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Double Full Moons In The Thermal Panes Across The Street

Double full moons in the thermal panes across the street,
elaborate fractals of disproportionate replicates
in a seasick multiverse warped by the aging ripples of the glass.
I see Li Po drowning in all of them trying to embrace
the euphemistic screening myth of his suicide. I don't think
a lotus bloomed where he died, but Jesus has a star
where he was born, so let's put one there anyway
for a man who sang and drank and chanced his path
through life because no one offered him a job as a bureaucrat.
I love the double entendres of the unadorned.
How the waterlilies land like migrating swans
in the wetlands of the windows, and don't expect to drown
like Narcissus in the mirrors of their own reflections.
But then I'm not in the habit of looking at things
like the emergency mentor of telescopes that suffer
nervous breakdowns looking for their third eye among the stars
as if it were interred in neuronic masses of black matter
and you could uproot it like a grail quest for ginseng
in the deep woods of Lanark County if you know where to look.

The night hot and humid and totally unmotivated,
all the windows open, and a big fan sword dancing above my head
waiting for the thorax of the rest of the helicopter to show up,
all revved up like a propeller without a flight path to anywhere,
I'm Zen-duelling in the acephalic shadows
of my hydra-headed anti-selves
for the lack of better company
until the muse of my solitude shows up
like a knock on the door of my coffin without
expecting a cogently analogous answer.
I write her long loveletters of cedar-scented smoke
I conjure from the ancestral inkwells
of my penumbral black holes to express
the excruciating loneliness of my singularity in eclipse.
In the intense heat of frog-rutting desire
black orchids bloom in the all-consuming fire
of an heretical apostate trying to burn
his God-particles into the wavelengths
of the photonic discharge of the rainbow bodies
of the highest Himalayan rinpoches as if
the sherpas of the Book of the Dead
were way over their heads like clouds
in the mountains of the moon without an atmosphere.

Easy in public to master the mot juste of a scalpel
you can use to nip and tuck the flabby psyches
of the less beautiful among your friends, but alone,
it's different to divest a ventriloquist of your life-mask
and express yourself in a secret grammar as twisted
as the sensibilities of the evil jesters of the times are
in the fun-filled halls of the judicious mirrors
that can only recognize you by the accent of your tears.
To bring a gravitational eye to your unworthy affairs
and bend space into conformity with the magic rituals
of a black mass in an asylum of acquiescent pharmaceuticals.
Not to talk to yourself as if you were enamelling buttercups
with imaginative projections, or immolating blue hydrogen
like wild irises breaking out like insurgent firestorms
along the mindstream of your vagrant waywardness
as if off the path were the way of the path as far as you can go
without turning into the template of a preconceivable destination.
But to see how the full moon shines in a thousand lakes,
a thousand thermal-paned windows, a thousand and one eyes
and a mystical number of poets drowning like a multiverse
in every one of them, or conversely, the moon,
as must happen in the infinite waterclocks of time,
sinking like a pearl of nacreous wisdom
through myriad incarnations of Li Po letting go
like blossoms and poems scattering before the fruit
of their inexhaustible enterprise ripening into a windfall of eyes.

poem by Patrick White
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And Should I Recall Whose Eyes

And should I recall whose eyes made the stars most beautiful,
and set the mindstream that flowed though us aflame with fireflies
a moment there and gone and come again like light
in the keyholes of the feral cats that prowled the graveyardshift
wholly to the top of the broom-swept path up Heartbreak Hill,
where the bones of the seven hanged men lay buried
in the duff of our childhood legends, a shadow and a name,
trying love on shyly like new clothes in the shadows of the pines,
where we lay down with the dead on beds of rusty compass needles,
out of sight of the windows of the town, how could I not feel,
here alone now by the Tay, thousands of miles away,
and more years later than it takes to walk a burning bridge,
waiting for the flower moon to appear above the horizon,
the waterclock in the nightbird's song of longing?

And if I were to say what it was like to be touched by her
when she was brave with hunger and my body
all loaves and fishs in the innocence of her hands
and her breasts and lips magic mushrooms without the flies
that swarmed the garbage cans in the back-alleys below,
and though it was not wise to begin a new life
on the last night of the past we were ending together,
like a bell and a cannon that had been melted down
from the same dark ore of a life we were cut out of
like a wound in a loveletter we left unsigned for one another,
because good-bye was harder to write than just to let things go,
what words could I use that weren't already
denuded of their shining like a windfall
of black dwarfs on the windowsills of time,
and the stars that night that clung to the sky
like bubbles in the evanescence of glass
or the grass to our flesh, all washed off now
as if they were grime, the quiet patina of time
gilding the dust like rainbows on the wings of flies?

