YOU SAY

You say you’re the fruit of a different flower than me.

I bloom in sidereal fire

and there’s no higher or lower

to shine down on

or look up to.

You say you’re earthbound.

But I could show you how

to cut a shoot of lightning

and root it in the air like wild strawberries

and transcendental jellyfish

that swing like comets

from the handlebars of a girl’s first bike

around the sun symbolically.

You say you’re a jewel embedded in ore

because your eyes can’t take the light.

That you’re the eye-seed of an apple

born with shades on.

But I could show you things beyond seeing

that none of your material mirrors

have ever dreamed of.

Places where they don’t carve guitars

out of trees with lockjaw

where the trees and the leaves and their shadows

don’t lipsynch the music

they play on your face with feeling.

I could teach you how to play a birdhouse like a flute

and make a demo of the silence

that would top the charts

like darkness on a starmap.

You’ve got the voice for it.

You’re as vocal as bees in a hive

making honey out of Japanese plum blossoms.

But two minutes with a hook

isn’t the same as a run-on haiku

that reads like the mindstream

all the way to nirvana.

I know backroads and shortcuts

off the main highways of our lifelines.

Sacred groves at the back of abandoned barns

with big hearts

that buried their children

where they thought it was most beautiful.

You may have been a dewdrop

in this dewdrop of a world

but even so even so . . . .

Reflections of Buddha and Basho.

Most people bleed for the world they wound

but I’ve tasted the sweetness of the mellifluous moon

adding its blossom to a dead branch

out of compassion for the emptiness

that embodies it like the deathmask of a tree.

Green bough.

Dead branch.

Same song.

Go ask the birds.

They know what I’m talking about.

You say you can’t get a grasp on the infinite sea

of your own awareness

but you approach it wave by wave

dewdrop by dewdrop

oar by oar

lifeboat after lifeboat

when the trick is to down it all

in a single shot

like your eyes do

when they’re out for a night on the town.

But I’m the wolf-shepherd of mountain clouds

and the lightning master of fireflies

that rig the beaver dams with blasting caps

that go off like soft munitions

with a change of heart

in the wiring of a terrorist

with the perfect timing

of an ageless face.

You preach the morals of the valley

to a mountain of offense

not realizing that your redemption

is only as deep

as the mountain is high

and you’re buried in a landslide

trying to make a comeback from the dead.

You say a lot of things

as if you were trying to make sense

to a lunatic

about losing your mind

for the sanest of reasons.

And you talk about motivation

as if you were trying to fit spurs

on glass sneakers

and inspiration

like wings on that born again hobby-horse

you transformed from a witch’s broom

into a drone with the sensibilities of a stealth kite.

You say you feel close to God

in everything you say and do

but I can tell by the terrible solitude

of your grailquest

that you’’re just another stormcloud

divining for water with a lightningrod.

Insanity’s just like any other kind of religion.

First you go mad.

And then you begin to doubt it.

St. Jerome in the early church Latin

of quicksand cornerstones

trying to beatify their heresies

with murderous absolutes.

Credo ergo absurdum.

I believe it because it’s absurd.

But you’re not crazy enough

to know the conventions of God

as inventions of your own

when there was no else around to play with.

Trying to regain possession of your mind

as if it were a homeless flower

out of touch with its roots

by making an ally

of the occupying army

is like trying to train circus snakes

to jump through hoops of hellfire

for haloes they don’t believe are worth the risk.

You obviously have the courage

and fanaticism of an ant

but whenever you show up like a dove

to make peace among combatants

you’ve always got a stinging nettle in your beak

instead of an olive branch.

You talk like bleach

that wants to clean things up between us

but you burn like formic acid

whenever I hook up with you

like a bloodbank on intravenous.

I may speak in a universal language

with an extraterrestrial accent

but that doesn’t mean I’m a dolphin

you can saddle with the boyhood of a god

that speaks in tongues to the agrammatoi

like some polyglot Apollo.

Muhammad was illiterate

and Jesus relied on ghost writers

to tell his story

and it took seventy-two Jewish scholars

in the library of Alexandria

before it was burnt accidently

against Caesar’s strict orders

to photocopy the Septuagint verbatim

out of the mouth of God.

Miracles and magic may be the backup authorities

that stand like default programmes

and power points

behind the throne of your actuality.

But I’m too steeped

in mystic surrealistic factuality

to look for a Rosetta Stone

to unlock the eloquent silence of God

with the echo of my own voice.

I listen to the sacred name

with a profane ear

and everything under heaven

and upon the earth

is a clear as a Sanskrit syllable

written in water

like the works of a tubercular poet

drowning in his own lungs.

The music of the celestial spheres

is like light.

It falls on the deaf and mute alike

like songs that were written just for them.

The lyric of life

can’t be heard by anyone more than once

but not knowing how to listen

you rewrite it as a hymn

to be sung over and over and over again

as if you could catch the picture-music of life

on an evangelistic video-cam.

But the word within the word

that can’t be heard by anyone

isn’t a linguistic scam.

Life is always sending everyone love-letters

but those with a nose

that sees more than their eyes

smell a lie in the rose

that keeps them from trusting their hearts.

They end up French-kissing the tongue of the envelope

and deleting the contents like spam.

And when they speak about life and love as you do

trying to legalize their wishful thinking

and unionize their guesswork

it’s as if all their words had paper-cuts.

But you can’t mend a forked tongue

by quoting God

as if she were a celestial brand

of super-glue

you were promoting

like a chastity belt

guaranteed to keep your legs closed

and your eyes shut.

You say it’s better to live like a clam or an oyster

at the bottom of a spiritual seabed

so deep

no one’s ever going to pluck your pearl

but when you edge your lips like that

I swear all your sacred syllables

sound like the tintinabula of falling paperclips

attached to the last word of God

as if they were in like pins

on a secret agenda.

I freely admit I may suffer

the loquacity of stars

that are always talking about something or other

they don’t understand

like what we’re all doing here in the first place

looking for our eyes like flashlights and cameras

in the gene-pools of candles and reflecting telescopes

that can’t believe what they’re looking at

even when they do find them

on both sides of their nose.

And it’s true that sometimes my silence

is a singularity in a blackhole

that sucks all the light out of the room

and it’s as hard to get on the same wavelength as me

as it is to tune a snakepit with a battery charger

but if I keep my mouth shut

about where my heart goes on its own

to be alone with the whole of creation

as if it kept me like a secret to itself

that doesn’t mean I’m a waste of life

because I would rather squander it all here now

like flowers and stars and leaves in the autumn

than squirrel it away for some rainy day in the hereafter.

I’d rather be a root

than hang my fruit

from a rafter in a house of cards

with one big toe of a cornerstone

over the fault-line in a earthquake zone.

Even if it means I’ve got to risk

bumping into God one day on my own

and I make a date to see her again

and she leaves me standing here

in this strange doorway in the rain.

Even if as you say

there’s no exit

for a heretic

who would rather go down in flames

of self-immolation

as the lesser of two agonies

than fly fighter-planes like a kamakazi

with a divine wind

in her tailfeathers

in defense of a hive of killer bees

who don’t know how to make honey

out of weeds.

Even if Eve

took a bite out of the apple

at least she spit out the seeds

like the taste of temptation for the rest of us.

