THE MORE I TRY

The more I try to write and paint

the more I’m pulled away by things

the more I’m dismembered

by the mundane exigencies

of underwhelming circumstance.

I’m swimming through glass.

I’ve abandoned all hope.

Like Rumi said

dangerous hope

futile despair.

I think of them both

and I sneer

like an emergency exit in a hall of mirrors.

My fate might be no more than an afterlife in arrears

but I resent being used so stupidly.

I’m looking for wisdom in a corporate feudal system

that enslaves part time people to full time jobs.

One life on earth.

One brief glimpse of the stars.

One chance to be set adrift in the mystery of it all

like the fragrance of a lover’s hair in the autumn rain.

I’m fighting an unholy crusade of one

that I’m doomed to lose

like a pilgrim that wandered off the track

with no particular shrine in mind

or way of finding his way back.

I knew years ago

when I was all elbows and windowsills

a poet’s life is a fish hook

a crescent of the moon

you had to push all the way through

to avoid the greater damage of pulling it out

once it got caught in your heart.

And there’s only been one theme from the very start

I’ve been humming to myself down this long dark road

where I’m walking with the moon

and the black walnuts don’t need to show me their leaves

like green cards or illegal passports to anywhere they land.

We’re all here alone together

among the homeless in the same lifeboat

on six billion mindstreams

all flowing into the vast inclusive sea of awareness

under a chaos of stars

in a labyrinth of wavelengths and cosmic snakepits

wandering off in all directions at once.

I used to believe

that people were born to see and be happy

but as I grew I realized

that the fairest form of clarity

is compassion.

Soften your eyes

and the diamond thaws

as if it were brought to tears

that put other jewels to shame.

When everybody’s already on death row

who can you find to blame?

Jim Morrison was right.

Nobody gets out of here alive.

But in the meantime

we can attend to the wounded.

We can apply the moon like a cool poultice

to the forehead of a fever

and raise a spoonful of stars

like an elixir to the lips

of a thirsty mirage.

We can wake a child up from a bad dream.

We can be oxygen

to those without any atmospheres

and when the world mountain

can’t find a way down from the clouds

we can be the river that shows it how.

What is our understanding of it after all

but a good guess

a stab in the dark

a firefly

a lightning bolt

a chimney spark of insight

compared to what we don’t know there is

to know of it?

Even the point of a single flower

is a whole field in and of itself.

And every system of conditioned consciousness

is having a secret affair

with chaos deep inside.

The cowards demand certainty.

The heroes are full of doubt.

Life is a succession of disconnected gestures

that somehow work out.

You find water on your way to a mirage.

Delusion was the muse of your inspiration

to head south

and the clarity of real water

was what happened spontaneously along the way.

No one likes a cul de sac

just as they don’t like angels that get in their way

but the dead ends in life

have as much to say as the thoroughfares

and no one ever walks away weaker

or more lost than they were.

The path the blind take

is just as much the way of the seeker

as night visions are

to the revelations of the day.

Try to walk all roads at the same time

and you won’t even walk one well.

Walk one well

and all the others will follow you

like the threads of a strong rope

or mindstreams flowing into a widening river

on its way to the sea

and you’ll end up walking them all.

And no river’s flowing the wrong way to the sea.

The clouds that pass over

don’t look down upon the flowers

that open below

as missed opportunities

they’ll be asked to explain to their watershed.

If things grow

let them.

If things perish

lend them your future.

PATRICK WHITE

UNGRATIFIED LONGING

Ungratified longing’s not much of a focus right now

but sometimes that’s all you’ve got to go on.

The dark energy of a few annihilated positrons.

Fossilized bones around a dead fire pit in a cave on the moon.

The ghosts of lost atmospheres.

An agony of thought and seeing

in a dispassionate waste of being.

Flat lining like the Burgess Shale.

So many lost beginnings in me.

So many aborted attempts at survival

I’m beginning to think I’m inconceivable.

How many worlds have gone extinct

failing to adapt to me?

And how many of my genes

are losing lottery tickets?

I know too much

to apotheosize random chance

and appeal for mercy

and yet I have an ignorant heart

that clings in superstitious awe

to love and compassion.

A sense of wonder that aches

to be intimate with the impersonal.

Last night I saw two full moons

one smaller one overlapping the other

and a smear of light like a snail-track

where it appeared a third one moved

reflected in the double thermal windowpanes

of the Masonic Lodge across the street

and I thought it was a visual clue

to how the infinite worlds of the multiverse

could be born of two membranes in hyperspace.

Of how a particle can replicate a wavelength.

And then I lit another cigarette.

Poured another coffee.

And watched the tail of my goldfish

shimmer in the water

as gracefully as the veils of the aurora borealis.

And then I thought of Isis

and how no man had lifted her veils

and I checked my left hand

to see if she had tattooed a star on it

to keep me from drowning

but she hadn’t

and I was left clinging to my cigarette

in a vast night sea of awareness

where everything I feel and think

ends like the maiden voyage of a shipwreck

and smoke and breath are all I have left to hang onto.

And I feel so sad for this absence in me

I’ve failed to fulfill

like someone’s last wish

on a deathbed

however I’ve laboured like Egypt

to make it come true.

This world that’s counting on me

like the apostrophe of an embryo

to conceive it in a fire womb

of imaginative facts

that seed the abysmal emptiness

with the cosmic significance

of even the smallest creative acts.

Knocking on the front door of absurdity

you realize there’s no one home

so the message doesn’t matter at all.

But knock on the back door

and the message means more

than the person it was meant for

but you still don’t get an answer

and there’s no trades entrance for common sense.

I end up following my train of thought

like buried arrowheads

downwind of systemic herds of stars

moving on to greener fields of vision.

