EVERYBODY SAYS I'M TOO INTENSE

EVERYBODY SAYS I’M TOO INTENSE

 

Everybody says I’m too intense and I say

you sure as fuck aren’t.

And since I was sixteen in highschool

and before that in the local neighbourhood

in the bosom of my family

people have always thought I was mad.

My highschool graduation yearbook says

most likely to become a mad teacher mad scientist mad poet mad.

An oracular assessment of my peers

that has haunted me for years.

But I say crazy is the only antidote

to the extreme chaos of conditioned consciousness.

Look at the world.

Lies lies lies.

A coalition of lies

that calls itself

the history of civilization.

Crazy wisdom.

The tantric insight

into the fact

there is no nature to things.

You’re not a very wise human

if you don’t understand ignorance

is the clearest expression of enlightenment.

You see what I mean?

It’s hard to speak of unity

in the split tongue of a snake

without making an oxymoron of it

at the fork in the roads

it mistakes for a direction.

Regard the dead parachutes of Babylon

no one can understand you

I said to myself one day dying with a sneer.

It’s the moral obligation of a writer to make things clear.

I forget who said it.

But he was a nitwit.

One of the lice of literature

that makes your mind want to scratch itself raw

for the next half century.

It’s that word moral that bothers me.

Not his preconception of clarity

though when it gets down to that

you smear the mirror

when you try to be clear about clarity.

I said that.

It takes an amateur madman

to be a good shrink

and make reality

try to correspond

to what you think.

But what an impoverished way to live your life.

What a distortion of humanity.

If you’re mad enough

there’s plenty of room in the asylum

to embrace sanity with decorum.

When in Rome do as the Romans do

and try not to make a spectacle of yourself in the Colloseum.

It’s been my experience

that so much of what the world calls mad

is only freedom

with the courage to open its eyes.

Most people look into the eyes

of spontaneous freedom

and it terrifies them.

They don’t want to know

what’s not there.

The world ends at the back of their eyelids.

Things just get too deep

and they drown in their sleep

like pearldivers on the moon.

At every moment of your life

life is more certain than death.

It’s all you can say about

where you expect to be tomorrow

and where this is now.

Everybody always wants things

to look the way they seem.

They want to live the dream awake.

They don’t go along with their own mindstream.

They’re shore-huggers.

They live at the edge

of the great sea of mysterious being

in sandcastles with blowholes

that burp like tiny volcanoes in the receding tide.

Herculaneum and Pompey

are mummified in the flow

down their pygmy mountainsides

but it’s easy to see where they hide

thinking they’re out of reach.

But who am I to preach

quicksand to cornerstones such as these?

Everybody always tells me I’m too intense

but they’ve never been through a nightstorm

far out in the Pacific

where the moon’s your only lifeboat

and it’s just gone down like a bright penny in a wishing well

like a last longshot in the slots of an odds-making hell.

And it’s seven to five you survive.

They’ve never fallen in love with a hurricane rose

that’s built like a fortune-cookie

and paints her eyelids

with the blood of ex-lovers

who were sacrificial enough to propose.

If you go looking for the meaning of life sincerely

sooner or latter it will find you

like one fact final enough to delude all the others

into thinking it’s ultimately true.

Complete one act well

and you’ve accomplished everything

because one act begets another

until everything is done of its own accord.

Because your birth isn’t terminal

your death is ongoing.

And the same is true in reverse.

How do I know this is so?

I let go.

I blossom like the memories of a dead branch

in the apple orchards of the Hesperides

everyone of them

a full moon.

I see how innocent my doubt is.

So even my darkness

is a singing bird on a green bough.

I’ve looked at drops of water

at the tips of the blades of the stargrass

like the thin-skinned tears of the sky in childbirth

and everyone of them

was the seed of a new world.

Worlds within worlds

whose only conventions

are the creative dimensions of the perceivers.

Not one size fits all.

I don’t put my finger to my lips

like an ego-I

to eclipse the great silence.

I let it say me with its eyes.

And we both come as a great suprise to each other

when we’re standing

on the same side of the mirror

on the far shore of the mindstream

like two eyes of the same seeing

astonished we’re here at all

without lying to the miracle

about our reasons for being.

Have you ever considered the enormous distances

in the body of a small bird?

Or how strangely intimate a star can be

from thousands of lightyears away?

A whisper of lucidity in an oceanic ear.

Something you’ve heard for a long time

but never listened to before.

