Patrick White

And Should It Come Time To Speak Of The Sadness

And should it come time to speak of the sadness
that reaches fruition in the medicine bag of the heart,
don't bring a teacher that can't heal by singing and dancing
to the wounded discipline of a lost art that's gone
into the sacred solitude of the secret suffering
that upholds the integrity of the silence in your eyes.
This is a seeing that has nothing to do with truth or lies
or the innovative causality of pain. Don't speak
of its release as enlightenment or liberation,
as if you were uncaging doves from the ashes of your voice.
Don't seek what has eluded you when you're cloaked
in an eyeless night like the screening myth of a lonely alibi.

And should it come time to speak of the sadness
don't humble the message at the expense of the medium you choose
to weep in when the hidden urges you into the open
like a dragonfly emerging from the hovel of a chrysalis
into a palace of air with the wingspan of your diaphanous windows
beaded in tears like the afterbirth of the rain
in the post-natal mirrors of your indefinable awareness of life
as the sweetest agony of sorrow transformed into bliss
you ever had to endure like the darkest night
of a sea change in the unforeseeable nature
of your inconceivable soul trying to emulate
the unknown likeness you shapeshift to accommodate
the arrival and departure of everything you've ever had to let go of
like summer stars, and waterbirds, and legendary ordeals of love
when the full moon so often filled the empty silos of your longing
with the unsuccessful harvests of hungry ghosts
that competed with the sparrows and the scarecrows
for the seeds of a garden the wind neglected to sow.

And should it come time to speak of the sadness
that saturates all human affairs in an aura of mourning
that hangs in the air like a mingling of swords and bells,
don't pretend your life was a nuclear winter of unrelieved misery
when everyone knows if it weren't for trying to cling to joy
or even the longing for it, you might have smiled your way
through everything like the cold stone of the moon.
Remember those thoughts that used to come
like snakeoil salesmen that greased their sinusoidal way
into your heart like coiled serpent fire that mesmerized you
like the blue bird of happiness on your own projections
until the promise wore thin, and all your ploys at joy
turned out to be nothing but the hucksterism of tapeworms?
And, then, as it sometimes happened more often in autumn
than spring, your heart soared like a guitar with a broken string
taking wing like a waterbird off your tears
until you burned out like a comet with an uplifting message
in a niche that was meant for candles with slower wicks?
That kept you hanging onto life like a burning box kite didn't it?

And should it come time to speak of the sadness
like a sin of omission that overpowers us all eventually
because the best things we promised ourselves
were never unattainable and the joy we sought and fought
and laboured for, and did not find, was barely explainable
even to us who became experts in grinding mirages into lenses
to reveal where it might be hiding somewhere in the universe
right under our noses. Up close and as intimate as our eyes.

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Verses For Pictures

Day.

I am Day; I bring again
Life and glory, Love and pain:
Awake, arise! from death to death
Through me the World’s tale quickeneth.

Spring.

Spring am I, too soft of heart
Much to speak ere I depart:
Ask the Summer-tide to prove
The abundance of my love.

Summer.

Summer looked for long am I;
Much shall change or e’er I die.
Prithee take it not amiss
Though I weary thee with bliss.

Autumn.

Laden Autumn here I stand
Worn of heart, and weak of hand:
Nought but rest seems good to me,
Speak the word that sets me free.

Winter.

I am Winter, that do keep
Longing safe amidst of sleep:
Who shall say if I were dead
What should be remembered?

Night.

I am Night: I bring again
Hope of pleasure, rest from pain:
Thoughts unsaid ’twixt Life and Death
My fruitful silence quickeneth.

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Patrick White

Flowers Adrift On The Fragrance Of Their Own Foregoing

Flowers adrift on the fragrance of their own foregoing.
In the night that takes me under its wing
to shelter me from myself, arrival and passage of spring.

Fish nibble at the wafer of the moon on the tongue of the lake.
The wind bitter as a green apple with an innocent cruel side.
Saturn at dawn, Venus at dusk, things abide in their own good time

without knowing for whose sake they shine until the mind
can't keep a secret anymore and let's the heart know
what the heart has always known. Reason is colour blind.

