, I can hear the laughter

of the sacred clowns in the iconic guildhalls

of a little skill, more yielding than a thousand acres,

you can carry around with you for life like the voice

of a nightbird that knows how to penetrate the dark

like the embodiment of a longing that asks for nothing back.

Ripples on the waters of life. Echoes in solitude.

If I shine, I shine without deliberation. If I love

I rise like foxfire from the ashes of the inspiration.

Ragged in the cloak of a noble calling, sometimes

I’m wrapped in darkness like the skeletal kite

of a troubled bat that can hear more than it can say.

The night is not a reward, but there’s never

a credible alibi for not laughing at yourself

for the crazy wisdom of an allegorical starmap

trying to get you to sit still like a fixed star

for your astral portrait in eighteenth dynasty starmud

glazed in Babylonic lapis lazuli and copper from the moon.

The gesture of a Mosaic snake among the pharoah’s magicians,

I wear the jester’s cap of a daylily when the stars

look into my eyes too seriously to see what keeps me burning

after so many light years away from the island universe

on which I was born. Life, the mystery of perishing perennially,

there’s a hidden secret to being clear that supersedes the obvious.

And when death calls for it, I gouge my eyes out

like symbolic jewels embedded in the underworld

so I can envision the eschatology of meanings

trying to justify their ends as if death had embarrassed them

by not making any sense they could cling to for solace in life.

I celebrate the absurdity of the insight death brings forth

like a firefly with the candlepower of billions of stars.

How the mighty must fall to appreciate the magnificence

of their own insignificance raised up like a grain of sand

to keep the pyramids in perspective like studs on Orion’s belt.

I enjoy a hermetic social life among a variety

of prophetic skulls, but even the moon isn’t a palliative

for my solitude when I hallucinate the fate that awaits me

like a lover at every corner of my coffin. Pay the mourners

before the tears on their cheeks are dry. Didn’t I write

the most amazing odes to catch their beauty on the fly?

Didn’t I publish the names of the flowers and the stars

that moved my spirit to give them something

to remember me by like the lyrical elation

of an unpredictable moonrise? Didn’t I emblazon

the heraldry of new constellations with argent starmaps

on the shield walls of exoskeletons in the Burgess Shale?

Wasn’t my madness enough to convince the shore-huggers

of the imminent dangers of an oceanic awareness

beyond the eyes of their circumspect tidal pools?

Came a time when I realized it crucially necessary

to be given up for lost like a heretic with nothing to confess

but forgiveness for the spiritual search parties

in the labyrinths of everybody’s fingertips in order

to decipher a way out of here like Braille hieroglyphs

breaking trail like a cul de sac in a desert of stars.

Don’t the homeless still seek shelter within

the boundary stones of the firepits I left in my wake

like lost and founds along the way I had to take?

Don’t gauge the size of the city by the measure of its gates.

Exits don’t always live up to the expectations of the entrance.

Sometimes the sunset disappoints the dawn.

And then here and gone all things turn around in a heartbeat

like the wind and the sea, and the toxicity of tomatoes,

and all those weathervanes we used to flip through

like telephone books with tenure, set in their ways

like wet cement, appear cumbersomely contrived and shallow

beside the depths of the nightbirds singing

in the shadows of the moonrise they’re drowning

their voices in like stars in the throats of autumn trees

with their hearts in their mouths like the taste of wild blackberries.

PATRICK WHITE