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And This Night

And this night that is ending,
bruising into the blue of an impossible rose,
and the windows opening their eyes to the light
that pales the stars from the sky like dreams;
and a man trying to keep the starving candle in his skull
from going out, the emptiness of the dark from demanding
oblivion from the day, the mouth of the morning
no beginning, but the start of a busy grave;
how can he tell his heart what his eyes already see
in the mirrors that mourn like hired grief,
some distant galaxy expanding into space,
some island of light in the forsaken depths of time,
that he's already the ghost of a future memory,
that a silo of ashes isn't enough to feed the flame
of the fire he's cherished in the boat of his hands
like a wounded bird he taught to sing for years,
and how to fly higher than the world is kind
like a hawk with broken wings, or an injured mind?

I see eyes in the dark soaked up like rain,
wildflowers in a field, the keys of unbound clocks,
and they're staring at me on a rocky precipice alone,
the lip of a vast abyss where even the winds don't go,
and they seem to know who I am, and why I must suffer
more deeply than the words of an eloquent man
who no longer answers his pain in silver tongues
but stands voiceless in the gulf of the silence before him,
mute, broken, baffled, a ladder stripped of rungs.

poem by Patrick White
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Were There Stars

Were there stars in your hair that night?
I cannot remember,
so taken with your face
and the mystery and the silence and the sorrow
of the tender bell in your eyes
that could summon ghosts
of yesterday's embodiments to the fire
of any passion that lost itself prophetically
at a rave of shadows among the trees.
You eased out of your wardrobe of rivers
like a snake on the moon
sloughing its skin like the eclipse
of a far more vulnerable shining,
and I couldn't tell if you were
a doe or a lynx
stepping out of the alder groves warily
to lap the moonlight
that flaked the shore
with the silver petals of an undulant rose
older and darker than night blood.
I could feel the danger within you,
the abyss of the early grave
that waited for you like a key
to come in out of the pain
that bled you like a shadow
pouring out of an open wound
that whispered to you like a secret scream
only the dead who owned you could hear.
Your hunger desperately sought salvation
from the eyes
that pleaded with you
to blow yourself out like a candle,
cancel the inevitability of your suffering
with the shudder and sigh of sex.
We lay down naked together
by the willow-stained waters
in that summer of flesh
and sought oblivion from each other
like two compatible cremations
that concealed a ravenous phoenix
ending its fast of fire.
Purified by the depth and darkness
of your intensities,
I burned in you
and felt the flames
of a dangerous angel
who had broken her afterlife like a curfew
flow over me
like dawn at a keyboard of feathers.
Your breasts still come up overnight
like supple mushrooms against my chest
and the moist heat of your mouth
throbbing with flowers like July
as you seized your joy
from the agony of the roots you tormented
to give up their dead
like bruised cherries.
I have never died as fully since
at the insistence
of any woman's appetite
nor known a night so final,
so brutal with time and beauty
as the pendulous moon swung
like an executioner's ax
over the nape of its own reflection
swanning on the waters.
We made love as if
we were both defying
the truth we didn't need to say.
I wanted to plead with you,
I wanted to call out into your emptiness
like a beseeching bird
disappearing into a dark valley,
but my voice ran ahead of its echo like light
and the things I would have asked you
not to do
had already been achieved.
Heroin, your asp,
at the funeral I stood back
beyond the baffled wreaths of flowers
and the ambivalent silence
of the modest gathering that mourned you,
maculate in the shadows
of the Japanese plum tree
we once made love under
and I kissed the rose of your blood
shedding in mine
like a wound
my love was never sword enough to heal
as they closed
and boarded you over like a well.
I spent the night like an empty vase
beside your grave
until the stars that bloomed above you like wildflowers
thawed my tears in the morning light.
I walked out of the cemetery
through the hard harps and spears
of its iron gates
and I have never been back.
The years since have been
chameleonic as a hooker
who plys her art
on the stairs of a temple
even the priests of my lust
are forbidden to enter,
but as you said I would
as you lay with me that night
like a knife beside the sea,
I have returned to you over and over again
like a witching wand
looking for water in hell,
like a cult of one to a lost island
that holds you like a secret
and wept like a candle of honey
in the dark hive of your unanswerable silence,
intoning the names
of an impossible god
on a rosary of black suns
until my heart hangs like a bell
dumb with grief
looking up at the stars
you rinsed like a tide from your hair.
And I lean on the crutch and the crook
of a shepherd's question,
looking everywhere for you
like the wind
sweeping the shadows of fireflies
like the fall of hair from your eyes
that night you tore yourself away from me
like a veil of blood and sorrows
wounded by the terrible light
of the black pearl
that ripened within you like the skull
of a full eclipse.
O my poor, broken angel,
you might have been fat and frumpy by now
if you had lived.
I could have watched your beauty
shed like the moon over the years,
and smile like an island
to remember how lost I was in your tides once,
a constellation of starfish
tumbled like dice in your dark undertow,
trying to shine, god, how
I tried to shine for you, how
I ached to embrace your planet safely
in the mandala of an empowering radiance
that could show you
I was worth living for
if nothing else.
Given the freedom
of the emptiness that engulfed us both,
we could have lived within each other,
we could have evolved our own atmospheres,
appointed our own stars,
written our own myths of origin
on the black pages of that journal of skies
where you scribbled down the events
of your pre-emptive afterlife
as if you wanted to make your ghost indelible.
As it was, the only thing I could do,
was take you in
like the last breath of a summer night
I could never let go of
without following it
like a shadow of you into death.
I haven't wished for much over the years,
and the dreams have come and gone as they will,
and my hair has gone gray
and my eyes are looped like powerlines
and the sad bells of a heavy solitude
that has yoked me to the grindstone of the turning world
to mill the stars like a tide
on the blood wheel of a worn heart.
I finally burned and broke all the weeping mirrors
I consulted like half-assed mediums
to see if I could restore you somehow
to the more intimate shining of that last night
you turned and ran back,
your shoes in your hand,
to make sure your final kiss would endure like a temple.
You pitied the agony of shapeshifting
you knew the black water ahead
was about to go through
as it smashed like goblets and crystal chandeliers
on the roaring skulls of the rocks.
You pitied me because you knew I loved you,
because you knew you were already
a future memory
and I was a prophecy from the past
that had ridden beyond itself like light
to illuminate nothing but your absence
measured in the filaments and lifelines
of eyeless oceans
like a seabird
circling a blind lighthouse on the moon.