All my life I’ve been consumed

by the creative extremes

of the energies released

by the spontaneous reciprocity

of mutually destructive intensities.

A cataclysm of insight

that’s one part lightning

one part fireflies

one part stars

and an exponential number of eyes

expanding in all directions at once.

I focus on things like space.

I resonate with objects in a room

as if we were all subject to the same doom.

I empathise with lamps and light bulbs.

I attend the funerals of forks.

I’m as fair-minded with my desk

as I am my kitchen-table.

I’m grateful to the windows

for their translucency.

And though I pace a lot

I try not to stress out my floors.

And every chance I get

I compliment the trustworthiness

and stalwart discretion of my doors.

Why not?

They’re as interior to me

as I am to them

or any mental image

of an old school delusion

I had of a self that was superior to them.

Now everything enjoys

the same parity as childhood

and we all get along

like unspeakable reflections

in the mirrors of one another.

They furnish me in my emptiness

and I people them with metaphors.

It’s an estrangement that is inclusively ours.

And I see the same arrangement

among stars and flowers.

Everything in existence

is immaterially real.

Why discriminate between one phantom and another

when a ghost of candle smoke

carries the burden of the theme

as well as a spearhead of flame

in the same dream of collaborative creation?

I sit here among things

in a small Ontario town

in the early hours of the morning

realizing how ridiculous it is

to wonder what my insignificance

might signify

and whether it was more wonderful

to be a human

two centuries ago

when they drove sheep down these deserted streets

than it is now

and if so

how have we been diminished.

Whose image am I now?

Is it more devastating

to be created in the likeness of a god

than what you can discern of yourself

in a cloud of unknowing?

What branch of the tree

did this skull-nut of a mind

drop off of

to root in the starmud

like a nervous system

and blossom into thoughts and words

and worlds within worlds within worlds?

One moment the mindstream

is an ancient river system on Mars

that’s either evaporated

or gone underground

and the next

it’s the white water of stars

where eagles hunt

and swans make the sign of the cross

before they land

and there’s a harp

that isn’t so much a musical instrument

as an untested hybrid wishbone

taken from the other two.

But I don’t want to break anything

before I know what to wish for

so it’s been drying on the windowsill for years.

I expose questions

like the Gordians

showed Alexander their knots.

I’m trying to cut my way

through a hydra-headed snake pit

hoping that the word is still mightier than the sword.

I feel the lies and illusions

as profoundly as I feel the fugitive truths

or the reflections that don’t subscribe

to either point of view

as if to say

this is it

this is all there is

and this is more than enough

to keep on baffling the whizz-kids

for generations to come

with the interrogative silence that follows their answers

like a great clue to how much we don’t know

as we try to collate our faces

over a lifetime of mirrors

into a symbolic design of wavelengths and lifelines

we keep undoing like Penelope undoes the moon

like a flying carpet unravelling out from under us

or Icarus

exceeding his own wingspan

until it was too vast to include either him or us

and every threshold of knowledge

we’ve ever crossed since

were the event horizon of a blackhole

that isn’t big enough to contain us

as we expand like dots on a starmap

into lonelier and lonelier spaces

that can’t remember what it was like to be human

and shine until your light’s

tucked under the eyelids of the roses

like a secret love letter

written in the voices of dream figures

that sometimes wake up when you do

like a stranger knocking

on the inside of the door.

Not to be shut out.

Not to be rejected or abandoned.

Not to be ostracized and exiled.

Not to be wholly consumed on a pyre

as a last ditch effort to make it to the stars.

Not to be the collateral damage of creation.

Not to be a sentient monad in an anonymous mob.

Not to weep in empathy with the victims

and seethe in savage rage at the perpetrators

and then watch their role reversal in a morality play

then ends like the myth of Sisyphus.

Not to be misunderstood because you tried to understand.

Not to feel that life

is an averaging out of brutal crucials

and that mean-hearted cunning is the measure of a human.

Not to see that life’s inestimably precious and generous

and as rare and full of wonder

among things of radiance in a dark universe

as a jewel beyond compare

you found in the bottom of your empty pocket

standing in line at the foodbank

and that no river’s flowing the wrong way to the sea

that receives us all

like birds summoned home at nightfall

to watch the moon be born again

in the sacred groves where we began

and not be treated like a deaf-mute

because your rapture’s not two minutes with a hook.

Not to look at the picture-music of your mindstream

from an intimately cosmic point of view

like sand and stars stuck to the spiral arms

of a dead starfish

and be told you have to put out your eyes like Oedipus

if you want your dreams and visions

to have any commercial potential.

Not to suffer the pseudomorphosis of virtual reality

minerally fossilizing every soupy cell

and intuitive insight of your bodymind

with microchips that treat life

as if it were retrievable skeletal evidence

of how we’ve evolved

from stone age wisdom

into stoned age data.

Not to look upon a computer

as an advance upon women

as memory and muse.

Not to look in awe

upon the vastness and silence of the future

as if it were merely the afterbirth

of the hysterical pregnancies

that rage like the opinions and views

kicking like ghosts in the wombs

of the politicians and pundits

with the life-expectancy of a miscarriage.

Not to see a blade of grass

struggling to grow

through a crack in the concrete

as if it didn’t know

we’d imposed another ice age of cement upon it

as a punishment

for trying to grow where it wants.

Not to watch children die in their millions

of material and cultural attrition

with less chance of survival than houseflies

as see nothing accusatory in their eyes

as their bellies swell with starvation

like small disqualified planets

as if our impotence

were a greater obscenity

than their helplessness.

Not to see illegal immigrants

killed by an atlas

trying to find a place

in the shadows under the table

of the global economy

to live like ants

on the occasional crumbs

that get brushed off the corporate belly

like missing links in the food chain

that led to us.

