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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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Night's A Black Hole Of A Begging Bowl

The night's a black hole of a begging bowl
that doesn't know what to ask for anymore.
Shall I throw the new moon of another beginning in
like good coin of the realm, in passing,
or bite the bullet of a counterfeit eclipse
in the silver silo of the dark abundance
I'm trying to trigger into stars again
like apocalyptic insights going off in my brain?
The heavens roll like an old thirty-eight
I raise to my temple for old times' sake.
But the gate I used to close behind me
in the high starfields to keep nothing in
is hanging on like a lapwing by one rusty hinge
to the wing and the prayer it's dragging on the ground.

It's getting a little late for suicide. The timing's
overtaken the importance of the content.
And this close to the end, it would be a shame
not to see yourself out like friend in the doorway
saying farewell to yourself as you say in return
I'm glad you came to the stranger whose threshold
you crossed like a star in transit at zenith.
My pulse is still hammering swords of light out
on the anvil of my heart for me to fall upon,
but lately I've been bending them like horseshoes
to put them out of use and return them in tribute
to the water sylphs in the sacred pools of my mindstream.

Inspiration ages into crazy wisdom that still
doesn't take its own advice but never fails to sing
in a voice worthy of a wolf or hermit thrush at moonrise.
I've been firewalking my way through this
long, dark, strange, radiant dream since I first
opened my eyes and the stars began to shine
but I've never lived the same thing twice.
Though the morning star falls like Lucifer
in the false dawn of enlightenment, the abyss
cannot be bridged by anyone's trajectories
however high we ascend, how ever deep we plunge,
until we're burning like maple leaves and shooting stars
in the second innocence of our return journey back to earth.

Fletched arrowheads of the sky, even the birds
falling short of the unattainable miss the mark
and return to the green boughs of their beginnings
just like the flight of these words in the sunset
as the night overwhelms us all unspeakably
with the proto-nostratic of the stars
like a mother-tongue of light that leaves nothing unsaid
in the autumn darkness fragrant with the decaying dream grammars
of the dead slipping their shadows like secret messages
under the door of the book we're writing between us,
the beginningless prelude of the endless epilogue
of the memoir of the love life we had with Venus in Virgo
when the new moon was in the claws of sensuous Scorpio.
Big, red-hearted, archaic Antares
threshing the green wheat of Spica
as if the harvest had been achieved before the seed was planted.

Just because we die doesn't mean that life
is finished with us like the draft of a manuscript
we threw into the bonfires of the maple trees
to inspire our ashes to rise out of the open urns of our firepits
like the feathers of a dragon enflamed by the wind
so our spirits could ride their own legends a breath
higher and closer to the stars every time we open our wings
to re-read the lyrics it took a lifetime to write in scars
like thorns in defence of the mystery of the black rose
we were happy to bleed for as if our blood had no other use
than the ink in the pens of these leafless woods
dreaming of new foliage in the spring returning
like the plumage of eagles to the lonely flight feathers
of their skeletal quills. Fossil constellations
in the darkness that whisper between the lines
of the alpha and omega of the life themes that once ran
like purple passages of the mindstream
that can still shed light on our afterlives in a book of shale
long before we had eyes to read what we were writing
like loveletters to ourselves on intimate terms
with the inconceivable solitude of this distant future
we're all living now in celebration of yesterdays yet to come.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Faceless This Time Of Night

Faceless this time of night, my skin evaporates like dry ice
into a deepening sense of containment
by a dark space with distant cities of light
trying to colonize the Pythagorean fireflies of Cretona,
or the shimmering mirage of Port Angeles
dancing like a seance at the foot of the mountains
across a hundred miles of the Georgia Strait at night,
the immensity of the freedom that dwarfs the stars
with the sheer magnitude of the labour before them.

The fragility of a spinal cord traversing the abyss
of a one-stringed box guitar made of cardboard
when you were a kid, the mere filament
of an anachronistic light bulb with the lifespan
of the wick of an apostate candle at a black mass,
disappointed it wasn't born a flower,
but a weed more at home among the stars
that uprooted it from its intimacy with the earth
like a kindred spirit of light
that must wander through its own solitude
like music at night from an open window
in the life of the mind to reach out to them
like a tendril of smoke from the embering nugget
of the heart nesting in a private crown of fire
that abdicated its empire of ashes for a single note
of the night bird's longing to sing back up
like a bell for a sad universe that's always on the road.

I hear crying in the distance, the dark lament of the hills.
The night creek weeping unseen through hidden valleys.
I can taste the deaths and sorrows, the broken promises
of the rain, drifting like the fragrance of a waterlily
like a star reflected on the undivined watershed of its tears
saturating the air. Matter a condensation of the light,
I can feel life moving through this body, this flesh,
this scrap of starmud, a rush of water, a gust of stars,
a purple passage of blood, a breath of fire and wind,
and the earth, not solid, but real, animating all my limbs,
my vital organs like the ripening fruit of a rootless tree
as if time wept like a bell in me as well, and its tears,
heavy with the weight of too many separations,
yet wise in the ways of the sky, sweetened the fall to come.

poem by Patrick White
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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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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Have Become My Own Season

I have become my own season
living through these renewable eras of you
that come and go
like the fragrances of passing stars
that sometimes stop by the gate
to talk about the garden blooming late.
Some flowers wait for the moon to open,
to throw their arms around space
as if they could encompass everything
in the brief embrace of their petals,
and their seeing is one eye under multiple eyelids
as they burn like jewels in the night
to keep it all shining and bright.
But I've worn out the elbows
of my insatiable longing
on the windowsills of a different insight.
Saddened by the distance, the time, the circumstances,
delinquent desires still hanging out their shingles
like green apples on a dead branch in winter,
withering like the inconsolable eyes of old men
who have died like sons
and now must die like fathers,
mine is the darker radiance
of the faint halo of light
around a black hole
that summons everything
down into it like the sea
sitting below its own salt
at a stranger's table.
You can't look into
the black mirrors in my house
with your eyes open
because they only reflect
what's on the back of your eyelids
where the only light is your own
and you are the road
and the lantern you go by
and everything you feel and think and imagine
is your own true face without skin
not the gate between outside and in.
How could I ever recognize you
in these dark spaces
if it weren't for the trees
and the stars and the moon
and the night stream that runs through me
like a lifeline on the palm of my hand
down from the mountains
in a rush of diamonds and gold
that pour out like the pent-up emotions
of a sword that's just been pulled from a stone?
And how hugely alone the night is
when you love someone as they are
and you realize without effort
that if you hold them a moment in their transience
you hold them like a star in a locket of water
that tastes like the past.
There are people
like treebound barrels of rain
and then there are people like me
who leak out of their lives
like radioactive water
that couldn't pool the pain
long enough to stop the meltdown
long enough to cool the brain,
long enough to let it kill me.
Now in the darkness
seeded with the dust of black dwarfs
trying to clench a fist of coal into diamonds
my auroras are weeping neon dew
like a cheap enlightenment
all over the watercolours of dawn.
And I'm wondering
what kind of an afterlife is this
that I might have foregone
if I were indifferent
to how my solitude deranges me
like a lost continent
wandering through its own mindscapes
like an extinguished star
that wants to make up
just for one luminous moment
a constellation of its own
that doesn't wait upon anyone's eyes
for the themes of its seeing.
And though the skies have changed
like the slides of childhood dreams
with every blink of an eyelid
whenever night approaches me
and asks to sit by my fire
and let the flames and the smoke
of our past lives
speak for the both of us
I look up to give my eyes
like two drops of water
back to their oceanic immensities
and it's always unattainably you
that is shining
like a woman in the window
of a secret house of the zodiac
far off the beaten path
that leads everywhere like a firefly.
And your stars speak to me
as if my flesh were light again
and my heart
that bumps its way through the dark
already a lamp beyond
the Lazarus of wax
that's buried in his own lucidities
like a candle I left for dead.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Undevoted, Free, And Wild

Undevoted, free, and wild,
no one to answer to, no one to answer for,
the urns shattered, and the ashes scattered,
and the fire liberated to perfect its own combustion
and the stars without anyone to walk home,
and the solitude silent, dark, and deep, cool
as the bliss of a wine-cellar talking in its sleep,
I have grown mad in the heat of the purple sun.
I have spoken from the mouths of the caves in the desert
and not expected the echo of my own voice
to return to me like a pilgrim stashing a gnostic gospel
deep in the sand, without realizing
how much closer to the stars dirt is than I am.

