PEACE IN THE SADNESS THAT ALWAYS
OVERTAKES ME
Peace in the sadness that always
overtakes me
this time of night. Distance and time
in the silence.
The darkness breathes subliminal
fragrances of the past.
Intensities relax and grow expansively
immense.
The stars look down on my eccentric
solitude
and deepen my emptiness with a strange
longing
to shine with the same cold fury of
creative turmoil
their unattainable radiance has always
inspired in me.
It may well be no small thing to
counterpoint
the beauty of their brilliance with my
paltry daub
of mortal starmud whose every
aspiration ends
in the expertise of an apostate clown
trying
to embody the first principles of his
sacred folly
without breaking into tears of face
paint as if
I were talking to dream figures in my
sleep
while I was still awake, and
inseparable as I am
from the stars down here by the river
where the town
doesn’t weed the stray whispers out
of the light,
none of us can explain the oddity of
our presence
in the midst of each other like psychic
phenomena.
And it isn’t likely I’ll know
before I die
whether I’ve wasted my life and
theirs or not.
I wonder if Jupiter ever feels like a
loser
for letting the sun down like a brown
star
that didn’t quite reach critical mass
to shine as a binary companion at the
dance
instead of sitting it out on the
periphery
like a wallflower in perpetual bud too
shy to be asked.
So my mind, as old as I can remember,
has
been allegorizing the abyss with
surrealistic romantic facts
to reach out like a bridge across the
mirage
of a blackwater mindstream in a desert
of stars
as if there were someone to relate to
in the clear light of the void less
impersonal
than the Planck lengths of speculative
graffiti
trying to attribute a narrative theme
to chaos
I could humanize like a candle in a
lonely room.
Idle ruminations of a restless night
owl
with blood on its talons like the last
crescent
of the waning moon roosting in the
leper colonies
of the inundated birch groves on the
far bank.
Most of my life it’s been an
excruciating labour of love
to bind the world to me in a collagen
of metaphors
that nucleates my cells and atoms with
mythologems
of the multiverse in the heartwood of
every one of them.
I’ve even come to appreciate the
quantum entanglements
of delusion and enlightenment as
complementary opposites
that have engendered my oxymoronic
awareness
of their coincident contradictories of
inharmonious synchronicity
and acted out the crazy wisdom of the
fool accordingly.
A liberated discipline of free
association
I keep rolling my prophetic skulls like
dice
against the odds of my meteoric amino
acids
ever having tallowed me like flesh
around
the wick of my spine mining liquid
nanodiamonds
out of the ore of these spent match
heads in Antarctica.
I paint my interior dialogue with the
cosmos
in vivid vowels but the consonants
still count
as earth colours I can rely on to
ground the effect
of lightning rooting in the wetlands of
my starmud.
Creatures rise out of the dark lagoon
like breaching trees
and I’m subsumed in these visions of
their passing away
as if there were nothing more
noteworthy about evolution
than someone realigning their body with
the angle
of what they’re adjusting to in their
sleep.
What random act of inconsequence dreams
of us
when we’re not there to second guess
the outcome?
Colloquies of madness, poetic
cosmologies
extrapolated from supra-dimensional
improbabilities,
I’m still amorphous enough to accept
the world
on its own terms as if it had all been
created anonymously
to intrigue the lunatics who focus on
it as if
it meant something as significant as
music
to the incoherent lyrics of their
longing to hear
a voice answer back that isn’t the
echo of their own
in this delirium of mystery where the
nightbirds sing
simply because the stars are there to
inspire them
and Sisyphean dung beetles navigate
their stones up the hill
like a solar system by the spectral
radiance of the Milky Way.
PATRICK WHITE
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