Borealopithecus robustus Americanensis.

Like the land of the free with electrical fences.

This man’s liberty

that man’s nemesis.

And everyone decked out in chains

as a sign of status

like pimps and mayors

and forty-one percent

of the people’s representatives

ideological millionaires who believe

the poor are the reason the rich suffer.

And that the job-creators

have the same right as leeches

to bleed them for their own good.

Just to be free for a little while.

Just for a moment.

Just to find a small wormhole in the dung heap

like a caterpillar crawling into the fortune cookie

of a space-time chrysalis

to be displaced on the other side of the universe

like a butterfly with a profound effect upon physics.

Not to sit like a night watchman

on the graveyard shift

in the drab silence of a small room

wondering what things are being faithful to

and if a flashlight ever feels

like an undisciplined lighthouse

standing in the shadow of a star.

It’s not possible in a world that always in flux

to return to the way things are

because the way things are

is to never be the same thing twice

so I don’t even bother trying to find my way back

to anyone or anything

knowing they never did

and don’t now exist

except as a guess and an interpretation

of the ungratified longings

of the human imagination

dumbing time down to get a fix on things

like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

How can you find your bearings

by doing parallax on a mirage.?

In the flash of a specious moment

it’s already light years between mirrors.

So if you were to ask me

where I’m at now

and really wanted to know

I’d say where I’ve always been:

physically intellectually emotionally and spiritually missing.

Even my most cherished memories

what they mean

and the whole of my past

creatively collaborate

in a dynamic equilibrium

with the present and the future

such that now always somehow seems

like just a long memory

of things and events that haven’t happened yet.

And I could easily believe I was prophetic

if I didn’t already know

that what starts out as my voice

invariably comes back

as somebody else’s echo.

PATRICK WHITE

ON INTO THE NEXT DIMENSION

On into the next dimension

like a measure of thought

sitting full lotus

on a flying carpet of feeling

that’s on the same wavelength as the stars.

I’ve been an intimate of windows long enough.

I trust them.

But they don’t shine.

They’re confined to the news

of what’s going on beyond them

that’s brought to them live

by skies they flip through

like old Time magazines in a doctor’s office.

Their eyes are long on views

but shy on visions.

Cataracts in the eye.

Flowers in the sky.

If you look through them long enough

you’ll kill all the wildflowers

in your field of vision

and your third eye

will start grinding lenses for a living

like Spinoza

for a spiritual telescope with myopia.

Clarity will start writing messages in your breath

you’re meant to take to heart

as you watch the universe shrinking

like expiry dates on the hot gusts of stars

evaporating like ghosts

from the cold glassy stares

of windowpanes

that have been crying in secret for years

because they’re not taken as seriously as mirrors.

It takes a rock of a will

and the passion of an angry delinquent

to break free of them

but once they’re broken

like the link of a koan

that liberated you from your own thought-chains

you can still see the whole in every piece

of the primordial atom

that precipitated the Big Bang

but it doesn’t get in the way of what’s beyond it.

You stop lifting fingerprints

as evidence that you exist

and start lifting veils

begin shedding skins

stop asking sacred clowns

if they can still recognize you

under all the facepaint

you use to express your emotions.

You let your masks blossom and blow away

like Ezra Pound’s images

of faces on a wet black bough of the subway.

You empty your streets

like a dangerous part of New York

and step out of the doorway

where you’ve been waiting for yourself

to return home.

You exchange the key to the lock

for a fork you can fly from a kite

like a lightning rod in an electrical storm

that sends the snake pit of serpent fire

that moved like a glacier in a dream of thawing

racing up your spine

like a dragon of life

urgent as spring rain

that sheds its scales

like waves and ripples of water

but wakes up feathered in flames.

And this time it’s the sun that drowns

for flying too close to Icarus

like the event horizon of a black hole

that smears its dimensions

like peanut butter

around the rim of a subliminal halo.

Free of the past

whatever you see

confirms your secret intuition

that the world hasn’t happened yet.

That everything you see

in the ubiquitous solitude

of your unwitnessed sentience

is merely prelude

to a greater event

that transcends

the inconceivability

of what’s self-evident about the present.

PATRICK WHITE

THE ULTIMATE ANGLE IN LIFE

The ultimate angle in life

is to be real

whatever that means.

Without wax.

Sincere

so you don’t end up being confused

by anyone else’s lies

but your own

and Caesar doesn’t melt in the sun.

This is my voice

not the distant echo

of a truth in disguise

with the stage-life

of radioactive carbon

trying to keep up to date

with its own decay.

Everybody’s looking

for the reality behind the art these days

but I keep my third eye

on the art behind the reality

as if security cameras

hadn’t been invented yet

and the one-eyed liars

hadn’t made a two-eyed God

look like the fraud

they were sick

of staring back at

from the blind side of the mirror.

Bread and circuses

but who watches the watchers

who are making the whole thing up

to keep your eyes off of them?

I’m more than a little middle-aged

but my passions swear

they’re still nineteen

waiting to come down

from the bad acid trip

of the last forty-three years.

It’s nineteen sixty six six six again

and I still get my kicks

out of the most serious things in life.

Like what the fuck am I doing here?

And am I going to wake up in time

to see how it ends?

And did I fulfil my life’s dream

of ruining myself on poetry

so I could make some meaning

out of the absurdity

of never having found one

that wasn’t round

and I had to roll up a hill

to prove to the people who had none

that I had the gravitas

and staying power

of a cornerstone

who was able to pull himself up

by the bootstraps

like quicksand

trying to make something of itself.

But I got tired

of designing pyramids

like works of art

with their vital organs

in the urns and embalming jars

of other people’s afterlives

and struck out for Orion on my own

to perfect my solitude

like Plotinus walking alone with the Alone

among billions of stars

without an interpreter.

