EVERY STEP I TAKE

EVERY STEP I TAKE

Every step I take either a crossroads, an impasse,

or a dubious suspension bridge that looks like

the work of spiders swaying over an abyss.

Eerie thresholds that don’t scare me the way they used to.

I take them now as if I were dancing

with clear-sighted surrealistic suicidal abandon

and what used to threaten me so deeply

I laugh at now as if it were just another buffoon

that overdid it, and turned its legend into a farce.

The furies that swarmed me once for things

I couldn’t even imagine doing at my most bitter

have mythically dwindled into black flies of the mind.

Now I smile at them like a miniature Pearl Harbour

dive-bombing a rotten piece of fruit. Malignant pests.

Even in my homelessness, kamikaze pilots

drunk on sake, bad house guests binging

on a divine wind that sweeps them all away

from the brittle sky above the windowsill

that fakes them all out eventually, though it’s sadder

on the other side, to witness the death of birds.

Once you accept you’re going to lose everything

you’re inestimably freer to spit in the eye

of your tormentor, and in that moment of enlightenment

the power and superstition of a madman in the joint

that could scare even Joe Frazier like Muhammad Ali

losing it at a weigh-in, overcomes you as if

your death were already behind you, inconceivably achieved.

You learn to stay ahead of the past, like a star,

shining down on the future history of who you are

even when you’re convinced you’re not anything

whether you win or lose and everything you do

is a risk you must take to keep on deepening your solitude

without shaming the eagles by living like a maggot

who sees a rainbow in a drug-induced mirage

and dreams it’s turning into a butterfly

with the dead-eyed instincts of a bird of prey.

Compassion isn’t the mirage a white flag you hang

like a bed sheet outside the window

to surrender your ego like a weapon.

Like a flower, it’s a sign of resistance that begins

deep underground in the blood roots

of a cult of rain and light that death cannot suppress.

It’s a compact with pain that enlightens the way of the other

by taking the egg-laying turtle of the world off the road

or using your own backbone to splint the broken rafter

of a house of life that could not stand without you,

one light enjoined to another like honey in the heart of a beehive

buzzing with stars. Not an alchemical crack house

freebasing its own mythic inflation like a dealer

tripping out on his product in a riot of vacillating ideals

that wobble like uninhabited planets losing their spin.

Compassion is a warrior. Not a martyr of circumstance.

Or the short straw of the last chance to be someone

on your deathbed like a sword between you and what you loved

as you lay side by side together and dreamed

your courage away by hesitating in the moment.

Sometimes mystic disobedience is a greater sign of love

than all the echoes and shades of our oaths and vows are.

Compassion’s a candle with the heart of a dragon

and it roars into the silence of its imperious empathy

like a black czar at the wedding of the waterlilies,

raising them up like paupers and constellations

or the crystal palace of the Celts wheeling in Corona Borealis

like a Sufi dancing with the dust and the wind at a crossroads

to celebrate his own annihilation in the rapture of his wisdom

to leave every room in his heart open to everyone else

as one of the fundamental conditions of intelligent space.

Not to fit the uniqueness of the human face to a life mask

compounded of enculturated delusions of its just proportions,

but to see in every one of its tears, a locket with the moon inside,

like a ripening lyric to the beauty of longing fulfilled,

a windfall shaken down in a sudden squall of stars

that fall to earth like the seeds of urgent cherry blossoms

to make way for the vital fruits of their unspoken exile.

PATRICK WHITE

QUIETLY AND LIKE A THOUSAND OTHER TIMES

QUIETLY AND LIKE A THOUSAND OTHER TIMES

Quietly and like a thousand other times,

I want to go. I don’t know where. It doesn’t matter.

This moment now is as homeless as it gets.

You can have all the entrances, I’ll take the exits.

