The Reason Most People Are Unhappy
The reason most people are unhappy
is that they love their misery.
They cling to it
like a voodoo doll of themselves
they've been poking pins in since childhood.
They derive their identity from it.
They wouldn't know who they were without it.
They drive pins through its eyes in the mirror
to make things clear as rain
and then refusing to go along
with the flow of life
seek shelter in the pain
of never going anywhere.
They cast curses
on fate on God on life on love
on the impure selflessness of blue knowledge
but they're spitting into the wind
and their curses come back on them
like chapter and verse
of an infernal bible
that doesn't command them
to do anything but carry on as they are.
You can look up astonished at the stars
enraptured by a glimpse of the same mystery
that awes the gods themselves
into an unfamiliar silence
and lose the moment
like a butterfly on a chainsaw
as you hear the hiss and snarl of misery
dying and whining beside you
like a snowflake on a furnace
about being down to its last cigarette
in front of all these firing squads
gathered like constellations
against the innocent flame
of a solitary match
that refuses to go out
without fixing the blame
on everything else that shines.
Misery sees a waterlily opening in a swamp
transforming all that decay
like enlightenment
into something brief and beautiful
like earth's answer to the stars
and it's the swamp it remembers
in all its lurid details:
the spider sucking the life
out of the dragonfly
caught in a radiant web
among the treacherous cattails.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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