When Imagination And Reality Are One
When imagination and reality are one
and there's no recourse for civilization
to distinguish between them by usage and consensus,
and the light of the stars isn't condemned
to a life of hard labour as a torch in a coal mine
looking for diamonds you can drink by the grailful
until you're as satiate as oblivion, there's no doubt
the mind is an artist riffing on the new strings of the rain
or painting it in picture-music like a poet or a scientist
who look deranged to those who've averaged out
the crucials of the mindscape like the odds of a lottery,
convinced as they are like pilgrims walking
from one end of their sacred asphalt driveways
to the other, that one size fits all, and that these
enlightened journeys without destinations
are just circles that haven't been squared yet.
But if you're off on your own,
making roads with your walking you're the first
to set foot on like the moon of a spaced-out planet
you're trying to turn into something habitable,
remember it's an act of compassion not to lock the door
to the available dimensions of the future when you leave.
Remember that all six of your senses
live in the world you creatively visualize
like the aura of the life that surrounds you
like an ongoing masterpiece of incompletion.
Without them you might be a master of making trees,
but, hey, man, where are the birds?
I don't hear anything singing.
There's nothing to taste or touch or listen to.
No appearances to deceive your consciousness with.
When your eye's got an idea of the kind of star
it wants to be, before it's learned to see, it never shines.
Wondering what flora to root where in the expanding abyss
of the night before you, scatter the stars across the firmament
as if you were sowing the unknown seeds of the wildflowers
that scuttled themselves like arks
in the cracked creekbeds of your neocortical starmud
and waited patiently like hibernating frogs
for the conditioned chaos of the rain
to come like a flashflood of life-nourishing insight.
And when you're annihilated
by the mystic terror of your own freedom
jimmying with the G-spot on your prison locks
to get them to open up like a coven of doves
that want to release their omens like feathers on the wind
that can scry and fly where they want,
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poem by Patrick White
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