ACOUSTIC SHADOW

Acoustic shadow.

Gravitational eye of a galactic hurricane.

Ship going down

I’m clinging to a plank

in the great nightsea of my awareness

as if the last great threshold of chaos

were the lone oar of a lost lifeboat.

The moon is weeping jellyfish like willows.

There’s more isolation

in one human emotion

than there is in the whole of the universe.

The abyss draws near

blurs the mirror

obliterates all thoughts from my mind

and pushs my feelings

on crutches and wheelchairs

off the Peripeteian cliff

down to the Periclean rocks below

just outside Athens

where they expressed their democratic distaste

for baby girls

and condemned criminals.

My skull shakes with sudden headquakes

like a cosmic egg that fell out of the nest

and smashed on the earth below.

The sun haemmorages a bright yellow

like the dusky blood of embryonic dragons.

I can hear music in the distance

like windchimes made of shattered windows

and my nerves are running their fingernails down a blackboard

that’s scribbling my name over and over and over again

like the writing on the wall

in runes of chalk

and quicksand hieroglyphs

and then rubbing it out

like an afterschool punishment

for saying what I meant

when I said I had nothing to say.

Since when has an empty mouth

been a sin of omission

or silence a confession of guilt?

The void’s got a voice of its own

and can speak to itself

in Etruscan linear A

but everything else in its grasp

is a word that was left as speechless

as the rubbished first draft of a tongue-tied play.

Sometimes I look into the future

send my eyes off into the night

like a crow and a dove

from the stern of my rudderless ark

to see if there’s anywhere to land

and they come back wounded

by the slings and arrows

of what they’ve seen.

Worse than losing your faith

is losing your sense of humour

when you’re a cosmic jester

in the tragic court of King Lear.

You can act as if life were a joke

but the gods aren’t laughing.

And all my best insights

have turned into Higgs-boson God-particles

that bend space with sticky grids

and take on mass like spiders.

And here comes Rilke like a gust of stars

to remind me that sometimes

the heaviness of life

is heavier than the weight of things.

For every angel that jumps from heaven

a demon rises from hell

and then there are those

who fall between the cracks

like cherubs with stone feathers.

I’m a Medusan snake-bird

with the eyes of a dragon

congealed like tears of glass

in a blast furnace

from lightyears of broken mirrors.

One moment I’m enlightened

and the next

it’s hard to know if what I’m looking at

is poetic vision

or the death throes of a violent exorcism.

And even when I’m dispossessed of myself

I still can’t tell

if the road I’m on

is the return of the prodigal son

or just another homeless demon on the street again.

So much pain.

Black mold in the walls.

A radioactive muse

abusing the watershed I drink from

until I glow in the dark

at all hours of the clock

like a nightlight in a morgue

for the dead who like to get up and walk.

Anti-matter universe.

I’m an unsychronized happening

in a discharged particle field.

I jump orbitals

like trains and thresholds

and coldwar wine-bottles

in a game of Russian roulette

with the empties

but all my photonic insights

are scattered like fleas on a hotplate

and even my tears hiss like scalded vipers of acid rain.

Worse than losing faith

in the candlepower of your imagination

like a canary in a coalmine

to enter a blackhole

and come out the other side

into a whole new universe

like the key that makes it true

is losing faith in your eyes to follow you.

But the only religion I’ve ever adhered to

is my next inspiration

and I owe my origin

as much to what hasn’t happened yet

as I do to the morphological past

reading the I Ching

like the Burgess Shales

while referring to Darwin’s Origin of the Species.

Nine in the fifth place.

Dissonant yin.

Blue herons fishing like pens

in the starless eclipse of an inkwell.

Sometimes the light goes insane

and starts stabbing at mad shadows

that sit for their portraits like windowpanes.

Pain without reason.

Without explanation or alibi.

Time without transformation.

The bigger the space

the deeper the isolation.

Insight lost in a labyrinth of cul-de-sacs.

Imperatives without creation.

I break the crescents of the moon like a wishbone.

Soon the starving dogs

will gnaw at it like a fortune-cookie

to get at its mineral marrow.