When you're no one but the wind in disguise
you don' need to be humble, you don't need to wise,
nothing to trust, and no one to rely on,
you can watch the dead at night
streaming toward Orion
like a blue-white ribbon of light
undoing the gift wrappings off the bodies and eyes
of people who can see and be again.

And you know it comes to everyone
like a nebular orchid with a fragrance of stars,
that the Sahara will green and bloom again
and the wind sing hymns to the grass
and the gazelles sport their elegant legs,
adolescents in the spring brush,
running like violins succulent with beginnings,
and it doesn't matter you're alone out here
listening to the ashes of a mirage
make up legends to tell the fire
about its ancestors buried on the moon anonymously
and how their blood once stained the earth
like a scarlet letter even the stars couldn't wash off.

The mystic anti-hero of my own dragon myth
I exalt in my isolation like a shriek of revolution
and overthrow myself like a book in the flames
to keep something I don't understand alive in me
as if I had to keep on dying to sustain myself
and the distinction between one and the other were lost upon life.
It's a touch, it's a feel, it's a hole in veil
with one eye looking out at me to see
if I've intensified the dark enough to break into stars,
if I can unravel my heart like smoke like water like fire
and perfectly disappear into the atmosphere of my dispersal
without a shudder of farewell to the masks I wore like scales.
Not to be constrained by even so much as
the single thread of a straitjacket, the husk
of an abandoned sanctuary left to the imagination
of the hermetic flowers to do with as they wish.

I shriek freedom across the heavens like the death cry
of a hawk waking the valley up in the morning.
I whisper to the water things the wind was never meant to hear.
So faithful to my calling, I lead those who come, away from me,
as if it were the perennial custom of the universe
to meet like this for a moment in time and space
and then disperse into the darkness alone like a unlit candle.
I'm a riot of fools in the sublimity of the presence within me
that elates the crazy wisdom of my spontaneous ignitions
and schools the black lightning of its absence
in the folly of trying to enclose my spirit in gates
like a candle in the niche of a tempestuous vision.

Yeeeeeeessssss, I scream into the face of nothing
like the efoliant scripture of my confession and protest
that life doesn't need an alibi to live and die by,
no extraneous, no outer, no other, no object, no subject
no flying buttress to act as a bridge
over a flowing river of Gothic stone,
no strong tree standing on its own to cut down
and carve into a crutch, no cork to keep the ocean out,
no bucket to bail the moonlight out of the lifeboat,
no jade Buddha to make your supplications to,
no footprints on the water Jesus walked,
no cave in Ramadan to receive the angel of light,
no Kabbalah to baffle your way through the night,
no Schmidt-Cassegrain reflecting telescopes
on clock driven equatorial mounts geared to the heavens
to thread the golden needle of the mystery
without any knots in your spinal cord,
to penetrate the vulva of the sea like a sacred shell
that once gathered armies on a burning hillside
to contest their revelations with the tongues of swords.

I shall tell you, my brother, I shall hasten to you my sister
like moonlight through your window, I shall not
hold back from you the least shadow of the furthest star
releasing its dark wisdom like the black doves
of its own excruciating ashes glowing like the pain
of horrendous transformations into light.
I shall not bring you the skins of the dragons I've shed
but inspire you with a fire you've never been burned by before,
a spiritual immolation into a godhead without a metaphor
to guide you by, a torch you can't drown in your tears,
a long firewalk down to a river of stars,
and there you shall cross on a burning life raft
of the bones you've been carrying around for lightyears like a body.

And it's a heresy of silence to say, but there
you shall you shall lie down in the nocturnal emptiness
in the long blue seagrass of the moon
and empower out of your own creative abundance
whatever worlds your longing inspires you to embrace
to amuse the bright vacancy of eternity with time, like love,
and the dark abundance of unperishing potential
with space, like wisdom, and the clear light of the void
and the unspeakable absence of any other voice
to ruin the silence with the bliss and sorrow of seeking
the mystic night you found within you longing like a bird
for the stillness to write it like a lyric of the wind,
a passage of blood through the labyrinth of the heart,
a shadow against the moonrise of a compassionate awareness
there's a divinity that sings like a human
in the heart of everything that breaks its long fast of nothing
with praise and celebration, with fire and light and rain
with the firstt sacred syllables to touch the lips
of the black rose charred in the heart of the dragon, like poetry.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Lament Of The Last Train Whistle

The lament of the last train whistle
has disappeared into the distance
mournfully looking for its lost child.
October night in the woods
around an old fire pit of prophetic skulls
blowing ghosts of smoke in my face
that bring me to tears, a neolithic calendar
of all the old and new moons that have passed.
So many, so much, that used to matter
doesn't anymore. Dream figures
that shed their skins like the longer wavelengths
of watersnakes in an infra-red mindscape
of serpent fire dying like the sun
that can tell the hour by the taste of its ashes.
I throw more well-dried thresholds on the fire
like branches that used to be green with the tears
of sweeter departures and arrivals over the years.

All the light's jumped from orbitals
of the tree rings that sag like bags
under the eyes knotted like islands
in the heartwood of their xylem and phloem.
Here where the river parts like long hair
on the skull of a stone, I sit like a demon
in a sacred place, clarified, alert, and alone
as any nocturnal animal in the woods.
The chalkdust of my bones trying
to connect the stars to their constellations
snagged in the trees like the rags of spiderwebs
on the blackboard of a starmap as wide as the sky
and deep as the subconscious of the Burgess Shale.

It's not a betrayal to let go of your faith
when you had none in the first place
and you don't need a parachute on the edge of space
to plunge from paradise, or a weather balloon
of a bad Christian poet to shepherd Dante
like a moon out of hell. Be yourself,
especially when nobody's watching
except that same drone in the sky
that occasionally flashes a flake of silver off
its stone cold third eye to flint your awareness
that it's still there in the cosmic background
like a witness to your dreams and schemes
for a luxuriously appointed life of enlightenment.

Be yourself. The direct copulative imperative
that has supplanted the light as the first word
out of the mouth of creation. Be yourself.
And then let there be light by the side of a good fire
to let you see who that is as acutely
as you can see in the dark who that is not.

The migration of the Canada geese might seem
a broken rosary of new moons calling out
the names of God to you, and one unknown,
or silhouetted against the moon they might
suggest the afterbirth attached to a cut umbilical cord
and your heart might feel reborn somewhere
in the autumn of your life, a child of the fire,
a flower in the full bloom of its solitude
dancing with its own mercurial apparition
on the waters of life in the mindstream
always out of season enough to lag behind
so it can tell the time by the widening gaps in its passage
as it's waiting for the night to catch up to its own shining
like a thief of fire unchained from the rock
that broke the glass window of its transfixed seeing
with a meteor in the hands of an enlightened delinquent.

Or you might read the falling leaves as occult lifelines
on a Tarot deck of overlapping lifespans
like the scales of a dragon playing solitaire
beside the small inferno of a signal fire to the stars,
to let them know you're coming faster
than the time it takes for a thought to make it
all the way to death and back to birth again
as if you were pinging your emotions
like stray wavelengths from the oceans of your awareness
off the horns of the moon the way
you used to skip rocks out over the sea as a boy
to see how long they would keep on going
like a waterclock of stone before they sank
like the flying fish of the hard, cold facts of life back into
the numinous depths of your collective unknowing
where the stars aren't fixed to anything that isn't
flowing along with them like the wind on the mindstream
or a small fire catching its breath in the silence and the solitude
of so much radiance, before it's on its way again for good.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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When Someone Loves You And You're No One

for Kristine Marie

When someone loves you and you're no one,
what happens then? What do you have to give
that they aren't already in full possession of?
The many I have loved have become one woman.
And this is an orchid that blooms in fire at night.
And this is the dove that returns from earth
with a wing like a broken arrow and asks to be healed.

