Everybody Says I'm Too Intense
Everybody says I'm too intense and I say
you sure as hell aren't.
And since I was sixteen in highschool
and before that in the local neighbourhood
in the bosom of my family
people have always thought I was mad.
My highschool graduation yearbook says
most likely to become
a mad teacher mad scientist mad poet mad.
An oracular assessment of my peers
that has haunted me for years.
But I say crazy is the only antidote
to the extreme chaos of conditioned consciousness.
Look at the world.
Lies lies lies.
A coalition of lies
that calls itself
the history of civilization.
Crazy wisdom.
The tantric insight
into the fact
there is no nature to things.
You're not a very wise human
if you don't understand ignorance
is the clearest expression of enlightenment.
You see what I mean?
It's hard to speak of unity
in the split tongue of a snake
without making an oxymoron of it
at the fork in the roads
it mistakes for a direction.
Regard the dead parachutes of Babylon
no one can understand you
I said to myself one day dying with a sneer.
It's the moral obligation of a writer to make things clear.
I forget who said it.
But he was a nitwit.
One of the lice of literature
that makes your mind want to scratch itself raw
for the next half century.
It's that word moral that bothers me.
Not his preconception of clarity
though when it gets down to that
you smear the mirror
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poem by Patrick White
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