Sunday, May 8, 2011
Thursday, May 5, 2011
INFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Is it true
the most commpassionate people in life
are the ones in the greatest danger?
That the most generous
will lose their hands to the ones they fed?
That the bravest will be hunted down by protected cowards
and when the last of the heroes are dead
and the dragons who inspired them
are the advertising themes of amusement parks
those with the smallest balls
will give themselves the biggest awards?
Is it true
those who are creative
chafe the destroyers like anti-matter
and give the intellectuals diaper-rash of the mind?
That just to open your eyes
to watch the stars and fireflies
is enough to make other people feel blind
and insist you black them out
like pearls in an air-raid?
What’s a starmap to a mole?
What’s a lamp that shines in braille
to someone without fingerprints?
Is it true that beauty summons the worm
as a material eye-witness to its ruin?
That genius is devoured
by cannibalistic Neanderthals
into homeopathic magic
for the power of its brain
to turn thought into protein
with a high creatine content
that can make your dick strike twelve anachronistically
so you can go on knapping flint
for the next hundred thousand years?
That genius is a freak in isolation
that gets its own back
for being pecked at
like a phoenix among chickens
by opening Pandora’s box
like the atom at
like the geni in the lamp
and making a Trojan horse of its gifts
gives them everything they want
because anything as red
as Van Gogh’s hair and beard and ear in
must be either a phoenix
or a fox with chicken-pox.
Sometimes you have more to fear
from the keys
than the locks.
Is it true
that a friend is a random event
in a space-time continuum
that’s got no room in its impersonality
for loyalty or sentiment?
That the heart has replaced the golden rule
with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
and everyone’s looking for love
like a Faberge easter egg
that’s already hatched its ugly duckling
sans fairytale?
Or the Czar’s family?
I asked Annie
as we were landing in
from the West Coast
like a waterbird with its wheels down
on a tarmac lake
is it true
that everything we thought sincere
has been exposed as fake?
That forever isn’t worth
the loveletter
it’s written on
for twenty minutes
because of temporal inflation?
Is it true
that all roads
that lead to
never return the way they came
like arrows and fishooks and Vercingetorix?
That justice is a celebrity fame-game with ratings
brought in by a jury of mirrors
selected by the reflections of their peers
to convict the innocent
for their sins of omission?
That the God-particle
everyone’s looking for
like something they can’t get out of their eye
might not be
trying to make a point at all.
It’s hard to get a fix on
just how fundamental you are
in the scheme of things
when you’re stuck in the starmud
up to your knees
looking for your keys like koans
you swallow like pills to feel real
but hey
no big deal
but I was meaning to ask you
is it true
that we’re wounded by death
and life is the way we heal?
I know how you feel
about what’s real
but you can have all the money you want
and that still doesn’t mean
you’ll ever really know
what it means to be rich
without having to steal.
You’ve got the disease
but none of its symptoms.
Is it true
that the most successful grow
by never accepting a challenge
that wasn’t a bigger failure than the last
and call the summits of their Himalayan defeats
experience and progress?
Answer no.
Answer yes.
Answer yes and no.
Or just nod your head diagonally
like the sum of the squares of the opposite sides.
Because the questions were less rhetorical
than sincerity being facetious
I don’t expect people to answer the doorbell
or read every piece of spiritual junkmail
that shows up on their doorstep
like a flightfeather to paradise
on the wings of a seagull.
If you’re wounded deeply enough
there’s no resentment in the pain.
You just play with your brain
like an angry child plays with the eyes of a doll.
You control your rage like a nuclear reactor
or
and you throw a tantrum
that expands like the universe.
You can polish the mirror all you want
and call it clarity
until your sleeves are as threadbare
as the carpets under the windows
you’ve been staring through
as long as it take to turn your eyes to glass
but enlightenment’s on the dark side of the mirror
like a star is
like your eyes are.
Like waves on a lake
that takes things as they come.
Myriad deaths in a single birth.
Life on earth.
Intense heat.
Unusual sprouts.
A Zen sententium worth consideration.
But the clear light of the void
isn’t radiation.
It’s a lucidity
with nothing to illuminate.
It’s the Uncreate that plays creatively
in the absence of itself
like a child alone with its imagination
making the world up as it goes along
taking the Inconceivable
and making it believable.
Giving airy nothing
a local habitation and a name
as Shakespeare did
and danelions do in the fall.
As I am now
by asking if it’s true
you haven’t noticed yet
how it’s always the overprivileged
who send the underprivileged off to war?
Death in the hearts of the governors.
Death in the hearts of the profiteers.
Death in the hearts of the generals.
Is it true
this spider-web shines
like democracy in the morning
star-spangled with dew
but late at night under the streetlight
it’s tearing under the weight of its own greed?
That obese spiders who once pulled the strings
of a sticky mandala to eat well
ripen like the dead weight of toxic fruit
hanging from the branches of a dead tree?
This web is not a constellation.
This web is not a starmap.
This web is not a bloodstream
that gives back what it receives.
This web is not the lyre of a siren
that called people to the rocks of a new continent.
This web is not an electric guitar.
Is it true
the interminable buzzing of panicked flies
stuck to its strings
like masses of people
waiting to be consumed
is not the music of celestial spheres?
Empathic ingestion of agony over many years
like a fish trying to identify with heavy water
by adapting to it like a sick mother
who passed on her genes like
Is it true
you can die tending the ill in a hospital?
Carnage without redemption.
Eye-soup.
Severed feet.
Outrage imploding into black dwarfs
that warp space like a child’s mind
into believing God is best served by the blind
than those who can read for themselves
before they martyr her body like a judas-goat
to God’s great design
for the faithful dead
who expressed their gasp of divinity
in a holy war
a marketable crusade
a deniable genocide
a mass grave
a defensible border
that doesn’t know who gave the order
to drop cluster bombs
and white phos
on the hospital
when it ran out of bandaids
and watch it flower like a white dahlia
or a belly-dancing jellyfish
with poisonous tentacles
spreading out like the spokes of a beach umbrella.
