Every Step I Take
Every step I take either a crossroads, an impasse,
or a dubious suspension bridge that looks like
the work of spiders swaying over an abyss.
Eerie thresholds that don't scare me the way they used to.
I take them now as if I were dancing
with clear-sighted surrealistic suicidal abandon
and what used to threaten me so deeply
I laugh at now as if it were just another buffoon
that overdid it, and turned its legend into a farce.
The furies that swarmed me once for things
I couldn't even imagine doing at my most bitter
have mythically dwindled into black flies of the mind.
Now I smile at them like a miniature Pearl Harbour
dive-bombing a rotten piece of fruit. Malignant pests.
Even in my homelessness, kamikaze pilots
drunk on sake, bad house guests binging
on a divine wind that sweeps them all away
from the brittle sky above the windowsill
that fakes them all out eventually, though it's sadder
on the other side, to witness the death of birds.
Once you accept you're going to lose everything
you're inestimably freer to spit in the eye
of your tormentor, and in that moment of enlightenment
the power and superstition of a madman in the joint
that could scare even Joe Frazier like Muhammad Ali
losing it at a weigh-in, overcomes you as if
your death were already behind you, inconceivably achieved.
You learn to stay ahead of the past, like a star,
shining down on the future history of who you are
even when you're convinced you're not anything
whether you win or lose and everything you do
is a risk you must take to keep on deepening your solitude
without shaming the eagles by living like a maggot
who sees a rainbow in a drug-induced mirage
and dreams it's turning into a butterfly
with the dead-eyed instincts of a bird of prey.
Compassion isn't the mirage a white flag you hang
like a bed sheet outside the window
to surrender your ego like a weapon.
Like a flower, it's a sign of resistance that begins
deep underground in the blood roots
of a cult of rain and light that death cannot suppress.
It's a compact with pain that enlightens the way of the other
by taking the egg-laying turtle of the world off the road
or using your own backbone to splint the broken rafter
of a house of life that could not stand without you,
one light enjoined to another like honey in the heart of a beehive
buzzing with stars. Not an alchemical crack house
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poem by Patrick White
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