I wish tomorrow wasn’t already too late

or fate preferred joy to sorrow

but when there’s only

two kinds of people in the world

toys and tools

you’re bound to end up

with a lot of deconstruction sites

like nuclear disasters

in a sandbox

manned by fools and ingenues.

When I used to ask life

what life was all about

the Buddha would always hand me a flower

or point to the morning star

and whenever I needed a heart-transplant

the government didn’t oppose

I’d wake up from a trance in intensive care

grateful to the organ donor

who gave me a new lease on life

with a previously used rose.

Now I sip tragic elixirs

from the breasts

of a morphine-drip

in the poetic snakepit

of a Medusan phase of the moon.

One tit heals.

The other kills.

But you can only know

which is compassion

and which is death

by the way it feels

when it’s way too late for appeals.

My spine is a ribbed skeleton of serpent fire.

A kundalini ghost walks over my grave

without recognizing its old name.

One of the great unspoken skills of a poet

is knowing

how to go down on the Medusa

without turning into stone.

Staring the dragon down like the razorblade

that first slashed its eyes open

like the birth-sac of an enlightened eclipse

without being blown away

like spun glass

by the intensity of the exchange.

You can’t grope around in the dark

like a piece of coal

looking for black holes

like star-nosed moles

in the tunnels of your mudmind

and expect to see like a diamond

on the cutting edge of the void.

Pure acetylene.

Not even so much

as the blue petal of hydrogen

in the immaculate heat of perfect combustion.

Nothing left unconsumed

in the fire-womb

of this creative crematorium.

Effusions of freak particles

and rogue elements

with radioactive halflives

converting to black energy

in a total liberation of the light.

All attachments go as cold as a murder case

some lonely corpse bears witness to

as if she were picking waterbirds

that don’t leave the trace of a clue

out of a line-up in a one-way mirror

that keeps one eye on the way things appear

and disappear like evidence

and the other on an artist’s sketch

of what she must have looked like once

before everybody tried to identify her.

Algol decapitated by a drug cartel

in the constellation Perseus.

Medusa’s severed head

hung from a bridge

as a warning to the snakepit

not to get stoned on your own product

or believe everyone who shows you a shield is a cop.

Some people reach for the top.

Others dive to the bottom

when the seas get rough

and some try to hide

in the corner of their eye

and play I spy with a storm-front.

Let the shore-huggers examine the local rocks

for the dna of sirens.

Let the sly ones tie themselves

like the sails of Luna moths

to the mastheads of their matchstick ships

to hear the candles crying

without the risk of flying to their rescue.

Even when you know how the trick is done

it’s ungracious in a poet

whether he’s listening to a siren a muse a lamia

Andromeda on the rocks

or a cashier in a fastfood mall

to resist the magic of a beautiful woman

as if you were a bandaid

and she were a bloodless wound.

The black widow times love

with the hourglass on her back

as if she were cooking an egg.

After that she’s a cannibal

and if you’re late

at making a getaway

you’re food on the plate

of your own children.

No one ever looks

for the motivation

behind their happiness

but everyone needs

a reason for their sorrows.

Who X-rays their joy

or seeks a second opinion

on the prognosis of their bliss?

But just look at the library of alibis

that have borne false witness

to human suffering.

And the snake-oil salesman

who have shed their skins

like the shirts off their back

to bind them.

But one answer doesn’t fit all

like a unified field theory

doesn’t do much

to cure the weak nuclear force

of a kid with cancer.

And yet there’s more inspiration

in the black muses of the negative

than there is in any number of positive prints

I would imagine in the same proportion

of occult matter in the universe to white.

Of darkness to light.

I’m being keel-hauled on the corals of the moon

in a seabed of shadows

cast by the flowerless light

like Roman salt into my Carthaginian wounds.

I’m the photographic negative of a galactic starmap

that swarms with brighter worlds.

And though there might not be any colour

or iris in my eyes

in the clear light of the void

that can’t be stained by seeing

the primordial atom

that grew up to be arboreal Adam

knows enough about creation

to remember that the world began

from a period at the end

of the previous sentence.

A full stop at the end of the road.