The aesthetics of atrocity.
The age of desecration.
Is it true
the next best career move for evolution
like an unknown writer
listening to his legend gossip among rumours
like a suicide note without a table of contents
is unnatural extinction?
The mystery in the riddle of the sphinx
after all those years of sand and stars
is what would she have asked
if we weren’t there to answer.
Is it true
that Saturn’s shepherd moons
have turned into human coyotes
jumping borders like orbits
in the Van Allen Belt
where the asteroids are broken by drug rings
thawing rocks in a crack spoon
to defy the laws of gravity
with deified norms of depravity?
I might be a vague social democrat
walking a Zen plank
like a blindfolded political platform
who doesn’t need a party
to spell out
or sell out
what I believe
but it’s easier to write a folksong
about a successful thief
than a man or woman
for whom love was an art
that transcended its inspiration
and compassion the root of all understanding
and when death approached
because it’s hard to be alive and real
at the same time
embraced it as a great relief.
Is it true
that more similes turn into outlaws
than metaphors do?
That when Jesus asked
the little children to come unto him
he wasn’t speaking in tongues
behind sacred firewalls
for polyglot child molesters everywhere?
The pen might be mightier than the sword
like a mammal is to a dinosaur
but I have my doubts about a bullet
and electrically detonated C-4
wired to a lab rat like the black plague
and holy warriors
with the radioactive half-lives of dirty bombs.
Suras and psalms.
Gardens with underground rivers.
And fruit trees by flowing streams.
Shalom.
Muslim.
Islam
And
that breaks into peace
when it’s shared
like a common word
from the pelican fountain-mouth
of the same mother tongue.
Peace brother.
Peace sister.
May you live to be
forever young and free
of walled partitions
and the double helices
of chromosomatic razorwire
uncoiled like vines
around your secret gardens
where the waterlilies bloom in gene-pools
and the grapes are bleeding
like a miscarriage of sacred wines.
When the Great Lucidity appears
like a star of wheat in the Virgin’s hand
and shines down
on everyone’s shelter for the night alike
no mangers in the beginning
no arks at the end
may we all understand
that the blood-oaths of enemies
are not stronger than the bonds between friends.
May you know the enchantments of life
when it doesn’t belong to anyone
as well as you know the horrors
of disowning it now.
Or as I imagine they would say in Zen.
The pen is the sword.
It’s just a voice with words.
A lamp that gives its light away
like an extravagant geni
you don’t have to blow out to see
but you should
if you want to write good.
Black glee.
Bright vacancy.
Too much pain.
The agony of the seed realizing
the harvest was in vain
not worth what had to be endured
to live it all again.
Eleusinian ergot on the grain.
Is it true
heaven prefers
the hallucinogenically insane
and the sun only comes up
when a cock crows like a weathervane
or a God-struck lightning-rod?
On the return journey
which is more amazing than the first
you get to pass backwards
through all the stations of your life
you progressed forward through.
A prodigal innocence
that resonates with experience.
A dream reflected in a mirror
like a waterbird
dragging its wake through the clouds
like a knife ploughing a wound
through the envelope of a loveletter
no one can wake up from but you.
And no one can take away
because everything is trued by time
to the path you took
just by walking on the earth
alone on a dark night in the starless rain
when you removed the world like a mask
that proved false to your faceless pain
and you realized
how much closer a stranger is to you
than you are to your unrecognizable self.
Though pain may be prophetic
when your heart hangs on a hook
like bait on a question-mark
but great suffering doesn’t reveal anything
you didn’t already know.
It doesn’t stay.
It doesn’t go.
It’s a nothing that exists.
It’s an existence that’s nothing.
A gust of fireflies
from the mouth of a dragon.
But what does come as a surprise
like dusk overtaking the window
are the numberless eyes
that emerge from the depths of your darkness
like grapes ripening on the vine
like fish coming to the surface
like urgent diamonds
growing like mushrooms
in the long night of an abandoned mine.
Numberless eyes.
Myriad stars.
Light-years of memories.
And is it true
every one of them
is a myth in the making
each an enlightened Zen master
with nothing to teach
who insists
it’s not the stars that are shining
it’s your mind?
That they’re all within reach
all the time?
Monday, May 2, 2011
UP LATE AGAIN
Up late again watching the stars settle like dew on the grass.
I must have been a lamplighter in another life.
Or a firefly in an observatory.
All the windows have gone out but one or two.
The
of a Daddy Longlegs in the distance
and the tardy townhall clock
is still trying to reset the moon to full.
The gram-masters on the corner
of Gore and the universe
are too drunk and overly curious
for their own good.
There are some dark corners
you should leave to their solitude.
If you’ve met and killed the Buddha in the road
it won’t diminish your enlightenment
by so much as a shadow
to step on the occasional toad.
Delirious with clarity
is still only one side of the mirror.
When you’ve broken the spell of its mesmerism
it isn’t as if another world view comes rushing in
it’s just that another eye opens
and you’re clear about your delirium.
My thoughts are too much of a heavy lift for a coma
and I don’t dream much on the nightshift
and there’s a starless space within me
that keeps blowing all the candles out
everytime the power goes off
so I can learn to see in the dark
where I’m going
and where I’ve been
without carrying the light on my back
like vagrant insights on a
Alone in the world
but I never lack company
because the world’s simultaneously alone with me
but we’re both a little nervous
like a seasoned sailor alone with the sea
or a reunion of lovers with what used to be.
I’ve been watching the spring willows
dye their hair blonde in the
and now their roots are showing silvergray
in the pewter moonlight.
I like to go down and sit by the water
whenever I forget how to live.
I like the way the willows
pour themselves back into the river
like fountains of lemonade
and at this time of the year
they’re wearing see-through veils
like negligees of
made of spiderwebs
and fishing nets
like the star-crossed wedding laces
of their greatgrandmother’s constellations
passed down through the generations
for special occasions such as this.
And if they weep now
like young women in the spring
it’s only a light rain
but when they’re fully greened by the summer
it’ll be a waterfall.
