I LOOK INTO PEOPLE'S FACES

I LOOK INTO PEOPLE’S FACES

 

I look into people’s faces

and I see the same wound

under many different scars.

I look into their hearts

like a stranger at night

through a passing window

and I see how suffering through

the agonies of life

has ripened some

with sweetness and compassion

and others are already rotten before they fall.

I look into people’s eyes

and some are vast starlit skies

and some are the iota subscripts

of scholarly fireflies

that footnote the constellations

at the bottom of the page

with details off the beaten path

of their MLA mainstream cosmic thesis.

And some are like moons

with parenthetical crescents

with nothing in between

both sides of their smile

that isn’t a cynical aside

about the lost innocence

of a phase they’ve already gone through.

And some stare back like eclipses

that have pulled the blinds down

over their eyes

like sunglasses disguised

by a witness protection program

but you just know

they’re oilslicks on the Sea of Shadows

as they were in the womb

and in the Gulf of Mexico

the black blood of an incorporated miscarriage

that haemorraged like the pot of gold

at the end of the olaceous rainbow.

I look into people’s souls

and I see how afraid they must be of life

to hide out in the open

like an ocean

that hasn’t kept faith with its own depths

and tries to pretend it’s as airy and light as the sky.

The birds are flying through the roots.

The fish are swimming in the treetops.

I see judas-goats chained to the stakes of their ego-Is

like sacrificial tiger bait devoted to their cunning.

I see the anti-muses that shadow Mt. Helicon

like black holes

in the death valleys of human imagination.

And I wonder how they ever got here.

What bend in space led them to this twisted place

like a forsaken road

they keep taking

like a wormhole through time

into the womb of a stillborn universe

where the moonlight burns their embryos

on pyres of lime

beside the dry creekbeds

of nameless rivers going nowhere?

Along their flowerless banks

I see the rib-cages of dead snakes

that went witching for water

with tongues and tines of Kundalini lightning

that ran up their spines

like time through a waterclock

and the hulls of empty lifeboats

that died in the desert

at the bottom of the mirage

they drowned in

hoping to find themselves

among those who survived

by learning to swim through sand

like fish in an hourglass aquarium.

I’d rather walk on stars

reflected in the shattered mirrors

of my last self-image

than repay

the generosity of my solitude

with mass ingratitude.

I listen to people’s voices

and they all seem like the same echo

with many different mouths.

I’ve tried to respect

the mystic specificity

of the thousands of fierce individuals

I’ve met over the years

but the more I’ve learned

about myself and others

the more I see the same mind

in many different skulls.

The same genius of inspired water

that poured an ocean

of sentient awareness

into everyone of our cells.

Union differentiates.

Separation binds.

I look into people’s faces

however young or old they are

and I see infinite spaces

moonlighting as time

on the nightshift of the stars.

I see horror and compassion .

I see butterflies sipping the nectar of diamonds

like honey in the promised land

and maggots born in shit thriving on shit

like the janitors of the dead

because everything grows best

in the soil it was born into

like karma in the fortune-cookies

of wombs and eggs and cocoons.

I look into people’s eyes

like sad stars 

through the generous end of the telescope

that brings the far near

like impact craters

and I see how some people

cling to the memory of themselves

like underground seas

in frozen lockets of water on the moon.

I look into people’s secret shrines

they build like birds

in the eye of the storm

looking for salvation.

And I can hear the echo of their prayers

bouncing back off hydrogen clouds

like a nineteen twenties radio show

thousands of lightyears away

as if they just said them yesterday

and the universe as usual

threw the words back in their face

like the cosmic background hiss

of snowflakes on a furnace

going out like stars.

I’ve seen the innocence of fireflies

making halos

and the blood-rose weaving thorns

around the massive blackholes of death

as if they were merely a pinprick in a voodoo doll

that got into white magic by mistake.

I’ve looked into the nuclear blaze of madness

like an A bomb with shades on

and seen the flash and shadow

of embryo silhouettes

spit out like cave paintings

on the firewalls of the fusion wombs

that give birth to the heavier elements

it takes to survive.

But the water’s not mad

just because the moon’s a lunatic.

The mirror might seem

just as angry as you are

but it doesn’t feel a thing.

Learning wisdom is learning space.

It doesn’t eat flowers

and the weeds don’t sting.

