And It Doesn't Matter Who I Am Now
It doesn't matter who I am now among these white dragons of energy
sleeping all around me like hills of snow, longing for a heart
that hasn't been run through with a sword or fried
in the fires of its squandered passions. As I pass and passing is an art,
the silent art of learning to prefer death, alone
with the tongueless eloquence of a vast departure, as I pass
I keep a journal of faces in the windows of longing hung
with sidereal curtains
to elucidate the perfect isolation of my enlightened crimes.
I wrote myself off a cosmos ago; everything I do, a reflex of emptiness,
even the shining a cry of torment out of space, an unamed wound,
a fountain-mouth that has sung itself away like the birds,
a leaf on articulated waters, an idiot moon that has sighed away its seas.
Within me, night; within me, mysteries I keep as pets
to amuse the children who come with their inquisitive eyes
and tortured dolls to learn if hope is the truest of fallacies. I read my own ashes,
some slapstick sage, embarrassed by their innocence
into an impromptu clarity, brick roses, embarrassed
to be anything at all. Out of the depths of my own inconsequence, the dark shale
of my awareness of life, the indecipherable chronicle of my life
that whispers strange fossils into the moment like curious doors
to the exhausted shrines of time, I laugh at myself as an antidote,
a mystical serum, as I teach the unteachable by arraying
the sacred fraudulence of my own unverified life.
I listen like the shadow of an assassin behind this eyeless translucence
for the sound of approaching footsteps, the groan of worn stairs,
the musical rain of keys, to startle the bones of their dragons
out of death, to cannibalize their lies and rob them of their radiant chains
in a sudden assault of light. I sell them forged passports to nowhere
to befriend their endless seeking like the wind
that erases their footprints home. I offer them everywhere
as a room for the night, my heart the stone beneath their head.
Sleep, gently, babies, in the arms of the dream
that covers your faraway hills like a summer sky freaked with legends.
I am the unworthy nothing that loves you best; the ghost of the grain
I break like bread and salt with stars
to entice you to the unsuspected windows of your own inner seeing.
Rogue dragons wake in the blood, root gods thaw
and send a shudder through the branch, spinal lightning
strikes the cold stone of the brain and the castle falls
that ruled forbidden fields. Are you afraid of your freedom, your exile
your ancient throne? Is the vastness too much, the solitude, the curse;
do you tremble before the armies of your own defeat, regretting the gods
and delusions you overcame to arrive at this moment
faced through tears by the mad messiah of suicide
who has come too late to witness your lonely redemption?
Are you snarled in the void by nets you cast for golden fish,
mesmerized by the points of emptiness that come
with pins in their mouths to trick you out in a wardrobe
of designer straightjackets, your heart, the rock that killed the bird,
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poem by Patrick White
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