But the world’s a snapping turtle
that won’t stay submerged for the night
like the id of the subconcious mind
and there are feathers of moonlight all over the water
where someone who felt
under-rated as a god
just raped a swan on drugs to prove it.
A serpent bites Persephone in the heel
and the spring is black with her absence
and death isn’t a crack in the void
you can easily heal
by sowing seeds
of Virgoan starwheat in the wound.
My prophetic skull bobs
like a horse chestnut
surfing its thoughtwaves
all the way to
but I’d rather be a cherry blossom
or the empty lifeboat of an origami poem
drifting down the
like a homeless loveletter
with nothing but
mystic black waterstars on my mind
instead of being blind-sided
by my last Maenadic dismemberment.
It’s not easy to get a gig
as a singer
or a stand-up comedian in hell
and even harder to make it big
as a court jester
when everyone’s into mimes.
You don’t raise the dead up to your lips
as if you were raising a bucket
from a wishing well
or your voice an octave higher.
Even if the music’s true
the lyrics can still prove you’re a liar.
And the Lord of Jewels isn’t a pimp
you can readily inspire
to sing along
with Sioux deathsongs at karaoke.
So down I go again.
Orpheus descending
with a wishbone harp
stuck in his throat
like a bird in a chimney
to see if I can charm death into letting you go
even if like the last time
you do look back in disbelief
at what you’re leaving behind
like a deathwish that came true.
River of fire.
River of darkness.
River of forgetfulness.
Lethe
running backwards in reverse order upstream
because this is hell with hope
Hades of the gibbering shades
and pre-Socratic philosophers
in the thought-fields of Elysium
standing like Druids and wandering scholars
on a sacred hill overlooking their holy wars like referees.
And all the mirrors
write left-handed in invisible ink
like the smile of the Mona Lisa
to keep the living from knowing what they think.
Sisyphus got used to rolling
his heart like a rock up a hill
only to watch it roll down again in vain
but you were an avalanche in the
and now I’m trying to excavate
a blackhole in the
beside
like a backhoe deprived of ls
to sing you back into the light
like a vernal equinox
among the daffodils and bluebells
that keep attending your funeral
over and over and over again
like friends of the family
meant to mourn your disappearance
by showing up early
to avoid the crowds.
A last warm kiss on a cold forehead
or a cold tear on a hot stove
and I can hear the cosmic hiss of the background dead
like the afterbirth of a foregone beginning
thanking me for not trying
to extinguish their fires
like torch bearing Roman dadaphores
in the waters of a Christian life.
My fingertips burned like ashes and urns
putting them to my lips then yours
as I turned sublimely
and walked away into the immense solitude
that followed me like the echo of your name.
Thereafter I could always hear you
as I do now late into the night
sitting by this snakey water
whispering dark insights into the black mirror
that keeps its reflections to itself
like a shadow with the voice of a nightbird
bleeding in a hidden grove.
No man is an island.
John Donne.
Dean of
He’s a peninsula.
Marty Balin.
Guitarist for the
But one wave of you
washing up on the shores of my skin
and I can feel your breath and fingertips all over again
and the urgent way you used to kiss me
as if I were an emergency exit for pain
and my heart turns over like a full lifeboat
far out at sea among the icebergs
that float by like corpses in the
Blood-roses for the crocodiles.
Swans for the snapping turtles.
It’s not just the nave
of the wheel of birth and death
that keeps a person centered
but the rim and the spokes as well
so when the dead come knocking
I’m a good host
and let them in
like strangers on the Road of Ghosts
or leaves on the bamboo branch
of a sumi ink painting.
Guests of my heart and art
I don’t enshrine them
in the beatitudes of oblivion
but my house is their house
my life is their life
and what I see they see
on the same side of my eyes as me
because I don’t greet them
like the black sheep of the family
who were determined to go their own way
like a prison break on the outside.
I don’t play shepherd to the dead
and though I sometimes feel like a lightning rod
I’m not a cattle-prod in a hospital morgue
and they’re not Giovanni Volta’s frogs.
Some are true as worms to the dead.
And some are not.
But if you’re a spiritual fraud
the Zen thing to do
is not get caught
fencing hot gravegoods
in the living rooms of your friends.
When you’re walking with the dead
your means don’t justify their ends
and their space doesn’t bend to your thought
even if the likeness is remarkable.
Eidolon spirit wraith
waif on the wind
your simulacrum possesses me
like a bird possesses a rootless tree
that follows it around.
Water and moon.
And this incredible longing
that makes an eye in the moonlight
inseparable from what it reflects.
Let Rhandamanthus recoil in judgment of the dead
or Anubis awake from a nightmare in a feather bed
to weigh the worth of this afterlife
I’ve spent with you
like a grail I poured back into the watershed
I took it from
like life from the womb of the dark mother
who gives birth to all of us
in secret on the far side of the moon.
Inseperable one.
Lost doll.
Sacred whore by the virgin spring
in the temples of the Iseum
sphinx and incubus
whatever sites I open
whatever windows I stare out of
however I channel the remote like a medium
you’re the banshee
the crone face of queen Mab of the Fey
the white goddess on the dark side of Kali
drinking blood libations
to each other’s spiritual health
from the skulls of their devotees
that comes in like a late-breaking wavelength
that jams the news of your unending death
on all two hundred stations.
I’m a creature of flesh and blood
and you’re into Platonic necrophilia.
Get thee to a nunnery
and I’ll sprinkle rue on the river
in our secret meeting place
where time was no friend to space
when the strong rope of our continuum unravelled
into tiny weak threads of fate
with severed Atropic filaments
for spinal cords and lifelines.
I’ve met you where the rivers meet
at every fork in the road
between your legs
at the junction
of wishbones
witching wands
lightning bolts
and snakes-tongues
anywhere one face
could speak to the dead
through the mask of the other
without feeling estranged by their violet eyes
like a blacklight on the wedding dress
that drowned Ophelia in flowers
when they recovered your body
like a blameless sacrifice to an unknown river
I’ve been sitting by for hours
like the white nights
of a winter Saturnalian
or a lovelorn dragonslayer
wan and palely loitering
waiting for his lamia to show up
late to the seance.