It takes everything it embraces to heart

and nothing’s left out

from the very beginning.

Like the whole of the moon and the sky

in every eye of water

that’s ever looked into me

and seen that everyone

is the heart of a mystery

whose lucidity

is their only true identity.

Its our seeing that makes the flowers open

and the stars shine.

Its our hearing that gives the wind something meaningful to say

and the grass something to whisper about.

Whatever you touch

walks in your skin from thereon.

Whatever you taste

be it roses and nettles

or sulphur and wine

or the sour-sweet radiance

of the stars on your tongue

you’re the flavour of the day

in everything.

It’s your nose

that gives the burning leaves

in the urns of autumn

the spectral fragrance of chrysanthemums

that are barely holding on.

And it’s your mind.

Your heart.

Your blood.

Your body.

Your imagination.

Your intuition.

Your wisdom.

Your ignorance.

Your darkness.

Your light.

Your spirit

enlightened or deluded

whatever you think or feel

is abundantly missing

or dream you’re waking up to

that makes the world real

in every mystically specific detail

of who you are.

Who else?

I look into myself

as far as the stars at the edge of my seeing

fourteen point five billion lightyears away

and I can see how much time and space

how many species of life

generation after generation

have been born to give birth and die.

All the roses swept from the stairs of our hopeless tomorrows

because they were a tribute to love

meant for someone else.

All the spontaneous joys

that cast their long random shadows

like occasional fireflies of insight

across the lunar mindscape

of this afterlife of sorrows

where every church is the gravestone

of an unsuspecting god.

I look into my own seeing

like light upon light

in the vast expanse

of an unknowable night

and I’m cosmicly astonished

by how many worlds within worlds

eyes within eyes

minds within minds 

lives within lives it takes

to make a single habitable human being

meaning everyone of us sacred fools

fit as a genius

for the crazy wisdom

of a creative life

in a self-inspired universe.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TIME SUFFERING AND TOO MUCH LOVE

TIME SUFFERING AND TOO MUCH LOVE

 

Time suffering and too much love have made me soft. I’m a moonrock that’s blunted its edge in a war against water. I’ve put my volcanos to bed. I’ve put my anger on ice like a Martian meterorite in Antarctica. And I don’t go looking for victories that are worthy of my scars as much as I used to. It’s enough to get carried back on my eyelids like a shield wounded in a solitary war of liberation whose frontlines are everywhere. You may be bullet-proof but how do you keep yourself from being assassinated from the inside by your own insight? Or the shadow of a loveletter being slipped under the door by someone in the well-lit hall late at night? I remember knowing who I was. I was whole with a goal and an undeniable direction. Everyone said I was a diamond in the rough but that only meant I couldn’t be cut by the baggage I was carrying. I was the eldest son of a single welfare mother and that’s why I think my small boy’s notion of doing good to please her turned into a holy crusade of gutter heretics against the orthodoxies of wealth and power that squatted like a landlord on the lid of the garbage can we were living in. I grew up like a goldfish in a shark bowl and quickly learned to get the jump on evolution by evolving teeth and fins. And though I’ve gotten rotten falling down drunk with the nine muses beside the Pierian Spring on Mt. Helicon just before they moved down from Thrace to Parnassus I still think of inspiration as blood in the water though I feel more like a dolphin swimming with sharks these days than I do a three hundred million year old marine carnivore who hasn’t changed his ways since his Paleozoic childhood.

              Sometimes I think I might be punchy enough to be loveable and good. But the further I get from home in space and time and thought the more the whole universe looks like my old ratty neighbourhood. And there’s that same old slumlord toad of a toxic Buddha still meditating on his lily pad flowering like the full moon of enlightenment rooted in corruption and decay like a garbage-can lid over the whole earth. Sooner or later you either have to indict life as a war-crime or convince yourself somehow that life isn’t fair or unfair and you can’t stuff the impersonal secret of the universe into your little sentimental heart. You’ve got to mentally outpace space in your expansion to stay one step ahead of the universe. You’ve got to understand that a curse isn’t the reverse of a blessing but two eyes in the same game face you’re wearing to scare your opposite into submission even as you read this now.

