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Don't Think I Owed It To Myself, But I Have Endured

Don't think I owed it to myself, but I have endured.
Scarred and broken and as full of escarpments
some bad mason laid in like a Cubist stairwell
in the Canadian Shield. Experience the sum
of all my failures, it's a strange book to quote from.
I tell people not to listen to anything but their own hearts,
but they take that as a sign of creative sincerity
and continue to listen out of the corners of their lives,
defying my unmastery by paying stricter attention.
You'd think someone who had lived sixty four years the hard way
like a wild mountain goat on a high, noble path
the rest of the herd doesn't take much anymore
as they did when the more siderealized shepherds
used to drive them to the Zen pastures of the moon,
would have his act down pat by now.

Still got a few gamma ray bursts of demonic energy
left in me yet, a black revolver of comets left in the clip
to take a few more pot shots on a drive by at the sun just for fun
as it's going down like a mailbox at the side of the road
with a waning rooster painted on it like a fire hydrant.
You can spend your whole life as preparation
for a moment that never comes. Some people
don't want to catch up to their star.
They just want to follow it as far as they can go.
They want to explore the offroad mysteries along the way.
Some ghosts radiate like well known constellations
and others roses in the dark that are just as happy to emanate.

Not in the habit of judging the ashes of others
by their constellations or their urns,
I've had more of a precessional inclination
to scatter them like seagulls on the wind
just to watch them hover motionless over a precipice,
each fixed in space like a mobile of sheet music
or the paradigmatic silence of a symphony
living the moment like a riff in the heart of time.
Wherever I've gone I've tried to leave signs
of where I'd been as delusory clues for those
sleeping walking in their delusional lostness,
roomy, lunar waterpalaces of the mind to move into
with more infinitely spacious windows
than there are condemned houses
in the slums of the usual zodiac of clockwork origins.

Not infrequently I can see time in a better light
than it deserves, and I like people that have been
sand blasted in the tide like a piece of broken glass
that washed up on the beach without losing its translucency.
An alumnus of the underground schools
for the occult science of new moons,
every moment of my life since
I've been the master apprentice of my own dark beginnings.
The serpent fire at the base of my spine woke up
like a fire alarm in the hallway of a burning house
shrieking for life at the window, and my vertebrae,
playing by ear, the silver-tongued flute,
and the picture-music within me, the snake-charmer,
swaying like a river reed going with the flow
to keep me on the same wavelength as lightning
looking for a place to strike, intrigued and alive.

It's the arrogance of consciousness to think
it's anymore than an eddy in the mindstream
that's got intimate connections with the greater sea of awareness
it's heading toward like a maple leaf with a flightplan
that's got nothing to do with how things fall out.
The world turns and things are relegated
to stolen milk cartons like old albums weaned
from the nippled turn tables of a breast implant.
The past is a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces
keep changing shape like the fossils of a man
who isn't comfortable in his death bed.

Over the course of time this vale of tears
slowly evaporates spiritually into the heat
like heart-shaped morning glory leaves
steaming into the dawn
like ghosts that had to get back to their graves,
arising off the lake like a mass exorcism,
or the third eye of the sun that shines at midnight
from the bottom up on the roots of the earth
as if it were trying to teach blind, star-nosed moles
to see the stars burning in the day
from the bottom of a dry housewell
that echoes like a firefly in the spider mount
of a hollow telescope listening to the cosmic hiss
of a message it's waiting to receive
that's already been delivered
like a star that's strong and true,
but apocalyptically behind the times
as if one person's past were another person's present
and past and future and present
were all living co-terminously in the moment
like the triune identity of time looking three ways,
and probably more if you were take its lifemask off,
simultaneously, so when the wind blows
through my musical skull in this celestial desert of stars
because I listen attentively to the lyrics
like a nightbird waiting for an answer
to its amorous enquiry, I know I'm not
singing out of my ears just to overhear myself talk.
My world's been complete since the Big Bang
and everything after, the prophetic echo
of a future memory of cosmic events
that happened without me billions of light years ago.

poem by Patrick White
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Coming Out Of A Blue Funk

Coming out of a blue funk, this seal,
under a sky thickening like sheet ice all day
has found an airhole it can breathe through for awhile.
Been wondering about my life. What
it's been doing to me for the last fifty years
for the sake of poetry, for the sake
of pursuing an earthly excellence
though it hardly matters why anymore.
I used to have an answer on the tip of my tongue
when I was young and thought more
with my mouth than my heart. Less so now.
Time, death, suffering, love and the devil,
certain intense realms of creative bliss
attuned to the dark harmonies of hidden roots
that flow back like the delta of a river
to the watershed of a single dropp of water
that got it in its head to do something big with its life
and turn something trivial into the sublime.
Did not the sun and the moon, the whole of the sky,
fit it like skin? And that was just the outside.
It would take more than light years to measure
the wingspan of the abysmal spaces within.
Even time would run out of itself
before it got to the end of anything.

My life in art has been like keeping a fire alight outside
in a rainstorm of tears. To see clearly
through windows that thawed in the heat
of looking through them with the compassionate ferocity
of a crystal skull poured out of a terraforming meteor impact
like a prophetic lump of coal, a diamond in the rough,
that refused to burn in the furnace to prove it had the right stuff
to shine like a star, no one could follow, on its way to somewhere else.
Not a sign post. Just a sign. Your eyes
once you see it, are never going to be the same again.
You won't look at a starcluster like the Pleiades
as if you were waiting for the traffic lights to change.
You'll take your three and a half pounds of brainy starmud,
like a meteoritic kissing stone, a falling star,
and run it through a diamond tipped bandsaw
and discover the jewel of life that's been glowing
in the core of the ore since time immemorial
like a dna molecule wasted on space
that transforms the medium and the messenger
into a voice, free of content, that's the whole of the message.

I walked out to this dark, deserted place, redolent
with the duff and detritus of life, the flotsam and jetsam,
where the half life of the rate of decay of my insights
into your heart, eludes being used as an atomic clock
to determine the agelessness of either of us.
I came out to look at the stars but I've been startled
by the photonic discharges of your bioluminescent fireflies
ever since I started looking up like a starmap to make sure things
were where they were supposed to be. One moment
you get in my eyes like the sandstorm of a mandalic power painting,
a masterpiece of the wind, and the next,
I can feel the intransigence of your vulnerability
dyeing your hair like a comet to attract the attention
of the sun at midnight looking for asylum from a black hole
where it's third eye used to be.