When someone loves you and you're no one,
what happens then? This picture-music flowing
like a carillon of bliss and despair through
my body, heart, mind as if they were all
poured like dragon iron into the casting of the same bell
that yesterday raised like a sword to kill it back into life?
And this is a doorway you can stand in forever
as if you were greeting someone who never comes.
And this is that butterfly among wildflowers
that flutters about like a symbol of the mind
as if it didn't know whose loveletter it is yet.

When someone loves you and you're no one,
what happens then? Do you give them your emptiness?
Do you wrap space around them when they're cold
like a star-studded shawl you asked the night to weave
for someone very special into astrology?
Or do you minutely examine the mystic specifics
of your life as you've known it up to now
and from somewhere in some dark room
way back of the heart, feel the urge to apologize
to the stars for how much their light's been through
for so little? The star labours, and candles are brought forth.
And this is the delirium of a window the moon drinks from.
And this is that jewel of a tear that didn't
make a big splash on the rock like other tears
and by that you know it's a diamond in disguise.

When someone loves you and you're no one,
what happens then? Does the air as now revel
like autumn in a gleeful chaos of images and insights
the wind unravels like leaves in a tantric realm of crazy wisdom?
Do you see a woman coming through a gate
as if she'd lived her whole life among roses and razor-blades?
And she's not asking for rapture, but you're beginning to feel
there's a peony of a supernova in the house of Cancer
waiting to express itself in the beauty of the way
it relinquishes itself like the moon to the waters of earth.
And this is that mysterious spell that beguiles
the expert hunter into baiting his trap with his own heart
hoping it's irresistible to the fox he wants to take it.
And this is that dawn of a new day that arises like
a strange exorcism of everything that's ever possessed you before
as you greet every ghost in passing off the lake
the same as you've always done, the waterbirds.

When someone loves you and you're no one,
what then? You stare as I do at Venus in the sunset
and write long poems that tunnel through mountains
like work trains full of precious ores that glow in the dark
more intensely as it approaches like a lantern from a long way off?
Or is it just another firefly at the end of my nose
casting galactic shadows across the time and space
it takes to behold them in the furthest reaches of my mind?

I sense a gentleness I haven't known before.
I see a beauty that's as easing to the eyes as moonrise.
And the seeds of words that haven't passed between us yet
are already beginning to open their eyelids and flower.
And there's a soft gray blue sky with a scattering of ashes
to honour the dead and give the wind its due
I can see spilling out of the urn of your heart
to make room for the phoenix I am about to give you
as if it were child's play, when I'm with you,
wholly absorbed like light into bread, to rise from the dead
and feel hunger again, to drink from the fountain mouths
of fire again, and desire and long as I once did
and imbibe the wines of life as if I'd never existed before
without cutting my tongue on the taste
or succumbing to the inconceivable as if everything
that followed thereafter were the afterlife of the inevitable.
And this is the era in which you know
you've already tied your blood like a scarlet ribbon
around a gift no one can determine the value of
if she opens it in wonder, haste and love.
And this is the moment you dread the joy of
when death tastes as sweet as birth in the mouth of life
and autumn lives out of the suitcase of all its memoirs
like the blossoms of a manuscript that has come to bear fruit.

I saw you and you were a gazelle at the easel,
painting the moon like a beauty mark on the forehead
of a sacred slave girl dancing naked in the light that released her
like a butterfly in the jaws of a dragon she could awake with a whisper.
I saw you in a gust of stars, and felt the wings and dust devils
sprouting out of my heels to let me ride the thermals of my heart again
as if the long, dark, strange, radiant journey I'd already come
were merely a hair of the way I had yet to go like the sole copy
of a love poem I had committed to the wind so hopelessly
such a long time ago when my solitude could play
the rosey-fingered sea like a musical instrument
that could make the waves sing like mermaids
without a plectrum or a pick or a ship, as long
as there was desire in your fingertips and urgency in your art.

When someone loves you and you're no one,
what then? Let them be everything to you even
if there's no you to be anything to. Pour your emptiness
into hers and fill the cup up to the edge of the moon
and let it spill over with light as if it had a leak in it
bigger than a record harvest in the horn of the moon at full.
I've cut star wheat in a virgin's hand
in a total eclipse of my senses
and touched flesh as if it were fresh bread
cooling on the windowsill of a hungry man
who can taste the light in it like letters from a child hood
far enough away from home to learn to love it again
with a second innocence more indelible than the first.

As for me and my treehouse with open windows,
I shall welcome a songbird on the cusp of Leo
to every branch and rafter of it, or if need be
at sea on the moon, in the event of a storm,
a lifeboat fashioned out of my own bones
to hang on to like the eye of peace in the skull of the dragon
who looks at you and reads you like fireflies on a starchart
delineating a new constellation out of homeless space and time
and a habitable myth of origin for two exiles in love
among the sacred groves of the rootless trees.

With you I have not come to revere the pain and longing
of hungry ghosts hanging on to every blade of grass
like a flag at half mast in a high wind.
I have come to appeal any destiny
that doesn't bear the seal and signage of your heart.
Nor will I ever surrender any sword to your waters
that wasn't first tempered in the translucent fire of diamonds
that feel like a fool of cool water running down your skin
like a spring thaw of the crystal chandeliers
that melted down their spear points into rain,
that dipped their swords in wax
and trimmed the wicks into fuses
and lit them up like Roman candles
such that my eyes and my heart
are still flowering wildly with you in these starfields.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Something Deeper Than Stars

Something deeper than tears to weep for you.
I weep blood. I weep the silence
on the backstairs with the screen door
that bangs like the sound of one hand clapping
all through the night at the slightest gust of wind
as if a constellation were trying
to strike up a insightful conversation
with a wet match, the sceptre of a spent blossom.
I need a moon deeper than water to drown in.
I need to dance the pain away
in a sword dance of serpents
that know how to carry a tune
like a well fledged arrow, a beautiful toxin,
straight to the heart of the mysterious apple
that's sitting on top of my head like a prophetic skull.
No flower can say. Not any number of song sparrows
returning to the budding tree in spring,
no green leaf of an innocent tongue,
not even this dry leaf of mine in autumn
writing lyrics on the wind no one can read,
not even among ghosts, can find a voice
that isn't already the dead language
of an absence that can't be adorned
by a seance of words.
I light no candles. I summon no gods.
No pretence of knowing where you've gone.
No black hole that's as empty as
your ring on the table, no halo
that ever fell as far from heaven.
Good-bye's too optimistic and farewell's
the rudder of a grave on the rocks.
And if I were to raise the paper sail
of another poem like the waxing phase
of the funereal moonboat
that carried you away,
I'd make it black. I'd raise it
like the shroud of a black magician
that can make things disappear,
like an eclipse at half mast
and patch it with the skull and crossbones
of a different phase of the moon on the dark side.
I wouldn't return your personal belongings
back to the morning like starlings and doves.
But there aren't enough sacred syllables
swimming like moonlit fish
in the watershed of the silence
to open this fountainmouth of grief
like an aviary of flightless birds.
Nor would I risk having you remember me,
and turn around like a false start,
supposing you can still recall anything at all,
like a light you left on in the hall
the night you left home for good.
You were magic while you were here to work it.
You were the black nun of an enlightened cult of one.
You were the black mass of the sun at midnight
and the blood sister of the moon
that nicked your finger
on both her crescent thorns at once
so one was the cure to the other's wound
like the eyes of a cat, the fangs of a snake.
Given how close to the moon you were
it didn't come as a surprise
when you started writing me loveletters
inscribed in bone as if you'd just invented
a whole new language out of your claws
to make love to a poet in the nude when the moon
didn't lay its silver sword down between us
to keep us a threshold apart from our fingertips.
And it wasn't long before the elixir began to work
and I lost count of the number
of consensual metaphors I had for your lips,
similitudes for the night skies
that surrounded your eyes in a delirium of stars
that revelled in the crazy wisdom
of their mystically inspired atmospheres.
As just as beautiful as they were,
so were they irresistibly dangerous.
How many light years now
have I poured this memory of them
like a love potion over my roots
and waited for you to bloom in my bloodstream
like stars and blossoms streaming
through the heartwood of an ageing tree
that has as many dead branches on it as it does leaves,
and like an orchard anticipating moonrise,
knew you weren't coming anymore,
and the night bird had no one to sing for?
But, hey, I'm still a better seance
than I am an exorcism and if you can hear me
calling the faithful to prayer
in all directions at once like a paper airplane
the boy in me has sent out to search for you
like a loveletter in a hurricane of razor wire,
dripping with clusters of blood
the size of hemorrhaging grapes,
fireflies caught in a spider-web
of starless constellations that aren't a sign
of anything except I miss you worst at night.
If you could sense the tremor
in even the slightest wavelength of light
I'm trying to shine on the darkness to find you,
I'd write you a holy book of sacred silence
inspired by the shadows in my blood
that overtake me like strangers from behind
with an urgent message not to return home
to what isn't there anymore.
I'd sit out here all night by myself
beside the black waters of this night creek
unravelling like a ribbon in mourning,
that's been talking to itself
as it walks in its sleep on the water,
and I would beseech the stars with my eyes
to let me know if they've seen you,
and in my heart I would entreat them
with the solo of a wounded wolf
raising its head up in a wild prayer
to catch a trace of you on the chilly night air,
to give me a starmap to when and where
I can see you face to face again
and touch your eyelids in your sleep
like crocuses coming up through the snow.
Like moonrise in the apple blow of the storm
that scattered us to winds like all these poems
I've tried to write for you ever since
as if you were still somewhere nearby
like another pair of eyes
in my pain and my solitude
watching from the woods
the stars, the water, the moon,
under the stones in the river
that mark your grave and name
above the flowing of this endless epitaph
of leaves and blossoms and poems
as if you alone could still read them,
like the comings and goings,
of waterbirds on the moon,
the first draft of words on the wind,
maple leaves and keys on the mindstream,
and still understand what I was trying to mean.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Compassion Is The Sweetness That Enters