Everything that's hidden out in the open isn't invisibly camouflaged
to look like God at a quick glance. Flowers don't dance
with their deathmasks on. Things may have changed

since I last walked here, but they haven't aged. Autumn
not an older season than spring, spring not younger than yesterday.
Water's never heard of a virgin birth that ends in a real death.

Silence of time as it appears to the spirit in a deepening sea of awareness.
Nothing disfigured. Nothing restored. Nothing scarred.
Nothing wounded in the moonlight, pleading to be healed.

Earth pungent with the expectations of urgent ghosts.
And dust in the eyes of the stars, the cries of Canada geese
with more longing in their voices than celebration

like the wailing of a train disappearing like smoke in the distance
from a sad fire in danger of going out. Exits and entrances galore
there are as many ways out of here as there is space and time to stay.

Bush wolves on a far hill agonizing over something in the night
like blues harps of blood. And in the heartwood of every leafing tree
I can hear the first violins of a symphony tuning up to the light

as if something sublime were about to begin with the first dropp of rain
pinging like a tintinnabulum beside the kettledrum of thunder at the back.
To speak now would be to conceal what I really feel in words.

Lavish with life, I reveal my voice in a rush of waterbirds
startled off the lake like a mantra of sacred syllables
that nuance the ripples they leave in their wake

with a whole new way of phrasing the light with eyes
that see things musically as they fall away from their wings
like the meaning of things when meaning isn't necessary.

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Good bye sadness

Good bye Sadness
She is so happy now
That you are out of her mind
You finally vanished
Good bye Sadness
Why are you called Sadness?
Because that’s the name they given you
You make people cry
You even made her cry too many times
There was a dark cloud hanging in her eyes
For a long tine
And now it is gone
Good bye sadness
She doesn’t need to see you again
You are also painful
Good bye sadness
You belong in the sad Sea
Where the pain lays
Among the dead fishes
In that sad Sea
The oil from that big ship and vessels
Pollutes this sad Sea
She doesn’t want to be a part of the Sad Sea either
Because it is sad to see
All that wild life dies
Good bye sadness
You never had anything good to offer her anyway
Pain and more pain you brought her all through those years
But the truth is that she had to go through it
To appreciate the good stuff
Yes sadness I can tell you she went through with it
For a long time
Good bye sadness
Please stay away from her forever
She doesn’t need you in her life
Sadness breaks everybody’s hearts
Her heart was broken too many times
By you sadness
Good bye sadness

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Never Ending Sadness

Tears I shed with feelings unknown.
Pain so deep I think I'll explode.
My loneliness that drives me insane.
The smile I put with no one to blame.

My heart's pieces lost in this world,
And I'm tide with grief to seek alone.
Im slowly trying to leave my grief,
to eventually find that missing piece.

The piece of happiness that my heart needs
The true smile my cheeks seek.
The warming love to dry my tears.
'Oh I really miss yall dear.'

It seems forever I will cry
And with a heart of sadness I shall die,
With a heart as cold as ice,
And a grief that slowly took my life.

Never ending sadness deep within.
Hoping happiness will some day win,
And one day leave these tears behind,
And have a smile all the time.

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Inconsolable longing

Inconsolable longing
Restless heart why yearn
The way not taken,
Love in the spring
Scent of flowers unseen
Seldom lasts the winter
Words left unspoken
Silence unkind silence
Burning bridges
Before they are crossed
Loves promise arrested
A beautiful sadness
Rose that never blooms
Seeds unsown love unknown
Distracted we glance away
Searching for tomorrow
Betraying the now
Of inconsolable longing
Love is not in the possessing
Nor moulding or changing
Dream wishes fade in time
Forever out of reach
To experience Joy is Joy
We cannot cling to it
Or call it to our side
Often surprised by Joy
We seek to mimic or bind
Such Beautiful sadness
Discovered in the moment,
Being and becoming is joy
Echoes the melody unheard
Beyond the beyondness
An inconsolable longing
Affirms we are strangers
In a strange world
Longing for home
Light of wisdom…
Whispers…
Come.