Been so long I don’t trust what happiness

would turn me into now, though I think

it’s just as stupid to despair. I’ve let go

of the crows and doves of my emotions,

the quantum insanity of my thought experiments,

and if I ever had dreams, they’re lost atmospheres by now

like a childhood among the asteroids

that happened astronomically to someone else.

I started out on a qrailquest, a maculate clown,

a partial fool, and though I stayed in the shadows

of my right-brained peripheral vision, more

a magic circle than a halo, I kept my third eye

out for it in passing. Strange how time mutates

the journey without losing the narrative theme

of the original psychodynamic. Now

I’m drilling for oil on the moon like the watershed

of a full eclipse and I’m no more averse

to the darkness as I was to the light. Either way

there’s more sincerity in being lost than in being

insufferably found. However rough the storm,

whoever comes to the aid of a lighthouse

with a heart as empty as a lifeboat and says

hey, get in, we’ll be swept out to sea together

where the earth can’t threaten either of us anymore.

Doesn’t happen. Much. There’s something fatuous

about security that takes your edge off like a keel

and leaves you bobbing on an inner tube way out

of your depths and your legs dangling

like participial jellyfish out of the mouth of Satan

like Brutus in the coldest ditch of Dante’s Inferno.

For lightyears I’ve practised the furious discipline

of a purposeless art, and betrayed myself

in the name of compassion for the beautiful absurdity

of celebrating the immensity of my own impoverishment.

I passed the test I set for myself like a stranger

at a dangerous gate to prove I was still sincere

in my own eyes. And even when I suspected a trap,

still, I was a wild shepherd of wolves in the wilderness,

and I hopped the fence. Intense as a wounded exile.

As soon as anyone starts explaining themselves to me,

I immediately hear the bells of faithful alibis.

Unfamiliar demons arise like infidels of the truth

and I’d rather follow last night’s wolf moon down

below the treeline, than cry over another fool’s lies.

Not bitter, not overjoyed, my curiosity amused,

given how little hope there is for any of us,

I’d still rather err with the largesse of dragons

who know more about shining and burning

than the fire blossoms of a thousand Chinese box-kites

looking for the ley lines on tinfoil starmaps

that never lead anyone astray creatively, least of all,

stop longing for the more subliminal phases and shadows

of Venus on a moonless winter night at perihelion.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference

between artifice and a genuine sacrifice

but it’s a matter of taste whether you want

bubbles in your poetry breaking the surface

like effervescent sacred syllables at a seal hunt

coming up for air, or add your breath

to the nucleation of new worlds in hyperspace

by going along with the drift, the gist, the flow,

the probable concourse, the aniconic fractal,

the supersymmetrical elaboration of the rococo,

loading every rift with ore like John Keats,

or the wound of a rikku teacup at a Chanoyu

ceremony for the taste of Zen with mended gaps of gold.

If you’re still too distinct to tolerate life with a smile,

at least try not to wince, and pray for a day

when your facial expressions are not in the name

of trying to better anything that isn’t spontaneous.

You can call it mind, form, matter, and then,

you can reverse the spin into the opposite

thought, the annihilant emotion, and achieve

spiritual immolation in a rapture of nirvanic self-destruction.

Nihilism when it isn’t in vogue as fashionable sentiment

looks at the world and says it’s empty as if

something were there that isn’t anymore, an absence

that lets the meaning leak out through their pores.

The little green apples of disappointment are sour

but if you hang around long enough, the return journey

is sweeter than the first, and disappointment

gets drunk with the wasps in the decaying taverns

plying the windfalls of dusk with nectar and ambrosia.

When things go supernova creatively, it’s not the end

of anything. It’s just one prelude over the line

like the Big Bang before it was wired for sound

like one hand clapping and all the lights going on

when you enter the house of life late at night

like a stray thought in your mother’s head

that nudges one stray photon into a collaborative avalanche

of interdependently originated genetic chain reactions.