poem by Patrick White
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Distant Light

Distant light flickers an invitation of hope.
In reaching it, there will be sanctification.
Dimness that surrounds the eyes
will be forgotten.
Black holes that open the heart
will be discarded.
Let the distant light come closer.
Let the distant light be a friend.

Shallow water cannot drown soul.
It can only hinder the passage.
Dampening the spirit as it frolics
like a moonbeam across the mind.
Distance lends unhappiness.
Let the distant light shine bright.
Let the distant light be a guide.

In closets of blackness the hands
seek an opening in the shadows.
They find nothing, but the eyes
focus on a distant light that
calls like a radio in the night.
Let the distant light embrace.
Let the distant light be closer.

In an emptiness of broken glass
there is a pattern to salvation.
Frame the light like fire in the glance,
walk towards it. Find escape.
Let the distant light be strong.
Let the distant light shine forever.

What is the distant light that shines?
What is its meaning in a journey?
This is an answer not easily explained.
This is a hope not readily known.
Let the distant light continue.
Let the distant light always shine.

poem by Chris G. Vaillancourt
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With Fingers Of Sand

WITH FINGERS OF SAND

With fingers of sand, with hands of water
with hearts fuller than apples with night,
we reach out to pluck the orchid on the moon,
to touch beauty on the wing,
the coal swan with feathers of flame,
the shadows that wear our face,
the skin of a waterleaf of gold
that evaporates like an eyelid of dust,
the pilgrim on the smoke-road of the candle,
the black panther in an oildrum,
and the vision is blanched from the seeing
like the albumen of an egg,
the albino leper cooked in the mouth of the moon,
we reach out for what exceeds us,
for the dark thresholds of blood
in the palace of the rose,
the vivid windows of the sea
with their curtains of light and salt,
the green chandeliers of the rain,
the hidden excellence of the early wood sorrel
that whispers to us from its solitude,
shy secrets, indigo birds of paradise
with harps of eloquent feathers,
the laments and deadly night shades
of the alone with the alone in a shadowless abyss.

And there's the predicate of an unexpected jewel
sewn into the lining of everything;
even the flies are touched by rainbows
and the morning lifts her gown
and wades gloriously through the oilslicks,
hummingbirds in the sour trumpets of the weeds,
jungle parrots painting passion fruit
with palettes of stuttering neon,
hard oyster hearts that bed with pearls. Everyone
reveres the beauty of the wine on the lips
of the unsayable quality of being
that supersedes them, a facet of the turning jewel
that falls like the eyelash of an angel,
a winged samara of autumn dusk
into the seeing, and for a moment as long as life
they touch the pulse of an ageless longing
and feel beating within them
in a panic of wonder and joy,
the radiance of the starbound dove
caught in the throat of the chimney.

Even the worst have known the nightsky reach down
and wipe the stains from their eyes,
or felt embraced by a warm summer rain
that polished their skin like heritage silver
and remembered it for the rest of their lives.
For me, the chalice in the ore is you;
for me, you are all lenses, all mirrors
dewed by the waterveils of the mystery
in the early morning dark before creation
begins itself anew. My heart is seized by the fire-trance
of a sacred silence, the word within the word
as if wax suddenly discovered the flame
whose dancing made its flesh melt in a luminous consummation.
Even seared in the igneous cages of my heart,
an iron tiger baring its worn fangs
to the torment of the staring, when I think of you,
a nightbird with gates for wings
brings me a star and a key
and the bars turn into the pillars of palatial winds,
and an openness lies before me that tastes of lilacs and rain.
For years I've been witching for water in hell,
for years I've been diving for corpses in quicksand,
living like a squall in a shipwreck
under the eyes of a pleading lighthouse,
and the morning was just the morning
and the night was just the night,
and I thought it would go on like this
until I stared myself to death,
believing there was only the suffering
and the emptiness, and the suffering
and the black, mute bells of the wingless seabirds.
Now there's a planet that gleams like an eye
in the peacock silks of the twilight,
and a woman standing in the last shadows of the willow
like a doorway, like a ghost on a wharf,
like the depths of an urgent spear.

PATRICK WHITE

poem by Patrick White
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These Days, This Late At Night

These days, this late at night, I'm usually a lone wolf sage
high above the timberline in a sanctuary of solitude
that occasionally breaks the silence
with the elegaic echo of the anquished shriek of a hawk
wheeling in the abyss like the stars overhead
feeling as if its flightfeathers just caught fire
and for a few brief moments no longer
than the wingspan of a wavelength
it was shining like them and there were jewels
like a woman's eyes cracking the rock
of a heart that's been more of an asteroid
than habitable planet with a few ancestral skulls of its own
for moons and a creative atmosphere where the clouds
can move mountains to tears with the beauty
of what can bloom spontaneously out of nothing
like wildflowers strewn all over the starfields
as if they were expecting someone to come
of the things we really feel are worth crying for.