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Patrick White

Since I Was A Child

Since I was a child, this longing in my heart
for something I can't even name, but keeps
drawing me into it like a unfulfilled abyss,
unattainably alluring, but the space
saturated with pain as if time itself were grieving
like the white noise of the cosmic background,
or the love of a created thing for this that has come
would always be left unanswered and unrequited.
Times I've thought the emptiness, because
nature abhors a vacuum, was life's way
of enticing me into the available dimensions of the future,
a furtherance of me as a means of achieving its own ends.
I could blunder my way toward it as the labour of my life
in pursuit of an earthly excellence radiant with stars,
sublime as a root, with the dynamic equilibrium of a tree
that had weathered many storms in the name
of a beautiful absurdity that adorned the heart
with the tenderness of fireflies without losing
any of the impact of a life-changing meteor shower.

Maybe I'm just chasing ghosts of the unborn
who should have been and my longing's
a kind of mourning that confuses the past
with what's missing when it's really the future
that's suffered a miscarriage, and the way
a woman's body grieves like a planet
for a shepherd moon that's lost, I sense
the devastation of the coming years and my heart
aches with compassion for what is yet to be lived through
and all I can do is retain a future memory
of the bloody rose I can see in the bedsheets
of a spiritual hemorrhage we'll wake up beside
one morning like a shattered window
into the souls and hearts and minds we denied
any possibility of life to because
we hoarded our potential for love so lethally.

Life keeps its balance by constantly adapting
to its growing awareness of what it's made of itself
as do we making it up as we go along approximating
the probable concourse of affairs spontaneously.
You might say consciousness, the light that each
has been given to go by, is what evolution
looks like on the inside, urgent with creation.
The gathering. The mingling. The dissipation.
All the eddies and currents of thought and emotion
writing on the mindstream sometimes in Kufic script,
sometimes Irish kells, or maybe just heavy-hearted bells
that like to write their own songs and sing them
to no one but themselves, as if the mystery
of their sadness were sweeter kept than told.

I came like a stranger to the burnt gate
of my unsurvivable longing, and it was open
as if it had been waiting for me, and I walked barefoot
in the ashes of the flowers that were being emptied
like the urns of many past lives on the wind,
until I came to one that bloomed like a waterlily of fire,
a blossom of enlightenment, a sun that shone at midnight,
and for awhile, as still happens from time to time,
I walked in my own profusion like a garden again
so alone with a blue moon in Pisces only
the most courageous of lovers could enter my solitude
like the fruits of the earth, like a windfall of stars,
like a gust of fireflies out to make constellations of us all
that evolve, as circumstances change, into intimate zodiacs
that keep us all fire walking on our mindstream
like maple leaves in an autumn that just won't go out
like inspiration and life and longing, the mystery
in the beautiful eyes of the muses of crazy wisdom.

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Seasons of Promise

Winter is a time of warmth when I am close to you
A time of sharing stories and of praising what is true
The cold wind can be daunting when one is all alone
But Winter is a time of warmth when I am close to you

Spring is filled with wonderment when I am close to you
A time of bursting energy and life so bold and new
The rain can be quite chilling when one is all alone
But Spring is filled with wonderment when I am close to you

Summer's light is restful when I am close to you
As nature paints a picture with pleasing greens and blue
The heat can be exhausting when one is all alone
But Summer's light is restful when I am close to you

Autumn days are crisp and clear when I am close to you
The reds and golds come once again, yet always seem so new
Letting go brings sadness when one is all alone
But Autumn days are crisp and clear when I am close to you

I will be with you in Winter when snow is thick and cold
I will be with you in Springtime when new life is taking hold
I will be with you in Summer when sun and growth abound
I will be with you when Autumn's old life decorates the ground

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Black Snow

Winter has come
He'll show us
What will come upon
The forever lasting signs

Flowers shall wilt
And never grow again
Trees and us have died in Winter's wrath
He have only hallowness
Filled with dread

Does he have darkness in his heart?
Is pain all he seeks?
Yet he have sadness in his eyes
Is pain all he seeks?