              So I turned to love like a romantic poet but women weren’t the church of my soul. They were the manger of thorns that gave birth to me creatively. I may have thought I was the matador with a sun-forged sword in my hand but it was my blood that ran down the horns of the moon. It’s sweet when the new moon lies down in the arms of the old but it’s hell on earth to be gored on the first and last crescents of a star-crossed calendar. But if someone were to ask me now I would say that sex is a farcical oxymoron that binds us to our spiritual profundities like sacred clowns. Love might stand up for the national anthem but fucking is the lyric of the mob. Two contradictions of the same coincidence or Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidence of the contradictories either way you cut it it’s still Shakespeare’s making the beast with two backs. The dark ores of those motherlode goldrush moments of rapture that punctuate the transcendental tedium of panning the mindstream for things that shine with nothing inside.

Now I consider the possibility that I’ve grown too immense to be loveable and it takes too much time and space for my light to get back to earth as a sign of intelligent life before I’m gone beyond myself again over the intimate edge of the universe as we know it like something that keeps outgrowing my mind. It’s not that I’m not getting younger as I approach the speed of light to make time stop it’s just that the stars get further apart and then go dark like braille constellations fingering the glyphs of their ancient myths as if they were divining for light in the blackholes of the cosmic mystery.

But all you have to do if you want to clarify the turbulent mud puddle of your personal history is evaporate. Liberate yourself from your own reflectivity on the other side of the mirror. The dark side of the moon. Where there is no emergency exit sign above the entrance to death because everybody goes in the same way they come out like a clock at midnight that’s lost sight of where it begins and ends. The shadows of the hands of time are amputees by noon. And by midnight they’re as blind as Tiresias looking upon two snakes copulating like DNA. The Atropic filos of fate severed like the umbilical cords of our afterlives by the scissors of the moon. Two hinges on the same gate that turns like a two-faced calendar of the new year. Two strangers trying to get over the same fear of the solitude that binds them to one another like an ice-bound roll of the dice in January.

Still it’s worth remembering that if you’ve grown bitter and spiritually impoverished by love because you couldn’t ring someone’s bell there’s always a line-up at the back door that’s longer than that at the front. And your knuckles bleed when you have to make a fist to knock. But if you’ve been enriched by love like a sour grape that’s turned its bitterness into wine you can always enter by an upstairs window like the full moon anytime you’re vine or ladder enough to climb up out of the radiant starmud of your own roots like a bootstrap theory of flowers. You can flow upwards like a river into the sky like the shapeshifting smoke of your remains scattered like ashs along the road of ghosts. The feather of a phoenix. Have you seen October sumac set its wings afire when it starts getting cold? You can burn like that beside the road.  Or you can lie there on your funeral pyre beside the indifferent night river alone in the dark wondering where you go from here for a whole lifetime. O.K. You died. Big deal. Everybody does. But if you don’t make a gracious bow and get back to life what do you do for an encore after the applause that’s going to make the cemetery sit up and take notice?

 

 

PATRICK WHITE

AS LONG AS YOU CLING TO YOUR EGO-DELUSION TWO

AS LONG AS YOU CLING TO YOUR EGO DELUSION

 

As long as you cling to your ego delusion

you’ll never amount to anything.

You’ll never cross the far horizon.

You’ll never rise to zenith

like a first magnitude star.

Because you won’t let go.

You’re hanging on too hard.

You’ve got a bit in the mouth of the wind.

You’ve got a rider in the race

that doesn’t know

she’s got a winged horse underneath her

like Pegasus or Buraq

no one’s ever laid a bet on

because there’s no way of getting the fix in

on Gabriel in the seventh.

The great thing about being a poet

is the less you are one

the better you can write.

It’s the same with everything else.

But it isn’t as if you reverse yourself

like an embryo in the womb of an hourglass

to let it say you.

Let it play you.

Let it paint you as you are

because if you get it right there’s no one there

to grab by the neck like a used guitar

to act upon.

There’s a mirror

but there’s no one looking at it.

It’s darker than a starless night

but it could see

long before anyone had eyes.

It amplifies its wholeness like the moon

in millions of drops of water

in millions of eyes

in tears and rivers oceans and lakes

by breaking into pieces like waves

like a path that’s strewn

with rose-petals

and the shards of shattered mirrors

as if to show someone the way

separation is a return to wholeness

and the many are not less than the one.

Originality is the lie

of an egotistical imagination.

