A Paint Rag Of The Masterpiece I Used To BeA Poem by PatrickA paint rag of the masterpiece I used to be. Is this humility? Or time to quit? I refuse to listen to my muse as if she were a whistle on a graveyard shift. A nightbird or nothing but the white noise of the cosmic hiss cooling its afterbirth off? I make a point when I write, or paint, or make love of never knowing where my mindstream's going with me, and everything sings mysteriously as if it were oracular. I let the world come upon me by surprise, expecting nothing beyond the moment or behind me, and it's twice as spectacular for being unanticipated than if I were in up over my head in an ocean of notions of what it was all about. I'm on an enlightenment path through the gutter. I'm swept along with things like log jams of cigarette-butts and dud lottery tickets on the rain and then things pan out expansively in my flowing and I'm able to reflect the constellations again like a starmap of mirroring consciousness, and I'm utterly astounded by the beauty of a peace deep within that makes me think, despite the apparent facts, the most prevalent element in the universe, is an exquisitely subtle intelligence that gives to everything that exists, and, I suspect, doesn't, as well, not a God particle, but to each its own measure of a wavelength from a firefly of insight to an apocalyptic supernova of mind-blowing revelation so intense, you glimpse it once, and your eyes evaporate. What a way to spend your life though. A poet on the road he took at a fork of his own walking on stars, thorns, the eyelids of black roses in eclipse, night seas that forbid the false hopes of lifeboats and the buoyant despair of the shipwrecks that lay on the bottom like a black box that had lost its voice in the depths calling out to the fish for help. Maybe you have to drown first to be a good lifeguard with gills you can trust, or return to the womb like I do from time to time to hear the allure of the mermaids singing me up onto the rocks of my birth as if the waters of life had to break like an urn before the dragon could be born again like a star out its own ashes. The light out of the dark like Draco. Hic sunt dracones. The eye out of the shattered lamp it used to go by like a nightwatchman among the shadows it cast like soot on the dark glass of windows into the heart as it made sure the doors were locked on what was stored inside like the unknown potential of the collective unconscious in the comatose warehouse of life. In order to be all inclusively lyrical, I learned a long time ago to pipe on a hollow silo like the wind or a drunk on the neck of an empty whiskey bottle beside the canal in the spring because it was too late to fish for evolution and satyr I may have been, there was no other syrinx or turtle-shaped guitar or lyre within immediate reach. Sooner or later, your Dionysian past is going to catch up to your Apollonian future, and the measure of a human won't be the palm of a planar hand laying out the Parthenon caryatid by caryatid, but a starmud temple of sacred prostitutes leaping naked through the fires of Isis at a rave of tattoos in a mosh pit of esoteric constellations dancing on the dark side of the moon like a cult of fireflies initiating your imagination into different altars than those you've been knocking over for lightyears now like the pillars of false idols that call down the mountaintops of mimetic avalanches to bury you in for calling their bluff. I've lost count of the number of times I've been carried home on my shield like the phase of the moon I was gored by like an island-hopping mercenary quixotically tilting at prayer wheels fighting to right the toppled axis of Neptune with its head stuck in the seabed like a tent-peg in a desert of stars on campaign in a holy war with myself I knew I was doomed to lose. What did Archilocus say? Some Thracian's got my shield. O, well. That's tough. But comes a time you've had enough. You just want to sit like moss on the rolling stone of a prophetic skull and listen to what the crowns of the elm trees swaying in the wind are whispering to the deep violet storm clouds mobilizing at the edge of the sky, embedded like a third eye in a hurricane of razor blades. These days I give hermetic poetry readings open to my solitude, after keeping my mouth shut for years, nauseously knitting my broken skeleton in a bone-box into the black pearls of sacred syllables dawning under my tongue like new days of darkness ahead expanding like space in the heart of a voyageur that's left the solar system like an explorer that's breaking twigs like blips and beeps along the way should anyone back on earth be following what I've seen and been to have gotten as far as I have in life. My heart is free. My spirit as uncontained as a flame that paints outside the lines of the mirror I used to look through like a reflecting telescope on a cold mountaintop trying to escape the light pollution of cities in the valleys I once rose from like a coffin of a comet over Sodom and Gomorrah or the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion looking straight into the eyes of