We shall wilt
And never grow again
We died upon Winter's wrath
We shall filled his hallowness
Filled with only dread

But, Winter's tears fallen upon us
Expecting ice to stab thee
Cold as his heart we have expected
For coming at us
Is the cold snow of his sadness

His sadness is greater than his hate
His loss is greater than our pain
He murdered us for a reason
Probably he knows that Spring will never revive us
Spring have died with the Earth and tribe

Sadness in his heart?
The pain is what he has left
Yet there is greif in his blackened heart
Is salvation all he seeks?
His pain will finally fall apart

His heart is broken
And forever more, he will never have love again
Spring have died in human's wrath
For his heart is hallow
His tears shall bury us
In black snow

(12-6-09)

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Early Works - Is It The Love In Me

Sadness is showing in my eyes
deep within the softness of the night.
Is it love I feel
or an illusion
of something that could never be real?

My heart is bouncing like a spring
as echoing in my ears are bells
chiming in concession with each other,
but how can this be
love should never come to me.

The confessions of my mind
delude my sense of reason
that it has built a myth within heart,
a falsity of fragments t
hat falsify the true facts of love and life.
Knowing love is a once in a lifetime thing
I know only sadness, it will never come to me.

My life is lost
in the boundaries
where romantics lie
in the solitude of tranquillity
where only the sounds of passion herald
near the wayward tombs of love
and only the sounds of sleeping
elude the silence of the night.

Encrusted in a velvet sky
are diamond shaped gleams of stars in the heavens
and a gold crusted ball of light - the moon,
which is said to be
a lovers light of peace and tranquillity,
but like all symbolic features of love
it has a falsity to fact,
for lovers need no moon to love
and much prefer when it is lacked.

Though all these falsities
are based on things of my past.
Could love be real?
Can it really last?
Or is my imagination taking over
my heart, my mind, my body, my soul, and my life
or is it love that has me in its grasp.

My mind tells me to deny the fact,
my heart wants me to believe it,
and so in my conquest of heart and mind
I believe my heart and fall for you.
Its all right for me,
but you - you are afraid
that I will hurt you.
In this confession,
my heart and my mind give a promise.

Never to break your heart
for I find you are the only one I love.
These words are from the heart,
not from the mind
and tell of the true deep feeling.
Although I fell I cannot tell you,
my feeling do not count
and once again like every time before
the priceless thing in life I must forfeit
as it seems my destiny is to live without love.


13 August 1968

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Sometimes In Your Sadness

sometimes in your sadness
the flying sparrows of the fields
are nothing but dry leaves blown by a
very dry wind towards the mountains

in your sorrow the roses blooming
along your paths become nothing but
lumps of mud sticking to their thorny branches
and the leaves are but trash paper
bound for some burning turning to ash

sometimes in your long mourning
you do not see the shining stars
and you wish that the moon and sun
may altogether stop making the nights and days.

you wish total darkness. You like that
everything becomes mute and blind and deaf.
Your friends and those who love you have
became straw men on the rice fields. They
have become to you utterly useless.

Just because the person you love had perished.
Everything has become useless.
The world looks at you and asks: Is there only one
person who is lovable that all those creatures
around you become nothing?

The world understands and mourns with you
only for a while. They have counted the time. They have
waited for so long. They cannot endure sorrow. They
have all other beautiful things to enjoy, joys to savor.
They are impatient now. Sorrow has a beginning. It has
also an end. Sadness cannot be forever. There is no such
thing as overwhelming sorrow.

Now they have contempt for you. The length of your sadness
has exceeded the limits that they have set. The boundaries
of joy, and bliss and happiness have been encroached.
Look over there. There is happiness waiting. There is dancing
over the other fence. They are waiting for you.

Do not frustrate them. They have mourned with you.
And it is over. Now you have to be with them too.
They love life. They like to sing. They like to jump with joy.

Now that you have come back to your senses.
Sadness is over. Let us begin the first step to happiness.

