Cosmologist With Tweezers
Palace after palace of blood I feed my idiot heart
to the fish and the cannibal stars
from a barge of funeral swans sullen as books.
I told myself not to look for this death when I dropped it
the day I was born, to leave it lie in the violent grass,
a key to a door that doesn’t exist yet,
an insect crushed between the pages of the sky
that reads like the failing eyes of an ancient astronomer
compiling an expanded preface
to an encyclopedic suicide note. O I can say anything
when the mirror is having an affair
with the moon’s oceanic face.
I can put lipstick on the corpse of a rose
and die for the whole cemetery like a callous messiah
sick of being resurrected at the take-out window.
My love forsaken, a beggar reaching into a serpent’s nest
for an egg that longs to be turned
like the handle to a door
that might be a way out, I consult
the crazy wisdom of the crows,
and a sage of the black night
to find my way back to a grave
that has not forgotten the taste of the dream
that was blood and wine and light.
This is a shabby afterlife, an unworthy war of mistakes,
where the orchids are raped on their wedding nights
and a peace treaty is chalk on the sidewalk
around a murdered mailman.
It would be a lie to say I wasn’t wounded,
it would be a falsehood to say I was.
This pain is the blundering apprentice of a mystic knife.
This agony is stupid and futile and vain, this sorrow
a brothel of homesick nuns.
I give my tears the address
of a man I know in Boston, a bibliophile
who might take them in as a first edition
of a bride who was published posthumously.
I give my heart like a fire-alarm to two women
waiting by the bus.
My skull begs for campaign funds
to run as an alternative planet
to the one I’m walking on,
but the terrorist behind the door
with his redressals and reforms, his ancient future
strapped to his waist like a broken promise
has already ruined my vote
by killing off the candidate.
I confess to a puppet government
with the decrescent sickle of the moon at my jugular vein
that I have always been, even in eclipse,
an avid fan of significant absurdities.
They accuse me of consorting with swans
and I give up smoking
in front of a firing squad.
The sun comes up like an afterthought, an iron rose
or a bullet hole through the troubled forehead of dawn.
Is there no end to the wonders of God?
cries a highschool prophet on a diving board
while his seeing-eye dog runs off
with a shoeful of massacred dice.
And this is the meaning of life,
and this is the meaning of life,
chants the scorned heart
pulling stitches out of a scar,
a cosmologist with tweezers
who bleeds to death
every time he opens his mouth to heal.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Related quotes
As If Beyond Death
As if beyond death today,
as if I lay already under the eyelid of the moon,
the echo of my heart
pumping shadows
through my perfectly preserved corpse
in a silence that's never known the wind,
a fallen wharf without arrivals or departures,
and sad enough not to care why,
blood on the dolphin in the black tide
that pours me out of the horseshoe of the bay
like a road from its boot,
wipes me like the pollen and dust of dark matter
off the windowsills of the constellations,
my unknown mass crucial
to the cosmic contractions
that might give birth to the world again,
and I'm here alone in the high field
drowning in the twilight with the wildflowers
and the sky a last exhalation of the blue-green luster
that flirts with the mystic violet
on a homing crow's head
as the shadows assemble the wings
of a total eclipse
and a new dragon is born of the pain
that shrieks like lightning in the mouth of the abyss,
a torn animal
peeled out of its own skin like an eye
to add its darkness to the furnace of the black rose
that roars in the night
to blood the hungry mirror
with the thorns and talons of clarity,
to feed the wound of its existence
its existence.
And when I walk to the end of myself
through the golden rod and waist-high asters,
the seed of the stars that sleep with the daughters of men,
some of the flowers close up like fists and kisses
and others grasp themselves like a key
to a door that the whole universe can walk through,
and there are strange birds
flying from the eyes
in the rising skull of the moon
that sing like the pyres of cremated guitars
that died like trees in their solitude
and even the gates are weeping like wild dogs.
And there's a wind, intelligent, dark
the ghost of an ancient serpent
horned without ears,
an ocean of mind that exceeds itself like a wave
that howls like a secret it can't tell itself,
like a root blind to its own flowers,
that wants to lead my voice away in chains,
that wants my tongue to try
like a leaf in the updraft of a fire storm
to scream its agony out in the night
so that even the furthest star shudders
with the horror of its final liberation
like an arrow through the throat of a caged hawk.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Scorched Futures
Scorched futures adjourn the skull's medley of escapes
when hell tunes the vibrant spinal cord
to one translucent black note. I don't expect
to be believed by any but the insane inoculants of the hour.
Call it what you will, evil, error, sin, ignorance or ego; it wears
a planet of masks and a great white smile
to get around like blood amongst itself; sometimes barely visible wolves,
often, the cracked cup of the one you love
lying face-down like a wilderness, dead at the table,
blue copper sulphate slipping silently from the corners of the mouth
like a serpent or a doctor leaving a doomed house.
These days you can look through a library of mirrors
for uncontaminated eyes and see nothing for years
but an eerie oatmeal normality that belies
the pain on the shadow of the face
condemned to terminal row for life, asking silently
to be delivered from itself like a posthumous letter of regret.
Now the wounds are deeper than the deaths,
great cosmic slashes that plunder the swollen womb of its birth-stars
and render the mother still-born and dark. Death
knocks and a greater terror opens the door.
And this foolishness hasn't got a name, a characteristic.
There is no way to distinguish the sneer from the smile.
Call it your life but you don't know what it is
when the darkening hills open their mouths like fish
and swallow the sun, the moon, the stars. Shadows written
on pages of light, and you, an illiterate.
The river dreams it has no banks; space finally gets the point
and a million unreal worlds fall like leaves
from an imaginary tree full of the moments
of birds, a clock of birds, each an hour and an aeon, over
before they begin. Late for your birth and too early for death,
you make a life to pass the time; you draw your face
upon the waters of illusion with your finger; the face lingers
and the waters keep moving. Somehow you feel
left out, left behind, abandoned by the flowing.
Eventually you drown in your own face to ease
the irresistible current of your own longing to belong.
Is this illumination, arrival, or suicide?
Maybe the sea will receive you like a word
it whispered into its own ear; maybe this is your afterlife
and you're too enamored of the dream
to wake up in paradise. Or maybe this is the clearing of the throat
we call hell and all the songs are broken, all the wings are ruined,
fractured guitars, idiot lighthouses stammering to the storm.
Goat-junk, even the holiest. And now there is this emptiness left,
this debtor-zero that goes from door to door
asking if anyone in the house owes it anything,
its eyes, two begging bowls, its heart, a panicked furnace
eating lethal salads of incriminating Nazi documents,
the bitter herbs of withered victory gardens.
You're trying to finance a movie of your fingerprints; you're
lost and yet you're standing at the crossroads like a street sign,
your emotional life, a traffic-light
in a cemetery where even the ghosts can't give you any direction.
So what are you now; what address would you offer the stars
that have pulled you over for delirious living?
Everything, a huge lie, corrective vision, a lifeboat full of sharks.
That's when love blooms like a white star on a dead branch of the night
and too desperate to obey, you bite into
the black apple of your own heart, trying to stir
your dispirited cauldrons of boiling vinegar
into the golden foil of joyous ciders. Don't you see;
this time around
it's the star that goes looking for the magi; it's
the garden that gives names to Adam and Eve; it's
the sinner that saves the messiah.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Black Fire
Evaporating in a black fire.
Don't want to drink the night from the window again.
Won't be a chain trying to escape itself
when I'm already free,
but what an affront of mirrors to be so diminished
because the lions of fire, the dragons
that flare from the eye of the black sun,
their shadows spanning the heartless abyss
of their ferocious lucidities,
pitched their wings like huge, black tents of night
at the gates of the wide-eyed gazelles of emotion
they could bed freely under the moon,
unspool in the blue grass silvered by the wind,
their eyelids waning like a glass of wine.