These days, this time of night, I delight
in looking for the most beautiful nocturnal metaphors
I can compare to you inside and out and beyond both
like a spirit of female serpent fire that haunts me
into paying tribute to her like a muse
who's beginning to possess me like the sea does
when the moon swims out to practise witchcraft
on a lonely island retreat that sings to itself at night.
Even from here, I can hear the song being carried
across the light years like the dove of a deep lament
she keeps like the wind in a locket the size
of the noose around her neck, and the flying carpet
under her feet all that's between her
and firewalking on stars like a burning kite
someone let go of like the umbilical cord
of a lifeboat that had come unmoored in a lunar storm.

Maybe I'm just fossil hunting on the moon
I've been howling at all these years
over the bone pits of dark wisdom I've dug up
on the far side of a black mirror
that doesn't insult your seeing with a night light.
But I swear sometimes when I think of you,
what lies like an archives in the riverbeds
of the sedimentary starmud you put back down
like a book you've read eras of time before,
and look out the window like a door
where you don't have to leave your body
on the threshold like shoes at the edge of the sea
when you walk into your own depths up over your head
to see if your eyes can still swim
with the dolphins and the stars and the flying fish
you left in your wake like a locust plague of urgent telegrams.

I know we're still more strangers to each other
than intimates, that there maybe watersheds
we have in common, and maybe it's still too early
for the fountains to come into blossom yet
as the last stars of the season become
the chandeliers of the morning stars of the next
like dusky candles going out in the blue light of the dawn.
And maybe there are ladders of fire to paradise
trembling like crutches on the edge of a shaky precipice
trying to climb higher than its cloud cover
to break into light like the Pleiades
just above the moon and Jupiter on a good seeing night,
but these days, this late at night, I've been inhaling
a lyrical lantern of oxygen and breathing out stars
like the circumpolar constellation of a healing dragon
pole-dancing with the caduceus of the celestial axis of the earth.

I'm laired with the unmarrowed riddles of bones of my own
I'm trying to read like the yarrow sticks
of a bird skeleton with rose-arbour wings
to see if the light I sense approaching out of the dark
is a mirage of fireflies disguised as a lightning bolt
or the soul mate of a rogue planet
that wants to ghost dance around the third eye
of a first magnitude star that doesn't have any idea
of what I'm doing up here, nor how far
a whisper of light away can seem
to a man fully awake these days, this late at night,
writing in the shadows cast by the candelabra
of a homeless zodiac off the beaten path
like the first draft a waking dream
sleepwalking beside me like the dakini
of a star struck maniac lifting the veils
of the inconceivable like the paint rags
of the night vision shining in the eyes behind them
that even in the dark make everything seem
so incredibly counter-intuitive and lucidly beautiful
I'd be truly out of my mind, like a crystal cranium
that's lost touch with its own translucency
if I didn't find it wholly believable
down to the last mystic detail my enlightened lunacy
howling like a wolf seer at the rising of a new moon
out of a valley where I can hear the distant barking
of the seeing-eye dog that follows Orion around
like a traffic light for the blind compared
to the way you light me up like the Pleiades
whenever I'm trying to get a parallactic fix
on your radiance dancing like a cult of fireflies
on the event horizons of my prophetic skull.

poem by Patrick White
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Not Quite Dawn

Not quite dawn, night seeping out of the blue,
troubled sleep, no stars, and you, a week gone,
the whole universe applying its laws to your absence
which is the silence everything returns to like water.
I have never touched you, so my fingertips
can still play you into existence on a keyboard,
though the loss of your voice is a dead bird,
and I am a loose thread of blood in a labyrinth
of motherboards and micro-chips like me
who can’t find a way out of themselves without
turning away like a planet from its own stars.
How quickly the light comes, and the darkness
bleeds away like a love-letter under the door.
No eyes. No hands. No skin. No hair. I am
not even the ashes of a cleft witching wand
that went looking for water and caught fire instead,
and we have shared only the light of the mind
that paints a world with the shadows of a ghost,
and might only be the last habit of an amputee to leave,
a mere mime of the way our eyes make us see.
And yet the heart hurts as if you once were flesh,
and I am awake as if another bed denied me my own,
and I am angry and sad, scared and alone as if
the universe were shy one comet, one bead,
one firefly among billions who shone for me
and that light was brighter somehow than a galaxy.
The day grows a new skin over your absence,
and I am as out of place, out of time, as a streetlamp
still shining down on its feet in the morning.
And there could be a thousand and one reasons
you don’t write back, why the black crow caws,
the sky is a concrete rose, the blood of the poppy
runs along the gypsy blade of its undulant smile.
From the heights, I can see a small, blue egg
smashed on the rocks below, a gesture of ruin;
from the depths, the remnants of a shattered star,
and all I can do is stare into the relentless images,
a word without a mouth, like the new moon
shucked from my tongue like a black pearl.

poem by Patrick White
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In You

