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Infrequently Asked Questions

Is it true
the most compassionate people in life
are the ones in the greatest danger?
That the most generous
will lose their hands to the ones they fed?
That the bravest will be hunted down by protected cowards
and when the last of the heroes are dead
and the dragons who inspired them
are the advertising themes of amusement parks
those with the smallest balls
will give themselves the biggest awards?
Is it true
those who are creative
chafe the destroyers like anti-matter
and give the intellectuals diaper-rash of the mind?
That just to open your eyes
to watch the stars and fireflies
is enough to make other people feel blind
and insist you black them out
like pearls in an air-raid?
What's a starmap to a mole?
What's a lamp that shines in braille
to someone without fingerprints?
Is it true that beauty summons the worm
as a material eye-witness to its ruin?
That genius is devoured
by cannibalistic Neanderthals
into homoeopathic magic
for the power of its brain
to turn thought into protein
with a high creatine content
that can make your dick strike twelve anachronistically
so you can go on knapping flint
for the next hundred thousand years?
That genius is a freak in isolation
that gets its own back
for being pecked at
like a phoenix among chickens
by opening Pandora's box
like the atom at Los Alamos
like the genie in the lamp
and making a Trojan horse of its gifts
gives them everything they want
because anything as red
as Van Gogh's hair and beard and ear in Arles
must be either a phoenix
or a fox with chicken-pox.
Sometimes you have more to fear
from the keys
than the locks.
Is it true
that a friend is a random event
in a space-time continuum
that's got no room in its impersonality
for loyalty or sentiment?
That the heart has replaced the golden rule
with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle
and everyone's looking for love
like a Faberge Easter egg
that's already hatched its ugly duckling
sans fairytale?
Or the Czar's family?
I asked Annie
as we were landing in Toronto
from the West Coast
like a waterbird with its wheels down
on a tarmac lake
is it true
that everything we thought sincere
has been exposed as fake?
That forever isn't worth
the loveletter
it's written on
for twenty minutes
because of temporal inflation?
Is it true
that all roads
that lead to Rome or Ottawa
never return the way they came
like arrows and fishooks and Vercingetorix?
That justice is a celebrity fame-game with ratings
brought in by a jury of mirrors
selected by the reflections of their peers
to convict the innocent
for their sins of omission?
That the God-particle
everyone's looking for
like something they can't get out of their eye
might not be
trying to make a point at all.
It's hard to get a fix on
just how fundamental you are
in the scheme of things
when you're stuck in the starmud
up to your knees
looking for your keys like koans
you swallow like pills to feel real
but hey
no big deal
but I was meaning to ask you
is it true
that we're wounded by death
and life is the way we heal?
I know how you feel
about what's real
but you can have all the money you want
and that still doesn't mean
you'll ever really know
what it means to be rich
without having to steal.
You've got the disease
but none of its symptoms.
Is it true
that the most successful grow
by never accepting a challenge
that wasn't a bigger failure than the last
and call the summits of their Himalayan defeats
experience and progress?
Answer no.
Answer yes.
Answer yes and no.
Or just nod your head diagonally
like the sum of the squares of the opposite sides.
Because the questions were less rhetorical
than sincerity being facetious
I don't expect people to answer the doorbell
or read every piece of spiritual junkmail
that shows up on their doorstep
like a flightfeather to paradise
on the wings of a seagull.
If you're wounded deeply enough
there's no resentment in the pain.
You just play with your brain
like an angry child plays with the eyes of a doll.
You control your rage like a nuclear reactor
or Chernobyl goes cosmic
and you throw a tantrum
that expands like the universe.
You can polish the mirror all you want
and call it clarity
until your sleeves are as threadbare
as the carpets under the windows
you've been staring through
as long as it take to turn your eyes to glass
but enlightenment's on the dark side of the mirror
like a star is
like your eyes are.
Like waves on a lake
that takes things as they come.
Myriad deaths in a single birth.
Life on earth.
Intense heat.
Unusual sprouts.
A Zen sententium worth consideration.
But the clear light of the void
isn't radiation.
It's a lucidity
with nothing to illuminate.
It's the Uncreate that plays creatively
in the absence of itself
like a child alone with its imagination
making the world up as it goes along
taking the Inconceivable
and making it believable.
Giving airy nothing
a local habitation and a name
as Shakespeare did
and dandelions do in the fall.
As I am now
by asking if it's true
you haven't noticed yet
how it's always the overprivileged
who send the underprivileged off to war?
Death in the hearts of the governors.
Death in the hearts of the profiteers.
Death in the hearts of the generals.
Is it true
this spider-web shines
like democracy in the morning
star-spangled with dew
but late at night under the streetlight
it's tearing under the weight of its own greed?
That obese spiders who once pulled the strings
of a sticky mandala to eat well
ripen like the dead weight of toxic fruit
hanging from the branches of a dead tree?
This web is not a constellation.
This web is not a starmap.
This web is not a bloodstream
that gives back what it receives.
This web is not the lyre of a siren
that called people to the rocks of a new continent.
This web is not an electric guitar.