You're a mermaid on the rocks of Andromeda singing to a telescope
to look up to see how far its got to sink in an ocean of stars
before it hits bottom like a shipwrecked moonrise
gone pearl diving for habitable planets
that can say I love you and mean it like an atmosphere
it's not going to lose again. Only in the Braille
of the scars on your heart so far, but I can read your pain
like the glyphs of an Aztec temple
I'm still clearing from the jungle of my indirections,
that recorded in imported stone how many times
it's been torn out to please the gods with a kidnapped sacrifice
worthy of the priestcraft in the sacred abattoirs
of modern drug cartels when you're too susceptible
to feeling too much, the same as me, when I'm thinking mythically
about what I've endured to be acceptable in my own eyes
that might shine across these aloof distances like a star into yours
that lights you up from the inside like an intimate familiar
whispering into your ear like a dream grammar of sacred syllables
that have liberated themselves from the syntax of the stars
just to speak subliminally in the same sign language as you
like the chaos of fireflies I see in the black mirror of my mindstream
bending space like the surface of a lake at night
where you can hear the echo of a loon ululating
like the wavelength of a mysterious love song
among these dark hills shapeshifting in the moonlight
toward you like a mirage of picture-music
emerging as something real in this wilderness of transformation
like a new constellation of fireflies I want to overhear with your heart.

poem by Patrick White
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Sometimes Think

Sometimes think I'm always
a life too late
to catch up to my own
walking away weary of waiting for me.
Or I'm a star too far ahead of my own shining
and that's why it's always dark.
I know the agony
in the stones of an abandoned bridge
that shoulders the world for nothing,
upholds nothing but its own mass
and waits for things to pass.
And even when I fall into the river
to flow along with my own mindstream
without consulting the leaves like maps
I still can't get the moon off my back.
Look at all these orchards
littered along my banks
from the tent of a single blossom.
And there are nights
when I can smell snake on the wind
as if everything were about to happen again
and I still haven't milked the fangs of the moon
for an antidote to the pain
or put out the third eye
of the irrational surveillance camera
that oversees the sorrows of the insane
when it's full.
I like my perfections whole enough
to include what is not
and if I am immoderately empty
it's so I can make space for the world
like the blood-sea of the rose
that flows out of nothing
into tides that shed their waves
like the eyelids, brides and petals
of a human heart.
My breath is silver.
My breath is gold
I've mined from the mystic mountain
that got in my way
whenever I tried to cross
the valley threshold.
I had to evaporate to rise to the top;
I had to get myself together like a cloud
to transform my own delusions
into a glimpse of the other side
that didn't take a scapegoat for a guide.
Now space is my only familiar
and the being behind the face
of who I was a moment ago
is just another snake in the furnace
of this star that sheds my skin like fire.
Streams of insight
that are not predicated like mirages
on deserts of thought
trying to spin themselves
into mirrors and silks of glass
like a new religion
sweeping the world like sand
advance the gardens
of the water-givers underground
who teach the flowers how to bloom
and drown like stars
in the infinite opening of their eyes.
And I've mauled the nets of the constellations
like a man in the morning
walking through a high field
radiant with spiderwebs
and if there's anything
left hanging in the wardrobe
that used to house my masks and cloaks
they're veils I've torn from the light
to better see into my darkness.
I'm still looking
but nothing has appeared yet
and no sleight of mind
that's ever mastered me
has ever taught me how
to realize the inconceivable
except in the proportions of a human
whose mere existence is utterly unbelievable
whenever I turn the light around
and discover the dispersing stars
I have followed so long and far
into the unborn darkness where I begin
shining within.

poem by Patrick White
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Since I Was A Child

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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If Only I Could Remember Things For Awhile

If only I could remember things for awhile
as they were before they changed. Savour them.
Let the flavour of the jewel
that's been ripening in my voice
wash through my mouth
like the mystic blaze of a star sapphire
and every word I say be a firefly of insight
that can shed some light on dark matter.

Would that my tears fell fruitfully enough
to feed the world, that one dropp of my blood
after years of preparing the potion, were enough
to immunize a whole planet from affliction.
And what marvels would my eyes not delight
in showing anyone, if they could astonish the blind
like an orbiting telescope that's just had
its cataracts removed
like the reflection of the moon peeled
like an albino eclipse off the black mirror of the lake
only to discover that all this time they groped through the dark
like star-nosed moles, it was their own face that got in the way
of what was shining. If only my hands
knew how to build like the birds
and my bones were strong crossbeams and rafters,
what palaces of light and water and air
would my heart not offer to the homeless
like the growth rings of a maple tree
that threw them the keys like winged samara
and said, move in, its yours. It's built on bedrock
not the quicksand cornerstone of a slum lord.

For the lonely sitting with their cats and their elbows
in half-opened windows, observing
the pigeons and the stars for memorable events,
I would break this long fast of my solitude
like black Slavic peasant bread with strangers
who sat above the salt at the table
as my honoured guests, and ask them, eye to eye,
heart to heart, all ears, as if I were a radio telescope
listening like Seti, if they've heard any news back yet
from Bellatrix or Rigel, and which
of Jupiter's shepherd moons is hiding
a secret affair with life that everyone's dying to know.

It's heart-breaking that we can't all bring our tears to bear
into one cloud weeping over a drought like a dry creekbed
where we're all hibernating in our own starmud
like toads and frogs waiting for flashfloods of the next rain
to underwhelm us like gravestones in a makeshift cemetery.
What would the world be like if we could
walk up a long country road at night far from ourselves
and not have to ask the roadkill for directions in life?
As if we were sure enough where we were going
to risk being followed by the lost like a starcluster of fireflies
within the compass of everyone's bearings, not
out there somewhere like the ghost of a spaced-out lighthouse
but like the porchlight of nearby farm on a summer night
that draws living things out of the dark like the full moon to it,
even if it just be gnats in the air, bats, or Luna moths,
what a seance of life we could be to each other
as if we left the screen door unlatched
for any lunatic of the light on the road this late at night
who might wander in like the seeds of new themes on the wind
to enrich the bright vacancy of our dark abundance
with a starmap to where our buried treasure lies hidden
like diamonds in the ore of the hearthstones of our hearts.

If I could take the whole of my darkness
and enchant its snakepits into the wavelengths
of the light I would have emanate out of me
like the rainbow body of a Tibetan rinpoche
entrusted with the wisdom of the Himalayas
to seek a low place among the stars like a sea
that all things flow down into like the shining images
we retain of ourselves like the reverberations
of experienced luminaries echoing
like seasoned birds to each other
in the valleys and black holes of tears and death below.

Sacred syllables of immortal butterflies
in the orchards of morning and moonrise.
I would shine down upon the abyss of the lovers
like a water star from the bottom up
of all the burning bridges they have yet to cross
like Aldebaran at zenith, or Cygnus at nadir,
to get them to the other side
of what binds them to each other
like water and air, light, earth and fire,
and each moment of my life, every step
I risked anew, I would become the way
that's never taken itself before this deep into the mystery
of what it means to be alive and everywhere
be endangered by the beauty of our own awareness.

Instead of breathing for the dead as long as I can
underwater on the moon, I would invite them
to make a new birthmark in new medium
that calls them back from the night like light
from the scattered ashes of the empty urn of a star
coming together again in a gravitational womb
of their own remains, where everyone achieves
the all consuming illumination of their endless afterlives
by opening the koan of a single flower
in the light of their darkest hour of perennial insight.