Compassion is the sweetness that enters
the wounded apple of knowledge after
you've taken your first bite out of it.
It's not an antidote to the facts of life and death.
And you should know by now if you've suffered at all,
and it's impossible not to from the moment you open your eyes,
the night is not a reward, nor the lantern of the light
that goes before you on a graveyard shift of the stars.
Compassion is the oldest instinct of the heart
and first muse of the mind that can taste only
the blowing blossoms and bitter green apples of the spring,
gripe brain, before it ripens like a sunset in your blood.

That's why the heart knows more about it than the head.
And I expect, on that basis, no one is more capable
of loving us who must doubt that we're worthy of love
to live up to the truth of it than the dead who can open
the tiny koans of the seeds at the core of things
like the lockets of fortune-cookies that break
like twisted cosmic eggs in a rush to spread their wings
like waterbirds who write the lyrics of their songs on the fly.

Words for the eye. Words for the ear. Words
for the voice of the wind like black walnut trees
and kites in a storm. And if you really know how to listen,
I mean if you can hear the wavelength of a black snake
swimming across your blood like a mantra
of terrifying, beautiful wisdom that keeps its secrets
to itself, or hear the unfathomable oceans in the black rose
whose petals and eyelids are always smashing
like white eyelashes in a squall of sunbeams
against the breakwater of a white dawn that passes
like an albino eclipse in a moonlit leper colony
of extinct black rhinos. If you even remotely
hear what I mean when I speak like this sleepwalking
through a dream grammar like a prophetic skull in a trance,
words that dance like light on the mindstream
rejoicing in the clarity of the voice that expresses
the hidden message encoded in the genes of the fireflies.

You have mouths. Speak for yourselves.
Some like lighthouses along the banks of life.
Some like thieves with searchlights for eyes on a bomber's night
when everyone is underground and the bummers are out
plundering the evacuated houses of the zodiac.
Might be the ravings of a star struck maniac talking to himself
to make sure nobody else is listening. Might be
the surrealistic lament of a Dadaist night bird
singing out loud in its sleep for things it doesn't know
it longs for, or maybe a lunatic is waxing prophetic
in a labyrinth of his own echoes trying to sound his way out
of the mountains without end he's being trying to befriend
like a cloud or an eagle silvered a moment
like the ore of a dream in the corner of the eye
of a moonrise coming on like a hurricane
with a black pearl in its teeth. The eclipse of a sacred lie
compassion concedes to an alibi without a myth of origin.

Compassion is the child of imagination that identifies
with its simulacra of suffering by applying the heart
like a bloodbank to the wounded eidolons of eyeless images
that didn't know how to bleed, or breathe, or cry or see
until compassion tempered their impression of themselves
as paradigms of rationality, by shedding real tears
in an ice age of lenses that kept their illusory distance
from the stars that came out after the rain, wet and shining,
laughter radiating through our tears, because life isn't a dry fire.
It's the hand on the rudder of a lifeboat
that keeps you from drowning from the day you were born
in the undertow of the tides of the new moon
until the night of the full when you haul everyone aboard
who's been swimming through glaciers of tears
like baby mammoths for the last twenty-five thousand years
afraid of extinction if they ever stopped to catch their breath.

Compassion is accepting everyone's death as a portion of your own.
Everyone's life as your third eye, a vital organ of your own body.
Compassion is an undisciplined action of the heart.
Compassion arises like a moonrise of inspiration
in the eyes of the older sister of the muses
who walks too much alone as if she'd devoted her solitude
to the suffering of a wounded stranger she met along the way
when she let her hair down like willows of rain
to cool the scorched earth and slake the roots of pain
until they bloomed like foxfire in the shadow of her passing.

Most poets sit around the lesser fires of their art
trying to divine the smoke of what's burning in their hearts
like autumn leaves they've heaped into books
that smoulder in tears more often than they break into flames.
But if compassion turns her eyes toward you
like a star in the darkness beyond your blazing
the Milky Way runs like a bloodstream through your veins
and you see in terrifying clarity the great mystic details
in the deep watersheds of picture music efoliating
like wildflowers and galaxies, grails, fountains,
lunar herbs, and starfish raised up off the ground
to take their place among the shining, radiant with life,
in the low valleys and high fields of an imagination that heals.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Little Thought In A Big Space

A little thought in a big space, I'm falling
through my own immensities here at my desk,
one of my Icarian propensities for plunging into things.
My voice intimidated by the violence of the silence within.
I'm on the dark side of my eyes.
No one's ever been here before.
No window, no wall, no door,
I'm on the threshold of my homelessness again.
I'm looking at stars, but I feel like rain.
I'm talking to ghosts that I don't remember.
Might be the wrong medium, but it's the right seance.
I don't even know what I'm doing here myself
but it seems I'm free to go or stay as I wish.
I'm wearing my shadow like a candling parachute
that didn't step back from the edge in time.
No point in pretending you're an airborne dandelion
when you feel like a rock with a message
someone just threw like the moon through a mirror
disguised as a sky the night birds keep flying into blind.

No one asks your name here on this pyre of a sky burial
if your birth certificate says you were born in fire.
Desire anything you like. It was all written in smoke
before you came. And these words that are saying me here
have been out of the aviary of the lantern for light years.
Who knows where the light goes or what if falls upon?
Trying to shine in a dark time without taking anything away
from the lunar eclipses that aren't in need of enlightenment.
Don't know if I'm a solar flare, a firefly, a matchbook,
or a lightning bolt that keeps stressing my starmud out
by sneaking up on it from behind and overdoing things a bit.

If you find yourself trying to pry the flowers open
with a crowbar or a koan, and it's nightfall, it's
time to turn your hourglass in for a waterclock
and see how the stars emerge out of nothing
as soon as you deepen the dark with a more acute sense of timing
that let's everything happen spontaneously by itself.
Even if you're the lighthouse of your dreams
that doesn't mean you're the nightwatchman
keeping his third eye on you in the shadows
like a theft of fire you can get away with
this second time around with only a warning.