You can be an inert gas and light up like a flavour

of neon or argon, with a fixed address

at the candy store of a highway motel, or more

significantly radioactive like a heavy metal

you can shine like an enfant terrible orphaned

by your own catastrophe in the name of art

as the potted plants wither on your lethal windowsills

for the lack of deuterium, and the waterclock

glows in the dark like a small zodiac on a stopwatch.

There’s no lack of fraudulent embassies ready

to forge a false passport with a name and a face

into countries that don’t exist without a border and a map,

but in all the years of my transits and zeniths, nadirs

and pain thresholds, gates, doorways, taboos,

dares, taunts, threats, holy wars and peaceful defeats

without any regrets, I’ve secured my passage

by exploring spiritually poetic realms without

a lack of identity in a universal mindscape

that doesn’t have one separate from everything else

for fear I’d give myself away as an imposter.

Why sip from the waters of life when

you can gulp the ocean whole in every drop?

Quick, quick, said reality to the passenger pigeon.

Humankind cannot stand too many birds.

PATRICK WHITE

MY STOMACH IS A MAN GINGERLY WALKING ACROSS QUICKSAND

MY STOMACH IS A MAN GINGERLY WALKING ACROSS QUICKSAND

My stomach is a man gingerly walking across quicksand.

If they’re not looking at the sky, my eyes

do more looking on the inside than they do

the phenomenal world I’ve brought in doors

homelessly out of the cold, a stray

that burnt its paws on ice, shepherd moons

around a rogue star, fire enough for the night.

I’m painting waterlilies, late summer sunsets,

apple bloom on a moody spring day. Spring

in violet and green. I find a dynamic repose,

sanctuary, shrine, a white hole that shines

on the other side of this carboniferous eclipse,

an embassy I can run to from the secret police

by painting mirages that drift out of the ether

like the visions of desert poets with an oral tradition

of making watergardens out of hourglasses out of time,

a madman who knows by the taste of the wine,

the jewels encrusted like barnacles to the grail,

amber, rubies, star sapphires, emeralds, diamonds,

amethyst and topaz, are mere tears of the rainbow

and not the night nor the radiance he’s in love with

like a hundred billion stars wheeling like a prayer wheel

at the crossroads of a Sufi ghost dance. I’m

absorbed into the mysteries of life, light,

the human heart, darkness, the elaboration

of the imagination aware of its own mindstream

flowing from one form into another, transmorphically,

butterflies out of their cocoons, dragonflies

from their makeshift chrysales, a sentient heart

lilaceously embedded in its starmud like the bulb

of a skull about to break into light like a waterlily

that effulgently lost its mind, trying to cling

to a starmap that can tell you approximately

where everything is, but not, syllogistically, why it shines.

I’ve been sweating the details about how

I’m going to pay the rent as I hang

helical coils of flypaper from the rafter

of the seasick feeling I have on the gallows

where I’m suppose to forgive the maenads

for severing me from my prophetic skull like Orpheus,

keel-hauled on the hull of a cretaceous moon.

I wish I was a chandelier of sticky monoicious catkins,

an alder that wasn’t so co-dependent upon attracting bees

to the wildflowers, the asters and chicory

of my paintings and roadside poems to churn out

just enough of a taste of honey to keep me going

long enough to spread like loosestrife through

the cemeteries and sunken fleets of the birch and cedar trees.

Uprootable. Like lightning, rivers and nerves.

The brachiation of dark matter, the skeletal trees

bound to their own masts like three bells of morning glory

singing all’s well to the pink skies of a warning

that’s isn’t enough of a storm front to dislodge them

like the big bad wolf at the door of the little pigs’ house

trying to blow the roof off the zodiac again

as if every hurricane were a sign from God

to found a new tent city of stargazer lilies for the dispossessed.