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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Living On The Cutting Edge Of The Lunar Waste

Living on the cutting edge of the lunar waste
I made of my last moonrise. A truce
with underwhelming circumstances for awhile,
no apparent pitfalls on a Saturday night in Perth,
too cold for snakes, and the leaves playing their cards
close to earth and the air a knife at your throat,
I can remember when I tried harder to exist,
and it's still a holy war every day just to subsist
and not let it scar your spirit into being cauterized
like a bad tattoo of the moon you had effaced,
but tonight I seek the ease of a solitude older than humans
down in the wetlands of the Tay River just off
Sunset Boulevard before you cross the first bridge.

Waist high in the broken antennae of the brittle grass
yellow as the fossils in a graveyard
of green praying mantes, decultified romantics,
I pad the skull of rock I usually sit on like a prophetic throne
with the old manuscripts of fallen maple leaves,
recalling lines from poems like lyrical snippets of chromosomes
I'd written many years ago to adapt my heart
to the changes it had to go through to recast
the cannon it was into the life of a shapeshifting bell
with the pulse of a nightbird lamenting the dead
instead of a twenty-one gun salute like a firing squad
aimed at the stars. Death is the saddest loss of discipline
the spirit will ever be called upon to master in order to survive.

It was sitting here one night, staring into the eye socket
bored into the albino nugget of a crow's skull,
the boney harps of its wings torn off their hinges
like gates that weren't strong enough to keep something out,
as the black flight feathers of a long eclipse slowly passed
across my eyes, that I realized, dead or alive,
existence is an interactive creative medium that doesn't care
whether you live it like a seance or an exorcism
and there are untold ages of the shining left
even in the oldest ashes of a star strewn on the path
of these long nocturnal firewalks through the mind
and that hello and farewell were the two wings
of the same waterbird, beating in unison
that empowered it to fly like a phoenix of imagination
out of an aviary of urns of its past lives
that might not sing for awhile but never lose their voice.

Cultivate the kind of spirit that can sing to you in the silence
when you're down, about the beauty of just being here
to live it, though you don't want to hear it,
you want to drown in your sorrow like a bell
but somehow the sound of life cuts through you
like a lunar blade with a growing edge
through wounded water and you can't help but wonder
what your ghost would give just to be here again
if only one more time, to resonate with the pain
like a back up singer to the universe,
who knows all the loneliest lyrics by heart
like a waterbird out on the river late at night.

If only to hit one perfect note of sadness, one tine
of separation and suffering like a phantom waterlily
adding its shining to the light like the art
of knowing how to paint starmaps on your tears
indelibly on water for light years to come
to let people know you were once here,
you listened as they will by the side
of this river of life to the same songs, hurt and alone,
as they must if they want to step out of the chorus
and sing solo through their tears in their own voice
before they're gone to a hundred billion stars
that are listening to the same echo
being whispered in their ears like the fires of life
carried away by the desire to live on
like the empty lifeboat of a song full of moonlight
drifting down river to an ocean of awareness
where the gateways of the crow are refeathered
like the exit and entrance of an eclipse of wings
still keeping time to the picture-music that shines
like a new moonrise in the voice of a mindstream that sings
its way through the woods at night alone like a wild grape vine
sustaining the tears of its spiritual high notes until they turn
into the euphoric lunacy of a poetic wine aged in an earthly urn.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Stars So Near

The stars so near it seems the approaching morning
could wet its thumb and forefinger
and pinching their wicks like intimate candles
that have held the lovers close
and the ghosts at bay all night
put them out with a hiss.
An ancient mirror deep within me
I couldn’t bring myself to bury
with the woman who once looked into it
is beginning to flood like a river of eyes with autumn rain
and I want to cry for things
that have departed like water birds
from their circuitous reflections on the mindstream
and leave the heart knocking
like an empty lifeboat against the rocks
that no one sings from now.
I’ve stared at the moon several nights in a row
as if we drank from the same skull
and I want to elevate my tears to a higher level
as a rite of passage worthy of what I mourn
but no lights on in the lockmaster’s house
me and the moon both know
how impossible it is to raise the dead
from their watersheds
by adding a few tears to a dry seabed
out of the largesse of the living
in the wake of so many shadows.
I’m trying to align my third eye like a bubble
in the middle of a balance beam
and build on the cornerstone of the moon
a Taj Mahal of lunar coral to commemorate
the loss of so much beauty
to the things it touched like braille
as if it wasn’t enough just to light them up
but parting the depths of its fathomless veils
open their eyes as well.
I shall turn three times in the silver grass
and stretching my body out like a scar upon the earth
lay down in a deer-bed by the river
with her absence bigger than the night for awhile
and listen to the frogs and crickets
as I used to listen for her footfalls on the creaking stairs
and the moon won’t lay its sword of light on the waters
like a vow of separation to keep us apart
and I shall ask every star
down to the sixth magnitude of time and shining
what has become of her who used to weave
English ox-eyed daisies into her hair
as if she were already among the constellations
showing off the lesser luminaries of earth
as if there were nothing so small
nothing so slighted or disregarded
no moment of life so devoid of inspiration
even the fireflies that can’t stay fixed in one place
long enough to beat a path into a zodiac
and elaborate their own creation myths
into something unborn and unperishing
weren’t enlightened
by the immaculate darkness of her transience.
To suffer everything as if it were a blessing she once said.
I look up through the leafless bough of an aging maple
twisted like a burnt match stick
whose fire’s just flared out.
I look up at the stars
as if they’d built their webs between the branches
like momentary dream catchers.
And I can’t manage it.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Life Is Too Short

life is too short
Music: rudolf schenker
Lyrics: klaus meine
Have you ever seen the morning?
When the sun comes up the shore
And the silence teach the beauty for the sound
Have you ever set there waiting?
For the time to stand still
For all the worlds and stars
From turning around
And you run
'cause life is too short
And you run
'cause life is too short
Have you ever seen the glory?
When the moon is on the rise
And the dreams are close
To the ones that we love
Have you ever set there waiting?
For heaven to give a sign
So we could find the place
Where angels come from
And you run (and you run)
'cause life is too short
And you run (and you run)
'cause life is too short
There's a time that turns
Turn back time
But i don't see i can
It only works
If you believe in the truth
But there's a time to live
And a time to cry
But if you're by my side
I will try to catch a star
I'll try to catch a star
Just for you
And i run
'cause life is too short
And i run (and i run)
'cause life is too short
And i run and i run and i run and i run and i run

song performed by by Scorpions
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I Remember The Bees

