IN THAT SLUM OF A NEIGHBOURHOOD

IN THAT SLUM OF A NEIGHBOURHOOD

In that slum of a neighbourhood

you were the Butterscotch Man.

Old. East Indian. Sikh. Kind.

Long white beard and hair

pouring out of your turban.

And as I can remember you now

fifty-four years later

you were a cloud circling the peak

of Mt. Sumeru

the world mountain

that walked among children

handing out one hard butterscotch candy to each.

You’re always there in my childhood

on the corner of Douglas and Hillside

by the totem-pole telephone booth

everyone jimmied for change,

reaching deep into

your tattered sports coat pocket

with a look of gleeful gratitude on your face

that the light had smiled upon you like a child

asking for a candy.

We were too busy playing for keeps

to know how or when you died.

One day we just knew you did.

And we broke into your small ratty house,

that crutch of a box that could barely stand,

and we saw how poor you were

so much poorer than us

and even though you had an address

here in Canada among us

and stared out through the same windows

at the same demeaning day

at the doors of the desperately poor as we did,

how inestimably far you really were from home

and how alone.

There was so little to steal

who could have robbed you?

But I remember the strange calendars

no one could tell the time by in Sanskrit

shedding the pictures

of the same unnamed goddess

in flaming sunset colours

like the petals of a lotus with its eyes closed.

I can’t forget the calendars.

Or how we went on looking

for large hairy black wolf spiders

hiding in the darker corners

of your abandoned rooms

we could drop hot match-heads on

to watch them run like startled wicks.

Some kids grow up like saplings.

We grew up like sticks.

But that one butterscotch candy

you were always good for

like some unknown kindness

we could infallibly depend on

however the rest of it hurt

has kept on releasing its sweetness in me

over the years

like some philosopher’s stone

that rolled down from a very high mountain of a man

that still stands before me in his turban

even at this distance

through the bluing of time.

I can still see you on any clear day

like snow-capped Mt. Baker on the horizon

across the Straits of Georgia

all the way to Washington State

from the southern tip of Vancouver Island.

And if you were alive now

I would thank you better than I ever did then

when we approached you like a bird-feeder

apprehensively as birds.

You were handing out

your wisdom your life your light

the largesse of your spirit

without words.

Now I’ve come back alone

for all of us who’ve gone our different ways

like the wind and the waves

and the heavy clouds

of the world we shared back then,

some to prison

some to god knows where

and some to early graves

like the seeds of bad beginnings.

And it’s not that I want to set things right

because things are never really wrong

to a strong mountain

that knows how to stand on its own

among humans

without blocking the light

and there never was a time

whenever I saw you as a child

I didn’t look upon you with delight.

But now as a man

I see you as a long dark night

streaming with stars down the Himalayas

like the eternal Ganges whose waters

I imagine myself standing by for your sake

to throw my heart in

like that shoot of a rose of blood

you rooted in our ancestral starmud

like a Taj Mahal of light in the slums

of a North American night on earth

where the children who went to bed

in that cast-off neighbourhood

like unanswered prayers

stoically beyond their years

like prodigies of disappointment

brutally acquainted with the dark side of Santa Claus

wondering why they weren’t worth much

to the people who were supposed to love them,

remembered you

and how much of the world can be saved forever

like the taste of kindness

in a half-finished butterscoth candy under a pillow

as hard as stone

dreaming of a huge big-hearted mountain

that thawed the milk of human kindness

to run down our lives like the lifelines

of the melting ice-cream cone

you looked like to us in your turban.

Thank-you.

May this rose of a poem

find you everywhere

like the children’s eyes

you opened like moments of light

to star in a dark world

as if every one of those timeless moments

were the lifespan of one of your many afterlives

handing out candies on the corners

of all the myriad worlds

where the children run to your shining

like children of the morning

with eyes as bright as morning dew

to greet the Butterscotch Man

and pry open his fingers

like the sun on Kashmiri flowers

to see what he’s got in his hand

that would taste like love on the native tongue

of any land as wise and old

and as compassionate as his forever is.