In the obvious light of the morning
they will run from lesser hunters
mistaking the truce of nightblood
on the horn of the moon
for a rag of surrender, a gesture of clarity
like a star in a well,
the signet of an ancient moment
when the abyss returns to itself
like the echo of a wounded voice
to heal at the foot of a throne of shadows.
Though I could have stung like a serpent,
I was the wind at your heel once, once
like the wind I would have sowed the path before you
with seeds that would have bloomed like the eyes of the stars,
I would have saturated the air with lachrymose diamonds,
and poured the oil of the only lantern of my afterlife out like rain
so you could have shone like a rainbow at night
and your roots were luminously charged
with vital urges of mystic lightning.
I would have come to you like a flashflood of silver on the moon
and run the labyrinth of dry creekbeds
that scar the lifelines on your palm.
I would have kissed the black rose awake from its dream
of being stoned for a miscreance of the light,
and held the nightsky up to its beauty
like the forbidden side of a mirror
to jewel the eclipse you wear like a face.
I would have lain down beside you
like the shore of an unmapped island beside the sea
and answered every wave of your incoming tide
with a nightbird in the mouth of a bell of blood
that ripened in a watchtower on the moon,
but every kiss was a translucent jellyfish,
the auroral rose of an ambivalent Medusa
rooted in the lethal snakepit,
the toxic electricity of her stoned hair,
the trawling storm of her decapitated tresses
when the truth struck like an unexpected fang of light.
Now you spend your time
trying to tie knots in your spinal cord
like the severed filament of the moon,
trying to wick amputated candles in the darkness
that might help you grope your way
back to your head
like the black hole that became of the star
that went looking for its lost planet
like a blind shepherd startled awake by the howling of wolves
running across the sky in a wilder freedom
above the timberline of your eyelashes,
tinkling in the glass womb of your brittle shining
like the tungsten crumbs of a burnt-out dream.
Even now you don't understand
how you can pour so much of yourself into yourself
like an ingrown hair, your love
merely an idea infatuated with itself
that your eyeshadow festers like a palette of gangrene
and like me the vision won't paint you again
in the vivid constellations and kells of braille
you insisted on reading backwards
in the troubled mirror of your own perversity.
No rose in the shadow of the black Pegasus
born from the blood that pours from the vase of your neck
like a dead bouquet of poppies, no inspiration
in the petrified skulls of your past lovers
scattered like the beads of a broken rosary at your feet
you once fingered carelessly
like the writing on the wall.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Grief Promise Me To Leave ' Part 2
“”After three months of lying and illusions””
GRIEF PROMISE ME TO LEAVE ' PART 2’
My heart: come back to me grief
My grief: I’m not grief any more I developed to MISERY
My heart: whatever just come?
My misery: I’m coming my friend
My heart: you were right
My misery: as I told you before but you won't believe me
My heart: I believe in you now
My misery with a 'happy tone': tell me what's happened
My heart: what should I tell you! ? I’m stupid.... I’m foolish
My misery: I agree cause every one think in his heart he is big idiot and you are idiot
My heart: she destroyed my soul
My misery: like always
My heart: I don't want that any more
My misery: what do you want?
My heart: I wanna death
My misery: not in your hand, it's our life happiness & sadness
My heart: but my life always painful, what should I do, may I blame the fate or what?
My misery: no, blame your self? You were so nice toy in other hands you are idiot, so blame yourself.
My heart: she lied to me, she gave me hope, life and happiness in months and toke it from me in a little moments.
My misery: that's because of your kindness, and there is no place for you in this world.
My heart: you are the only one who can understand me well.
My misery: I know that cause we borne together.
'My misery thinking'
My misery: you shouldn't keep moving in your life
My heart: I know! ?
My heart: I just wanna the honest from her not anything else
My misery: you won't get it
My heart: she thought me a little nice toy in her hands
My misery: with all my regret, you were and you will still always
‘My heart thinking about ending his misery’
‘My heart saw a knife near from him, he carry it to suicide and end his cruel life’
My misery ' with happy voice ': what you doing?
My heart: I can't be idiot anymore, cause I believed in something silly doesn’t existed ' love '.
My misery: you are right.
My heart: I’m sorry for keeping you away from me.
My misery: its ok, as I told you before, something from me will still inside you.
My heart: you are my faithful friend.
My misery: we had borne together.
‘My heart I s going to suicide now’
My misery: any last words?
my heart: before I leave this life forever I want you promise me that you will never go to live in her heart ever, cause she make me live in the most beautiful illusion I’ve seen.
My misery: do you know that you are stupid?
My heart: I know cause she kept telling me this word.
My misery: ok I promise you but you have to end your life now
My heart: ok i will
‘When my heart tried to stick the knife in his heart’
‘The 'happiness whisper' came to him in hurry again but she barely breathing’
Happiness whisper: what you doing? Are you crazy?
My heart: yes I’m crazy cause I loved someone in crazy way but, she failed me, and the misery controlling me forever.
My misery: let him rest of his cruel life.
‘Happiness whisper trying to convince misery to make him not killing him self’
My heart: it's too late, that's my choice.
‘Happiness whisper started to vanish’
Happiness whisper: you don't deserve that, you are good heart
My heart: forgive me I’m not belonged to this world
‘The happiness whisper start crying and after a while she vanished’
‘My misery was standing and waiting’
My heart: goodbye and don't forget what you promised me don't forget
my heart stick the knife in the center and he begin bleeding to death, his tears freeze on his eyeball, he begin trembling, his color turned from the puce to the dark blue, and then he is died.
The misery: it was his end but, it was the beginning for other broken hearts so be careful cause I’m coming.........
poem by Damn Angel
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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It Isn't That I'm Looking
It isn't that I'm looking for eagles in a barnyard
or a phoenix in a match-head
when I observe
by the number of wrecks on the rocks
how few lighthouses there are these days
among so many flashlights.
What can the hair say about the horn
or the feather teach the wind
or quicksand preach
for the edification of the cornerstone?
And must I put a healthy leg
at the service of a broken crutch
to limp along with the mob
at the end of a dying culture
that insists that all roads end
in a cult of cripples?
If I'm walking alone to the stars
on a pilgrimage of one
finding my way in the going,
my heart aligned like the needle of a compass
to a darkness brighter than the light,
and the only map the clarity of my eyes,
why should those
who weep in their ashes like rain,
trying to put glasses on a fly,
who have never dipped
the thorn of the moon
in the night of their blood
and written a love poem
to a skull in a desert,
care if I want to roam
in the hills and valleys of myself
like some homeless shepherd of the wind
taking the stone of the earth for a pillow to dream on
in the high grasslands
where the stars walk
whispering eternal intimacies like black swans
barging the ores of a vacant throne
through my bloodstream,
as all along the shores of my flowing
ancient flowers wake mysteriously
like candles in an eclipse?
If I take the sky for the walls of my house
and leave the rest
like an autumn of junkmail
looking for a door and a last known address,
if I choose not to contrive a world
to accommodate my absence
in the available dimension of the future,
wiping my shadows and ghosts
like mirrors off at the threshold,
even letting go of the door
to enter empty-handed
as the applause
for an understudy of the dawn
that never got over its stage-fright
in the abyss of an abandoned theater,
happy to let the river pan itself for gold,
not laying a claim to anything,
making sure the gate-latch
clamps down like a dog on a bone
when I close it up
like a straitjacket in its own thoughts,
not stringing my spinal court to a wishbone
or the warped neck
of an obvious guitar,
but taking my voice with me
like a wounded bird in my hands,
a star struck from a stone,
moonlight in an empty boat,
the taste of silence
in the mouth of a mask,
my name a rainmark
on the eyelid of a dusty bell
I've left to the dream it keeps returning to;
why should it matter to anyone
who lies to the bleeding door
that is wounded by their entrance
everytime they say it's just me
as if a pillar answered?
I can't find anything
less than everything to call a self
and there are no mirrors
in an abyss more naked than the sky
to consult like the oracular flights of words
that litter the windowsill of this seeing
like flies that spent themselves,
flints on an empty lighter,
wicks on a glass candle,
consuming the ferocity
of their lives against the illusion of the world outside
they brain themselves against again and again
like small meteors
doused like torches in the eye
of the upper atmosphere
just above the open window.
