I WISH EVERYONE IN THE WORLD WERE AS MAD AS YOU ARE

I WISH EVERYONE IN THE WORLD WERE AS MAD AS YOU ARE

 

I wish everyone in the world were as mad as you are.

I wish everyone in the world talked the same nonsense you do

and meant as much.

Stop crying.

I wish everyone in the world were as good as you are

and didn’t lie to anyone else

other than themselves

about what the truth is.

You shape chaos to your mind

like light to space

to make a habitable planet you can live on

and if it isn’t round sometimes

and O doesn’t always cast the same shadow

that the others mimic with theirs

I wish everyone could put on your kind of airs

and be as good to life as the kind of atmosphere you are.

Come on now.

Here.

Dry your tears with this.

All those constellations you made up

out of the stars in your eyes

are your own private myths and mandalas

and you’re free to change them as you will

and I wish everyone made as much of the light they were given to go by

as you have.

I’m too much of a thorn

to paint the delicate irridescent watercolours

I see smeared on your tender bubbles

like original pictures of the universe

from a thousand spaced-out Hubbles

but I wish everyone in the world had your kind of genius for vulnerability.

You hold up a single feather of light

like a candle among stars

like a green leaf in the middle of winter

and the world that is innured to three dimensions

for infinitely tedious reasons

would rather put its eyes out

and gape like blackholes

than see as you do

that there are countless seasons to the soul

that burn like a phoenix

and there’s nowhere you can point to in the darkness

that isn’t an equinox of love and understanding

when the sun shines at midnight

and spring harvests what the autumn sows.

Having a deep cosmic insight

like a stranger beyond lucidity

into the windows of the houses of your own zodiac

might make you look like a maniac to the neighbours

who keep watch in their asylum

against any kind of freedom

that might release them from their lighthouse

like a geni from a lamp

that doesn’t conform to anyone’s wishs but her own

but I wish everyone had the courage you have not to be them.

Life isn’t fair or unfair.

Life isn’t kind or cruel.

It isn’t half-Buddha and half-fool.

Neither impersonal

nor sentimental

life isn’t a kind of obedience

to its own rules

as if it were bound like God to keep its word.

Or what?

Who else is there to answer to?

All the taboos want to be thresholds

and all the thresholds

want to run away from home.

Could be a curse.

Could be a blessing.

Could be just more idle words.

But you’re not like that.

You’re not a fountain mouth

that mistakes alphabets for birds

and holds them to the letter of the law

in a world full of music.

It’s enlightenment to sing to a window.

It’s ignorance to sing to a mirror.

But you don’t sing to either

and your song is clear as running water

all the way down the mountain.

The picture-music

of your eyes and your ears

can already hear the ocean from here

that gathers to receive the flowing

like the heart receives blood

like the mind receives your thoughts.

Look out at the world.

You’re the host.

Look inward.

You’re the guest.

You can break bread with the dead

without being a ghost.

You can drink wine with the living

and it’s the wine that gets high on you

flowing into a seabed of shadows on the moon

that hasn’t touched a drop for years.

Don’t believe what the cynics say about innocence.

They have the sensibilities of blackflies

trying to draw blood from the Mona Lisa.

Don’t grieve if you’re a butterfly

that can’t follow the flightplans of the maggots.

There’s only a slight difference in wingspan

between a waterbird and a phoenix

but it would take lightyears

to measure a single feather of yours.

There’s no cult of the rose

that insists it fall upon its own thorns first

or the moon draw first blood

on the blades of its own crescents.

You don’t have to scar your own deathmask with experience

just to prove you knew how to eat the pain and bleed.

You don’t have to wear your face in public

as if it were something you kept up your sleeve.

Dice might be the foundation-stones of the lost

but that doesn’t mean

you have to go pearl-diving for the moon in quicksand

or change your song like a jukebox

playing the slots

when you’re a mermaid on the rocks.

I wish everyone had the same chance to risk it all as you do

and win back their lives

like eleven come of seven

insteading of seeing everything

as if they were jinxed by inasuspicious birds

turning the wrong way on a prayer-wheel

that keeps coming up snake-eyes

with every roll of their skulls.

You can’t heal the luck

of a wounded Nazi

by turning his swastika the other way.

You can’t teach snakes to bite other people.