Or as ours was then

unfeelingly young by ten.

So thank you.

Thank-you from all the children of when

the world was a shabbier place

than this homelessness of now

but somehow you always managed

to corner a little kind place for each of us

in that spacious heart

that seemed to understand

how to stand forever before us

in a turban of snow

like a sacred mountain

in the body of an ageing holy man

as if the deepest secret of life

were as childishly simple

as a hardrock candy in the open hand

of the Butterscotch Man in a turban.

PATRICK WHITE

OUT HERE ALONE

OUT HERE ALONE

Out here alone so late at night

with all these spectacular stars

burning through the clean glass

of the freezing winter air

I can almost hear them thinking

behind the myths of the cover stories

they’ve told for years

dark truths about life and light

it would be madness in a man to understand.

Don’t try to stuff the impersonal secret

of the universe

into your sentimental heart.

How could you ever fit its likeness

into a locket

and finger it lovingly as your own?

Out here alone so late

even if you have come

like a thief in the night

to steal from the light

when nobody’s home

there are no cracks no facets no gaps

no backdoors, unlocked windows

or emergency exits,

no stairwells or entrances

in these jewels of insight

that can feel your eyes falling upon them

like rain running down a mirror

that shuts you out

like someone in the bathroom crying

for reasons that are light-years beyond you.

However deep and sincere your tears are

they’re still only dry wells

in that vast ocean of awareness,

black snowflakes

on the roaring furnace of the abyss

and if you reach out with affection

hoping to make things better

by embracing it all

you’re still only tendering a kiss

to the gaping jaws of your own lipless skull.

There’s a silence older than space

in the bottomless heart of things

that makes intelligence seem

the unlikeliest of exaggerations

a human could ever mean

holding his mind up like a lamp to the stars

as if he could find his own way back by his own light

without the dream that themes his mindstream with creation.

But as foolish and futile as it is to surmise

or try to get a leg up on the wise

I don’t think the darkness

is the negative space

around the troubled face that appeared

after all the dots were connected

like rising constellations

in a child’s colouring book.

And I don’t think there are gods

squatting like frogs

on the lotus of the world

making us up as they go along

like wheels and roads

to the grunts and groans

of an axial mating song

anyone could mistake for a joke.

And I don’t think the stars

believe the things we say about them

or even remotely feel the mystic dread

of what it is to be a human

looking up at their shining

out of deeper darknesses within

where no direction can be given to the lost like eyes

that would never find their own way home again

were it not for the stars and fireflies that mislead us

from one illumination to the next

by giving the finger to the braille of the text

that would school a gust of stardust into us

like God gave life to Adam

and Eve gave life to God

long before there were any laws to blind them

like Satanic lightning bolts

uprooting their eyes like rain from the clouds

to put those fires out.

I look up at the stars

with the eyes of an exile

through the diaspora of my breath

and I want to think them all to death

like the people and things I’ve left behind me

when it was time to go my own way

anywhere into the darkness inside me

to see if I could shine a light upon myself

that didn’t blind me to the fact

neither in the beginning

nor in the end

was I there to witness the act

that made a certainty as good as a doubt

to the great indifference

that wasn’t trying to find me

like a needle of light in the heart of a haystack.

I look up at the stars

like a scarecrow in winter

trying to put its pants on

one leg after another

like a man

with nothing but time to burn

scattering his ashes among the stars

urn after urn

skull after skull

of the heretics and mystics

that were martyred by his scar-crossed heart

in the name of nothing real.

I don’t know what they feel

but I look up at the stars

like a black rose

of blood and starmud

in the last death throes

of self-immolation

and see in my own image

what I’ve always had

in common with creation.

PATRICK WHITE

THE PAINTING FINISHED

THE PAINTING FINISHED

for Sally

The painting finished, I sit at my desk

and go on painting windows and computer screens.

My body is grateful and my heart a submarine.

I don’t know if I expressed what I meant to mean

but there it is and that’s an end of it for the night.

Time now to rely on my resident metaphors.