No joke. Sometime you just have to let go of the wheel

of birth and death when you’re swept overboard

by a maverick wave from the stern of a Tarot deck

trying to wash you like a cinder out of the one good eye

you’ve got left to navigate with like a mystic

clinging to the planks he’s been compelled to walk

like water on the dark night of his soul, trying

to salvage himself from his own wrack and ruin

as if Apollo Delphinus were going to send Delphi to his rescue

so the oracular dragoness that coils around me now

like the umbilical cord of Pythos, the earth mother,

post-mature as I grow gummy in the womb

of her lunar seas, with long hair and the Mandarin fingernails

of Edward Scissorhands trying to perform a Caesarian

from the inside out like a medicine bag he’s using

as a collapsed lung to stay afloat until he’s born

with a less ambivalent outlook on learning to dogpaddle

in a gale of raving mundanities that shriek like banshees

at the jagged windows of the eyes into his soul.

Times like this, counter-intuitively I purse an earthly excellence

as if I were painting landscapes like placards in protest

and writing poems as if I were framing the Declaration

of Independence with French overtones of the gathering fireflies

of revolutionary insight into the Enlightenment

about to strike the tree of life from the roots up

like a guillotine of lightning dropping the blade of the moon

on the neck of a black swan like an intinerant executioner

leaving murals on the walls for the next prisoner

who’s about to go under the knife, or about to be hung

from an easel by the neck as he lyrically addresses the crowd

like the body bag of the Shroud of Tourin, or Napoleon

going into exile, weeping se souvenir de moi as he

kissed the colours, proclaiming, like Mnemosyne,

the mother of the muses, apres moi le deluge. Je me souviens.

Like a license plate that hadn’t forgotten its cultural heritage.

PATRICK WHITE

DARKNESS, LET ME ENTER

DARKNESS, LET ME ENTER

Darkness, let me enter. Oblivion, open your arms.

Sweet liberty, lengthen my chain by light years.

Venus in the Pleiades, let me feel your charms.

I want to ride the light, o yes I do, as far as I can

toward some flowering of the mystery

I can add myself to and bloom as the stars do.

My most intimate familiar, solitude, eras of it,

yet it’s never known my name. My best feature

once you get pass the indignation and the anger,

compassion. And though love seems to me

the sum of many hearts, trying to express itself

as one, when have I not been a doorway to the dead?

When have I ever preferred my happiness

even as my last rainbow bridge went up in flames

and there was no where else to cross before the falls,

to that of the ironic beatitudes of the forbidden and the blessed?

Make me a star again one day with a few habitable planets,

each with at least one moon that can make me crazy as this one.

Promise? Promise me it will be so and mean it.

I will continue. I will keep on. I will endure like a mountain

that never capitulated volcanically to my own rage.

I’ll walk the road standing up. I’ll traverse it on my knees.

I’ll be the nightbird. The green bough. The apple bloom.

I’ve learned. I’ll listen. And when I’m overwhelmed by words,

I’ll give you my voice and let you speak for yourself.

Whoever, whatever, you are not or you are,

though I hear you’re too ineffable to get to know,

should the day ever come you want to disclose yourself

like a hidden secret that wants to be known,

I’ll understand that, I’ll be the night in your mirror

that shows you four hundred billion stars in the eyes

of as many life forms and more in the multiverse

than you can see without being astonished by the beauty

of all the secrets you’ve kept to yourself for light years.

Even if I’m just talking to myself like a waterclock

pouring my mindstream from one ear into another,

whether you’re there or not, or just the matriculated anima

of a pineal gland projected onto a holographic space time continuum,

and my spirit be no more than my own breath

condensing on the diminishing window of this cold sky

where I write the name of someone I’ve never met

with a frost-bit finger, longing for encounters I won’t regret,

let me flow into your awareness like a wavelength

into a river of light or let me burn in the immutable darkness

a firefly of thought, a thread of lightning, a distant star,

a thinning fragrance of a wildflower you might have known

a long time ago that reminds you of someone

so many changes away from anyone you’d recognize today.

I’m not looking for someone to whine to.

I’ve been omnidirectional since I turned forty-five

so I don’t need anyone to tell me where I’m going.