Never this near.

This clear.

Have you ever wondered which of two sisters

is the older of the elements.

Fire or water?

Or why spring lies about her age

when she’s as old as autumn

and then claims

to be the daughter of the grain

when in fact she’s the womb of summer?

Is it insane to wonder?

Is it too intense to fear

living my whole life

as if I were never here

to take a good look?

Is it deranged to feel

the enlargement of my seeing

is not the diminishment of my being

because I opened my eyes

and saw they were both

two ends of the same telescope?

It’s one thing to let the light in through the gates of your eyes.

It’s wholly another to let it get this far

into the palace of your imagination

without being announced

or scrutinized.

Life’s a breeze

when you don’t look at it

like a disease you’re afraid to get over.

If I’m inspired by the vastness of my ignorance

to turn a leaf over now and again

like a new page in an old book

to avoid being obvious

am I looking for a happy ending

or am I just delighting in my indolence

when I read it like a map of my own lifelines

by running my finger over it as if I were blind

and it were the one who could see?

If I don’t believe we appear briefly

to disappear forever

because everything here

is a vast collaboration

with creative emptiness

and it isn’t going anywhere

what do I care

if you’re confused by my endeavours?

What’s it to you

if I’m a mirage on a grailquest in a desert of stars?

Or if I practise compassion spontaneously

toward myself and others

as if we were all the same wound

under many scars

and if my lies heal

are they not the fruit of insight?

If I’m the dark genius

deeply intrigued

by my own misdirection

that you say I am

though that doesn’t change a thing

about the way I can’t help being

and not being myself

what makes you think

there’s only one star

you can point out

like the needle

in the impoverished compass

of your last course correction

as if there were only one way to go

and the truth were always

somewhere north of you

instead of under your feet

in all directions at once

like the radiance of stars

before the arising of signs?

Today Jesus and the Buddha walk on water.

Tomorrow Lucifer and Kamamara will walk on fire.

But when the opposites

get their shit together

and realize they can’t lift it

and abandon it by the side of the road

like an outhouse on a trailer hitch

or a hubcap in a country ditch

that’s stopped spinning around

and come to rest in an oxymoron

posing as the full moon

that’s come to liberate

an empty asylum

they both walk on earth

bewildered by their innocence

when they discover

they’ve never had anything to do

with the course of events

that made them who they are.

Wasn’t the Buddha enlightened

by watching Venus in the dawn

lead the sun up

like the morning star

that once was Lucifer

before he took the fall like a ripe apple

before he stole fire from the gods like Prometheus

the thief of inspiration

knowing the moment of his perfection

in all realms of knowledge

infernal or divine

was the best time to jump?

And the darkness will always seem like a liar

to those who don’t know the truth.

If I don’t see life as just a bag of water

with nine holes in it

leaking out of itself

as I onced used to

eras and eras ago

and you still do

when I look at what remains

of the dessicated parachute of a jellyfish

you’ve made of your brains

clinging to shore

next to the sewage drains

that poured you out

and washed you up

and wiped their mouths of the taste of a dead ocean

what’s it to you

if I run so far out to sea

from so high up

on the down side of the world mountain

I’m swimming with dolphins on the moon?

I’m teaching blind starfish how to shine

like dark matter with a mind of its own

and no sign of a constellation

with feet of clay

afraid to leave home.

Say what you want to say.

Be what you want to be.

Enlighten your ignorance

and then ignore your enlightenment.

Don’t drive the darkness out of your lucidity

like a scapegoat into a spiritual desert

you’re afraid to enter

because you’re not bright enough to see

that under every threshold

between the inside and the out

certainty and doubt

insanity and the sane

the trivial and profound

the homeless and a habitable planet

there’s a sphere

spinning on a tilted axis

in the immensity of space

that’s so far out it’s in.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE TRAGIC BLISS

THE TRAGIC BLISS

 

The tragic bliss of having loved you

like a lost generation.

The farcical sorrow

of the one that was found

like the other shoe

of a crystal slipper that didn’t fit.

What was lost?

What was recovered?

Nothing’s lost until it asks where it’s going.

I was in love with the knower.

But you loved the knowing.

Everything was as it was.

Only the perishable growing.

Only the stars to clarify oblivion.

Only you telling me

like a leftover voice in my head

that’s been gathering dust in the attic

it’s one thing to do what you want to do

it’s another to do what you must.

