Related quotes: All these bottles with s.o.s....

All These Bottles With S.o.s. Inside

All these bottles with s.o.s. inside
but not a genie in a lamp among them.
Occasionally the Cutty Sark
in a forty pounder of whiskey,
but the masts snap like matchsticks
whenever I try to pull them out
as if I were trying to give a caesarian
to the chrysalis of a dragonfly
that got turned around somehow. Too often
a viper body surfing the dunes of the Sahara
in the hourglass of a gamma ray burst.
A lot of starfish that have quit shining
that I pick up off this sad, far shore
and bury them in the starfish cemetery
each in their exact place in a starmap
that replicates the constellations perfectly.
It's what the enlightened do when they're bored
and there hasn't been a word
they don't want to hear from anyone
for lightyears. All the sages
have left the house with Elvis
and Morrison's just turned the lights out.

Raw solitude underneath such thin skin.
Hush, the flatliners are meditating.
They're putting transalpine creases
in their theta waves, hoping to levitate
like a lifeboat up off the rocks they're scuttled on.
Neap tide in the affairs of providence
for barges and schooners alike I guess.
Met this man once who said he was homeless
then gave me his card with a name
and a home address, so I asked him
if he could spare any change for postage
and after that, his mail never came here anymore.

Just thought I saw a ghost, but now
I'm convinced it was only a reflection
on the rim of my chromatically aberrated glasses.
O, ya, or maybe they're the magic circles I draw
around my eyes empowering me to exorcise
the apparitions as I please, or spiritual junkmail
that lavishes way more on the promise
than it budgets to spend on its fulfilment.

Whenever I want to remember how the truth feels
I run the blade of the moon along my tongue
and sit in a sacred place where two rivers
of lightning join to split the oak, and if the truth heals
hope it isn't cruel to realize, even to myself,
that most of us are the unrealized simulacra
of things in accord with the contradictions
of what we once wanted to be. The palettes
of the lichens that mixed lunar blues and greens
on the rocks, are scattered all over the place
around here like folk art in a Zen gallery of minimalists.

What's important, crucial, in fact, when things turn infernal
is to observe the protocols of hell if not the content
with unparalled grace and distinction. Demon up
until you've burned all the slag out of your field of view
like asteroids trying to make a big impact on you
like a swarm of blackflies buzzing all around you
like spy satellites and semi-colons. Until
their radios short out. And I'm awash again with stars
in the cooling silence of my dispassionate clarity
with a wry slash of a smile on the deathmask of my face
it would be uncharacteristically ignoble of me
to let anybody else see, even if they had
the eyes and the mirrors for it because
I didn't abandon all hope when I entered here.
I transcended it. I got real wicked. And clear.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Related quotes

Dont Give Up

In this proud land we grew up strong
We were wanted all along
I was taught to fight, taught to win
I never thought I could fail
No fight left or so it seems
I am a man whose dreams have all deserted
Ive changed my face, Ive changed my name
But no one wants you when you lose
Dont give up
cos you have friends
Dont give up
Youre not beaten yet
Dont give up
I know you can make it good
Though I saw it all around
Never thought I could be affected
Thought that wed be the last to go
It is so strange the way things turn
Drove the night toward my home
The place that I was born, on the lakeside
As daylight broke, I saw the earth
The trees had burned down to the ground
Dont give up
You still have us
Dont give up
We dont need much of anything
Dont give up
cause somewhere theres a place
Where we belong
Rest your head
You worry too much
Its going to be alright
When times get rough
You can fall back on us
Dont give up
Please dont give up
got to walk out of here
I cant take anymore
Going to stand on that bridge
Keep my eyes down below
Whatever may come
And whatever may go
That rivers flowing
That rivers flowing
Moved on to another town
Tried hard to settle down
For every job, so many men
So many men no-one needs
Dont give up
cause you have friends
Dont give up
Youre not the only one
Dont give up
No reason to be ashamed
Dont give up
You still have us
Dont give up now
Were proud of who you are
Dont give up
You know its never been easy
Dont give up
cause I believe theres the a place
Theres a place where we belong

song performed by by Peter Gabriel
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Chewing On Memories Like Broken Mirrors In Her Sleep