A supermassive blackhole

that warps space

into the nucleus of a galactic cell

to protect the contents

like a flash in the pan

that came out of nowhere

until it could replicate its luck

like white braille in a dark room

playing with loaded dice.

Sometimes it’s fireflies on hot August nights

lingering in the valley

like the leftover cloud of a thunderstorm.

Sometimes it’s snake-eyes in the light sockets of a skull.

Sometimes everything in existence

all events and forms

wake up from being the stuff of dreams

and begin to factualize the acts

of its creative memory

as if everything

everyone in the universe

could suddenly see

in the saddest wavelengths

on the darkest nights

of their longest shadows

what inspired the stars.

Demonically confessed as I am

under the truce

of this white phosphorus halo

of horned snakes and black laurel

I might suggest

to the true few among you

still seeking the truth

without knowing what you’re asking for

to watch your step

on the threshold of an event horizon

that can have prolific effects

throughout the mirroring multiverse

of your cosmic consciousness.

Two dimensional holographic picture-music

of everything I could have been or not

projected on the cave womb wall

opposite the black hole that’s casting them

like the infinite paradigms

of everything I am.

Worlds within worlds

procreating at the slightest touch of the wind

each one the afterlife of the other

like waterclocks that don’t keep time

like a dynasty

with a line of succession

but let their mindstreams flow freely

like the vast nirvanic ethers of hyperspace

breathing on the waters of life

like light mirrored through a blackhole

into infinitely expansive bubbles of inconceivable insight.

The mind puts the whole of itself into every thought

and what feeling was ever denied access

to any part of the heart?

And show me the redacted passages

in the conservation of information principle

that never burns its tats off

never shreds the enigma of its limestone frescoes

in the cave of Les Trois Freres

would rather live half-mad sad and lonely

with what it knows

than please a blind lover

by putting its eyes out

to prove that all it knows and will ever know

is for her eyes only.

The present may be well married to the past

but it longs for the future like a mistress.

And light’s just the dove

that carries messages

back and forth between them

in the first rush of enlightenment

that comes like a loveletter in the mail

addressed to everyone.

From the very first word

to the last

that leaves even the silence speechless

from the alpha and omega

of one flightfeather of a prehistoric alphabet

to the wingtip of another

lifespans across

from the snakepits in the deserted saltmines

of Sodom and Gomorrah

to the unearthly wellsprings

in the sacred grottoes of the stars

afraid you’re going to be upstaged

by your own suicide

or uncharacteristically vigorous

for a woman of your years

written indelibly

like the equals sign

between Einstein’s energy-mass equation

like a peace treaty between chameleons

like Monet’s Japanese footbridge

giving its blessing to the waterlilies

written where everyone can see it

smeared on mirrors in desperate lipstick

like the death lyric of haemmoraging snails

or written with a slow finger

in warm breath on a cold windowpane

like the nickname of a god

that’s late getting home.

Whether you meet God or the Buddha

Jesus working on his dovejoints

Blue Krishna dancing down the road with his Gopi girls

or surrender all the battleflags

of your holy wars

to the dark imageless beauty of Allah

or you’re working hard

on a Theory of Everything

to explain the unlocality of quantum events

like synchronous happenings

in a charged particle field

to explain how the message can get here

before it’s sent

like a future memory

of something that hasn’t been done yet

because reality is a singularity with personality

that takes the shape of the way you see it

like the pixellated skin of a space time continuum

with its tail in its mouth for eternity

stringing theories of picture music

over the supermassive blackhole

at the heart of a guitar-shaped universe

just to be

in this resonant medium

of interdependent awareness

means

you are that

when you’re looking at a starmap

impersonally

but closer to home

where things are more

qualifiably human

from a more intimate point of view

than quantifiably true

there’s no doubt in the world

that doesn’t affirm

by reversing the spin

of the definition

I am you

multiplied by the velocity of thought squared.

A boundless circle

with infinite points of origin

where the tail isn’t at the end

of where the head begins.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN YOU LOOK AT A STAR

When you look at a star

can you see

how the night leaves

the intimate doors

of intuitive eventuality ajar?