It was only then

that I really understood your helplessness.

How weak you were.

How deeply enslaved you were

to adding a new link every day

to lengthen your chains

as a way of earning your freedom.

How far down the road did you get?

I haven’t gone anywhere since.

I let things come to me

so nothing’s ever the same anyway

whether I stay or go.

It’s still the same river

you can’t step into twice.

It’s still the same mindstream

watching the world flow by

like a starmap of fireflies high overhead.

I’ve got wounds that never wear the same scars twice

and get hurt worse

when they realize how rare it is

that a young scar ever listens to an old wound’s advice. 

I watch the moon slash her wrists over and over again

on her first and last crescents

and the shadows bleed out of me

across the seabeds of dead oceans

where the bride of suicides

trails her gown of seafoam

on the tides of adolescents

that never made it to shore.

I could never see life as intolerable

except as a form of self-disgust

however brutal it was

watching the seagulls swoop down on the baby turtles.

You changed like seasons of paint.

You wiped the moon off the window.

You disowned all your doors

as the whores of a saint

and rolled a stone back over your womb.

From now on things would be immaculate.

God would come down

and help you clean up your room like a desert.

Thorns for the main course.

And roses for dessert.

I tried to free you from your glass rapture

with lifelines of black lightning

that would thaw your chandeliers

and shatter the eyes in your face

like glaciers in an ice age

but you wanted to live forever

in a cold crevice of eternity

like a wooly Mammoth in an ice palace

with a thirty five thousand year old afterlife.

You felt a shift in the north pole

and followed your inclination

to fix everything in its place.

You found religion.

You found grace.

You made time stop

but you only widened the space between us.

That’s when I left the Sahara to its hermits

and what little water I had left

to the mirage of my wife

to look for something green

and obscene with life.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MY SECRET PLACE

MY SECRET PLACE

 

My secret place down by the Tay River.

I deer-bed down among the atumn grasses

and last of the New England asters

half-lotus in cowboy boots

with a clear view of the stars

dancing on the water.

The waterlilies have perished.

Jupiter.

And the moon at last crescent.

No one knows I’m here but me.

I’ve never come here with another.

A place where I talk to the universe alone

as if it existed

more personally

than the mere immensity

of a cosmic intelligence

super-saturating time and space.

Belief’s a bad habit of mine

and sometimes I want to be deceived

into believing someone’s listening

even when I know they aren’t

and that the worst always happens for the best

even though I know it doesn’t.

The sky’s a windowpane I can fly through

without breaking my neck on delusions

and the moon feels like a cool poultice on a hot wound.

I watch a spider repair its dreamcatcher

and say good luck.

And the stars don’t really give a damn

how they shine deep in my dark inner spaces.

Everything is so perfectly entranced with being itself

I wonder what it is about a human

that has to take time out like me

to reconsider what I’m doing here

wandering around on the earth

without any certain purpose

other than the ones I make up like poems

to spin bedtime stories out of my nightmares.

A birch leans out over the water

like a woman washing her hair in the river

and I sense there’s an inevitability about a tree

that isn’t like me.

I can’t find a fixed reality

to be in harmony with.

I have no doubt the rocks along the shore are getting it right

but with me conciousness is a light

that contradicts its own clarity

the moment it reveals itself.

There is no path to follow

no way to flow

no aspiration to fulfill

that isn’t pure folly.

Or just another way of running out of myself

like sand in an hourglass

piling up pyramids

until I’ve exhausted myself like Sisyphus

rolling stones uphill.

And then I’m overturned like an empty shotglass

to begin again

or just sit here by the river like an amphibian

and let the universe do what it wants to my brain

without assuming it wants to do anything

or that the damage hasn’t already been done.

A new way to be partially whole!

Flesh and blood with a mineral soul!

Prophetic tents full of snakeoil salesmen.

But I’ve never been tempted

by things I couldn’t give my heart to

and the curse of spiritual valium

is the same as it is on earth.

The withdrawal is as dangerous

as following the addiction

all the way through

to the emergency ward in heaven

that handed out the prescription in the first place.

It isn’t the soul of a butterfly I see

when I look the money-maggots in the mouth.

I’m not praying for an afterlife that’s worthy of me

as if anyone knew what that amounts to.

What would you suggest

for an agony of snakes in a bag of skin

that’s got nine holes in it?

The tears I’ve wept for the world

have all turned into serpents.