Chewing on memories like broken mirrors in her sleep
tears of blood run from her eyes.
She doesn't know I'm watching
but I've got windows everywhere.
But for her
just for her
because nobody else cares
third eye satellites with unlimited airspace
in her choice of skies to match her eyes.
A haemorrhage of sunsets.
Fly little bird fly
as if you weren't the shattered sparrow
God took his eye off
when you fell.
Sometimes the mystic oversights
have more to say
about the great revelations of the world
than all the burning bushes in the valley of Tuwa.
Rumours and news.
Fly little bird fly.
Be an apostate waterbird
and let your skull skip out over the lake
like the moon through a glass house
that's been asking for it for years.
There must be stars
that haven't bloomed yet
somewhere in the corner of a leftover garden
that no one's trampled on
like moon rocks
on a firewalk with a spoon
that hisses like the head of a viper
boiling with venom
at the tip of the tongue of a Zippo lighter.
Fly little bird fly
into a state of grace
that isn't tainted by your experience
of the taste of humanity
that threw you like bad meat
down your own wishing well.
How they pried your innocence out of you
like a flower before it was ready to open
like a keepsake from a locket
your mother gave to you on her death bed
like a silver bullet that would keep you safe
from the grave robbers
the moment you used it on yourself.
Fly little bird fly.
I don't know why
people attach more of an emergency
to the exit
than they do to the entrance
but I guess you'd have to ask a junkie about that
who's used to coming in through the back door
with a ticket to ride
that's better than a forged passport
to Disneyland
after you've done business with the Pentagon.
Fly little bird fly.
Don't lose your nerve for enlightenment.
There's the Bodhi tree.
There's Venus in the dawn.
And there's all this emptiness.
Isn't it sweeter
than a hot fix
once you've gone beyond
the last judgment between right and wrong
like the pick up sticks of the I Ching
into the nirvanic bliss
of discovering nothing
was your best guess after all?
Fly little bird fly.
Disappear into your own eyes
like a candle
that's stopped sticking its tongue out at the darkness
looking for a new place to hit.
Fly little bird fly
as if you weren't tarred and feathered like Icarus.
And may the sun that shines at midnight
find you a lot more approachable
than apple blossoms
scattered like ashes on the wind
or fireflies that can't hold their fixed positions
like the stars.
O it's so anatomically true
that life on earth hurts
especially when you've fallen
out of love with love
like a baby out of the nest of a lullaby.
Down will come baby
shaman and all.
I see your bruised body on the bed
like the embryo of some past miscarriage
that taught you how flesh
can grieve for its own death
while it's still alive.
I see the black haloes.
I see the bright horns.
I see the butterfly feelers
that have burnt out
like the short-lived filaments
of your average light bulb
and the place where you were anointed
with holy oil that hissed.
And it's hard to miss where the apple sat
when William Burroughs
shot you through the head
pretending he was William Tel
like your crackhead boyfriend did last night.
Luckily he missed your heart.
He should have hired a firing squad
instead of relying on a sniper.
You don't send a single viper
to do the job
of the whole snakepit
when you take out a contract
on anything as elusive as that.
I've made the bed
and you can lie in it alone
for as long as you want.
I'll keep watch over you
like a mongoose or a lighthouse
over a bird that was stared to stone by snakes
and I won't have anything to expiate
if I see their shadows
sliding hate mail under the door.
Fly little bird fly.
No more skies that lie like windows
about what you're going through.
No more pretending
those bruises on your arm
are rare orchids of jungle love.
When you went to sleep
tangled up in the powerlines
you couldn't teach to dance to your flute
and the rhythm of your body
like bullwhips
you might have felt
like a broken kite on a funeral pyre
but if my magic still works
by the time you wake up
I'll make sure
you open your eyes like a phoenix.
So fly little bird fly.
The world won't heal while you sleep.
Your lover won't have a change of heart.
He broke you like a chandelier
he threw down the road
in a drunken rage
on a Friday night
like a bottle of beer.
One solitude denies another theirs.
Lovers take each other hostage.
The rest is the Stockholm syndrome.
One fanatic.
One addict.
It looks like devotion
It looks like a life raft on the sea of love
but the ocean's gone rabid and mad.
Just look at the way it foams at the mouth.
Things are bad.
Fly little bird fly.
You're not caught in the chimney
with no way out.
You're the genie of the lamp.
You're the one that tunes the power lines
that are humming along with you
like Mozart with a sparrow.
You're the silence
that times the rhythm of the music.
You're the tuning fork
not the lightning rod
of a wanna be god
in a pick-up truck
who keeps you around
to beat on like a false idol
who shalt not come before him.
Stop pecking at the crumbs of your dreams
like the leftovers of a garden
that used to be secret
That's no way to get out of a labyrinth
when you've got wings.
So fly little bird fly.
Disappear into the depths of a starmap
that breaks into flames as you approach
the creative intensities of your own shining
like sumac in the fall.
Here's the dead branch.
Here's the green one.
You be the moon.
You be the blossom.
You be the firefly.
You be the hidden night bird
with the faraway call
that doesn't make the distinction at all
because you're too far gone to tell
by any feature of the light
you can often see things deeper
in a black mirror
than you can in a white.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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View From A Bridge

Written by ricky & marty wilde
View from a bridge, cant take anymore
View from a bridge, cant take anymore
I guess it all began about a year ago
Like a cheap love magazine
You know the kind you read about
And have to laugh
At the pages in between
Now I cant believe that fool inside is me
cos I just cant face the world
Ive grown to see
View from a bridge, cant take anymore
View from a bridge, cant take anymore
I saw you kissing her
I saw you making her
In the soft sheets in between
But when you turned around
I saw your eyes were fire
And you crashed out all my dreams
And like a fool I just stood there
And let it go
I should have fought right back
And let my feelings show
View from a bridge, cant take anymore
View from a bridge, cant take anymore
You sure as hell knew how
To make a fool out of me
Well you cut me down
For the things you want
And now its killing me
Ill lay it on the line now
Youre running out of time now
But then a voice said jump
And I just let go
And Im floating out in space
But then I feel your arms
And I turn around
To a ghost without a face
And I just dont know
Whats fact or fantasy
cos when I look below the bridge
I see its me

song performed by by Kim Wilde
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Low-Tide

These wet rocks where the tide has been,
Barnacled white and weeded brown
And slimed beneath to a beautiful green,
These wet rocks where the tide went down
Will show again when the tide is high
Faint and perilous, far from shore,
No place to dream, but a place to die,—
The bottom of the sea once more.
There was a child that wandered through
A giant's empty house all day,—
House full of wonderful things and new,
But no fit place for a child to play.

poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Moon And Sea

You are the moon, dear love, and I the sea:
The tide of hope swells high within my breast,
And hides the rough dark rocks of life’s unrest
When your fond eyes smile near in perigee.
But when that loving face is turned from me,
Low falls the tide, and the grim rocks appear,
And earth’s dim coast-line seems a thing to fear.
You are the moon, dear one, and I the sea.

poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Theres Only One

Theres a thousand ways to tell you whats weighin on my mind
On this heart shaped rock at lovers peak above the city lights
I take off my jacket, put it around you and watch you close your eyes
Your hand feels so warm like your breath on my face
These words that I have been holdin back
Have found the perfect time and place
Theres only one, wish I make each time I see a falling star
Theres only one, place I wanna be and that is where you are
Theres only one, man in this world who can love you like I do
You know we only get one life, and I wanna spend mine with you
One
Through the silence all I hear is one dry autumn leaf
Falling like my careful heart, then landing at your feet
I clear my nervous throat, sit here and hope and pray where this will lead
Once in every lifetime someone comes along
I guess Im trying to say that someones you, and I know where I belong
Theres only one, thing thats missin that will make my life complete
Theres only one, time with all my heart Ive known whats meant to be
Theres only one, man in this world who can love you like I do
You know we only get one life, and I wanna spend mine with you
One
It feels like more than just the moon is shinin down on us
And the tears in your smile say you love me as much
Theres only one kiss I long to feel my lips at night
Theres only one body that I want to hold until I die
Theres only one soul Ive ever really felt connected to
You know we only get one life and I wanna spend mine with you
Theres only one, wish I can make each time I see a falling star
Theres only one, place I wanna be and that is where you are
Theres only one, man in this world who can love you like I do
You know we only get one life
And I wanna spend mine with you, theres only one

song performed by by Yankee Grey
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Theres Only One

song performed by by Yankee Grey
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I'm Having An Unrequited Love Affair With Myself

I'M HAVING AN UNREQUITED LOVE AFFAIR WITH MYSELF

I'm having an unrequited love affair with myself.
It's surrealistically ironic and spiritually annihilating
at the same time, and I can say from personal experience
black holes have a profound sense of humour.
The waterlilies look up at the stars and wonder
if they could shine like that if they ever dried out.
Fire and water. The serpent fire of my electrical potential
jumps the gap like a spinal cord, a bridge is made.
Spiders weave enlightened filaments in a light bulb
like webs of neuronic wiring into dream catchers
and empowering mandalas. I have ignition.
Billions of eyes light up in the dark like fireflies.

I always thought if I really wanted to do the world some good,
I'd lead it away from myself. My alter-ego
shines like a demon in a dark light whose intelligence
is intent on ruining my life compassionately
out of a begrudging respect for sacred rodeo clowns
with red geraniums sticking out of their straw sun hats
like pathetic solar flares of blood trying to wave a red flag
to draw the bullshit off a Pacific mystic Zen cowboy
about to be gored by a horn of the moon in her crone phase.

All the women I've ever loved, lived, left and will live with
on these thresholds of the sublime and the ridiculous
like a seance that can see a future in calling things back from time,
have come to me in an aura of dark energy
like a poem in a dream expanding into space.

Or you could see Ophelia under her deathmask
drowning in wounded flowers. Two witches,
an apostate madonna, one ferocious priestess
from the dark side of the moon, one incubus,
one lamia, a Medusa, a delusional gold-digger
who kept working me like a motherlode
although I told her from the first all you're going to find here
is the slag of meteoric ore that's been mined out.
The last thing I heard her say when I left her
singing like a canary in the belly of an anaconda,
as I climbed out of the grave she was digging for both of us,
was, I thought you were rich. No, I replied,
a little taken aback at my innocence at this late date,
I just gave you everything I had
because I thought it would make you happy
if I gave you what you asked. Who else
should I have given it too if not you? Good-bye,
with blessings on your house and head,
that erotically upgraded body of yours
and all your excellent possessions.
I'm going to sleep with a bridge tonight
that knows there's two sides to every river
holding hands secretly under the mindstream
and the bird can't fly when it's a lapwing
trying to lure danger away from its cosmic eggs
and all the other wing's doing is flapping its lips.
And one Female Principle of the World
that needed me to help her incarnate in bed.

Muses all. Eclipses and full moons alike.
Eras of my life. Legends of my genome.
Each a different planet with a physics of her own.
And me the mere scaffolding of bones,
the passionate snakes and ladders
they climbed up on to paint their picture-music
on the ceiling of esoteric pantheons
where the goddess is always the pearl, black or white,
and when I know what's best for me,
I'm the big-mouthed lunar oyster shell
gaping at the moonrise in desire and wonder
dying to say what leaves me more speechless than silence.

Never knew a woman who wasn't a sky higher
than my wingspan, a sea deeper than my wisdom
despite the oceanic commotion on the surface.
I was always a continental ledge shy of their depths,
and even though I knew how to swim my way
through the darkest diamonds as easily as I did the night,
I've always considered it spiritual bad manners
and an abuse of grace, if I've paused to listen
to a mermaid singing to me, and I haven't drowned
in applause for her as soon as the song is over.
If you're not willing to die for the picture-music
you're just another flatlining event horizon
looking for a lifeboat like a whole note with a tin ear
that can't hear you singing like the fog horn
of a dinosaur mired in a tarpit like a keyboard of bones.

You don't ask a goddess to be a sacrifice.
Your heart gouged out like an organ donor to the moon
you lay it while it's still beating like a bleeding ruby
on her temple stairs and by that she'll know
you were a real king of the waxing year
and eat it like the forbidden fruit of enlightenment
when the jewel is in the lotus like a dragonfly
in a waterlily, and she smears your blood like lipstick
on the petals of a rose that worked witchcraft
with the flavours of life and love she left in my mouth.