If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
And if you did, whining about it in your sleep
isn't going to help and who's Spartan enough these days
to stash the fox under their tunic to keep
from being caught while it eats them alive?
If you want to be a dragon you've got to learn
to swallow people's hearts like hot coals as if they were chocolates,
without wincing. The stars don't come out
like emergency candles you've been saving
for exactly this kind of situation. And if
you really want to know the truth about illumination,
try and blow one out. Quick, now, look
and see immediately into the clear light of the void
what it's like to shine without a metaphoric reflection.

The stars here don't hide their nakedness under a cloak
of black holes and dwarfs that take it all in
but give nothing back like the second hand clothes
of serpents shedding their skin. One size fits all
like a bubble in a watershed of dark worlds
dazzled by how much a single eye can contain
whether it's hanging from the lip of a flower in the fall
or going down the drain in spring. I know
you hit it like a snowflake on a furnace
and do your damnedest not to cry. Thing is
as unique among billions as you think you are,
there's not a star in the sky that isn't a rite of passage.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Things I Must Say To You The Crystal Said

Things I must say to you the crystal said.
Jewels I must turn in the light.
Things I have gathered
like wild herbs from the starfields
to make a cool poultice of the moon
to draw the pain out of the wound
like a child that got turned around
when she was born
on the nightside of her blue eyes
to colour outside the lines of her constellation
like one of the original watersheds of Aquarius
that didn't take to the bottle and spoon of lesser wells
that warily sip from themselves
as if they were testing for poison,
but poured herself out
in an elation of so many lifelines
so many rivers vital with beginnings
the world mountain discovered her
like gold in the stone
gold in the mindstream
gold in the ore of its bones
gold that shone even in the darkest of valleys
wherever she flowed
like the white moon
when it wants to be mistaken for a swan
and sheds her eyelids like the petals of a waterlily
that's gone, gone, gone beyond herself
like a waterbird into the undetectable mystery of things
that lifts us up from our own reflections
and calls us to exceed ourselves
by flying beyond our own wings
past the last lake at the end of the universe
we could bask in like a keyhole
in the third eye of an unrelenting sky.

There. That's a breathful.
A dust-devil in a gust of stars.
A precipitous river of my own.
But I like listening to the green mountains
talk about things that are perennially true
that no one ever believes.
There's inspiration in the fires
that inspires their leaves
to burn like old myths
and poems that went up in flames
true to the muse of autumn
that has forgotten their names.

And I'm listening to this little world mountain
this dolmen of a crystal you gave me
this palace of mirrors
that sits above my desk
and tells me things about you
only an older spirit than the road I'm on could know.
It whispers to me at night
like a fragrance of light
from the unseen flowers
behind your eyes
flowing down from the high fields
and unscalable facets
of the mystic mountain you live upon
planting trees.
Abruptly enlightened medieval Rinzai Zen masters
did the same
in the mountains of Japan
as if they were rooting their pupils
like worlds within worlds
within a grain of sand
like the cornerstone of it all.

Trees are the future memories
of a prophetic skull
that stays true to its ancestors
like pines in the fall.
Anyone who plants a tree
raises a temple to the wisdom of birds
who will speak to you
in the native tongue of a new language
in voices older than words.
Anyone who plants a tree
attains what lives beyond them like an afterlife
that's always rooted in now
and even the dead branch
that holds the autumn crow in the rain
when things are bleak with the passage of things
will turn into a strong rafter in the house of life
and the moon will add its blossom to it
and the sun its butterfly
and everything that grows
will greet you as a child of its own.
And life will hold you up
like a candle
like a Douglas fir
like a star
like the tiered pagoda
of a pine-cone
like a mirror
like a bird
like a quiet smile
in the sweetest of solitudes
and well-pleased with what you've sown
hang you like a thousand shining chandeliers of rain
in the sacred groves of the Pleiades
to show you what has grown over the years
from the labours you undertook
from the tears you shed
to green the wounded mountain back to health
by adding your life to its life
is you returning
like a prodigal daughter of water
to the mystic springs
of your own starcrazy source.

Ride the wave.
Ride the snake.
Ride the wind.
Ride the fire.
Ride your own eyebeam
like a sword that delivers
the boon of life
like the first word
of a new universe
that's just heard its name called
like an endless beginning.

You are comet. You are wheat. You are starwheat.
You're a comet in the starwheat
making crop circles.
Aquarius.
Aquarians can take their skin off
and put it on again like water
and pour themselves out forever
like the sea in every dropp
so when the tide returns
it's never empty-handed.
I see a naked watersnake
swimming through the moonlight
like the path of something perpetually true
and inconceivably beautiful
as if time itself had learned to move like that
and every ripple was an era
widening its wingspan in its wake.
Hic sunt dracones.
That's how dragons learned to fly.
The highest and the lowest all in one.
The snake in the claws of the eagle.
Wisdom in the lawlessness of insight.
God.
You.
Me.
The Mysterium.

For those who haven't opened
the eyes in their blood yet
to see the bloodflowers
the bloodstars
talking to each other
like variations of the same light
these visions are the lost dream grammar
of an ancient madness
you can't recover from like a fever.
But to those who know the fireflies
are lamps on the road
the stars are not useless
and everywhere is the clarity and passage
of a river that forever arrives.

And I can see the wounded child
who's brave about her pain
but feels like a ladder in the rain
no one will hold for her
to climb down like the moon from her window.
And those that should have been waiting down below
to catch her if she falls
have scattered like stars
on the insides of her eyelids when she blinks.
Abandonment is that hollow shell
you find washed up somewhere on a beach
and raise to your ear
to hear the sea far off
like a life that's going on without you.
Even the sea can't fill that cup.
Only another emptiness
could feel at home
in the homelessness of that space.
Abandonment is getting up every morning
and putting your face on inside out
and thinking of it as some kind of good luck
you're on the other side of the universe
all on your own.
And though you howl like a wolf on the wind
the moon still cannot hear you.
That's how longing is born
in the fires of separation;
that's how the universe is called
every moment out of the nothingness
like someone to love,
and the deeper and darker the emptiness
the higher and brighter the mountain.
The watershed holds the fountain up
like a bouquet to the rain.
Emptiness doesn't stand like a god
in the shadow of an unknown definition.
It's the selflessness of everything that is.
Unborn it lives without distinction in the heart of things.
Unperishing it dies for everyone
without leaving anyone out.

When insight blossoms
like the moon
on a dead branch
compassion's the fruit
that's always in reach.
Life doesn't practise
what the heartless teach.

This morning
I'm sitting at the feet
of your little crystal buddha
enthroned in full lotus position
as he turns my heart in the light
like a jewel in the eye of a diamond-cutter.
And the sky is generous with tears
as it clarifies the windows of perception
with eyes as old and wise
as the sun at midnight.
And every thought I have of you is a fierce peace.
And every feeling a black mirror
deeper than white
that has extinguished my face
like one of last night's stars
in the bliss of a greater illumination.
The mystic specificity of my mind
pales like the moon
in a blinding abyss
of no-minded indistinction.
And the stars that shone down on nothing for so long
like an indecipherable language
are now looking up at you
like the fountainmouth
high above the treeline
in the mountains
of an Aquarian understanding
of what they've always meant to say.
There are no echoes in the voices of love.
No avalanche of Rosetta Stones.
No scoffing crows.
No genuflections of the dove.
There are no shadows hiding like daggers
under the cloaks of day
to get even at noon
for things that happened at midnight.
Love is a feather
from a passing bird in flight
life puts into the scales
and the earth turns eastward toward the light
and death takes its finger off the measure
of life's most cherished treasure.