She didn’t make jam or apple sauce

of what she learned that day

from the tree of knowledge.

And she didn’t knead the flesh

of her body-mind

with cold hands

into the crust of an apple-piety

that rises toward heaven

like the unleavened ratings

of a reality show

keeping one eye on the oven

like a crematorium

in a sports stadium

that moonlights as a prison camp

and the other on her cosmic temperature

as if

ah Faustus

why this is hell

nor are we out of it

weren’t the cause of global warming.

You want to wash blood off with blood

mud with mud

paint with paint

me with me

but I say

you’d see a lot more clearly

if you were ever to wipe your make-up off

and take a look at things

you’re fanatically fixed upon

more like a window than a mirror

more like a bird feeling its way south

than a nervous weathervane

that thinks it’s the lighthouse and foghorn in one

of the coming apocalypse

you demonize in people like me

who mean what they say

omnidirectionally

so they can be overheard

and understood by the stars

more like a medium than a message.

Trying to palm an s.o.s. off as a lovenote

from the gods

is like saying the word always

to a one way street

baffled at the crossroads to nowhere.

Remember when Dogen Zenji

whispered in your ear

the place is here

the path leads everywhere?

He wasn’t trying to make candles out of earwax.

Or ladders out of crosswalks.

Rivers out of roadside ditchs.

Mindstreams out of oilslicks.

You might have wiped your lips

clean of the profanity of my name

like a full eclipse of the moon

but there’s still lipstick on the mirror

like the painted tear

on the mask of a spiritual buffoon

trying on the face of a sacred clown.

But there is no likeness

no working hypothesis

no masterpiece in progress

no unified field theory

not so much as the eyelash

of a holographic simulacrum

projected by the pineal gland

of my third eye

in the Buddha realm of a screening room

where universes are born to be stars

when no one is watching

and all the seats are empty

that can begin to compare

with my inconceivably unattainable life

just as it is.

You say that’s just mere existence

flatlining on the terminal nightward

like a wavelength that’s given up on going straight.

But I’ve torn a page out of the book of the light

without casting so much as a shadow of censorship

like an eclipse across my seeing

and I’ve travelled voluminously

through a near perfect vacuum

for billions of years

without ever losing touch with the source of my being

because every step

of the long dark strange radiant road I made by walking

was the ubiquitous threshold

of my original homelessness

in all directions at once.

And everywhere I look

these fireflies of insight

showing off like supernovas in distant galaxies

and Cepheid variables

in the playhouses of the constellations

that are not fixed

but show up in every lifetime

with a new script

for an old myth

behind the rising curtains of nightfall.

And whenever I’ve encountered the truth

along this pathless path

it wasn’t the angel in my way

or the demon at my back I met

but an intimate stranger

who travelled light and alone

without a compass or a destination.

But I’ve never bumped into a lie

by accident or design

who wasn’t travelling with a witness.

But the power of the truth

doesn’t depend upon its innocence or guilt.

There is no ultimacy in it.

No corroboration or culpability

because the truth is never complete.

It’s alive and creative as the past is.

As transformative as the universe.

It’s not the vehicle of law

nor any other conceptual nonentity

getting its hands dirty

in mundane realities

like ghosts summoned to a seance of the senses

to pass judgment on life

like black and white smoke

from the Vatican chimney

after a vote among flawed men

on who’s the most infallible.

The truth doesn’t know anything about freedom

because it’s never been bound

and even less about rights

because it’s never had to ask anyone’s permission.

The truth isn’t the flavour of enlightened buddhas

and its shadow the stench of sentient beings.

The truth is just as likely to free

the key from the jailor

or the jailor from the jail

as it is to liberate the drunken sailor

who posts bail for all of them.

The truth exists because everything else here does.

The truth lives because you and I do.

Because the stars do and the rocks and ants in the grass.

Boom!

The primordial atom strikes twelve randomly

and Cinderella turns into a pumpkin.

Interdependent origination.

I owe as much to you for my existence

as you do the warring dragons of your worst fears

and they to you as the harshest of teachers.

And once the primordial atom

like the transcendent one

who’s always one step beyond

everybody’s best guesses

like the light of a star

by the time it gets here

got things started

its hereafter didn’t depend on what was to come

but the beginningless beginning of this moment now

at the center of everything

like a jewel in the navel of God.

Your future isn’t waiting on deathrow

for the past to come through

with a last minute reprieve.

You don’t need to close your eyes

to see the sun shine at midnight

nor open them

to see there are no shadows at noon.

And you can go ask the lightning

if you don’t believe me

about how hard it is

to put down roots in the earth

nerves in the flesh

like rivers and stars and cosmic themes

who don’t know where they’re going

but nevertheless

at the heart of their enlightened guess

indulge their taste for intuitive compassion

in the ripening fruit of their intellect

and that sweetness of autumn life on their tongues

like frost on the morning glory

dew on the stargrass

take the time

to teach the maps

that fall from the trees like leaves

to the mindstream below

as much as they do about flowing.

How you can only know the road by going

and that’s as true for the road

as it is you.

Because every step of the way

every whirl in the current

the path and the destination

the road and you

a star and its light

a thought-wave and its brain

the many and the one

are not discontinuous and discrete.

Death isn’t the singularity

at the bottom of the blackhole

envious of your rainbow Joseph’s coat of light.

And life isn’t a concept

that’s been reified

with fingerprints and blood samples

waiting nervously

for news of its purity

to come back like a vampire bat

from some celestial bloodbank

turning it into wine

and nasty drunks

defacing the shrines of killer bees.

Your heart’s not Jerusalem.

And your blood hasn’t gone on crusade.

You say you’re looking for god.

I say that’s o.k.

but why do you go about it

as if you were looking for her number

listed on the cellphone of a terrorist?

She’s not being held for ransom

because she’s worth less than nothing

and more than the inconceivable

but the moment you begin to look for her

I’ve got a hunch

she’s lost.

And there are missing posters

on telephone poles

out looking for your face everywhere

because you are

who you want to know.

The light doesn’t come

like a thug with shadows

to cover its back.

And life doesn’t need to show its i.d.

to the arresting officer

to prove its an ambassador with immunity

to criminal prosecution

in a foreign country

where one law of life for all

and all for one

covers all the flaws

of creationists mimicing evolution.

If the emptiness within you

you’re trying to fill with God

weren’t already aware of your potential

to change the course of the universe

with every breath you take

every step of the way to everywhere

you wouldn’t have been empowered into being by it

to achieve yourself exactly as you are

every moment of the unborn day

and in all the watchtowers

of the undying night

in the small quiet hours

just before morning

when the dew grows eyes in the dark

that ripen like luminous bells of insight

into what we’re all doing here

looking for our minds with mirrors

that have sweetened the light with our tears

like old wines

that have been dreaming for years

of dancing like stars on the waters of life.

And even after the blossom has bloomed and gone

like the plumage of a phoenix in spring

the drunks still sing unreasonably

of the seasonal sorrows

that come of untimely desire.

Because deep in their urn and furnace hearts

they can feel the seeds of fire

the ghost of the orchard left

sprouting like the bloodroots

of their next incarnation.

Salamandrine regeneration.

Dust to dust.

Ashes to ashes.

Though it all sounds

a little too cut and dry to me.