I’m not looking for a soft shoulder of the road to cry on.

After so many nights of laying my head

on this hard rock pillow of a world

that’s refeathering itself in scales and razorblades

I’m not dissing the occult wisdom of my consolation dreams.

The way it seems is the way it appears. Let it.

I grew up on the streets, drastically. I know how

to break a mirror in case of a catastrophe.

Just let me pretend for awhile out here in the woods

where I always feel as a human it’s the first day

of a kid in the schoolyard until I make friends with an owl

or the occasional, curious bush wolf wondering

what I’m doing so far off my natural turf, and why,

just like a dog from the city abandoned on a farm

I feel so disowned sometimes I should learn

to snarl back at the moon when it bares its fangs at me

instead of baying its praises to the rest of the asylum.

Just let me suppose for awhile that a poet

isn’t the orphan of the absurd, that there’s

a bloodline of meaning that still seeps into everything

like the dye of a black rose in the night that steeps the heart

in all frequencies and colours of the clear light of the void

that tastes like the mystic poetry of the waters of life

on the tongue of a stranger who’s just wandered in from the desert,

his lips dusty with the stars he’s been drinking

from an hourglass rimed with sand and salt.

I don’t want to receive everything only to find out

I prayed for nothing, so I won’t, but if you’re

the shapeshifting creatrix of subtle intelligence

I intuit you might be sometimes when I’m alone

with the stars like a childhood that hasn’t forgotten me,

and there’s a sudden breeze out of nowhere

that grazes the back of my neck like a sabre of the moon

so close I could swear we were lovers in another life,

light a candle for me somewhere in the universe,

and you be the light by which the light is known.

Show me your smile like moonrise on the lake.

Let me see your eyes in the rain, so inter-reflected

they can’t help shining out of everything as if

no one could keep you a secret for long, except you,

and for the moment, at least, I’m not accepting this.

Don’t care if I’m painting a lifemask to put on an abyss

of molecular indifference. You should see the tears

I’ve smeared under my eyes to save face

with the sacred clowns I’ve been from time to time.

You keep your distance and I’ll play hard to get as well.

You take one step toward me, and I’ll go the rest of the way.

Devotion’s always been a weakness of mine. One sign

and I’ll light up like an esoteric zodiac that just went electric.

I’ll meet you on a bridge at midnight, and I won’t forget

when fire comes down to the water’s edge, fire

has to use the bridge as well. Just tell me that you care,

if not for me, for all these humans that die like roadkill

stunned by the highbeams of oncoming circumstance

as if nothing in life, however rightly or wrongly,

however young or old the blood on the hands of the clock

that kills them as if they were as devoid of characteristics as you

could console them for the loss of what they dared to hold close.

That’s the gamma ray burst of the protest that has kept us apart

since my innocence first started bleeding in childhood

for the impersonality that mutilates 3.5 billion years of evolution,

the sum of all our infirmities and strengths, as if there were

nothing to cherish or venerate in us, like a homeless drunk

beaten to death on a fire-escape in a back alley just for the fun of it.

That’s the thorn in my heart. I watched my mother

half beaten to death three times by my father before I was seven

and it wasn’t you, it was me, that picked up the ax

to put a stop to it. Who could aspire to heaven

when that’s going on in the snakepit at your feet?

How do you return to your toy truck after

the cop cars and the ambulance has left with your mother

and the absence is so terrifying even the nightmares

don’t dare echo an answer that isn’t an atrocity of guile

that lies to a child about the good that will come out of it.

I’m sixty-four now and ever since my eyes were pryed open

like the petals of a flower that wasn’t ready to bloom yet,

everywhere I look, the indignity and ferocity

of intrusive happenstance inflicting itself upon life

with a few intermittent truces to lick our wounds

like razorblades in candied apples. Yes, I stand my ground.