When everything is absurd as this,
and even the tuning forks of the rain
are an era off in their pitch,
and music is merely
the coming and going of ants
in an abandoned syrinx,
and the drum of the heart alone
isn't enough to start a band,
and the only melody
is a road the wind blew away
like a hair off the shoulder of the night,
and everyone's trying
to unmarrow the moon like a fortune-cookie,
and every snowflake in the furnace
of this dark fire
thinks it dies like a galaxy
when it's only an inflection of tears,
am I not free to walk in harmony
with the savage senselessness of it all,
without hanging a bell of advice over my head
like the only corpse
on an island full of gravediggers
who can't get out of the holes they've dug
to bury me in?
I don't want to live waiting for yesterday
like the light of a star
that's already gone,
or dream like a seed of constellations to come
like a roll of the dice,
or watch the surplus of your smile
rotting on the docks of a famine.
And don't think these harvests I leave you
like a trail of breadcrumbs and dead flies
out of this wilderness of thought
are any more than stars
caught in the throat of the labyrinth
that follows itself like a snake with its tail in its mouth,
trying to find a way out of itself
by eating its own head.
And by some chance
if you ever make it out this far,
I've mailed back
the same map of fireflies
with its legend of smoke,
three lifetimes a lightyear,
you once handed me to find you
and marked every place I'm not
with a black hole.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Come To Me In Rags Of Blue Fire
Come to me in rags of blue fire, you, muse, you,
the gardenia face on the other side of the black gate
whose ancient spears are tipped with the taste
of wounded moons and iron roses; do not be swayed
by the blossoms on the cherry bridge,
or why the shadows of the brick children
on the walls of atomic decisions
haven’t been signed by the artists; give up
your fixation for amateur comet-watching in the rain
and come to me, touch me, hold me, consume me
in the flames of your igneous dispositions,
pierce me with stars, tear me on the thorns of your light,
as you have loved me in revery, distress, and tears,
as you have loved me in horror and humiliation
and then yourself lain down with me
in the mass graves of the student guitars
that were raped and murdered in the limelights
of the show-bizz army trucks,
antidotes weeping all night from the crescent of your kinder fang
to keep my heart alive like a toad in winter,
bring me now the night fire of your tigers
and the fragrance of wild sapphires blooming on the wind
when you return like an atmosphere to find me
as only you know how to find me
listening to my scars eat through the silence of dry creekbeds
revising the flash floods of their nervous breakdowns
with the short hands and amputated fingers of cactus alphabets.
Shall I call you dark names, and season my calling
with black swans and histrionic willows;
shall I summon you by silvering the Russian olive,
or bleeding the cherry to paint a man without lips,
or will you make me labour for nothing
in the sweatshops of the underpaid cocoons
when my tongue’s already as thick as a shoulder-pad?
Come, just come, come with wings, come with fireflies
and trust I’ve always preferred you to suicide,
come with bells and starfish calendars, come with candles and cedar
and tears in the mirror that don’t belong to anyone
and remember what I’ve died for when you asked,
come with fish and peacocks and orchids,
with squandered lakes bruised by the moon,
with black roses shedding their crows like witches,
come to me like an emerald that needs healing,
come with fingertips, breasts, eyes, a windfall of soggy peaches,
and believe in the poor goat whose piety’s a broken horn,
lift him up like rain above the sphinx in a desert ripe with diamonds,
and let him know, softly remind him, caress and confine him
like a cemetery covered in a keyboard of snow
until he confesses there’s an asylum in the heart of chaos
that sings to itself like an emergency constellation,
more enthralling than all the rest, a black waterstar
you are compelled to turn the lights off everywhere to be.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Un-Break My Heart
Un-break my heart,
Become part of me again,
You broke my heart and never fixed it,
Leaving a hole that sucked in my soul,
My days grow darker and my life grows shorter,
And yet you are no where to be found,
Please un-break my heart,
And say you will love me again,
Un-do all this hurt that you have caused,
When you walked out of my life,
Help me to un-cry these tears,
That i cried over you so many nights,
Please un-break my heart,
take away this pain,
that's slowly killing my soul,
darkening my days,
And creating a back hole,
please heal these stab wounds,
You've caused with your words,
Heal these scars on my heart,
That have become a part of me,
They are threatening to re-open,
Threatening to cause more pain and hurt,
Please father Un-break my heart,
Walk through the door,
The door i often sit in front,
Waiting for your return,
I need your love,
I need you,
I need your arms around me,
And for you to never let go of me,
You brought darkness into my life the moment you walked out,
So please bring back the light,
poem by Charlie Bones
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Guardian and BloodRose
BloodRose,
Rose of my love,
My love for Dark moon,
Dark as my heart,
Black as my soul,
And gave me my rose.
The rose of blood,
With petals soft and black,
Never as a rose so beautiful,
Grown not in light,
But under a dark moon lit sky.
Guardian,
Yes a guardian of BloodRose,
With teeth long and sharp,
Claws hard as diamonds,
Scales as dark as night.
My dear sweet guardian,
Guardian black as my heart,
Fire in your eyes,
Shadows in your soul,
A dragon of the dark moon.
A single rose,
With petals so fare,
As dark as my heart,
I now hold in my hand,
The rose of blood.
You are my darkness,
Fear of this love,
This love for you,
Love for darkness,
The cold shadows in my heart
That makes me yearn for you.
Now as you lay dying,
I hold a single rose,
The rose you gave me,
And as I hold it tight,
The thorns slice my hand,
Covered with blood,
My blood.
I have one fear,
The fear of death,
Symbol of my lost love,
Rose as dark as me,
Laying in a pool of blood,
Blood from me.
As I lay dying,
I remember my name,
BloodRose,
I am the rose of blood,
And I died of my own creation.
A creation of perfect beauty,
Petals dark black,
Thorns like small daggers,
Grown from my love,
My love for a dragon,
A dragon as dark as my heart.
Even in my death,
I think of you,
And the rose you gave me,
The rose that killed me,
The Rose of Blood.
poem by Nicolette Gonzalez
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Let Me Be Worthy
Let me be worthy of the river
and the strange ores that glow at night,
buried like teachers in the mountain;
let my blood always taste of the moon
and my heart burn like a black rose,
like the poem in the fire
that sweetened the sky with a flower of smoke,
for the wisdom of the generously unattainable,
and transcend the hell that shadows the folly
of not being foolish.
May the stars,
when they gather in gardens
water the roots of my seeing from clear fountains
and the wind bleed like ink from my pen
when I’m wounded by the beauty and the terror
of my helplessness.
When I am large, spacious, profound,
let me sit like the universe
on the throne of a seed
that lies in the dirt;
and when I am small, brief,
a trinket of light in a flash of ephemera,
robe me in the lion skin of the night sky
and ennoble me
with delusion and enlightenment
on this road of ghosts.
Whatever befall,
let me perish or prosper as a human
who insists upon the divinity of all
and burns and rises
for the heresy and truth of it.
Let anyone born be accounted a hero,
a lifeboat that hauled the world aboard
when the seas raged in the womb
to give birth to suffering;
and may I always be entrusted
with the ancient shales of dark courage it takes
to look into the dragon’s eyes
and not be horrified
by the ferocity of the freedom
that thaws space
like an hourglass in the rain.
And should love occur
to shape the blade of the moon
on the anvil of my heart,
and a cauldron of passionate visions
scald the eyes with intimate glimpses
of myriad heavens and hells,
all truer than reason,
may my bitterness pass
like the eclipse of an hour,
a left-handed blessing,
no vinegar of injured illusion
accept the sad surrender of the wine
like the death poppy of a folded flag,
no tar of judgment and denial
feather the dream with stone pillows,
no abyss under the brief era of an eyelid,
make me too petty or afraid
to dance with my skin off
engulfed like the wind
in secret sails of mystic fire.