Let’s try

just for a change of pace

life to life

death to death

light to light

water to water

fire to fire

mind to mind

heart to heart

human to human

face to face

like inspired reflections

that don’t depend upon a mirror

to make things far

seem near?

We all enter life

before the inception of thought

like intuitive forms of the inconceivable

with stars on our breath

and even when death

shifts our wavelengths toward the red

they don’t go out.

When did we ever need

more of a reason to shine

than our own seeing

needed to grow our eyes?

So why average out the crucials

looking for god like your lost omniscience

when she’s omniabsent everywhere

the moment you begin to look for her

like the muse of a longing poet

who knows how to keep the fire burning

as spontaneously in the lamps

as she does the urns?

Why put on a death mask

and go looking

for the highest common denominator

to the sum of it all

as if you were trying to commensurate

the dynamics of the world like pi

or square the roots of your eye

into the self-contained monad

of a whole number

forgetting that every number

like the letter of every word that was ever spoken

is the alpha and omega of all the rest?

Myriad houses with the same address.

Who speaks of completion

in a world where

one inspires the all

and the all inspires one

like grains of sand

pyramids and pearls

or one atom

elaborating a lonely dark space

into billions of galaxies

without beginning or end

and everything in existence

is already the boundless center

of the infinite immensities

in the creative intensities

at the extremeties of everything else?

PATRICK WHITE

THE MOST FRAGRANT FLOWER

The most fragrant flower of the spring.

The midnight shift of the Perth soap factory three blocks away.

The witch is brewing love potions

that put the grape hyacinth and trout lily to shame.

Something so sweet from something so ugly.

Waterlilies in a swamp do the same.

Just as this world of light roots in black matter.

And we invented the wheel

after losing our gumboots one too many times

in the starmud we were bogged down in

like a red-haired Pitcairn Man in peat.

Druids and Sufis and shamans

are all close nephews of the same Siberian uncle.

Hunting magic following the northern herds

like stars across vast expanses of land and sky.

The Sufis annihilated themselves

on roses and wine

and used vertigo as a compass at a crossroads

like St. Francis of Assisi

that secret Muslim

who talked the birds

into helping him into the garden

by giving him a lift over the fence.

He knew the black wisdom of imageless knowledge.

Nothing gave him offense.

He thanked the rocks

for the continuity of their friendship.

He didn’t lock the gateless gate from the inside

to keep anyone out.

But the other two liked garottes and groves

and drank blood from prophetic skulls

down by the water

where they could practise sacrificial slaughter

on a human condemned to divinity.

But I’ve never thought that death

was ever a fitting tribute to life

so I don’t think

I would have liked them too much

but I like the magic touch in their poetry.

Like this fragrance from the Perth soap factory

drifting through the warm spring air

like some siren practising music

by playing with her hair like the willows.

Amusing thoughts.

Charming mirages to disguise the way

water really feels about life in the desert.

I know one thing it feels

is elementally alone.

It wants to fill the empty cup of the moon

and drink to the shadows

in the Sea of Tranquility.

It wants to flow like a river

in a Malayan monsoon

but in these circumstances

you’re either a well

or a cloud at the other extreme

going straight up like a weather balloon.

No one shares their tears here with another.

The heat flows vertically like a stage-curtain

or the aurora borealis

with see-through illusions

like stealth-fighters

veiling what’s real and ineluctable

with imitations that are just as unsustainable.

So I wait for the stars

like the eyes of Isis

to peer over the horizon of her veil

that only no one can lift

and though I’m adrift in sea of sand

I raise a sail

just for the hell of it.

And she tatoos a star on the palm of my left hand

to protect me from drowning

and pierces my hearing with a gold earring

that gleams like Bailey’s beads

when the light beams

through the valleys of the mountains

in a full eclipse of the moon

to bury me decently

in case I ever do.

Her love of me

is a dispassionate creative dynamic

that doesn’t need a body to get physical

and looks down on deserts

and their myriad grains of sand

from the perspective of hundreds of billions of galaxies

as a spiritual kind of redundancy.

The life of a hydrophobic moralist

not the blissful lunacy of an enlightened human

glancing off the waters of life

like a sword dance with the light fantastic

and nothing but laughter up his moribund sleeves

patched together like a Sufi robe

out of locally embroidered autumn leaves

and skies as blue as the lapiz lazuli of Persia.

First you annihilate yourself

fana

and then you continue

baqa

like the Buddha did

until you realize with questionable certainty

that nothing ever happened.

When I attained absolute perfect enlightenment

I attained absolutely nothing.

In other words

though his are perfectly clear

you’re only not a buddha

when you’re not what you are.

This is perfect that is perfect

take the perfect from the perfect

it’s still perfect.

And the reverse is also true

because water is the embodiment

of a complementary emptiness

it’s impossible to leave a hole in.

You can’t wound it

so it never needs to heal

though it runs like blood

and there isn’t a feeling

that beats like a caged bird

against the human chest

that it doesn’t express

like the house-key to freedom.

Water doesn’t have an identity of its own

and you can’t sneak one into its nest

like a cosmos in a cuckoo’s egg

or wisdom into a fortune-cookie

when it talks to you

in the same voice

in the same choice of colour schemes

as a chameleon in front of a mirror.

Interdependent origination.

Dreams are dreams.

You don’t wake up from them

like an explanation.

Water knows its place in the universe

like space and time and emptiness

glassblowing windows out of vitrified sand

so lovers and widows and forlorn astronomers

have somewhere to stand

to expand their point of view

into the longer wavelengths of infra-red insight

and the sea-bottom bioluminescent nightvision

where the fish have to moonlight for their eyes

on the nightshift of the Perth soap factory

to see where they’re going

and what’s to eat

when they light up like a fridge door.

The truth of water is as transparent and clear

as the eyeless void it springs from.

It’s only a mystery of occult starmud

when it comes down

from the clouds

that circle the peak of the world mountain

to speak to the mystified

in a language they can understand.

Whether it’s the mindstream the stars

an avalanche or a tidal wave

water teachs you how to look up

without being overwhelmed.

But the mudminds

are genetically descended

from a few surviving Atlanteans

and get an apocalyptic high out of drowning

and the continental letdown

of the aquatic afterlife that follows.

And you can tell by his

Maenadically scratched eyes

that Orpheus sang his heart out

until all that was left of his dismemberment

were old unplayable records

in the music collections of the spheres

and the metronomic apple

of his prophetic skull

bobbing up and down like a plumb line

exploring the depths of hell and Hades

on the surface of the waves of awareness.

Skip the barnacles

he’s been keel-hauled on the craters of the moon

tongue-lashed by long shadows of serpentine kelp

like a proto-messiah

and salted like Carthage

to preserve oblivion like the memory

of an old threat.

Lest we forget

and start to see through our enemies’ eyes

how hard it is to love our likeness

in someone else.

Homeless wavelengths of light

on an infinite sea of awareness

looking for something to shine upon

like a distant star

and watch it bloom like a flower

that shines back.

Clarity isn’t the answer to anything

except a lack of seeing.

Clarity isn’t a lightbeam

you ride like Einstein

at an absolute constant

on a unified field quest

to look for your eyes with your eyes

your mind with your mind

your hearing with your ears

your voice with the words

that fall from your mouth

like the snake-eyes of Pythian oracles

reading the braille on the dice

they roll like skulls with blackholes

where their eyes used to be.