Go ask the sea about creative collaboration.

Go ask the oracle at the end of the line

who you are and where you’re going

and he’ll tell you

you’re the journey the road takes.

Why cast an imperium of shadows

upon your intimate spaces

and huddle like a black hole

in the corner of your room?

Why stuff critical doctors

into the womb of your imagination

to see if your embryos are fit to be born

and then wonder why everything comes out dead?

Originality is an index

of how much you’ve been influenced by everything else

that flows into you like a galaxy

or a sea

that revels in the diversity of its oneness

in a low place

as if it were nothing

and all things were above it

at the table of life like salt.

Even in the smallest dewdrop of a womb

you can taste the world in the water.

Have you ever considered how much art owes to oxygen

and how little credit it gets?

Stop standing in the way of your painting

like Alexander in Diogenes the Cynic’s light.

Be a star.

Be radiant.

Shine.

But remember spontaneous poetic vision

doesn’t consult a calendar

to see what night it is

or what star it might be following.

And if one of your eyes says to the other

as if one saw reality

and the other the way things seem

am I my sister’s keeper?

Say to them both

as I do to you

about the poems

you’ve aked me to look at.

Less sleeper.

More dream.

Poetic insight

isn’t a mixer

you add to the black exlixir

you drink from the mooncup of your skull

to make it go down easier.

You take it straight in a single gulp

like the grail at the end of the quest

and though you won’t know

whether it’s Athenian hemlock

nectar and ambrosia

or the nacreous milk of pearls

that suckles you

like a cobra at the Medusa’s breasts

one that seals your death

the other a herb that heals

you’ll feel the stranger

who’s always changing inside

like a firefly trying to make its way through the universe

without up-to-date starmaps

or a drunk in the doorway

to show it the way home

lift the curse that is you

lift it like a mirage of water

like a veil of Isis

like a cataract on your third eye

no one has ever lifted before.

Oudeis aneile peplon.

And show you your ego-delusion

is just a wave on an infinite ocean of mind.

A ray of light just like all the others

who frustrate themselves

like moonmoths at the windowpane at night

trying to open the eyes of the blind flowers

before it’s time to bloom.

Look at the ants on the planetary globes

of the white peonies

waxing to full moon

witching for honey and sugar.

They don’t pry things open.

They know when it’s time

to turn an antenna from a divining rod

into a magic wand

that sets the peonies free as doves

with a kiss on the eyelids

that wake up

without a return address

at the back door

of the homeless envelopes

that stand like tents

in a desert of stars

that bloom in the fires

of enlightened loveletters

signed by the wind on sand

in a cosmic hourglass.

And I know you want to be famous.

But the moment you begin to believe

in your own legend

you turn it into a farce.

Stay ahead of yourself if you want to shine like a star.

Don’t let people know where you are.

Never burn your face in your own light.

Be a waterbird in space.

Don’t leave a trace

of where you’ve been

or where you’re going.

You think of literary immortality

as a fountain of youth.

But it’s just a dead scar

on a living wound.

The bone-box

of a homey afterlife

that aspires to be a pyramid

among smaller gravestones in the cemetery.

Get over your death envy

and let your bones speak for themselves.

And don’t abuse your inspiration

by only using it to tune the guitar.

You might make it to the platform on time

but you’ll still be late for the train.

You can spend your whole life

mastering shadows

like an occult discipline

that let’s you in on a dark secret

that’s only known to the blind

but you shed no light

on black matter

and you still won’t shine like a star

at a Toronto soiree of literary eclipses

who speak as if they were indelible enough

to have left their mark on the moon.

Better to be a watercolour in the rain

than get sucked into the blackholes of appearances.

Everybody knows who Shakespeare is.

They all know he wrote King Lear.

But what’s really weird

about being famous

is that Shakespeare doesn’t know

who Shakespeare is.

The genius of empathy

doesn’t wear a face on stage

like a passport to its identity

so it can relate to everyone

without leaving anyone out

because the ways things go 

a negative space is never empty.

Dark abundance.

Bright vacancy.

Who are you waiting to be?

Who are you waiting to see?

Look now.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'M TRYING TO CARE

I’M TRYING TO CARE

 

I’m trying to care that you lied to me.

I thought that if you ever did

it would hit me like a tsumani

but it lies lightly on my shoulders

like a shawl of dew on the grass

that will evaporate soon.