Most of the time there's no interrogative scorpion
of bitterness up my sleeve of stinging nettles,
nor in her shoe when I put her crystal slipper back on,
having just removed a splinter of glass from the paw of a lion
I hope will remember my kindness if we're ever
in the Colosseum together as audience to the act
instead of predator and prey of the fact
that the asters at the end of summer that we cherish most
are adorned by time in a romantic rite of passage
and then apotheosized as constellations of the autumn
approaching our lingering ghosts like a seance
of the fruits of the earth that all fell in their own good time
singularly, or a windfall in the night, sweetened by our ordeals
as if our hearts had always been bears in a beehive
of rapture and loss and paper wasps
getting mystically hammered on our tears
like the lightyears of life that have aged like stars in our eyes.

I can still taste the mystery of the dark mirrors
we held up to each other like synchronous swimmers,
that deepened so many insights into the strangeness of human nature,
even long after we entered the abyss of the future
like empty urns, I swear, there's still a dragon in my ashes
that rises up like a pillar of fire or a solar flare,
an eternal flame, a sudden efflorescence of stars,
and makes a deep, sweeping bow to the women I have loved
who left me these gloves of moonlight
glowing on my windowsill when I'm alone in the dark.

And I can hear the Canada geese heading south,
and I remember how vast and eyeless the sky is
when exhausted lovers part like frayed mindstreams
trying to flow past the sacred junction where two rivers meet
without realizing the mingling of their waters is indelible
and it's hard to find reverse in a universe
that just keeps on going the same way
in this time and place, this now and here
the same path of thorns and rose petals
that everyone walks like the wind in love,
leads everywhere like fireflies trying to read a starmap
from the past, that's left its future far behind
trying to catch up to what it just let go of
like an almagest of prophetic zodiacs to come
longing for the Beast Mistress of the animal kingdom
to make them jump through their burning hoops again
like moondogs or the black haloes of comets
that keeping falling through the coronas of the sun,
or a dragon dancing in the ripples of the rain
after it's just swallowed the moon like the cosmic glain.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You Came

Written by ricky & kim wilde
Someone I know is staring at me
And when I look into her eyes
I see a girl that I used to be
I hardly recognise
Cos in the space of a year
Ive watched the old me disappear
All of the things I once held precious
Just dont mean anything anymore
Cos suddenly
You came, and changed the way I feel
No one could love you more
Because you came and turned my life around
No one could take your place
Ive never felt good with permanent things
Now I dont want anything to change
You cant imagine the joy you bring
My life wont be the same
And Ill be there when you call
Ill pick you up if you should fall
Cos I have never felt such inspiration
Nobody else ever gave me more because
You came, and changed the way I feel
No one could love you more
Because you came and turned my life around
No one could take your place
I watch you sleep in the still of the night
You look so pretty when you dream
So many people just go through life
Holding back, they dont say what they mean
But its easy for me
Since you came
No one could love you more
Because you came and turned my life around
No one could take your place
You came, and changed the way I feel
No one could love you more
Because you came and turned my life around
No one could take your place

song performed by by Kim Wilde
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I Want You

The last time that I saw her
Was the night she said goodbye
She said that love's a stranger
And it's sure to pass you by
As she packed up her belongings
She wouldn't look me in the eye
But I could see a tear roll
Off her face
As we both tried so hard
Not to cry she said

I never wanted the stars
Never shot for the moon
I like them right where they are
All I wanted was you
So baby just turn away
Because I can't face the truth
All I'm trying to say
Is all I wanted was you

I tried so hard to remember
When where how why love went away
I tried to drown myself in pity
But the whiskey kept calling your name

I bought you fancy cars and diamond rings
All the things that my money brings
And the servants to paint the sky blue
And I worked so hard seven days a week
And built a fortress for your heart to keep
If I could I'd wrap these words up for you

I may have built for you a dreamhouse
But never thought you were alone
I filled the party up with company
But never made our house a home
All I got is my guitar

song performed by by Bon Jovi from Keep The Faith
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Tolerance

[ merchant ]
The still and silence is torn with violence.
A loud breaking sound in the night is made.
Hear it grow, hear it fade.
The sound youre hearing, the sound youre fearing
Is the hate that parades up and down our streets, coming within bounds and within reach.
Now, inside the place we hide away, we hear it near and hope it turns away.
Turn away...
Theres something seething in the air were breathing.
We learn slash and burn is the method to use.
Set a flame, burn it new.
Were overpowered.
We kneel, we cower, we cover our heads.
Feel the threat of blows that will come and the damage that will be done in its wake.
Now, inside this place we hide away, we hear it near although its miles away.
We hear it near and hope it turns away.
Turn away...
This house divided, we live inside it.
Hates dwelling place is behind our door in fitful nights.
Hear it walk the floor and hear it rave as it moans and drags along its ball and chain,
As it moves through this house it cant escape.
Now inside this place we hide away.
We hear it near and hope it turns away.
Turn away....

song performed by by 10000 Maniacs
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Broken Chances

My Love,

I don't know how you're going to get this,
But it is my last word on this Earth.
Just what ever you do sit alone and read this.
I want you to be at the lake where you gave me my first kiss,
I want you to sit by the tree that held us, and read this.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You were my love, my only one person who always made me smile,
You held my hand through so many things, so many firsts.
You were my light you were my smile
And you told me the three deadly words,
The words that always kill, but first make you smile.

I have sewed my mouth shut, so you will never see me smile.

I would melt at the sound of your voice,
I would just sit and listen just to know you were really there,
I would call when you weren't home, just to hear your voice.
My wish every day was to hear you say 'I love you',
To hear your voice.