And now the buddha turns into
two lovers sitting upright
face to face
in a lotus embrace
of enlightened connubium
in a coincidence of the contradictories
as if two were not the extinction of one.
And when desire opens its flames like petals
and blooms like a phoenix
there are no strangers in the fire.
And love doesn't burn its feet
by making a firewalk
of the nameless constellation
rising from the dark innocence
of its sweet dreamless sleep
like the thirteenth house of the zodiac
with two people home from everywhere
with myths of their own
like Venus and Mars
turning the lights on and off
like lovers and stars
while the neighbours stare in amazement
through closed windows and locked doors
at the bright vacancy of the rumours
the dark abundance of the night
that knows all we are and do
and will and have done
is true to the overproof joy I take
in this lyric of a jewel in the light.
It turns me like your eyes
turning the key in the dark gate
of a mystic moonrise
where fate elaborates the worlds
like pearls from grains of sand
and time refires its last hour
like a master glass blower
to make more space
for stars in the desert at night
by breathing on the flames
that feather the ashes of the moths
in the urns of our names
with the wings
of a dragon
the wings of a phoenix
the wings of a sphinx in the rain
planting trees on the slopes of a pyramid
to watch the dead mountain grow green again
and know all the secret paths down into its afterlife
like a river running through the wilderness
or this theme of stars on the mindstream
beguiled by the mystic wiles
of a cougar caught in the moonlight
like a jewel in the eye of a dreamcatcher.
Or the seasoned seer in a mirror like me
enraptured by the anarchic fireflies
beading themselves
like the mandalic stars
of a new constellation
only the enlightened can see
enflamed like a prophecy
empowered by love
to rise in the night of your name.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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There's A Black Lotus In My Heart

There's a black lotus in my heart, black hole
of enlightenment, black waterstar, sacred eclipse.
Nothing worth attaining that isn't unattainable.
And all the gates are upside down and backwards.
Albino starmaps with black dots shining
on the other side of the mirror, zodiacs
of black matter looping back on themselves
like solar auroras of the sun that rises at midnight.
I don't know what all this means. I may have gone
too far into exile and actually managed to get
to the dark side of the moon. Or I'm a warehouse
of shadows at noon that have lost track of the time
like blind sundials that feel they're being followed.

The light illuminates, but I bloom nocturnally.
I've got the burn marks of stars all over my skin.
I work on the nightshift at the foundry of a constellation
busy pouring itself out like iron and oxygen, blood and air,
forged out the afterlives of hydrogen I've gathered over the years.
A fire-womb engendering one you fill with water.
Fire the midwife of its own daughter. I'm envious
of creative immolations I know I'll never attain.
Though my left brain is in full communication with the right
and I'm a full moon of the bright vacancy, dark abundance
of both sides, and the harvest is ripe, I'm always
a star ahead of my light, so I don't end up
like a dead school furnace in the basement
writing my memoirs like a manuscript of ashes in an urn.

Deconstruct me wholly down to my last atom
and I promise you, if that's all I've got to work with
like one stem cell to another at the beginning
of a matrix of causes and conditions into which
we'll be placed by a Hox gene assessing the chi
of which direction our eyes should face, and how many
degrees of separation there should be between our ears,
I promise you, I'll still burn with the fireflies
and the supernovas like a blind prophet
who saw two wavelengths copulating like snakes
and has been tied at this stake of of a spine,
an oracular heretic of both sexes in synchrony
like the hybrid of a phoenix and a waterbird
burning in visionary serpent fire ever since
for the sake of a muse that always comes
in the nick of time like rain on the moon to my rescue.

When it's night in the diamond of my third eye
is the light not more mystically enhanced by the darkness,
more mystically specific than the white wash of the sun?
The moon is the mitochondrian that tempers
the toxicity of the light so the nucleus of the solar system
can blaze with alien oxygen meteorically across the night.
The black mirror, brighter than the white,
shows you your reflection on the inside
where you're arrayed like a faceless world
that's given up trying to second guess
who's the unerring witness under the lifemask
of the surreal cosmology that doesn't recognize
it's not a self, at first glance, and that all physics
is the psychology of ridding yourself of the delusion
you can, even if you're riding a flying carpet
out into this desert of stars to sweep the constellations away
like mirages that have been throwing bad meat
down your holy wells like sacred crocodiles.

Ignite even so much as a matchbook at this distance
or turn on a flashlight to see what's in the dark
as if you were looking for your mind with your mind on the light
even though it's as abundantly clear as your eyes it's night out,
and the billions of stars in the next closest galaxy,
Messier 31, at eleven o'clock above the middle star
in Andromeda on the rocks, and two million light years
of enlightenment will gently recede back into the cosmic hiss
and disappear from your field of view subliminally
knowing, because the timing's yours, you're a daylily
covering your insight with the petals of your own hands
because you don't know how to open them sidereally yet
from the outside in, where your darkness shines
and the night you turn your face away from
like the bright side of the moon blinds you
by a reflected glory to the radiance of the origins
of your own vision, deep within, where it all begins
emanating stars of the darkness of your own eyes.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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My Back Aching Like The Sky Goddess Nut Doing Yoga

My back aching like the sky goddess Nut doing yoga
over a sidereal painting that's burning like a bridge.
I've been many kinds of fool before, some just silly, some profound
but this is the work of a sacred clown hemorrhaging in the heavens
like the supernova of a pot of gold at the end of a ragged rainbow
still shining through the remnants of a colourful wardrobe.
I've been accelerating into space driven by a muse
of dark energy with an expansive heart. Time stops
as I exceed the speed of light across a threshold of starclusters
flowering in my wake like New England asters
with cadmium yellow suns with auras of orange coronas
glowing in their eyes. The apartment is silent
except for the trickling of the water pump in the aquarium
and a dance arrangement of goldfish that are swimming
in synchronicity with my thoughts and feelings
as if the heart of a human can speak through many voices
like the wind through the harps of the trees,
like the angels that descend among the daughters of men
when they're feathered in their beds at night like black swans,
or stars rooted in their own decay like waterlilies
that just don't know when to quit making beauty
out of the muddy deltas of their creative bloodlines.

She's firewalking in her sleep by now I hope, watching
a documentary of how the universe works in another city.
I'm flipping through the pages of the rooftops of Perth
outside my window like a weirdly bound heritage history book,
trying not to get any paint from my fingers on the view of the stars overhead.
Arcturus in Bootes still flying its kite in the west.
I need some rest. I've been bleeding like a cut rose
on the blades of the moon all day, and I feel threshed,
a cylinder of hay left out in the open starfields
for the black horse she told me to put in my last painting
to show something grazing under the full moon
like an eclipse that just discovered it had life on it
lyrically at peace with the siloes of light in the distance.
Even when love is cosmically oriented, God
how it loves to focus on the mystic details of everything
right down to the eyelashes of the ruby throated hummingbirds
hovering in a Pleiades of first magnitude larkspur.

Sometimes I feel like the fossil of a dreamcatcher
in the Burgess Shale, but right now, my third eye's wholly open
and I'm casting silver nets I've woven out of
my axons, blood vessels, nerve ganglia,
lunar fuses of serpent fire coiled around my spinal cord
like a helical riff of a bass run on a burning guitar
I'm holding like a metaphor for the body of a woman in my arms.

When I told you I was a sacred clown. I didn't invent it.
I meant it. I feel it. I can dance for ghosts at a seance.
I can dance for rain and war. I can paint my face blue
with moonlight and wode, and dance for peace, dance for fire,
dance for someone like you to step out of the darkness
as if someone had shaped a jewel out of the northern lights
and I was looking at it from the inside out through your eyes
on a a night of the new moon that isn't on any calendars
that are going to hang doom over my my voodoo heart
because there's never been a curse from the mouth of a Druid or Mayan
that could stand up to the courage that it takes
to receive a blessing without worrying what mistakes
inspiration might make when your muse is as flawless
as imagination obedient to the laws of her own myth of origin
and your art elucidates the crazy wisdom of your folly
like a discipline that isn't for the petty or sane at heart.

The stargates just don't open for those who are still in their right mind.
Just as the maple key to your entry, isn't about
what you leave out like a sin of omission that's culpably blind,
but what you leave innocently behind you
like mountain streams, and morning snails,
and the long uncombed comatose trails of sleepwalking comets
plunging from their dark haloes like Icarus
into a sun that only shines at midnight
like a candle on a windowsill calling out
like a poet for a new medium that's lightyears beyond words
to the first of the autumn stars purring like a cat in her dreams
when she hears the holy nightbird just before the dawn
knowing Regulus and Spica and all the stars of my art
won't pale in the lotus of the heart like real jewels in the eyes
of a sacred clown whenever he looks for her
shining in the ascendent of Leo long after
the Lyre, and the Swan, and the Eagle have all gone down
and all these poems I write on the wings of Luna moths,
enraptured by the sphinx of her radiance, are irrevocably skybound.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Would Miss You Were You Not So Deep Inside

I would miss you if you weren't so deep inside.
I would send the fireflies out like a search party
to beat the bushes and the stumps to see where you hide
were you not the stars within that lead me home.
I would cry out in anger and tears, World, you are not fair,
were you not the mystic intimate of my indignation.
I would look upon the illuminated world
thriving in its garden, and accuse the sun of being blind
did I not see more in your eclipse, the abundance
of your darkness, than I do by the vacant light of day.

