A Paint Rag Of The Masterpiece I Used To Be

A 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. 

Reviews

[Rita L. Sev]

Some delicious lines here, Patrick - your words encompass so many emotions, yet the piece flows in one direction. Your title alone gives food for thought!

[Frieda P]

Speaking of, this is a masterpiece....I started reading it earlier but I had to wait till I got home from
work to finish reading, it's quite long but I hung on every word, my favorite is the third stanza, but I really adore the entire body of this piece...outstanding work Patrick.

[jacob erin-cilberto]

I always took the wrong fork...and wanted to go back into the womb many times...

lived through the cigarette butts and wasted money on loser lottery tickets...we get by by the skin of our teeth...maybe that is what makes us write so much...limit the damage to our psyches..

I feel in no position to refuse the muse...but often wonder what would happen if I did...

[Lauriegirl]

Wow! Your feelings ooze from this write. This is written with much passion. I can feel it. Bravo on another stunning piece.

[Tricia Pattinson]

Wonderful lines in this and the imagery is as well. But if I may point out from one hermetic enthusiast to another...Every time you look into another face, you are looking into a mirror. :) Beautiful!