Stop looking at things that flower in space like stars

and coercing the light into compliance.

Sit in my apartment and watch the weave of the rain

unravelling the loom of the window in tears.

Feel like a seance trying to talk to an exorcism

when I address myself in my solitude

at cruising altitude over the sirens and car horns,

the wailing of long distance freight trains

like graffiti art shows on the road all the way

from North Carolina, the land of talented spray bombs,

and the gleeful shrieking of a gaggle of girls

as shrill as apostate nuns of narcissi in the rain

that have just broken their vow of silence

and are making up for lost time impishly.

Relatively serene, the composure of chaos,

I let the starmud settle in the puddle

until my mind becomes as clear as

a refracting telescope without chromatic aberration.

And then you show up in a blur of stars

like the Andromeda galaxy,

a smudge of shining, a gust of wavelengths

and what had been unfocused in me,

like the cosmic background hiss

when I’m sitting here like this,

the afterbirth of a man wondering

where the rest of me is, and suddenly

I’m whole and focused again on an old wound

I had thought was scarred over forever

some time ago by the moon

that keeps re-opening every spring like a rose

as I realize that love isn’t done with me yet.

And I say to myself, here comes the mystery again,

the fire, the desire, the moon with its black pearl

and its white, its eclipse and its harvest,

and the one blue one that’s too shy to come into the light,

but everyone sings and dances under just the same,

the harvest in and the labour done.

With love. That valley of a word that can wound mountains

when they get lost in it, as their lifestreams bleed out

like gold from the undiscovered ore of their darkness,

and they become snowmen riding their own melting like glaciers.

Love when it isn’t just a sound beavers make

when they slap their tails on the water like a warning

there are wolves around. And everyone takes a nose-dive

and heads for the lodge like Montezuma’s capitol in the middle of a lake.

Love. That ghost of an abstraction that holds everyone in its wake

like a symphony of seagulls at the stern of a moonboat

navigating waterways through the mountains of the moon

like a muse or a voice coach, or a lapwing with a broken rudder.

Imagine that. A word so mute it doesn’t have any senses of its own,

and yet it can enflame even an old growth forest with desire.

And I’ve had banshees wailing, and ravens saying nevermore

at my window before, and felt every beat of my heart

like the dull thud of small birds who mistook

the mirage of the sky in the window for the real thing

and thought even in the body of a swallow, what immensites

are contained within such a tiny locket of a heart

barely the size of a raspberry, if that, and yet

this small thing could ride out a hurricane if it had to,

and not even a Boeing 767 can do that.

And I buried it in my heart with reverence

like an obsidian Clovis-point arrowhead.

Love is the third wing on a bird, the third edge on a sword

of Damascene steel forged and folded like the first crescent

of a metal from the ore of love-struck moonrocks

to kill you deeper into the rapture of life

like a loveletter you weren’t expecting.

Engendered from two extremes, love’s the intensity

in the middle, the rebel of a third eye between

and slightly above the other two, like a star

you’re trying to point out to the child within you.

And then someone comes along out of the anthracite blue

of a spring night like a comet

out of the black halo around the sun,

you can identify with as a radiant omen of things to come.

And you can’t believe it, it’s inconceivable

given the badlands you’ve just cowboyed your way through

like a dinosaur on its own waiting for the sign of a meteor

heading toward its extinction like a prophetic skull.

And then comes love with its starmaps

like this last-minute change of flightplan

and you’re a warm-blooded mammal again

and all your scales turn into the feathers of songbirds

waiting for the return of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent,

in which is conjoined the highest and the lowest

in a godhead of opposites that can’t be explained

any more than desire can explain

why it’s a soggy matchbook in the rain one moment

and the next it breaks into flame like a poppy with big dreams.

And just look at me now, sitting here like a Zen monk

in the pagoda of a pine-cone germinating

a whole new wilderness to explore

out of the seed thoughts under my half closed eyelids

sprouting in fire and putting down roots in the rain at the same time.