There’s always a clown, a jester
who rides beside the hero like an anti-self,
a thoroughbred and a dray
yoked to the little red wagon of the heart
like two thieves either side
of an unwitnessed crucifixion,
two dadaphors, two torches
disposed like opposible hinges
on a door that opens like water
at the whisper of a key.
Let me be the clown-prince
of my own idiotic profundities then,
let me survive my way into the wisdom
of the inspired fools
who know that anything they ask for
from the stolen bounty of the king
is just another absurdity in disguise,
that even laughter isn’t a lifeline.
I’ve always had my heart
caught in my throat
like a bird in a chimney,
a cork in a wine-bottle,
a habitable planet in a black hole.
I have loved and befriended
almost anyone
who would let me
and seen their evanescence,
their transience, their vagrancy, their passage
through this mansion of space
with the amazing windows and chandeliers,
the sad brevity of the things they cherished.
Blind to restorative grails,
I have not sought the meaning of life,
I have not hunted the dragon with nets,
knowing reality is meaningless
because it has no fingers,
it doesn’t point to anything beyond itself,
nor bear witness in a mirror,
but I have walked in the peacock robes
of the twilight sky, all eyes,
in the gardens of the life of meaning,
past the hushed bloodtalk of the roses,
and seen for myself
that there are flowers with petals of water
and roots of fire
that drink the stars like rain.
Meaning dethrones the flowers like bottle-caps
and there’s no refund on the empties.
Night puts its hands over your eyes
and asks you to guess;
and there’s no end of the mystery,
no end of the blessing
of sitting under a tree
looking up at a star
wondering what human beings,
what you are doing on earth;
what a thought is, an emotion,
the blade of grass beside you,
everything alone together
in the silent boat of the rising moon
docking at its own reflection
as if the port were always in the voyage,
understanding
merely an expression of the intensity
of our not knowing.
The answers come and go,
governments, religions, arts, sciences, fortune-cookies,
like parking meters, like waterbirds,
like oceans on the moon.
Life is the lock that opens the key,
the skymouth of the dream that woke itself up
talking in its sleep,
trying to remember the dreamer.
Like the fleets and caravans
of the seeds on the autumn wind
we are the purest expression
of a universe
that answers us with ourselves
when we ask for a sign.
Like cherries that ripen in the silence
of the deepening night,
turning our tears to wine,
our darkness into eyes,
may my shadows always be worthy
of the light that casts them.
Fifty-seven years a human being,
fifty-seven years of suffering and doubt,
of boredom and magmatic intensities,
of mystic elation and mythic insignificance,
of anger, danger, risk, defeat and victory,
of saying and seeing,
of trying to kiss the shadow of my pain away
by deepening my ignorance
and progressing backwards
through the re-runs of old eclipses
that once gorged on the moon like dragons.
Tonight the wind howls bitterly outside
and the stars seem eras away in the cold
as if the intimacy I have felt with their shining
since I was a boy
were just another leaf torn from the tree.
It’s rare to catch a glimpse of your agony,
to see that even the brightest fountains
of your efflorescence
are rooted in a wounded watershed
that has never known the colour of your eyes.
I don’t need to be forgiven
for being born;
and I won’t be poured
like a tidal wine
into a life that isn’t mine
however many cracks appear in the cup,
however I recede and leak out of myself,
my blood isn’t anyone else’s signature,
and this walking to nowhere I call a poem,
no one’s footprints following me but my own.
How should it be otherwise
that I fall like rain
to appease this rumour of life
like a fire in my roots
and flash through the creekbeds
of my own flowing
like time returning to its hidden source
with news of nothing?
An echo of light
looking for its lost voice like a star,
I don’t need to prove myself to the night
like a theory in the heart of a passing stranger
and space is the only death mask
that is the true likeness of my face.
No more than the light and the rain
that open the seeds like love-letters,
I don’t need to know
what I will become
or what was revealed behind me in the dark,
but let me be worthy
of this wounded boat of the moment
with its cargo of eyes
enduring the burden and inspiration
of the voyage
like illegal refugees
with forged passports to Atlantis;
and if I must be accounted
one of the martyrs of absurdity,
then let me be as generous as wings
to the worms in my name
that blindly tilled the soil
of a rootless country.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Let Me Be Worthy Of The River
Let me be worthy of the river
and the strange ores that glow at night,
buried like teachers in the mountain;
let my blood always taste of the moon
and my heart burn like a black rose,
like the poem in the fire
that sweetened the sky with a flower of smoke,
for the wisdom of the generously unattainable,
and transcend the hell that shadows the folly
of not being foolish.
May the stars,
when they gather in gardens
water the roots of my seeing from clear fountains
and the wind bleed like ink from my pen
when I'm wounded by the beauty and the terror
of my helplessness.
When I am large, spacious, profound,
let me sit like the universe
on the throne of a seed
that lies in the dirt;
and when I am small, brief,
a trinket of light in a flash of ephemera,
robe me in the lion skin of the night sky
and ennoble me
with delusion and enlightenment
on this road of ghosts.
Whatever befall,
let me perish or prosper as a human
who insists upon the divinity of all
and burns and rises
for the heresy and truth of it.
Let anyone born be accounted a hero,
a lifeboat that hauled the world aboard
when the seas raged in the womb
to give birth to suffering;
and may I always be entrusted
with the ancient shales of dark courage it takes
to look into the dragon's eyes
and not be horrified
by the ferocity of the freedom
that thaws space
like an hourglass in the rain.
And should love occur
to shape the blade of the moon
on the anvil of my heart,
and a cauldron of passionate visions
scald the eyes with intimate glimpses
of myriad heavens and hells,
all truer than reason,
may my bitterness pass
like the eclipse of an hour,
a left-handed blessing,
no vinegar of injured illusion
accept the sad surrender of the wine
like the death poppy of a folded flag,
no tar of judgment and denial
feather the dream with stone pillows,
no abyss under the brief era of an eyelid,
make me too petty or afraid
to dance with my skin off
engulfed like the wind
in secret sails of mystic fire.
There's always a clown, a jester
who rides beside the hero like an anti-self,
a thoroughbred and a dray
yoked to the little red wagon of the heart
like two thieves either side
of an unwitnessed crucifixion,
two dadaphors, two torches
disposed like opposable hinges
on a door that opens like water
at the whisper of a key.
Let me be the clown-prince
of my own idiotic profundities then,
let me survive my way into the wisdom
of the inspired fools
who know that anything they ask for
from the stolen bounty of the king
is just another absurdity in disguise,
that even laughter isn't a lifeline.
I've always had my heart
caught in my throat
like a bird in a chimney,
a cork in a wine-bottle,
a habitable planet in a black hole.
I have loved and befriended
almost anyone
who would let me
and seen their evanescence,
their transigence, their vagrancy, their passage
through this mansion of space
with the amazing windows and chandeliers,
the sad brevity of the things they cherished.
Blind to restorative grails,
I have not sought the meaning of life,
I have not hunted the dragon with nets,
knowing reality is meaningless
because it has no fingers,
it doesn't point to anything beyond itself,
nor bear witness in a mirror,
but I have walked in the peacock robes
of the twilight sky, all eyes,
in the gardens of the life of meaning,
past the hushed bloodtalk of the roses,
and seen for myself
that there are flowers with petals of water
and roots of fire
that drink the stars like rain.
Meaning dethrones the flowers like bottle-caps
and there's no refund on the empties.
Night puts its hands over your eyes
and asks you to guess;
and there's no end of the mystery,
no end of the blessing
of sitting under a tree
looking up at a star
wondering what human beings,
what you are doing on earth;
what a thought is, an emotion,
the blade of grass beside you,
everything alone together
in the silent boat of the rising moon
docking at its own reflection
as if the port were always in the voyage,
understanding
merely an expression of the intensity
of our not knowing.
The answers come and go,
governments, religions, arts, sciences, fortune-cookies,
like parking meters, like waterbirds,
like oceans on the moon.
