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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476658" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>I Took My Death Mask Off For You</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I took my deathmask off for you <br>to show you the naked absence <br>behind the past of everything I've ever been.<br>Real, you said, and meant something squalid. <br>And I autographed your holy book<br>with green ink the same colour as your eyes <br>with a fountain pen that didn't <br>step into the same poem twice.<br>Let's be real, you said, but you meant solid, <br>so we pushed your single bed <br>over by a window full of stars<br>and pulled the blind down on enlightenment, <br>cataracts in the eye, flowers in the sky, <br>and made love to the picture-music of a candle, <br>jealous of my gold-nibbed fountain pen<br>trying to prove it had a voice of its own <br>and could bleed as easily I could over nothing. <br>And I remember how you liked to sing to me <br>with that old cat-scratched guitar<br>you kept in the corner like an emergency lifeboat.<br>And I'd listen like a lighthouse <br>just to bug the candle <br>for being so competitive <br>any gust of stars could blow it away in jest.<br>And I heard the music of shy spiders <br>spinning the lyrics of their silken sorrows <br>on the looms of their guitars like webs.<br>And you could tell by the way I looked at you, <br>I wanted you to take off your veils and dreamcatchers, <br>that serpentine boa of apricot orchards<br>feathered between your breasts, get naked again<br>and go swimming with me <br>like two dolphins on the moon <br>in your deepest, darkest watersheds<br>where you weep black pearls <br>like the broken rosaries of past eclipses<br>that portended the end of the world <br>for all those one-eyed lovers as they knew it<br>who tried to patch the wounded rose <br>with one of her own petals like a bicycle tire <br>and blew it big time on the downslope to nowhere. <br>And if I was autumn <br>with my whole future behind me <br>then you were spring <br>with your past up ahead.<br>Though we both knew <br>time was just a rumour <br>some snakeoil salesman <br>was trying to spread <br>like a cure-all for everything. <br>And there were times when we bumped hearts<br>like two soft rocks of coal playing with fire<br>I swear I saw meteroritic nano-diamonds in the sparks <br>anyone of which could have been the beginning<br>of a new religion I could have given my soul to<br>if I wasn't already the prophetic heretic of one of my own.<br>And you'd end up burning me at the stake of your guitar <br>for breathing life back into the dead words <br>that expire like caged birds <br>in the chimneys and lockets, <br>of your spiritual metaphors, <br>new lamps for old, new wine <br>for the old wine-skins of the new moon.<br>I never wanted to see Mary Magdalene<br>stoned among the asteroids <br>like a sacred whore defamed <br>by everyone else's vices<br>because she dances unashamedly <br>naked as a snake in the temple of Isis. <br>Besides, why make confession like graffiti<br>written on the concrete underside <br>of realistic overpasses and burning bridges<br>as an urgent sign of the times<br>even in these urban shrines of futility <br>where we speak in forked tongues when we pray<br>for things we don't even know if we want, <br>in pictographic hieroglyphics<br>for illiterates with dangerous spraybombs<br>that shake their tails like rattlesnakes <br>that don't want to be tread on when they're empty.<br>And for those who've mastered <br>the writing on the wall <br>as if it were their mother tongue, <br>the ambiguous eloquence<br>of these blessings and curses, <br>this Delphic ambivalence of Pythian oracles <br>split down the middle of what they meant <br>like the witching wand of a fire serpent<br>or a tuning fork looking for the G-spot <br>on the lunar body of a shapely guitar <br>trembling like a spider in an hourglass <br>everytime the world gets turned upside down<br>like moonset in the morning of a mirage. <br>Why crack another perfectly good mirror <br>just to hatch another eclipse <br>out of a cosmic egg<br>when it's just as easy <br>to teach people to see in the dark.<br>And, besides, you being the singer you were, <br>I didn't think a nightbird needed a voice coach <br>and I'm nothing, if not a man of my word<br>though I know it sounds <br>too sophisticated to the foolish, <br>and to those who know <br>way more than I care to, absurd.<br>But I don't trust any kind of wisdom <br>that takes its craziness for granted<br>and starts putting bars on the windows<br>to keep itself out of the asylum.<br>This is this. And this is that too. <br>And whether I'm looking <br>deeply into stars or fireflies<br>from either end of the telescope <br>at a feast of light, or the crumbs <br>of a dream in the corners of the eyes <br>of the last famine of seven lean kind, <br>alone with myself in the night <br>beauty is always an ocean of bliss <br>tinctured with a mild antidote of sadness<br>so this doesn't overwhelm that <br>in a delerium of epiphenomenal madness.<br>I don't know if you'd call it spiritual or not<br>but when it comes to divining the undefinable, <br>I know that similes share a lot more of themselves <br>with a world that doesn't cut itself any slack<br>than metaphors that insist on exacting <br>false identities from refugees along the road <br>with whom they have nothing in common<br>but exile and the longing <br>of a candle in the window<br>who doesn't know who it's waiting for <br>to write someone's name again in fire <br>like a fountainpen talking to birds<br>in a dialect of being that's older than words.<br>And the Sufis say you begin to take on <br>the characteristics of anyone <br>you've been around more than forty days. <br>And we made it a bit further than that.<br>You so much like the nightsea<br>of starless rain in me by the time we parted <br>and me the unpredictable spiritual weather<br>in the third eye of your emotional hurricane<br>looking for landfall with ravens and doves <br>in an exchange of transcontinental loveletters<br>with black and white feathers.</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=476658" data-title="I Took My Death Mask Off For You de Patrick White" data-description="I took my deathmask off for you 
to show you the naked absence 
behind the past of everything I've ever been.
Real, you said, and meant something squalid. 
And I autographed your holy book
with green ink the same colour as your eyes 
with a founta..."></div>
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