THEY'RE TRYING TO MAKE ROSARIES OF MY MOLECULES

THEY’RE TRYING TO MAKE ROSARIES OF MY MOLECULES

 

They’re trying to make rosaries of my molecules

but the way I see it

Jesus was nailed to a cross

and then the cross was nailed to Jesus.

Morality is the degeneration of wisdom

and wisdom shows up like a streetsign

that confirms you’ve lost your way.

But I don’t want to be lined up

all in one direction

like magnetons and weathervanes

or Canada geese making waves in the wake of airplanes.

I don’t need a Jerusalem a Vatican a Kaaba or a magnetic north

to tell me the direction of prayer

because I’m not asking for anything more

than here and now

and that’s more than enough

of an afterlife for me

and I’ve already got that

because there’s no birth or death in the moment

and as for the rest

if there’s anything more to feel with

I’ll get through it as I always do

creatively.

I’m already drinking

from the ginger fountain of Salsabil

in jana with houris

whose lips are roses

and skin is pearl

who never seem to bore me.

And in seventh heaven among angelic swans

idling in the stillness on the rivers of joy

like Cygnus in a summer sky

streaming down the Milky Way

or the Road of Ghosts if you’re Ojibway

or Rhea’s milk down her breast

in a cave in Crete if you’re Greek

I’m already floating like an origami paper boat poem

I made from an apple blossom

full of moonlight

down the mindstream

of my own dream

of where I might be going.

And though I’ve been known

to climb mountains like a B.C. salmon

summoned from the depths of the sea

to procreate in the siren pools

and inspired wellsprings of the muses

that soma sema kill me into life like a seed

over and over again

through many lives

I’m not the kind of paddlewheel that abuses the flowing

by entrusting my fate to a lifeboat

when I already know how to swim

through my own medium

by letting things come

and letting things go.

Or if you like

more deciduously

I harvest my life like a windfall

that will keep me dead drunk

through the long winter before me

in a goosedown bed

with a woman who’s got my head

on her shoulders

like the Atlas Mountains

that no one’s ever conquered.

The way I see it  

we’re all irridescent supersensible soapbubbles

everyone a unique universe in hyperspace

smeared in a covenant of rainbows

floating above the birth muck

of our own starmud

with a lethal vulnerability

so I drift well clear of the thorns and horns

of those who want to gore me into damnation

or the humbler modes of mythic deflation

that come like science and salvation to my door.

I adore the radiant lightness of being

in this parachute of skin

I’ve worn thin as a flying carpet

jumping from higher and higher heights

toward a paradise

that looks like the earth from the air.

And if I have any say in the matter

I’ll free-fall this way forever

as I have for certain women

who were forged

like swords on the moon

for a noble death

in the name of a mystic passion

that will romanticize my ruin

into a myth of origin.

I’ll sit on the banks of the Ruknabad with Hafiz

that flows through Shiraz in medieval Persia

and discuss the roses and moles and ghazals

on the cheeks of all the slavegirls

who didn’t take our hands

for all the gold in India

or the new capitol

of the Mongols in Samarkand.

I’ll wait with the Buddha

under the Bodhi Tree

for Venus to get up

like the morning angel of light

who’s just lain with Lucifer

as she once did with Mars

and before him Vulcan

the bitch

like absolute perfect enlightenment

with a smile on her face

that disarms space

like real water in an oasis

deep in a Martian landscape

without a trace of delusion.

Or I’ll just live my everyday confusion

while I’m alive to know it

as that element of unpredictability

that ignores the standard model of the universe

and ascends to chaos spontaneously

like mist off the mirror I’m walking on.

And it’s not hard to imagine

madness as a kind of religion

that gives asylum to the lightning

from packs of hunting weathervanes

with their noses to the wind

when you see what the sane ones are doing.

The strong rope that binds

has been unwoven

into a million weak threads

just as Muhammad said it would

and the moon undoes at night

what she wove by day

and no one among the righteous hypocrites

knows who the faithful are among the heretics.

When the shepherds of the black camel

build tall buildings in the desert.

When a tree shall be planted in Israel

in which no birds sing.