The tears I’ve wept for myself

watered the roots of a mirage

in a desert where the stars burn your eyes like sand

and turn your blood to glass.

I wonder if the birch knows

what’s passing it by.

If the river is its mindstream.

And then it comes to me

like a message in a bottle.

Maybe my sole purpose on earth is passage.

Maybe I’m just time looking for a reason for itself

to go on like a season that’s known by the way it changes

by always being estranged from itself.

Maybe I’m the more-than-me I can’t conceive of.

Maybe all these things seem self-possessed in their tranquility

because I’m a mess.

Maybe my being as fucked-up as I am

helps get them through it

and all my pain and turbulence

all my preposterous longings

to be well-meaning and beautiful

all the black elixirs of the ruthless mystery

I’ve drunk from my own skull

held up to the gods

like the begging bowl of the moon

when it’s full

just to see if the darkness tastes of light

the way a lump of coal foreshadows diamonds to come

after aeons of excruciating transformations

and if there’s more room for chaos on a calendar

than there is space in the scheme of things for thought.

But there I go again.

You see what I mean?

Fish jumping out of the stream at the stars

that lure them up out of their depths

like low-flying insects

to take one great leap into a new medium

out of themselves

like an arrow through the back of a bullseye of ripples

it didn’t know it was aiming at.

But things are getting too elaborate

and at this rate I’ll soon be speaking in voices

like some right-brained polyglot in a rapture of saying

going on like the Rosetta Stone

as if I weren’t sitting here alone

like the misbegotten seventh son of zero

trying to come to terms

with a formless reality

I keep stubbing my heart on.

Mahaprajnaparamita.

Great wisdom for the further shore.

Gone! Gone! Gone!

Completely gone beyond.

Isn’t that what the Buddha said

in his secret place

when he went out of his head

trying to stare the world in the face

and all he could see was Venus in the dawn?

Desire and its afterbirth

at the beginning of nothing at all?

An insight into what’s unearthly about the eternal

or just the way the light’s bent by an atmosphere?

To those who can’t let go of things

and to those who cling to letting go

impermanence is suffering

and the only way to cure that

is to pour yourself out upon the earth

like the bitter cup of the moon

when she’s had enough of herself

and find peace

in the sweet potential of your emptiness

to be filled up again.

To sit here in a secret place

like I do

tangled in my human roots 

with waterlilies on my brain

strung out all the way from earth to Venus

like a chain of thought

severed in the distant past

we had resolved would never come between us.

Where is the peace?

Where does that flower bloom

that’s rooted in blood and starmud

if not in the solitude of a human heart

that’s wandered this far from home

along the shores of its longing to return?

Why does my heart argue

against the will of the world

like a salmon swimming upstream

on the downslope of a cosmic mountain?

I’m not trying to scheme my way out of

my dream of this

like someone who turns his back on his eyes.

I’m sick of lies.

I’m sick of universal truths.

I’m sick of how blithely everything obliges death

with every second breath.

I’m sick of the grailquest.

I’m sick of the hypocritical crusades.

I’m sick of Aztecs and Christians

with the blood of gods and children on their lips.

I’m sick of atheists who claim it’s lipstick.

The lightbulb in the well on the moon

to keep the water from freezing up

has gone out

and I’m sick of the way things don’t flow anymore

like a tide in a sea of shadows

like the road of ghosts

through the cold dark vacant interstellar spaces

of an enlightened lunatic with a creative abyss for a heart.

I’m sick of the bitter black ghost bread of my art

that tastes like the futility of burnt paper.

I’m sick of trying to understand

what isn’t understandable

about my own and human nature.

I’m sick of all these long incommensurable interminable questions

I’ve walked all the way to the end of time and again

only to return with an ambiguous answer

that’s rarely communicable through form.

In all humility

take the low place like the sea

and the sewage of the world runs down into me.

Take the high like the open sky

and the mountain turns into a mudslide.

The best is to be here right now as I am

with all my dilemmas answers contradictions insights questions and aspirations

all the paradoxical sorrows that have come

of my physical assurance that life is joy

and ultimate unity is bliss

without the oxymorons

and love’s a deeper insight into life than death

if only by a breath

and though why we’re here in the first place

is anyone’s good guess

intelligence is not the anti-Christ of chaos

but the genius of dark matter becoming aware of itself

like a hidden secret that wished to be known.

What is dark will appear light

if you surround it with something darker

like a star shining in daylight

no one notices

until the night reveals it.