Even when the mirror shatters

into a billion pieces

like water on the rocks

you are and have always been a unified field theory

in actuality

whole in every part.

A water droplet of cosmic lucidity

with a grail as full and as big

as the shoreless sea of your rimless awareness.

Why break off a branch of lightning insight

like a hazelwand in spring

to go witching for water

like a fish that’s gone divining in a seabed

for a dream that’s already a reality?

In every seed of light

like a fountain in a watershed

the archetypes of fireflies eyes and flowers

light upon light

that stays out of sight

to keep the stars from going blind.

Everything that exists

in the nucleated bubbles of creative inflation

like two people who don’t know they’re in love yet

accidentally touching each other’s skin

like the wing of a Luna moth

or a Monarch butterfly

or an M-theory with infinite dimensions

tuning the strings of its old saddle-shaped universe

to the resonance of membranous space

improvising bass runs on its vocal cords

like Jimi Hendrix playing Kiss the Sky

to a sell-out audience in the starfields

of his endless fans

dancing to the picture-music

that comes with the lightshow.

But I can tell by how playful I am

how estranged my freedom is

from everything I thought I was.

The deeper the wound

the lighter the gesture

that expresses it

as the poignancy of being alive

to surpass your own understanding

by letting go of everything you know.

And not expect anything to replace it.

Water doesn’t drown in its own reflection.

It effaces it without rejection.

It embraces its own exclusion.

Just as it’s delusion not enlightenment

that opens the door to liberation

from the inside

so water doesn’t distinguish the surface

from its depths.

Sweet sweet water from bottom to top.

And the fragrance of flowers from the Perth soap factory

overwhelming the warm night air

like the smell of decay on the corpse of an angel.

This is empty that is empty

Take empty from empty

it’s still empty.

It isn’t real.

It isn’t delusional.

It’s clear.

It’s the ghost of a willow

in front of a mirror

trying to remember her face

while the water does her hair.

PATRICK WHITE

BLACK AUBADE

Dirty winter windows

smudged by fingerprints and nicotine

the dawn looks like an old water-blotched sepia-tinged photograph

of someone’s fiance from nineteen-seventeen.

The shadow of a crow in a dolorous pine.

Sky the colour of apricots and opals.

Shades of Keats looking at it like a sick eagle.

No sleep

I’m exhausted in the new light of day.

Vampiric blood too long out of the grave.

My heart Vesuvius

and my body Pompey

my mind the halflife

of some unknown element’s radioactive decay.

My life is a brown star setting in the east.

Too tired to shine.

Too forsaken to dream.

A wavelength shy of the light.

Too high frequency to sing.

I may be a synchronous happening

in a charged particle field

but nothing I do reverses my spin.

I suffer who I am

and the conditions of my life

as karmic retribution

for not being someone else.

I can hear the sound

of one hand clapping

like a koan slapping the wind in the face.

A heartbeat without a pulse.

Other people live

but I endure.

Other people care

but I’m the extinct species

of a unknown cure

in the slashed ashes of a burnt jungle.

Other people are happy

to throw a few coins into a wishing-well

but I’m a stem cell

for Promethean body parts

that grow back like salamanders

caught stealing fire red-handed from hell.

Other people are as clear and definitive

as copulative metaphors

but I’m haunted by

the more accurate simulacra

that approximate my likeness in similes

that suggest and enhance

but don’t make a stance

of the probable concourse of things.

My kind of clarity includes the clouds.

Metaphors don’t leave much room for individuality

and people and things are more like one another

generically

than they specifically pretend to be.

Similes put out feelers

like dragonflies and witching wands

lightning tines and serpent tongues

to taste the atmosphere for signs

of what they’re looking for.

Metaphors are an imperialist kind of identity

that lays its eggs like wasps

to feast

on the forehead of the living host

until nothing’s left but the guest.

They enslave the brain like a foodchain.

So I live similically

like the missing link

among so many evolving likenesses

of the way I think

you won’t find anybody behind the masks

you could identify with.

I burn like a first magnitude star

not to be affixed to any constellation

not to be gilled or gulled

like the Circlet of the Western Fish

like a butterfly in a spider-web

to any compliant paradigm.

The quickest way to make a mess of your life

is to look for a design in it

you can stick to.

I don’t impose my mind

upon the creative chaos

of my changing nature

by overstaying my welcome.

Others are calm and serene

but I hurry on

like a tour bus

from Kitimat to Prince Rupert

between an avalance

and icebergs in the Skeena River.

And if you were to ask my blood

what colour it is

it would say it was

a union of contradictories

between a rose and an ambulance

and show you the genome to prove it.

This morning’s it’s more like lava

coagulating into bloodclots

like islands in the stream.

Mu and Atlantis

submerging like submarines

with nothing but the daffodils coming up

like periscopes

to check the horizon for lifeboats and bees.

Space feels as heavy as a black dwarf

with its fist in my face.

And there’s no continuum to time

that isn’t T-boned

by the abruptness of eternity

at the intersection of now and then.

If space is curved

then time must be random.

I want to live longer tomorrows

and shorter yesterdays

now.

I don’t want to wait

like cold dice

for seven come eleven

on a snake-eyed clock.

I want to strike twelve now

like a sword on an anvil

my heart can fall upon quietly

like an apple

when the time is ripe

not an alarm bell at midnight.

You can’t steal your way into a dream.

And you can’t lie your way into the truth.

Reality isn’t a room in a house

someone you loved died in

where things are kept for years

like combs and mirrors

behind closed doors

just as they are.

It’s not a scar.

It’s not a fixed star.

Unrelentingly brutal

as Antarctica or a mountaintop

and yet look how lightly

it settles like a waterbird on the waters.

There’s not much difference

between a wave and a feather to the moon.

Or the Byzantine leaf of a silver Russian olive

doing oldworld metalwork on mechanical birds

and watchs with dead mainsprings

that have passed on

beside the Rideau Canal.

Reality doesn’t put the is in existence

like a lithium battery into a camera body

just to get a few shots of you

for the family album in the funeral home.

Reality isn’t the stuffing in a teddy bear.

The inflammable substance of being.

You can’t grow towers of radio dishes like hollyhocks

and stuff the secrets of the Inconceivable

like cosmic gossip into your ear

and swear that it’s unrepeatable.

Once the primordial atom showed up

in its own good space and time

like the tree in the seed

the universe wasn’t inevitable

It didn’t look for a motivation

to express itself in stars and trees and birds.

It was inspired.

It didn’t choose its words sparingly

like a sparrow in the leftovers of a garden

It squandered them like a blizzard

where every single snowflake

is as original in the seed of the atom

as it is in the fruit.

Inside time

everything looks like a beginning.

When there’s no outside to space

every grain of sand

is the cornerstone of a cosmos.

If you want to know the origins of life on earth

where are you going to find them

if not in yourself first?

In your own birth?

The peduncle may be lost in the ensuing phylum

but that doesn’t mean it disappeared.

If you want to know yourself as you really are

get rid of the mirror

you’ve been hiding behind for light-years

and all things will become as clear as the stars

to those who can feel them shining

in the nucleus of every cell of their eyes

like the sunrise of their own seeing.