the sun like the vapour of a rainbow that went blind looking back like a pillar of salt at what time can wreak when the light gets turned around like an ingrown solar flare of a mind that's lost at sea on a liferaft surrounded by the fins of circling sun dials. I've privately reprieved all the doves on the death row of the aviaries of my voice, and released the stars like chimney sparks from the bad contracts they'd signed early in their musical careers with the managerial blow hards that pumped the volume up on the celestial spheres until you couldn't hear anything but the sound of your eardrums breaking like chandeliers of hard rain in an ice storm into the scene with big dreams of shining one day like creosote in a crematorium of genuinely undiscovered talent stars that burned the whole house down like a zodiac over the slums of London in 1666, or Rome while Nero fiddled his way through 180l literary awards on tour in Greece lying through their eye teeth like Corinthians. My childhood a progressive demolition of norms. No regrets. I was born like a heretic into this madness of homicidal fictions dismembering Orphic corpses in nondescript bathtubs after hanging them upside down to bleed them like roses and acoustic guitars, ear to ear, their vocal cords cut like downed powerlines that used to accompany the starlings on their staves. I have a lot in common with extraordinarily ordinary people. Art for art's sake is akin to masturbation and about as productive, so I don't try to prove when I write I'm so unique you have to ask someone else for an explanation. No people. No painting or poetry. No communication. People come first. Art is for people, or it's just the wind moving the sand around in an hourglass to no effect like moments of life lived on the seabeds of the moon, cul de sacs, dead ends with no time to reflect on the possibility of pearls rolling like dew off their tongues. Everyman is No one, the same who lifted the veils of Isis and revealed himself to the Cyclops. Poetry's the long, hard discipline of learning to forget your name going beyond the unpublishable lovers of fame with one hand down the muse's pants like an amanuensis. You've got to sit at the side of your deathbed at every moment in order to be fully alive and free of yourself so you can sing for the dream figures on the corner of Gore and the universe as if they were listening to their own voice in the crowded solitude of their passing. There's mercy in this, a way of life, a form of worship, celebration, devotion, sacred circus clowns, ghost dancers elated by the crazy wisdom of praying off the reservation like poetry readings in the basement catacombs of busy bars. Reality wholly conformable to the surrealistic facts of an active imagination looking at the way things are as they pass from one transformation to the next like the waterclock of a mindstream pouring itself out into the empty forms of dry housewells waiting for water levels to rise on the moon like a temple of sandbags. I write like a river overflowing its banks like the Milky Way or the soft shoulders of the Road of Ghosts to flood the earth with the alluvial silt of burnt out stars that renew their light by breaking bread with Spica in the hand of Virgo like the dark abundance of the autumn equinox pouring its bright vacancy like a harvest moon into the inexhaustible silo of an hourglass the wind plays its picture music on like the urns of starlings born like a voice box caught like a song in the throats of exorcised chimney pots. True to my circuitous blossoming I refuse to give up the ghost of my evanescence like the smoke of a draconian fire roaring down below to keep this house of life warm by laying down on the pyres of my cracked heartwood like a fossil of rain singing to the beatific stars like a heretic in an auto de fe of blue jays and sunflowers blooming in the creative wake of my self immolations as a way of exacting as much ecstasy as I can from the pain. Absurd as it seems, I'm trying to live up to the aspirations of rogue fireflies untethered like a dream of what could be released like grains of wild wheat in the star-fields of a feast from the treadmills of conditioned consciousness like constellations of the usual myths of origin rising and falling like life and death from the east to the west while everything that thrives on earth is exuberantly turning against the flow of things like salmon summoned from the sea by the mystery of a counter-intuitive voice upstream the other way as my embryonic stem cells listen to what it suggests and pro-creatively hearing what its eyes have to say about the immanent vision of life that burns within me, radically obey.
© 2014 PatrickReviews
|
Stats
305 Views
6 Reviews Shelved in 2 Libraries
Added on September 11, 2014Last Updated on September 11, 2014 AuthorPatrickPerth, Ontario, CanadaAboutI have a confession... I write for therapy, its not transcend artistic statements or postulating polemics, I write to communicate and express myself in a form that can promote communication between pa.. more..Writing
Related WritingPeople who liked this story also liked..
|