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Patrick White

This Is An Old Sorrow

This is an old sorrow, almost beautiful in the way
it underwhelms me from above, a sky caving in
like a circus tent under the weight of the rain,
a ghost of fruit that could not bear the weight of its tears.
This is a random sadness that's got me as its only friend
when it thaws like a mirror
looking back over its shoulder
at its glacial past, ex-lovers, friends, certain pets,
and eyes that were glass weeping
in the intense mystic heat of a blast furnace full of stars
for how little they understood at the time, things pass
like Canada geese migrating across the moon
like a river you can't step into twice.
Though it doesn't make any sense to say so.
This is an ancient sorrow. And though one direction
is as good as many, I'm still following
the herds of the grazing stars as far north as I can.

O we shall sit down on the good earth half lotus sometime
and cry together for the wound of being alive.
The rose has teeth. And celebrate the scars
in the herb garden as if they were crescent moons.
Or the eyes of a powerful wraith of sadness
saturating the atmosphere with the pathos
of a lament that's been sublimely burning
through its heart for lightyears
like some deep emptiness it knows can never be filled.

As if God would never be enough for herself
and the whole of the universe were
one long maternity of endless creation
that is manifested in its entirety in each one of us
the way the moon's reflected in a dropp of blood
hanging from the thorn of a rose
with the last of two beautiful sunsets for eyes
like the sheen of auroral silk glancing off the scales
of a black watersnake at nightfall when the swallows go in
and the bats come out on the nightshift
like the winged heels of some demonic messenger
with minions that squeal in a frequency too high to hear.

But however you send it, by sound or by silence,
by light or by night, be assured the message you send
however time and space bend things
is the message that's received, like a bee by a flower
or a star by the eye that transcribes it creatively
into hieroglyphic metaphors of picture-music
following a dream grammar of starmud
with a bird stuck in its voice like a phoenix in the Arctic.

Time washes the dust of the road off
by shedding the moonlight like a snake's skin
and skinny-dipping in the fathomless lakes of eternity
it finds along the way like eyes along the mindstream
full of stars and fireflies and what blooms in the soil of its sorrows
beside the stairs at the back doors of all those tomorrows
that left the way they came without saying good-bye.

Volcanic lunar oceans that are only as deep
as the dark tears I have left within me
when I dip the leaking cup of my heart
like the goblet of an impact crater
into a watershed of compassion that looks like the holy grail
and share it with my fellow mirages in this desert of stars
as if they were all as thirsty as I am and everyone
deep down inside somewhere within them
like the green star you can find at the core of an apple,
had a fountain within them like a moon dial or a wine glass
they smashed on the high notes of the nightbirds
just to express their joy as a kind of defiance
in the face of their lots in life, though, in fact
nothing is longer or shorter than anything else in eternity
just as there's only so much time and then there is forever.
And it's the black magic in the roots of a demon
that blossoms like Venus in the west
or New England asters up around Westport in the fall.

And though there's something beautiful in this sadness
that eludes me like a Braille starmap
I can't quite put my finger on to see what's shining
like Aldebaran through the tree line of a bride in a widow's veils,
as I listen to a whisper of flesh
pleading in the darkness not to be excluded
from the presence of time, or left behind by the spirit
like a false clue of cast off rags on a hawthorn bush
to say where it's gone forever and ever and ever
as if whatever the spirit and the flesh had
going on between them never mattered,
whenever the clarity cuts through
the thin-skinned mirror like this
as if it were trying to slash my eyes open
like an insight into what's beyond the obvious,
immediately out of a wounded mouth
I am healed by the balm in a voice of compassion
that rises sweetly like the new moon from the womb
of a scarred guitar that didn't know it had such music in it.