I’m just sorry

you didn’t take

the path of least resistance

and tell me the truth.

Maybe in retrospect

you can blame it on your infamous youth

but it will sadden me

in some remote space in the future

that’s never heard of time and death and separation

where I sit alone at the end

of a rocky peninsula

and trust my thoughts

to the moon and the ocean

to remember what you did to yourself

when you pimped your emotions out to your mind.

Good-bye is such a harsh word

to use on those

who cried out for your love

and you tried to love them back. 

I doubt that even years from now

when things are more

the negative space of a silhouette

than they are the shape of a human

I’ll be able to say it and mean it.

How far and wide the leaves might travel

they’re still attached to the tree

and though I might be

a dead branch in autumn by then

I will still reach out to the full moon

like the last thing to ever blossom in me

that wasn’t eclipsed by the far side of the night

that couldn’t look into the light

without turning away.

And I imagine I’ll try to say to myself

something wise and cogent and grand as the stars

about this intimately lyrical life

I live with both feet on the ground.

How sad it was so much of the time.

How destructively creative

and how creatively mad

to live this dream of flesh and blood

for the sake of someone

I’ve never known.

And how much space it took

to wash the starmud off my face

to see that it wasn’t my own.

I let the earth take the weight

when the heaviness of life

is heavier than the weight of things.

I let the wind blow away my sorrows.

I wield a sword of water

against the titanium dragons in the mirror

knowing the soft and yielding

will overcome the hardness of my anger

and rescue the princess

chained to the rock of my heart

like that locket around her neck

with no one’s picture in it but her own.  

But I’ve always preferred to drown

in the company of sirens

who know how to sing

if I’m going to go down with the ship

named for a woman I loved

and trusted like a lifeboat on the moon.

It’s a diamond discipline of grace

I’ve honed over the years

to cut myself lose of my tears

like a river in an ice-age

that doesn’t flow anymore.

I have tried to live in such a way

that I never shamed

the wonder of being alive

by smearing it with a mirror of myself

that lied to my eyes

about what they were seeing.

I don’t know is a small religion

that encompasses everything

from the shrine of an atom

to the great temples of the galaxies.

It doesn’t try to convert deceivers into believers

It’s three and a half words of scripture

written by birds in the air at night in passing

to remind the perceivers that nothing’s lasting

but the silence beyond what they’ve heard.

The darkness that illuminates the stars.

The stillness of the perpetual motion machine

beyond the waxing and waning

the ebbing and neaping

of our lunar scars

keeping watch over our wounds

as we dream away the pain of staying alive.

I don’t know holds everyone accountable spontaneously

because it doesn’t ask anything of anyone

extraneously.

It makes you answer to yourself.

It doesn’t prophecy.

It doesn’t curse or bless.

It isn’t the fulfillment of anything.

It doesn’t have heretics.

It doesn’t have saints.

And yet it’s the holiest inspiration

to ever express itself as a human

looking into the nature of things

without knowing what it is

that’s looking back.

Or whether anyone can even tell

when things come to light

like stars and fireflies

far off in the intimate distance

of a limitless darkness

or a loveletter like a sail

crossing the zenith

of its own event horizon

without an adress to go back to

if life is a white lie or a black.

I don’t know is purer than mercy.

It doesn’t diminish its echoes

or raise its voice.

There’s nothing to affirm.

Nothing to deny.

It doesn’t send children to confession

like original sin

because it doesn’t know

if things start

where they begin

or if a good heart waiting

at the traffic light

for the red apple to turn green again

like an impressionist painting of innocence

is on its way out

or on its way back to Eden

like Monet in his gardens at Giverny.

But I’ve seen the waterlilies

enlightened at night by the moon

and drank real water

from mirages in a desert of stars

that longed to be taken seriously.

And I’ve seen Aquarius in love

when she pours her heart out inexhaustibly

like rain from above

on the burnt roots of dead trees

that bloom in the urns of their ashs

as if they didn’t know when to stop.

It’s the curse of courage

for someone to keep on keepin on

long after they know for sure

they’ve wasted their life on nothing

but hungry ghosts

begging for illusory bread

they could feed on for life

like real flesh and blood.

But it’s worse to put words

in a dead man’s mouth

and expect him to live up to them

like a necromantic norm of cupidity.