You’re the python priestess
in a prophetic trance of magic mushrooms
that fills my Orphic skull
like a message in a bottle from the future
with inspired oracles of oxymoronic wisdom.
You’re the divine coincidence
of my contradictories
karmic redressal
for the dress rehearsal
of my favourite incarnations.
Apollo will keep chasing Daphne
on the winds of time forever
but every moment’s a crossroads
where the dead intersect the living
like time and the eternal
like the mortal and the praeternatural
like the celestial equator with the ecliptic
at the equinoctial colure of spring
pouring out of Pisces into Aquarius
like the sea into a waterclock on the moon
where time stands still
and the midnight sun beds down with Virgo.
But this time around
you ditched the laurels
and turned into a willow
so I could run my fingers through your hair
in a whirlwind of lovers
like Sufi poets
and Paolo and Francesca
under the demotic breath of Dante in a dark wood
lost for good in his vision of Beatrice
like the ashes from the urn of a moth
caught in the updraft of a candle.
But then again
alive or dead
when were you ever not an inspiration?
Muse and atmosphere
for years
I have breathed you in
like a fragrance of light
from an intimate eye
in a private garden
passing the time
flower by flower.
And I’ve blooded every breath
deep in this heart of mine
where the vine bloods
the darkest grapes with wine
and myriad meanings make one sign
of the two of us
like many streams flowing
under the name of one river.
I have lived with you for lightyears
in a house of the zodiac
the sun never enters
because it has no fixed address
and no one looks out through any windows
that don’t belong to the neighbourhood watch.
It has no thresholds
or doors to open and close.
There are no walls
no floors no roofs or cornerstones
no living rooms and long halls
where the mirrors sleepwalk at night
no stairs to climb
no skeletons in the closet
to remind us of better times
just you and I
urgent with life and longing
listening to the watercharms of the willows
rinsing their roots in the river.
You’ve been dead for many years
but you’re not a watercolour
washed out by the rain
or stained by human tears.
You’re not a ghost
that came back to haunt a tent
like a painter you once sat for
who’s packed up his canvas and easel
and moved on like a one man caravan
to the next well of the closest mirage
that wants its portrait done.
Death is undying.
And life is unborn.
So they’re both as ageless
as ashes and fire
and what was lost in the autumn
is found in the spring
and everything that seemed
voiceless mute remote
cold as the stars
shining down on the snow
suddenly begins to sing.
And though different birds different words
might change the lyrics and intonation
from generation to generation
once a muse always a muse
and there’s no expiry date
on the inspiration
that keeps me up this late at night
like an empty grave that can’t contain
the life that stirs within it.
Everything’s that gone gone gone beyond
like Venus over the horizon of a sunset
meditating on life and death
like Buddha under the Bodhi tree
or you and I under the willows
enlightened by the morning star
returns to a dawn without limits
not a blackhole in space with its grave-face on
like the unscalable summit
of the world mountain
founded on the back of a snapping turtle
with its eye on the moon like a swan.
It’s the silence within
that shapes the word without.
It’s the fish that jumps spontaneously
that articulates the stillness of the water.
The branch that interesects
the circumference of the moon
that amplifies its roundness.
And just as you have
these many years
it’s the dead
that intensify our lives
with the intimate absence
of everything that was near to us.
Voice within my voice.
Mindstream flowing into mindstream
though we think we drink alone from our skulls
it is not true
it is not true
that we don’t pass the cup to the dead
and say as we do to one another here
like a prophet in a bottle
or a message in a whale
drink up
drink up
drink the whole river in a single gulp
because sweeter than the waters of life
from the watersheds of the dead
are the tears we shed with them
and that delirium of awareness
that is neither spiritual nor material
neither now nor hereafter
neither then nor yet to come
that we share with them like crazy laughter.
Under the willows together
at this time of night
as the wind combs out their hair
and a snapping turtle
tries to bury the moon
like a cosmic egg in a sandbank of stars
as proof that it’s really a dragon
who can bring the rain.
No world other than this one
that includes all the others
like the boundless eye includes the stars.
The way I am included in your death
like an intimate familiar
from no other side than this
we’re all on
like our eyes are
and the stars in all directions
neither near nor far
but here
where you are
and nothing’s ever missing
because now has never heard of life
and forever isn’t convinced it’s death
and you sweet one
nectar of grief
elixir of joy
honey alloy
that pours like gold and willows
from the pollen and ore of my soul
you are the belief that I’ve forsaken
as nothing more
than the schoolproof signage of fools
and you are the dream that wakes up in me
and keeps me from my bed
life after life after life
like the death in every breath I’ve ever taken.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
BECAUSE I DON'T CONFRONT YOU
Because I don’t confront you
doesn’t mean this tree
doesn’t know how to stand up to the wind.
If I bend like a river reed in a current
I’ll still be here
long after the current has passed.
To the unenlightened it’s inconceivable
there’s nothing to win
because both opposites are empty.
Take empty from empty it’s still empty.
No reason to put a gun to your head to check it out.
Just because you’ve got a trigger
like the first crescent of the moon
doesn’t mean you have to pull it.
Three for three.
Blood and cartridges.
Strange lipstick.
But you’re still banking on the one that’s empty.
Those that have the power to hurt
but will do none.
Shakespeare.
Sonnet 94.
Lonely advice to those who never take it.
And it’s not hard to imagine
better things to do in the world
than trade barbs and stingers
with third world killer bees.
And there’s nothing unholier than a holy war.
Or a faith that festers
because it doesn’t know
how to clean a wound properly.
Even maggots make better nurses than that.
And besides
as unlikely as it seems at times
I’d rather be loved than right.
I don’t want to lie down with a woman at night
like a body count.
You say I’m not in touch with reality
as if reality were some kind of guillotine
you expected me to stick my neck out for
swanning on the block.