When men dress like women

and women dress like men

and sex degenerates into impotent promiscuity

and then the day of the red-haired one-eyed liar A Dajal

who will sway many with his miracles

for a thousand years

and then the day when his day is done

and then a day

when the last man on earth will be Chinese

and he will grovel in the dust at his sister’s feet

and consummatum est. It’s done.

Histrionic stage directions

for our dramatic exit from existence.

For all the talk of peace

things always end

like a bad party in religion

but how easy it is to imagine one

where prophecies aren’t always

the fossils of things to come

and heaven isn’t a kingdom

and babies aren’t cursed at birth

and a garden doesn’t grow treacherous apples

and the jihads and the crusades

the genocides and pogroms

the Darfurs the Auschwitzs,

the Sabra and Shatilas

the Sawettos and ghettos and gulags

the Bosnias and Gazas and Warsaws of the world

aren’t nails driven through

the heartwood of compassion

to save the chainsaw from the tree.

Only slavers think that freedom isn’t free.

I don’t want to cut out God’s tongue

and call it a creed.

I don’t want to smear

my own shit on the mirror

and claim I’ve corrected perfection

with my anal infallibility.

I don’t want to molest the minds of children

with a Republican spin on creation.

I’m pro-life when it comes to imagination.

I don’t want to vote on the way things began.

And if you’re looking for a unified field theory

or a God-particle in a hadron collider

or the unimprovised explosive device

behind the Big Bang

circling like a drone

to see what terrorist group

is going to claim credit for it

I’ll show you one

that’s not a religion.

I call it a human.

And it explains everything.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CRAWLING THROUGH KELFORD'S JUNKYARD

CRAWLING THROUGH  KELFORD’S JUNKYARD

 

for Rebekah Cider

 

Crawling through Kelford’s junkyard

cursing my fucking life

looking for a cooling fan relay switch

to keep my car from overheating.

I long to be standing on a Japanese footbridge

over a quiet stream somewhere

watching how the water

bends at the waist to greet

the moss-covered rocks

as the soft overcomes the hard

by yielding.

And what a treat it would be

just to lie down alone again at night

in the long dry grass of the wild summer fields

up around Westport

and be renewed by the wonder

that is imparted to me by the stars.

There’s more to being a human

than looking for parts for cars

that are harder to find

than a compatible donor

with a healthy organ 

to do a heart transplant on a dinosaur.

I’m shucking the hoods of cars like oysters

trying to find a black pearl.

I’m opening their mouths like a Nazi dentist

looking for a gold tooth.

I’m a grave-robber plundering a corpse

for body parts

like Leonardo da Vinci

because I’m poor

because I dedicated my life

to my heart and imagination

to gratitude wonder and compassion

as was the fashion when I was young

for fifteen minutes on the West Coast in the sixties.

And something’s kept me true to the meaning

of a word I just made up back then

and never gave away

like the secret name of God

and because of that

I’m now snakier than Schopenhauer in a black mood

when he set his will against his own idea

like his jaw against his mother

or a man crawling through a junkyard

thumbing the grease off fuses

like quick-pick lottery tickets that won’t fit

and didn’t win.

My knuckles anointed in blood and oil

like brutal kings in the dark ages of man

coronated like Clovis at Rouen

I shake them against the gods like mountains

for leading me here to dig up the dead

and rob them of small change

to ensure my passage back to Pizza Hut

so I can spend the day in traffic delivering pizzas

without wondering if the car’s going to turn into

Mt. Saint Helen’s or a demonic exorcism

stuck in a cult of trucks on Drummond.

I picture waterlilies on a grailquest to the stars

as I step like a rogue planet

over the dead orbits of the threadbare tires

lying like the fossils

of empty life-preservers in the mud.

If I were rich

even if I just had a modest sufficiency

I could walk right into Canadian Tire

and buy the fucking part outright

like a real man

instead of enduring myself

crawling through a junkyard

like the punchline of some kind of joke I didn’t get

sixty-one years ago.

It may have been a mistake of the sixties

to liberate sex before work

but it’s still not too late

to liberate the lady at the stake

not only in bed

but from the slave-trade of the Puritans

who came here like refugee Nazis

full of imported hate

to lock us in the stocks of oxen jobs.

By God if she still exists anywhere

out there among the exiles outlaws and heretics

heads are going to roll

for the peace-crimes of the cultural memes

that have turned the human soul

from a labour of passion

into a nightshift of clones and trolls

working overtime on a toll-bridge into Jerusalem.