I stopped talking to myself

like someone I didn’t want to hear from anymore

and started listening

to the anonymous picture-music

that expressed me

like something hidden

that would remain unknown.

Something singing

like a nightbird in a dark wood

that my eyes and my mind

couldn’t quite make out

but my heart fully understood.

How deeply everything hurts to be real

in this agony of existence

where sentience would hurt a lot worse

if it weren’t for the occult arts

of spontaneous compassion

that can take a gaping wound in hell

and turn it into a celestial wishing well

that sometimes make things ring true

like lies that heal.

And as Dogen Zenji commented

if the medicine doesn’t make you dizzy

it’s not strong enough.

It isn’t poetry.

And that’s a lie

I keep repeating over and over and over again

like the mantra

of an incommensurable decimal point

of an insight into enlightenment

that can’t be realized fraction by fraction

as if you were picking up the pieces

of a shattered mirror

and trying to put them back together

to make things whole and clear again

when you come face to face with yourself

like an illusory cure for an illusory disease

in real pain.

And you put your fist

through your reflection in the mirror

like an antidote

to wake the others up

from these private nightmares

in public snakepits

but most of them

aren’t looking for an emergency exit

from the toxic delirium

of being stoned on reality

the way a cobra

holds the attention of a bird.

They’d rather be swallowed

like a cosmic egg

by a serpent they know

and live in a cozy eclipse

than break through to the other side

and leave the nest

to cross the event horizon

of their own wingspan.

And that’s ok too

because all the flowers

don’t bloom at once

and it’s wrong to try and pry them open

before it’s time.

Even when they’re disgorged like a collapsed parachute.

And it’s the snake that flys away

like an early oxymoron of God

in the form of a dragon.

But how can I be created

in the image of God

if God is unknowable

and unbounded by metaphors?

So I say

the ultimate angle in life

is to be real enough

not to conceive of a self

you can pin up on your bedroom wall

like a poster of who you’ll be

by the time you’re discovered.

Just because you’re holding on

to a starmap

like the birth certificate

of a myth of origin

with your name on it

like a number in the NGC catalogue

doesn’t make you a galaxy.

Doesn’t mean you’re shining.

Doesn’t mean you’re throwing a light on anything

and even if you’re convinced you are

what’s that

but old advice from an aging star

that’s moved on to other things lightyears ago?

The point is

not to let the road behind you

define the available omnidirectional dimensions

of the road ahead of you

as if you could only walk one road at a time

to get to where you’re going.

Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo

that some people walk some people fly

and some people take a train to the stars

when they die

but if you live in a starless darkness long enough

like a god without a similitude

they’ll come to you

and let you see through their eyes

what it’s like to be so full of light

and never seen.

The angels might keep their ancient places

under the sticks and stones

of warring cosmologies

but whatever was holy about Jerusalem

is a crusade in a bone-box of relics

that can’t hold a candle to the Burgess Shale

and one little fish with a spine

that threaded the eye of the needle

and made a rosary of its vertebrae

to count the names of God

like qualities it had in common

until it got to ninety-nine

and had to stop

because it couldn’t define the last one

like a skull of starmud

with an inexplicable brain at the top.

How could anyone ever hope

to understand a mystery

they’re too confused to accept

because they think it means

you amount to nothing

if it can’t be reflected in a mirror?

But an exemption from lenses

doesn’t mean you disappear

or that you’re everywhere at once

except here

the way most people think

in the presence of God

they’re being ignored by their lover.

You don’t need to make up a myth

as a cover story

to corroborate an alibi

for not being here in the first place

if you realize your mind

is as innocent as space

of anything you might experience

that becomes attached

to a likeness of you in time

you keep passing around

to see if anyone can recognize you

at the scene of the crime.

Dispense with all that nonsense.

You can’t get an insight into the outside

without turning the light around

like a shadow of dark energy at high noon

so the sun shines at midnight

and the mirrors have no way

of telling the time

because there is no lost watch of a face

to show them how they’re aging.

Be sentient space

without a notion of being

in an ocean of seeing

that the life that is happening in you

is not happening to you

as if awareness were merely there

to witness its own downfall

and space got caught the act

of trying to hide the fact.

The metal petals of a radio dish

are just flowers waiting

for the buzzing of bees

in an exchange of honey and seeds

you can make of what you wish

like emission spectra you can read

like the genomes of meiotic galaxies

and their embryonic quasars

a star that drowned itself in a well

when it heard what you wanted

or a genie in a lamp

that thought it was haunted

but whatever way you look at it

whatever wavelengths you weave

on the loom of this space-time continuum

like the moon unrolling itself

like a flying carpet of white feathers on the lake

you’re the space it all happens in

and life is living itself through you

like water lives in a fish

like the sky lives in a bird

like darkness lives in the stars

like the universe lives in the life of the mind

without a mouth

without a voice

without a word

without a grammar

for the expressions of time

that space lives in

like unconditional existence

without a sign of resistance.

PATRICK WHITE

THE WEBS

The webs I could once brush off my shoulders

as lightly as the hair of an old romance

that’s been sitting in the closet for years

are beginning to feel like rigging and ropes

and I’m at sea again under full sail.

No more enzymes fossilizing my mind and heart

like the La Brea Tar Pits.

You can’t get a tattoo of the sun

and not expect the occasional eclipse

but there are seagulls in my wake again

and dolphins at my prow.

I’m as omnidirectionally bound to everywhere at once

as any star

so no more trying to figure out where I’m going

by making constellations out of matchsticks

that enlighten me about as much

as the myths of black dwarfs.

And as much as I love the fireflies

they’re just going to have to work with the lies

I told them

to get them to start believing in themselves

and shine like galaxies.