Knock me down. I’ll get up again. And I’ll carry my pain

in my heart, in my voice, in my art, my blood, my arms,

in the urn of everything I’ve ever cherished

like a silver eagle, a placard, a birthmark back into the tear gas

of the last crusade that never had a chance, if I must,

until the human divinity that broke the seal of our suffering,

small as our light may be now, leaves an indelible impression

upon space and time, or you, if you’re there,

like the labyrinth of a fingerprint you can’t ignore.

And I’m not asking for an emergency exit,

just take the gate off the entrance and let everyone in

on the secret of why everything seems so brutally true

in the bright vacancy, dark abundance of your absence,

and I’ll dance with you in a garden on the moon

until the lemons turn blue as the wild grapes in late October

when you shall be my folly. And I shall be your fool.

PATRICK WHITE

IF I WERE A POEM YOU'D BE THE LAST LINE THAT ELUDED ME

IF I WERE A POEM YOU’D BE THE LAST LINE THAT ELUDED ME

If I were a poem you’d be the last line that eluded me

like a rope thrown to a man overboard in a perfect storm

of the picture-music that swept me off the deck

as if from then on I wouldn’t need legs whenever

I tried to walk on water to hear the mermaids

singing like the Supremes to Sam Cooke.

Late spring snow this morning. People drawing

their tendrils in like the blunted horns of morning snails

who were ready to venture out of their shells

like buds and tendrils, but got caught like crocuses

out in the cold, and it’s one more night in their coffins

before winter gives up its ghost. If I were a poem

you’d be the muse of fireflies in total eclipse

that lit up my life like the new moon in the arms of the old

for a while, the last nightbird to give voice

to an old growth forest struck by lightning and chainsaws.

Winter patina of candle smoke and nicotine

almost skin on the windows looking out at the grey skin

as if they had a reflectively depressed, unlucky opal

for a third eye coated in a cataract of milky ice

like a goldfish trapped like a comet in a frozen pond.

I usually identify with everything that’s going on,

empathize with the pigeons someone’s scattered like ashes

from the urns of the chimneys squatting on rooftops,

though I never knew them personally, I heard their word was law,

and there are states of mind, sublime and trivial alike

that can be reactivated by the garbage people

throw away in backalleys and parking lots

like lottery tickets and crushed coke cans,

cigarette butts put to the heel like a third world country

or left to burn out like the field fire of a relationship

that’s vaguely over, the mountain ranges of house keys

with tiny coded teeth lying like the jawbones of fossils

nature doesn’t have any use for anymore. If I were a poem

you’d be the caesura I kept falling through like a crack

in my skull when it opened up like the earth

and swallowed me whole like a dragon swallows the moon,

a cosmic egg in the nest of a red-winged blackbird

returning to the place of its childhood after long absence.

If I were a poem, you’d be the one word, like October

I couldn’t find a recombinant rhyme for, though

I read the dictionary like a parrot listens to a rap song.

Funny how we pearl our irritants into full moons

and the false dawns of sunrises in an oyster shell,

the silver lustre on the lining of abalone pit mines.

If I’ve learned one thing as an alchemist over

the metamorphic course of an hermetical life

is that it’s impossible to make an alloy out of inert gases

however resplendently they shine on their own

like secular stained glass on the Keatsian eve of St. Agnus,

and even when you do find empty chairs at the table

that enable you to bond periodically, the argument begins

as you start to forge a new life together whether

it’s better to be poured into the mold of a sword

pulled from the rock of a metallurgical wizard

or a ploughshare ready to till the moon like a fertility goddess.

Conquer or nourish. Make war on agriculture

or try to civilize nature with genetically modified wheat.

If I were a poem, you’d be the solitude I entered into

like a vow I made to the willows down by the river

that made me weep my heart out like a bloodstream

whenever the last crescent of the moon slashed my wrist

like the tongue of an envelope on a loveletter

I was trying to reread in private like a paper cut.

