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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476864" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>So Crazy At Times I'm Exiled From My Solitude</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476864" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">So crazy at times I'm exiled from my solitude. <br>I disguise my madness as the excruciating discipline <br>of beading the stars into a lifemask I can wear<br>like a constellation of fireflies that never arises <br>the same sign twice. Among all these myriads of me, <br>not one with an identity I can isolate monadically <br>and say, see, I'm indefensibly this mystically specific human.<br>I have an ontological address, and these are my doors, <br>my stairs, my floors and windows, my local habitation <br>and a name as the bard suggests. Whatever my magnitude <br>I've got a place on the starmap. I'm grounded like a garden <br>in being. The hummingbird thrums sacred syllables <br>into the ears of the hollyhocks, aum mani padme aum, <br>the jewel in the lotus, and the crow caws like a black mass, <br>but even when I walk through the cemetery <br>up on Drummond Road, looking for a gravestone<br>with the future of my name on it to prove that I existed once <br>to suffer the same dissolution as everyone else, <br>none of the voices I hear like starlings in the elms <br>are my own. And altogether the dead echo: not here, not here. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476864" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Everyone seems to have a God-particle they cling to for mass, <br>but I've been bubbling up for light years in one universe <br>after another, and I'm more vaporous than solid, <br>and even when I morphologically assume what I take to be, <br>briefly, the true shape of my shifty universe just <br>to get along or belong to all my friends with backbones like rafters, <br>it's only a provisional scaffolding I climb up on like monkey-bars <br>to paint the latest theory of my myth of origins.<br>Am I a sum of destructions, God's Own Zero, <br>or a creative deficit of cosmic proportions in debtor's prison? <br>Have I run out of afterlives, broken the continuum, <br>or is this one just unborn without a beginning <br>though there's no end of dying behind or ahead of me? </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476864" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Subjective idealism, the slippery slope to solipsism, <br>the shadowy puppet theater of my own imaginative projections, <br>the mind only intuition of Vishnabandu, <br>the vehicular autobiography of the road not taken, <br>no bed in the shelter of the Shepherds of Good Hope<br>to lay my head down on like the rock of the world <br>to dream of what I could have been if I'd found a self <br>I could take seriously. Not life in a palace, but even <br>a tent I could carry around with me like my homelessness, <br>or a deer bed of cool nocturnal grass, a crude crop circle <br>under a broad-leafed basswood tree to say where I slept last night<br>on my way to somewhere else like the stations of a crossroads<br>where I can dance my way honestly like a Sufi <br>into annihilations of anti-matter in a charged particle field <br>reversing my spin. But there's no particle at the end <br>of my wavelength. The snake with its tail in its mouth <br>has swallowed its head. The exclamation mark is missing a period.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476864" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Or maybe I'm hydra-headed and the more I prune off, <br>dead blossoms off the hollyhocks, the more grow back.<br>Salome would have danced herself to death by now <br>if she ever wanted my prophetic head on silver platter.<br>Valley without an echo, rootless tree, not even an anti-self. <br>I'm an oxymoron of crazy wisdom, what's to oppose, <br>when there's no one there to contradict being not two? <br>And then, again, what if I'm missing what wasn't there <br>in the first place and I'm just lamenting the loss of legs to a snake? <br>A toy I lost in last night's dream. Quicksand missing a mirage? <br>A reciprocal hourglass I mistook for a candle without a wick? <br>Or maybe sometimes the moon howls for a lunatic<br>to talk to her like a lonely mountain <br>that can't find its reflection in a sea of shadows<br>but fits her like the skin of an eclipse up to the elbows. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476864" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Emptiness doesn't insist upon itself anymore than space <br>gets in the way of things, or the wind is a distraction <br>to the flight of the white clouds behaving like herons. <br>Or a star is inhibited by the eyes it's shining in. <br>It's conceivable that somewhere along the line <br>I jumped orbitals like the photonic discharge of an insight<br>into the earth as a beautiful woman who had become my lover<br>and I was enchanted into passing my time and space<br>here with her, without leaving a mark on her <br>as if I were sleeping with water so unfathomable <br>I had the good spiritual manners not to kiss and tell.