The best is to be here right now as I am.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

like the mirror in a reflecting telescope

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I DID THE KIND OF GOOD A STORM DOES

I DID THE KIND OF GOOD A STORM DOES

 

I did the kind of good a storm does.

I may have broken some tree limbs

and downed some powerlines along the way

but I cleared the air of its festering

and from top to bottom

we got down to the roots of things

like lightning and rain

like real radicals

free-basing the ideological ions

addicted to their brains

like razorblades.

O ya

I remember now

we were going to save the world from itself.

I gave up trying

when I realized

that if we did that

there would be no one left

to save the world from us.

Trying to justify yourself in retrospect

is like trying to exonerate a big hairdo

you wore back in the early seventies.

It can’t be done

except as a kind of dangerous chess

you play with yourself

and cheat.

It’s fun to play

with the lethal intensities

and swaggering immensities of yesterday

as if all those great sublimities that moved us

like fixed stars

had come down to earth

like the ashs of fireflies

in a snakepit of thought

poured out of tiny urns

the size of a human heart.

When I’ve got nothing else to do

and the moon bores me late at night with its looking

I run my tongue along the edge of your words

like old knives

I’ve kept like a collection of my favourite smiles

to see if they still know how to draw blood

and what that might still mean to my heart.

Maybe I should have fallen on them like swords

as you wanted me to

instead of reading them

like a delinquent boy

in front of a no trespassing sign.

Back in those days

my heart was a rock

and my mind

was a broken windowpane.

But I’m not one of those people

who long for the past

as if you could step into the same river twice.

Everyone forgets

memory

Mnemosyne

is the mother of the muses.

Everyday the past

comes up with a new song

that surpasses the last like the future.

The ghost of tomorrow returns to its grave at dawn.

The past is just as spontaneously inspired

as the present

and makes it up as it goes along

thinking this is what it must be like

to live on and on and on

with your cosmic elbows

leaning on earthly windowsills

wondering what it might be like to die

and come back

reincarnated as a horizon

or a threshold.

But I don’t go back to the past

for the view

like a tourist passing through

his old neighbourhood

to see where he was born and died.

I don’t want a brass plague

for a birth certificate

and a postcard

from the edge of nowhere

for a passport

that lies about my record

for telling

what I mistake for the truth

to anyone who’ll listen.

I don’t want to fake my way into reality

the way they do in Zen.

I don’t want to begin again

like tomorrow’s has-been.

I’m not trying to convert the faithless

to my disbelief

like a tree preaching to a leaf

like a cross to a crucifixtion.

I’m not trying to pump my latest work of fiction

up into a universally inflatable religion

you can take on camping trips to the holy land.

I’m not sure

I’m even really trying to understand

the way things were way back then

when we didn’t need to.

Just something to do

when I’m watching the moon

float downstream

like the prophetic skull of Orpheus

all the way from Thrace to Mytilene in Lesbos.

If I look at it long enough

even through a dirty window

I can see a footloose waterlily

preening its feathers

like the swan of a loveletter

late in the autumn

to someone

who will pick it up out of the water

and wonder who it’s from

for the rest of their life

like I do

remembering you

as you are to me

now that all these lunar calendars

have shed their blossoms and leaves

and stand naked as the tree of knowledge

adding zeros to everything

like tree-rings in the heartwood

of my personal history.

I’ve never made a cliche

out of any muse of mine

whether she took me to bed or not.

If she infused me with inspiration

I didn’t abuse her

with a parting shot

like the afterthought

of an ignoble mind

or a paper phoenix

that couldn’t take the heat

when things got sweet and hot.

I come back

like an old wind to a funeral pyre

that blazed its way up to the stars

to see if anything

was left unburnt or unanswered

in the ashes of the scorched earth.

I rock the cradle awhile

like a manger in hell

that once gave birth

to a childless messiah.

I transcend my own innocence

and fall toward paradise

without asking to be forgiven.

Love hangs stars above us all

that take the fall

for the way our scars

demonize our open wounds for living.

I drink from my skull

to your memory

and then I drink to you

whoever you are now.

In a desert on the moon

in a sea of shadows

I drink in the darkness alone

like an open window

to let the birds out

as if they were the only words

I had left to say

about the passing years

to hide my crazy tears

like an atheist on a grailquest

who knows that life

is a mirage

of burning muse water

that tastes like broken mirrors.

 

PATRICK WHITE