Let others bathe like birds in the fountainmouths
of happier lyrics, I drown in your watershed,
a starfish on the moon, and the darkness shines
like a nightsea the colour of your eyes. And there's a sky
full of shipwrecked constellations without lifeboats
that went down into fathomless time with all hands on board
like a cargo of bones that reached its destination
by giving them all up to you, like yarrow sticks
to the Book of Changes, whether you read them as such or not.
Nine in the fifth place. Enlightenment in hell.
I am the nightwatchman with the moon for a lantern
that strikes the bell of his heart three times and says
all is well, all is well on the bottom of the sea.

I would be planting supernovas like a terrorist with i.e.d.s
in the Milky Way by now to add to the chaos
were you not the black hole of a galactic inspiration
that's mastered me like a magic latent in the heart
to burn the sum of all my destructions in a blaze of insight
by which the light is known to the light, the way
a tree is by a breeze, or ashes know the fire's out.
How could I reach out to you except with your own hands?
How could I speak to you in any way you'd understand
did not your voice coax the words from my mouth
like a dream grammar of sacred syllables betokening
the things of the earth like the echo of a prayer we forgot?

Too intimate to be the principle of anything
and yet your impersonality can only be approached
with tenderness, like a feather floating through space,
or the cloud that grounds the mountain like the cornerstone
of a temple to the emptiness it floats upon.
Were you not the valley my grieving shadow wanders through
like the lachrymose theme of another lonely psalm
trying to palm itself off as poem, how could the eagles
shriek eureka in the heights at the very next insight
into the nature of your vulnerability moving down below?

We might both dance to the same music as if it were true,
but you're the silent witness when I listen to the wind,
you're the charmed locket of darkness the light conceals,
you're the secret jewel that's wholly transparent
to all the eyes in the universe that have spent their lives
looking for you like a sky that's been hidden from sight
right over their heads and under their feet
like an atmosphere and ocean that never left the moon.
Even here on earth, the silver fish are frenzied in your tide.
Lunar horses graze like waves on your seagrass
and run wild when you spook them like an ocean
with a bit in your hands, and the look of an angry teacher.

If your absence were not deeper than my solitude
how could I resist the consolations of oblivion
and carry on as if I'd never missed you? Who
would I long for to affirm my presence in this emptiness
that engulfs me like an eye with something in it
like a star that can't be washed out? I was not
born a warrior to surrender to anyone less than you.
I do not open my heart and my mouth to sing
lullabies to houseflies growing dozy on the windowsills
as the cold comes on like the sheet music of ice.
Who would I dedicate the works of my nightshift to
like the journal of a dark demon writing to himself
about the spiritual intricacies of jumping from paradise
just to meet you naked in the garden again
as if we were born to be exiled together by the pain
that is visited like swarms of killer bees upon those
who break taboos like white canes over our knees
and throw their cornerstones around like dice
to entice blind luck into taking a chance on their disobedience?
Who would inherit the crazy wisdom of my human divinity
if I did not know how many lives you'll outlive me
like the randomness of an alibi based upon a truth
that reprieves everyone from death on desolation row
by undermining the limits of our culpability with compassion.

You, the sorceress of meaning, you, the beast mistress
of my savage emotions, you, the fire sylph at the hearth
of my homeless wandering into these evictions of self
that bury the days with no names on their graves.
You shake the lightning like a spear of fury in a lion's skull.
You wake the dragon from its dream of lotus fire
You touch me on a night when nothing else will
as if I were real, and the solidity of my atoms sublimates
like a ghost of dry ice into a mirage in space
so I could see in the grand paradigm of things
even the most enduring pyramids in a desert
are the work of the wind when the mind is inspired
to move things around like the grave goods of the heart
in the hands of a tomb robber that frees us of them
to travel light without baggage through the gates of Orion.
The past has no need of any other afterlife than the present
nor the future the prelude of a promise of better things to come.
Born into a life with a ferocious childhood for an introduction,
I have grown young again in the ashes of those fires,
like a skin transplant of flowers over a burnt face
to hide the scars, and give the stars some space.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If You Worry About Where You're Going

If you worry about where you're going
before you go, you're not worthy of the road yet.
If you're not having some black-hearted fun
with your worst nightmares, because they're
just as surrealistically absurd as the bliss
of your most recurring dreams are, how
are you ever going to avoid taking yourself literally?
If you're not crazy enough to wander
through a cemetery saturated with the moon
in the early hours of the morning, trying
to organize a choir of singing gravestones,
how are you ever going to recover a voice of your own?
That dowdy wren you let go of when you first discovered swans?

If you ever want to sweep across the lava plains of the moon
in a rush of emotion of a homecoming ocean,
but you can't feel the tide in a single dropp of water,
you haven't cried enough yet to drown in your own sorrows
and see everybody's life flash before your eyes
as you go down in retrospect, wiser than bubbles
in the way you descend like feathers trying to smile.
O, it's hard here, isn't it. Isn't it brutal at times?
All your beautiful teeth knocked out against a concrete curb?
Inoperable cancer. The savage inexplicability
of the death of children it would be sacrilege
to even think there was an acceptable answer
to appease the loss, to satiate the grief. And I know stones
I've turned over I wished for years I hadn't, things I've seen
that make me wish I'd never been born with eyes,
that have rendered my nemetic courage dysfunctional,
estranged from the Pleiadic radiance of my seeing
as if it were a black farce on tour in Taurus.

But if you want to shine like the fire of a pioneer star
in the clear light of the void, as I keep reminding myself
like a mantra over and over and over again,
you're going to light up the intensity of hell
as readily as you do the cruel immensity of heaven
when it terrifies you with joy. Be a brave boy, I say to myself,
resolved to live all the lives of the Tarot Pack
and then go looking for the cards the Sufis say are missing,
just to say and smile at the end of time, if only to myself,
yes, I played all the stations of my life
as if they were the winning hand of an inveterate gambler
calling my own bluff in an unbeatable casino.
Seven come eleven, I've rolled my prophetic skulls
up against the wall like a printer in inky coveralls
in the back alley delivery entrance of a cosmic newpaper
on its lunch hour, throwing snake-eyes around
like the fang marks of a prison tat turning to Braille.

If you haven't blooded your sword by falling on it yet,
and hemorrhaged by a river wild blue irises, just to add
a little Zen beauty to your death in life experience,
if you haven't felt love slash its nadir across your wrist
and worn it like the talismanic bracelet of an unmentored initiate,
how are you ever going to transit zenith
as if you were crossing the threshold
of that thirteenth house of the zodiac
you raftered with your bones to accommodate your heart,
to cherish your own ashes like the mystery
of the afterlives you had to live through
until you burned like a star that had learned
the art of shining is the art of inexhaustibly letting go?

More doubt in our joy than in our pain, if
you don't learn to ignore your certainty to the point
you disappear into the abyss of an expanding universe,
giving no second thought to whether you exist or not,
with no nostalgic attachment hovering over your emptiness
like the halo of a black hole, how are you
ever going to evolve the mystic green thumb you need
to root sunflowers in the darkness like neighbouring galaxies?
How are you ever going to adapt to the things you cherish
if you can't endure the transformations that come with them?
If you skip the cocoon and go straight to the butterfly,
all you've really done is traded your birds in for a kite
that doesn't know how to sit or sing on the power lines
it's entangled in, nor how to negotiate the wind with wings.
You may glimpse the unattainable, yes, like a moth
at a closed window, wondering what it must be like
to be annihilated in a candle like an old love poem,
but the vision's not sustainable as a way of life of your own
until you've set fire to your own antennae like wicks
that are not consumed by the flame, or extinguished in the rain.