I don’t know how I know this is so

but somehow I do.

It’s as if the future placed its hands on my skull

and my eyes have returned to me

like birds to nests that haven’t felt the weight

of a cosmic egg in light years

like spring skies with the silhouettes

of Canada geese

flapping their wings like eyelashes

against the full moon

as if it were flirting with the idea

of driving me mad again

just to see if it still could.

Of course you can.

And you’ve known it forever.

I bring the atmosphere

and you’re the weather.

I’m the genius in residence at a school of one

and you’re the muse that knows it all.

This isn’t midwinter spring

and I’m not sodden

nor sempiternal toward sundown.

My heart isn’t turning urns out

on a planetary potting wheel

to accommodate the ashes of a phoenix

that doesn’t know how else to pass the time

among so many dead things.

I see iridescent green fire.

Mystic orange-blue oxymorons and koans of colour

flaring like butterflies over flowers in flame

that open like third eyes

that would put peacocks to shame.

I bring the radiant intensities

and you

even more profoundly

bring the veils.

And together we make one mystery

like angel-fleets

with skulls and crossbones on their sails.

Hoofs and haloes.

Lunar horns

with the blood of roses on them

and sacred dolls

with thorns driven through their hearts

to wound their rapture

with seraphic spears of dark insight

that elude even the subtlest of seers

like the shadows cast by mirrors.

You cross a curse with a blessing

and the union is an expression of love

that doesn’t differentiate between pain and pleasure

or look upon fullness as half.

And it delights in the crazy hurtful crucial wisdom

that enlightenment leaves in its wake

like an afterlife of cool bliss

that can prophecy in a coma

when the next comet’s going to hit earth

like a species change

that has nothing to do with the judgment of God

any more than inspiration

clings to a lightning rod in a storm.

I bring the sound of one hand clapping

and you bring the encore.

I bring the medicine bag

and you bring the emergency ward.

I need a break from myself.

I want to turn a blind eye for a while

on the hurricane raging around me

and you look like club med

run by a Mexican drug cartel from here.

But my biggest fear

is that you’re not dangerous enough

to never have to prove your power.

My deepest wish

is that I’m still dark enough

to bring the stars out in your eyes

like a mix of tears and laughter

when I tell you

that when God took a rib from Adam

he didn’t know whether he should use it

for a rafter in a lighthouse on the sun

or the keel of a lifeboat

that’s tipped over on the moon.

So he split the difference

between the two of us

like a wishbone

and no one’s ever known

what to ask for ever since

but you get yours

and I get mine

and we both shine

a wavelength or two shy of a spectrum.

I’ll bring the eclipse

and you bring the rainbows.

In the eleven dimensions

of the inner and outer illusions

that currently pass for reality

I’ll bring the ten for space

and you bring the one for time.

PATRICK WHITE

EXISTING UBIQUITOUSLY IN MULTIPLE UNIVERSES

for Pat Doyle

Existing ubiquitously in multiple universes

because it’s getting too hard

to suffer this one on my own.

Dark room.

Star globe.

Thunderstorm.

Goldfish.

I just received an updated e-mail

from a friend who hanged himself

this past Christmas

that began

let’s change the world together

but then the computer said

there was a decoding error in the url

and that’s where the message broke off.

If you stare long enough into the nothingness

all your inconceivables

become synchronistically believable.

What is a mind the measure of

if it isn’t the quantum foam of hyperspace

blowing worlds like the bubbles

of an infinite multiverse

where the impossibly probable

does and doesn’t exist

like the way you look at clouds.

I had a dream once

where I stood on a cosmic precipice

and looked out into the abyss

and space was full of eyes

looking back at me

and ever since then

I’ve realized

that the seeker only exists

because the seer is the seen.

Like the Sufi master said

you can only understand

the things you’ve been.

And I would add in the same breath

that being is seeing

born in the heart of the stars

and that this life

this death

are just metaphors

for the way we forget and remember them

as if we were seeing ourselves

when we look back at them in time

from the inside out.

Yesterday throws a light on tomorrow

as if it were already a thing of the past

which explains a post-dated e-mail from a dead friend

but not why it should end so absurdly

or why it was sent in the first place.

What could any fundamental paradigm

in this house of warped mirrors be

except a distortion of my own face

in a space time continuum

that imagines me

out of the sum of all my reflections

as if I existed like an entity in arrears

long before I showed up

as what appears before me tonight

like anybody’s guess

as far as I’m concerned.

In a place so full of masks and mirrors

it’s hard to hold on to your lack of identity

like a passport to unknown worlds

when you’re the only witness.

No stars

except the stain-glass mobiles

hanging from the dirty windows

but there are beads of rain

enmeshed in the window screen

like jewels in the weave of Indra’s net

and they’re all marked

like a thousand tiny logos

from the Bank of Nova Scotia sign across the street.

A thousand eyes.

A thousand drops of water.

The tears of a thousand mirrors

created in the image of everything.

And when they’re all gone

what is it that disappears like my buddy Pat?

The bank of Nova Scotia sign across the street?

Or me

like someone I have yet to meet?

Cosmology or cosmetics on a clown

trying to run himself to ground

because in one world

he’s afraid to go to sleep

and in the next he never wakes up?

Does the rain remember everything it reflects

like mugshots of the usual suspects?

Does it dream of things in the tongues

of dead languages

like the forgotten grammar of chaos

and wake to the echoes of the voice

that talks to it in its sleep?

I’m tired.

I’m scared.

I could weep.

I’m at a crossroads

at the end of a cul de sac.

I’ve been uprooted like a weed

and thrown on a compost heap.

My mind is mulch

on a garden that doesn’t bloom.