And diving even deeper into your birthwaters

you’ll discover

the new moon

of the black pearl

in an endless night

of nacreous and nebular beginnings

that sleeps in the abyss of your being

like an unborn primordial atom

and dreams that you’re awake.

As Chardin said

union differentiates.

That’s why lovers are anti-social

when they first meet

and people feel alone

in their own mystic specificity

like a house-guest without a host

most

when they’re dying.

Chromatic aberrations of consciousness

around the rim of the mirror

where the stars step off into eternity.

As my dead friend Willie P. Bennet once sang

I wouldn’t be in this mess

if I could take my own advice

and I mosaically returned

the only vice I’ve ever avoided

is advice

so we’re here together alone again

trying to avoid rehab.

Humpty-Dumpty

has to put the pieces back together by himself.

Union is Separation.

Separation is Union.

On the great journey of life

pilgrims on the winds of the starstreams

like doves released from sacred shines

not knowing what they’re the signs of

except that they’ve escaped being sacrificed

to the meaning of love once again

one foot’s always leaving

the other one behind.

But the same can’t be said for wings

when they sprout from your heels

and you’ve got a hermetic message

in an alchemical bottle

full of the eyeless wisdom

of the dark blessing

that lies deep in the heart of everything

like a compassionate answer

to its own wounded s.o.s.

The iceberg goes to the rescue of the Titanic.

When you can see the toxin and the antidote

in the one snake

striking at your heel

and not crush its skull

you see the lowest in the highest

and the highest in the lowest

you become a real dragon spontaneously

with the wingspan of the universe

breathing serpent-fire

into the ashes and urns of an old cold furnace

as big as the abyss

where big is as small as something that doesn’t exist.

And you can stand forever

in the flames of illusion

like a prophet in the lion’s den

the belly of the whale

the candle of a moth

or be tied at the stake

like a hapless heretic

in Bonfire of the Inanities

and nothing burns.

But you can hear in the words

that flower from your mouth

like poppies with solar flare

returning to the silence of their source

the unborn longing for the undying

as if one eye were seperated from the other

into the subject and object

of consciousness

and there were untraversible eras of light

between them.

Running Bear and Little White Dove

Hero and Leander

on opposite shores of the mindstream.

The extinctions and distinctions

of prehistoric hunter-gatherers

on the trail of themselves

leaving empty impressions

of their hands and feet in the starmud

they keep doubling back on themselves

like the retrograde motion of Mars

to follow later.

And you want to explain the optics of thought

and the cosmic dream-grammar

of PsychoBabylonic verbal expressions

to those who mistake words for thoughts

and talk in tongues in their sleep

like conceptual polyglots.

I’m not trying to give anyone anything

that isn’t already theirs

and I’m not trying to take anything away

that no one could possibly own.

I’m just trying to undo their locks

with a hairpin

as if my own escape depended upon it.

Rapunzel lets her hair down

like a navy seal

all the way to the ground.

But I’m not kidding myself about anything.

My third eye’s so wide open

most of the time

I feel like a Cyclops with nightvision

on a covert black ops mission.

And ambassadors martyred in chains

like St. Paul

or barbecued by the Iroquois

like Brebeuf and his brethren

get better spin in this life at least

than the great heretics

who suffered the same agony

as they did

were immolated in the same flames

felt the same claws and fangs

tear their flesh

in the same ecstasy

the same mysterium

of orgasmic excruciations

like the eye of a hurricane

a boy with a telescope

hoping the clouds will clear long enough

to get a good look at the stars.

No difference between a sage and an ignorant man

except the sage knows how

to free you of his foolishness

and approach God

without losing your sense of humour

whereas the ignorant man

expects you to change into him.

Like the pseudo-morphosis of native children

press-ganged into Catholic reformatories in Ontario

or house-slaves in confederate Louisiana

or refugees who change the names of their children

like chameleons in an alien country

to gratify the cauliflower ears of tongue-tied bigots

who approach every new sound

they can’t say

as if it were Etruscan linear A.

Mo-ham-mad

not Ted.

There

that wasn’t so hard afterall was it?

It’s not like you had to tell anyone

the secret name of your God now

was it?

And tomorrow we’ll work on your taste buds.

Amen.

It’s the heretics

not the saints

the exiled and the demonized

the broken and unrepentant

the abandoned and hunted

the condemned and stigmatized

the victimized

before they become next year’s perpetrators

and the great fools

with tears running down their face

to mask their laughter

who best express our human affinity

for a divinity that doesn’t malign us

with the unattainable slyness of its expectations.

If all else fails

you can always whip the horse’s eyes.

What you can’t do

though it’s been tried

is make a mule of Pegasus

and harness inspiration

to the death cart of your heart.

It’s hard to lay rubber in a hearse.

And all the phosphorescent algae in a red tide

shine though it might like a living galaxy

can’t do any good

for a dead starfish.

Inspiration grazes on a free range.

Even if you don’t burr stars in its mane and tail

or under its girth

and refuse to wear spurs

you can’t throw a saddle-shaped universe on it

and not expect it

to cast you back down to earth.

Heretics aren’t anti-orthodox

anymore than keys are against locks.

They just know how to open them

when opportunity knocks.

They know where the loose threads are

on the straitjacket

and how irresistible it is not to pull them

like a ripcord on a parachute

of someone standing in the doorway of a plane

when things that were looking up

seem a long way down

and they’re afraid to jump.

Their brains scream at the abysmal lack of solidity

though its clear to anyone who’s been there

the cornerstone of the atmosphere

is obviously the earth.

You can stub your heart

and fist-bump your forehead on it

like the kissing stone in the Kaaba

or the meaning of Peter’s name

they built the Vatican on

if you don’t think it’s solid enough.

Or you can jump as if your life depended on it.

In any case.

Things aren’t solid.

They’re real.

Not fight or flight.

But fly or die.

Without knowing

before the fact

whether you’ve got a parachute on or not.

Some fish one day bluffed its way out of the sea

without knowing

whether it had a leg to stand on or not.

Are we so much less

we won’t even linger in the doorway

of a dangerous medium

that adapts to us as intimately

as our next breath?

Daring said feathers and falling took flight.

How did you learn to walk

if not by falling forward

and learning how to catch yourself

with the next step.

Jump.

There’s more dignity in jumping

than there is in falling

or being driven out of paradise.

The first time I did I liked it so much

I did it twice.

Now I’m addicted like an Olympic gymnast

or Hart Crane off the coast of Cuba

after a change of heart about sex

to swan-diving off the back of the Titanic

as if I were the constellation Cygnus

plunging into the Milky Way

with style and grace

and a touch of demonic glee

just to add a little shadow to all this lucidity.

PATRICK WHITE

O SWEETNESS

O sweetness

you’ll make as good a poet one day

as you already are

but the things I’m really interested in

no one can say.

No one can think.

No one can see.

No one can feel.

A painting that’s more real than the model

who paints herself sitting there

like a palette of flesh-tones.

An interactive mirror

she holds up to nature

so nature can fix her hair.

It’s not that I don’t care about your writing career

or I’m not listening.

Attachment too is a Buddha activity.

It’s just that in the shadow of so much significance

swaying like a cobra to a flute

or a river-reed

like a semi-quaver in the current of the music

I’ve learned to kiss it lightly on the head

as a sign of respect for the dead

who didn’t.

