If You Look Upon A Puddle Of Starmud As A Degenerate Third Eye Poem by Patrick White

If you look upon a puddle of starmud as a degenerate third eye
you’re a retinally detached fascistic mystic that runs
enlightenment into the ground the way Round-Up cowboys weeds.
Your nervous system hasn’t rooted very deeply
in your spiritual topsoil and that’s a heavy bell of a blossom
to bear on your back as long as you have
without coming to fruition like the moon on a dead branch.

By the lack of their fruits we shall know them as well.
Five petals open. One flower blooms that was raised
like a loveletter in a slum, not a green intellect with gripe
the sugars of life never ripen into compassion like light and water
ageing the root fires of desire into windfalls of dark abundance
quantumly entangled like black matter in your bright vacancy.

I’ve walked up and down your hall of mirrors
and never once recognized myself in your dismissive laughter,
tree rings don’t ripple through your heartwood
and I can tell by the way the wild irises burn their eyes
in your acid rain, they’re just paint rags of that masterpiece
of a mirage you keep trying to wash the face of the moon off
as if it were a stain on your void bound clarity
and everywhere you labour like a glassblower on the nightshift
to reweld the scars of the crystal skulls you keep
smashing on the ground in case of an eclipse then
walking on the splinters like the thorns of frangible stars
as if your enlightenment path were some kind of painful short cut.

Little vehicle, I’d rather be a busker on the stairs
with an empty guitar case and a crutch midway between the entrance
to the inner sanctum of the temple and the mob on the midway
than be the kind of barker you are like a spiritual junkyard dog
guarding the spare parts of all the carcasses
of the golden chariots you used to cruise through Sunday slums
like a pimp trying to get people to look out of their windows
while thieves of fire stole the wheels off Ezekiel’s ride.

You want to redefine the nature of light with the brilliance
of the blazing that blinds you, but the wavelengths
aren’t co-operating with the spectroscopic analysis
of your chromatically aberrated chameleons, are they now?

I don’t want to make a moral issue out of it, it’s not.
It’s just this is the floating world and the bubbles
in your misperception have no buoyancy,
your shipwrecked swim bladder isn’t much of a lifeboat
for people drowning further out than you are
to haul themselves into out of a greater depth
than you’ve ever been over your head in before.

Fathomless the emptiness of compassion
that leaves enough room for everyone to find a space in it
without throwing anyone’s homeless corpse overboard as dead weight.
At 11: 11 you’ve got fifteen minutes before they close the doors
on the motherships of the elect come to gather
its imprinted chromosomes up like memory cards
from pre-recorded cellphones hacking into a cosmic database
before the dakinis delete the bag ladies like viruses
on the faulty downloads of a spiritually fictional movie house
that hasn’t seen its name in enough mystic insights
to start a zodiac in a desert of stars of its own like Las Vegas
without blessing criminal money in a Vatican bank
bleaching out the bloodstains of Caesar’s scarlet robes.

Compassion is a lack of standards that never gives offense
to anyone in the way it loves flesh and blood unconditionally
knowing there’s only so much time to be wrong or right
and then there’s forever, and forever might not be long enough
to make up for all your oversights here among the indefensibly human
because you want to meditate on jewels without illuminating
the ore of the ugly mandalas they sweated them out of their suffering
like evergreens weeping through their pores for a better life
than the face-value you keep placing on theirs like unwanted poster children.

There’s a drunk slumped in the doorway of enlightenment
you can linger in for ten thousand lightyears like a koan
you can’t step over like a threshold until you see other drunks
no less inebriated with their love hate relationship with life
looking over him to make sure he doesn’t choke on his own vomit and you,
finally waking up like a chandelier from your spiritual crystallography,
you take your inestimable masterpiece of spiritual conceptualism
and use it tenderly like a paint rag to wipe the Buddha’s mouth.