Citatepedia^®.com

You Look Ahead At The Slice Of Light At The Opening Door

You look ahead to the slice of light at the opening door
and you're tempted to look back at what
you're not going to be anymore once you walk through it
without knowing whether it's an entrance or an exit.
A station of change. A bardo state that slipped between the lines
of the Tibetan Book Of The Dead you're karmically
sowing your way through to synchronize your seed to the harvest.

Dawn soon. False or otherwise blanching the nightblue
like any other day of life upon earth, into the starless hue
of waking up from the mystery of being alone in the dark
shining into a vast solitude of hidden insights
like the eyes of shy animals warily observing you walk
through the woods like a nightwatchman without a lantern
looking for a light to go by like lightning and fireflies.

In vino veritas, mystically speaking, I've been intoxicated
by the grails and skulls of life like a drunk for so long
I speak in the oracular voices of my own exhausted honesty.
I squandered my potential on the actual, applying
my imagination to the surrealistic factual aspects of life
like an oyster bed on the moon pearling whole new worlds
out of a grain of starmud. If work is a form of worship
as the Upanishads say, I've laboured long and hard creatively
like a heretic at play in the flames of the staked-out starfields.

And the shadows I've cast upon the earth like scarecrows
to look after things in my absence have never depended
upon a light source that wasn't sublimely human.
I've reflexively responded like a shapeshifter
to any fixed image it's been imperatively suggested
I was created in the name of to mimic like a dead metaphor
I was living like the lyric in the heart of a man
with nothing left to lose when I breached the boundary stones
of the usual taboos like a labyrinth of seawalls, locks and dams
in the liberation path of an emotional tsunami
of oceanic awareness after every earthquake that shook
my foundation stones into an avalanche of quicksand
sliding down the unstable slopes of the world mountain
like an otter down the mudbanks of my own mindstream.

Compassion's a ruby. Innocence, an emerald. Insight,
a star sapphire. And I wore those like the corona
of an eclipsed crown on the head of a pauper prince,
but it was the diamonds that intensified out of the darkness
like coal in the furnaces of the star clusters I beheld
like luminaries in the black mirrors on the far side of my eyes
that intrigued me the most as an adamantine example
of how to live my life in the midst of decay
with feet of clay and my head among the stars
like the catalytic agent of my own transformations,
the mercury and sulphur of the royal quaternion
of the philosopher's stone I was enthroned upon
like a beggar king with a dynastic history of self-abdications.

I got down in the dirt under my fingernails
where Neruda says the poetry is. I planted
the withered crescent moons of zinnia seeds
in the furrows of my brow like terraced gardens
I ploughed with the needle of a boustrophic lp
like a palindrome that sang the same
whether you were coming or going either way.
A Satanic message from the angel in the mirror
trying to play both sides of the fence in reverse.
Like the moon, I've never lingered in the window
of enlightenment for long, without looking
for an unlocked, backdoor I could enter with effortless ease
like a thief returning what had been taken from me.

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!