If You Were A Thought And I Were An Emotion
If you were a thought and I were an emotion
time would still be at cross-purposes with space
and we'd still be sitting here
dangling our bare feet like two kids
over the edge of the abyss
when we go fishing for stars
not really caring if we catch anything
as we throw them back in with our blessings.
You can taste the jewels the light's been through
sometimes when you close your eyes
and the revealed and the revealing
are just the water and fish of a feeling
idling in the shadows and reeds of the mindstream.
There's a way of being lost within yourself that's starbound.
And there's a way of being found
where people scatter flowers before you
all the way to a hole in the ground
you're expected to fill like someone else's shoes.
You can lie under a gravestone
like a man behind a desk with his name on it
who's been practising for years
to lie very very still
in case he wakes the others up in the snakepit.
Or you can keep the music on
all through the long uneventful night
and feel things that have nothing to do with you
like stray bits of your neighbour's dreams on the internet.
Or you can put a finger up to your lips and counsel silence.
Three approaches. Three gates. No difference.
Everyone enters the same garden
as if Eden were a cemetery in slow motion
but that old angel with the flaming sword at the gate
burnt out like a candle a long time ago
and the serpent's a tour guide for fanatical purists
who can't get out of the closets of hell
and the apple of knowledge
finally took a bite out of itself
and has been falling down crazy drunk
with the cranky wasps of autumn ever since.
Wonder's the passive sister of interactive madness
and twice as alluring in her self-restraint
than Rasputin in a burlap sack in the river.
Wonder sails off the coasts of the clouds like the moon
and doesn't lay a claim to what she discovers.
She can see and be seen
but she doesn't put a name on it.
She doesn't need to turn the leaf over
like an unopened loveletter
to know what the tree means
because it's always been her lover.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