Is it true
the interminable buzzing of panicked flies
stuck to its strings
like masses of people
waiting to be consumed
is not the music of celestial spheres?
Empathic ingestion of agony over many years
like a fish trying to identify with heavy water
by adapting to it like a sick mother
who passed on her genes like Love Canal.
Is it true
you can die tending the ill in a hospital?
Carnage without redemption.
Eye-soup.
Severed feet.
Outrage imploding into black dwarfs
that warp space like a child's mind
into believing God is best served by the blind
than those who can read for themselves
before they martyr her body like a judas-goat
to God's great design
for the faithful dead
who expressed their gasp of divinity
in a holy war
a marketable crusade
a deniable genocide
a mass grave
a defensible border
that doesn't know who gave the order
to dropp cluster bombs
and white phos
on the hospital
when it ran out of bandaids
and watch it flower like a white dahlia
or a belly-dancing jellyfish
with poisonous tentacles
spreading out like the spokes of a beach umbrella.
The aesthetics of atrocity.
The age of desecration.
Is it true
the next best career move for evolution
like an unknown writer
listening to his legend gossip among rumours
like a suicide note without a table of contents
is unnatural extinction?
The mystery in the riddle of the sphinx
after all those years of sand and stars
is what would she have asked
if we weren't there to answer.
Is it true
that Saturn's shepherd moons
have turned into human coyotes
jumping borders like orbits
in the Van Allen Belt
where the asteroids are broken by drug rings
thawing rocks in a crack spoon
to defy the laws of gravity
with deified norms of depravity?
I might be a vague social democrat
walking a Zen plank
like a blindfolded political platform
who doesn't need a party
to spell out
or sell out
what I believe
but it's easier to write a folksong
about a successful thief
than a man or woman
for whom love was an art
that transcended its inspiration
and compassion the root of all understanding
and when death approached
because it's hard to be alive and real
at the same time
embraced it as a great relief.
Is it true
that more similes turn into outlaws
than metaphors do?
That when Jesus asked
the little children to come unto him
he wasn't speaking in tongues
behind sacred firewalls
for polyglot child molesters everywhere?
The pen might be mightier than the sword
like a mammal is to a dinosaur
but I have my doubts about a bullet
and electrically detonated C-4
wired to a lab rat like the black plague
and holy warriors
with the radioactive half-lives of dirty bombs.
Suras and psalms.
Gardens with underground rivers.
And fruit trees by flowing streams.
Shalom.
Salem.
Muslim.
Jerusalem
Islam
And Bethlehem the House of Bread
that breaks into peace
when it's shared
like a common word
from the pelican fountain-mouth
of the same mother tongue.
Peace brother.
Peace sister.
May you live to be
forever young and free
of walled partitions
and the double helices
of chromosomatic razorwire
uncoiled like vines
around your secret gardens
where the waterlilies bloom in gene-pools
and the grapes are bleeding
like a miscarriage of sacred wines.
When the Great Lucidity appears
like a star of wheat in the Virgin's hand
and shines down
on everyone's shelter for the night alike
no mangers in the beginning
no arks at the end
may we all understand
that the blood-oaths of enemies
are not stronger than the bonds between friends.
May you know the enchantments of life
when it doesn't belong to anyone
as well as you know the horrors
of disowning it now.
Or as I imagine they would say in Zen.
The pen is the sword.
It's just a voice with words.
A lamp that gives its light away
like an extravagant genie
you don't have to blow out to see
but you should
if you want to write good.
Black glee.
Bright vacancy.
Too much pain.
The agony of the seed realizing
the harvest was in vain
not worth what had to be endured
to live it all again.
Eleusinian ergot on the grain.
Is it true
heaven prefers
the hallucinogenically insane
and the sun only comes up
when a cock crows like a weathervane
or a God-struck lightning-rod?
On the return journey
which is more amazing than the first
you get to pass backwards
through all the stations of your life
you progressed forward through.
A prodigal innocence
that resonates with experience.
A dream reflected in a mirror
like a waterbird
dragging its wake through the clouds
like a knife ploughing a wound
through the envelope of a loveletter
no one can wake up from but you.
And no one can take away
because everything is trued by time
to the path you took
just by walking on the earth
alone on a dark night in the starless rain
when you removed the world like a mask
that proved false to your faceless pain
and you realized
how much closer a stranger is to you
than you are to your unrecognizable self.
Though pain may be prophetic
when your heart hangs on a hook
like bait on a question-mark
great suffering doesn't reveal anything
you didn't already know.
It doesn't stay.
It doesn't go.
It's a nothing that exists.
It's an existence that's nothing.
A gust of fireflies
from the mouth of a dragon.
But what does come as a surprise
like dusk overtaking the window
are the numberless eyes
that emerge from the depths of your darkness
like grapes ripening on the vine
like fish coming to the surface
like urgent diamonds
growing like mushrooms
in the long night of an abandoned mine.
Numberless eyes.
Myriad stars.
Light-years of memories.
And is it true
every one of them
is a myth in the making
each an enlightened Zen master
with nothing to teach
who insists
it's not the stars that are shining
it's your mind?
That they're all within reach
all the time?

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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