I have glued my ears so I don't have to listen to your lies.

I remember the feeling of your hands running through my hair,
You'd weave your fingers through it to comfort me,
Sometimes I would act sad just to feel your fingers in my hair,
I would silently smile and melt in your arms.
I remember your fingers running through my blond hair.

I have cut my hair so I can never remember that feeling.

U can see you standing looking at me with your sparkling eyes,
I always see you,
I can never see past those deep eyes,
I can see you smile at me, see your hands reach for mine.
I can still see your eyes.

I have cut my eyes out so I can never again fall into your deceiving eyes.

You made my heart race with butterflies, with hope.
I gave you my heart to keep, you said you'd never break it,
You gave me the one thing i needed ti keep going; hope.
And I fell for the traps, I gave you EVERYTHING.
I ave you all the hope I held in my heart, my soul.

I have stabbed my heart, just so you can't shatter what's already broken.

You became my life, you became my love, my everything.
No matter what happened I still loved you,
And no matter what I tried to give you everything,
And you made me loose so much that I'm left with nothing,
And with my dying breath I give you what was all I had left, my everything.

I take my life to show you what love really means, that it's not the lie you told.

I may not be able to smile when you hold me,
I may not be able to hear your words even if their truth,
I may not be able to remember you soothing touch, or your warmth,
I mat not be able to see your eyes, or your reaching hands,
I may not be able to press my beating heart against your skin,
I may not be able to give you a second chance, for like my heart it is broken,
But After the pain and lies, I believe in what I felt for you,
And hope maybe someday you'll believe the same, and find beauty from pain

Even with nothing left to give you but my word, I breath my last breath for you.

I lay in silence to let you live, to give to you a broken second chance,

For I will always love you,
Be............

by: Bethany Maxwell =)

poem by Bethany Maxwell
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Beginning and End (Again)

faded lines, greying hair,
life spillt from a cup.
even stars fall down,
nothing ever falls up!

world changes, still the same,
or maybe getting worse.
vanity of vanities
riding in a hearse.

and the truth kills the lie
with a savage swing.
but there's a place
inside our dreams....

a door only time can open,
a peace beyond all our hoping.
where beginning and end begin again.
the home of lightning and howling wind!

faith burned, anger earned,
fists against the wall.
you cant see what can be
when you cant hear the call.

the house you built, the spirit killed,
the love that in the end devours.
when seconds turn into lifetimes
in your final hours.

and the truth kills the lie
with a savage swing.
but there's a place
inside our dreams...

a door only time can open,
a peace beyond all our hoping.
where beginning and end begin again.
the home of lightning and howling wind.

poem by Eric Cockrell
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If You Had Any Compassion For Yourself

If you had any compassion for yourself,
others wouldn't have to suffer for you
and the world wouldn't show you
such a sad, woeful, wounded face.
You wouldn't see the withering leaves
and petals of the rose in autumn
as merely the scar tissue of its thorns.
In winter, mend your severance.
In spring, attend to your joys.
Like fishing nets and snow fences.
Like delphiniums in a garden bed
that's beginning to bloom like a starmap.

And you know that stranger inside
that's always witnessing everything we do
like a perfectly clear mirror, even in dreams?
Take another look, you might be surprised
at whose face you see at a meeting of eyes.

It's important not to pass judgement on yourself
for fear of condemning the world.
Show me a mirage that isn't a friend to water
or a wishing-well that resents a rainbow
for the pot of gold at the end, though
no one ever knows which end at the time.

Be kind to your delusive paradigms of life,
as you would an old skin you shed like the moon
when your serpent-fire could no longer contain itself
and broke out of its sacred chrysalis like a dragonfly
that had made itself a house of life out of matchsticks
and went up in flames like a snake with wings.

If you could see your life for what it is,
a teaching device for mentoring your own enlightenment
you might read the books of all the sages
rooted and flowering in you like the wisdom of a seed,
or the star in the ore of a panspermic universe
that was planted in you like the garden you've been from birth.

You might think that the wildflowers
are looking up at the stars to understand themselves
but, in truth, they're looking up at their roots
like rain reveres the lightning that engenders it.

You don't need to convince the wind of your freedom,
you've just got to ride it out to the end,
a friend to yourself, a worthy companion,
the intimate familiar of a cloud with a clear blue sky
or a subliminal lover of the darkness
love mushrooms up in like a moonrise.

If you knew how to nurture yourself
by breaking bread with the spirit of life within you
there wouldn't be millions of children
all over the world who will go hungry tonight.
They'd be licking the spoon with stealthy laughter
like cookie-batter out of the begging bowl of your heart.

Enlightenment isn't going to add one ray of light
or a single star to the night you're already shining in,
and whatever wavelength you're on, regardless
of the mystic polarities your potential flows between,
like dark matter and light, whether the journey you're on
is orange or infrared or the blue white violet of the Pleiades,
absorption or emission spectrum alike, no wave
of thought or mind, light, heart or water
is discontinuous with the oceanic consciousness
they rise upon, so why turn back to the source
like a solar flare to ask for directions from a starmap
that sent you out like a bubble in the multiverse to look for land.
You know, if you were more of an explorer
without a preconceived destination, more
of a space probe leaving the solar system periodically,
the rest of us wouldn't feel so lost or out of place at your table.

And even if you've made a vehicle
of the wheel of birth and death
and think you have a firm grasp on things
with your arm out the window in the driver's seat,
enjoying the passing view with the wind in your hair
without clinging to anything along the way
it still might be a good idea to learn how
to come down off your throne like a pauper
and change a flat tire now and again.