I’m watering dandelions on the moon.

Whence comes victory and the help of God?

Or am I only a poet possessed

who wanders into every valley

where his hands forget what his mouth said

chasing exotic metaphors

for the incomparability of the multiverse

to anything in existence?

The fruits of a lifetime of labour

nothing but fossils?

I need a new assessment

of what it is I think I’m trying to do.

I thought I was leading disparate elements

out of this desert of insights

into the oxymoronic bondage of enlightenment

that sets things free for good

to celebrate their own human divinity

without having to give up their solitude

for a redundant union with God.

I’ve always thought the mystic

was the most vulnerable part of me

but now I’m beginning to see

it’s a false spiritual clarity

that’s the bigger threat

and I’ve gone back to trusting my eyes.

And what do I see

that’s at least honest

even if it isn’t very uplifting?

I see how the greatest achievement

of my existence

was being there to witness it.

To watch the dust gather on my blue starglobe

with its archaic constellations

like paper cut-outs

a kid would paste on the walls of his room.

To look at the crystal star clusters

dripping like mobiles from the window

and see how much the rain is like them.

And how the mind which brings things together

like infinite similitudes

out of the incoherence of their dissimilarities

so that people fall in love

and the planets stay in their orbits

and good people inoculate voodoo dolls

with the blessings of an antidote

like victims of the curse they’re spreading.

How the mind

which brings all this together

like an Arctic mirage of an iceberg

to the cosmic hallucination

of a lifeboat sinking in a desert of stars

is the loneliest of witnesses without a metaphor

when it looks for a face in the mirror

and all there is the endless space

in which everything happens

because it isn’t there to be noticed

though it’s what makes the difference

in everything we see.

I see how the mind

is empowered by its own impotence

like I am

to look for cornerstones in an avalanche

Ionian pillars among the asteroids

like a higher branch of learning.

I see how the mind is not set apart

from the blood in my heart

or the crescent moons of my toenails.

How breath and water and stars

and birds lifting off the lake

like the birth of rain

are all just vapours of a dream

in a mirror

that can’t wake up without me.

Gusts of stars

like gold-dust flowing down

from the world mountain

into the valleys and mindstreams

of the sleepwalkers below

panning for insights

that might shine a light

on the poverty of what they already know.

Chaos is the life of order

and order is the replication

of its own unpredictability.

Prometheus is liberated by his own chains.

Bodhisattvas are imprisoned by their freedom.

The grail goes looking for the ailing kingdom

and finds it as spontaneously as rain.

There’s no identity

to the endless variety

of a creative imagination in pain.

There is suffering

but no one suffers.

There is death

but no one dies.

The most intimate details of life

are cosmic laws

that are as inherent as pyramids

in the mystic specificity of every grain

as if everything

were the cornerstone

of the afterlife

of everything else.

You cut a witching wand

like a forked fractal

from a branch of the tree of knowledge

that begins like the letter Y

to go looking for the watershed

of the original design

and you end up divining

the meaning of the creative fever

that inspired you to search.

When the Zen master said

just regard the extreme chaos

of conditioned consciousness

he was talking about Nazis

goose-stepping their way

through the rubble of Berlin.

He was talking about chaos

failing with the highest grade-point average

in the graduating class

of a traditional military academy.

Form is a function of its own unpredictability.

Intensify the one

and you shorten the odds

in favour of the other.

You can see the immensity

and power of the sun

in the opening of the smallest flower

and the far sightedness of the most distant star

in the wavelengths of light

that inspired the eye to look

back into time and space

when the grammar of chaos

was the muse

of every sentence in the book

in an endless encyclopedia of beginnings

each of which evolved

like genomic alphabets

into the cosmic expression

of a work in progress

that always ends in a prelude.

But syllables are such a meagre way

of expressing what’s unsayable about life.

Like the gesture of an unfinished e-mail

that suggested we change the world

like the urgent imperative of an optimist

on the verge of suicide.

Homage to the ghosts that empower us Pat

and to yours in particular.

But it’s hard to imagine

sticking your head like a key

through the eye of the needle

whenever a lifeline

ties a noose in at the end

of an umbilical cord

is going to do much in the way

of bringing heaven down to earth

like a kite you can reel in

without getting hung up in the power lines.

And may the muse of inspirations that last

bless the poet who said

All things change when we do.

The first word ah blossoms into all others

and they’re all true.

And eventually the lies are too.

And maybe that’s why

you didn’t finish the e-mail.

Did death make you realize

as it does all of us at last

that you don’t have to hate something

to change it?

That what we don’t know

isn’t the probable cause

of our estrangement?

That the quickest way to end it

is to befriend it

like an unnamed road we made

of all the shortcuts we’ve ever taken home?