And you don’t know enough

if there’s anything left to say or understand

and even then there’s a silence

that still longs to be heard

like a humming bird sipping honey from your ears

or deep in a telescopic wishing well of stars

burning in a dream of mirrors

they walk across

like fire on the water

or the distant blue notes

of the hidden nightbird

that echoes your tears

as if it were crying out in the darkness

from the safety of a secret place 

for the same reasons you are.

As if it were trying to befriend its own sorrow

and weep for tomorrow as you do

for all the things of the past

it won’t even know it’s missing.

I wish everyone in the world could live the future as you do

as something that is already happening now.

Even when you’re crying

because you don’t think you’re brave enough

not to.

You’re not a lame princess

that anyone needs to rescue.

You’re a dragon bringing rain.

And if the snakepit hisses at you

like a social structure

and calls you insane sometimes

because you have wings

and they still hug the earth

all tied up in knots

taking their poisons out on each other

to keep from feeling anything

it’s just their way of defining sanity

by the standards of the numbest.

It’s not you that’s crazy.

It’s not you that’s the dumbest.

I wish everyone in the world were as warm-blooded and wise as you are.

When the serpent fire at the base of your spine

has passed through the doors of all your chakras like vertebrae

and you’re already a circumpolar constellation just a little off true north

shining like Draco

why worry if you’re no good at the game of snakes and ladders

they play like politics and religion back here on earth

to see who gets to be the pillar

and who the quicksand.

You understand way more than that.

I can tell by the fire in your eyes

that you’re a phoenix among stars

and you’ve trancended the eagles and the houseflies

that can’t even begin to imagine

the kind of heights you can reach to

or the depth of the view below you

when you’re riding your own thermals

like beautiful helices in the mindstream

for the sheer joy of being only you.

Even now.

These tears

that run all the way down to your lips

as if water had fingertips

what are they

but the way you cry for things

that everyone else didn’t?

I wish everyone in the world could be like you.

I wish you could teach us all

to stop living a spiritual lie on the deathbed of an earthly truth

as if that were the only way

to foolproof ourselves

against reality

like a stranger looking through our windows at night

who doesn’t recognize herself in us

because most of us aren’t as brave and free as you are

to leave the door ajar

and let whatever wants to come in

come in.

Some track in mud.

Some.

Stars.

And the mud flowers in light.

And the stars bloom in fire.

And one looks up

and the other looks down

on each other’s likeness

reflected in the other

as if they were engendered by the same being.

Sight is a kind of love

and I wish everyone in the world

were inspired by the mystic dimensions

and intimate clarity of your kind of seeing

that even through these tears

that I’m not having much luck in wiping away

can comprehend a world that’s more wonderful than it thinks it is.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IF YOU'RE BRAVER THAN I AM

IF YOU’RE BRAVER THAN I AM

 

If you’re braver than I am

it’s only because you’re more desparate you said

and I broke down laughing in tears

as you were tripping on mushrooms

and I was starting to peak on acid.

Why should you love me at all you asked

and I said I like to take subjective risks

and I can still light up at the smile you gave me

because you thought I thought you were dangerous.

Have you stayed dangerous over the years?

Did you ever find enlightenment?

Or have all those Doors of Perception we stepped through

way back then to expand our cosmic conciousness

by crossing all our thresholds

and dotting all our taboos

closed like space behind you?

Have you made your return address a point of view

you can live with

and turned those beautiful Hispanic eyes

into late night windows

that don’t see anything that ever goes down in the neighbourhood?

Is your seeing still ambidextrous

or have you shut your eyes to the world

so they’re more wall than window

and there’s only one way of looking in?

Sometimes I think that night I dropped acid with you

on China Beach under the stars

estranged by the flames and shadows and smoke

of a cedar fire eager to burn its first heretic

I got so high I’ve never come down

and though forty years have passed

I’m still nineteen back there somewhere with you.

Even my mother used to say in frustration

when she couldn’t win the argument

that I had a way of turning things upside-down.

That may well be so

but I’d still rather be an oxymoron

that can see all sides of things at once

like a multi-faceted jewel turning in the light

in front of a mirror

that doesn’t know which one of its infinite profiles to choose

and doesn’t

than suffer the Great Reversal of the Hourglass

and end up walking on my head

and thinking with my feet

just so everybody would think I was normal.