I’m all future with a prophetic past.

Aviomantic signs of liberated doves.

So many lifespans in a single moment.

How many light-years to the nearest star?

And how many shadows back?

Trying to say the inexpressible in words is like

to trying to thaw a snowstorm

on the tip of your tongue

flake by flake syllabically

or trying to explain bubbles to a glacier

in a momentary suspension of disbelief.

When you look at a star

do you see

that’s it’s you

that’s shining up that far

and it’s you down here

receiving your own light back like a ball

you made of your childhood

and threw up in the air

like a celestial sphere

when you had

all the time in the world

to come back and catch it later?

And as I grew older

not waiting for it to come back down

I learned to play vertical pool with the stars

to move things around

that were once considered fixed.

When you look at a star

if you want to clear the table

if you want to make the longshot

if you want to change the birthmark of misfortune

into an upturned elephant trunk of good luck

you have to chalk the cue with your skull.

But I ask you earnestly

if no one’s ever failed their death

is it probable

anyone’s ever failed their life

despite what their tears and fears have told them

about where they’ve ended up?

But a good beginning doesn’t lead to a good end

because a good beginning never stops.

A good beginning is without conclusion.

It doesn’t need to look beyond itself

because nothing’s missing from the very start.

When you look at a star

do you see the ancient wisdom

in a child’s heart

do you feel the depth

of all the eyes that have looked at it before

with longing wonder and sorrow

asking you to give them some direction

by adding yourself like another dimension to the past?

Is there a firefly of human suffering

mingled in the shining?

A window makes a better starmap

than a ten inch mirror

in a Schmidt-Cassegrain reflecting telescope

on an equatorial mount with clock drive

following them around like paparazzi

but when the stars want to know

where they’re at

it’s your eyes they parallax

at both ends

of the wingspan of your orbit.

It’s your seeing that gives them a fix.

The same eye by which I see God

is the eye by which God sees me.

It’s the same with everything

from fireflies to supernovas.

The donkey looks into the well.

The well looks back at the donkey.

Tat tvam asi.

You are that.

The lampshade and the blue parrot.

The donkey and the carrot.

When you look at a star

do you dress your destiny up

in hand-me-down constellations

like clothes you’ll grow into one day

or do you wear them like patchs on myths

you’re trying to give up

about how rough it’s been

to be chosen beauty queen

and bear the diamond tiara of the Pleiades

like the Northern Crown?

When you look at a star

is it the chip of a broken mirror

the plinth of a shattered chandelier

the Holy Ghost of fireflies

a fire-womb of immaculate fusions

that bear the transgender features

of their ancestral elements

like Abrahamic hydrogen?

A burning bush

in the valley of Tuwa

that eventually talks itself out like a candle

when the conversation begins to harden

like an auditory hallucination

into a puddle

of earwax shadows and wicks?

Or do you discern something more

you can’t quite put your finger on

or point to

not a presence

but there

an absence

but everywhere

and you standing there

like this tiny insight

with the precipitous extremeties

of a human being

trying to discover your own nature

in the inexplicability of all that shining

wondering if the rumours of awareness

the universe has been spreading about you

are true or not?

When you look at a star

have you ever thought

if mass is energy

maybe matter is mind

and thinking of one

as something that has to get over the other

is like expecting a wave to transcend water?

Light and lamp.

Body and mind.

Not one of two

but two in one

and even that’s one too much.

The flower opens

in the light of the sun

like a kiss on the eyelid

and the sun blooms

as if it had a crush on the flower.

When you look at a star

can you feel how the light

touchs your eyes as gently as a butterfly

as if all the eyelashs you’ve lost in a lifetime

like the ribbing of broken kites

or the spokes of a bike

or the straws of overworked brooms

had come back to you

as a living thing

with antennae legs and wings?

Have you ever looked at a star

and wondered how far away it would be

if you were to measure the distance in thought-years?

And such a small thing the mind

a child’s hand

and yet within its grasp

all that mass black matter energy light space time?

How could you fit

all those cosmic immensities

and the abyss that contains them

into such a small place

if they weren’t your own ideas?