In you I come to the end of roads,
and an alphabet of burning wings
falls from an indigo sky
like meteors trying to write
the unsayable in a slash of light,
in a language of luminous scars
the night beatifies with mystic knowledge
that wants to name you
so deeply in thresholds and stars
the charged silence
is giving birth to an indelible mouth,
a doorway of blood,
an ancient grammar of fire
the wind puts on like a robe
to scry the darkness for a voice
that could fill the goblets
of the moon's dead seas
with the wine of a radiant wound,
so much within me
already the tongue of a bell
that can taste you like blackberries.
The whole of you
in every single dropp of your eyes,
you are the black swan
of the eclipse that rares its reflection in water,
the dark orchid in the shadow of the dragon
that sways like a bell in the night,
even your absence a shape of cherishing,
a harvest of shadows beyond the light
of the lamp that burns for you.
Within the deepest abyss of myself
where the heart stands alone
like a single black pillar
in the twilight wasteland of the world,
a mysterious temple to the ultimacy
of having been here once
to suffer the passage of form and time,
everything a gesture of space
that thaws back into itself,
I have written your name
in the hourglass of my blood
like a whisper of secret ink
that once voiced the light to be
and shook the stars like wheat
out of its blind abundance
and will be remembered forever
as the first intimacy of the sea,
and there is the rumour
of a dream in the air,
the fragrance of an approach,
that out of an ocean of light
the tide will embody a woman
like the shore of an island
littered with fingertips and kisses
enmeshed like galaxies and starfish
in the exhalation of her veils
and our lips will meet like archers,
and our bodies will sing like arrows
sunk like orchards through the heart
and long after the last flame of life is shed,
the night will silence the birds
in the groves where we bled like poppies
to open the gates of the mystery
like keys and rain, or the rosary of black pearls
that chants its prayers to the night
like the slow alarm of autumn geese
in the eyes of a human face.
I try to say what can't be said,
pouring my spirit
into the wineskin of every word,
but my heart is a larger apple
than the bough of my voice can bear,
and the silence
that would erect temples everywhere like flowers
spun from the auroral silks of my soul
and perfume the air with the pollen of sacred fireflies,
every emotion a priest with a shaven head
to honour the moon
climbing the stairwell within me
of a million horizons at once
in every breathless step,
falls away behind me like the wake of a sinking ship
that lowers me into my coffin like a lifeboat
or a message in a bottle
that pleads like wine with the emptiness
for an alphabet that isn't in arrears to time
to say you to the night
in a lightning breath of life beyond
these elemental likenesses I carve
from a quarry of stars.
And I know I ask for immortal children
from a human womb,
and wide as my powers are
to exceed the sky with homing birds,
to adorn the dead branch with windows
that dazzle the roots of dawn,
I am the ashes of a black star in daylight,
a stone man with a chain for a tongue
when I try to swim like Atlantis
through the depths of your shining within
and the last word, the last life
to flash across my mind as I drown
again and again like a pulse
in the embrace of your beauty
is always the world as it is
before anything was said.

poem by Patrick White
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Anyone Can Say What They Feel

Anyone can say what they feel
but how few can sing what they dream.
You put your heart into any art
and people will follow you like a bloodstream.
In self defence against the omnipotence
of being interdependently originated,
you can substantiate your absence
to prove you're not living in the same world
we all do, but where's that going to get you in the end?
You can true your delusions anyway you want
but that's not going to clear you for the truth.
The destroyed see deeper than those who survived.
That man puts a straitjacket on
everytime he says he's arrived.

Just because it's absurd doesn't mean
it isn't believable. Me sitting here
writing this to a caste of albino stars
I haven't reconfigured into a constellation yet
because my imagination keeps shape-shifting me
like a gust of fireflies into myriad myths of origin
since I realized, cosmically speaking, one size
doesn't fit all like a house of transformation
in an Etruscan zodiac. Or a prayer wheel.
Or the ecliptic of a mystic head band
still bound to the skull of a Druid who died young.

Fifty years, a poet, but I don't expect
this is as mad as it's going to get.
I've been deepening my ignorance aesthetically
for light years, but when I cry for things I regret
my tears are still wet, and my mindstream suggests
there was no other way of flowing at the time.
I hang on the hook of the moon prophetically
until the pain grows profound
and ten scribes in a tower write it all down.
I am blessed. I am cursed. I am hunted and ignored.

I love disingenuously to keep from being bored.
And when there's nothing else for the fire to feed on
I offer it my body, my soul, my solitude
and the rare acquiescence of a tumultuous mind
like the third eye of a hurricane with a corneal implant.
I don't keep the impersonality of what I feel about life
in a little drawer with a skull on a keychain
I use to master the coffin doors of the slumlords
that won't open of their own accord
like rosebuds in a rusty locket that's come unhinged.

I don't pour the ocean into a teacup anymore
as much as I used to and there's a little more wisdom
in my love lyrics I haven't completely
taken to heart yet, but I'm trying. I stand
an intimate distance away from the things I cherish.
I'm dying as we all are, but it doesn' t feel
as if I'm going to perish. My emotions are ageless
and inspiration's only the whisper of a star away
and though my dark energy keeps expanding the starfields
further apart, so I have to walk further
to find a wild flower I can identify with,
the dark's beginning to shine like a black candle
with my spinal cord dipped in serpent fire
like a total eclipse of dragon's blood as its wick.

I rave like the vision of a sacred clown who's become
the misfit of his own crazy wisdom, heretically so,
to live up to the standards of my own disobedience,
a saintly truant in the labyrinths of spiritual malfeasance.
A shepherd of wolves, I don't drive the stars
up into the high fields like a small herd of scapegoats
like a hard rock on a mountain keeping
its fossils to itself like apocalyptic alibis
for the silence in the voice of the void that unwords me.