I remember the bees
moving like heavy slow notes
among the sunflower microphones
two octaves lower than the fireflies
on late August afternoons
perishing in the light.
And the irrelevant felicity of being me
with nothing to do but time.
Many roads and years away now
and this is another life
another town
and I'm staring out of a window
that's been forgotten by the eyes
that used to look through it
at the bleak winter rain
trying to distinguish the oases
from the mirages
in this glass-blowing desert of pain.
I remember white sweet clover along the dusty roadside
overwhelming the still hot air with its sweetness
and how it grew so high and thick
in the drainage ditches
it folded it wings over the road like a swan.
I remember watching the moon
lower its hook into the lake
hoping to catch something.
And now I'm trying to get it out of my mouth
like a question I can't answer.
I'm envious of the happiness I used to know
as if it had all happened to someone else
I could never be again
because even a river
can't step into itself twice
and the same is true of a bloodstream.
So do we all wash ourselves clean of ourselves in the running.
It's the mind's way of not staining its own clarity.
You don't need to see to shine.
There are quantum events of the mind.
There are insights and thoughts
auroral premonitions
and solar prophecies
that flare like the Medusa's hair on fire.
There are shadows of the unforeseeable
that cast their eclipses and sunspots
like exponentially tiny black holes
that steal the seeing from the light
and make space and time gape at their own measure
in the darkness of the heart of a human.
And in the next era of a moment
terrify them with the wonder of breaking into stars.
And most strange and astonishing of all
elaborated out of a chaos of photons
emerging out of the random
like wind on water
like Penelope weaving and undoing the moon on the lake
membranous worlds in hyperspace
blowing bubbles at each other
as if the light in their eyes
were life itself
shaping the multiverse playfully
into mystic glains swallowed by cosmic serpents
and fireflies caught in the drapes
by the open window
like jewels in the net of Indra,
like primordial atoms going off spontaneously
for the sheer thrill of it.
Mark one world and they're all marked.
And there's no end of the accounting.
That's why the most gracious of numbers is zero
and in any world I find myself possible in
I am the spacious friend of its infinite variety.
Even in Perth on a Sunday
among the flagging ambitions of leafless backyard trees
that have given up
dreaming of the doors and arrows
the coffins and lifeboats
they could have become in the hands of a mastercraftsman
and content themselves by staying out of the way of the powerlines.
Worlds within worlds within worlds being born
under my skin
at the tip of my nose
the end of my fingertips my tongue
pouring from the precipice of my lips
like lemmings and words not afraid to take a chance
the wind might feather their falling.
If compassion is worth the weight
of one single tear
of what life suffers here
then all things must be falling toward paradise.
Even the willows with their yellow-tinged hair trapped in ice.
Even the mailman who was convicted of taking his own advice.
Even the young beauty queen whose mouth overflows with saliva
as she dreams her makeup has turned into a pillow
that's trying to smother her like a serial killer
trying to get her attention on the news.
Do you see?
When you get right down to the point
there is no point.
Ask Heisenberg.
There's only you and I
and what we are
embodied in this memory
is merely the shadow cast
by what we are becoming.
Ask any star.
Keep the light behind you
like a ufo file with a due date.
Make a photonic leap into space.
Jump orbitals.
Release your infinitesimal quantum of energy
into the mind-bending unforeseeable gateless expanses of space
and instead of depending
on the fossils of cyanobacteria in Martian meteors
to improve on being alone
create worlds of your own
where space isn't time flatlining
but a field of imagination
where the absurd lets its muse run free as an enzyme.
Why do you keep coming home empty-handed
like Ponce de Leon searching
for the disabled fountains of youth
when you must know by now
it's the questions that are the watersheds of the truth?
It's the questions that keep you alive and searching.
It's the looking and not knowing
that keeps the fires of life
moving and growing
one step ahead of their ashs.
It's not the questions.
It's the answers that are killing you.
You might seek like a phoenix
but all your lanterns are ghosts.
Your eyes might be faster than light
but you're still blind if you can't see
that the world is
merely the shadow of an insight
you cast behind you
like the stars
like the candles
like the fireflies in your skull.
And it's good to know them all.
It's good to trace the lifelines
on the palm of your hand
and follow them back to the source of the Nile.
It's good to know the imaginary animals
that talk like your fingers
held up to the lamp
like constellations on a starmap
like zodiacs and arks
like a dog that barks
in the voice of a human.
It's good to see your own face
in the shadowplay
of subatomic particles
and take small intimacies with the profound
as if you'd just opened your eyes
like God's umbrella
in the spirit's lost and found.
It's good to stand in your own light
under the nightskies
and add your lustre to the stars.
It's good to abide in clarity and law.
But enlightenment is a darkness that shines
beyond the reach of your eyes
and just as space is bent
by the mass of Mars
so time is as supple as water and silk
and yesterday
is just as much the future of tomorrow
as the perennial brevity of this moment now
flowing down the lifelines of the mindstream
like a wavelength of night and time
that can't be measured in lightyears.
I reflect on everything I'm missing
and my grief turns to wine,
my tears to honey.
I resonate with the forked harmonies of time
like the tremulous skin of serpentine cosines
it sheds as it moves up my spine
like a waterclock of snakefire
pouring into the watershed of my mind.
And all the threads and rivulets
of my string theory thought
and the membranous theses
that are spun from them
are gathered up
and woven into whole cloth
over the black hole
of an acoustic guitar
the shape of a universe
as if it were a loom of music.
Time is music.
Space is music.
Life is music.
And death isn't where the music stops.
When you listen to it
not just with your ears
but with your eyes your heart your mind your blood your skin.
When you let it come empty-handed
and go empty-handed
without trying to grasp it like a thing
you realize that everything is singing
about what it is to be a human.
And you must be a human to hear it as such
because you can never understand
more than what you are
out to and beyond the youngest stars
that are the oldest of your insights
into the birth of the universe.
Time is music
and neither time nor music
leave anything behind.
Here once
here for good.
Though time has a past and future
a coming and going
a lament and a longing fulfilled
reflected like opposites on the watermirrors of the mind
it's still the same waterbird
cosmic note
first word
from the void in the mouth of now
waking itself up from a dark dream
with the sound of our voices
arriving in joy
and crying with relief when we leave.
I can hear the locust tree in spring
even with snow on the ground
and this hopeless duty
of a bleak window before me
singing in my ear
like the slow whisper,
the murmurous humming
of an intimate voice full of bees.
Time is music.
Life is music.
Death is music.
All the syllables colours notes thoughts feelings images and symbols
all the doubts and half-lives of the certainties
all the ardency of our holiest guesses
and starless inspirations
all the brutal black lightning insights
and firefly epiphanies
that have ever expressed the hearts and minds of humans
all the homeless clarities
and godless vagrancies
of what we're doing in the world
feeling lost in the doorways of our own thresholds
where every step we take is arrival and departure.
They're all the picture-music of us
and we're as indelible
as the moon dropping her petals and feathers
her hooks and thorns
her horns and claws and surgical fangs
like white swans and peonies on the river
like the eyelids of a mask she takes off
a drowned nurse
to remember whose face she's looking at.
And you can't remove a quaver of it.
Not the slightest detail.
Not one black swan.
Not the swerve of a single photon
with an identity crisis
striking the lightning rod of a nerve
that runs it to ground
and roots it in the body
until the mind opens
like the eye of a flower
a New England aster
that can see from the inside out
that life is a phoenix
in the ashs of a blue guitar
with the wingspan
of a locust tree in the spring
and the afterlife of a star.
Light flows through the roots
of my dendritic lifelines
like a zodiac of fireflies
streaming through space
for a place in the sun
and I can remember the bees
before the arising of signs.
I can hear them with my eyes.
I can see them with my tongue.
And I might not know
all the words to the song
or even what the lyrics
are all about
but that's never kept me
from singing my heart out.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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All This Stuff