No.
I don’t stay in touch much
with French executioners.
But I can see the world as you see it.
A snakepit with the occasional apple-tree.
You think of reality as a hard medicine
you have to wince like a lemon to take
but if you ask me
the way you put it
reality sounds more like a toxin
than the antidote to the snake.
If the kids don’t like it then neither do I.
The iodine you pour on things
hurts worse than the original scrape.
The cure is more delirious than the disease.
You see the black door of the prison
and you want to paint it pink.
You realign the constellations
like barbed wire around a concentration camp
and reality drives up like the commandant
of what you think
to announce to the inmates
they’re in the real world now
where iron rules
and the watchdogs never sleep.
What happy fool
bemused by watching his illusions
chase their tails
and play with snakes
is going to turn his delusion in
for something as stern as that?
An ideologue is someone
whose spirit is weaker than their intellect
and ideas pack like cholesterol around their hearts
and harden like plack on their teeth.
Someone who is terminally ideational
thinks of reality as a kind of rehabilitation
for the rest of us.
A man asks for water in a desert of stars.
An ideologue offers him bleach
as if he were redressing an incorrigle wino
for giving up on reality.
And when he talks of reform
it’s like listening to a dvd
giving step by step instructions
in how to turn a chameleon into an albino.
And I see something of the same in you.
Ideologues are appalled by the sloppiness of life.
They see it as something to organize
not something to create.
They hate the suggestible mysteries
that never quite come into focus.
They want to refit the Flying Dutchman
with real sails and upgraded astrolabes.
They loathe the Uncertainty Principle
at work in their atoms and their evolution.
They look at beauty as ornamentalism.
There’s nothing functional about a sunset.
Even out in the country
I’ve heard them scolding life
for squandering itself on a flower.
Wild asters and loosestrife
are merely a silly extravagance
and there are so many stars at night
you’d think life was running a casino.
When you tell me I should get in touch with reality
I feel I should be looking for some ultimate
behind everything
some ulterior way of understanding life
that illegitimizes everything under my nose
as mere phenomena and appearance.
The rat behind the arras.
The meaning of things
that makes things irrelevant
as if what my senses perceived
were mere wrapping.
When I look at things
as if there were no inside or out
to them or me
I see the creative contents
and events of a mind
that belongs to all of us.
And there isn’t a thought or a thing
that doesn’t express the whole of it.
Delusion and enlightenment
share the same nature I do.
The star is as much me
as I am the star
so when I say the stars have opened my eyes
to how exalted you can feel
when you’re humbled
by the sublime lucidity of life
my eyes have done as much for them.
You want to put life on a diet.
And time on a budget.
Usually when someone tells me to be realistic
I’m talking to a conservative
who’s in denial about the future.
Nature is nurture
and no one’s ever left the womb
but there are available dimensions
in the dark backward abysm of time
that’s been maturing us for the last
fourteen and a half billion years
out of our own inconceivability
like wine
not vinegar
into this sublime creative collaboration
which is the life of the mind.
Whatever we create
simultaneously and seamlessly creates us.
It’s a child’s drawing.
There are no flaws in it.
What’s unrealistic about a purple sun?
Lebanese cochineal shells
for the togas of the Roman imperium.
The emperor’s got no clothes.
So you dress him up in your nakedness
and paint his portrait in purples and blues
and ask Caligula to lend him some shoes.
It’s a dynamic equilibrium of transformations.
It’s a living cosmic harmony
that’s as mystically specific and intimate
as a snowflake melting on your arm.
The dead branch blossoms
like a witching stick
whenever it’s near water
and the magician’s wand sheds its skin
like serpent-fire on the wind.
These things are true too.
Anything the Inconceivable
does or reveals
is always spontaneous
because there is no way of predicting it.
Every drop of water
that opens itself like an eye
in the infinite sea of awareness
is merely water watching water
shift its shape into fish and trees and humans.
The river turns
and the zodiacal kings of the Etruscans
bow down to Vertumamnis
who will grow up to be kidnapped by the Romans
and raised as Morpheus the god of dreams.
Or Orpheus among the Greeks
if he dreams while he’s awake.
If life weren’t creatively inconceivable
we couldn’t have been born into it
to conceive of the unthinkable.
It’s the empty cup that pours the wine.
It’s the mystery
that all our answers are looking for.
When I look at the stars
though they’re arranged in constellations
to me they are never endlessly one thing
but radiant with beginnings
going off in all directions at once.
You speak of reality
as if it were the negative
of a photographic starmap
elapsed by time.
You’re an equatorial mount with clock drive
and a colour-blind spectrograph
where your third eye used to be.
Thirteen ways of looking at the same blackbird.
Meaning infinite.
And they’re all true.
I am.
And so are you.
And what’s a blackbird
if it isn’t the primordial atom
the many in the one
nuclear fusion
the muse and the inspiration
all the combinations and permutations
of the way it will continue to be seen anew
in every moment
as if it will always be the beginning of creation?
Six trillion miles in a light-year.
And Proxima Centauri 4.7 light years away.
The next star over unfencible time and space.
You look at the insurmountability of these distances
and you think that’s how far it is from here to there
and your isolation brings you to the precipice of despair
when your omnidirectional self
looks creation in the face
and mistakes humility for insignificance everywhere.
And you say to yourself
there’s no point or place
for a period
at the end of an infinite sentence.
And you make a brutal discipline of your irrelevance
and call it reality
and the dead begin to legislate for the living
and the blind for those who can see.
Van Gogh said it best in a letter to Theo.
Some people live their lives
as if they were walking to the stars.
Some take the train.
And some fly.
For the birds
nothing’s ever further away
than their wingspan
as it is with fish and fins.