Love’s doing it to me again, and the mirrors

are beginning to thaw like Mayan observatories

as they open their eyelids at the first sign of a star

to make contact with them like astronomers who’ve

been buried in the mines of their prophecies

and cosmological calendrical theories for lightyears now.

And suddenly the urge to jump zodiacs like orbitals

comes upon me like a homeless photon of insight

on the threshold of a whole new house of life

it’s attracted to like a lost starless stranger

to a porchlight in the distance

in the shadows of the mountains of the moon

And when I’m in love I smile like the white

but in my heart I’m the black Taj Mahal reflected

in pool of liquid moonlight. Everything is

mystical and intense, full of wonderment

in the smallest details, in the cosmic uniqueness

of every event, however seemingly insignificant

and raises the trivial out of the dirt

into the stardust of the universally sublime,

and even the antheap of day to day life

gets turned into a shrine I lay poems on the stairs of

in the name of love, where yesterday I lay like an orphan

on the steps of a halfway house to heaven and back.

Love. That can turn your head and your vision of life

from a computer screen into an Arizona moonrise

of a woman in the Sonora desert, a siren in the sands

of an hourglass full of stars that pay no attention to time,

and me an old sailor on a ghostship who should know better

drunk on the delirium of the song she’s singing to me

like a seance to summon me back to the living

and my whole life flashing before my eyes as they drown

in the wellsprings of hers, like a poet in the tears of a muse.

Love and the lack thereof taught me a long time ago

there are dark jewels in the ashes, and secret sorrows

in the crowns of life, and mystic terrors in every piece

of the broken mirrors and exalted chandeliers of love

that reflect the radiance of the Beloved

after a storm has passed over the distant hills

in every drop of rain that hangs

like the sun and the moon and the Pleiades from her earlobes,

as if they were the personal Faberge jewellers of her light

or as Elizabeth the First said ascending the throne

at the beginning of her reign, thanking her god,

this is your doing and it is marvellous in our eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

WIRED TO LOOKING FOR GARDENS OF EDEN

WIRED TO LOOKING FOR GARDENS OF EDEN

Wired to looking for Gardens of Eden at the wrong end of my dopamines.

Want to move back to the country

and live in a secluded place

you couldn’t find unless I led you there.

Want to take pride again

in knowing all the names of the trees and stars and flowers

as if they all lived in the same small community

of intimate immensities that I do

like pebbles on the edge of an avalanche.

Tired of playing Russian roulette with the asteroids.

Want to live somewhere even the animals know

the plants know more about healing than they do.

And it would be great

to have a woman who knows how

to think and feel and make love there with me

to laugh at what a brilliant idiot I am

to know how to make soap out of the sap of flowers

that smell like their names.

Bouncing Bet.

Pride of London.
Lady at the Gate.

I’m not looking for purple noons and honeybees.

I’m not trying to make a big splash like Basho’s frog in Walden Pond.

Just want to lie down in the tall yellow grass of a September hillside

and feel like a freshly baked loaf of bread

cooling on a windowsill

like a philosopher’s stone

as the sun goes down over the hill

and the dust of many roads

gets in the eyes of my starmaps

like gusts of stars

that makes them water with the wonder

of being here at all to know how lost and homeless I am

even in the depths of the dark womb that first imagined me like water.

I cling like a tree to my lucidities

and I’m rooted in the light

as much as I am the dirt

and I sprout poems and paintings like flowers and leaves

and even when I’ve been struck by lightning

the dead branch blooms like the moon

and you can hear the drums of silver apples

marshalling at my feet

like a troupe of white-winged horses.

Like the pulse of the windfall

when death first entered the garden

to let me know how alive I am

in this present moment

that has no death or birth in it

no beginnings

no ends

and goes on forever

as the only feature of time

that doesn’t need a calendar.

But I’m not waxing Biblical about the brevity of days

and I’ve always been grateful

that I was born too stupid to be a cynic

and looking up at the stars from anywhere

one of the greatest wonders of life to me

is that so few people are amazed.

They’ve never listened with their eyes to the night

so that when their eyes speak

they don’t understand

the mother language of the light

and the fireflies forget how to talk to the stars

and everybody’s looking for an interpreter

to tell them the meaning of things.