And it says in moonlit windows and nightbirds
that make all the dreaming children wake up and listen
to the intimate strangers that speak as gently as fireflies
to the vast nightskies of their own imaginations,
that the world that casts these shadows on your wall
like a crow preening its feathers, or a bell
that's lost its faith in knowing, and plunges like an apple
into its next afterlife, are merely the holy petals
and sacred syllables taken like pages from the Book of Life
left out like an orchard in a nightwind for every one to read
like a story each of us writes for ourselves
to help us drift gently off into sleep again
to find out how it all ends in a dream that goes on forever
like the fragrance of lilac in an old woman's memories
or the marrow of the apple bloom
that clings like the moon to our bones
or stars to the flypaper stairwells of our chromosomes.

No other way to explain the shining of this sadness deep within
as if my very blood mourned the passing of the things
that have drowned and disappeared into it over the years
like honey-bees in the lees at the bottom of a black tulip
full of rainwater, and by that I know
this is a sadness common to all
that's worthy of the stars in its windows,
and the dreams in the mirrors that paint our faces
like quick watercolour life studies of rainbows in tears.

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In This Poem

in this poem when i speak
about myself in sadness
actually i speak about the
sadness of the whole world,

from a mole i move to the mountain
from one apple we move from the apple to one
and one is intangible
and one is invicible
and one is universal

like a fan with many fingers
but it is the fan of the world

so when i speak about a woman
on love unrequited i may start with a name
like a rose, or a woman named Helen of Troy
or just a plain Maria
whose sadness is as specific as
my own sadness but when it is written in poetry
and read by everyone
Maria is lost what is taken in is the sadness of the world

it is just like us: there is no ric anymore or a candice or
anyone else but just the universal man
the universal woman

because the poem is an expression of the world
unto itself
we become mere specks of dusts
sands of time's cannister

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Through My Eyes

Leaving through the back door
Freezing in the cold
Communication breakdown
Emotional overload
Been through a wall of fire
Now I feel like, the ashes glow
Cars passing on the freeway
My mind is on the run
I keep running from my shadow
Im not the only one
Somewhere in the distance
Someones taking flight
Destination unknown
Just fade into the light
Theres so much said and done
But after all
The time has come, to leave it all
Behind
If you could see it through my eyes
Yous know I tried to change it all
Ive been trying all my life
To stand up every time I fall
If you could see it through my eyes
I feel sadness up my spine
The future on my hands
Im standing here alone
With open arms again
Tomorrow aint no stranger
Therell be a lucky star
And love will find its way
Into someones heart
Too late for tears
No time to be confused
Its just the echo of our
Swan song
If you could see it through my eyes
Yous know I tried to change it all
Ive been trying all my life
To stand up every time I fall
If you could see it through my eyes
Youd see that love will always wait
Somewhere out there is my life
A new love that comes my way
If you could see it through my eyes
Through my eyes
What was meant to be forever
Is breaking all apart
What was meant to be forever
Leaves the hole inside my heart
What was meant to be forever
We throw it all away
What was meant to be forever
Was nothing but a game
What was meant to be forever
Is breaking all apart
What was meant to be forever

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Patrick White

These Words Turn Homeward

These words turn homeward
toward you, my dark wood,
because of all assignations of the night
you are West, you are dream and secret
you, deeper than jewels, sweeter
than the taste of stars
in the eyes of wounded black berries.
You, longing and lucidity,
singing in the last of the shadows
of the sacred trees for the unattainable
that summons me to you.
Endless, the farewell, endless
the dusk the nightbirds follow
after the swallows
have danced for the stars
in an aerial display of their own.
You, my star field, my wildflower,
whose skin is the skin of lunar waterlilies
and the tide at the tips of my fingers.
My new moon, my despair,
my solitude, my silence, my absence
which among these thousand lonely lakes
has looked upon you and seen
as I have seen in your incomprehensible eyes
how unfathomable they are to themselves
in your depths, your death,
the fullness of your abiding evanescence.
the quiet intimacies
that have just crept up on me
over these intervening years
that have done nothing
but linger in the moment
as if you would always be there
and could be found nowhere else
but now forever in this doorway
this broken window into my heart
to let go of
over and over and over again
like the rain, this stone, that leaf,
the wraith of your breath
hovering like a thin autumn mist
always at a distance over the harvested fields.
O diminished one, subtle one, free,
how is it you can inspire me still
though your ashes were given back to the stars
like a message for their eyes only
so many years ago that time itself
has upgraded all my starmaps
and made you alone, far one, bright one,
this lonely holy road that’s walking me home
as if my final destination, like yours, like you
were everywhere in whatever direction I turn
to ask the next star, where you’ve gone,
has it seen you, has it heard
was it too soon, was it too early
is it too late, too perilous, too absurd
for the morning to return you
like a singing bird to a green bough
to the dead branch that lost the moon
like its only blossom
on the rootless tree
that it took you from
when it took you from me?