Life is the lock that opens the key,
the skymouth of the dream that woke itself up
talking in its sleep,
trying to remember the dreamer.
Like the fleets and caravans
of the seeds on the autumn wind
we are the purest expression
of a universe
that answers us with ourselves
when we ask for a sign.
Like cherries that ripen in the silence
of the deepening night,
turning our tears to wine,
our darkness into eyes,
may my shadows always be worthy
of the light that casts them.
Sixty-three years a human being,
sixty-three years of suffering and doubt,
of boredom and magmatic intensities,
of mystic elation and mythic insignificance,
of anger, danger, risk, defeat and victory,
of saying and seeing,
of trying to kiss the shadow of my pain away
by deepening my ignorance
and progressing backwards
through the re-runs of old eclipses
that once gorged on the moon like dragons.
Tonight the wind howls bitterly outside
and the stars seem eras away in the cold
as if the intimacy I have felt with their shining
since I was a boy
were just another leaf torn from the tree.
It's rare to catch a glimpse of your agony,
to see that even the brightest fountains
of your efflorescence
are rooted in a wounded watershed
that has never known the colour of your eyes.
I don't need to be forgiven
for being born;
and I won't be poured
like a tidal wine
into a life that isn't mine
however many cracks appear in the cup,
however I recede and leak out of myself,
my blood isn't anyone else's signature,
and this walking to nowhere I call a poem,
no one's footprints following me but my own.
How should it be otherwise
that I fall like rain
to appease this rumour of life
like a fire in my roots
and flash through the creekbeds
of my own flowing
like time returning to its hidden source
with news of nothing?
An echo of light
looking for its lost voice like a star,
I don't need to prove myself to the night
like a theory in the heart of a passing stranger
and space is the only death mask
that is the true likeness of my face.
No more than the light and the rain
that open the seeds like love-letters,
I don't need to know
what I will become
or what was revealed behind me in the dark,
but let me be worthy
of this wounded boat of the moment
with its cargo of eyes
enduring the burden and inspiration
of the voyage
like illegal refugees
with forged passports to Atlantis;
and if I must be accounted
one of the martyrs of absurdity,
then let me be as generous as wings
to the worms in my name
that blindly tilled the soil
of a rootless country.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Feel Like There's A Beast
Feel like there's a beast in the darkness
eating my eyes.
I'm a moon-bull
at a crossroads of solar swords
down on it knees
hemorrhaging like a poppy.
And there are constellations
I've never heard before
playing the harp of my horns
with pensive fingertips.
How strange this rag of life
soaked in tears and blood is.
Everything dies like a snowflake on a furnace,
a rock on an autumn mountain,
no two the same.
There are nights, there are
vigils of darkness
when the mirror can no longer bear
the weight of this feather of fire,
this vision of life
that estranges the spirit
of those who love it most
like a funeral bell
that once drank to the folly of love.
I am a snakepit of lightning
knotted in a glacier of ice
and every emotion
is the undertow of the tide in a sea of eyes
on the cold skull of the moon,
every thought, a stone lifeboat
inundated by the waves
it's convinced it's saving from drowning.
Once I was the dupe
of my own ideals,
now I am the master of none.
This far into the abyss
you forget the name of the god
you died in the name of;
you have squandered your certainty
on greater and greater risks,
the enciphered lotteries of mythic necessity,
only to discover,
though you traversed eras like deserts
that made a skull of your faith,
the donkeys have eaten all the mangers,
and there is as much radiance in the eye
of the dead serpent on the road
as there is the eyelash of a star.
A tear is not a fountain of seeing,
nor a dropp of blood, a rose.
How rare the sword in its silence
among all these chatty scissors at war
trying to cut along the dotted lines
of their border highways
crammed with refugees
they once called lovers,
the horizon slashed
and bleeding like a letter.
I want to calculate the half-life of pain;
the pillar of ore it calls home;
the elemental devolution of its atomic evictions
into the leaden passion of a base metal.
I want to know what I've turned into.
I want to know what's making the stars
throw down their spears of light at my feet
though my heart's out in the open
like a voodoo doll
waiting for a donor transplant.
I want to see myself
opening a door in the mirror
to someone with absolute eyes
irrevocable as yesterday's rain.
Let the star know
the flower it engenders;
let the rose
taste its own honey.
Blind in a dream; blind,
what light roots in the darkness
that I should want to
throw off this robe of blood like a sky
to slip through the eye of the needle
that binds the seams of this world
like a bird
with the single thread of a life in its beak,
washed out of God's eye
like a firefly snuffed
in a torrential downpour of stars?
Why am I
always one heart too many
over the threshold of the truth
I had to leave home to discover?
Am I a hoax in tears
or a tear away from a gate and a rafter?
Let the wave know the sea
that packs its caravan on the moon,
let the silence of the waking abyss
write indelible preludes
with a last kiss
that goes on forever
like the white autumn wind
in a turmoil of seeds
that demonically exceed
the life they're after,
flower by flower,
death by death
like the pulse of a bell
setting the doves free
in the towers of farewell.
It's the eloquence of a tree
to say what life is
when the full moon ripens
in its leafless branches
and the heart beats
like a windfall of silver apples,
though I have tried,
but love is a bridge
on a finger of water
that not even the moon
can slip off like a ring
when the wind rises
like a gaping fish
to swallow the chimes and eyehooks
of its matriculate ripples.
And with each breath of the night
I took and returned,
I have aspired to succeed
at every failure I was ever inspired by.
I raised every sail,
crossed every wave,
every eyelid, every petal
of the sea of life
in the heart of the rose
only to dropp the first crescent of the moon
like an anchor
in the furnace of a dream.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Want To Take The Moon Out of the Sky
I want to take the moon out of the sky
like a cup, like a rose of black wine
and drink it down to the last shadow of a mountain,
the last, lost eyelash of the light
that floats on the surface, the final crescent.
If I could inhale fire, or snort the stars
like a rail of radiant coke on a black mirror
and pull the darkness up around me
to keep me warm in the night
against the cold drafts that barge through the window,
if the darkness were a woman
I could throw my arms around
and hold her back against my chest in the bay of my body,
a shore I liked to wake up on
still drunk on the moon
and walk in the morning as she
dazzles me with her nakedness and veils,
the litter of the broken jewelry
she arrays in the sprawling waves, I would, o
believe me I would. I would
take this paint rag of a life
this hard, dirty smear of leftovers on the plate
of so many paintings, this injured towel
that has wiped the blood and tears and clouds,
the wounded sunsets from so many faces and rivers,
from so many brushes and knives and tongues
leeched off the rotten rainbows, the flags,
the bad water in the dark well, I would
take this skin of dirty flowers,
this Joseph’s coat of colours,
this blighted, blotted pelt of soiled skies
and corrupted trees, eyes that have dried
into blisters and scabs, lips
that crack like dry peonies, I would take it
and give it a decent burial, already
the poor, leather shirt
of some archaic Indian from the book of changes
lying in the yarrow of his scattered bones.
Or maybe I could acquire the thunder
of a large, rusty oil drum and burn it at night
in the backyard, cremate it and smudge
the evil spirits out of the house
of my prevailing stars, smoke
the adulterous virgin’s disease away,
like clothes after someone’s died of the plague.
There are days, and this is one of them,
when life seems kinder than I thought
to everyone else but me;
mornings and afternoons, but seldom the nights,
that seem like dead dogs
lying at the side of the highway,
ants in their eyes dissolving like soap
and turkey vultures unravelling
their organs and tendons
like the yellow and scarlet yarn of old sweaters
that will be reknitted into something else
that doesn’t fit, days
when I realize I was born middle-aged,
how homeless my heart is,
and how my voice,
though it’s been hurled into the dawn for years,
is such a lonely bird, not even an echo
disappearing into the silence
of the vast, unanswering spaces that overwhelm it.
I write in the air with the wind for a pen
like a madman who gestures at things
no one else can see, believing against belief,
he’s doing his part to better the world
though it comes with asylums
and bills to his door, demanding
mechanical birds on iron boughs,
and revisions not his to give.