You want to get inside poetry

as if it were some kind of scene

featured in a Jenson highgloss art magazine.

You’re a sphinx in the kelp-gardens of a seawitch

but a riddle isn’t a mystery

even if you can’t answer it

and poetry isn’t a cadaver in a surgical theatre

someone stole from Leonard da Vinci.

Poetry makes an unfashionable entrance

but by the time it leaves the party

it can fake a real cool exit.

What fool sends the wind to dancing school

to learn how to move?

Poetry is your own human nature

not Jovian thunder above a tin roof

with a butterfly’s antenna

tuned into haiku like a lightning-rod.

You don’t want to tempt God

into meeting you unprepared.

It would be rude to meet your worst fear

and not be scared.

Poetry is a power node of sublime insanity.

Crazy wisdom.

What life’s got to say to you at the back door

that it can’t tell you at the front

because all the neighbours

have installed listening devices in their telescopes.

And when I do answer you

if I seem light-years away

it’s just that I’m letting someone

I haven’t been in a long time

answer for me

as if I were twenty again

coming down the world mountain

like a mindstream clarifying itself in the darkness like stars

so the late frost of what I know now

doesn’t scorch the orchard.

Timing is as important as content

in the conduct of life.

I’m not going to hang a green apple

on a dead branch in winter.

Or tear a page off a lunar calendar

and tell the moon

when to bloom

and when to ripen.

And what can you say about the Unsayable

that isn’t two minutes of a lie with a hook?

Just because it’s playable

doesn’t make it a good book

even if you’re gossiping

with back-stabbing gods

who treat every tidbit of information

like a muck-raking revelation.

Imagistic reportage

is only the skin of the vision

the snake sheds

when it feathers its scales like wings

and the highest and the lowest meet

like a frenzy of gnats

and oxymoronic dragon stars

in the jubilant night air.

There are cave paintings

on the backs of your eyes

that have been there for thousands of years

like shadows dreaming in the darkness

of what they’ve seen and been

to the fossils of the generations

that painted them there

in ashes red ochre soot and silence.

Dream-catchers with the eyes of arachnid mandalas

webbing the threads of your lifelines

into powergrids

and table lace

that doesn’t say grace over dinner.

Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico

with a pen in his hand

by a man with an icepick in his.

The pen isn’t mightier than the sword

the moment it takes the sword for granted

or revolutionarily inevitable.

Don’t hang a pen over your head

like the sword of Damocles

and expect to write the truth

as if you had just submitted to a polygraph test.

At best all it will prove

is that you’re a good liar.

There are no border guards

or burning angels with swords in their hands

acting as if they were the hinges

of the gateless gate

that no one can enter

and no one can leave

that leaves nothing out

and keeps everything in

because it’s all around you

like the pathless space of the mind.

But don’t waste your time

trying to look into the future

of what I’m saying to you now

because however long and far you look

into the meaning of these words

you’ll never find the womb of the Unborn

until it kicks you in the belly from the inside.

I know someone raised on a diet of clocks

finds it hard to believe

but you’re the winged mother of time

with the seven ages of man

coiled around you like a helical snake

with the pit of its head above yours like a cowled chakra

or the pschent of an Egyptian pharoah

that unites within himself

the two genders of time

the past and the future

in the specious present

of this ageless moment now

this endless creative insight

this shy voiceless voice

that is always trying

to communicate you to you

as I’m trying to do collaboratively

in the panavision of a blind seer

with a child’s eyes.

Shakespeare wrote

by indirections we find directions out

so it’s okay to wander around

bumping into things

like dead ends on desolation row

or stubbing your head like a toe

on the rock of the world.

Poetry is a thoroughfare

in a labyrinth of cul de sacs.

It makes an emergency exit sign

of its inert passions

and passing a current of life through them

makes them glow in the dark

like fireflies in the mason jars

of Nikola Tesla’s lab.

Sometimes it’s God that says let there be light.

And other times

as the night comes on

and the stars are beginning to appear

it’s Lucifer the light-bringer who says

trying to get past his days as the morning star

O.K.

Las Vegas.

Sight is a kind of love

but blazing is an eyeless man

acting out against his blindness.

The sun shines at midnight

but it doesn’t put the stars out.

And at noon

in the clear light of the void

you can still see the shadows.

God has two eyes

the same colour as yours

but the liars only one

like the singularity

at the bottom of a blackhole

or a shark without an iris.

The light crosses the event horizon

and goes in

as if it were being summoned to a seance

but only the random halo

of the occasional ghost

shines out like a candle at a black mass

and nothing is revealed.

I’m writing this to you late at night

so the darkness can intensify my seeing

placed next to these highlights

I’m painting in the air

to show you the stars in your eyes

are a constellation all of your own

waiting for you to come up with a good myth

that can embody all that shining

without asking someone like me

to draw you a starmap.

There’s no doorman

on the thirteenth house of the zodiac

no lamp in the window

to guide the moths

and no phoenix in the ashes of their afterlife

to teach them how to grow new wings.

But if you think of words

as the gravegoods of the great dead

who once spoke them in their sleep

as if they were channeling metaphors

and not living creatures

as integral to your mind

as cells are to your body

or the thousands of tiny animalcules

that graze on your eyelashes like cattle

you’re just another mummy

who hasn’t come out of the closet yet

waiting like a old shoe

you had to take off

at the threshold of a stargate

to relive the same journey

that brought you here in the first place.

Better to walk barefoot the rest of the way

whether you’re walking on stars or water

quicksand or earth

than cure your body like leather

and wait under the weight of a literary pyramid

like a post-mature embryo gummy with its afterbirth.

Unborn undying

who needs to worry about living forever?

Carrying a candle through a hurricane

isn’t going to improve the weather

or impress the sun.

Poetry isn’t a nightlight you turn on

in a total eclipse

to keep the dragons at bay.

If the light weren’t alive

how could it have grown eyes?

If words weren’t living creatures

with our features

how could they express

the estranged voices

of so many different children

in the Babylonic intimacy

of their mother-tongue?

Language can be a whore

but she always acknowledges her children

by giving them a name

they can carry into exile.

And like the affable familiar

of this absurd harmony

I’m whispering in your ear

like the nightsea in a conch shell

with one earring dangling like Venus

from your lobe

I seed the wind

like a blue Sufi with an empty hand

giving generic names to the stars

in Arabic.

And these are the oghams

on the breath of the last Druid

left alive in the sacred groves of Mona.

The mystery of grammar

magically speaking

about the roots of words

is not the abracadabra of a linguistic cult

exhuming dead metaphors

like the photogenic fingerprints of ghosts

through a new medium

of necrophilic forensics.

Reality tv is just a lie

you overhear in the hall.

Like a bird that can’t peck out of its shell

what most people call reality

is just another kind of coma

that can’t break the spell of its own magic

when it backfires in the faces of the liars

by coming true.

Don’t try to take the measure

of the wingspan of a cosmic egg

or the size of the sky in your third eye

until you’ve broken out of one yourself

smashed the mirror

dispelled the mesmerism of the self

with its own awareness

and disappeared out into the open

like the last bird of the dying day.

Money talks

and bullshit walks

but money isn’t the root of all evil.

By their fruits ye shall know them

and money’s just a tree

that never comes to fruition

counting its leaves like cash

until the fall

when there’s no seed

no room in the lifeboat

no ladders at the windows of a burning house

to take all of you with it.