Spiritual diamonds don't forget where they came from,
their perishable beginnings, and though they can shine
like water and rainbows, their clarity smeared
by the chromatic aberrations of their colour-blind telescopes,
they haven't forgotten how to burn like bituminous coal
in a basement furnace, or melt the intensity of their emotions
like a glass river making its way to the sea or how to use
a meteoric explosion as a way of sowing adamantine insights
like seed stars in an immaculate ocean of enlightened awareness,
the life-mask of the inconceivable assuming form
to express itself as an event in time that outgrows itself
transcendentally without a revolution or message for anyone
but itself, thereby ensuring, given our inquisitorial nature,
that everything from stars to rocks to apple trees to humans,
overhears it as a revelation of angelic gossip
waxing the long after-hour halls of a demonic institution
that was founded synarthritically on the cornerstones of our skulls.

Zen might be the taste of tea. But if you'd rather spice the water,
do it with all the flavours of life, dip an eclipse
in the full moon of your cup now and again,
and let the darkness work its cure upon you like a spell
deeply steeped in your imagination like a school bell.
Attend to your shadows, not as a theft of flowers,
or the clone of a brighter garden you've lost your way back to,
but as mute voices with a grammar all of their own
deep enough to show you the stars you wish upon
from the bottom up of a well with fireflies caught in its throat
it articulates like chimney sparks, even at noon,
or when the black sun shines at midnight
through a clearing in the tree-line of the starfields.

The snake that takes your life grows wings
and turns into the bird and the dragon that uplifts it
with oxymoronic lyrics of fire and rain that are as real
as any symbolic gesture that plays suggestively with your heart
in the cauldrons and fountains of being
that elaborate you as you are, slack water in a mirror
that neither ebbs nor neaps, as the tides reverse direction
like a heartbeat or the flow of your breath.
This mysterious third extreme in between life and death
where everything you sought among the mountain peaks
finds you at the moment of your withdrawal
from your circuitous passage through the valley of longing.
And in every emotive thought, the serpentine wavelength
of the immensity of the transcendent silence
overwhelms you with the intimate impersonality
of its approach to you in every risky step you take toward it.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Won't Mean Much If Your Eyes Aren't Open In Your Blood

Won't mean much if your eyes aren't open in your blood.
If the stars can't see you because you don't know how
to read them poetry in the small cafes of your heart
accompanied by spoons and plates and broken goblets
of the cheap house wine that smash just like love affairs
dashing your skull against the rocks, hoping the mermaids come back.

If you can't hear in the parking lot of a raucous industry
the colours of your emotions, you're a deaf chameleon
and who could make you listen to what you can't listen to
even if you had enough people who loved you around you
to want you to try to listen to your own tears when you cry?
Your ear on the same wavelength as a corrugated tin roof,
maybe you can see what I'm trying to say to you
if you close your eyes, and just listen to the rain without
trying too hard to make a big effortless effort to be
auditorily enlightened by the racket of your delusions.

I can't remember when my life stopped being my own
and I went to bed one night, and I was as human as my toes are
and I awoke, I was merely the afterbirth of a visionary
I didn't recognize, as my eyes were being igneously wrung
from a cope of dark ore like stars out of the distant hills.
Not a lot of self-respect from the beginning, maybe
it wasn't that hard becoming everyone and everything else,
and I was a prime candidate for effacement
but when I looked into the mirror of my
ten inch, equatorially mounted, clock-driven, reflecting telescope
I used like a canning jar to capture and mount stars and fireflies
on a black velvet starmap, all I could see
was this abyss staring back at me that couldn't say
where I'd gone, but the last I thought I heard
was that I got a job as a janitor in an hourglass
sweeping mirages out of a desert of private school stars.

I say what I see as it occurs to me spontaneously.
And I'm compelled to say it without hesitation
so the vision isn't tainted by the colour of the jewel
it's passing through, from one eye to the next, ad infinitum.
No light pollution in the shining, though there's something
about the idea of purity that continues to appal me
because I never had so much against chaos from the beginning
and I sense a deep hatred of all that is soiled and flawed,
in which case, I'd rather be an outlaw than one of these monks
who disdain me because I can't help seeing their discipline
as uncreatively redundant. Eventually, if they're blessed,
all our faces are going to fall off by themselves
like the scabs of sunspots that healed the wounded light
like a wildflower shedding its petals like nurses' caps
and deathmasks frozen like a moment in time meant
to last forever though we go on being estranged by them forever.

Uncanny transformations of the solid into the real.
Maybe it's time to let the mindstream flow as it will
and let the burning bridges of our delusions cross us for a change
to get to the other side of a life that's only got one bank
and it's as clear as space, we're not even standing on that.
Hang on. Let go. It's just your hand opening and closing
like a door in a dream, and you'll find your falling
just as fast as you ever were and if you were to ask your eyes
they couldn't tell in this vastness whether your were falling up or down.

When you've dismantled all you've desired,
post neo-deconstructionism sets in like spiritual rigor mortis
and you can't tell if you're sleeping with the living or the dead
when you haven't got your mask on. You can wear holes
in your shoes, and windows and carpets, pacing
like a waterclock of the heart in an hourglass of waiting
like a boy at the edge of the curb with his elbows on his knees
and his face in his glum hands, waiting for a parade
with sacred clowns throwing away free candies
like stars along the route of the mystic Milky Way.
Just be sure to keep your eyes open like a spring thaw
so the light can recognize you like the flower that brought it
to full illumination this time last year like a candle
that keeps blowing its petals out so you can see
the black matter of what you are not deeper
into the eyeless dark than you've ever bloomed before.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Want to Be Brilliant, Want To Shine Like A Black Star

Want to be brilliant, want to shine like a black star.
Trying to bend space with my mind. Trying to stop time
with my heart. Counting moments like beads on a rosary
of skulls, or shepherd moons on an abacus of gravity.
Though I know they're not all strung out like that.
Asteroids on a wavelength of light, or a spinal cord.
Or maybe I'm just trying to bead a guitar string
with a great black hole, or is it a lunar pearl,
in the center of a lyrical abyss? Workaday world
in a small town, who spends their time like this?
Not fortunate enough to have been born a carpenter,
I'm a mystically surrealistic, poetic astrophyicist
trying to come up with a new grammar for the stars
so all they have to do to express their shining,
is say, Metaphor, and as it is in the abyss, so it is everywhere.

Because I miss you like the main clause of my relativity.
The focal point of all my wavelengths. You're the radiant
and I'm the Martian meteor shower that's dying
to bring the gift of life to the Antarctic like the Leonids
did in the first place as I look at my face in the mirror
and think it's time for a change of species. Sometimes
it's crucial to sustain a few pathetic fallacies about yourself
so when you're under the moonweather of an estranged planet
and a black star breaks through the clouds like the anti-matter
of a waterlily, so do you. Funny how the flowers close their eyes
because none of them wants to miss the eclipse.
One of them said we're all looking through a glass darkly
but I don't see any soot on their petals,
and none of the telescopes are wearing shades.

I like to keep things clear in the light of the void.
I've come along way from the coal mines of space
to shine through your diamond so you can feel
a different kind of translucency that's eleven parts cheap thrill
in all the dimensions I can see you in, and one,
not even you, has discovered yet, that's the orphan of an exile
singing to himself to people the dark in a desert of stars
like a gnostic gospel in the mouth of a cave
to keep the evil jinn and bad spirits away
from the watersheds of my wishing wells
where the angels gather to mingle with the demons like water
they've just turned into wine. As for the other eighty-nine
realms of seeing and being what you see, they're shrines
I've devoted to you, swearing in blood and devotion
on the sidereal plinth of my sword, as I dedicate
all my prophetic skulls from the dark side of the moon
where the crows are wiser about lunar things than the doves,
to the enhancement of your radiance, your love and your art,
by deepening the dark, with a full heart, with things to harvest
that will make the abyss seem like a silo of stars you can break like bread.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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