I feel like a cinder in someone else’s eye,
a crumb of sleep shaken out of a dream,
a thread of smoke that stings people
into rinsing me out with anger and tears,
the stone of the new foundation cast away
though all I wanted to do
was astound the blind with stars,
make the dark flower with the wild orchids
of a more luminous fragrance,
arrive with islands of wheat and roses and wine
and lay the cool sage of the moon down
like a silver herb on a scalded heart.
I’m a brilliant hoodlum from the late sixties
as one of ex-wives called me, leaving,
and we thought we could heal the world
with love and music and art.
Hearts change, times change, and maybe
I’m the casualty of a slow accident
and this is my coma, these days I spend
witching for water in hell,
for signs of life among the corpses
that fell en mass from a terrible height,
going from one to another,
lifting up their pale arms,
the limp necks of broken swans, looking
at my watch to time the indifferent heartbeat
of the pulsing cursor on the computer screen.
I’m a habit of buoyancy
drifting through dense fog,
an empty lifeboat crying out
to a ship that may have gone down years ago:
“Is anyone out there, is anyone alive? ”
And no one answers
but the gargantuan vacuities
of the atomic distances between us.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Night In The Wounded Mirror
The night in the wounded mirror
is only a childhood away from my face
and there's always a shattered window
between me and my starless shining,
and a dead bird upturned on the sill
as if the sky, too, had its quota of roadkill.
Looking back from all these
lightyears and constellations away,
on the black day I was born under an eclipse
like a flower clenched into a fist,
an eye without an iris darker than a shark's,
I suspect there was a lot more suffering back then
than I was able to live my way through,
estranged in the corner of a kitchen
that was a feeding frenzy of knives.
I still can't leave one out on the counter
without fearing it's just another punctuation mark,
the claw of a comma in a long sentence of blood.
At best, it's the silver scar of the moon
that slashed me open like a well-honed loveletter
that wasn't meant for me.
And I still don't know how to approach
the child I was, the child I still am
time-travelling through himself like a glacier
as if he could put a stop to evolution
or survive his extinction
by keeping to himself like ice.
I look upon his solitude and silence,
the unaccusing indictment of his face,
like a cold, brass plaque
commemorating the unidentifiable victims
of an atrocity that can't be understood.
He's still seven and I'm looping through sixty
like the spine of a calendar
shedding me like autumn,
a picture of turning leaves on every page,
until there's no way of telling what age we are
in this season out of time,
and I want to love him, I want
to say things that could heal us both like water
before I take him with me into my grave,
but I don't truly know how,
and there are secret vows of violation
that are taken without a mouth
and assassins of intimacy in the shadows
and children sleeping in snakepits
who make up their own bedtime stories
and dream of things that can't be told to anyone
who hasn't been devoured in their ancient infancy
by the furious innocence of the sea.
Dark-hearted jewel
of a child in the night,
older than light
who has made more of me
than I can make of him,
when I weep for what he knows
and will not say, what am I,
what are these words
in the inky shacks of the trees
but the lengthening shadow
of the darkness that pours out of him like blood,
or duct-tape like moonlight
over the mouth of a scream?
And if I come back now
like the legend I have made of his sorrow
to gather him up in my arms
like a harvest under a full moon,
and if I sit with him all night
without saying anything
here on this skull of a rock
until each of us is the memory of the other,
could it make anything better,
would it take the thorn of the moon
out of the eye of the dragon
that sheds its skin like childhood skies,
not knowing where things end, things begin?
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Sit At My Window
I sit at my window
trying to translate the Kufic script
of the shadows of the trees on the snow,
smoking the invisible ink of the light
over the flame of my mind
to clarify my seeing
by realizing there is no deep or shallow
in the fathomless depths of I am,
nothing hidden, nothing revealed.
And it's not so much that I am in the presence of the world,
but that the presence, the world, is me,
and if I go looking for it,
only my fingerprints will be found
like these violet shadows dusted by the snow
under my multitudinous mugshot in the mirror.
So I open my mind and my eye, my heart and my hand
and let things arise as they will,
knowing that even this is a blunder
that advances my tardy illumination by another eclipse.
This morning blue is the taste of the sky
and I am alive again at my desk
to wonder who or what or why I might be
this wondering spontaneity
circling like a bird in the abyss,
feathered by feeling and thought
for a tree or a meaning to perch in
that hasn't already been struck
by the lightning of my homeless insight.
Indwelling energy in the turmoil of a terrible silence,
I am an ambassador of water to an unknown star
that foils my blood with light the closer I approach
and I don't know what the message is
or who it's from, but every time I deliver it,
my head comes off like the moon.
At some point you have to give up looking
to go on seeing, you must
come to a full stop
if you want to liberate the pen
that indicts you like an assassin
with his ear to the wall.
So I go by night, unheeded and alone,
a constellation of my own
that doesn't read the braille of itself
reflected like direction in the starchart on the lake,
cored like eyes into the dice of my bones,
or mummified by a legend in a straitjacket
interred in the long-standing consensus of a guess,
knowing I would only be following my own footprints
like the shadows of these words
that flow from the trees in the snow.
And there are squirrels that leap from branch to branch
of these arboreal letters like commas
that don't know where they go
and wrens that perch like quotation marks
around things that can never be said
that everyone claims they know
as they call out their name
like the echoless vocabulary
of a febrile grammar in a mad dream
as if their whole life were ingathered into one last scream
that might shatter the mirror of the way things inevitably seem.
I listen to the world and hear in each person and form
the mindstream moving through the night
like the voice of a mystic alphabet
returning to the sea
with news of itself
whispered into its own ear.
And if sometimes the stars think
my seeing goes too far,
my seeking exceeds the bounds of the light,
as it turns planets like doorknobs
to open new rooms in a dark mansion
that stands like an abandoned cornerstone of the night on a hill
waiting for me to return like a lost threshold,
or the faceless side of the moon to a window,
then let me here and now confess to my own denial
and knock on the door of the next false address
to see if I can find who wrote
this loveletter that slashes me open like a smile
and reads me out loud to the stars on the wind
as if I were the last flare from an empty lifeboat.
poem by Patrick White
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Out Of So Much
Out of so much experience
so little to signify it
in a language
extraterrestrial life could understand
about our relationship with gravity
and what's crudely human about being a human
we don't even have in common with ourselves.
Out of so much sorrow
so many tears shed
like oceans of wounded salt
like bruised orchids of blood
like the lightyears between windows
living next door to each other
there is so much vastness between us
in an expanding universe
in the way we reach out to each other
like the stars in wavelengths of farewell
toward the red end of the spectrum.
Out of so much radiance
so much shining
not even the ash of anything
to show for it
when the last ghost has left town
with leaving so much
as a loveletter of smoke
propped up against the mirror.
Out of so much that was seen once only for good
and for a moment understood
until we started thinking about it
my eyes taste of what they've seen
like iron apples ripening in the rain
no one can take a bite out of
to improve their education
by learning how to bury the dead
because most of what I've seen
is pain without insight
pain without eyes
like impact craters in the skull of the moon.
A war of windows in a world without vision
without stars
without dawn and moonrise.
Viral eyes that abhor stained-glass
as much as they do the godless clarity
of the most advanced telescopes
playing Russian roulette with the stars
to prove the Big Bang was cosmic suicide
and we're here like living proof of the afterlife
of its bad karma
like a hunting religion in an agrarian society.
Out of so much mystic specificity
so little sense of earthly union
in the fractious sameness
that tries to blame everyone else
for why things are falling apart
as fast as they're coming together.
Five petals open.
And no flower blooms.
The sun rides a victory chariot through Rome.
The moon a deathcart through a slum.
But the stars know
how much the night keeps to itself.
How much it can't say
when the silence clears the sky of birds.
How much there is to express
that leaves even the dead speechless.
Out of so much verbiage
so many words
so many opinions
stuck like bats in burrs
just beyond the porchlight.