And turning the jewel in the light
and looking at its infinite flashs of insight
without the glass eye
of a Cyclopean appraiser
cut it up atomically
like a butcher or a surgeon
deciding on where to make the next incision
I would add that like a star
even after billions of years on the road
whose light never really leaves home
because everywhere it goes
it’s in the doorway
on the threshold
because there’s no discontinuity
no distinction
no severance
between a ray of light and its source
between a way of life and its course
there’s a fourth kind of pilgrim
who just has to look up at the stars
or the sun and the moon
or Venus luxuriating in the sunset
if he wants to shine down on everything.
So if I don’t confront you like a bottom-feeder
on the floor of your thinktank
rising to the surface
like a scumbag to high public office
it’s not because I’m a coward or a fool.
It’s just that I’m enrolled
in this funny kind of school
where you learn through experience
to use your ignorance
as a teaching device
to enlighten the Buddha.
What’s water to the goldfish
is water to the barracuda
without and within
every wave of water light and life
the whole sea of awareness at high tide
the whole sky with all its myriads of stars
tatooed on the skin of a water droplet
that thinks it’s tough
to stick pins through the eye of an inkwell
like an Oedipal voodoo doll
with Medusan issues
because she never had a mother
who didn’t turn her heart to stone.
Water is fish.
Fish is water.
Air is bird.
Bird is air.
Earth is worm.
Worm is earth.
And fire is a phoenix that nests in its own ashes.
And you can ask the moon
if you don’t believe me.
Sometimes the water
makes a quick exit
and swims out of you
like tears and light-years of neap tides
but there’s never going to come a time
whether you measure it in lunar months
or waterclocks
or the wavelengths of a snake-pit
you’re ever going to swim out of it.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
THIS PROPHET SWALLOWED THE WHALE
This prophet swallowed the whale
and there’s a sorrow that haunts me inside
like a heavy bell that’s already written the music
but hasn’t caught up to the lyrics yet.
I’m riding a wave of tears like a dolphin
nudging a drowned man toward a shore
that keeps disappearing over the horizon
like an island that’s afraid of the dead.
I am encumbered by a grief that weeps glass
and moves like a python of lava
a wavelength of life
that’s a path unto itself.
An old unknown sorrow
an ancient ore of suffering
that hasn’t ripened into gold yet.
The empty wombs of the hydrogen clouds
that were the first to give birth to the stars.
The echo of exhausted siloes
that finally found their voice
when there was nothing left to say.
Something I can’t see
but I seem to understand.
And sometimes I even think
the rocks feel it and the trees
and it’s rooted in the very heart of things
like our veins and arteries are.
Not a longing for anything that exists
but an absence that’s been waiting
to be fulfilled by someone.
An incomprehensible sadness
that probes the disposition of humans
to determine the fate of a star.
And yet it has the wisdom of a mountain
and the weight of the sea about it
and in its heart
a thorn like the crescent moon
and the blood of a million roses
that didn’t end in love.
Sometimes it’s so intense
I think I can hear far back in the cave
a wounded Medusa crying alone
that even her tears turn to stone
when she looks at herself in a mirror.
I know the drunks feel it
especially at night
after they’ve fallen down
for the last time
before the morning light
and they look up at the stars
that don’t mind where they sleep it off.
Sometimes it seeps into my dreams
like the taste of saltwater mingling with sweet
and there’s a plea in its presence
as if it were asking me to bury
the afterbirth of death
so it can rest easy in oblivion
knowing the right thing was done at last.
One moment it’s the wasteland
of a lunar watershed
resigned to its lost opportunity
like a widow at a window
making love to the rain
and the next
it’s an unborn child
that’s been wounded by its future
in the womb of now
and knows more about abominations to come
than even the most inhuman of us do.
Bruised flower.
Blue lotus.
Black rose.
Your sadness is a strange elixir
on a poet’s tongue
a fragrance of pines in the shadows
their resins sticky with moonlight
like slow emotions that keep to themselves.
I experience you like a mysterious symbol
of all that is injured and broken by life
of all the struggle and agony
of those the mountains cast down
like the bodies that lie frozen
with their mouths open
on the unapproachable slopes of heaven.
You are the old woman
who comes late to the battlefield with the crows
looking for her son
like a ring that slipped from her finger
knowing the real devastation
doesn’t start until the war is over.
Not even a maggot has ever fouled the light
that shone upon it
but I can feel the silence of your compassion
for all those who have been deluded
into thinking they do
and pass judgment on themselves
like an eclipse upon their shining.
You are the custodian of prophetic skulls
and I sense the great tenderness
in the way you caress them like ancestors
who are grateful to have someone like you
to talk to.
What secret graces
do you whisper to them
to leave such silly grins on their faces
long after their faces have gone?
What do you say
that makes them gape?
If I were to ask them
would they break salt and bread and words with me?
Would they predict the past
turning their zodiacs in reverse
like deep sky objects
ahead of time and space?
Dark mother
what woes do you embody
what unspoken despair seals your lips
what unfinished lives
what green works
what blossoming passions that never guessed
by late spring
among ubiquitous beginnings
they were already past their prime
and perishing?
Is it your voice or theirs
that summons me to listen
to the abandoned picture-music
of these icons in exile
no one reclaims
from the spirit’s lost and found?
The undiscovered genius
who lived too long
to be a tragic loss
and the child prodigy
who died too young
to sacrifice her facility
on the altars of her art.
Do they find salons for the rejected
like eyes that weren’t acceptable
in the open abyss of your embrace
hanging their works
like constellations in the sky
so no can miss
what’s obvious about the night
and singularly rare?
I can feel the desolation in your sorrow
like an elephant in a graveyard
who can’t forget anything.
And what is this buoyant heaviness
but the perennial testamonial
of the leviathan within me
remote and deep
that never comes up for air
but what the sea feels
after so many millions of years of giving life
to plankton and whales
who took what they knew
about being wolves
and turned back to the water
like prodigal sons and daughters
with stories from foreign lands
and extra-uterine worlds?
Lonelier than the small self-effacing smile
of the Mona Lisa
resigned to the truth
she couldn’t share with anyone
that she would give birth
and die young
I sense in you as well
the same ambivalent incomprehension
that stills the wind
and leaves the tides flatlining
to see the number of needles
piercing the eyes of the voodoo doll
you played innocently with as a child
like harpoons in the side of the moon.