I’m still nineteen back there somewhere with you

and the fire we lit that night

like something ephemeral

among so much that was eternal

keeps flaring up in me like a phoenix that’s never gone out.

Clarity doesn’t turn a lie into the truth.

And enlightenment might be so blissed out

it celebrates its own ignorance

because everything is perfect just as it is

but I still think there’s more sincerity in the search

than there is in the finding.

I still think life is a mystery that surpasses its own wonder.

I still think every moment contains the whole of space

without beginning or end

like a water droplet contains the whole of the sea.

I still think that whenever people touch one another gently

they leave their fingerprints on the window

like constellations on the sky

that prove our identities are as indelible as light.

I still think there’s something more alluringly mystical about action

than there is in the undynamic peace of contemplation.

But the best is to make love as we did that night

as a tantric mode of creative annihilation

that showed the drugs we were on

like flying carpets

what it was like for once

to get so euphorically high on us

the next time they saw us coming

they’d just say yes.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I STAND WHERE THE LISTENING BEGINS

I STAND WHERE THE LISTENING BEGINS

 

I stand where the listening begins

as if my voice were just another one of the echoes

and my tongue were the tip of an edgy precipice

that doesn’t dare make a move

over an immeasurable abyss of eyes

that nobody belongs to.

This is a seeing that’s older than the stars

that were born of it

like a mirror is born of the shining.

Like a body is born of the mind

and takes on the shape of a universe

as an expressionist gesture of classical reserve.

In the great ocean of being before it turned into everyone

our eyes weren’t beaded like two drops of water

strung through our nose

like a statement we were trying to make.

They were waves.

Waves of water.

Waves of light.

Waves of thought and feeling.

They were waterbirds that came and went

without leaving.

They were meteorological events

in the emotional life of the sea

when it played alone with itself like weather.

We didn’t evolve hands to prove we had a grip on things.

We didn’t evolve brains to prove we were intelligent.

We’re not nuggets of insight

panned from the mindstream

that runs down the world mountain

in a rush of gold.

I stand where I can hear the night

breathing like a shadow in its own darkness

and whatever I am not

is as real as whatever I am.

And my sorrows drop away

like the black fruit of ruined bells

and my joys know a freedom

no holy war ever deserved.

Here my death answers to my life

and not the other way around.

My beginnings are not justified by my ends

and my solitude is so wholly itself

it embraces everything

as if it were space

and time were its only friend.

This is a poetic state.

A dynamic mode of creative anihilation.

This is a phoenix blooming in its own fire.

This is life.

This is the universe full of bright ideas

that come to it like stars in the darkness.

This is the white mare of the full moon in the high field

with the gates open

like wings growing out of her shoulders.

This is a space that is so spontaneously immediate

that you receive the reply

long before you’ve even asked the question.

It doesn’t take thousands of thoughtyears

for the light to get here.

A flower blooms.

A star comes out.

It’s as simple as that.

You lift one veil of the mystery like an eyelid.

Nothing has a history.

The old man remembers nothing.

The old woman forgets her name.

Once they were seabeds of meaning.

Now they’re just water.

And everything is ok with that.

People go grey

and turn into clouds in the mountains

just to catch the last of the light

and give their lives some colour.

And then it’s night again

and the dancing chandeliers of the stars

that are burning like legends

to make a name and a myth for themselves

fall like constellations to earth

and shatter like the rainbows of youth.

Every dawn has a taste of the sunset in it.

What’s the end of anything

if not the dark side of its beginnings?

I am the fool of a freedom

that lets things be whatever they want to be

deep within the heavy fruit of a compassionate heart

that ripens in its own lucidity.

There are worms.

There are birds.

There’s a green star in the apple core.

My skin is the chameleon of the sun going down.

I know how to swim through stone and water.

There are fish in my treetops

and birds in my roots

and when I drown

it’s the sun in the sea

and nothing ever really goes out.

Everytime I open my mouth to sing

this is where the muse

puts a finger to her lips

to teach me what I’m talking about.

I’m a star when I write.

First I let go of the light.

And then the children point fingers at me

and say in mutual recognition

of the stories they make up on the go

there you are

just as we foretold.

It’s the same way with water

when it’s lost in a desert of sand and stars.

Sometimes it takes a mirage to find your way home.

Death gapes like the jawbone of a mummy

and writes like a pyramid

as if it wanted to make all things last forever.