Your life is not an untimely interruption of eternity.
The eternal sky does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds,
and it even bends down sometimes toward the earth
to pick up Venus like a lost earring in the sunset.
It's your point of view that turns your back on yourself
like the retrograde motion of Mars, not
the planet itself playing rope tricks with your spinal cord.

Why go looking for your mind
like a lighthouse with a flashlight,
a flame for the source of the fire
or a star for the constellation it belongs to,
or the homeless for a home when everyone's
the foundation stone of their own habitation
wherever they are at the moment.

If you chase the wind, it will be you
that loses its breath like the atmosphere of the moon.
And when you run out of air, breathe light, breathe space,
and don't try to fix an expanding universe
to your nostrils like a bicycle pump
to get you back on the road again.
Or you'll find you're swimming out of your depths
to run to the rescue of an empty lifeboat
that's already unloaded its contents ashore.

If you don't want to go blind as a starless night
it's prescient to eclipse your blazing from time to time,
turn the lights down low, snuff the candle,
and learn to see in the dark there's just as much reflected
in the depths of the dark abundance
of a black mirror, though it takes time to focus,
than there is in the expansiveness
of the bright vacancy of the white
that takes things in at a glance.
The seed of a every glimpse of insight contains
the whole of the vision in advance,
and at the core of the apple of the issue
is a green star with dark auburn eyes
on the nightshift of the maternity wards of spring.

And o come on now, how long can you hang on
to being this box kite on a string
watching another phoenix ride your thermals
like inspiration on the wing, without feeling
like the premature ghost of yourself at the onset of spring,
all smoke, and no fire, your flightfeathers smouldering
like a pyre of wet maple leaves who haven't got the courage
to break into flames and flap their wings and rise above it all.
Better to be a weather balloon losing altitude like Icarus
or even a candling parachute taking the fall for all of us,
as daring said feathers and falling took flight,
than not risk falling through the black holes of life to paradise?

And what if I were to tell you're they're just the pupils
the light enters through like your eyes into your imagination
to be transformed from a visual into a vision,
the visible form into the invisible shining of the spirit
that raises everything in the known and unknown multiverse,
and the trees and the stars, the rocks and the clouds
are all counting on you to do this for them,
because this is what you're here for,
if you've ever wondered,
to raise them up to eye-level
with a human who knows the names of things
like parents know the names of their own children
running toward them down the street. It's how
we were meant to meet and greet the universe.

So if once, just once, for my sake, your sake, the sake
of the forsaken with their elbows on the windows of the world tonight
watching it all go by like stars on the firewalks beneath their noses,
that are not embedded in cement like a mausoleum
of movie-stars that refused to become fossils
before their shining was spent,
you took a chance, and that's all it would take,
one step forward with no return address,
to risk falling down at the dance,
and seven times down, eight times up,
such is life, get up on your own two good feet again
and discover you've got wings and spurs on your heels
the rest of us wouldn't feel so lame
when we came over to your place
like a riot of erratic fireflies to celebrate
the lightning moves of the rain that's dancing on our graves
where the dead lie down like the corpses of candles
knowing they'll be reincarnated
as wildflowers and Luna moths
because nothing that's ever given its life up
to this business of shining on everything alike
from a first magnitude star, to the night light in the hall
that shoos the ghosts away from their portraits on the wall
so the whole world can bloom in the tears of your eyes,
the fire in your heart, and in the human divinity
of the spirit of your imagination, can ever be put out
because every shadow of doubt
leads back the light that cast it
in love and sorrow, time and space
like the life and death mask of your own face.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Gently Took The Strawberry Heart

I gently took the strawberry heart
of the bird with the broken neck
and buried it in a shrine of leaves and grass.
And in a low voice, whispered a blessing.

Under the window of an illusion
like a song you can only hear once
and it's good for a lifetime of listening,
I buried you with your wings together in prayer.

And I prayed to know what to pray for.
I prayed to know what to ask that could ease
the burden of the earth on a nightbird's journey
flying solo deeper into the dark

than even the stars or these eyeless words can go.
And I know death returns even the worst of us
to our innocence again, though our bones
come crashing down like childhood kites around us.

And the flight feathers of the aerial acrobatics
of our love lyrics run out of ink
when there's no one in the dark
to sing for anymore, no stars

to chart where you've gone,
no sign from the heavens you're not alone,
no ghost of smoke from a distant fire
I can summon to a seance of lingering desire

that would console you in the flesh again
like a candle in your solitude reaching out
to the pain of a stranger in the shadows
to make your wound cry out in bliss

as you once did from a greener bough
than this dead branch I sing from now
when we thought blossoms were the answer
to everything we didn't understand at the time

that could befall us like fledglings in the spring
who didn't know what autumn would bring
like an ice-storm in its wake
to things that break against the sky

like the cold-hearted lie of a window
that wasn't open and didn't go on forever.
And though I ask the weather for news of you,
if the wind might have heard

a word or two in passing, all
the silence does is deepen your absence
and teach me not to cling to things
like birds and flowers on the wing.

But if grief is all I can know of you now
I'll console myself with sorrow.
I'll hold onto it like the string of a kite
soaring among the constellations.

I won't let go. I'll play the line out
like a flying fish I caught in Pisces
and hauling it into a lifeboat with a net
I'll take the hook of the moon out of your mouth

and throw you back into the depths like a muse
swimming among the stars like a siren
that keeps calling me to the rocks
like an astronaut to these mountains on the moon

I keep hurling through this earthly view
of a window from the inside out
that breaks just like the shell of a cosmic egg
unfolding a loveletter with a wingspan of light

that penetrates this dark forever
like the third eye of a needle in a haystack
of begging bowls I won't abandon like the nests
of nightbirds with flightplans

that feather our falling into the abyss
of the unbelievable with starmaps
and the beacons of homing metaphors
that make our disappearance inconceivable.