Money isn’t evil.

Words are

in the mouths of little magicians

when they stick like polyps and cists

to the vocal cords

of those who think they speak for God

barely an octave lower than she does.

Cast a great spell

like a fishing net out over the stars

without getting caught up in it

by expecting to catch anything

that wasn’t yours from the very beginning.

And the golden fish that swims from shore to shore

that eludes your grasp of enlightenment

will jump into the boat spontaneously

all by itself.

The heron is the second oldest symbol of a poet

but you’ll never see it out spearfishing at night

with a lamp in its hand

choosing its words as carefully

as a needle practising a cross-stitch.

Poetry is as easy as breathing

when you’re listening to the picture-music

like a submotif of its theme song

swept along like a leaf on the stream in the fall.

You only have to sweat the details

when your little mind’s lying

like a wave about the sea

to your big mind

and your big mind knows it

and cuts you off from your own depths

like the Burgess Shales.

And the rest is pre-Cambrian history.

The little mysteries might inspire you

to start looking for an answer right away

but the greatest mysteries of life

leave you so indelibly clarified by wonder

there’s nothing to ask

that doesn’t make a lie of the question

that isn’t amazed enough

to know immediately for itself

that when you perceive the whole in every part

like the reflections in the broken shards of a mirror

down to the smallest photon of a firefly

the entire sky and all of its stars

fit into it like the Andromeda Galaxy fits into an eye.

So here you are like an early spring

seeking advice from a late frost like me

and all I can do is throw myself like salt in the fire

and say

do you see?

Green flames.

The moon blossoms on a dead branch.

And there’s an echo in the valley

but no voice.

When I was young

my teachers told me

I had to find my own voice

as if there were only one among myriads

that could fit my foot to my mouth like a glass slipper.

So I went looking for it

like a Martian chondrite in Antarctica

trying to detect signs of life

like the amino acids

and fossilized proteins

of a dead language

as universal as Panspermia

in my own homegrown genome.

But I soon discovered

the little I had to say

was crowded out of the way

by the voiceless living and the vociferous dead

trying to express

their more urgent intensities through me

and if I had a voice of my own

like a brass doorknocker on the inside

how could they speak for themselves

if I were always at home in their space?

Which of all the breaths you’ve taken

and given back like water to the river

like migratory thoughts to the mindstream

wasn’t the last of the dying woman before you

and the first of the new moon in the arms of the old

that came after

through the same door

the last one left by?

And what of all you’ve heard

and will hear

wasn’t said first

by the prophetic dead

and the only distinction

between you and them

a thin skin pulled down over a hard head

like a spiritual prophylactic?

Soma Sema.

Be fruitful and multiply

like the lost tribe of a dandelion on the wind.

The seed sacrifices itself to the tree

and the tree makes a sacrifice of its apple.

Revere and praise the earth you walk upon

and the wild irises that bloom beside the starstreams

like fortune-telling gypsies in their purple tents

reading lifelines like loveletters

that haven’t been sent yet.

Be grateful for the generosity of the void

that gives you an insight

into the black matter of the dark abundance

that fills the negative space of your skull with light enough

to find your own way through the night

whenever you open your eyes

like jewels that lay hidden in eras of ore

suddenly discovering the shadows they cast

like thoughts in a mindscape

were born of their own shining.

In any direction

in every direction

there’s a star that’s following you

as sign of where it’s going.

But you don’t have to worry your maps to death

because true north is ominidirectional

and who needs a compass for that?

Poetry is the enlightened awareness

that’s endowed upon everybody at birth

by the illumination of a world of things.

Teacherless teachings.

No need to sit at the feet of your own wisdom

to master what you already know.

Open your hand

and let the wind take it

like a gust of dust and ashes and stars.

Take the lids off your mason-jars

and let the fireflies go free.

Overturn the urns of your cosmic theories

and instead of asking the world what it is

let it tell you who you are

and listen with your life.

The universe is a polyglot ventriloquist

that throws its voice into everything

as if it were talking in its sleep

to you alone

and you were listening to it

like a conversation you were having with yourself

in the next room.

Poetry hears with its mouth

and speaks through its ears.

It isn’t a way of expressing

what you’ve got to say.

It’s the way

the listening expresses you.

PATRICK WHITE

INFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Is it true

the most commpassionate people in life

are the ones in the greatest danger?

That the most generous

will lose their hands to the ones they fed?

That the bravest will be hunted down by protected cowards

and when the last of the heroes are dead

and the dragons who inspired them

are the advertising themes of amusement parks

those with the smallest balls

will give themselves the biggest awards?

Is it true

those who are creative

chafe the destroyers like anti-matter

and give the intellectuals diaper-rash of the mind?

That just to open your eyes

to watch the stars and fireflies

is enough to make other people feel blind

and insist you black them out

like pearls in an air-raid?

What’s a starmap to a mole?

What’s a lamp that shines in braille

to someone without fingerprints?

Is it true that beauty summons the worm

as a material eye-witness to its ruin?

That genius is devoured

by cannibalistic Neanderthals

into homeopathic magic

for the power of its brain

to turn thought into protein

with a high creatine content

that can make your dick strike twelve anachronistically

so you can go on knapping flint

for the next hundred thousand years?

That genius is a freak in isolation

that gets its own back

for being pecked at

like a phoenix among chickens

by opening Pandora’s box

like the atom at Los Alamos

like the geni in the lamp

and making a Trojan horse of its gifts

gives them everything they want

because anything as red

as Van Gogh’s hair and beard and ear in Arles

must be either a phoenix

or a fox with chicken-pox.

Sometimes you have more to fear

from the keys

than the locks.

Is it true

that a friend is a random event

in a space-time continuum

that’s got no room in its impersonality

for loyalty or sentiment?

That the heart has replaced the golden rule

with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

and everyone’s looking for love

like a Faberge easter egg

that’s already hatched its ugly duckling

sans fairytale?

Or the Czar’s family?

I asked Annie

as we were landing in Toronto

from the West Coast

like a waterbird with its wheels down

on a tarmac lake

is it true

that everything we thought sincere

has been exposed as fake?

That forever isn’t worth

the loveletter

it’s written on

for twenty minutes

because of temporal inflation?

Is it true

that all roads

that lead to Rome or Ottawa

never return the way they came

like arrows and fishooks and Vercingetorix?

That justice is a celebrity fame-game with ratings

brought in by a jury of mirrors

selected by the reflections of their peers

to convict the innocent

for their sins of omission?

That the God-particle

everyone’s looking for

like something they can’t get out of their eye

might not be

trying to make a point at all.

It’s hard to get a fix on

just how fundamental you are

in the scheme of things

when you’re stuck in the starmud

up to your knees

looking for your keys like koans

you swallow like pills to feel real

but hey

no big deal

but I was meaning to ask you

is it true

that we’re wounded by death

and life is the way we heal?

I know how you feel

about what’s real

but you can have all the money you want

and that still doesn’t mean

you’ll ever really know

what it means to be rich

without having to steal.

You’ve got the disease

but none of its symptoms.

Is it true

that the most successful grow

by never accepting a challenge

that wasn’t a bigger failure than the last

and call the summits of their Himalayan defeats

experience and progress?