We’re all born into the light like mystic winners

but the profit margins of hell

compel us to live like sunspots and sinners.

And I can remember when

I was the golden boy

of whom great things were expected

by all the right people

for all the wrong reasons

and all I had to do

was rat on my own eyes

for seeing the things they kept hid

from a poor kid

if I wanted to improve my address

and make my threshold a rung on their ladder.

I didn’t fall from paradise.

I wasn’t pushed.

I didn’t stumble.

I didn’t commit suicide.

I jumped toward earth

like the kissing-stone of the Kaaba.

An alchemical meteorite of anti-matter

I threw my philosopher’s stone

through their projection of me in the mirror

and quickly turned all that gold

back into this base metal lead

and then walked away

from the periodic table altogether

to be true to my own elemental nature

even if that meant belonging to another universe.

I came to understand that existence is a mixed drink

two worlds in creative collusion

like galaxies pouring into a blackhole

and that the dark energy dark matter dark flow

in a five to one ratio

was mingled in my blood

like stars and ink and wine

that bloomed in my mind

like an eclipse of the black sun at midnight

crossing the nadir of enlightenment

like an unmapped constellation with eyes of its own

that couldn’t see where I was going.

I wasn’t the knower.

I was the knowing.

I wasn’t the flower

I was the flowing

of one branch into another

of one mindstream into another

like the arboreal reachs of the rivers of earth

all from the same drop of water that gave them birth

all from the same fractal of sand

that replicated death like a pyramid

in the image of what it was made of.

I came to understand

that there was nothing to be afraid of

because everything in existence and out

wasn’t created

it’s creative

and that’s the one sublime insubstantial dynamic

that makes me a human

making myself up as I go along

without beginning or end

not the singer

not the song

but singing just the same.

I was that extremity of chaos

that shows up like a stranger 

in the conditioned consciousness

of an intimate candleflame

you can’t get off your brain

like a moth or a thought

or an unknown bird in a black walnut tree

saying its name out loud to the stars

summoning its own echoes back

to their original voice

like music out of its own solitude.

Even here in the cemetery silence

of Kelford’s junkyard on a Sunday

where the trout lilies are blooming

through the windows of cardoors

that have been shed like petals and scales

and there’s a large black dog

rolling in blue flowers

growing in the shade of a rusty tractor

and my life seems no more

than bad advice

in a mad capitalist enterprise run amok

like a carcinogenic beserker

through the front lines

of an outmoded immunity.

Even here

where the buffalo are still slaughtered

for rubber and iron 

as the conventional weapons of my anger

grow into the nuclear rage

of an age looking for regeneration

like me for a relay switch in Kelford’s junkyard

out of the seeds of its own destruction.

Even here among the plundered cadavers

of these disemboweled vehicles

whose journeys ended like organ donors

who took asylum in a morgue

like the cattle of the sun

in a mythic midnight abbatoir.

Even here despising my life

as I do for the moment

like a sign of the times

that makes heretics out of humans

and binds diamonds to a life of coal

I can feel life emerging in me creatively

like something out of nothing

that is always full

even when the bright vacancy

of a sentient lucidity 

is blinded by its own dark abundance

like a star eclipsed by the sun

as if God were trying to hide from herself

to look for herself in fun

by putting her hands up to her eyes

and counting to forever and forever and forever.

And whatever

the urgency crisis emergency or catastrophe

I’m trying to run from like my own shadow

to evade some apocalypse

like rad fluid throwing up like a drunk

all over the overheated radiator of a seized engine

I won’t be riding away like a cowboy into the sunset

or the pizza delivery dude at Pizza Hut

because I can’t find the missing link

in the genetic code of the microchip

in a relay switch

that’s going to make my fan turn

like a beached starfish

or a dead sunflower

that’s run out of light to follow

like the law of the golden square

into a free-wheeling galaxy

that’s going to keep

the black holes

in my cracked engine block

cool for very long.