All this stuff going on in my head all the time.
All my fixed constellations changing like fireflies.
All the burning ladders of my unsuccessful siege of heaven
lying down like crosswalks at the feet of the mob.
And the stars that seemed so aloof and untouchable
settling like dust on my eyes.
I want to go home but home itself is gone
and there is no one waiting for me.
I live in these nomadic tents of my breath
that the wind blows through day and night
and everything I touch
though I long for the will of a pyramid
turns into quicksand.
I observe the life within me going on,
this flux of intimate intensities
as if I were no more than the container
and sentient window of a stranger's house
looking in out of the darkness
of my uninhabitable homelessness
that has always been my last known address.
Nothing is ever what it seems
in this shell-game of themes and memes
that shuffles me around like a hard pea
gullible enough to deceive itself
it might one day turn into
the new moon of a black pearl.
But I'm chained by my vertebrae to a slaver
in a caravan of all my wild sides
being dragged like a jungle
toward these civilized coasts
that put everything asunder
that God has joined together
and brand what they sever
with the savage logos of an enforced belonging
that death is the only escape from.
My private cloud of unknowing
with the occasional black lightning bolt of insight
that sets my roots on fire
so that the whole tree becomes its own funeral pyre
and sheds me in flames.
And trying to fit me like a shoe
to the newly washed foot of God
is a vain waste of time for both of us
when you're life's got a hole in it
I keep patching with poems in the cold
or keep stopping along the way to take off
and dump out the pebble of the world
I'm walking on with a limp.
And it's as foolish for a river
to ask where its youth has gone
as it is for me to lament the passage of mine
that I sent on up ahead like water
to keep something flowing behind me.
I don't look for grey hairs in the wind
when it's as clear as grace
that time and space
don't encroach upon the stars like cataracts
and everyone we've ever been
lives on in each of us forever
like water waiting in the open mouth
of the frozen moonskull
for me to swallow and thaw
so that the blossom can flesh the dead branch again
that trembles and bends before the wishing well
that all men drink from like a bell
in this mirage of fire in a desert of stars
to taste the lightning-tongued elixirs of life
that frees the serpent from its scars
like a discarded straitjacket of skin and pain
to go witching for water in hell again.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Constant Time

Time past and the future give way to this present picture,
But can somebody tell me how to recognize that gate that leads to the bed of roses,
We speak about the future like the past is a grain of sand on the shore,
Washed away by the ocean tide,
Giving way to new grains to make a portrait of the present,
These past memories stay deep in our heart like the depths of the ocean,
Though it gets washed back to shore ones in a blue moon,
Reminding us that our past is a standard measurement of our strength,

Time moves so fast making the past to fade away,
this makes us seem so secured about the present,
Forgetting the fact that our present becomes our past that was once a present from nature as a new day,
Some take the future to be a dream and a wish,
But I take my future to be what I see when I stand from the bottom of the mountain to look at the top,
And my past to be the depth of the ocean that can always be washed ashore …
The only thing I can control is my present,
Yes cos my mind controls my hands to give you a flash of what goes on in my head
Like this words i write to you was once my future and will become my past, making my future my past and my past my future..So ironical isn’t it?

Standing here I sure know 1 thing,
I will reach the top by that foot path,
Yes of course it’s not to mean that I wouldn’t fall,
But I have to break myself off my present past and walk with grace to stand where I belong,
There where I am the king of my destiny,
The past is just going to be a page of memories,
And my future will become my present making time constant in my head,
Because I stand on my past which was once my present and my present which was once my future, making time equal and constant
As I flip thru this page of life,

By: ade

poem by Adeniran Oluokun
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Won't Meet Most Of You In A Lifetime

Won't meet most of you in a lifetime
and know there are six billion of us
and more coming all the time, each trying
to interpret the sign of their own star,
you know, the one that nobody else can see
but for a few rays of light breaking
through the clouds here and there,
that says, this is the way to shine,
this is the way to shine, and that includes
black holes everywhere as well.

Whether you can see through it or not
as a plagiarism of water and sand
every mirage has its own meaning,
every star belongs to a different zodiac,
each with their own totems, mandalas,
and shapeshifting constellations, each
their own houses of worship and disrepute,
we're all wearing on our foreheads
written in between the lines of fate
like a sidereal bandanna, each
a meme of one we're hoping will allow
someone to recognize us in isolation
like a prison tat that says we've paid our dues
for the last thousand lifetimes without parole
and have a right to be here as well as anyone
because we've done our time standing up
just to be alive, whether you're running from it
or not. Everyone's got a different approach
to their own departure, and though
there is no gate they must go through,
there's a garden they must spend
some time in for awhile, telling
the flowers what the roots of our names mean
each as unique as a snowflake
on a petal or an eyelid or a furnace.

Each a theme of their own picture-music,
our lives are not sub-plots of the main narrative.
There's a whole symphony in the tintinnabula,
like a dropp of water reflecting the entire universe
just the same as there is in the first violins.
And everyone brings their own instrument to the jam
whether it be the wind in the silver Russian olives,
a tuba, a burning guitar, or the fossil of the lyre
that used to sing the dead up from hell
to a day of show and tell, and it doesn't matter
what kind of music you make, whether
its the choral riot of your favourite nocturnal animals in a zoo,
or the distant plectra of a hidden nightcreek
playing solo on a harpsichord in a lonely sacred grove,
or you're riffing on futuristic mystic mantras
like Tibetan prayer bowls that used to sound
like a waterclock of urns, as long as you're adding
your singularity like the longing high note of a nightbird
to the dendritic staves of the trees. Even the silence sings.

And what is it we're all really longing for
in the solitary labyrinths we've made
of the complexity of our desires,
if it isn't a world elaborated from
the prime fractal of our love,
as if it fell to each of us now, not god,
that weight was removed from her shoulders
the moment our cosmic egg hatched
and we took to our own wings,
eagles and fireflies and Icarus alike
to provide the image of light upon light
like a masterpiece we leave behind us
that's everybody's signed like a self-portrait
of who we were to each other for awhile
when we stood in wonder and awe
at what was arrayed before us knowing
it's the exact likeness of everyone,
and the star in the eye that's turned toward us
as if each of us were the direction of prayer
is the same one we've been following for light years
like the magi seeking the source of their own radiance,
candles in the dark wondering where
the light's coming from in billions of creative mirrors
falling on everyone alike like rain and eyes
so that before we close them
like two dew drops of stereoscopic water
falling back to our roots like our last words
from the tips of the tongues of the stargrass
to dream up new blossoms in our sleep
like new moons budding on a dead branch,
we each realize that we're the myth of origin,
the alpha and omega of all things that begin and end
as well as the unattainable for which there is no metaphor
placed well within the creative reach of everyone of us
though if I were to give it a shot as a poet, I'd say,
knowing what I know of this life in the arts,
like the habitable planets and ripening desert moons
of the low-hanging fruits of our hearts.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Weary Of The World Tonight

Weary of the world tonight. Can't stand the lies.
Some drunk loud-mouth out on the street
wants all the girls to know he's there,
My noise is bigger than your noise.
Someone playing a guitar badly in a doorway.
A homeless cat cries, lets out a howl
of torment as if its sinews were being keyed
as tight as guitar strings about to snap.
Out of the window that hasn't said anything yet:
you touch that cat again, slugger,
and I'll be right down with an axe
to give you a gender change. He looks up
startled. But all bullies are cowards
trying to deny it to themselves
while wearing their sister's underpants.