They don’t know how to enjoy

being alone

with everything they don’t understand.

That’s why I like New England asters and purple loosestrife.

That’s why I like being kept at home by snowbound roads

and unanswerable fires.

I want to sit at a carved picnic table

under a locust tree in the morning

when it’s in full bloom

and humming with thousands of bees

and wonder aloud in a poem that’s writing me why

whenever you find nectar

there’s always thorns

as if my life depended upon it.

I want to approach my material confinement

with the suppleness of water

given that’s what I mostly am

and have no fear of spiritual evaporation

after I’m dead

and gone beyond into

the transformative darkness of my original watershed

because I’ve seen the same thing happening to the shapeshifting stars

that everyone says are fixed.

I am not deceived by appearances

into believing there’s any kind of reality behind them

as if a mirage were lying to a desert.

Water’s no less of a window

when it reflects the moon on its surface

than it is in the depths of the sea

that grows it like a pearl.

If you can only see with the eye

and not through it

as Blake suggested

then you’re inundated with visuals

as impersonal as the camera lens

that follows you through the city

like an upgraded form of state shadow.

But out in the country where no one’s watching

but the occasional squirrel

once you let the light in

your seeing isn’t just

a phenomenological reaction

to photonic randomness

but a creative response to chaos

that makes images out of visuals

and symbols out of visions

and facts out of purposeless experience

like tiny mouse skulls

and abandoned herons’ nests

that don’t make a liar

out of your imagination.

I want to live somewhere in peace

without thinking I’m selfish or a coward

to observe the world around me

as if it were the expression

of the beautiful absurdity

of this reclusive artistic discipline

that keeps making me up as it goes along

to fill in the lyrics

of a half-forgotten song

it’s singing to itself like water.

I’m tired of the gibbering of the sacred monkeys

who don’t know what’s holy about life

unless it’s washed in blood.

I’m tired of the intrusion of the good and bad

into my solitude

as if the mob

and the government

civilization

culture and education

had a right to homogenize

the taste of life in my mouth.

Not the same.

Not different.

Not exclusive.

Not effacing.

I’m sick of gaming the rackets of life

for my daily bread.

Sick of the maggots

laying claim to the pedigree of butterflies.

Sick of the tapeworms

trying to convince me they’re spinal cords

and shoelaces

or downed powerlines that are the envy of cobras.

Sick of never underestimating

the violence and ignorance of humans

without always being right.

Are there ants that go to sleep hungry tonight?

Are there bees in the hive without honey?

Just want to walk out late at night up to a high field

with a broken gate

by myself

or with someone else

that hasn’t been closed in years

and delight in going creatively mad under the stars

exalting in the radiance of human eyes

in an exchange of lucidities

that proves we are not strangers to the light

here on earth

or in any other place

where we greet each other like guests without a host

wondering why we are gathered here to ask.

My heart is torn under its own weight

and all my dreamcatchers

have turned into unsustainable spiderwebs

by accumulation.

My soul is the swan of the full moon

unfeathered on dark waters

by a snapping turtle

that keeps rising from its depths like the world.

I’ve walked so long down this long road on crutches and stilts

it’s forgotten the feel of my feet

and all the mystic auroras of my spirit

robe me in meat

and chameleonic anxiety.

Sick of technological progress

that is the equal and opposite reaction

to the devolution

of what’s beyond comprehension

into the truth

into wisdom

into knowledge

into facts

into data

into lies

that upstage the myths of the stars

with mutative alibis.

Want to go somewhere I can scream

and the hills will understand the echo.

Want to go somewhere I can look at the spring columbine

growing out of the green moss toupee

on the lichen-covered rock

and not see it covered in the blood of children.

Want to walk out into the darkness

even on a starless night

and feel like a vulnerable mortal

made wary by the innocence of natural dangers

and not the deranged perversities

of ghouls off their meds in the cities.

Want to get away from the maggots and tapeworms

that govern the body politic within and without

like the corrupt flesh of a dead horse

that died of exhaustion

pulling the milkwagon uphill.