<br>And there's a freedom, I swear, when you're not bound <br>to anything, not even the void, or your word, <br>like a flurry of loveletters released from a dovecote<br>that makes you laugh out loud at the absurdity of glee <br>profoundly delighted at the emptiness of the sky <br>receiving them like the first signs of a giddy emotional life<br>more sublime than the dragons that bring the rain <br>to the starfields of wild rice with a universe in every grain. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476864" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Words aren't panned from the grammatical ruts of the mindstream <br>like nuggets of gold washed downed down from the world mountain<br>to be picked out like blackberries or stars from the galactic slurry. <br>Nothing's thrown away as of little or no value, <br>not even the alluvial silt, or the cobwebs in the corners <br>of some dead stranger's dreams. Everything shines, <br>and even the blind can point themselves out entangled <br>like medicine wheels in the treelines along their horizons<br>their eyes once disappeared over on the prows of Greek triremes, <br>or birds, yes, birds, homeward bound through the gloaming. <br>Disparate images appear and school into synchronized fish <br>or startled sparrows, and then they're a gaggle of Canada geese <br>trying to rise from a cornfield like an Ottawa traffic jam<br>waiting for the fireflies to change. Metaphors bridge <br>the gap between things with copulatively interactive equals signs <br>or staples in wounds, the axles of death carts and dumb bells.<br>Or the neck of guitar like the deck of an aircraft carrier <br>when the music's flying solo after take-off, and the notes<br>are hooked on a spiderweb of spinal cords in hidden harmony.<br>The bottom falls out of the bucket, the mirror<br>of a reflecting telescope, a brain hemorrhage of light <br>like the supernova of a star that has finally had enough of the dark <br>to lose it big time. Evanescent hybrids and alloys <br>of memes and genes transmutate into surrealistic paradigms <br>with the half-life of logos. Intelligence has a heart transplant <br>and reason waits like a fire-hydrant on call to be a first responder. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476864" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Forms caught in the searchlights like bats and bombers <br>in midflight, no sooner glimpsed than gone, <br>and nothing to focus on, not even the clear light of the void <br>where your eyes evaporate like tears on a hot stove. <br>Maybe I'm that river of Heracleitan fire you can't <br>step into twice, or a wardrobe of shadows for every occasion <br>to accessorize my next incarnation as an extinct species of being time <br>without the necessary photo ops and passports to prove it exists<br>like a future that lies buried under the stones of its past.<br>Logic can try to stay on top of its sorrows<br>so it doesn't get hurt again by the unforeseeable, <br>and sensible shoes can cut their tongues out<br>and amputate the flightfeathers on their heels like tonsils, <br>and still speak mutely to each other like thumbs up or down, <br>a waste of good messengers with nothing crucial <br>to say to themselves, that isn't better left to the silence <br>that's been flatlining their headlines for light-years. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476864" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">But I wear a black leather jacket on my back like an eclipse, <br>or an oil spill, that occludes my rainbow body until <br>I shed it like the new moon of a rat snake<br>and it's impossible to say whether I'm a hearse <br>or a wind-up waterclock in the hands of a teleological god<br>that knows I'm only dangerous when I never show up on time. <br>Late for the Burgess Shale again. No fingerprints. No fossils. <br>Spontaneous generation like a flashmob<br>of immaterial sub atomic particles out of the void<br>that always behave like thought waves cut loose <br>like an empty lifeboat on a sea of awareness <br>when no one's looking to see if you're solid or real.<br>If this is the way you are, or just the way you feel<br>the dark abundance of your negative capability, <br>the bright vacancy of your absence from the mirror, <br>asylums of apostate selflessness in an inconceivable abyss<br>where to say not that isn't just another metaphor <br>for what this is. Or denying the affirmation, <br>the affirming of the denial. Crazy wisdom. <br>Deeper in the shallows of what's hidden <br>than in the manifest depths of what appears.</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>