Sharkfin soup.
Canned dolphin.
As if the only food
that could be tasted anymore
in this feeding frenzy of appetities
the only things worth ordering
on this menu of an abbatoir
were all taboo.
Bad meat.
Blood in the water.
Peacock’s tongues
and butterfly antennae
the livers of black bears
and tiger dicks
original Viagra
elephant tusks
and rhino horns
and the hands of silver-backed gorillas
and whales in the morning
running from slaughter in pods
beached and dying
under their own weight
all along the beach
like a miscarriage of faith in life in Jonestown
because there’s nowhere left to swim
where the sea hasn’t turned into black kool-aid.
All the lifeboats returning like surgical barges
full of body parts
torn from your womb
as if it were the backdoor of a hospital
without a crematorium.
I wait like hieroglyphics
in this desert of stars
with long afterlives
and no islands
for you to open your mouth
like a Rosetta Stone of scars
and speak to me in the native tongue of your sorrows.
My gumboots are stuck in the starmud
like words that weren’t invited to the dance
and the guitar in my voice
is that dunce in the corner
gathering dust
waiting for new strings
like a puppetmaster
who can pick it up and play the blues
for a lady of the lake who’s worth more
than the dues she’s paid
to keep it all in
like wounded water
in a lunar womb
that never breaks.
What spirit of sad wine
are you trying to mature to birth in me
like autumn in the grape?
Have I not already thrown
the ceremonious sword of my lunar art
like a sacred blade
that was raised on my blood
from the rainbow arc of the bridge
as a tribute to your river
that it might be washed clean of me
without profaning the mindstream?
Young moon in the arms of an old light
it’s well past last crescent
and I still don’t know
if it’s a lover or a crone
that’s opening the gate
this late at night.
But I’ve left the door ajar
and a candle burning in the hall
for you to find your way
across the threshold of my homelessness.
I have established peace
among the duelling keys
that kill one another
to be privvy to the secrets of my heart
by taking off all the locks.
And every breath I take in the dark
is the atmosphere of an unknown planet
looking for signs of life
when it opens its eyes to see you.
Is
or are you the star on the left-handed sailor
that will keeping me from drowning
in the great resevoir of northwest passages
you keep like a private library in Atlantis?
How long must I wait
like a dead seabed of shadows on the moon
for your ancient ice palace to thaw underfoot
for you to lift your own veils
and throw off
this dark pall that shrouds me
in your carboniferous wisdom
like the cube of the Kaaba in imageless black
and offer me your longing and your lips
like the cornerstone of a meteorite
putting my forehead to the ground
I can bow down
and kiss?
And if I’m done.
If I’m finished.
If you’re the crone
who knows where I am buried
and you’ve come back for me
like a widow I am married to in the future.
Unhood Horus.
Take the blinders off the falcon of the sun
like bandages off the new faces
of the mummies and plastic surgeons
and let him make whole
that which is partial and scattered.
Gather me up like wheat you’ve sown
within the compass of your blade
under the second full moon in October
and let the wounded bull of my heart
ensure the fertility of next year’s siloes
by pouring the mystic bounty of my blood
the dark abundance
bright vacancy
of my life and art
like the high tide of a libation
over the skull of the moon
so that I can feel you flooding in on me at last
through the trees
through broken windows
through the mirrors that fear
they’ve lost their beauty
through the hidden jewels
in the ores of illusion
through the eyes of hurt children
and the adolescent lenses
of moody telescopes
projecting their passions on the heavens
through the cataracts of aging visions
that have let the clouds
overgrow their gardens in the sky
like weeds they can’t keep up with
through the damaged hearts of irreparable mailmen
who shut the moon out
like lunaphobic loveletters they never send
imagining somehow someone might actually answer
even the damned
who live in fear of miracles.
Inundate me like Noah
Atlantis Mu Dilmun
The
Let me drown like a lover
outside on a rainy night
when the streetlamps are smeared
like lipstick on a mirror
with a painting knife
and no one’s coming to meet me but you.
I picture you as the view
that all windows aspire to
and you as the janitor of lost causes
that sweeps the stairs of stars
like discarded lottery tickets
and scars on the cards and dice
that could have cut either way
but didn’t win.
Seven came and passed
but eleven was too much to ask.
To begin is to risk
and no one risked beginning again after that
because they had nothing left to lose
except you
and you took them in
like a condemned hotel
on the wrong side of the tracks
of the high-flying zodiacs
and gave them a place for the night
where not to have any luck
was still o.k.
Just because you’re a black hole
still doesn’t mean
you can’t be starstruck.
The ravens haven’t stopped stealing the silver.
And the fish still rise to the lure
like city pimps to something pure.
But I sense you’ve always known this.
That you’ve always been the best of healers
because you don’t apply
the moon like a poultice
to lepers
to draw the infection out.
You don’t attach leeches like eclipses
to bleed the fever
and treat the mind
by putting blinds on its delirium.
You are the mysterium tremendum et fascinans
and your eyes are more potent
than the laying on of hands.
You let the dead summon their own saviours
from the grave.
You let the cowards walk with the brave
so the heroes can deepen their courage and heart
by learning what it means to be afraid.
And for those who think
that timing is the content of life
you’re the bus that’s late.
Everyone’s a perennial in your presence
even the weeds and the wildflowers
and the hopeless bouquets
with expiry dates
arranged like Zen gardens in garbage cans
by desperately improbable humans
hanging on by a hinge
the slumlords won’t fix
like the quantum gate
to your infinitely expanding starfields.
Sex is an expression of love.
Love is an expression of sex.
And the word fuck
the English stole from the Dutch
when their fleets fleeced the golden ram
means to batter someone.
Do violence to their person.
As in I’m going to fuck you up.
Not let’s make the beast with two backs
in an alchemical connubium
of Hermetic transformation
and turn all this base flesh
into a gold rush.
