BEGIN NOW. THE LIGHT WILL CHANGE Begin now. The light will change. Get the rain started. Let a few tears fall. Open the aviary of your heart and let the doves and the nightbirds out, and if liberation isn’t enough to sing about, celebrate the next best thing, escape. Get out of here. Isn’t there enough open space within to include worlds within worlds begetting worlds? Or has your mind become the slumlord of a run-down tenement you converted from that ark you built like a lifeboat for everyone in the flood myth of a lava flow on the moon before you bled out like a wounded fish in the Sea of Tranquillity and decided like a feeding frenzy it was a shark eat shark world, everyone for themselves? Nature red in tooth and claw. Every star in the sky aspires to shine like a starfish washed up on the sentient shores of a pre-dawn awareness like pilot lights of life navigating by the starmaps of the fireflies. The sea has its constellations, too. Drown if you must in the unanswerable sorrows of the accidentally innocent fate of love in the world, or go up in flames in Vietnam or an Arab souk as if someone had just confiscated your cash register like an officious autumn in the Adirsndaks. Or a tax on your eyes, how much you can see in the course of a life from the bottom of the mountain up like a haiku, or the dangerous lyric of a northern river with muscle and mind, making its way to the sea like a savage waterclock that knows it’s never going to turn out of time. Paralysed by atrocity, our sensibilities trashed like polluted loveletters of junkmail advertising toxic food as the soul of joy and satisfaction, indulgence, the suicidal compassion of despair, desecration, the alternative aesthetic to no one ever being there to show you how to empassion your wonder into an insight humbled by awe at the mystery and magnificence being here at all. Madmen punching holes in the ozone like the only lifeboat heading for an ice floe calved by global warming like a glacier in the North Atlantic. Paradigms the abstract ghosts of fossilized metaphors. Logos instead of symbols that resonate like a seance among the living and through perception change the spin of atoms and rearrange galactic seastars like the seeds of sunflowers opening like the eyelids of a total eclipse. No one needs a prophetic skull to see how horrifically surrealistic it all is. Even the sacred clowns aren’t laughing like Zen masters anymore. Ryokan gets home to his hut in the shedding woods and this time the thief did steal the moon from his window. What now? You fold your poems into paper airplanes and let them blunt their noses like sparrows on the false dawns in the windows of your stem cells? You live in a crack in the wall, you excavate a grave in the caldera of an inactive volcano and hope the poppies and wheat that are left of the crumbs of your dreaming grow better where you’re buried like the Burgess Shale that’s come of your starmud avalanching down like the asteroids of a rockslide of headstones in a vandalized cemetery? PATRICK WHITE
Posted on: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 14:47:56 +0000
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