If I were a poem, more important than me,

you’d be the publisher and the literary award

I didn’t get for it as I sighed for another just as hot

sure to enslave the ripples of the rain at the growing edge

of the expanding tree rings in the wavelengths of my heartwood

and give all my literary root fires dry rot. If I were a poem

it would be difficult to explain to you how

my mythic deflations are a seasonal function

of my oxymoronic quantum entanglements with life

that exalt me as compassionate compensation for

enduring my humbling like a Zen samurai

writing haiku that caw like crows on dead branches in autumn

and drift like apple bloom or the swan of the moon

shedding its feathers on the lyrical theme of a nightstream,

without drawing my sword in ignorance

part way out of the scabbard then resheathing it

in a magnificent eclipse of being effaced by enlightenment

like a deathmask with a smile like a telephone cut from ear to ear.

If I were a poem, I’d be here and you’d be there

like an electron that can be in several places

at the same time and I’d be shadowed by enigmas

that would follow me for the rest of my life

as I walked on home alone without you

past the lunar tarpits where I used to go skinny-dipping

with the mammoths and staple gun Smilodons

as if I were swimming through penumbral oilslicks

on the moon like a snakepit of emotions at high tide.

My Papa was a rolling stone that came down on me

like an avalanche, literally, so I always feel

there’s a meteor shower out there somewhere in the unimaginable abyss

with my chromosomes. The building blocks of life

like Castor and Pollux in Gemini, snake-eyes

on the upside of the dice if I were a poem, you would

well-meaning enough, breathe on for luck, and then

where X marks the spot where we expected to dig up

our buried treasure, I’d be called upon to suck the poison out,

hoping there were no cuts on the lips I kissed you with

for fear of contaminating your wishing wells and aquifers

with local earthquakes caused by fracking

as I researched my panic in a maenadic state of Orphic dismemberment

for everything between you and I I was lacking.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT'S TO KEEP YOU FROM DANCING?

WHAT’S TO KEEP YOU FROM DANCING?

What’s to keep you from dancing if you’ve got nothing to live for?

Dance naked in your tears. Cry through your laughter.

Plunge into a black hole and come out the other side,

renewed, a virgin, no more feathers and tar pits.

No more dead petals in a dry fountain. Absurd, isn’t it?

When you begin to compare skulls with the moon,

not at all what you imagined you would see, not even

the prevailing consensus of delusion that passes for reality,

this neo-primordial soup of logos and memes

we’re all swimming in like fish in radioactive water.

This pre-Cambrian efoliation of multitudinous sentience

re-inventing cuneiform to write it all down in the Burgess Shale

three hundred million years from now, fossil by fossil

and one among myriads, the lucky lottery ticket

of a fish with a spinal cord that will lead eventually

back to the saddest excuses in the world for the likes of us.

I’ve stood on bridges late at night by myself

watching the waters flow as if my mindstream

were going on without me, and the pain were too much

even for a poet to sublimate his way out of,

and I’ve lived my way to the end of a labyrinth of cul de sacs

and wearied of their chronic recurrence like a water wheel

at an abandoned mill that used to gamble on a river boat

things would stay afloat long enough to make shore

before the ship goes down. The crucial point here

is not to live with regrets as if you had something personally

to do with all of it. There’s no starmap

for the burrs of the sorrows that smoulder

like brown constellations in the slums of an inflammable zodiac.

You diminish your arrogance at the expense of your humility

that’s grown as gigantic as God, when you think

you know enough about the unknowable to fix the blame

as if you’d just come up with a new alibi for you and the world.

Could be a curse. Could be a blessing. Could be

an improbable concourse of unforeseen events

that’s been chain-reacting well before

the infinite beginnings of the multiverse.

You cut your skin with razors as if you were

playing tic tac toe on your thighs, hoping someone

would come along like an antidote and suck the poison out.

But life isn’t sweet when you’ve learned

to weep through your fangs. Go ask the moon.

There’s no holy crusade going on as if the rose

aroused its petals to go to war against the infidelity of its thorns.