The cat makes a quick getaway
through a dark heritage alleyway.

Supercharged like a fire hydrant full of blood
throbbing through my temples, and demons
I haven't seen in years smiling darkly in the mirrors
my shadow always regretted like left-handed virtues
that got the job done. Demonic compassion,
colder than intelligence, with a deep
poetic sense of of infernal irony
whereas a muse ago in this specious present
I was longing for a small hobby farm
on the dark side of the moon, now
I'm a dragon eating waterlilies down
by the banks of my mindstream
quietly letting go of itself
like an unmoored lifeboat full of emptiness
drifting no where in particular I want to be
except here where I can shed my humanity for awhile
among the living and the dead
who don't care what I am and am not
as long as I'm not a threat to them.

Darkness, my solace, moon, my longing,
Star, warmer than any fire I've ever
sat around to exorcise my ghosts,
you, who've danced like my third eye
with the other two still chained to their irises,
the poetic lucidity that mentored me
in the ways of light and taught me
the creative rapture of the fish
that still swam like flashs of insight
to the surface of my oceanic tears,
I don't know how many light years
either of us have yet to shine or cry over,
but tonight, come down from your unindictable heights
and sit with me like the intimate stranger of a candle
in my eyes, in my soul, in my blood,
be the small flame that trembles in my breath for awhile,
be the sole illumination of my spirit for awhile,
ease my bodymind with the elixir of your radiance
emanating from the inside, and let me
be born again of that fire that burns within me,
purge my starmud of these urns and bones and black dwarfs
that weigh me down like disappointed bells
and feisty mastodons in the tarpits of my heart
that sink deeper the more they struggle to get out.

And I don't even care if you're the last firefly
to transcend my cosmic solitude like a wavelength
of the transmorphic singularity at the beginning of time
that woke the valley up with the roar of a dragon
in that elemental morning of mad genius
that's be the dawn of every moment ever since
in this chiliocosm of energies and forms
flashing out of the mystery of the questions we ask
about the inconceivability of being here to ask them.

No purpose. No meaning. Except the one
we all live vaguely as ourselves like a nebularity
out of which we might precipitate stars
of a different order of shining beyond what we can see.
Sit with me awhile as if we both had the same nature.
And you can look at the world and me through my eyes
and I'll look at you through yours as if I were seeing you
from the inside out, and there were ashes in my heartwood
even before I began to burn, as in yours,
there were the urns of heavy elements even
before they were born of their own afterlife.

Be that moment within me when time breaks into light
and even the shadows, like sunspots, shine
in their own right, and nothing is disturbed,
not even the silence that is intensified when the fish jump
or a dog is barking hills away at what approaches
out of the dark, and the waterbirds in their onceness
might seem to fly away, but have been here from the start.
Fill my life with the unimaginable splendour
of all those nights you've looked down upon the earth
and witnessed the horror and the wildflowers
in the same breath on a cold windowpane in winter
etching the light like an artist with an eye for life
or the praying mantis of a small telescope in the summer
its legs spread like a doe about to drink from her own reflection
or one half of a collapsed bridge to the other side
of everywhere at once. I don't ask for bliss or enlightenment.
Just show me how you make the shadows luminous again.
Even on a starless night, how to mourn like the eyeless rain
even as it renews the leaves and roots of the constellations
of the wild asters with their violet plinths and yellow suns
burning fiercely as a distant relation of your myriad myths of origin.

Do that for me and I'll show you how to intensify
the darkness into a diamond chrysalis of transformation
like a deeper mystic bliss in life, enhanced by the ores of pain,
as your light is by the night, or the flying stickshifts
of the dragonflies put the waterlilies in park for the night
as if they'd just got out of a car by the side of an unknown road,
not to find out where they are, but just
to gape up at the stars in the midst of decay
and let the wonder of it all heal me as it always has
by showing me how to make a cradle out of a grave
or the long, slow art of a human out of a wounded heart.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Stand Where The Listening Begins

I stand where the listening begins
as if my voice were just another one of the echoes
and my tongue were the tip of an edgy precipice
that doesn't dare make a move
over an immeasurable abyss of eyes
that nobody belongs to.
This is a seeing that's older than the stars
that were born of it
like a mirror is born of the shining.
Like a body is born of the mind
and takes on the shape of a universe
as an expressionist gesture of classical reserve.
In the great ocean of being before it turned into everyone
our eyes weren't beaded like two drops of water
strung through our nose
like a statement we were trying to make.
They were waves.
Waves of water.
Waves of light.
Waves of thought and feeling.
They were waterbirds that came and went
without leaving.
They were meteorological events
in the emotional life of the sea
when it played alone with itself like weather.
We didn't evolve hands to prove we had a grip on things.
We didn't evolve brains to prove we were intelligent.
We're not nuggets of insight
panned from the mindstream
that runs down the world mountain
in a rush of gold.
I stand where I can hear the night
breathing like a shadow in its own darkness
and whatever I am not
is as real as whatever I am.
And my sorrows dropp away
like the black fruit of ruined bells
and my joys know a freedom
no holy war ever deserved.
Here my death answers to my life
and not the other way around.
My beginnings are not justified by my ends
and my solitude is so wholly itself
it embraces everything
as if it were space
and time were its only friend.
This is a poetic state.
A dynamic mode of creative annihilation.
This is a phoenix blooming in its own fire.
This is life.
This is the universe full of bright ideas
that come to it like stars in the darkness.
This is the white mare of the full moon in the high field
with the gates open
like wings growing out of her shoulders.
This is a space that is so spontaneously immediate
that you receive the reply
long before you've even asked the question.
It doesn't take thousands of thoughtyears
for the light to get here.
A flower blooms.
A star comes out.
It's as simple as that.
You lift one veil of the mystery like an eyelid.
Nothing has a history.
The old man remembers nothing.
The old woman forgets her name.
Once they were seabeds of meaning.
Now they're just water.
And everything is ok with that.
People go grey
and turn into clouds in the mountains
just to catch the last of the light
and give their lives some colour.
And then it's night again
and the dancing chandeliers of the stars
that are burning like legends
to make a name and a myth for themselves
fall like constellations to earth
and shatter like the rainbows of youth.
Every dawn has a taste of the sunset in it.
What's the end of anything
if not the dark side of its beginnings?
I am the fool of a freedom
that lets things be whatever they want to be
deep within the heavy fruit of a compassionate heart
that ripens in its own lucidity.
There are worms.
There are birds.
There's a green star in the apple core.
My skin is the chameleon of the sun going down.
I know how to swim through stone and water.
There are fish in my treetops
and birds in my roots
and when I drown
it's the sun in the sea
and nothing ever really goes out.
Everytime I open my mouth to sing
this is where the muse
puts a finger to her lips
to teach me what I'm talking about.
I'm a star when I write.
First I let go of the light.
And then the children point fingers at me
and say in mutual recognition
of the stories they make up on the go
there you are
just as we foretold.
It's the same way with water
when it's lost in a desert of sand and stars.
Sometimes it takes a mirage to find your way home.
Death gapes like the jawbone of a mummy
and writes like a pyramid
as if it wanted to make all things last forever.
But when life picks up the pen
around the fires of the stars
to whisper into its own ear
things that only solitude
can suggest to the night
its poems are always tents on the move.
The moon sailing paper lifeboats down a river
like waterlilies
blooming in the pale flames
of their lunar immolations
as if each were a white phoenix
rising above its own ashes and smoke
like someone dreaming of swans.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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When Rage Broke Down Into Tears

