A GOOD DAY TO ENJOY BEING LOST, ADRIFT A good day to enjoy being lost, adrift. A monarch butterfly skirts the heritage stone of the bank across the street for good luck. Hectic palette, it’s good to see the badge of your shadow smudging the gridwork of predictable brick. You made it through the pesticides, the milkweed’s been good to you. Small relief, tender loveletter may no one ever scrawl return to sender across your envelope. May no one ever tamper with your pollen. Sweet rapture of not giving a damn for a day and meaning it. I’m an offroad aster, a wayward English ox-eyed daisy that’s thrown off the yoke of all the burning bridges I’ve crossed, trying to grind the chaff in the hand of the sign I was born under into broken loaves of starwheat cooling on the windowsills of my ersatz ideals. It didn’t take me long to learn by living me to be afraid of everyone else. That every moment of life was death-defying in extremis, a high wire act on a spinal cord stretched like a single filament of a spider-web between one abyss and the next. I’ve been a poetic wino dizzy with mystic vertigo, slumped up against the door of a stranger’s threshold that kept sweeping me off the stairs like a mirage of junkmail, leaves and stars that could foretell by the agony in my eyes I was born to live a life in freefall as I have, no hell below me, no heaven above, and earth, the shakey footstool of an unstable mountain on the back of a turtle that seldom sticks its neck out for anyone who can play self-fulfilling Orphic threnodies on a tortoise shell harp. Choreographers who know how to teach totem poles to dance to the picture-music of the sacred fires that still burn, branded by spring, in the tree rings of the heartwood they refuse to pile like pyres around the feet of native martyrs singing death songs at their own sky burials. Life’s a bird bone flute, a syrinx, a lute, a harp, a cithara, a guitar, Lyra in the summer sky, not the trumpet of a dying swan. Good day to let go of my mind like a kite or a weather balloon, give up beating on this old drumhead of a trampoline like an erratic pulse and jump six times higher on the moon like the photon of a third eye of a spy satellite in a chromatically aberrated orbit that sheds more light on the secrets of life than it keeps to itself like private data deep in an unsightly black hole. I don’t want to candle out like the parachute of a daylily the higher I rise into a spiritualized atmosphere wigged out by its haloes and comets. I don’t intend to wait like a dragon in a wax museum for someone to show up with a wick to give a little spine to the votive candles in a shrine of gummy prayers. I’m going to take charge of events like a fisherman caught in a Pacific storm, and take my hands off the wheel of birth and death in this great nightsea of awareness and roll with the dice on the swells of chaos. Seven times down, eight times up. Such is life. Even if I’ve got to chart my course through life like a starmap of snake-eyes, I’ll make a constellation of matchbooks that will set the zodiac afire like an arsonist inspired by the cult of his own heretical martyrdom. I’d rather burn sincerely for something I don’t believe in than give my assent to the false confession of a poem I didn’t write from the inkwell of a heart I threw at the devils in white like blood on the snow of a savage sacrifice of a life that arises from life, not the death wish of a cold, cold rose with thorns of ice on its frozen eyelids. A good day to cherish the innate heresy of creative freedom I was born into like the natural medium of imaginative extremes I keep violating like a snake with wings on a burning ladder of hierarchical taboos laid out like crosswalks with traffic lights to supervise the way we came back like shepherds down from the mountain at night with a flock of judas-goats in painted tiger-stripes and sheep we fleece for their carnivorous clothing along the same path we’ll labour back up in the morning, like pale stars that bleach their torches in the eyes of albino crows with silver irises for moondogs and a skull’s way of looking at things that makes you shiver when there’s no one else in the room but you and what you’re becoming as the older you grow the more you realize, how little you have to do with it. A good day to sit enthroned in my own brain coral like a gleeman in the absence of a dynastic bloodline, free to laugh at myself as the urge overcomes me, or cry like a ghost of rain on a spreading root fire. Good day to take my deathmask off another man’s face and throw it away as if neither of us ever looked good in it, and the mirrors lied behind our backs as if our hearts were blind to what our minds were up to. Intellect blossoms. Compassion is a moonboat with a cargo of windfall apples riding like a low-hanging branch on the waters of life, as the stars pilot it into port. No born again cuckolds pushing the eggs out of my cosmic nest. A dragon with the wingspan of space, time can’t keep up with the pace of the stars I keep panning out of my ashes like nanodiamond insights into meteoric splashdowns on the moon. Good day to stay crazy and let wisdom follow suit. Good day to go down to the river and watch the beaks of the white-throated waterlilies open like the mouths of baby birds that burn with hunger to be consumed in the fires of their own appetites, young candles preening their flames like the feathers of falling stars that forego their fixed place in the great scheme of things every time a child makes a wish upon them, and the serpents at their heels puts the plumage of the highest on the lowest and in a union of opposites, flies. PATRICK WHITE
Posted on: Thu, 29 Aug 2013 14:46:43 +0000
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