Click in the field, then press CTRL+C to copy the HTML code
<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476597" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Going Through A Dark Time</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Going through a dark time. Antares, the red ant, <br>the bitter berry in the heart of Scorpio. Why not <br>blame it on the stars? How could they deny it? <br>Living penumbrally in the eclipse of a celestial body.<br>I want to paint my first old rusty bike that I found <br>languishing under the neighbour's stairs, its <br>deflated tires, spider looms and jinxed prayer wheels<br>that hadn't turned for years, want to paint it <br>with model airplane enamels again and run <br>a perfect red stripe down the middle of a black fender <br>gleaming like anthracite in the blue-yellow sun. <br>How many worlds away I am from that pure moment. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Dark in my heart, gnawing on the skulls of dragons <br>that have finally become like the moon <br>that's never known rain, a frozen watershed <br>in a locket of ice and no light bulb in the well. <br>I'm striding down the corridors of a well-polished hell <br>and I'm turning the portraits of my heroes toward the wall. <br>Why not? I've got no use for their eyes anymore. <br>I've drained the lies out of the samples of their deaths. <br>I've chewed the flavour out of what it was they had to teach. <br>I've trashed my best features in dangerous neighbourhoods. <br>I've broken my own brain like bread with them, <br>offered them my blood like a rose with teeth<br>and watched them evaporate like stars in the sun<br>as if they never really knew they had my devotion. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">What I made of them to set my own potential an example. <br>Something unattainable to aspire to <br>so I would be sure to lose as they did<br>preferring a brilliant failure to a mediocre triumph. <br>I think the quality of a human is a direct function <br>of the depth of their suffering. And I loved the ones <br>who cried out so beautifully in their agony <br>the night birds didn't dare lift their tiny voices <br>up again for fear of being put to shame<br>for the pettiness of their desire. Or the wolves <br>ever howl at the moon again without being aware <br>of the absurdity of their longing for an old stone. <br>I have danced barefoot on the splinters <br>of the winter chandeliers that brought the trees down <br>like a palace of tears in a brutal ice storm.<br>I've heard the Pleiades crash like silverware <br>all over the ground of a botched burglary <br>and seen the junkies run like collapsed veins <br>to pick the spoons up like fences and crows. <br>Going through a dark time. The shamans <br>are dying in the treetops from the shock<br>of what they had to see and live to be <br>if they wanted to die thoroughly back into life again, <br>apprenticed to their own foreseeable pain like savage healers. <br>Winged serpents angered by the humiliation of the flesh<br>like a rose too beautiful not to be abused <br>by those who desecrate life out of their own self-hatred <br>that they are possessed by what they despise the most<br>and beauty will have nothing to do with their power<br>that isn't forced, or broken, or garbaged. <br>The mirrors of the spirit freak and flake away <br>from the ideals of their silver lining in horror.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Funny how you can come to look upon <br>even the most passionate of loveletters <br>with the eyes of a three hundred million year old reptile <br>as if life could not be borne any other way than as a thorn <br>through the heart of a voodoo doll <br>that cursed the good in life for the passing of it. <br>What have I not buried in this desert of stars <br>as if one night I would be able to come back to it <br>and ask it what it dreamed of in my absence? <br>To see if the afterlife of a mirage tasted <br>like water, blood, or wine, or more real than death, <br>the tears of someone who had aged into understanding<br>when the windows that looked out on life <br>like a valence of silicon dioxide slow down<br>like glaciers of glass, and the mirrors speed up <br>as if they were running out of time for reflection. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Ask a man what he misses the most and listen to the echo <br>of how long it takes to reach his ears and if <br>there's an ocean in his eyes he drowns in <br>and I'll reintroduce you to someone you already know<br>talking to themselves in the dark to keep from going mad. <br>Who toys with the smiles of their approaching assassins <br>like the slash of a snake's mouth breaking into blossom? <br>Life is the puncture wound of the staple <br>that was meant to mend it like a bridge <br>that sat cross-legged on a lotus in meditation. <br>And it's easy enough to look at the fireflies after a storm <br>and the stars so out of touch with the world as it is<br>you long for the innocence of the childhood distances <br>you traversed every night you crawled out of your sleep <br>to approach the mystery of your own solitude <br>like an estranged familiar calling you to come alone <br>to the furthest extremes of the night and beyond. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Going through a dark time. Too many gates. <br>Too many doors. Too many worn thresholds <br>Too many threadbare carpets under the one-sided window. <br>Too many dead birds killed by a lack of transparency. <br>And still, I refuse the blindfold when I'm standing <br>in front of a firing squad of stars <br>armed with the latest telescopes.<br>I've always been one of those who prided myself <br>upon my strength to see it coming from afar off <br>and stare at my own death in the third eye of it. <br>And what monument could you possibly raise<br>befitting someone who made exile and rebellion <br>the two monolithic cornerstones of their life<br>if not a rogue planet beyond the reach of gravity <br>looking for a star they could thrive in the light of <br>without the slightest shadow of ulterior spontaneity? </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Going through a dark time. I will not put my eyes out<br>by turning up the light on what befalls me, <br>as if there were something I could save myself from.<br>I will eat every detail of the pain and not waste <br>one unmarrowed bone of it. I will consume it whole <br>like a prophet in the belly of the whale, make the message <br>flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, and then <br>I'll spit it out like a bullet I pulled out of my heart <br>with my teeth, my soul, the elegance of my desolation. <br>I'll make key chains for the blind out of spite <br>and striate the rocks of this cold prison with the runes<br>of the horned ones who linger here with me. <br>I'll be a mile-high corrective lens of ice<br>and putting one hand over my third eye <br>I'll read the writing on the wall from memory <br>and renounce every sacred syllable of it like heretic <br>that thrives on fire, that scatters his ashes in triumph<br>and feathers the wind like a gnostic phoenix <br>with gospels of my own where there's not one imperative. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Pain demands my obedience, threatens to break me. <br>I smash myself on the rocks like an empty wine goblet <br>and say, you can break what remains. You can grind <br>me down to dust, if you like, you can step over me <br>like Spinoza lying down in the threshold of the synagogue<br>to atone for what he opened the world's eyes up to, <br>but my vision of life, though a squall of stars, remains my own<br>and the seeing isn't in my eyes, and the one who suffers <br>isn't in chains, nor the door locked on my heart <br>for fear of the night, for fear of turning to stone <br>when I look the snake pit in the eye with a microscope, <br>and observe the minutiae of the heart's addictive attention to detail.<br>Though every word be a thorn through my tongue, <br>Yet will I sing of the agony of lemons and roses <br>bleeding on the razorwire in No Man's Land for mercy, <br>and those compelled by the whips of circumstance <br>to dance themselves to death because it amuses the cripples, <br>and the little, amoebic man who never amounted to anything <br>and his wife who has aged like salt in a conquered city<br>still thinking she's a garden ornament, I will sing <br>in the name of what even the worst must endure, <br>just to set this methane moon afire in the darkness <br>like a furnace in an abandoned school of unregenerate clowns. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Going through a dark time. A rite of ordeals, <br>the brutal pit of the mystery you can break your teeth on <br>like a koan or an iron-nickel tektite in Antarctica<br>to get at the life inside your own panspermic mind.<br>I should happily break my flesh like bread upon the waters <br>for the fish and the birds, and save the life <br>of an unworthy man from drowning <br>like bad meat in a well, or lose <br>my own precarious foothold on the precipice of an abyss <br>that humbles me to the point of no return. I should do this<br>for the thought-trains of the birds that shall come after me <br>high and late at night through the bars of my longing, <br>yearning to return to my ancestral homelessness<br>like a wandering planet that doesn't give off any light of its own <br>but shines with life, despite the odds, shines <br>tenaciously with life through all these transformations<br>I take on like a river in its own running, <br>pouring myself out of one life wholly into another <br>like an igneous fireclock on the nightshift<br>that keeps adding more carbon to my steel.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Going through a dark time, I will not suffer <br>this passage passively like smoke, I will not plead <br>to abstract my senses from reality to deaden the pain <br>or thin my blood with holy water from a dirty fountain.<br>This dark child of my life shall not be an orphan. <br>I will not disown the pain, I will not drive <br>myself out into the wilderness like a scapegoat <br>to wash the soot off the temple I cry in <br>though they were my doves that were stained <br>in their own blood in the name of a useless sacrifice <br>to a unity that includes as much of separation <br>as of love that welds a stronger bond <br>that doesn't scar the spirit, or dull the eyes, <br>or deaden the tongue to the taste of the stars <br>on the lips of the people who pass through our lives <br>like thresholds on their way to somewhere else<br>than this palatial homelessness we dwell in alone <br>throwing boundary stones like asteroids through the mirrors<br>just to keep things abundantly clear and open between us.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Going through a dark time. Swimming through a tar pit. <br>Another doorway without an exit or an entrance. <br>Another keel-hauling on the hull of the moon <br>trying to maintain discipline aboard a shipwreck. <br>And the unbearable sadness that crushes your heart <br>like a pop can in the depths of an unrevealing ocean. <br>Your face is a skin graft on a burn victim.<br>People reach out for you, but only with their hands <br>when there's nothing at all, nothing at all to grasp <br>of what has already come and gone for good or bad, <br>who can tell? I'm centered like rain in my falling. <br>And there's something vaguely radioactive about the way <br>I glow in the dark, though there are dozens of dead fireflies <br>on my windowsill that dropped like exhausted stars. <br>I move into the available dimension of a future <br>that hasn't won my confidence, and the past<br>is the burnt foundation of a crack house in the zodiac<br>cooking rocks like a meteor shower with its radiant<br>in the eyes of everyone I meet who's trying to shoot the stars out. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Going through a dark time. A bardo state. Nirvanic doubt. <br>The new moon no brighter than the last eclipse. <br>I hear the disembodied thunder of my amplified heart <br>making its way toward me like an enlightened storm front. <br>I've always chosen the hardest teachers to ignore <br>and where the road divides, I've gone both ways at once <br>just to give my earthbound guides a chance of a wishbone <br>to find their way back on their own by following <br>the choices they made to get here like an avalanche.<br>I'm as effortless about my despair as I am about bliss.<br>I treat them both as if they were none of my business. <br>The birds and apples come to this rootless tree <br>of their own accord and the tree does not protest <br>the unleaving of an earthly excellence <br>that blossomed awhile in the human heart and was gone.<br>A windfall of loss. The dead flower frosted with winter stars<br>in a dream where the waterclocks are frozen in time <br>and this is perfect and that is perfect and if you take <br>perfect from perfect, it's still as perfect as it was then<br>and as it is now and shall be tomorrow.<br>I watch the moonrise without breathless aspirations.<br>I observe the sunset without lingering disappointments.<br>What I have received in joy, I will not deceive in sorrow.</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>
<img src="https://www.citatepedia.ro/g/32share.png" style="float:left" alt="Share">
<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=476597" data-title="Going Through A Dark Time de Patrick White" data-description="Going through a dark time. Antares, the red ant, 
the bitter berry in the heart of Scorpio. Why not 
blame it on the stars? How could they deny it? 
Living penumbrally in the eclipse of a celestial body.
I want to paint my first old rusty bike tha..."></div>
</div>
</div>