PATRICK WHITE

PUT MY FIST THROUGH A WINDOW AT SEVEN

Put my fist through a window at seven because the door didn’t open in time. A nugget of rage. A Martian meteor with signs of extraplanetary life I couldn’t return to. An angry child whose innocence was already a broken action hero before he received it like a second-hand toy. My sisters played with eyeless dolls. I looked upon the future like a starless telescope and the present like a dangerous doorway you had to steel your fear to walk past. No one could afford a history of their own so they lied to each other communally about making it in the world alone without any help from the rest of the family. Squalor and mystery. Stars at night out in the rough broom fields around Heartbreak Hill where I went to read John Keats alone about a thing of beauty being a joy forever and deepen the homesickness of a child in exile by gaping all night at the incorruptible stars before I returned to the broken windows and punched-out plaster of a forsaken moon without an atmosphere. A thing of beauty may be a joy forever but the severe joys of that neighbourhood made ugly perversities out of the waste of their humanity like a caste system of untouchables who embraced a thing of beauty until it was as despised as they were. Virgins yearning to join the hooker colonies of utopian pimps selling Shangri Las and Jonestowns up and down the street. Sex shouldn’t have to spend more time standing on its feet than lying on its back but if you didn’t show up for the nightshift you didn’t eat and there was nowhere a woman could take a bath in her own grave to renew her virginity where someone wouldn’t walk in and stab her like a female Marat for betraying their reign of terror. I keep returning to the misery of those days in an abortive attempt to love my childhood retroactively but the damage that was done was as thorough as it is implacable. Drunks at the backdoor. Junkies at the window. Lepers in the living room. Vipers raping roses with sump-pump syringes full of angry toxins because they both had thorns in common with the moon and when you flagged them they all haemorrhaged the same way. It’s one thing to get off on the pharmaceutical rush of strewing the path to death with bruised flowers in a coma but there’s nothing very brave about a whole new world that hath such creatures in it when you go through a withdrawal from life like a cult of one intent on sacred suicide. The rich adapt to what they’ve stolen but the poor left to their own resources mutate. I saw one man belly-flop from an attic window onto a picket gate. Meat on a fork. And another walk out into the ocean with diving weights and an empty aqualung like the shell casing of a spent round on the bottom of the seabed. And still another who upheld his right not to live by shooting his wife to death because she ignored him in her sleep after a drunken brawl. I always wondered if the dead die in their dreams if they don’t wake up in time to know they’ve just been killed. You can look upon your afterlife as the Greeks did as the gibbering shadow of this one or you can turn the light around and see this as the happy prelude to everything that’s gone for good. Or sitting precipitously alone on the rocky ledge of a hanging prison you can study comparative mythology with superstitious stars in your solitude as if you like them had raised your radiance above the atrocity of it all and no one could lay a finger on you here where the ghosts had long been liberated from the bones of their capital offenses. Nothing demeans the stars in the eyes of a child who looks up at them like a cellophane snail sticky with dirt. They diminish the hurt somehow but not getting involved in what they portend. And the message is clear. Not muddled in the curdled starmud of an astronomical catastrophe like thermophilic bacteria deep in the diamond-mines of the earth waiting like a default program to restore life to the planet every time it crashes. The bottom feeders know more about resurrection than the blue whales skimming krill. Lazarus raised from the dead like road kill. The reek of crushed frogs in rain-flavoured eclipses of oil seeping into your nostrils like prehistoric air from a manufactured jungle.

The intermittent innocence of growing up by the time you’re seven. Or you perish in exotic ways that only baby turtles that have been the subject of a national geographic wildlife film can fully understand. Or people harvesting garbage-cans. The shock and awe of savage circumstance. The slash and burn approach of bad karma catching up to small pockets of unencountered cannibals living in the way of the bigger pockets of progress. It was less painful to see what I lacked than to take account of what I had going on for me. There are the masterpieces. And these chalk outlines of the bodies of the rest lying on the sidewalk are folk art. And when God ran for election in our neighbourhood one year my mother sold me like a vote to a church that taught me to feel guilty if I dared to aspire any higher than zero. Consider how many children there are in the world where zero is the zenith of optimism. Ask any mirror decent enough to be vaguely disturbed and they’ll tell you about all the clear-eyed children who come before them like poor people into a clean room and looking around at how immaculate and tasteful everything is feel as out of place as the only smudge in space with a human face.

And you who have so much. Who are cuddled like new moons in the inherited fullness of prosperity. Who can afford the extreme frivolity of your desires. Who can recruit celebrity choirs in the war against poverty to write anthems for the poor that drown out their crying in middle-class raptures of how beautiful it is to be trying. Let them eat spam. Let them eat shit. Keep a lid on the garbage-can. And don’t stop to train the wildlife through your power windows to take food from your hand. Hampers at Christmas are enough. Or too much if William Blake is right. And to you who take so many wheatfields and rice-paddies out of the mouths of the disquieted children and give back just enough to have a stained-glass window named after you in a hilariously prosperous church I say you probably don’t remember who Talleyrand was, but the peasant in Napoleon got it right when he said of him as I say of you he was nothing but shit in a silk stocking. Except you’re not as smart as he was because your arrogance has made you stupid. He could see what was coming in time to change the colour of his socks to match the floral cravat of his festering fleur de lis. He buried his corpses secretly at night in the catacombs of politics but you step over yours like the rhetoric of the summa theologica for the rich on cable TV. The exonerative pundit of your own loveless obscenity. The stone is turned over. The worms are exposed. All eight eyes of the spider in the corner who sucked the life out of the music like ripe semi-quavers doing bass runs on the strings of an acoustic guitar can be seen for the toxic succubus it is. A rich arachnid on the net with stagefright. And nothing but the biomass of violated butterflies and outraged killer bees for an audience. Have you heard what the snakes are singing in their mosh pits about the ladders in the boardrooms of the U.S. and Canada these days? Your days are numbered like a platinum hit. You’re a Mayan calendar that isn’t going to make it in time to see if your speculative projections on the future of market commodities rang true or not at the closing bell. Global warming isn’t just a function of the environment. Human nature can run a temperature as well. The obese dreamfevers of the overly surfeited have a nasty way of turning into the gastritic volcanoes of populist nightmares that have swallowed too much to find you credibly edible. The poor feel free to steal whatever they want knowing they’re parasites and petty thieves that will never be well known for feeding on their own but when you steal like a bank from the public you must be seen to keep up an appearance of injured injustice like Robin Hood. You forgot that. And a stitch in time isn’t going to save the other nine as your flying carpet unravels like a spider-web in a hurricane. No one knows better than Jerusalem what happens to your holy shrines when they’re occupied by money-changers inflating the price of candles and doves like lottery tickets taking a risk on love. And God’s lobbyist walks in the door like the U.S.S.R. And there’s a rush to dump the indulgences of the infallibly rich like counterfeit Confederate currency on the slave markets of the Ivory Coast or bargain basement antidotes past their expiry dates in Ethiopia. Go ask the prophetic skulls of your own headless ancestors what it means to drive the golden chariot of the sun king through the slums of people who sweat like diamonds in coalpits to provide you with a good enough living you can afford to squander the fruits of their labour on the prenuptials of a seventy million dollar wedding. And you shouldn’t smile so whitely when you’re on TV talking about your latest atrocity because we can all see the dental plans we don’t have and it fills us with rage that all we’ve got to smile back with are tight-lipped caramel-rippled cocaine teeth even the fairies won’t give you any cash for when you lay your head down at night on the rock of the world like a hard pillow it’s getting harder and harder to dream on.