Don’t want to walk any more roads that turn into quicksand.

Just want to kick my cornerstones like pebbles

down a dusty lane

as if I had all the time in the world

not to explain to anyone

why it seems so crucial

to get the colours of the New England asters right.

And I know it’s a dream.

I know it’s an illusion.

A mirage of the way I feel.

But sometimes even water

is wounded by this desert

where the only roads are snakes

that make paths in the sand and the stars

and it takes a mirage to heal.

Sometimes it’s better

to let yourself be decieved by appearances

to be relieved by the compassion

inherent in the way things seem to the mind

like a cool herb on a severe burn

than go blind.

PATRICK WHITE

IMAGINE ME

IMAGINE ME

Imagine me being here now this very moment just as I am slipping through my own disembodied awareness like a silver dolphin alone in a sea of shadows on the moon on the eyeless side of the mirror. And you. Just as you are. Doing the very same thing because it’s in everybody’s nature to swim through themselves as if they were shoreless, looking for islands in the mindstream among the stars. To be free. To delight in the mystery of exploring themselves like a new medium they discover they have an unknown talent for beathing life into. Beyond reality, beyond delusion, beyond enlightenment and ignorance the knowable human divinity of pure sentience omnipresently at home with itself like the homeless everywhere. Everywhere within yourself even at midnight can’t you see the aura of the gold in the ore that dreams of being dug up? Or how the fireflies are always trying to get your attention like tiny lighthouses off the coast of continents that have already run aground like mountains? Or gone down with Mu and Atlantis? How many lost civilizations are waiting in the overgrown jungles of yourself for you to let the dead use your voice to decipher their ghosts at a seance of whispering hieroglyphs? If the one word the wise never use is complete then you’re a fool to think there’s an end of you in sight. But that shouldn’t discourage you from looking.

And isn’t that what we were born for? To see and be happy. To attain a transformative insight into the tragic innocence of seeing itself that let’s the witness go free to delight in its eyes without accounting for anything? Even if you’re trying to wash your reflection off your face like a deathmask in a mirage in a desert of stars. Even if you’re scooping up the moon to drink from your hands like a lifeboat in the rain. Even if you’ve crawled into one of the wormholes of space like a prophet in the belly of a snake whispering in Eve’s ear things that weren’t meant to be heard by anyone other than yourself. Even if you’re the most fucked-up, twisted, mutated, incontravertible perversion of yourself, a black dwarf that ate its own children after it had starved them to death by keeping its light to itself. Even if you’re dropping breadcrumbs like asteroids everywhere you go or threading the eye in the needle like a spider in a labyrinth to figure a way out of yourself like genetically inherited dice. You’re still not a victim of gravity. Whatever excruciating transformations you must undergo like the sea enduring its own weather. Nothing can get you down. Nothing can bring you up. Because the whole universe in all ten directions is wired to surround-sound listening to itself like an old recording of what it had to say at the beginning of things before it discovered its voice. But it’s not a Big Bang when nothing’s come into existence yet to compare it to. It’s not the sound of one hand clapping or the crash of a tree in a forest when there’s no one there to hear it. And even if you’re holding on to your religion like a superstitious grudge against the world. And it may be hard at first to discover the universe God the Zeitgeist the Cosmic Id whatever you want to call it never had a motive from the very first that wasn’t invasively human. But that’s just you being godlessly unconvinced of your own existence. That’s just you trying to believe in your own inconceivability like an established fact. That’s just you trying to spread your angel wings over the earthly turbulence of learning to fly on your own.

So what if you’re a dead civilization before you’re seventeen? That doesn’t make you any less intriguing than the living ones. It’s the tragic heroes we remember the most not the ghosts of the bookends who lived to the end of their long and boring biographies wholesome as twelve grain bread. So what if you’re gnawing on yourself like a bitter black crust of starwheat? You’re still shining. You’re still breaking yourself into loaves and fishes. Some people are bright and light with stars in their eyes and smiles that can only be measured in lightyears. And some are dark and deep as Solomon’s mines hiding their wealth from the graverobbers in gnostic caves of black matter no one’s thief enough to enter. Here’s a Zen koan I just made up specifically for you. If a thief stole the moon from your window would your window miss it? If you ever find an answer that doesn’t let you in on the know as immediately as your mind. Let it go. It wasn’t meant for you.