Answer no.

Answer yes.

Answer yes and no.

Or just nod your head diagonally

like the sum of the squares of the opposite sides.

Because the questions were less rhetorical

than sincerity being facetious

I don’t expect people to answer the doorbell

or read every piece of spiritual junkmail

that shows up on their doorstep

like a flightfeather to paradise

on the wings of a seagull.

If you’re wounded deeply enough

there’s no resentment in the pain.

You just play with your brain

like an angry child plays with the eyes of a doll.

You control your rage like a nuclear reactor

or Chernobyl goes cosmic

and you throw a tantrum

that expands like the universe.

You can polish the mirror all you want

and call it clarity

until your sleeves are as threadbare

as the carpets under the windows

you’ve been staring through

as long as it take to turn your eyes to glass

but enlightenment’s on the dark side of the mirror

like a star is

like your eyes are.

Like waves on a lake

that takes things as they come.

Myriad deaths in a single birth.

Life on earth.

Intense heat.

Unusual sprouts.

A Zen sententium worth consideration.

But the clear light of the void

isn’t radiation.

It’s a lucidity

with nothing to illuminate.

It’s the Uncreate that plays creatively

in the absence of itself

like a child alone with its imagination

making the world up as it goes along

taking the Inconceivable

and making it believable.

Giving airy nothing

a local habitation and a name

as Shakespeare did

and danelions do in the fall.

As I am now

by asking if it’s true

you haven’t noticed yet

how it’s always the overprivileged

who send the underprivileged off to war?

Death in the hearts of the governors.

Death in the hearts of the profiteers.

Death in the hearts of the generals.

Is it true

this spider-web shines

like democracy in the morning

star-spangled with dew

but late at night under the streetlight

it’s tearing under the weight of its own greed?

That obese spiders who once pulled the strings

of a sticky mandala to eat well

ripen like the dead weight of toxic fruit

hanging from the branches of a dead tree?

This web is not a constellation.

This web is not a starmap.

This web is not a bloodstream

that gives back what it receives.

This web is not the lyre of a siren

that called people to the rocks of a new continent.

This web is not an electric guitar.

Is it true

the interminable buzzing of panicked flies

stuck to its strings

like masses of people

waiting to be consumed

is not the music of celestial spheres?

Empathic ingestion of agony over many years

like a fish trying to identify with heavy water

by adapting to it like a sick mother

who passed on her genes like Love Canal.

Is it true

you can die tending the ill in a hospital?

Carnage without redemption.

Eye-soup.

Severed feet.

Outrage imploding into black dwarfs

that warp space like a child’s mind

into believing God is best served by the blind

than those who can read for themselves

before they martyr her body like a judas-goat

to God’s great design

for the faithful dead

who expressed their gasp of divinity

in a holy war

a marketable crusade

a deniable genocide

a mass grave

a defensible border

that doesn’t know who gave the order

to drop cluster bombs

and white phos

on the hospital

when it ran out of bandaids

and watch it flower like a white dahlia

or a belly-dancing jellyfish

with poisonous tentacles

spreading out like the spokes of a beach umbrella.

The aesthetics of atrocity.

The age of desecration.

Is it true

the next best career move for evolution

like an unknown writer

listening to his legend gossip among rumours

like a suicide note without a table of contents

is unnatural extinction?

The mystery in the riddle of the sphinx

after all those years of sand and stars

is what would she have asked

if we weren’t there to answer.

Is it true

that Saturn’s shepherd moons

have turned into human coyotes

jumping borders like orbits

in the Van Allen Belt

where the asteroids are broken by drug rings

thawing rocks in a crack spoon

to defy the laws of gravity

with deified norms of depravity?

I might be a vague social democrat

walking a Zen plank

like a blindfolded political platform

who doesn’t need a party

to spell out

or sell out

what I believe

but it’s easier to write a folksong

about a successful thief

than a man or woman

for whom love was an art

that transcended its inspiration

and compassion the root of all understanding

and when death approached

because it’s hard to be alive and real

at the same time

embraced it as a great relief.

Is it true

that more similes turn into outlaws

than metaphors do?

That when Jesus asked

the little children to come unto him

he wasn’t speaking in tongues

behind sacred firewalls

for polyglot child molesters everywhere?

The pen might be mightier than the sword

like a mammal is to a dinosaur

but I have my doubts about a bullet

and electrically detonated C-4

wired to a lab rat like the black plague

and holy warriors

with the radioactive half-lives of dirty bombs.

Suras and psalms.

Gardens with underground rivers.

And fruit trees by flowing streams.

Shalom.

Salem.

Muslim.

Jerusalem

Islam

And Bethlehem the House of Bread

that breaks into peace

when it’s shared

like a common word

from the pelican fountain-mouth

of the same mother tongue.

Peace brother.

Peace sister.

May you live to be

forever young and free

of walled partitions

and the double helices

of chromosomatic razorwire

uncoiled like vines

around your secret gardens

where the waterlilies bloom in gene-pools

and the grapes are bleeding

like a miscarriage of sacred wines.

When the Great Lucidity appears

like a star of wheat in the Virgin’s hand

and shines down

on everyone’s shelter for the night alike

no mangers in the beginning

no arks at the end

may we all understand

that the blood-oaths of enemies

are not stronger than the bonds between friends.

May you know the enchantments of life

when it doesn’t belong to anyone

as well as you know the horrors

of disowning it now.

Or as I imagine they would say in Zen.

The pen is the sword.

It’s just a voice with words.

A lamp that gives its light away

like an extravagant geni

you don’t have to blow out to see

but you should

if you want to write good.

Black glee.

Bright vacancy.

Too much pain.

The agony of the seed realizing

the harvest was in vain

not worth what had to be endured

to live it all again.

Eleusinian ergot on the grain.

Is it true

heaven prefers

the hallucinogenically insane

and the sun only comes up

when a cock crows like a weathervane

or a God-struck lightning-rod?

On the return journey

which is more amazing than the first

you get to pass backwards

through all the stations of your life

you progressed forward through.

A prodigal innocence

that resonates with experience.

A dream reflected in a mirror

like a waterbird

dragging its wake through the clouds

like a knife ploughing a wound

through the envelope of a loveletter

no one can wake up from but you.

And no one can take away

because everything is trued by time

to the path you took

just by walking on the earth

alone on a dark night in the starless rain

when you removed the world like a mask

that proved false to your faceless pain

and you realized

how much closer a stranger is to you

than you are to your unrecognizable self.

Though pain may be prophetic

when your heart hangs on a hook

like bait on a question-mark

but great suffering doesn’t reveal anything

you didn’t already know.

It doesn’t stay.

It doesn’t go.

It’s a nothing that exists.

It’s an existence that’s nothing.

A gust of fireflies

from the mouth of a dragon.

But what does come as a surprise

like dusk overtaking the window

are the numberless eyes

that emerge from the depths of your darkness

like grapes ripening on the vine

like fish coming to the surface

like urgent diamonds

growing like mushrooms

in the long night of an abandoned mine.

Numberless eyes.

Myriad stars.

Light-years of memories.

And is it true

every one of them

is a myth in the making

each an enlightened Zen master

with nothing to teach

who insists

it’s not the stars that are shining

it’s your mind?

That they’re all within reach

all the time?

PATRICK WHITE