All The Good Reasons That Get In The Way Of Writing
All the good reasons that get in the way of writing,
baby needs new shoes, and you're conscientious and diligent,
will kill you faster than the bad ones
that brought you to the edge of your mindstream in the first place
to dip your skull like the cup of the moon
in the wellsprings of your own imagination
instead of always sipping spit from other men's mouths.
I'm not saying don't do what you must do
to be a decent human being, or as close as you can get,
but when you're creatively underwhelmed
by the rising Rockies of Circumstance
losing their footing like an avalanche of cornerstones
coming down on you like a barrage of asteroids,
you better find a mountain gear deep within yourself
to power you out of the way of your own collapsing mindscape.
Don't come to a reasonable truce with the ashen exigencies
of the underwhelming reality love married you to,
or pontificate like a hollow urn on the tragic absence
of even so much as an echo of yourself to make a comeback
or tell me you squandered it all like apple bloom
when everything I've read of what you haven't written
smells like smoke from a distant pyre on the wind.
Remember the fire. Even if you have to burn underground
through the occult roots of the cedars, or bury yourself
powdered in red ochre under the hearthstones
of your prophetic forebears erasing your picture-music
from the cave walls like graffiti under a bridge
between this world as it never is when you look too closely,
and the one that's working on you like spiritual water on limestone.
Remember the fire. Remember the discipline
of disobedience that tempted you to steal it in the first place
like a Spartan boy with a hot fox, as it
eats you from the outside in without you saying a word
lest you get caught ratting your deepest secret out in agony.
Or regenerative Prometheus chained to a rock like a salamander
born in the fire of his own afterbirth. Know this.
Lightning doesn't strike the roosters of fire
that crow like weathervanes pinned
like a medal from an old campaign to the axis of the wind
as if the dawn were some kind of triumph over the night.
Cradle that fire in your hands like a bird that's fallen to earth,
or a lamp of holy oil in a niche of unanswered longings,
a candle in a hurricane of boarded up windows,
the light of your own mind, casting shadows of time
like a sundial with a wilder imagination
than its usefulness might at first glance suggest.
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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