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

IT'S NOT LIKE THE FACE IN THE FLOWER OF THE STAR

IT’S NOT LIKE THE FACE IN THE FLOWER OF THE STAR

It’s not like the face in the flower of the star

grows more beautiful the more times it’s looked at,

it’s just that it’s humanizing

the vast, cold spaces within you

with your own awareness of it so that

when you spot Arcturus shining through the trees

as you have since childhood and call out its name

it’s you that shines brighter

a magnitude more for the moment.

Affable familiars in a big, lonely space

acknowledging each other in passing

as if, animate and inanimate, the same,

what we all hold in common

since we started kicking in the womb

is this life of perpetual exile. Shape-shifters,

driven out of the bliss of oblivion, to bury the bell

of our agony in the stillness of an alien place

and try to love everyone who’ll let us

as if they weren’t a stranger at the gate.

O the appellations the mind applies to its formlessness

in a world of forms to befriend its cosmic isolation.

That fills space up with stars and birds

suggested by its senses and then casts a spell

like a grammar of things to turn them into words

to start a conversation with chaos as if we weren’t all

talking to ourselves. We put lifemasks on everything

like an old Greek play and act out our tragedy

like a dilemma gored on the horns of the goat gods

as if they had a clear grasp of what we were talking about.

Asking a question doesn’t change

the ambiguous nature of the issue

and when no one answers isn’t proof

the silence is divine. Bright vacancy, dark abundance,

nothing includes everything in it

like a table of contents for the mind

that plays host to its own imaginary guests.

The door bell rings and the world’s

standing in the doorway bearing gifts

that have no other meaning other than

they’re addressed to you the way life

nourishes itself on its own emptiness

as if every moment were a cause of celebration

engendered by your own inspiration.

Every song in the distance is the ancestral echo

of your own voice in an abyss

you’re trying to relate to by listening

as if you were sounding the depths

of the mystery you must be to yourself

to live among your own creations as if

someone signed you too. Your name

scrawled in cadmium red blood across

a white canvas of albino eyes in the dark.

Imagination obedient to the freedom

of its own lawlessness to create as it is urged to

on a caprice, a gust of stars, the nudge of an atom,

whole new paradigms of space and time

it will answer to as if someone called its name.

If the same eye by which I see the star

is the eye by which the star sees me,

then who’s the creator, who’s the creation?

So if someone were to ask me the colour of my eyes,

I’d show them a painting I did

of blue weed towering beside a dirt road

or a moonscape I dashed off one starless night

between the clouds. Or even further afield,

if I felt they’d been siderealized sufficiently,

the blue auras of trace elements grinding galaxies

into mirrors they can see themselves in

like leggy gazelles come down to the shore

to drink from their own reflection of themselves

like telescopes alert to the eyes that lie in wait for them.

Everywhere I wander down these pathless ways

through my homelessness, I meet myself

like a mirage at the end of a cul de sac,

and I walk through it like a wall

or two galaxies passing through each other

without disturbing a star, I embody such distances,

and I encounter hypnotists from all quarters

that call themselves seekers of the truth

trying to wake up from their own magic

as if they hadn’t caught on to their own minds yet

and were still underestimating the power of their illusions.

Why wash the stars off the windows, or sweep

the scars of the autumn leaves off the stairs

expecting the enlightened arrival

of the lord and lady of the manor any day now

as if you could get a grasp on the nature

of your own emptiness like a servant

looking for a master in your own image?

Everything nasty and blind,

everything beautiful and sublime

are the facets of a clear jewel

turning in the light of the void.

All that is separated, all that is enjoined,

all that are searching and finding

and losing themselves again like solar flares

on a return journey back to the sun

or rivers flowing into themselves

as if every wave crossed the threshold of itself

into an openness exhilarated by

the expansive gesture of its presence,

are just the hidden secret of you

wanting to be known by a world

you whisper into your own ear

as if you’d never heard the sound

of your own voice before the wind

began to throw the sea into turmoil

and you were swept ashore out of

the inconceivability of your own emptiness

like a myth of awareness sadly in need of an origin.

So you end up creating a world

out of your own inner resources and calling it

mother or father in the hopes it might be able

to explain what you’re doing here by yourself.

And that’s how you get lost in the labyrinths

of your own being, that’s how your wires get crossed

in the short circuits of your lifelines

tangled up in kites like morning glory

that wouldn’t fly. You keep asking simulacrums

of your own creativity about things

that only you on your own, lonelier than God,

projected imaginatively like a lifemask

you created in your own image

onto the formlessness of an invisible space within you,

can be the answer to. The moment

you say I am to yourself and realize

that you’re not even there to recognize it

the little thumb puppet in three pounds of starmud

dematerializes like something solid

into the presence of the real. You revel like a child

in the creative liberty of not keeping your own distance

from anything in existence, knowing

in the crazy wisdom of your second innocence

the only thing that binds you to it

or separates you from it, is a sense of play.

That everytime you say I am without

including the whole universe in it as well

it becomes the wayward paradigm

of another brilliant mistake with feet of clay.

Or as Archibald Lampman said

dead of a heart attack at thirty-six,

poor shining angels whom the hoofs betray.

PATRICK WHITE