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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476456" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>All The Good Reasons That Get In The Way Of Writing</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476456" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">All the good reasons that get in the way of writing, <br>baby needs new shoes, and you're conscientious and diligent, <br>will kill you faster than the bad ones <br>that brought you to the edge of your mindstream in the first place <br>to dip your skull like the cup of the moon <br>in the wellsprings of your own imagination<br>instead of always sipping spit from other men's mouths. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476456" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I'm not saying don't do what you must do <br>to be a decent human being, or as close as you can get, <br>but when you're creatively underwhelmed <br>by the rising Rockies of Circumstance <br>losing their footing like an avalanche of cornerstones<br>coming down on you like a barrage of asteroids, <br>you better find a mountain gear deep within yourself <br>to power you out of the way of your own collapsing mindscape. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476456" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Don't come to a reasonable truce with the ashen exigencies <br>of the underwhelming reality love married you to, <br>or pontificate like a hollow urn on the tragic absence <br>of even so much as an echo of yourself to make a comeback<br>or tell me you squandered it all like apple bloom<br>when everything I've read of what you haven't written <br>smells like smoke from a distant pyre on the wind.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476456" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Remember the fire. Even if you have to burn underground <br>through the occult roots of the cedars, or bury yourself <br>powdered in red ochre under the hearthstones <br>of your prophetic forebears erasing your picture-music <br>from the cave walls like graffiti under a bridge <br>between this world as it never is when you look too closely, <br>and the one that's working on you like spiritual water on limestone. <br>Remember the fire. Remember the discipline <br>of disobedience that tempted you to steal it in the first place <br>like a Spartan boy with a hot fox, as it <br>eats you from the outside in without you saying a word <br>lest you get caught ratting your deepest secret out in agony.<br>Or regenerative Prometheus chained to a rock like a salamander <br>born in the fire of his own afterbirth. Know this.<br>Lightning doesn't strike the roosters of fire <br>that crow like weathervanes pinned <br>like a medal from an old campaign to the axis of the wind <br>as if the dawn were some kind of triumph over the night.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476456" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Cradle that fire in your hands like a bird that's fallen to earth, <br>or a lamp of holy oil in a niche of unanswered longings, <br>a candle in a hurricane of boarded up windows, <br>the light of your own mind, casting shadows of time <br>like a sundial with a wilder imagination <br>than its usefulness might at first glance suggest. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476456" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Nor will it do to catch a falling star and put it in your pocket, <br>or pour gold down your throat like the Parthians did Crassus <br>and expect to shine like a lighthouse in a diamond mine<br>with the voice of an oracular canary in a cage. <br>You've got to live inexhaustibly <br>what you're going to write about first<br>if you want to burn down the Library of Alexandria <br>in a gamma ray burst of creative annihilation <br>because you can only master as much life <br>as you've surrendered to like a heretic at the stake <br>or a pine cone germinating the seeds of enlightenment <br>like a zen hermit in a forest fire. Don't take <br>all the beautiful green swords flaming like wild irises <br>whose beauty you fall upon like an honourable death <br>and abuse them like the palings of a gate or a fence around paradise.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476456" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Even if you've only got a firefly of talent <br>left in the caldera of an extinct volcano, <br>a spark in the firepit of a burnt out dragon, <br>a smouldering ember from last night's fire in the stove<br>on a cold morning when the windows are blazing with ice, <br>you must be crazy and wise enough oxymoronically<br>to be the benign tyrant of your own Golden Age<br>like Pericles of Athens, with a politically incorrect<br>lover for a muse you look upon like the Parthenon <br>as if she were a phase of the moon. Even if <br>you love the swaying silver of the wind <br>over the heavy-grained harvest breaking water <br>like a bell under a redundant blue moon, <br>don't shrink from threshing it if you want to <br>share it like bread with people as hungry as you are <br>to eat the heart of the king of the waxing year, <br>like Wodin made a sacrifice of himself to himself, <br>or life thrives on itself like a soccer team <br>that crashed landed on a mountaintop, <br>or the cosmic eggs of turtles feeds a manger of seagulls, <br>and the grass eats the grazer, and the grazer eats the grass.<br>Or if you're too sensitive to compassionately take life <br>in order to give it, sharpen the edge of your golden sickle <br>on the whetstone of the moon, and express your mercy <br>as Muhammad suggested, with a quick kill<br>you can hold love responsible for like a spiritual alibi<br>if you've got genius enough to heal it like a inspired liar. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476456" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">You have to be part salmon. A battering ram <br>swimming upstream against the flow of circumstance <br>like the gate of a water castle you're besieging <br>to lay your blunted sword down in tribute<br>among the sacred pools of life that gave it to you <br>at the beginning of your song, like fire from their eyes<br>to wage a holy war of one on their behalf <br>you're doomed to lose like a conflict that progresses <br>from one defeat to the next against ever stronger adversaries, <br>angels in the way, shaitans obstructing the path for your own good, <br>who realize, too late, with every encounter, <br>you're growing stronger than the best reasons<br>could have anticipated strategically. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476456" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Be a good apple tree, lyrically seasoned and epically strong<br>as Lao Tzu and the Druid aptly described you <br>like the sacred syllable in the heartwood of the letter Q, <br>and express yourself completely without intending <br>the betterment of anything, though all do, <br>from wasps and birds to bears and humans<br>with the beauty of your blossoms, the wisdom of your leaves, <br>and the generosity of the sacrifice that laid you out<br>like a windfall of dice enshrining the eyes that can see<br>like seeds in the sibylline books of the apple <br>the risk they'll need to take tomorrow like a fire swallower <br>of the sun and the moon to keep their planets shining <br>from the inside out in the Goldilocks zone<br>of a light that's been sweetened immanentally <br>by a dangerously habitable life holding up <br>a lantern in the dark that disappointment, defeat and struggle <br>could no more put out than a volunteer fire brigade of waterclocks<br>for the best of reasons could put out the stars in an arsonist's heart.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476456" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Set the world afire like a flame that writes on the wind, <br>poppies flaring uncontrollably across your field of vision.<br>Burn like a two-eyed passion for everything <br>you can see and be on the earth that consumes you <br>in the equinoctial fires of your vernal immolations, <br>not a magnifying glass that intensifies the sun into <br>the capricious focus of an idle boy on a cruel afternoon <br>shepherding ants like prophetic semi-colons into a furnace.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Patrick+White">Patrick White</a></strong></div>