What an abomination of man. What a distortion of woman. How many millions of years of evolution did you have to undo to stand in the doorway of death and deny a sick child a cure because your golfing buddies couldn’t afford the disease? Did Jesus take you aside after one of your political rallies and tell you despite what he said in public you can whip the poor anytime you please? Wage economic genocide against welfare mothers when your tax lawyer tells you poverty’s part of an international banking conspiracy to make the rich suffer. In my neighbourhood it was the closet cowards who put their boots the hardest to anyone who was already down. They wanted to make a heavy impression to disguise themselves as one of us. But they never quite got the subtle difference between brave and depraved and were eventually put down like fawning dogs with rabies. Look. You’ve got your ass covered. Your children’s teeth funerals summer vacations medical plans bail retirement funds divorce settlements and the mortgage is paid on three of your houses and even God would have to take it all the way to the Supreme Court if she ever accused you of anything. You’ve got lawyers and lobbyists and spin doctors like worms in everybody’s roses and there’s always enough viciousness in the world to support smallpox. So why do you go out of your way to come down from your mountaintop like an avalanche on the poor just because they didn’t have the same post-graduate advantages as you and learn to steal and manipulate and lie on as grand an institutional scale? Were you one of those gruesome kids when you were growing up who went out of their way to step on ants because you couldn’t empathize with the same struggle for survival as the rest of us? Go read Shakespeare’s ninety-fourth sonnet about those who have power to hurt but will do none if you really want to see what kind of a festering lily you’ve become. But I’m curious. I’m as big a student of inhuman nature as I am of my own. And I want you to tell me what it’s like. When precisely did you know the moment had come to give up passing yourself off as a butterfly and throwing your life like bad meat down a wishing well begin to live like a maggot in your own corpulence? Tapeworms against the poor because they don’t feed you enough to feel you have a vested self-interest in them? Listen to how loud and brawling you talk out against people who have no voices to speak up for them because they can’t afford the liars you can. That’s not cool man. That’s not groovy. You’re not going to get the girl in the movie that way to make up for not getting laid in highschool. Don’t be cruel to a heart that’s true. Remember that? Elvis never had to pay for sex the way you do like some dirty little boy still spying through the keyhole on his sister in the shower. You’ve got to sow your wild oats in the spring. That’s all part of agricultural husbandry brother. Or is it you love the plough the moon because you’re a farmer alright but one without any seeds? Are you trying to thresh before you sow? Does standing up against the downtrodden like a quisling scarecrow for the rich and powerful gratify your repressed sexual needs? Do you get off on turning people who haven’t got much against people who have nothing by lying about where their paycheck’s going as if poverty were a form of graft? And you’re the biggest pig at the table? Let them eat peanut butter and jam. Let them eat bananas. You who walk down marble corridors where they wax your reflection as hard as they do your shadow and think of the poor as dirty hallways you can clean up with hysterectomies and drug-tests you wouldn’t dare give your own son because you know what’s missing from the medicine cabinet as if pissing into a test-tube were more indictably remedial than pissing into the wind. You who sleep well tonight on soft pillows stuffed with the flightfeathers of other people’s dreams and don’t think a day is ever going to come when you wake up to their nightmares. You who would deny the birds last rites in your baptismal fountains and say God God God all day long like a crow in a pulpit as if a poor man saying rich rich rich all life long made him so and think that makes you holy enough to spit in the collection plate like a sign of hate from above. You who are too mesmerized by the blazing of your own blindness to realize that the darkness that falls like a nemetic shadow at the end of the day is always more disproportionately grotesque and intense than the inflated luminosity of the gigantism that casts it. You who don’t think that gangrene in the big toe of the global body politic isn’t going to go to your head like a guillotine and insist upon not attending to it like a spin doctor without a comment on what’s rotten in Denmark in the Congo in Somalia in Pakistan in Syria Iran Palestine Israel Louisiana Ottawa Arizona West Van Eritrea Darfur Tokyo and locally in the kitchen of the apartment next door two weeks before the next welfare check. You who walk upon the earth as if every step you took were the bright event horizon of a new threshold and like a false dawn that doesn’t make the flowers open or the birds sing never gives a thought to what you must look like to the homeless and hopeless making their cardboard beds over industrial heating grates in the middle of winter. You who are witness to people sleeping in the dangerous doorways of condemned buildings and the uninhabitable prospects of life in the ghettoes like abandoned landrovers on Mars trying to colonize a duststorm like a little land of their own and contend the slumlords and the captains of industry have it a lot worse than the serfs do. You who try to justify the neo-feudalism of free enterprise like a trickle-down theory of food supply and demand as if the poor were the public urinal of God and you were the salt who decided who sat where at the table and who begged for scraps like plaintive dogs under it. Have you forgotten so much of your own history you don’t know what comes next?

Even on the street we knew stupid would get you killed faster than evil.

PATRICK WHITE