No truth ever mattered a damn to me
if it defeated people who were just trying
to get on with not knowing what to do with their lives.
No beauty ever took my breath away for long
that wasn't emotionally siderealized
or hadn't drowned like a sorceress on an island
in the oceans of the black rose of a new moon.
I prefer to look at the blessings of life
through a broken window more than
the polished mirror of a purified mind
blinded by its own blazing to the diamonds
that pour like stars from the eyes of weeping meteors
that have initiated the extinction
of too many, too much, without rancour
for the fragility of the afterlives in the ashes
that emerged from the inside out
into the available dimensions of a random future.

Time might observe the protocols of its waterclocks
for some who still drink from wishing wells
and hourglasses that are always pouring another
for the road, but in the intimacy of my solitude
time acts extemperaneously upon my heart
like a stranger who could always feel his way past
what he didn't know about what could hurt him
if he ever stopped long enough anywhere to find out.
I'm grateful to the abyss for the black hole
in the centre of my life that can't be fulfilled
galaxy after galaxy at a feast of light that keeps
my appetite for the moonrise of the mystery
intrigued and hungry. My mind was never an experiment
nor my heart the rube of experience.
I didn't map the rain to know where to go.
I let the mountain be my goat-footed guide to the top
and when it came time to come down,
I won my wings falling toward paradise
with more joy in taking the plunge
than I relished in the angelic aviary of my arrival
where nobody jumps unless they've got a parachute on.

Buff the risk with a safety net or you'll candle
like a daylily all the way down into an early grave
people used to say to me when I was a young precipice
ferociously faithful to exploring the nether depths of myself
like a comet jumping the orbitals of a dark halo
to shed a little light like a petal of the sun
on why I'd rather perish in the night like a firestorm
on a purple passage of the wind, than blossom
like the wildflower of a savage mystic
in the genetically engineered garden of a false dawn.

poem by Patrick White
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Love Magical

IF you had been where I have been
(Grey, grey the skies above),
And you had seen what I have seen,
You would not laugh at love.
Seek, seek till you find a rose
Red all through to its petal-tips,
And you shall know the curve of her mouth,
The scent of her breath and the red of her lips.
If you had heard what I have heard
(Dull, dull the beat of the sea).
Your heart would leap like a singing bird
Troubled and thrilled by ecstasy.
Stars sing in the dark o' the night,
Birds sing in the gold o' the noon;
Melody reigned in her speech a queen,
The song of the stars and the birds' tune.
The rose is dead that was her mouth
(Pale, pale on the earth it lies),
And East and West and North and South
The world is full of weeping eyes.
A noon is dark, a star is gone,
A rose is dead, a bird is mute;
And love that made sounds magical
Is silent like a broken lute.

poem by Roderic Quinn
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Butterfly Dreams and Angel Wings

my hands shiver in the cold
because you are not here for me to hold
and the summer rain starts to fall
while i'm still waiting for your call...
butterfly wings slowly take place
eventhough it's dark
and i can't see your face
as the moon says goodnight
and fireflies start to take flight...
all around me,
i can hear no sound,
no thunder, no lightning, only silence
i step out and stand in the rain
hoping that it will wash away the pain...
and angel wings took hold of me
slowly lifting me up to eternity
taking me to distant places
that are always full of hope and happiness...
then i suddenly opened my eyes
and i started to realize
it was just butterfly dreams
coming from my broken heart...
butterfly dreams and angel wings
are you really true?
or just a fantasy to make me blue?
butterfly dreams and angel wings
are you really there?
could you hold me
and never ever let go?

poem by Carla Grace De Los Santos
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Self Portrait

I can see this world in a different way- from this world I hid for many years.
Riding a ship towards some other galaxy,
Though only inside of my mind-
The rain would pour down upon the real world, and
In the mid winter the snow would fall, but
Lost in some other place in time, I only saw the sun.

I was a rare bird whose wings would carry me
High above the treetops, the mountains and
Even above the highest clouds,
Traveling far away from everybody and everything that was real.
Rain, sleet and hail would fall, though all I could see was a rainbow,
Glistening within the sky, high above the mountains-
I placed no trust in the people who walked upon the ground below,
Although it hardly mattered- I could always converse with those people
Who lived within the kingdom inside of my mind.

I would board a ship, its full sails to the wind,
Carrying me towards the world of my dreams-
Today I see the world in a different way-Now I see reality,
I see reality- hunger, war and people who threaten, and
All I can do is place my hands over my eyes, hoping to shut this cruel world out.

The ship I rode to some other place has been lost somewhere in the sky and
A rare bird, whose wings are now broken, I now see the world under a different light.
Somebody took me and locked me away last night and I have become
A prisoner inside of my own mind-upon that ship with fallen sails
I feel as if I am on a pathway headed towards nowhere-

I place my hands over my eyes. Attempting to hide from all that is real,
Unable to find peace of mind, unable to find my rainbow.
I find myself alone inside of an empty room, with no windows and a door that is locked-
I converse with the voices that speak to me inside of my mind-as
These, nobody can take them away from me and
They are all that is left of my dreams…

poem by Claudia Krizay
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Three Flames, My Goldfish Dancing Like Stars

Three flames, my goldfish dancing like stars
in a telescopic lens with a narrow field of view.
Eerie slate blue in the blank windows
across the street, as if they once had eyes.
Blind prophets in the dawn. What do they see?
One poet on nightwatch sitting in an apartment
by himself with the lights out, listening
to what the silence has to say about everything,
nothing, the way the sky is beginning
to keep its stars to itself as if
the great liberties of shining
they took with the night are practising
the greater discretion of candle wicks
that someone lights up and someone blows out
and they end up bending back on themselves
like solar flares, or ingrown hairs,
or tiny black monks concealed under the cowls
of this holy hour like shadows of noon in the sun.

