Playing Chess With Mundanity To Survive To Write
Playing chess with mundanity to survive to write.
Evading destroyers disguised as Everyman
who hates what I do because he thinks he can't
and ignores it, forgetting I've been trained for oblivion
and writing poetry is the only way you can breathe
when you're swimming in it and the moon is in the corals
trying to grow gills. All the useful functions I serve
I had to make up for myself. I express things
with no regard to having a useful function
though things shape themselves around me as a result.
Let them. I'm as supple as space on a balance beam.
Younger, I sought a name in the fountain mouths of humans
to actualize the pretension of what I hoped I was,
real carrot, real stick, real donkey, by consensus,
like reality, until I began to smell the methane,
and the swarms of squabbly seagulls, and uncover corpses,
and realized the pursuit of fame was just trying
to be something shiny in the garbage dumps
of other peoples' mouths and minds, and any thought
of a literary career came candling down after me
like a collapsed parachute that felt like a punctured lung.
I don't really care how many books you've got published now.
I'd rather howl like a wolf on my own above the timberline lamenting
the loss of the wild spirits that used to animate this wilderness
where my instincts are not blunted like swords of moonlight
on the skulls of first edition gravestones. All those books,
songbirds in an aviary of caged words that have turned you
into a voice coach. I'd rather howl with the wolves
than chirp with the birds, or teach the pigeons to sing
under the eaves of the safehouse built on quicksand
that's taken up residence in you. Moonlight feathers the tarpit
and the rat snake's scales gleam like sequins in the dark
as it slips like a wavelength back into the lake of the abyss.
Try writing four lines that are remembered for nine hundred years
because they intrigue the human heart with the sincerity
of our mortality caught in a rainstorm of bleak sorrows
far from anywhere, and the struggle of blood
to keep a small fire burning in the encroaching solitude.
Humans will keep your memory alive only so long
as they need you to hold out your lantern into the emptiness
like a lighthouse teetering on the brink of a vertiginous precipice
to see if you grow wings on the way down when you jump.
Experiment and experience. Though the former's
old science by now. Objectivity is as obsolete
as a steady state universe with a planetesimal theory
that sank like a cue ball in the pocket of a decaying orbit.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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