When rage broke down into tears
over the shattered chandeliers of stars
that crashed against your windowpane
before they thawed in the furnace
of a Promethean thief of fire
human enough to burn,
and you cried, yes you did, I was there,
I took the splinter of light out of your eye
with the corner of the sky where Venus
goes down in the west like the crumb
of a radiant dream that wanted to break
loaves and fishes with the masses
only to find you were swimming through glass;
you cried as if all the birds in the world
had died under your windowsill
like the words to the song
you were dancing to at the time.
And you picked them up one by one
and cradled them in your hand
like a midwife with a manger
and stroked their soft bodies with your finger
as if you would give their lives back to them again
by way of apology for being human
in an ice age of rain
that had lost its purpose in life
like the seeds of flowers on the moon.
And that’s when the wind, that’s always
the moment when the wind cools your eyes
like a glassblower dipping crystal blue birds
in the fountains and watersheds of the moon
and strews your path with the flight feathers
of a nightbird that can see beyond a starmap
fireflies shining in the distance.
And you suddenly realize
a thousand and one ways home ahead of you
like a Nazca landing strip
for alien artists blown off course
into the third eye of a spiritual hurricane.
And you can’t help but fly through it
like an open window into your soul
seeking repose and shelter
among the human totems
of more habitable emotions
scratching fish, birds, monkeys, spiders
jaguars, flowers, trees, fallible people out
in the desert plains of coastal Peru.
Zoomorphic geoglyphs of greeting and return
in every conceivable sign of life
as if the whole planet came out
all at the same time to say hello
and welcome back
like a vow they kept for you
until your myth of origin
returned to its fulfilment,
a nightbird singing
in a rootless tree on the moon,
as if love, rage, life, joy,
death, separation and sorrow
were all pilgrims of one voice.
A pageant of medieval notes
bearing the banners of knights
the hoods and habits of monks,
unholy vocables of middle English
on the tip of your tongue
like the wicks
of holy candles at a black mass
where a young girl dances naked
around a pale fire on the moon
as a flower blooms in the flames,
or sparrows on a stave of power lines,
when the music makes its return journey
like Canada geese in the spring
bearing the souls of the underworld back
like the eyes and stars
and new moons of the dead
to the night of the living
making love in the dark.
Pelvis to pelvis,
heart to heart,
crescent to crescent,
two halves of a broken wishbone
conjoined again into one harp,
one cithara, one guitar
in the ashes of a blue moon,
the second harvest of loaves and fishes
at the spring and autumn equinox.
Every year a new zodiac,
the growth rings in a tree.
Something protean about memory.
The dark matrix of the muse.
A wavelength with its tail in its mouth
that doesn’t ricochet off anything else.
Lamentations, bewitchment, rapture,
time in the hold of the abyss
for not mastering your own powers.
You either cast the spell for yourself
or you wind up gilled
in your own sidereal nets,
a firefly in spider webs of dark matter,
and it’s not likely
you’re being hauled into a life boat.
There are realities, there are windows,
some broken, some whole
even the moon won’t dare look through.
And there are rooms in a palace of water
that move like fish on the moon,
and starmaps that are used to start a fire.
Birds that are the sacred syllables of the sky
that nest in chimneys like hash pipes,
every one of them the Rosetta Stone
to a language of your own
only you can learn for yourself
even if you’re the only one
who was ever born to speak it.
Most people sip spit
from other people’s wishing wells
but they’re always two echos shy of an original
and it’s enough if they put a seashell up to their ears
like a hearing aid to listen to the ocean,
a tidal pool dying like a starfish
out of water and sky,
a shore-hugger that’s afraid
to go along with the ebb and neap
of the dream that gives a pulse to the moon,
your own mindstream
returning to its homeless source
to realize that life and death are both redundant.
That whatever passes away, stays.
And that which doesn’t, goes.
And there are places so deeply secret
that everybody thinks they know
what’s happening to them as it unfolds.
But this is just a way of using knowledge
to keep your eyes closed to the world.
Only a fool would build a gate
and live in a guardhouse
of sword swallowers and fire-eaters
to keep the birds out of the garden.
Or a refugee camp for turtles.
True clarity doesn’t know the light
for what it is.
Reality is as blind to its own translucency
as a painted window.
Two blades of stargrass in a hurricane.
But if you were to take them away
like the long and short straws
of something to win or loose
like the luck of the draw
and chew on them like cud
to get to the deeper meaning
you might get a gesture of it,
you might get the flavour of it
like a dry wad of gum
stuck to the bottom
of a school room desk,
but you wouldn’t get the use of it,
for any reason at all
that should or should not concern anyone.
Have you ever noticed
that time might be
an hourglass full to the brim on top
but it always begins at the peak
of an inverted pyramid
stuck like an arrowhead
in a flesh wound of sand that’s bleeding out?
What’s the point of trying
to claw your way up the heap
to the top of the bottom
when even Sisyphus knows
enough about absurdity
to realize the mountain
climbs its own reflection
all the way down like an avalanche
of all those little rocks
you used to roll up a hill
convinced you were getting somewhere.
And it’s true there’s a different universe
in every grain of sand
and every grain of sand is us.
So why go looking
for what’s already been found?
In any universe there’s no up or down.
And everywhere anywhere you are
from the smallest pebble on the beach
to the most radiant star beyond reach
the gates of the lost
are the end of the search.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Hidden Jewels In The Ashes Skinless As Light

Hidden jewels in the ashes skinless as light.
It's a big place when you only see it through your eyes,
but see it through your heart, and even
your deepest tears are a wound shy
of the bell of silence that overturns the fountainmouths
of even the most efflorescent of the arts
so many paint on their windows so as not to see it.
It's crucial to be a sincere sword in any holy war,
but how rare it is to meet anyone with
the courage of their clarity to peer beyond that
and look up at the stars from a dark, open field
and see, despite the way the light shatters like chandeliers,
we're not living in a world of broken mirrors.