Even here now just as wretched as I am

I can still feel the wind

jinxing the pinwheel

of a life I sometimes curse

turning me around

like a synchronous happening

in a charged particle field

unpredictably reversing my spin

as I breathe myself out and in

upon the waters of the abyss

that’s always threatening

to drown me in a vast impersonal space

for making waves in a universe

that has transformatively come to think and feel  

its long dark strange radiant way

into people like us

living dangerously on the brink of the world

as if the only threshold we’ve ever known

were the one false step

on the edge of this heady precipice

we call home.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

REDUCED TO COSMIC INSIGNIFICANCE

REDUCED TO COSMIC INSIGNIFICANCE

 

Reduced to cosmic insignificance

by the splendour of the view

I give the world its due magnificence

by wiping the mirror clean of my existence

so I don’t soil the lamp with soot

or cling like oil to the shoreline

like an eclipse that leaked out of a well

or a thick black serpent haemmoraging snake blood.

I don’t stand here

staring up at the stars

like a new millenium of meaning

trying to express things

that haven’t been heard before

like a stranger at the door

flipping through panicked grammars

to let me know the house is on fire

and the nearest clean water’s on the moon.

When you’re not bound by anything

you’re open.

When there’s no truth to seek.

Nothing hidden.

Nothing disclosed.

No longing in the fire.

No fulfillment in the ashes.

You don’t need to know who you are

to be truly human

because the moment you say you’re this

you’re contradicted by that

and you’re not anymore.

You’re drawing up plans

for a building

that already stands before you

like the reflection of the Alhambra on water

like the bones of your body

that arose out of the starmud

to frame you on that cornerstone of blood

that everything else rests upon

like a pyramid by a river that floods

or the wellspring of an oasis in the desert

far far far to the west of the sun

where Venus burns

like a white mare

in the high fields

and just to look up

is to answer the summons

like a Libyan wind from the north.

The universe isn’t trying to reach out to us.

It isn’t trying to preach to us.

It isn’t trying to teach us

anything we didn’t want to learn

about this turn of events

in the deep dark concern

we have for ourselves

when the mirrors turn their backs on us

as if to say

see for yourself

how much has to go on without you.

Selflessness isn’t what’s left

when something that was there is gone.

It isn’t a desert that’s left

after you’ve tasted the water in the oasis

and seen through the mirage that’s been swept away

along with your thirst for delusion.

It isn’t the nihilistic emptiness

of the mind calling out to itself for long years

without ever hearing the echo of its own voice

come back to itself

like a dove

with a sprig of olive in its beak

it carries around with it

as if peace

were the only place left to land.

Selflessness isn’t the taste of the cup

after you’ve drunk the wine.

Selflessness isn’t something to be

something to see

something to become

something to understand

or something you can resist

anymore than you can resist space

because it is the non-existence

of everything that is as it is

inconceivably arrayed before you

like the immeasurable measure of your own mind.

When you’ve lost your way in the dark

and the silence isn’t a friend of yours

and you’re asking the stars

where your eyes have gone

send out the blind

because they’ll find them

faster than those who think they can see.

Dark matter enlightens the ignorance of lucidity.

Dark matter can be things before they happen.

Dark matter is the mother of the world

who gave up her identity

so you could delude yourself into believing

you’re not the same as her to whom

you’re bonded like time to space

whatever you do to escape her embrace.

Dark matter knows

by the emptiness in her heart and womb

that the universe

isn’t a precondition of life

but life is a precondition of the universe.

The dark mother’s emptiness is always full

like a woman who has lost much

and gives more

because her suffering is thornless

and the waves go on forever

like mystic oceans in the rose

when she sends the light out

on a long sea journey at night

like a widow standing

at an expanding window

abandoned by the view

thinking of what she gave birth to.

New lamps for old.

Blue-white T Tauri stars

for dreaded black holes.

Intimately fresh wounds

she mends with cosmic scars.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE REASON MOST PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY

THE REASON MOST PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY

 

The reason most people are unhappy

is that they love their misery.

They cling to it

like a voodoo doll of themselves

they’ve been poking pins in since childhood.

They derive their identity from it.

They wouldn’t know who they were without it.

They drive pins through its eyes in the mirror

to make things clear as rain

and then refusing to go along

with the flow of life

seek shelter in the pain

of never going anywhere.

They cast curses

on fate on God on life on love

on the impure selflessness of blue knowledge

but they’re spitting into the wind

and their curses come back on them

like chapter and verse

of an infernal bible

that doesn’t command them

to do anything but carry on as they are.

