Rain At Five In The Morning. Can'T Sleep Poem by Patrick White

Rain at five in the morning. Can't sleep.
Too many shards of broken mirrors
of the way things are in my mind.
Not enough windows to look through
for a star or two between the clouds.
No one on the streets. And the doorways
keeping their thoughts to themselves.
The pipes of the gas furnace creak
like an octopus with arthritis
and the aquarium filter leaks
like a mindstream on the rocks
not the lyrics of a fountain with a dolphin's mouth.

My eyes observe the protocols of seeing
into the sturm and drang of my awareness
like a lighthouse, but the dragon's awake
scalding my heart until my blood seethes
like the toxic glands of a cold-hearted reptile
in a cauldron of volcanic mistakes
reversing the spin of the spells I cast
that had more of an air of forgiveness about them
than is seemly for a curse but still too much
the smouldering of the Druidic glais
dedicated to the ashes of the Burning Man
to be a blessing in the eyes of the beholder
who sees his own features in it, good or bad,
depending on how raw or cooked he is.

My subconscious mind surfaces
like the dorsal fin of a sundial
to circle the lifeboat I'm in
like a prophet in the belly of a killer whale
trying to knock a seal off an ice floe.
I've disciplined my karma like a martial art
but my heart is a miasma of provisional compassion.
Dead dog's dream self snarls like a junkyard
of bad performance poetry behind an electric fence
I wove out of the optic fibres
of a discarded dreamcatcher
hanging from a rearview mirror
in the middle of a windshield
swimming against the flow of things
like a salmon up the mountain
in the slipstream of its own wake.

I keep my rage on a chain and a muzzle.
I keep my sorrow to myself like a child
I never wanted to grow up to be me.
I can be a heretic devoted to the freedom
of my own creative apostasy
as a decultified mode of poetic disobedience
but there's a gleeful buoyancy
in the experience that bubbles up
within me like a tar pit liberated from itself
that says touch even this lightly
in your passage through here.
Listen to the wind in the trees
with your nose as well as your ears
but follow the stars like a shepherd of wolves
hunting in the same high fields
their fires graze upon themselves,
not the wheeling of the world's wavelengths
in these earthbound coils of renewal and extinction
crushing the life out of me like a beached Leviathan
suffocating under its own weight, or oracular pythons
with their tails in their mouths like the last word
of anything left to say on their deathbeds.

My despair is still contaminated with hope
and the lucky long shots that ricochet off chaos
but still hit the target like the master stroke
of a random God particle, haven't done anything
to improve the aim of my hadron collider.
The secret of life is confided only to those
discrete enough not to tell it to anyone else.
They wear it on their sleeves like silence.
Their tongues are not candles in the niches of their mouths
they keep blowing out with every breath they take
looking for emergency exits in the fire traps of their shrines.
And woe to the hypocrite that tries
to love me unconditionally as if I didn't have
a mind and a heart of my own to see
what a ploy it is to climb a burning ladder
up to heaven, only to let people down conditionally
like a fire-escape in a cheap hotel
that stops half way to the ground.