You can look into the eyes of the dragon
that weeps like rain. You can feel compassion
for flying reptiles and then you can kneel
at the end of the futon in front of the beaming window
and add your own ray of light as if your were humanizing
prismatic power mandalas through an antique kaleidoscope
by adding your eyes to the sand painting the next moment
is going to be erased at the zenith of fulfilment
and all the apple bloom like the circus tents
of the enlightened clouds and clowns,
are going to blow away, as if time weren't
just the younger sister of space, but a kind
of sad, lyrical wind as well that keeps
shedding our lifemasks like the petals
of the wild roses and the wings of the flying ants,
as autumn comes looking for the maple keys
that could unburden your heart and sweeten your sleep
like a windfall of the fruits of life that replace it all
with a better return journey than when you went into exile.

Mentored by suffering the improvised myths of our origin,
keeping our third eye on the twists and turns
of the washboard road we're driving home on,
not to be surprised about what's around the next bend
or the rock like a hidden chip on a soft shoulder
waiting to be knocked off, wondering if life
has just provided you the occasion
to love again as inexhaustibly as you once did,
as if someone's just uncovered you like a hidden housewell
or a buried telescope in a graveyard of famous constellations
with an afterlife of born again stars, you turn a corner,
bemused to be alive, as if you'd forgotten the feeling,
and your truly surprised, startled even, when you look to your left
that there's a field, half-returned to the bush, beyond a cedar rail fence
patched by lichens that look like the seas of the moon
eclipsing their wounds as if time really could heal all things,
and the last of the common mullein were flowering
out of an urgent dream just before dusk, and the light,
I swear the light was making making everything
glow like effulgent honey, as the leaves on the trees
were on the verge of burning, and the goldenrod
and the purple loosestrife stood out like complementary colours,
mutually enhancing hot spots on the wheel of birth and death,
and the star clusters of New England asters
and blue chicory blooming by the side of the road
like floral prototypes of the new starmaps as the night comes on,
each as original as the last, and you're mystically entranced
even in passage, of how reality, even in the midst
of its dissolution, can sometimes take your breath away
with the beauty that's immanent within us all revealed
spontaneously like a stranger at the open gate
swinging on its hinges of hello and good-bye
that I took as a sign this was always the right path to be on
after all these light years of driving through the dark on my own.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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White Void For The Moment, Quiescent as Paper and Canvas

White void for the moment, quiescent as paper and canvas,
a little white square in the middle of my heart
as a psychologist once said, startled and wide-eyed,
and there's no one there, as if I were the simplest
of impossibilities. Could be. But who would be there
to know what it might make a difference to, or care?
Some purposes fulfill themselves or maybe
the quality of peace goes white in the winter
as it does in the dove, so as not to attract
undue attention to itself in a snow storm of poems.

Or maybe, sooner or later, even reality
comes to realize its suprasensual ground of being
is misconceptualized from a word or a name
that has the creative power of one of the shapeshifting lords
of the dead metaphors that get brought back to life
with no idea of where they've been in the meantime.

All of genesis in the first word, the to logos,
the whole table of contents of the imagination, now and to come,
the alpha and omega like the short and long vowels
of the sacred syllables of picture music,
apple bloom playing the dead branches of its leafless violins,
and the grammar of a living medium of animal images
and the shamans who entered into their visionary agony
painted on the blackboards of our native skull caves
where we worshipped bears dressed in the hides of humans.

The happy beginnings quit and the hard-line endings go on forever.
I'm back here at Long Bay, like the long story
of a lifemask that's been passing itself off as me for light years
sitting alone around a daylily of fire
giving a private lapdance to the wind,
scattering stars and leaves and smoke around
all over the place, as if it were looking for something it lost
in a panic to retrieve it from the passage of the mindstream
like time unravelling the seams of all things
unstitching the constellations like the wavelengths
of the enfeebled threads that kept our wounds together
long enough to heal into the crude ores
of terraformed scar tissue that might smoulder
like a starmap of brown stars over the course of time,
even when it's been mined out like the open pits of the moon,
no light bulbs in the sockets of an empty skull
but never shines the way its eyes used to
when you could look through them
like reflecting telescopes into the sidereal splendours of the soul.
Before it discovered the unbearable solitude
in the nightfall of pain, and the white apparition
that comes like the silence of a nurse in soft shoes
to sow its mouth shut to keep the others
from waking up on the night ward from their dreams
to discover like a wild rose at the end of summer
that everything is terminal, our departures and arrivals,
our exits and entrances alike. That there's a holy war of one
deep in the heart, win, lose, or draw, day and night
that goes on without respite that even for survival
the crazy wisdom of a compassionate warrior will not fight,
our human divinity not something to be won,
but a birthright, a square of light like a faceless stamp
on a loveletter that melts like a snowflake
as soon as it alights like a star on the furnace of the heart
and the ghosts of our tears return like rivers
to the oceanic awareness of the bays
we sit beside listening to the spiritual white noise
of the cosmic events, in bliss and sorrow,
we once lived through like the mirages and muses
of a tomorrow that came too late to celebrate our absence.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You Don't Need To Put A Supernova In The Window

You don't need to put a supernova in a window
like a candle in a telescope
to help me find my way back to you
from the next galaxy over. I'm gone
like a sixties light show after the music was over.

But I didn't close you like a door behind me,
I didn't find you like a threshold
in the spirit's lost and found
and try to return you to the house you belonged to.

I've always been a little ahead of myself
so when I said good-bye, it will be light years yet
before you know anything about it.
It's just that time doesn't linger in the doorway
of enlightenment, and eternity isn't any closer to God

than the next moment is. A hundred billion stars
two thousand lightyears away and you,
checking the wiring on blasting caps in a beaver dam
that's threatening to flood the road you're on
as I go off like a firefly already
two mellenia into the future that's looking forward
to meeting you eye to eye in a brighter place than this

just to see if you recognize me as I am.
Black matter in the lifemask of a blossom
peaking through the keyhole of the universe next door
to see if I've returned to my room like the moon
with a curfew it's in my nature to break forever

whenever we are, if the timing's not right.
If you can't see in the dark what the light owes
to the shadows who have died for it
just to attract your attention from afar again

like a man who's been tarred and feathered
and set aflame like a phoenix in the rootfires of the sumac.
Like an immolation that scatters the ashes of a burning house
all over the garden you've been tending
like a urnful of flowers about to come out.
Like a candle in the darkness enlightenment
snuffed out on the dark side of the moon
to keep you from being lost in the blazing like a star at noon.

I lead you away from me, like all I've ever wanted.
I say good-bye to keep death from saying hello along the way
as if it had met you somewhere before I came on the scene
like a flame thrower with a flare for arson burning
like the passion flower of a dragon on a pyre beside the Ganges.
To raise you up shining out of the grave of your aspirations
like lightning and fireflies in the updraft of my expedient means.
So when you cry over someone you're missing like me,
your tears have the power of a sunflower in the garden after dark,
and the ashes turn green. And scarlet runners bind themselves
like the happy home fires of heretics to the triune axes of your tent poles.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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