Even the predators, in their own way, are the children of their prey.

The longer the fangs. The sharper the talons. The harder the armour.

Ever seen what an owl can do to a snake? Yes,

things can be bad, but not necessarily for your sake.

They can be good, too, but if you think it’s for you,

you’re going to end up telling lies about suffering in your sleep

like a flashflood in a dry creekbed trying to wake the frogs

that have burrowed deep into the starmud for the duration

by singing to themselves in the rain as if they’d just had a revelation

it’s wet on the moon again. I’d could give you any one

of a thousand interpretations of your eyes. I could

turn your sacred snake’s tongue where the rivers part

into a green witching wand twitching over the watersheds

of mystic lightning. I could scry the self-sacrifice of your next breath

like the smoke of a distant fire on an autumn hillside

and try to explain the fireflies as the popular demotic

of the proto-nostratic of the stars and how that relates

to the scars on your leg. Befuddle you into a salvation

that would last at least a couple of decades before

you could ever find your way back by your own lights

to where you were going with the rain before I met you.

You’re not wrong. You’re not right. I could say that and mean it

as easily as a principled astrolabe looks upon a starless night

and doesn’t try to see what isn’t there. It isn’t dark.

It isn’t bright out. It’s clear all the way to the next star

if you don’t bind yourself to a mental atmosphere

where the mind suffers at the hands of its own weather

like a child that thinks it needs to be taught to wake up

from its own nightmare when, in fact, once things

begin to bottom out it’s as over as a bubble rising to the top.

Pop! No more delusion, no more enlightenment.

No more mirages taking charge of the wellsprings

in the desert of stars in ruins around Jericho

as the wind shapes the sands in an hourglass

like a potter or a sculptor into a sea of eyes

that can actually flow like tears of glass in the heat

you can drink from like a dragon on the moon

just before it begins to rain. And the grasslands awaken

of their own accord. And everywhere guitar-shaped gazelles

are getting up on their own four legs like amputees

that haven’t forgotten how to dance to the elegant thunder

of their own leopard skin drums. And the rain

comes back to your drought-stricken eyes again

and runs like rivulets and the unravelled threads of your lifelines

through the starmud gullies of your brain breaking

into waterlilies of insight on the banks of your mindstream

tempering the broken swords of moonlight

that are offered to it in tribute, not surrender,

because there is no war, into alloys of reality and dream,

delusion, enlightenment, imagination and awakening

no one before you has ever fallen upon like a dancer

who was cut to the quick by a life she’s not been out of step with

by not so much as one angstrom of a wavelength of a firefly

for all the billions of lightyears along the way

you’ve been leading a pilgrimage of shadows deeper into the night

like a calendar of shepherd moons

you’ve been slashing like a sundial on your legs

moments away from the shrine of broken promises

you intend to keep like a vow you made to yourself

sleepwalking your way across the corals of your grief in bare feet

as if sooner or later you could tread all that blood into wine.

Put your dancing shoes on. Crystal slippers. Moonboots. Winged heels.

Stop carving your body like a deathmask you can wear in the world

like an alphabet with omega as its only child.

Why lie down on the grave of that morose saint of clowns

you prayed to deliver you from yourself like the spade

you were using to dig your own ditch on the moon

for the mass assassination of the innocent and obscene?

I’m a poet. And to me you’re as beautiful inside and out

as a blank piece of paper after the first snow

has had a taste of moonlight and softly glows in the dark.

Not Joan of Arc singing at the stake of her own serpent-fire

feathering her body in flames, in boas of smoke to cover up

the glyphs of the bird tracks on the secret loveletter

she’s been writing to herself in the flesh to really mean

what she says when she says I want to live, I want to love,

I want to give and receive the way I breathe without

meaning anything by it. I want to see, because I have

brave eyes, deeply into the light, into the dark, the mystery

of a life that keeps on going without knowing where it ends.

PATRICK WHITE