But when life picks up the pen

around the fires of the stars

to whisper into its own ear

things that only solitude

can suggest to the night

its poems are always tents on the move.

The moon sailing paper lifeboats down a river

like waterlilies

blooming in the pale flames

of their lunar immolations

as if each were a white phoenix

rising above its own ashes and smoke

like someone dreaming of swans.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THERE'S A TWILIGHT ZONE

THERE’S A TWILIGHT ZONE

 

thinking of a friend’s suicide

 

There’s a twilight zone between dissolution and creation

where life can exist for awhile

as the polar extreme between two non-opposites

that share the same nature

like two bays of the same heart

where the departures are just a way

of making room for the new arrivals.

It’s the way life gets around like blood.

It’s the way the moon trancends itself

without giving up an inch.

It’s how your eyes give birth to windows and mirrors.

It’s how your seeing mothers the world into being.

If you’re only clear enough

to see beauty reflected in the autumn hills

and not in the filth of the polluted valley below

like the oilslick of a fly with rainbow wings

then you’ve only got one eye open on things

like a badge-minded cub scout

learning to tie knots in your thinking

that even Alexander could undo without a sword in his hand.

There’s a middle extreme

between nothing and nothing

between waking and dreaming

between what’s false

and what’s true

between your tears and your laughter

your darkness and light

between the adult and the child

that’s trying to keep itself alive in you

by keeping one breath ahead of death

like the runner behind you

not the one you’re trying to catch up to.

Life is a sea that braves its own weather

as if there were no difference

in the shallows and depths of water.

That’s reality.

What brings us together is space.

What keeps us apart

is a sign of the times

looking for a fresh start

like a new mask under an old face.

Whatever mediums you master.

Water.

Land.

Sky.

Starmud.

Intelligence.

Passion.

Emptiness. 

Life.

If you can’t keep faith with your own absurdity

without losing your mind.

If you lose touch

with the light at the end of your fingertips

even when your genius

gropes its way through the darkness

blinder than a mole with a starmap that doesn’t shine.

If you haven’t understood yet

that even when you cast your life aside

like a fish you throw back into the sea

because it’s not big enough

for the both of you

it’s just another way life has of hanging on to it like a lifeboat.

If your feet have misjudged the journey

and your winged heels

are no match for the speed of light

and your shoes are old turtles that are tired of holding up the world

or being run over on the road

and you’re looking for a resting place

among the lost hubcaps in the drainage ditch

smothered in white sweet clover.

If you’re not as wily and cunning as the morning glory

or the single-petalled wild roses

that are holding up the abandoned fence

that’s given up keeping anything out

or holding anything in.

Then all you’re doing

is trying to approach

what’s open and free

and accessible about you

like a gate that won’t let you in.

You’re dying of thirst beside a freshwater lake

that doesn’t impede the flight of the white clouds

anymore than it’s disturbed

by the departure of the waterbirds

heading south with the souls of the dead

like the homesick thoughts of the living.

It might look like taking.

But it’s a thief’s way of giving.

Even if you were born the child of an executioner

with a long lineage of dynastic skulls

that have slowly evolved into a family

and there’s nothing alive on earth today that wasn’t

every breath you take

is an eternal flame

that never goes out

among generations of the dead

who gather like ghosts around it

to remember what they died for.

If you can’t feel the rapture in the ashes of moths

that burned their bridges behind them

like loveletters to God

in the light of a candle

that summoned them out of the darkness

into the deeper darkness of an unknown medium of life

that brightens things up

by turning the transient fireflies

of today’s heretics

into the fixed stars of tomorrow’s martyrs

like every moment of the life you lived until now

then your eyes have been numbed by their own seeing.

As if the tears

the lachrymae rerum

were cryonically frozen deep down in the heart of things

like the blind embryos of the children that were born of your shining

to look up at the stars

and see flowers.

To look down on the flowers

and feel alive as light and rain

called to the seance of a rose

that lets them use her voice

to say their names

before their days were crossed out

like the Xs and echoes of a used calendar

that time ran out on like a bucket in a waterclock.

You downed yourself in a single gulp

and turned the glass over like a barfly

to say you were finished

with pouring one universe into another and another and another

down to the last drop

until your mindstream leaked out of itself

and all that was left of the conversation

between you and the dead

were hieroglyphics in a dry creekbed.

 

PATRICK WHITE