I'll live like the return address on an envelope
with a mouthful of silence for a voice
and wait for you to answer me again
like a songbird at the spring equinox

through a broken window in a house of pain.
And though it hurts worse when the candles go out
I'll refuse to turn my heart away
from your reflection in everything I see.

Everything I hear and do and say.
Everything that was as true as a night sky about you.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Every Morning Of The Moment, A New Creation

Every morning of the moment, a new creation,
the distillation of the dreams of the night before
when the moon was as fertile as the dew we were born from.
I start out each day with a new face. By nightfall
it's just another phase of the same old ageless deathmask,
heavier than a bell that's been talking through my mouth
for more light years than I've got tears to measure in mirrors.
That's usually when I start thinking like a potato about stars.
Blood sugars in my mindstream ripening me like a vision
I'll only ever get to see backstage like a forlorn clown
trying to hang on to his faith in laughter.

You can pursue happiness, but it will only
run from you like the light, or you can cover your eyes
and try to avoid it for fear of losing it like the last time,
but when you turn around, it's right behind you,
flirting with your shadow. Better to let it come and go
of its own accord, like a waterbird in a moonrise
reflected on a lake. Then when you speak of things
you increasingly know less about the more
you're intimate with them, your voice isn't
a bird net trying to cage words on the fly
but an aviary as open as the sky when
Cygnus and Aquila are up, and the Lyre's
a larynx for the asking. And you're free
to sing your heart out as if no one were listening
but you and the trees and the stars you hit like high-notes.

Or shriek like a rabbit seized by the coydogs
if you run out of lucky feet and that's what comes up
like snake eyes. Lap the experience out of the bone
until there's nothing left to eat but your appetite itself
and among the myriad flavours of life you've exhausted
that will taste the sweetest of all to that emptiness
that harvests the world like a blue moon that's never full.
Is the moon not the equal of its waxing and waning alike?
Is it trying to enlighten its dark side?
When the candle goes out, does the light have any trouble
handling it? Fear returns to what it knows the best.
It hugs the shore like a tidal pool beside the sea,
a dead starfish or two it can get its arms around
like a worm's-eye view of the galaxy, and the shell
of a red sunset in the morning on the carapace
of a crab that left its hovel for a house in
a more upwardly mobile zodiac. Sometimes
it comes down to that. Quantum level gravity.
A gravitational eye with myopia that bends the light
like a stick in the water, a mirage of sand in an hourglass
that's afraid of being swept out to sea
with nothing to hold onto but the lifeboat
of a shucked clam Venus just stepped out of onto land
to have sex in a new medium like an artist
who's just switched from water colours to oils.

You've got to accept the down times as all part
of the same wavelength you've been riding
like a snake scaled in white caps of light
that break on shore in a turmoil of kelp.
The cosmos doesn't need to be put in order
and chaos doesn't need any help. Listen to your sorrows.
Summon them to a seance of yourself
and apologize to their ghosts for not having the voice
to let them speak through you about
learning to swim with the stars further out of your depths
than you've ever been before. First you drown
in the fathomless immensities of even the smallest detail,
and then you bubble back up to the surface
of a multiverse with an oceanic awareness
of what's been hiding under every eyelid of a wave
like a overturned lifeboat that's waking up
to the fact that everything floats like the moon
in the reflection of its own mindstream.
And whatever sail you spot coming up over
your event horizon, whatever constellation
or black hole you take for a sign of salvation
or salvage, it first had to sink
before it could rise to the rescue.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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O No Witness To Me

O no witness to me you can't go,
though I long for it, you don't follow,
my shadow stops leaving itself behind as a sign.
I have been ungrammatized by the madness of scientific magic,
a waterclock of life boats I kept bailing out of
until I threw the baby out with the bathwater, mushy as soap.
I tore down the shrines of chaos as an act of irreverent devotion
and the dead thanked me for stealing what they couldn't give away.
Divine solace without earthly consolation,
I wanted to be crucified diagonally as a random act
of symbolic defiance, but I was buried
under an avalanche of skulls on the moon
and all these voices in my head that swear they're prophetic
keep baffling me with alternative universes
that have no interest in cultivating me as a way of life.

But you my heart, dark star, dying insurgent of my solitude,
homeless door into the open, your eyes more beautiful
than reflecting telescopes on a cold mountain
far from the city, I am a casualty of space, what hands
do I have to hold you with? Time has ripped out my tongue
like an autumn leaf, and the clouds gather, sweetness,
the clouds, hushed like a book-signing at a mortuary.

Whatever value I had once as a man has turned
against the mirror of miracles, the chthonic excellence
of elegizing the teen age suicides and untactical drunks
that curled up in a coma on the train tracks
as the inevitable came into view with a warning whistle.
I poured libations of poetry to beseech the poppy gods below
among their immortal bees, to explain something to them
gentle and soothing, cool honey on a burn. Delusional
but compassionate in a useless kind of way. A gesture
of ineptitude that swept me away in tears for how much
has yet be lost in the abyss of human affairs
that doesn't even taste of us after all these years.