poem by Patrick WhiteReport problemRelated quotes
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Speak The Word

Unsettled hearts
Promise what they cant deliver
Bring me the wine
And the cold night air to clear my head
Gray matter memory house
Master of this trembling flesh
Steady still my doubts
Let me speak the word that precedes bliss
Let me speak the word
Let me speak the word
Love love love love love love love love
Let me speak the word
Let me speak the word
Love love love love love love love love
Let me speak the word
Let me speak the word
Let me speak the word
Let me speak the word
These weakened knees
Have not touched ground or pew in ages
I havent bowed my head
I offer thanks to any God or to ask for favors
But watch me now
Im falling down
Praying
To speak the word that precedes bliss
To speak the word
To speak the word
Love love love love love love love love
Let me speak the word
Let me speak the word
Love love love love love love love love
Let me speak the word
Let me speak the word
Let me speak the word
Let me speak the word

song performed by by Tracy ChapmanReport problemRelated quotes
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The Eyes Are Windows

The eyes are windows of the heart
Wherein transparency will show
A myriad feelings to impart
From where in sadness, tears do flow.

The eyes will say contents of heart
The speech two lovers freely speak,
For Silence eloquently starts
Romance in muted communique.

The eyes are windows of all cares,
Display the sad and wearied soul;
Distant looks and empty stares
Reveal a man who is not whole.

His weak attempts to somehow hide
What's clearly felt and seen-
Will showcase all the stuff inside
Deep secrets of where love had been.

The eyes are windows too of kindness
Touching looks that give embrace,
Blessing one words of forgiveness
Of bitter hurts there is no trace.

The eyes of Love are open windows,
Giving joy, shared happiness;
Reaching forth to let one know
It always seeks to bless with goodness.

-----
(Written May 4,2009 Tarlac City Philippines)

poem by Cynthia Buhain-BaelloReport problemRelated quotes
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The Poem of Unrequited Love..with a twist

The love you speak of
is mesmerizing.
You speak of acacias
and of the happy childhood
memories they bring you.
You compare me to those acacias
although by the time I met you
childhood was far gone.
You speak of their lovely scent on the breeze
and it fills your heart with such
longing and love
that I see tears come to your eyes.
You tell me that you no longer
have to see acacias for them to
bring you happiness.
You are happy simply because they are.
You tell me this is how you feel about me.
I am very quiet.
part of me optimistic; trying to soak in
and feel the love you are telling me-
part of me is pessimistic, in mourning-
knowing that i will never be able to feel this love.

poem by Noemi LeeReport problemRelated quotes
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Patrick White

Up On Heartbreak Hill At Night

Up on Heartbreak Hill at night
with a 2.4 inch,60 mm, refracting telescope,
a cat, and a journal of poems,
deciphering those immensities of sky
as if every star were the sacred syllable
of an inconceivable intelligence that explained
everything in light, and the light were singing.

Earth noises in the broom bushes and Douglas firs.
The air rife with the spirits of those
who had their necks broken here by a prison noose,
and had more of a right to be here than I did
who felt like an intrusive guest in their house
even though the darkness was common ground.

Eventually they learned to ignore me
as just another adolescent longing for eternal responses
to the expiry date on life and love,
and not one of them without a silent understanding
of what a star could mean through the bars
on the windows of their prison cells.

Up here on the hill I was a temple above
the imperial rhetoric of toppled garbage cans
expurgating on the fate of fallen empires
that took themselves way too personally in restrospect
than they did at the time, as if the wound,
even the children had to amend like a religion,
grew deeper and more volatile with age.
Up here, just the executed ghosts of perversity and rage.