All the deep, soul-searching questions
make peace with all the elusive answers
they've been searching for like a battered bird
the eye of a storm. And the lies of life prove
vastly less intriguing than its truths.
Every firefly of insight, a dragon breathing
in the distance, exhaling chimney sparks
like a furnace in a dream talking in its sleep.
Plumes of smoke dissipating in the air
from the fumaroles of gentle exorcisms,
ghosts trying to get back to their graves
before the day starts to take itself too seriously.

The numinous aftertaste of all the afterlives
I wanted to live in my mouth, one's as good
as another, and I'm beginning to exalt
a little in living this one as a creative endeavour
that's been trying to achieve me all along,
not the other way around. At least
it amuses me to think so though I'm not expecting
a masterpiece. The same eye by which
I see the star is the eye by which the star sees me.
Interdependent origination. Cosmic intimacy.
All these broken mirrors that have given birth to my face.
All these Cepheid variables drumming on the hide
they tanned from my heart like the pulse
of an enraptured ghost dance around a blazing fire.
Listen to one solitary night bird and you can hear
the whole choir singing backup to the human condition.

Compassion is the sweetest sadness when the stars
bend down to kiss the burn like a sunspot
soothing its feet in the lunar shadows of the mindstream
on a long firewalk across the cool sands of a new moonrise
over the Sea of Tranquillity. Why walk
when you can row your way across or fly
like a waterbird through the skies of a million eyes at once?
Mark one jewel and they're all marked for life.
Whisper to the willows in starlight
and you can hear the booming of the abysmal echo
on the far side of the universe like life in a small town.

When life isn't copulating in the brothels
of a false dawn, it's the prelude of a longing
to impart your heart to someone like a secret
you couldn't reveal to anyone else like a humming bird
that's caught the ear of the holly hocks.
You enter the dream without knowing
what you're going to wake up to.
The empty silo keeps the hunger alive.
It's the full harvest that blows the candle out
beside your death bed. Fulfilments of failure.

No one's a sailor until they've drowned
running aground on the lunar reefs
of an enchanted island you washed up on
like a lost cause doomed to be found in the morning
like the guiding light of a dead starfish
still shining out of habit in a dawn that pales
by comparison when a sorceress sets her easel
up on the beach and begins to sketch
a starmap of you that's an exact likeness
of the vision you had of her just before you died.

There's always another side to a black hole.
Turn the emptiness of the hourglass over
like a drink you've finished crossing the bar
and it's a different world with different stars.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You, My House Of Burning Thresholds

You, my house of burning thresholds, come
to me written on the breath of urgent windows,
and the palms of the walls that want their fortunes read, come
with palettes and kittens and your blue notebook of poems
that grows through ages of skin and mushroom kisses
on the forest floors of your flesh, the bracken spume
of the fountain that pebbles its tears in the light,
and the thoughtful rocks with moss-covered shoulders.

Come like a spoon that sips from the heart
and your blood a riot of sea roses, pink and green,
and the black ashes of the eyes of your secrets
and the locks on the loveletters you wrote on the wind
and I will bury my boat in the waves of your mind,
and be your ghost forever, and live as if I were blind.

There are poppies in your paintbrushes, cherries, wine,
earlobes of blue, and the tongues of mute tattoos
that have pierced your body with sad revelations
of the lives that you leave behind, all the simple journeys
that unravel the keys of the mystery in the dark inks
of another face, another crime, dead trains in the tunnels
caught like words in the throat of a mountain
that forgot what it meant to say, the long, mourning sentences
that carry you away from life to life in the arms of today,
and the bells and the lanterns that swing like fruit
in the lonely midnight stations flowering under their names.

Bring me your love, your art, your wounded past,
your wardrobe of rainbows and scars, and the chaste rings
that chain your body like a planet with mutable orbits
to the vast freedoms of stars in the rain, all the comets
you could never explain to the skies you riddled from blue,
and all the men you’ve married under the fallen bridges
of final farewells. Come in the hour of thieves, in darkness
with your windows open, and the ladders we’ll never climb down,
from our islands in the clouds that call like whales across the moon.

And there are laments we can only say in echoes, in valleys,
in the loose threads of the stream, huge shadowing sorrows
that walk like clocks through our dreams, looking again
for faces in the window that passed their orchards in pain;
looking for tomorrows in the way they came in the night
to a doorway at the top of the stairs, that once was theirs.

There are reasons in the blood that we loose like gloves
and seasons and departures, exits and arrivals
that brave the coming and the going with maps and graves
that lead us each like bees to the heart’s destinations.
Let love guide you through the labyrinths and maze
and putting on wings feathered from the fires of sad silvers
that fall away like water and stars from the herons of our rising,
fly from the old reflections of the mirrors at your feet
out of your face of lilies and fish into a deeper darkness
that waits like a man on a bus with a vase, beside an empty seat.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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As If Beyond Death