At the window of wonder, if you don't throw
the moon through it, you're going to dropp like a fly.
No more questions to pin down like the head of a snake
to keep it from turning on you like the lethal insight
of a gamma ray burst into the nature of nothingness
across the great divide of the razorwire
that twinkles like stars that are deaf and dumb
to the wishes we make upon them. I wish I may,
I wish I might be seen by you as the missing wing
of your cosmic symmetry, and you, the dark matter of mine.
Could we fly? Could we shine? Could we go mad together
under your bedroom window in a connubium of moonlight
and even the insincere candles from the dollar store seem sublime?
This far out at sea, would you be my island galaxy,
would you let me be washed up on your coasts
among the drowned, my whole life flashing before your eyes
as I reached out for you ingenuously as the tide
leaves things at your door like nomadic starfish
and my fingers, almost touching your face,
as I have so many times imagined
an enlightened savage might your talismanic sorrows,
feathers of joy and sacred dirt in a sexual medicine bag?

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

poem by Wallace Stevens
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Real Turned On

Girl, before you go now
Theres one thing I wanted to do
Thats get you to come back
Because I wanna make love to you
Got me real turned on
Yes, you have
But theres something in your eyes
Telling me you have to go
Something in your eyes
But youre trying not to let it show
Got me real turned on
Next time you come over
Ill buy you a bottle of wine
Just take a little drink
And everything will turn out fine
Yes, it will
Whoa baby, do you know
What Ive got in mind
Can you guess what it is
Or do you want it on the line
Got me real turned
Got me real turned
Got me real turned
Got me real turned on

song performed by by Uriah Heep
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Willow-Minded Friend Of Mine

Willow-minded friend of mine
you're the star of Isis in the palm of my hand
that keeps me from drowning in a sea of glass.
How often have I been washed ashore
on the coasts of your flesh
like a naked sailor in an icestorm
of breaking chandeliers
and been taken to see the king
by a princess doing laundry?

A firefly in the distance
might be a great star up close
and your every breath
seed the whirlwind
with golden drops of rain
after the tempest has exorcised its pain
and you grow more beautiful picture by picture
like someone who wants to be redeemed
in her own eyes
for things that only she could be.

But that's not why I love you.
No siren no muse no priestess no witch
no shepherdess of exotic snakes
squirming with the future
like mystic themes around your body
no sacred whore ready to party in the temple
with Minervan night owls and Cepheid movie-stars
that don't want anybody to turn the lights on
to see what's going on in the darkness
they are to everybody,
you are to me more
than I have eyes to see
to the beginning and end of things
but I can feel the night within
flowing like dark energy through space
and tendrils of time growing like paisley lifelines
into something sweeter than the wine
the white mirror drinks from its own reflection.

Before the arising of signs
I can feel your presence moving in me
like unborn constellations playing chess with time
to see who shall be the blossom
who the root
who the leaf
and who shall prime the lightning of the vine.

Long before your veils are parted by no one
like rivers of insight
I can hear your stars
whispering things into my ear
that make whole worlds appear
rocking life in their arms like water.

Time is a mental space
with different flavours.
You taste like the wounded grace
of an eloquent truce with flowers
or as Dogen Zenji said in l238
the lucky day is when you discover it's all one day
meaning one chameleon
turning many different colours
to match the hours it spends
in front of the mirror
that keeps it guessing
who's the seer and who's the seen.
The grass turns red.
The flower turns green.

How long have I waited for you
like a tide on the moon to come in
like the spoke of a tree for a rim of stars
like a metaphor in the chrysalis of a dragonfly for wings
you could see through like a stained-glass window
divining the silence like a witching wand
in a waterless church?

And it's all just been a moment ago
that isn't at the discretion of birth and death
I learned to breathe with you on the moon
like some atmospheric fish
transformed by a new medium
into whatever you wished me to be
when I was the lifeboat
in the eye of the endless sea
that washed me out like a cinder
with the tears of a passing mindstream
as if I got in the way of my own dream
and you?

You were the mystic specificity
as you will always be
in the lunar pearl of it all
that sometimes doubles for my skull.

And isn't it funny how when the night screams
it's always an aurora
that everyone mistakes for dawn?
A snail of a comet smears the mirror and moves on
and it's as good a path as any to follow I suspect
if I had a destination in mind
that wasn't looping in retrograde like a noose.

I may be as footloose and fancy-free as a ghost
but there's no end of this longing
that keeps making me up as I go along
trying to be true and strong
to what I love the most about being dead.

I think of you
and I burn in the terrible clarity
of a light that's never fallen on anyone
as if illumination were endlessly eyeless.
I think of you
like water looking up at the moon as it rises
and I realize the wingless openness
of the dark gates before me
and pass through like a midnight sun
whose seeing evaporates in the morning
like visions and words and waterbirds
that have been transcendentally uplifted out of the graves
of their own reflections.

We are what we need to be to each other
without knowing what that is
like a phantom kind of picture-music
that's always changing its lyrics
to keep up with the mood of the times
whether it's the high definition tunnel vision
of the smokey beekeepers
trying to bring law to the unruly flowers
or the dark energy of an expansive space
driving the stars like exiles
into the absolute sublimity of a starless place
deep in the heart of God
that even creation can't fill
or we're just kicking pebbles down the road together
through clouds of white sweet clover
like afternoon companions of each other's solitude.

Time is the poetry of the eternal
when love sits by itself under its willow tree
and watches the stream pass by
like the flowing eye it drinks from.
I drink pellucidly on the moon
from old grails of sacred blood
like an ark that survived the flood
only to find itself abandoned like a farm
on a mountaintop with two of every kind
except for one

who made his way down alone with the alone
to sing his lover up out of the dead
as if he were missing one of his eyes
and the other had turned to stone.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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