You can look up astonished at the stars

enraptured by a glimpse of the same mystery

that awes the gods themselves

into an unfamiliar silence

and lose the moment

like a butterfly on a chainsaw

as you hear the hiss and snarl of misery 

dying and whining beside you

like a snowflake on a furnace

about being down to its last cigarette

in front of all these firing squads

gathered like constellations

against the innocent flame

of a solitary match

that refuses to go out

without fixing the blame

on everything else that shines.

Misery sees a waterlily opening in a swamp

transforming all that decay

like enlightenment

into something brief and beautiful

like earth’s answer to the stars

and it’s the swamp it remembers

in all its lurid details:

the spider sucking the life

out of the dragonfly

caught in a radiant web

among the treacherous cattails.

Misery holds a grudge against life

for sustaining itself on food

it grows for itself

and breaks like loaves among the poor

to keep things going

whether you taste honey

or bitter ashes on your bread

or brunch with the dead

by giving up hunger altogether

as a protest against

the lavishness of nature

squandering good water on wine.

I remember a poet

from the non-existent good old days

who could cut your throat like a razor

with a sharp dark phrase

and the birds would stop singing

and his girlfriend in the corner

would shudder to think

she would be his next blood-sacrifice

if he were ever to discover

how innocent she really was.

He ended the way he began

according to his own cosmic laws

with nothing left to eclipse

agreeing with Sophocles

that never to have been born is best.

He may have gotten the world off his chest

when he shot himself through the heart

like the last fang of wisdom he had to impart

like a crescent of the moon

that would never be full

like a sickle without a harvest

that cut down everything in sight

just to spite the flowers

but he had to point the gun

at his heart

not his brain

to do it.

And that was that.

He stayed true to his pointlessness

as if that were the point

he had been trying to make all along.

And then the birds broke back into song.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE REASON MOST PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY

THE REASON MOST PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY

 

The reason most people are unhappy

is that they love their misery.

They cling to it

like a voodoo doll of themselves

they’ve been poking pins in since childhood.

They derive their identity from it.

They wouldn’t know who they were without it.

They drive pins through its eyes in the mirror

to make things clear as rain

and then refusing to go along

with the flow of life

seek shelter in the pain

of never going anywhere.

They cast curses

on fate on God on life on love

on the impure selflessness of blue knowledge

but they’re spitting into the wind

and their curses come back on them

like chapter and verse

of an infernal bible

that doesn’t command them

to do anything but carry on as they are.

You can look up astonished at the stars

enraptured by a glimpse of the same mystery

that awes the gods themselves

into an unfamiliar silence

and lose the moment

like a butterfly on a chainsaw

as you hear the hiss and snarl of misery 

dying and whining beside you

like a snowflake on a furnace

about being down to its last cigarette

in front of all these firing squads

gathered like constellations

against the innocent flame

of a solitary match

that refuses to go out

without fixing the blame

on everything else that shines.

Misery sees a waterlily opening in a swamp

transforming all that decay

like enlightenment

into something brief and beautiful

like earth’s answer to the stars

and it’s the swamp it remembers

in all its lurid details:

the spider sucking the life

out of the dragonfly

caught in a radiant web

among the treacherous cattails.

Misery holds a grudge against life

for sustaining itself on food

it grows for itself

and breaks like loaves among the poor

to keep things going

whether you taste honey

or bitter ashes on your bread

or brunch with the dead

by giving up hunger altogether

as a protest against

the lavishness of nature

squandering good water on wine.

I remember a poet

from the non-existent good old days

who could cut your throat like a razor

with a sharp dark phrase

and the birds would stop singing

and his girlfriend in the corner

would shudder to think

she would be his next blood-sacrifice

if he were ever to discover

how innocent she really was.

He ended the way he began

according to his own cosmic laws

with nothing left to eclipse

agreeing with Sophocles

that never to have been born is best.

He may have gotten the world off his chest

when he shot himself through the heart

like the last fang of wisdom he had to impart

like a crescent of the moon

that would never be full

like a sickle without a harvest

that cut down everything in sight

just to spite the flowers

but he had to point the gun

at his heart

not his brain

to do it.

And that was that.

He stayed true to his pointlessness

as if that were the point

he had been trying to make all along.

And then the birds broke back into song.

 

PATRICK WHITE