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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=477015" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>What's To Keep You From Dancing?</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">What's to keep you from dancing if you've got nothing to live for? <br>Dance naked in your tears. Cry through your laughter. <br>Plunge into a black hole and come out the other side, <br>renewed, a virgin, no more feathers and tar pits. <br>No more dead petals in a dry fountain. Absurd, isn't it? <br>When you begin to compare skulls with the moon, <br>not at all what you imagined you would see, not even <br>the prevailing consensus of delusion that passes for reality, <br>this neo-primordial soup of logos and memes<br>we're all swimming in like fish in radioactive water.<br>This pre-Cambrian efoliation of multitudinous sentience<br>re-inventing cuneiform to write it all down in the Burgess Shale <br>three hundred million years from now, fossil by fossil <br>and one among myriads, the lucky lottery ticket <br>of a fish with a spinal cord that will lead eventually <br>back to the saddest excuses in the world for the likes of us. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">I've stood on bridges late at night by myself <br>watching the waters flow as if my mindstream<br>were going on without me, and the pain were too much <br>even for a poet to sublimate his way out of, <br>and I've lived my way to the end of a labyrinth of cul de sacs<br>and wearied of their chronic recurrence like a water wheel <br>at an abandoned mill that used to gamble on a river boat<br>things would stay afloat long enough to make shore <br>before the ship goes down. The crucial point here <br>is not to live with regrets as if you had something personally <br>to do with all of it. There's no starmap <br>for the burrs of the sorrows that smoulder <br>like brown constellations in the slums of an inflammable zodiac.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">You diminish your arrogance at the expense of your humility <br>that's grown as gigantic as God, when you think <br>you know enough about the unknowable to fix the blame<br>as if you'd just come up with a new alibi for you and the world.<br>Could be a curse. Could be a blessing. Could be <br>an improbable concourse of unforeseen events<br>that's been chain-reacting well before <br>the infinite beginnings of the multiverse.<br> <br>You cut your skin with razors as if you were <br>playing tic tac toe on your thighs, hoping someone<br>would come along like an antidote and suck the poison out. <br>But life isn't sweet when you've learned <br>to weep through your fangs. Go ask the moon. <br>There's no holy crusade going on as if the rose <br>aroused its petals to go to war against the infidelity of its thorns. <br>Even the predators, in their own way, are the children of their prey.<br>The longer the fangs. The sharper the talons. The harder the armour.<br>Ever seen what an owl can do to a snake? Yes, <br>things can be bad, but not necessarily for your sake. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">They can be good, too, but if you think it's for you, <br>you're going to end up telling lies about suffering in your sleep<br>like a flashflood in a dry creekbed trying to wake the frogs <br>that have burrowed deep into the starmud for the duration <br>by singing to themselves in the rain as if they'd just had a revelation <br>it's wet on the moon again. I'd could give you any one <br>of a thousand interpretations of your eyes. I could <br>turn your sacred snake's tongue where the rivers part <br>into a green witching wand twitching over the watersheds <br>of mystic lightning. I could scry the self-sacrifice of your next breath <br>like the smoke of a distant fire on an autumn hillside<br>and try to explain the fireflies as the popular demotic <br>of the proto-nostratic of the stars and how that relates <br>to the scars on your leg. Befuddle you into a salvation <br>that would last at least a couple of decades before <br>you could ever find your way back by your own lights<br>to where you were going with the rain before I met you. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">You're not wrong. You're not right. I could say that and mean it<br>as easily as a principled astrolabe looks upon a starless night <br>and doesn't try to see what isn't there. It isn't dark. <br>It isn't bright out. It's clear all the way to the next star <br>if you don't bind yourself to a mental atmosphere<br>where the mind suffers at the hands of its own weather<br>like a child that thinks it needs to be taught to wake up <br>from its own nightmare when, in fact, once things <br>begin to bottom out it's as over as a bubble rising to the top. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Pop! No more delusion, no more enlightenment. <br>No more mirages taking charge of the wellsprings<br>in the desert of stars in ruins around Jericho<br>as the wind shapes the sands in an hourglass<br>like a potter or a sculptor into a sea of eyes <br>that can actually flow like tears of glass in the heat <br>you can drink from like a dragon on the moon <br>just before it begins to rain. And the grasslands awaken <br>of their own accord. And everywhere guitar-shaped gazelles<br>are getting up on their own four legs like amputees <br>that haven't forgotten how to dance to the elegant thunder <br>of their own leopard skin drums. And the rain <br>comes back to your drought-stricken eyes again <br>and runs like rivulets and the unravelled threads of your lifelines<br>through the starmud gullies of your brain breaking <br>into waterlilies of insight on the banks of your mindstream <br>tempering the broken swords of moonlight <br>that are offered to it in tribute, not surrender, <br>because there is no war, into alloys of reality and dream, <br>delusion, enlightenment, imagination and awakening <br>no one before you has ever fallen upon like a dancer <br>who was cut to the quick by a life she's not been out of step with<br>by not so much as one angstrom of a wavelength of a firefly<br>for all the billions of lightyears along the way<br>you've been leading a pilgrimage of shadows deeper into the night<br>like a calendar of shepherd moons <br>you've been slashing like a sundial on your legs<br>moments away from the shrine of broken promises <br>you intend to keep like a vow you made to yourself <br>sleepwalking your way across the corals of your grief in bare feet<br>as if sooner or later you could tread all that blood into wine.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Put your dancing shoes on. Crystal slippers. Moonboots. Winged heels. <br>Stop carving your body like a deathmask you can wear in the world<br>like an alphabet with omega as its only child.<br>Why lie down on the grave of that morose saint of clowns <br>you prayed to deliver you from yourself like the spade <br>you were using to dig your own ditch on the moon <br>for the mass assassination of the innocent and obscene? <br>I'm a poet. And to me you're as beautiful inside and out <br>as a blank piece of paper after the first snow <br>has had a taste of moonlight and softly glows in the dark. <br>Not Joan of Arc singing at the stake of her own serpent-fire<br>feathering her body in flames, in boas of smoke to cover up <br>the glyphs of the bird tracks on the secret loveletter <br>she's been writing to herself in the flesh to really mean <br>what she says when she says I want to live, I want to love, <br>I want to give and receive the way I breathe without <br>meaning anything by it. I want to see, because I have <br>brave eyes, deeply into the light, into the dark, the mystery <br>of a life that keeps on going without knowing where it ends.</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=477015" data-title="What's To Keep You From Dancing? de Patrick White" data-description="What's to keep you from dancing if you've got nothing to live for? 
Dance naked in your tears. Cry through your laughter. 
Plunge into a black hole and come out the other side, 
renewed, a virgin, no more feathers and tar pits. 
No more dead petal..."></div>
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