But word on the street is
they’re both mafia rats
in a two way mirror
burning saints in the palms of their hands
making deals to open their mouths
taking vows to keep them shut.
An etymological confusion of sex and destruction
eros and thanatos
an alloy of breath and death.
Venus might hang on the arm of Vulcan
but she smells like the sweat of Apollo.
And you might be life
you might be death
you might be light and love
or the Babylonian Harlot
or none and all of the above
but my heart tells me
you’re the crazy wisdom
that blossoms like deadly nightshade
in the lonely recesses of an enlightened brain
where great pain speaks to itself
like the hard rock on the mountain
or a dry well to the rain.
Being and nothingness are not peers.
They’re not cloned from the stem cells of mirrors
and replication might be a material form of immortality.
Everybody’s eyes are black and blue
But reflection is the half-life of a cosmic radiance
that doesn’t see things with the same eyes
in the same light most people do
because when you blow it out
like a candle at the end of its wick
it enlightens the room for billions of years.
The moon jumps over the cow
and compassion transcends its tears
and even the tragic deliberations
of the most serious-minded fools
are the spontaneous schools of the buddhas.
Great illumination
keeps it secrets
like seekers to itself.
And it’s easy to mistake the truth
for that crumb of a dream
in the corner of your eye
when you lie to fake reality
but it’s not proof of anything
except that you’re not awake yet
to your own lucidity.
Your seeing maligns what shines
by not being it.
It’s your own blood
you’re wiping off the blade with your tongue
when the truth wounds.
Lies that heal are wiser than hurtful facts.
And even the midnight sun
that has nothing to do with flowers
when all is said and done
is not the sum of its acts.
Conceptual thinking
is like trying to fix the stars to your eyes
with thumb-tacks.
It’s not the stuff that myths are made of.
The moon doesn’t ride Zeus like a white bull
and Zeus doesn’t fuck swans
with a condom on
because all gods at heart
are socially transmitted diseases
that weaken the immunity
of your own human divinity
to keep them apart
like the sea from sweet water.
And I think that’s what makes you so sad about us.
Like a mother resigned
to the children who doomed
the dreams she had of them
like a miscarriage of life
long after it’s left her womb.
We’re fallible fire-gods looking for fire
among the shadows we cast
like the writing on the wall
in a dangerous neighbourhood.
The gods never ask about the divine
because it’s always
a human that answers.
The gods water the wine
of earthly compassion
that sweetens the bitter truth
like fruit on the vine
with our own tears.
But I’m only guessing
you’re the forlorn muse of the expired hope
that inspires the dead and the living alike
You’re as aloof as the rumours of truth
that disappear into the distance
like prayers and birds
and the smoke of burning heretics
purged of their humanity
at auto de fes
held in public squares
for private control
to remind the crowds
how dangerous it can be
to be
to be who
to be who you are.
To be the thesis
antithesis
synthesis
of your own triune identity.
The three in one version
not one in three perversion
of your own faceless trinity.
And as for me and my house
my spirit moved and bruised
by these suggestions
of who you might be afterall
following me through the shadows
of this temple wilderness
ever since I was a kid
growing up in the logging camps of B.C.
like a big cat
half hunting half playing with me
where parallel paths converge
on the periphery of prophetic vision
I choose the sanctity of a profane woman
to the profanity of a holy ghost.
Your blood is wine.
Your flesh is bread.
You breathe in the last breath of the dead
and you give it life again.
It blooms in you like a flower
and if it’s only for now an hour or eternity
it will still live as outrageously as life on earth
agelessly giving birth
to hearts and minds
that don’t need to waste their time
defending their humanity
against the blind groping for the blind
to put out the eyes
of what’s spontaneously divine
and earthbound about us.
And I suspect prophetically it’s you.
Or maybe I’m just a Sufi weathervane
that’s come to a crossroads in life
and falling to earth from sidereal spaces
like some panspermic meteorite
high on amino acids
I’m elaborating into protein
like the beginning of a new life
I’m finally getting up on my feet
and all this is just a mystic delirium
of prophetic vertigo
to let me know
which direction should take me
to go where I go.
And it’s hard to tell
by the calm of my awareness
whether you’re near
or I’m caught in the third eye
of a spiritual hurricane
like a bird on the wing
but I feel no fear
and I’m used to the pain
and whenever I see you
out of the corner of my eye
and glimpse the beauty of your compassion
and sense there’s nothing about being a human
in the way you look upon people and things
with the emotional wisdom
of your sad-eyed night vision
with all its stars and fireflies
lit up like candles and tears
in the chandeliers of the constellations
writing earthly myths for unearthly lamps
I know there’s nothing about being a human
by the way you love them
not just for who they are
but who they wanted to be
that was ever a condition of anything.
Infinite in your intimacy
you might be the morning star
shining alone in the sunset
of an estranged way of life
that accepts humanity as it is.
Holy water without the fizz.
Nothing to unmask
Nothing to reveal.
No grave to rise from
that isn’t the cradle of a prophecy
that’s already been fulfilled.
The whole shoreless sea
of enlightened awareness
in every wavelength of insight
that illuminates and adumbrates the mind
whatever the weather
and everyone mystically specific
and indiscriminately alone together
in the same lifeboat
rowing with every pulse of their hearts
to the rescue of the illusory bubbles
they wear like lifejackets
to keep them afloat.
And though every glimpse I have of you
is the merest suggestion of a flightfeather
from a nightbird folding its wings
on the waters of life within me
I can intuit from the way I feel
the Y of the witching wand
twitching in my hands
like the cross of a human
with uplifted arms
that you’re near
that you’re real
that you’re the muse
and the inspiration
that raises this goblet
and rises like a living fountainmouth
to speak for the great watershed of the dead
you carry in your womb.
That you’re the void in the voice
that engenders these worlds
within worlds within words
that fit the forms of things like skin
such that
eye to eye
inside and out
with faceless space
where all things end
is precisely where they begin
and the less I know about nothing
the more reason I have to sing.
PATRICK WHITE
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