Out of so much hatred of life
out of so much hatred
of light and water
air earth and fire
compressed like a fist of coal
around the blood diamonds of the ideologues
who write political suicide notes
for whole nations by proxy
who don't know how to bleed for themselves
or convince the dead
they died for someone else.
Out of so many words
so many civilizations
from the Tower of Babel
to the New York Metropolitan
with its polyglot fire alarms
warning Alexander
about the approach of Caesar
and his love of books.
Out of so many voices
that spoke like trees in the wind
or out of burning bushes
and the light of the stars
or the thunder that follows the revelation
that it's raining on a lifeless Mars.
Out of so much clamour and noise of insight.
Out of so many whispers of stars
and rumours of waves
held up to both our shell-shocked ears
like skulls of oceanic awarenessness
that found us washed up on a beach somewhere
after some serious weather.
Out of so many poems and paintings and heartfelt polygraphs.
Out of so much confessing.
Out of so many speechs.
So many prayers and blessings
So many dead languages that carried their mother-tongue
like mitochondria in the DNA of their mouths
down through the generations
so that every living word
contains the corpse of a metaphor
like a mummy under a pyramid
or Lazarus catching his breath
to be interviewed
about a life after death
that looked exactly like his
when he woke up to this all over again
with nothing much to say about anything.
Out of so many with so much to say
how few are listening
as if their lies depended on it.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Black Rose
A black rose can stop the beat of ones heart…
A black rose brings the scent of death as it tears love apart…
A black rose makes nightmares reality…
A black rose fills my life with uncertainty…
A black rose is forgotten hopes and dreams…
A black rose is a broken girl laying in tears and painful screams…
A black rose is the pain of a shattered life…
A black rose is lost love in my hopeless life…
A black rose is the memories that haunt my restless soul…
A black rose took everything from me that once made me whole…
Including…you…
The Serpent
The serpent sits enthroned
at the top of its own stairwell,
helically reposing in its own empyrean
like an August hawk
coiling up its own thermals;
its fangs, a stargate
to an unknown afterlife, emancipation,
and the jewel of its head,
the first stone thrown,
a small planet without
the eyelid of a sky,
a nugget of mystic uranium,
looped in a turban of orbits,
a sacred arrowhead
that flys from itself like a bow
drawn back long before the wind
knew its first feather.
Lethal healer,
the sword that kills is the sword that saves.
This morning,
the drubbing of the rain on a tin roof,
the hiss of traffic
flaring like matches down the sleek asphalt,
if I were to say
I want the emotional life of space,
I don't know if I'd mean it,
but I'm so weary
of being this slow crisis of a bird
mesmerized by the swaying eyes
of the black lightning
that has caught me in the net
it weaves of my own nerves,
I want to douse my heart
in the next providential tide of tears
like a torch I put out in the night
to see better in the dark.
I asked for wings
and my spine was adorned with fire.
I asked for water
and I'm a fish on the wind.
and now this desert I hoped to remain,
a craze of sand,
has grown teeth
and is overgrazing the starfields like pyramids.
I don't think
I will ever recover
from the wound I received
like the hidden twin of the moon,
trying to love the world, myself, women, people.
Every word was a road, a pulse, an eye,
a dropp of blood
I could ride to the end of and beyond
into the implacable subtlety
of my own empty, ageless temples
where even the silence isn't ghost enough
to conjure a medium
to jar the table as a sign,
and death is buried in its own vacuity
like an embryo in a mask without eyes.
I was bound by my own boundlessness,
my nerves, wicks in the abyss
that enhanced the darkness
by cleaving me like a tree
vision after vision,
another world
with every blink of the eye
that wiped the mirror clean of me like an ax
until I understood
that even the most enlightened watersheds of wisdom
are just a smear of perception
on the least dropp of that splendor
I went looking for like a cloud
saturated with the ancient seas of the moon
that was covered by my own looking.
I lay at the bottom
of my oceanic odyssey,
trying not to sink,
but I wanted to give something back
for what I felt I had received;
not an ethic or a metaphysic,
but a spontaneous action of the blood
that remembers it was once a rose.
I wanted to return spring like a water-key to the moon;
I wanted to harvest the shadows
of my own non-existence
and break bread
with the famine of ghosts
that came like royalty to beg food from their servant,
blind doors standing on the thresholds of awareness
asking me to address myself
to the terrible openness
of their unanswerable need.
I have eaten my own ashes
in the furnace of every star
I have ever looked upon.
I have drowned in the wells
of the faceless, fathomless mirrors,
and every woman I have ever drunk from
was a grail with an enigmatic black pearl in it
lustrous as the moon in eclipse.
O promises of bliss
that tuned the webs of the spiders
like a guitarist with perfect pitch
to the frequency of my spinal cord
that I might entangle a star
in the silk of my conceiving;
that I might seize a firefly
in the fangs of my thought
and taste the honey of the lantern
that lit my dark corner
in the era of the moment.
O sweetest of lies to ripen with longing
like the eyes of a child in the darkness
far from home.
I was trying to find a road
that fit my walking like shoes on a mountain;
I was trying to walk on water with mystic crutches;
I was looking for an arrow
dipped in the blood of a serpent with wings,
set aflame by a demonic star
and feathered by spiritual fire
to restring me like a bow
severed like the branch of a sacred grove
by the oracular blade of the moon.
I was too deeply sheathed in the truth
to appreciate the arcane sagacity of my lies.
I stood like a shadow in the burning doorway of my own fire
and looked deeply into the night
to answer my own knocking
like the echo of a stranger in the darkness,
walking away from someone who didn't know
how to greet himself.
I was a tree crucified on a man,
a vandal in the shrine of the moment,
bleeding like stained-glass,
a rosary of vertebrae and skulls
reconstructed in the future museum of now
I played myself into like a funeral plan.
Now everywhere the wind is a pilgrim,
I leave my heart like a shrine
I will never return to.
And the sadness, and the solitude
and the vastness of my insignificance
is the shadow of a bird on a cloud.
The only way to perfect my defeat
was to sit at the feet of my most cherished delusion
like a rootless flower watching over a coffin,
then rise like the wind
from the rubbish of the shedding,
the loneliest pillar and sole cornerstone of the sky.
Now my apish profundities
no longer crack fleas of light like stars
I picked out of God's burning beard
with the forceps of the moon.
Now I am infested with constellations.
I no longer turn the pages of the waterlilies
like the holy books of an inspired swamp.
I no longer seep down to the river
to drink from the moon
like a serpent at the water's edge
and watch the panicked angels jumping
from the reflection of an uncrossed bridge
that collapsed like a covenant with hell.
I no longer shred my heart
like a secret document
in an abandoned embassy of swans
looking for asylum further south,
tormented by the unattainability
of a woman's beauty,
looking for sanctuary
in the ashes of a black sail
that flared like a poppy with passion
at every gust of desire
that silvered the trembling grass
with sidereal aspirations.
Why bother to laminate your lovers, your legends?
Let them go like autumn leaves and smoke,
the last breath you took
before you were interred
like a scream in the larynx of a deaf-mute,
a foreign currency you couldn't spend at home.
Naked is the only way to dress for the rain,
but it doesn't matter which
from the wardrobe of all your many lies
you wear to the fire that waits for you
like a fledgling waits for its plumage.
And this is a long river
and this is a long day and a night
and maybe only the silence is listening
to what the stars are preaching
from the pulpits of the flowers,
and this that says me now
is just the promo for the intensive care ward
of a new religion
the founders are always the first to betray;
but when I truly let go
it was my falling
that taught me to patch my shoes with the sky.
And have you come this far,
passed through this many gates
for wisdom, compassion, freedom,
wandered aimlessly until you could not tell
the stars from the sand,
the journey from the arrival,
suffered worse than all the things you cannot say
until you forgot what you were looking for
in the first place, until
you despised what you craved the most?