It’s a twitch of mystic stupidity

to talk through God

like the dummy on your knee

and believe every word he says

as if for every ventiloquist

that says she loves you

there’s a burning bush

deep in the shadlowless valleys of her thighs

that lies.

But doesn’t it take the fun out of lying

for people like you

when people like me

accept everything as true?

And it’s hard to pull the wool over someone’s eyes

like a Las Vegas of lights that blindsides the stars

by playing at love like a casino

when they can see just as well

in the dark without them

the braille constellations

that punctuate the dice

like a starmap in a snakepit

trying not to get bit twice

by the same sting

that dragged you down

into the rootless underworld

by the heel

just last spring.

You’ll come up somewhere

rooted in manure

pure as a crocus again

and just as beautiful 

I’m sure.

But try not to con the rain

or deceive yourself into believing

that the truth is just a lie in pain

you can tell to anyone

to excuse the agony of living

underground.

Just say I don’t know to everything

like I do

and all the lies come true.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

STARMUD AND MOONWATER SIX

STARMUD AND MOONWATER SIX

 

letters to everyone in particular

 

              Stop chewing over other people’s ideas as if they were wads of used gum you found under the desk. Stop trying to taste the flavour of yesterday’s meaning by drinking spit from other people’s mouths as if yours had none of its own. Is the water hot or cold? Does it taste like the moon? Does it taste like the sun? Is there a hint of stars in it? Can you drink from your own reflection like the moon on the mindstream without getting drunk on yourself like Narcissus in an asylum? Or are you just another prisoner preaching liberation to the key as if it were the my way or the highway kind of enlightenment and everyone else were the lock?

              I can see you, little brother. I can look into the black apple of your heart. I can see the green star shining deep in its core like a shy embryo of who you wanted to be and haven’t become yet you’ve kept like a secret souvenir of your future lucidity whenever I cut you open into life with the mystic switch-blade of the moon. What do you think about that? Is it logical enough for you? Ah, little brother, you want to be a tiger of fire but what kind of tiger follows a map? Or trusts someone else’s nose? Hot nervous blood on the wind at night agitating the leaves. Can you smell it like a fire alarm? Are you tiger or lamb? Or just another messiah at the last supper of a judas-goat chained to the stake of your vertical threshold like a scapegoat tempting fate to crucify it with claws? Are you a real sphinx or have you turned your instincts into laws?

              I don’t mind playing Zen tennis with you once in awhile and getting off on the profound frivolity of it all. And I like to hear you laugh when you see how spiritually Chaplinesque you are in that silent movie on the dark side of the mirror that’s always on rewind. You like to be discovered in your game of hide and seek because you think everybody forgets where you were hiding and you’re amazed when someone stumbles across you naked and shivering quite by accident on their way to somewhere else. You’re sure it’s a miracle. And then you try to convert everyone else by urging them to come to your movie.

              I’m probably too hard on you most of the time but you can’t master magic by showing up at the ritual like a voodoo doll with a lack of confidence in your ability to cast a spell. But I’m not without mercy. And I know that Everyone’s a lonely place to be. I’m not into some kind of ego-game. I take no credit for lying to you so realistically about spiritual things. I can tell you I’m a window until I’m blue in the face. But you keep flying into it like a stubborn sparrow that keeps insisting it’s the sky. And that’s got to be hard on your neck. Why don’t you adjust your eyesight to what’s there instead of running around in this delusion of a holy war looking for bullets with good aim? Now have I said something healing here or have I wounded you again? Would it ease the pain if I told you I don’t go hunting unicorns with a firing squad just for the fun of it or would it only add to the mystery of the game?

              How many times have you sought me out and asked me for spiritual advice over the mystery of life having coffee? Usually you want to get some emotional atrocity off your chest you’ve either suffered or perpetrated on another. And what if I did say ok you’re just having another bad dream and wake you up? Would that make it all better? Would that heal the tormentor? Would you walk away blessed and culpable thinking you were the invisible man? Or would your chains and straightjackets find a way of wriggling out of Houdini like a snakepit? And even if you did get free what would that be but just another loophole in the rules of a negative power-base you’re trying impose on everyone who can’t see what I do?