As if beyond death today,
as if I lay already under the eyelid of the moon,
the echo of my heart
pumping shadows
through my perfectly preserved corpse
in a silence that's never known the wind,
a fallen wharf without arrivals or departures,
and sad enough not to care why,
blood on the dolphin in the black tide
that pours me out of the horseshoe of the bay
like a road from its boot,
wipes me like the pollen and dust of dark matter
off the windowsills of the constellations,
my unknown mass crucial
to the cosmic contractions
that might give birth to the world again,
and I'm here alone in the high field
drowning in the twilight with the wildflowers
and the sky a last exhalation of the blue-green luster
that flirts with the mystic violet
on a homing crow's head
as the shadows assemble the wings
of a total eclipse
and a new dragon is born of the pain
that shrieks like lightning in the mouth of the abyss,
a torn animal
peeled out of its own skin like an eye
to add its darkness to the furnace of the black rose
that roars in the night
to blood the hungry mirror
with the thorns and talons of clarity,
to feed the wound of its existence
its existence.
And when I walk to the end of myself
through the golden rod and waist-high asters,
the seed of the stars that sleep with the daughters of men,
some of the flowers close up like fists and kisses
and others grasp themselves like a key
to a door that the whole universe can walk through,
and there are strange birds
flying from the eyes
in the rising skull of the moon
that sing like the pyres of cremated guitars
that died like trees in their solitude
and even the gates are weeping like wild dogs.
And there's a wind, intelligent, dark
the ghost of an ancient serpent
horned without ears,
an ocean of mind that exceeds itself like a wave
that howls like a secret it can't tell itself,
like a root blind to its own flowers,
that wants to lead my voice away in chains,
that wants my tongue to try
like a leaf in the updraft of a fire storm
to scream its agony out in the night
so that even the furthest star shudders
with the horror of its final liberation
like an arrow through the throat of a caged hawk.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Swimming in Time

Swimming in Time
By: Adam M. Snow

I am lost yet found;
in time surround;
past and future follows.
I see the door;
neither open nor closed;
and divine nevermore.

I'm swimming in time;
seeing your life and mine;
and all that gleams;
in this time divine.
This is beyond reality;
beyond mortality;
swimming in time.

I feel no pain;
not crazy nor sane;
neither light nor dark.
I'm but one yet not alone;
between space and time;
in the looking glass shown.

I'm not dead nor am I alive;
but a ghost that thrive.
I swam through time;
to see your dreams delight;
down an isle in a gown so white.

I'm swimming in time, time again;
being resurrected now and then.
I see the sun covered in blood;
waiting here for the endless flood.
The sandman awakes to children cries;
as mother nature dies.

The people wander with hearts of weary;
as the stars grew dark in the night;
they lay to rest their soul so dreary;
hoping that time would finally cease;
and everything would be at ease.

I am swimming in time.
there's no fantasy;
nor is there ecstasy.
It's a bad nursery rhyme;
and everyone is blind;
yet I am within my dreams;
trapped in time.

I'm my own shadow;
staring at me;
through a broken window.
I'm not blind yet I cannot see;
all my pass desires.
This is my only crime;
now I am drowning in time.

I'm caged yet free as time despise;
and all the truth feels like lies;
here all alone, lost in time.
there's no rest for the weary;
as we suffer sick and dreary.

I am stuck in time;
trapped in abyss;
nevermore will I feel bliss.
I am one broken in two;
again, nevermore will I be new.

I hear the echo;
it calls to me;
telling me I should let go;
of all my doubt and misery.

For all time sake;
I lay here, now wide awake;
no more swimming in time;
now gone is the night;
sun now greets me with morning light.

poem by Adam M. Snow
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Out Here Alone

Out here alone so late at night
with all these spectacular stars
burning through the clean glass
of the freezing winter air
I can almost hear them thinking
behind the myths of the cover stories
they've told for years
dark truths about life and light
it would be madness in a man to understand.

Don't try to stuff the impersonal secret
of the universe
into your sentimental heart.
How could you ever fit its likeness
into a locket
and finger it lovingly as your own?

Out here alone so late
even if you have come
like a thief in the night
to steal from the light
when nobody's home
there are no cracks no facets no gaps
no backdoors, unlocked windows
or emergency exits,
no stairwells or entrances
in these jewels of insight
that can feel your eyes falling upon them
like rain running down a mirror
that shuts you out
like someone in the bathroom crying
for reasons that are light-years beyond you.

However deep and sincere your tears are
they're still only dry wells
in that vast ocean of awareness,
black snowflakes
on the roaring furnace of the abyss
and if you reach out with affection
hoping to make things better
by embracing it all
you're still only tendering a kiss
to the gaping jaws of your own lipless skull.

There's a silence older than space
in the bottomless heart of things
that makes intelligence seem
the unlikeliest of exaggerations
a human could ever mean
holding his mind up like a lamp to the stars
as if he could find his own way back by his own light
without the dream that themes his mindstream with creation.

But as foolish and futile as it is to surmise
or try to get a leg up on the wise
I don't think the darkness
is the negative space
around the troubled face that appeared
after all the dots were connected
like rising constellations
in a child's colouring book.

And I don't think there are gods
squatting like frogs
on the lotus of the world
making us up as they go along
like wheels and roads
to the grunts and groans
of an axial mating song
anyone could mistake for a joke.

And I don't think the stars
believe the things we say about them
or even remotely feel the mystic dread
of what it is to be a human
looking up at their shining
out of deeper darknesses within
where no direction can be given to the lost like eyes
that would never find their own way home again
were it not for the stars and fireflies that mislead us
from one illumination to the next
by giving the finger to the braille of the text
that would school a gust of stardust into us
like God gave life to Adam
and Eve gave life to God
long before there were any laws to blind them
like Satanic lightning bolts
uprooting their eyes like rain from the clouds
to put those fires out.

