Mad People Trying To Impress Me Poem by Patrick White

946 / 834
Patrick White

Patrick White

Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada

Mad People Trying To Impress Me

Rating: 5.0


Mad people trying to impress me with the quality of their souls.
Ego-slurry alienated radioactively from the rest of the world
trying to compensate for the meltdown of their lives
by glowing bioluminescently in the dark like the tiny zodiacs
of their watches allotting one star each to all of their signs,
or colourless fish in the depths of the seas of their own awareness
that have no need of the sun to shine by their own lights.

No river’s flowing the wrong way to the sea whether
it goes underground, evaporates, flexes its flowing
in the froth and fury of whitewater turned rabid, plunges
over a precipice into a misty ghost of itself or
trickles down through the faults of old earthquakes
to lie dormant for two billion years in its own watershed
like a dream waiting to wake up in a different hourglass
than the one it drained to the lees of life. And here comes

a cloud in a bong that’s troubled she’s not more of a river
and keeps looking for a lover that will fulfil her like an ocean
she’s dying to drown in. Modes of water all, glaciers
calving into the sea like nervous breakdowns,
or a drop of water trying to leap from the fiery tongue
of a burning leaf in the fall she can’t put out
with how beautifully she reflects the moon in every tear
that hangs on the moment like a glassblower stretching a point.

Fifty years, a poet, it’s not hard to relate to their shapeshifting
or see the fear in the eyes of the paradigms that transmutate
like a seance without a medium into a chaos of evocative stars
that blur and illuminate the nebulae of their vision of life
by the way they associate metaphorically with a darkness
indelibly schooled by the shadows of night into one
apocalyptic revelation after another going off like fireflies
as if they were blasting caps in a beaver dam
they wanted to blow up like terrorists to liberate their mindstreams
like a rush of dopamines in the fractured creekbeds
of their starmud exhilarated into life again like frogs
singing in the climacteric of a seven year flashflood.

Extremeties of heart and mind quantumly entangled
in the disorder of conditioned consciousness, and I’m
no less susceptible to hearing voices in the genius of the rain
suggesting wild irises and extemporaneous lilacs
to the insanity within me that makes a petty life great.

In the company of rootless trees, what’s to get right,
what’s to get wrong? The lightning doesn’t lead
a moving target and birds aren’t the first draft
of the dawn I’m carrying like a sheaf of poems
under my arm to see if they’re in tune with the croup
of shore-hugging swans and astigmatic peacocks
changing their prescriptions like world views every two years or so.

Like powerlines every octave’s a stave of wayward words,
crows, wrens, swallows, bolos of old running shoes,
even when they’re a snakepit hissing on the ground
or just humming to themselves in a summer rain,
as long as you’re singing you’re not sane or insane,
timid as a whisper or so sure of yourself you leave
the whole universe in doubt. Weird as it sounds,

it’s going to work out, I swear, like a jam session
between you and the stars, Vega on the electric harp,
Orion burning its axe like Jimmy Hendrix and o
go quietly, my soul, into the mosh pit
of the Day Glo Abortions singing galactic lullabies
to the cacophony of black holes eating the light
out of the eyes of the picture-music that echoes
in the nightclubs of anarchic Neanderthals
teaching the nightingales to sing like blood-stained buckles.

Chaos isn’t a miscarriage of the dancing star in my soul,
the diffraction patterns of a spider on acid
messing up its webs like mandalic ripples
to empower neo-expressionist bass runs
that like to colour outside the orthodoxies
of its dreamcatcher casting the nets
of starstruck constellations far and wide
as if it were dragging the great sea of awareness
for the corpses of the dead it can haul up
into the empty coffins of the lifeboats on a shipwreck.

Estranged friends, I cherish the negative intimacies
you’ve shared with me over the intervening lightyears
like a blizzard of fireflies trying to make the darkness visible
deep inside the occult priestcraft of your temple telescopes
scrying the stars like eyes in the back of your head
where the shadows enlighten your paranoia
of being left out in the dark alone with no one
to see how bright you are when you shine
like a starmap of lighthouses in the gravitational eyes
of your intensities, bending the light like Beckham and Einstein.

Old pond. Frog jumps in. Splash. Basho
jumping to conclusions like the sacred syllable of a haiku
that’s gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond
the boundary stones of the prophetic skulls
that set an acephalic limit to the taboos
of the wandering scholars among the mad and homeless
born to bloom like wildflowers and mushrooms
beyond the fence of cultivated gardens
that don’t make any more sense than the untampered seeds
the wind scatters like weeds driven into exile
for tasting the wheat, pomegranates, fly agaric and apples
of the forbidden windfalls under the fruitless tree of knowledge
even the bees couldn’t churn into honey
in the asylum of their hives without a black queen
to colonize the stars like the crazy wisdom of a dark mother.

Freedom isn’t bound like a motive to itself
and the abysses of love we fall into like diminished I.Q.s
remedially reading the writing on the wall
by plunging deeper into the darkness beyond
the blindness in the blazing of a one-eyed midway
might be the portals to another universe
more lucidly irrational than this turmoil
of common sensical chaos labouring to order itself
like an elephant graveyard of gateway precedents
poached like tomb robbers for the tusks of the moon.

Who isn’t a lunatic, each after their mystically specific fashion?
Enlightenment isn’t bound by the heretical vows
it makes to its own disobedience, just as the mad
aren’t the repeating decimals of cosmic incommensurables
running on forever like rapids in the waterclocks
of their mindstreams as Heracleitus reminded us,
if you were paying attention, you can’t step into twice
anymore than pi can build a bridge to the other side
of this shoreless river of life or your third eye can visualize
through its tears what it’s like to have the stars
kicked in your face by the bullies of random chance
because some are born to walk upright on their knees
and others, more wisely, have taught their crutches to dance.

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Paul Brookes 22 May 2013

A great poem. Your use of metaphor is wild and the imagery in the landscape you paint magnificent I've had to read it several times to get a meaning and each time I do so I come to a different conclusion which is what a good poem should do that and make the reader think 10/10 Thanks fro sharing BB : O)

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as usual you are forcing the readers to read your poems..wonderful, , , I may need a few days to visualize all your metaphors. the last line is the balm to the aching hearts, who assume that the grapes are sour..

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946 / 834
Patrick White

Patrick White

Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada
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