              Dogen Zenji once said that if the medicine doesn’t make you dizzy it’s not strong enough. You imbibe the cheap highs of the little waves of your emotions because you’re afraid of the great depths of the ocean of awareness underneath you. Your knees go weak when you’re walking on water. You’re hanging everything on a lottery ticket of random luck as if it were a sign of divine providence that you could finally afford your vices. You’ve worked hard at achieving the means to corrupt yourself whenever you want to go out slumming with success. I’ve seen you humming like a bee from table to table bumming beer from the flowers by promising them you can turn their earthly nectar into a spiritual honey that tastes like money if they’ll only front you one for free. Excess outgrows the ecstasy of living and oblivion sets in like a gangrene of the senses when you overexpose them to the fire and the cold. And you can lose more than just your big toe if you don’t know by now that enough is more than enough. My mother taught me to lead my dick around not follow it like a compass needle in a magnetic storm. You come on to women like an open palm in love with itself but deep inside you’re shaking your fist in bed because you’re angry at the power women have over you. You want to be mistaken for a lightning rod instead of a weathervane but the fireflies can’t take you seriously and they know by themselves when it’s going to rain long before you can put them out.

PATRICK WHITE

             

             

             

             

             

STARMUD AND MOONWATER FIVE

STARMUD AND MOONWATER FIVE

 

letters to everyone in particular

 

            You were born with gifts you haven’t realized. There are presents under the tree you haven’t opened yet. You hide your lights and their shadows like stars in the sun at noon. Your eyes evaporate in your blazing like troubled mirrors of water. And you talk like a stagemother to yourself. You blow the ashs of your youthful charms in everybody’s face like the urns of your latest ancestors. And you long to be loved by those you’re trying to conquer until you’ve managed it. And then you quit. You finesse betrayal with a coup de grace to the heart as if love were the farcical art of a mystic Polyanna practising voodoo on a simulacrum of its desire. Some are born with silver spoons and others are born with wishbones up their ass. Or is it fortune-cookies? Regardless. It’s got to be uncomfortable. Better to be born with nothing. And let things pass. And try not to take what you’re missing out on everyone else. You can’t tease love out of hiding and you can’t approach it with stealth. You’re out in the woods at night lamplighting for deer and you’re fishing for exotic birds with illegal nets in the clear mindstream that pulls you into its moonboat on the silver hooks of words that come out of your mouth like the lures of a fly fisherman who’s just caught the prophet in the belly of Leviathan lying to himself again about what he’s running from. But one mile west is one mile east and everywhere you go it’s the same place.

              Why ask anyone the meaning of life when you already suspect the meaning is you but you’re too upstaged by the truth to admit it? And don’t wimp out around me talking about suicide as if you were clocked by death when in fact you’re balked by life like a boy with his nose up against a candystore window feeling deprived of his longing. And don’t tell me you’re on a grailquest with Gilgamesh pearldiving for the moon in the corals like a snakeproof herb of healing when all you’re really doing is looking for the next tit to suckle you with feeling.

              But I know you can shine. I know you’ve got light in there somewhere deep in the ore of the night that wants to get out like gold. And when you’re saddest. When there’s no one around to know how disappointed you are in yourself like a penny-wish in a well that didn’t come true. I see your true genius for compassion master you as if death were a lighter burden to bear than the life of one who cares that people are so deeply wounded by their own mental snares. Yourself included. And me too. And that fool over there in the corner trying to live through himself by regretting who he is when he compares himself to others that are just as unfortunate as him.

              Divine gifts come in earthly wrappings because we’re human with features of fire and water and light. God doesn’t give anything to the angels because they were created perfect and long for nothing. They don’t call out in the night for her to answer them in a way they can understand. They might have wings but holier the hand that’s blessed by an earthbound way of giving to those who have less than the perfect. Just look at the generosity of the planet you’re walking on as if your path were strewn with flowers and thorns and stars. Have you tasted the wounded blood of the rose that scars your eyes like the moon whenever you refuse to drink up? Have you emptied the cup of sorrows down to the dark lees at the bottom that lie prophetically to the fossils of tomorrow’s embryos about a better future than this one? Don’t you know by now that life doesn’t keep what it can’t give away? That it doesn’t speak of things no human can say until their mind is at peace with its own bright vacancy and happy in the dark abundance of a heart that’s empty?

 

PATRICK WHITE