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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476648" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>I Refuse</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I refuse to persuade any emotion to a poem <br>like a horse I can lead to water but can't make drink. <br>If it's a straitjacket it's a straitjacket. <br>When its a wet suit it's a wet suit <br>to go swimming with stars in. Tea leaves.<br>Yarrow sticks. Tarot decks. Incinerated match books. <br>I listen to a poem as if it were a response <br>to what I've said, and didn't say. <br>I like the counter play of voices and mine <br>one among them, the whole tree full of birds, <br>and the chatter of black squirrels in the walls.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Midway between a car starting up and a stanza break <br>when I write, I feel like a thief that stole the prison <br>under the warden's nose, and broke out through the window, <br>exhilarated by the bliss of getting away with my freedom. <br>I'm on an island alone with the moon. <br>And it doesn't matter if I was marooned <br>or just washed up here like a wounded paint rag. <br>My spine is smoke. I drift tribes away from the fires<br>that send me like a message to the stars <br>without knowing what it is I'm going to say to them. <br>Until I get there like a crane-bag full of alphabets<br>and a couple of mystic words I'm keeping to myself. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Siderealized. Space speaks through its mere presence <br>like a field of unnamed wildflowers. Star clusters. <br>And there's a solitude you can't help answering<br>that gets deeper every time you open your mouth. <br>You stop fooling yourself about time the moment <br>it's realized there is none. You break the bones<br>of the sturdy ladders of all-well-and-good-but.<br>You crush the fossils of the crutches you once crawled upon, <br>take off your spurs, turn your scales into feathers, <br>and the wind comes along and fits wings to your heels.<br>Things stop being solid and become real. So <br>when I write everything writes along with me, <br>every leaf that falls upon the river like a map<br>changes the course of the flowing and I let it<br>and every fallen tree's got its hand on the rudder<br>and I say if not that way, where? <br>And the waves all answer in unison, here. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">And even the loneliest guitar that ever sat under a willow <br>and thought of the home that wasn't there to go back to anymore<br>can feel crowded when myriad words begin<br>to introduce you to their relatives by close association, <br>and shades in the closets of the chameleons <br>that rainbows haven't worn in a thousand years. <br>You can see things through gravitational eyes <br>that telescopes have never dreamed of, and all the time<br>you're lost at sea in a derangement of stars, <br>you're pulling bodies into an empty lifeboat, <br>asking each of them as they begin to breathe, <br>if they knew where they were, because I'm sure <br>we've all been here before. And everyone<br>sat still as teeth in the mouth of a seagoing dragon. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Play. Full. Intensity. Sublime absurdity. Big Mind <br>full of chaotic potential, dark and yet to be the future<br>of everything, not exceptional perfections of lucidity. <br>Little Mind absorbed in playing with matches <br>that blossom in fire like the enlightened water stars. <br>Flare and dazzle. Ptolemaic translucency. The snow man <br>melts right down to his eyes in the heat of the picture-music, <br>peacock blues and greens of auroral acetylenes<br>and no one knows what it means, except it means deeper <br>than any answer could conceivably convey. <br>Here work is a form of worship, and the gods pray. <br>Mind is a gift. You just undo the ribbon of your chromosome <br>and let things out. Doves, dragons, and the occasional phoenix.<br>Or your own voice the tiger that wakes the valley up in the morning <br>with the roar of a vatic lily. The early breezes stir <br>and the dew trembles like an amateur on a spider-web. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Constant beginner, how could there be a precedent? <br>An exploration? An insight into what wasn't there <br>until you saw it flash across the waxing moon if even <br>for a nanosecond, the God particle that created you <br>without having anyone else in mind but you, the becoming <br>that always worries about the end it never reaches, <br>the mystic specificity of the unfinished paradigm? <br>If you don't feel like an idiot from the very start of a poem <br>you're not showing enough respect for yourself. <br>If you don't know where you're going, that's a good sign. <br>You've left everything behind the next world doesn't need. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">And the memories will come of their own accord <br>like waterbirds setting down upon a lake, they'll reflect <br>what they only are for a moment as creative as the past, <br>and then they'll return like vases and urns to the mantle<br>to resonate with the stillness of objects, and you'll be the one<br>that's deeply moved. The fireflies and lighthouses <br>will see eye to eye, and things will come to you <br>and ask you why you're crying, and you'll them<br>because I wasn't expecting you to show up like open gates. <br>And this is an aesthetic madness, a crazy wisdom, an antidote<br>to being afraid to get out of your coffin once you reach shore. <br>Here the word beauty isn't the verbal fossil of the living tree. <br>And truth is a virgin sword that's never cut anything <br>or slept between two lovers like a vow that can't be kept. <br>Here you're the hydra-headed genius of your own horror story. <br>You can grow heads upon heads until you're delirious <br>with intellectual conception, and live in a snake pit <br>waiting to be bit back by your own black lightning, <br>or you can take the dandelion path of a parachute <br>the sky mends with patches of your own skin on the line <br>and land somewhere gentle as the eyelash of an unknown warrior. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">The important thing is to let go. Even of the letting go. <br>Reacquaint yourself with the dream grammar of the dead<br>who've been gone for millennia from the bodies they left <br>before alphabets were born of man's hatred of women <br>when the sun comes up and the moon fades like soap in the daylight. <br>Be the nightbird. Be moon. Be shadow and light together.<br>Include the unlikely similitude without judgement <br>into the pantheon of your enduring monument to people or the gods<br>and if someone tells you there aren't any, make a few up on the spot. <br>Mermaid and witch, warlock and sorcerer alike, <br>all drink from the same well, but in each mouth, <br>a different flavour of life, mirages of blood, wine, and water.<br>Become the mirage and stop hallucinating <br>there's a reason for everything they can't discern. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">There are eyes deep in a poem that are looking out at you <br>to see if you want to get close, whether you can intuit <br>the logic of metaphor whispering behind the door <br>through the keyhole on the inside, or you're stuck <br>in one long periodic sentence like the logic of syntax<br>laying tracks across the continent like a ladder of cautious thresholds, <br>expecting to reach the sky, without any risk of falling. <br>Fall and you'll find out you can grow wings on the way down.<br>Fall and the first thing you say will be the sound of bliss <br>freed from its cage to shriek in a language of its own<br>that surpasses the teacher like a sonic boom<br>that doesn't sit at the feet of the thunder in awe. <br>Real freedom, the most terrifying liberation of them all, <br>doesn't come up in an unkempt garden like the placard <br>of a flower that doesn't know what it's there to protest.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Reality? Illusion? Valley and crest of the same wavelength. <br>When you see the mindscape from the outside in <br>you're cutting gems with your eyes. You talk about <br>reality and objectivity as if your were in a solid state. <br>When you write from the inside out, turn the starmap over, <br>the light around, nothing is more acceptable than another.<br>All facets shine Even the abysmal inner spaces <br>that dwarf the heart into singularities that seed <br>the bottomless depths of blackholes that tunnel <br>like star-nosed moles into new worlds <br>like the other half of the hourglass of this one<br>seem no different than from here to the store for a loaf of bread. <br>Nothing's lost, effaced, expunged, or strictly given up <br>right down to the last detail of starmud in your make-up. <br>The sea learns not to fear its own weather, and the moon <br>ebbs and neaps with the tides, and the fish thrive <br>in the way it edges the waves with the flash of a sword <br>it's laid down upon the prodigal waters as a sign of itself. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">The mystery is the mystery of the wonder <br>that stands before the beginning and after the end <br>of a poem that spans the mindstream like a bridge <br>that let's you see your own reflection on the flowing <br>inseparable from the water, more indelible than <br>blood is to skin. Less significant than who's standing beside you. <br>Or the fact that life is a river with only one bank <br>and no one's going to make it across in their secret lifeboat <br>without hauling everything into their inexhaustible emptiness. <br>Once you stop trying to figure out the universe, <br>and explain it to the rest of us, you can learn to play in it <br>like stars without curfews when the crows come home to roost. <br>The worst is bound to you in inestimable measure to the best. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Gather up your sorrows like old manuscripts <br>and fling them like leaves out to the stars on the wind.<br>Put eyes in your weeping and follow your tears <br>all the way back to the ocean that gave you them <br>and said water shall see, in the depths and the heights, <br>the whole of me as the mystic ocean of awareness <br>that eclipses the blossoms in the black mirror of the mind<br>to show you the darkness is not homeless <br>and no more than you can stain space with your blood<br>does it need to be washed off in the stars like Aldebaran<br>or our footprints in the red tides of the Pleiades. <br>You've held that tidal pool up to your face long enough now. <br>The lobster claw like an amputated crescent of the moon. <br>The grey nacreous dawns of Chinese-silk harder than porcelain. <br>The evictions of seashells like empty fortune-cookies <br>and koans with nothing more to tell, the nervous fish, <br>the dead starfish that jimmied the locks on the vaults of the clams.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">O shore-hugger, when have you ever not felt discarded <br>by all those things you never took a risk upon <br>for fear of losing what you know and being washed out to sea<br>into the greater danger of being vividly alive beyond? <br>You may live in a marine cemetery but you know nothing about death. <br>You think because the mirror's broken it stops shining? <br>Because your missing a claw, you can't be made a constellation? <br>You live among your cupboards and empty cups <br>like craters on the moon, and your eyes are full of wariness<br>the sun's going to come out one day, hot and intense <br>and you're going to evaporate or there's going to come <br>one overwhelming wavelength that's going to steal the pot <br>like a man gathering money with both arms in poker, <br>and, just like that, you're gone. And what are you <br>going to do then, cling to the mountain tops like snow<br>for fear of falling, for fear of the echoes of your calling <br>sweeping through the valleys below, looking for you, <br>like eagles and sparrow hawks for something running away? </div><div style="margin:10px 0">What a waste of good birds. Step out into the open. <br>Spread your own wings like Cygnus or Aquila.<br>Encompass what enlarges you by conceding to it<br>as if they were your own inimitable spaces you were <br>flying through with prophetic serpents in your talons <br>as you raise the lowest up like homely bread <br>to manna from heaven that tastes of the stars that leavened it. <br>Spare the scalpel of reason a swordfight with the thorn <br>of your heart trying not to spill blood out of season <br>because you've declared a holy month on the moon. <br>And don't try too hard to impress nothing <br>with the poetic depths of your vacuity, as the world <br>rushes in to fill the spaces between one lifeline and the next. <br>There's a sacred emptiness in the heart of everything <br>and it's built a temple out of the ground of your being <br>to receive your gifts like flowers and stars you lay upon the stairs.<br>And there's nothing from black walnuts to unified field theories <br>to explain this phenomena that isn't also the noumena <br>of your own mind listening to a voice older than your ears. <br>There's a shining in the least of things that could dazzle the stars <br>were you to take the blinders off your life, <br>that carapace off the heart of the world turtle you stand upon <br>like the cornerstone of the cosmic eggshell <br>that's been free of the encumbrance for fourteen billion lightyears<br>like a gift that gave itself freely away like an inexpressible secret <br>in the private lives of the wistful mirrors that reflect it.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Patrick+White">Patrick White</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476648" data-title="I Refuse de Patrick White" data-description="I refuse to persuade any emotion to a poem 
like a horse I can lead to water but can't make drink. 
If it's a straitjacket it's a straitjacket. 
When its a wet suit it's a wet suit 
to go swimming with stars in. Tea leaves.
Yarrow sticks. Tarot de..."></div>
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