I don't remember how long I slept
before my dreaming woke me up
and I realized
no fool could defame my solitude
and that life
was only the story of a scar
looking for the knife that inflicted it
like a shadow
in the forsaken valleys
of the mountains of the moon.
Looking for a pearl of light
I had to plunge into a darkness
deeper than anything
my eyes had ever given birth to before.
I had to swallow the key before I could open the door.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Least You Can Do
I was lying awake last night, waiting for your call
But if the rumours are true, that won't bother you at all
I'm trying hard to understand
What it takes to be your man
Now I don't have to wonder anymore
Least you can do is say you're sorry
Least you can do is give me back my heart
Just give me back my heart
Seems living in hope was wrong those years I was away
Thinking your letters, I never received, had gone astray
You said you'd always be there for me
Like a fool I thought you'd be
Now I don't know what I was thinking at all
But the least you can do is say you're sorry girl
Least you can do is give me back my heart
I won't come around no more
You won't find me standing outside your door
Least you can do is tell me why, tell me why
The least you can do is say you're sorry girl
Least you can do is give me back my heart
I won't come around no more
You won't find me standing outside your door
But the least you can do is tell me why
I won't be your fool anymore
There's no need to be cruel anymore, no, no no no no no
Least you can do is say you're sorry girl
The least you can do is give me back my heart
Just give me back my heart
Least you can do is say you're sorry girl
Say you're sorry, it's all you need to do
The least you can do is give me back my heart
So I can move on with my life
Least you can do is say you're sorry girl
Is that so much to ask
The least you can do is give me back my heart
Give me back my heart
Give me back my heart
song performed by by Phil Collins
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Were There Stars
Were there stars in your hair that night?
I cannot remember,
so taken with your face
and the mystery and the silence and the sorrow
of the tender bell in your eyes
that could summon ghosts
of yesterday's embodiments to the fire
of any passion that lost itself prophetically
at a rave of shadows among the trees.
You eased out of your wardrobe of rivers
like a snake on the moon
sloughing its skin like the eclipse
of a far more vulnerable shining,
and I couldn't tell if you were
a doe or a lynx
stepping out of the alder groves warily
to lap the moonlight
that flaked the shore
with the silver petals of an undulant rose
older and darker than night blood.
I could feel the danger within you,
the abyss of the early grave
that waited for you like a key
to come in out of the pain
that bled you like a shadow
pouring out of an open wound
that whispered to you like a secret scream
only the dead who owned you could hear.
Your hunger desperately sought salvation
from the eyes
that pleaded with you
to blow yourself out like a candle,
cancel the inevitability of your suffering
with the shudder and sigh of sex.
We lay down naked together
by the willow-stained waters
in that summer of flesh
and sought oblivion from each other
like two compatible cremations
that concealed a ravenous phoenix
ending its fast of fire.
Purified by the depth and darkness
of your intensities,
I burned in you
and felt the flames
of a dangerous angel
who had broken her afterlife like a curfew
flow over me
like dawn at a keyboard of feathers.
Your breasts still come up overnight
like supple mushrooms against my chest
and the moist heat of your mouth
throbbing with flowers like July
as you seized your joy
from the agony of the roots you tormented
to give up their dead
like bruised cherries.
I have never died as fully since
at the insistence
of any woman's appetite
nor known a night so final,
so brutal with time and beauty
as the pendulous moon swung
like an executioner's ax
over the nape of its own reflection
swanning on the waters.
We made love as if
we were both defying
the truth we didn't need to say.
I wanted to plead with you,
I wanted to call out into your emptiness
like a beseeching bird
disappearing into a dark valley,
but my voice ran ahead of its echo like light
and the things I would have asked you
not to do
had already been achieved.
Heroin, your asp,
at the funeral I stood back
beyond the baffled wreaths of flowers
and the ambivalent silence
of the modest gathering that mourned you,
maculate in the shadows
of the Japanese plum tree
we once made love under
and I kissed the rose of your blood
shedding in mine
like a wound
my love was never sword enough to heal
as they closed
and boarded you over like a well.
I spent the night like an empty vase
beside your grave
until the stars that bloomed above you like wildflowers
thawed my tears in the morning light.
I walked out of the cemetery
through the hard harps and spears
of its iron gates
and I have never been back.
The years since have been
chameleonic as a hooker
who plys her art
on the stairs of a temple
even the priests of my lust
are forbidden to enter,
but as you said I would
as you lay with me that night
like a knife beside the sea,
I have returned to you over and over again
like a witching wand
looking for water in hell,
like a cult of one to a lost island
that holds you like a secret
and wept like a candle of honey
in the dark hive of your unanswerable silence,
intoning the names
of an impossible god
on a rosary of black suns
until my heart hangs like a bell
dumb with grief
looking up at the stars
you rinsed like a tide from your hair.
And I lean on the crutch and the crook
of a shepherd's question,
looking everywhere for you
like the wind
sweeping the shadows of fireflies
like the fall of hair from your eyes
that night you tore yourself away from me
like a veil of blood and sorrows
wounded by the terrible light
of the black pearl
that ripened within you like the skull
of a full eclipse.
O my poor, broken angel,
you might have been fat and frumpy by now
if you had lived.
I could have watched your beauty
shed like the moon over the years,
and smile like an island
to remember how lost I was in your tides once,
a constellation of starfish
tumbled like dice in your dark undertow,
trying to shine, god, how
I tried to shine for you, how
I ached to embrace your planet safely
in the mandala of an empowering radiance
that could show you
I was worth living for
if nothing else.
Given the freedom
of the emptiness that engulfed us both,
we could have lived within each other,
we could have evolved our own atmospheres,
appointed our own stars,
written our own myths of origin
on the black pages of that journal of skies
where you scribbled down the events
of your pre-emptive afterlife
as if you wanted to make your ghost indelible.
As it was, the only thing I could do,
was take you in
like the last breath of a summer night
I could never let go of
without following it
like a shadow of you into death.
I haven't wished for much over the years,
and the dreams have come and gone as they will,
and my hair has gone gray
and my eyes are looped like powerlines
and the sad bells of a heavy solitude
that has yoked me to the grindstone of the turning world
to mill the stars like a tide
on the blood wheel of a worn heart.
I finally burned and broke all the weeping mirrors
I consulted like half-assed mediums
to see if I could restore you somehow
to the more intimate shining of that last night
you turned and ran back,
your shoes in your hand,
to make sure your final kiss would endure like a temple.
You pitied the agony of shapeshifting
you knew the black water ahead
was about to go through
as it smashed like goblets and crystal chandeliers
on the roaring skulls of the rocks.
You pitied me because you knew I loved you,
because you knew you were already
a future memory
and I was a prophecy from the past
that had ridden beyond itself like light
to illuminate nothing but your absence
measured in the filaments and lifelines
of eyeless oceans
like a seabird
circling a blind lighthouse on the moon.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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How Great The Palace Stands
I
How great the palace stands
with its golden domes
in a city that is on seven hills,
snow white where it towers seven times.
As if everything holy, righteous and wonderful
comes to stature in it,
where hymns are constantly sung,
in the inner court and at the outside
with a central stela as a sign
of life originating, pointing into the air,
with the moon and sun meeting,
rises and dies as in ancient heathen worship,
circled twice,
almost like the throne of God Himself
and year in and out
have been seen as the very fortress against evil.
This place is full of light and darkness that mixes,
much like the checked surface of a chess board,
maybe symbolic of a cycle of life and death,
that is eternal for these people?
II
After a journey over the whole earth,
coming from far as a pilgrim,
the traveller looks at the big palace,
later he stops in front of a copper door,
where there are soldiers on guard duty
and these symbols are depicted on that door:
Jesus Christ on the cross, the death of Mary,
death by torture, death on earth,
or in space,
symbols of the communion,
a vine and sheaf of wheat
and on the edge of the door
birds of the night and day
and thus again light and darkness:
a dead dove, a sleeping guinea pig,
a hedgehog, a night owl,
a tortoise bitten to death by a snake
and a threatening raven.
poem by Gert Strydom
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