The whisper of something beautiful
no one could smear, soil, smudge,
out of touch, though I caressed
the skin of the stars as if it were as smooth
as the lenses and mirrors I used
to watch the fragile radiance of how they danced
so intimately across the apertures
of my field of vision trembling before
their scintillation the way I used to make
some spiders vibrate in the morning
like sewing machines or the clappers on fire alarms
by simply touching their webs
as if all the strings on a Spanish guitar
were trip wires in a terrorist museum.

Light as the only liquid in a desert
for many dangerous miles around,
the stars were cool jewels of water to me.
I could almost taste them like the tartness
of wild blackberries on my lips, lemons,
the deadly nightshades of experimental girlfriends
testing out cartridges of new lipstick
the first time we kissed in the shadows
of the new moon behind the abandoned warehouse.

It's impossible to see a star as it is
until it's become part of your love life
or, at least, until you can learn to flirt with the light
like a firefly at the window
of this thirteenth house of solitude
where the homeless gather like an avalanche
of the misplaced cornerstones of condemned temples
that like the stars, are always updating their past
about things that shine, but don't last.
If the medium is the message, and it is and it isn't,
then seeing must be a kind of love as well.
I saw the stars through the eyes of the stars.
I felt the weight of the billions of years
there wasn't even a one-eyed sea to look back at them
for intimate insights into its own impersonality.

Hard stars in the winter, soft stars in the summer.
Stars can see further into the darkness of the human heart
when it's cold out for everyone and clarity
stops breathing on the mirror like evanescent nebulae
sensitizing the light to the chromatic aberrations
of the disappearing veils and crushed rainbows
synchronously aligned with my poetry at the time.

I could feel the passage of the stars
like migrating Canada geese in the autumn
the shamans read like rosaries in retrograde orbits,
an abacus of wandering planets, and one,
whose name was unknown
rooted in the ground of itself like a strange silence
that had whispered the world into its own ear
like the dark secret of light upon light
as everyone looked up like mirrors
with tears in their eyes as big as lenses
trying to overhear what was clearly not hidden
through the keyhole of a telescope up on Heartbreak Hill
when seeking wasn't a way of avoiding what was revealed.

poem by Patrick WhiteReport problemRelated quotes
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We Drank The Sadness

Come! !
Solitude, my friend
Accompany me tonight.
come! !
sit to my side
and bring your glass and pour in it
the sadness of solitary hearts.

Take their tears, put yours and take mine.
Let´s allow them to ferment a while
until they are converted into wine,
that tonight I want to get drunk
with the wine of sadness.

Tonight, in your company, I'll not only
drink your sadness and the sadness of world
but, rather, I´ll get drunk myself with my heart´s sadness
and the solitude of my soul.

Come solitude!
Let´s leave to walk and let´s scream to the world
that tonight we drank its sadness
and the drunkenness of the sadness
in happiness it finished! !

poem by Enrique Alberto Hurtado MinottaReport problemRelated quotes
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On the Face of the Moon

I feel your pain running deep,
By the light of the moon I see you weep,
Lost and lonely in a crowd,
You shout your thoughts out loud,
Is there nothing sacred on earth?
Is there no love without dirt?

Your heart is on the moon,
Craters filled with gloom,
To whom will you turn,
Loves ashes fill the urn,

Why, oh why, did I forget?
This is no time for regret,
I should have taken more time,
Your pain is greater than mine,
It's never too late, love can be great!
Love lost, need not be your fate!

Your heart is on the moon,
Craters filled with gloom,
To whom will you turn,
Loves ashes fill the urn,

They never meant to cause you pain,
Love lets them live their game,
We watch and learn about life,
There is no need for strife,
I'll wait for you on the face of the moon,
Stars shining bright, lift the gloom,

Your heart in the clouds,
Far from the crowds,
Eyes bright as stars,
Life might be better on Mars?

April 2012

poem by David Andre' KlopperReport problemRelated quotes
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