Hallowed Be The Gentleness Of A Pacified Mind
Hallowed be the gentleness of a pacified mind.
Uplifting, a gust of stars, dust doing wheelies
in a back alley like a vehicular Sufi in a Ford,
because, and this is significant, it doesn't, I swear,
mean a damn thing and therein lies the joy of it.
Inspiration never aspires to meaning. It doesn't
cling like a God particle to give the matter at hand, mass.
The morphology of the multiverse is bubbles.
Iridescent, rainbow-smeared grackle-headed bubbles.
And that includes the black-pearled oil slicks
shining like new moons after their first eclipse.
Meaning, that hovers like a ghost of grammar
over the things of the world that can find
their own place in it without consulting anyone.
Who turns around to ask their shadow where they're going?
Grammar's a dead shaman. Time for new orthodoxies,
to let the rain make some new creekbeds to flow in
when it's lamenting the death of a Spanish guitar
like a gored matador scarred by a Babylonian bull.
I'm smothering in the parachutes of the morning glories
as if it just snowed outside by mistake. It's not fake.
It's playful, profoundly playful, unsayably so.
Putting things together like table legs
is the basis of perception. Put any two
disparate elements together that share the same metaphors
and guarantee you you'll laugh at the shock
of photonic insight discharged like a power-surge
down the backroads of your nerves, out for a joy-ride.
But you've got to be free to do this. Unpack
all those preconceptions you've hoarded
like a coral reef you've got to navigate around
to keep from running aground without a life jacket on.
Travel light. Don't even take yourself. On the road
let your thumb go on by itself like an over eager companion.
Hellfire's just the smell of burning rubber
bored by life on the farm. No risks worth taking.
Life refuses to be denied its vastness, stunted
into a black dwarf that limps like the king of something.
Even the stumps of the clear cut slopes of literature
are being burnt out like old gurus in their pine-cone temples,
seeds opening their eyes in fire like a nirvanic experience
that nobody knows anything about. Who can't hear,
anti-solar gegenshein above the horizon, the distant mutter
of another breech-loading revolution in the distance
moving like a weather front toward us with eviscerated intent?
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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