I look up at the stars
with the eyes of an exile
through the diaspora of my breath
and I want to think them all to death
like the people and things I've left behind me
when it was time to go my own way
anywhere into the darkness inside me
to see if I could shine a light upon myself
that didn't blind me to the fact
neither in the beginning
nor in the end
was I there to witness the act
that made a certainty as good as a doubt
to the great indifference
that wasn't trying to find me
like a needle of light in the heart of a haystack.

I look up at the stars
like a scarecrow in winter
trying to put its pants on
one leg after another
like a man
with nothing but time to burn
scattering his ashes among the stars
urn after urn
skull after skull
of the heretics and mystics
that were martyred by his scar-crossed heart
in the name of nothing real.

I don't know what they feel
but I look up at the stars
like a black rose
of blood and starmud
in the last death throes
of self-immolation
and see in my own image
what I've always had
in common with creation.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Comfortable Light

Most comfortable Light,
Light of the small lamp burning up the night,
With dawn enleagued against the beaten dark;
Pure golden perfect spark;

Or sudden wind-bright flame,
That but the strong-handed wind can urge or tame;
Chill loveliest light the kneeling clouds between,
Silverly serene;

Comfort of happy light,
That mouse-like leaps amid brown leaves, cheating sight;
Clear naked stars, burning with swift intense
Earthward intelligence;--

Sensitive, single
Points in the dark inane that purely tingle
With eager fire, pouring night's circles through
Their living blue;

Dark light still waters hold;
Broad silver moonpath trodden into gold:
Candle-flame glittering through the traveller's night--
Most comfortable light....

And lovelier, the eye
Where light from darkness shines unfathomably,
Light secret, clear, shallow, profound, known, strange,
Constant alone in change:--

Not that wild light that turns
Hunted from dying eyes when the last fire burns;
O, not that bitter light of wounded things,
When bony anguish springs

Sudden, intolerable;
Nor light of mad eyes gleaming up from hell....
Come not again, wild light! Shine not again,
Hill-flare of pain!

But thou, most holy light....
Not the noon blaze that stings, too fiercely bright,
Not that unwinking stare of shameless day;
But thou, the gray,

Nun-like and silent, still,
Fine-breathed on many an eastern bare green hill;
Keen light of gray eyes, cool rain, and stern spears;
Sad light, but not to tears:--

--O, comfort thou of eyes
Watching expectant from chill northern skies,
Excellent joy for lids heavy with night--
Strange with delight!

poem by John Freeman
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Light The Way

(eric carmen)
Recorded by oliver
United artists ua50735 / 1970
Dreams
All those silver dreams,
Though destined to be broken
Still linger in my memories as tarnished pages
Loves
That have been and gone,
Left saccharin and ashes
Scattered in a wind of silent indifference
Light the way, light the way
Where do I belong?
Light the way, light the way
Oh, where do I belong?
Tears
Bitter sweatened tears
Have left their burning traces
Of bridges soaked in kerosene and expectation
Light the way, light the way
Where do I belong?
Light the way, light the way
Where do I belong?
Hopes
For a time of peace
Left many broken hearted
For causes that are lost are felt far more deeply
Light the way, light the way
Where do we belong?
Light the way, light the way
Oh, where do we belong?
Oh, where do we belong?

song performed by by Eric Carmen
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Candle of Hope

Candle of Hope

Lost within space and time,
I am running, as I am
Following the stars before me-

Inside of my mind,
All I can see are moments of madness.
My hair, blowing in the wind, behind me, as I
Dash away from all that I fear,

My thoughts are far away from
Every moment in time,
As I am searching for a ray of hope to hold onto as
None of my dreams have ever
Come true-

If I could light a candle,
Perhaps its flame would guide me towards a miracle-
A miracle of my most promising fantasies becoming reality-
Where the darkness of night
Would transform to the levity of daybreak at sunrise-

I am lost in space and time, where
My world continues to darken-
Life has always been a bizarre journey for me where
Hope has yet to be found-

It is the stars that have given me an increment of light,
Illuminating a pathway before me, to give me
Some small hope that I would awaken
In some other world where
Love, fortune and peace of mind would
Overshadow mistrust and sadness-

I whisper in thought, somewhere in the back of my mind-
Light me a candle with a flame so bright,
That will break through dark clouds of doubt-
Whereby I would be running forward in time,
Finding wealth, joy, and hope never ending
As the flame on that candle
Would burn for an eternity
Only to guide me forward, not backward,
Leaving that life of misfortune behind me-

Claudia Krizay

poem by Claudia Krizay
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A moment in eternity

Outside the streets are filled with light,
doors are closed and locked
when the nightly silence is lingering,
while some people look out through dark windows
we walk with your hand fitting into mine,
silver-white stars are all across the night sky
and we talk about places where we have been,
the old oak tree throws a huge dark spot.
Your lips are suddenly hot, sweet and soft
when my heart beats delightful in my throat,
a dove calls to its mate in the dark night
when in that moment time stops suddenly,
your eyes say that you also love me
and I look into their bright depths.

poem by Gert Strydom
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Light in My Winter

A light in my winter
For spring dreams to come
Shady darkish tinter
Where my summer is from
A light in white frost
For the blossoming dreams
Those with autumn were lost
In oblivion river streams

Each morning come glowing
With sunshine and day
Through the darkness going
To lead forthcoming way
When rose shall reddish
So lovesome in my bed
To bring in spring wish
Through their colors red

A light in my heart
To fulfill my dark eyes
For blossoms shall start
When there are blue skies
And again summer spring
With each beauty of worth
And birds in trees to sing
Every song of new earth

poem by Peter S. Quinn
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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