You get up every morning and you open your eyes like storefronts and informers and for all that appeared and disappeared in plain view before and through them have you ever heard them complain that anything was ever missing from the seeing? Whatever you’re looking at. Awake or dreaming. Whose light is cast over everything and then withdrawn like day and night? When it’s gone. Stars. When it’s here. Flowers. When you fail at finding happiness you discover peace as a way of consoling yourself. When you fall a god or two shy of perfection you master an earthly excellence that’s out of reach of the angels. Cornerstones and quicksand. Everything here stands solidly on the unsubstantiated reality of everything else. The defeated don’t stand like shadows in the victor’s light. An eclipse isn’t midnight on the sun when the clock strikes Cinderella with a pendulum like an executioner’s ax. You can call it praying if you like but from here it looks like swanning on the block for betraying yourself.

Or is it Chicken Little when the sky’s falling in all around her like Leonid meteor showers? Did you raise a false alarm? Did you let the world down? Have your zeniths caught up to their nadirs like snakes with their tails in their mouths? Zero. Forever. Did it become inconceivably unholy to tempt yourself with the earth’s believable fruits because they fall back on their dark roots like pregnant rain to climb up the waterslide again like clear fountains everyone can drink from like clouds and birds that pass without a trace? Is that blood or lipstick on the mirror? Was your last loveletter a suicide note full of agitated compassion for what you’d done to everyone else by killing them into life with your absence or were you just kidding when you said life was too hard for the living and what’s the point of swimming when the lifeboats are full of the dead?

It’s too late for the Mayan calendar to do the Mayans any good. And Nostradamus’ worst guess on a bad seeing day is just another unenlightened truism at the wrong end of a telescope looking for signs of intelligent life. And maybe we’ll destroy ourselves out of hate and ignorance long before we get any answers that might have prevented the onslaught of doom like a prophetic skull that had spoken. Everything is broken. Fractious. Raptors in rapture they’ve made a comeback at last like Nazis in the Black Forest. Like Dante in a dark wood. Like children all over the planet tonight turning into young men and women who remember war like the scar of a childhood Caesarian that marked them for life like that which has been rent asunder. Like an olive tree by lightning without thunder. Or the Israeli airforce. A flash of insight without wondering what they’ve seen that makes them want to kill themselves in a holy war of mirrors vying for perfection of the reflection of a God that escapes detection like a cosmic Houdini whatever chains straightjackets or suicide vests or religions you want to dress him up in.

So why are you crying like a broken teacup you couldn’t pour the ocean into? Is your mind too big for your skull? Look at how the trees bag all the stars in the sky into the tiniest drop of water and throw a hobo branch over their shoulders like a jolly swagman down under and walk away with the spoils of the victors like a windfall at their feet. You say you’ve lost your purpose for living. But here’s one that’s as purposeful as evolution. Begin. Anywhere. Now. Like a crowning achievement that returns to transcendence by getting over itself.

When misdirection comes to its senses where are you that isn’t always here and now? Because there is no other place to be. If you make goodness the standard of life then you’ll end up practising an occult alchemy looking for a philosopher’s stone to turn maggots into butterflies with the wormy afterlives of people obscenely out of touch with themselves. Knowledge feeds on ignorance and true wisdom doesn’t acknowledge the difference. Great enlightenment doesn’t maintain a teacher. You want to be a star. You want to rise and shine. As well you should. But remember this. The darkness is a star’s best feature. And beauty and meaning and art don’t mean anything to anyone with a heart if they haven’t lived through their own passionate annihilation. You won’t find a phoenix in an urn on a mantle. You want to burn? You’ve got to learn to eat your own ashes sometimes.

PATRICK WHITE