When you look at a star

do you ever get the feeling

you’re swimming through your own gene-pool

your own meme pool

the Pierian spring

where it meets the sea

at the bottom of your mountain mindstream?

When you look at a star

do you ever turn the light around

and look into yourself

through its eyes

and realize

you’ve been communing with your own reflection

inconceivably

for billions of years

and that little insight

is the cosmic light of awareness

that fills the night with everything that is

when is is not the opposite of is not

and there’s no separation in the first atom

between thought life light mind matter and form

and the lion lies down with the lamb

and the old woman says she is not old

and the sparrow lays her egg in the serpent’s coil

and the old man who has seen everything says

my eyes are as young now

as you were back then

and your beauty is today?

When I was a boy

growing up in a garbage can

like a diamond in the rough

everyone wanted to cut

and buff the edges off

to polish me like a lense

so everybody could see how focused I was

when I looked up at the stars

from the bottom of a spent wishing well

where you could see them even during the day.

Though I was taught

they were responsible for my fate

and I should blame them for what I am

and not the black dwarfs of hate

who perverted the space around me

like slumlords

until even the buds of the flowers

were white as the knuckles of clenched fists

I never thought for a moment

that anything that clean and beautiful

that far away

from the scene of the crime at the time

could ever do anything here

that needed an alibi.

When I looked at the stars

I was enraptured by their mystery.

I was exalted by their unattainability

and the age of the silence

that surrounded their fires

knowing they’ve burned longer

than the light has lived

and seen more

than their eyes can forgive

of human life on the planet.

And the greatest agony of my childhood

from seven till ten

such that I would weep

my bitterness to sleep every night

like a child abandoned to a hospital

was that I was born way too early

to get to Aldebaran.

When I looked at a star

I didn’t gape like a telescope

into the depths of its utter solitude

but looked upon it like a far intimacy

I could draw near

until I could feel it breathing like silver

all over the mirror

that was as clear

as any dark spear

that ever wounded a mystic with bliss.

Strange whisperings of exiled sages

pouring stories of home

into a young boy’s ear

like my mother used to talk about

her childhood in Queensland

as if she were in the Garden of Eden.

When I looked at a star

and listened to its picture-music

I was so deeply moved

by the beauty and sadness of the song

like inspiration in utter solitude

I went into exile with it here

and it was my blossom

no wind could blow away

and it was my root

in the starmud

nothing could pull up

and throw away.

When I looked at a star

I was enthralled

by the dispassionate attachment

and creative dynamic

that burned me like a sacrificial heretic

in the ice of inspiration.

I could forget the small orbit

of house arrest

that a circumstantial planet

had affixed like an electronic anklet around my leg

for being born unforgivably poor.

When I looked at a star

it was as if the flightfeather

of a bluewhite fire bird

landed on the windowsill of my cell

to take pity on me

and share its freedom

with someone living in a cage.

When I looked at a star

it was the synteretic spark

I sent out like a dove from the ark

with two of every mind

in the zodiac aboard

after forty days of flood

to look for Atlantis

like the next best thing

to Mt. Ararat or Cathay.

It was the angel that always looked back

with the same mystic fury in its eyes

that were in mine

when I looked up.

When I looked at a star

I could prognosticate the future

like the distant memory

of someone returning to their origins

waking up from exile

to discover it wasn’t a dream.

You can tell by the way a star

flashs like a panicked chameleon

on the event horizon of a blackhole

things are what they seem

when you’re peering through atmospheres

with tears in your eyes.

I used to make telescopes when I was young.

I would grind their pyrex eyes

with ever finer grades of carborundum

until they could see just right.

I shaped their fibre-glass bodies

until they were as smooth as a woman’s skin.

And I took them out into the open fields naked

far beyond the intrusions of the city lights

and exposed them to the stars

who revered them like clear-eyed mirrors

and adorned one with leaves

and the other with sidereal veils

and said like the elders

and old midwives of an Ojibway tribe

when they name the newborn.

This one shall be called Eve.

And this one Isis.

And to celebrate their birth

opened a third eye

and said

as it is on earth

it shall not be in the sky.

PATRICK WHITE

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