And the wind asks, and the water sylphs want to know
and the wild willows are holding their breath like a veil
and the Tay is pulling a curtain of water aside in its wake
to hear about another stranger the earth swallowed
like a sacred syllable in the mouth of a snake
that envied the waterbirds their wavelengths and wings,
and though the skeletal birch and prophetic skulls
in the riverbed plead like the end of a dream
for one more lullaby in the ghost story of the moonrise,
I show them the black pearl of my heart
lustrous as hard coal to burn again in the furnace of dawn
on the dark side of the moon in partial eclipse
as I weep like a dragon for the secrets I keep
like myths of origin in the urns of things that are gone
like the irrevocable flightfeathers of the words and waterbirds
under the lost petals of fire that bloom in the eyes of the flower moon.

poem by Patrick White
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At The Crossroads Of Martyrs And Reptiles

At the crossroads of martyrs and reptiles,
annihilation's easy enough. It's carrying on
that's hard. All my emotions are feathered
like crows or osprey, hermit thrush, Canada geese,
and the occasional humming bird but that doesn't mean
they're perched in an aviary, or forgotten
what it was like when they had scales.

I've softened as I've aged. Molars and mountains
worn down like a planet in the tides of time and the stars.
I used to embroider my emotions in blood
on pillowcases full of razorblades that had
as many phases as the moon has thorns,
broken stained-glass windows, the shards
of shattered mirrors. I lived like stolen
radioactive material in a black market
with no flower-stalls, though I was raised
in a city of gardens with hanging baskets
dripping from the lamp posts outside the pawn shop,
with three full moons of leprous white globes
cloned incommensurately down the main street.

I buried my emotions at sea on the run
like depth charges deep within me
where the sharks and submarines cruise
for targets of opportunity. Boom.
But on the surface all you'd hear
in polite company, was this muffled wump
like a boxer connecting a right cross meteorically
with an entire species. And I'd tuck myself in at night
under the chained blankets they use
like straitjackets to discipline dynamite.
I'd dream like a junkyard dog with its head
on its paws in between thieves of one day
winning my colours like a moonrise in a wolfpack.

Ask me what the nights were all about back then
and I'd immediately say black. Intense,
voracious black. Black matter, black holes,
black energy, black dwarfs, black diamonds
on the coal road they took like the wrong path in life.
I'd look at the traffic lights, the colour of lifesavers,
and I'd see three eclipses, two for the way
I looked at things, and one indelibly patched
over my third eye like cataracts on the windows
of a black out in a blitz. Not brutal, not cruel.
But it wasn't often anyone looked at the ore
and saw a jewel. I was a chip off the old block
as my mother used to say referring to my father,
and I'd go away for days at a time feeling
like Charlie Manson in a nuclear winter
for carnivorous losers like Smilodon
in the last ice age who would never know
what it was like to be petted under the chin and purr.

I may have been evil, but I was smart.
And is that man good, who likes you,
and tells you to get away from him to keep
the infection from spreading? Any merit in that?
If the plague rat jumps ship before docking in Genoa?
Who knows why things change the way they do?
Maybe everybody's got a quota of mutations
to go through before the world shapes up like a pear,
the snake sheds its last skin, evolution
gives you a break on a long, lonely highway at night
and the prehensile grip of your thumb gets you a lift
from a stranger with cigarettes the rest of the way.

Even as a cold furnace of a kid full of the ashes
of the tree forts I built from stolen lumber
like eyries where I could shriek on the wind
like an eagle with an arrow in its wing
and nobody could hear me but the wind and the leaves
and at night when they came out like call girls, the stars.
That did the trick, I think. When they weren't
mean and stupid, they were wise as underground cells
of a compassion as tangible as honey on a burn.
I loved to hear the stars roaring like dragons in the abyss
without anyone catching fire for heresy
and then watch them fixing chandeliers of fireflies
to the lobes of their ears in front of the light bulbs
marqueeing the fragrant make-up mirrors
that told them no lies, as if it were raining light out.

You could burn, you could burn, you could burn,
you could burn like a clear blue white star,
pure acetylene hotter than the indigo petals
of the wild irises with their tongues hanging out
like Sirius A in the Big Dog because of the heat.
You could know them all by name and still,
and this is the best part of any art, have no power
over them, even when you knew the secret name
of their god, and kept it to yourself out of gratitude.
Even when they were grasped by the throat like swans
by a john as sometimes happened, it only
went to prove how unattainable everything is
you think you've got a handle on, as they'd
slip through your fingers like water and clouds
and seductive perfumes with the names of romantic novels
billowing like mustard gas in no man's land.

As vivid as the lilac dot of Mercury dancing in the sunset
of a modest telescope that can see light
at the end of the tunnel of death, like a fun ride
in a circus of horrors, I remember looking
through the plumes of smoke from the pulp mill
through a glass darkly on my mother's back porch
just to get a glimpse of Wednesday's planet,
exhilarated to see what Copernicus hadn't,
this tiny seed pearl that never turned its face
away from the sun, intermittently revealed
through a parting of the ways between me
and the black ghosts of an ongoing exorcism.

I began to understand the dark wisdom of shining
isn't so much a matter of what you put out
as what you take in when the light turns you around
like stars and callgirls and says, here, in this black mirror,
take a good look at yourself. What constellation is that?
Black dwarfs on a starmap, or a cabal of fireflies
cauterizing the lightning roots of your myth of origins
like bad wiring on the electric chair of Queen Cassiopeia
shorting out the fuses of the old asterisms
with the creative possibilities of less terminal visions?

Even today, after fifty years of poetry,
I can't look at the Pleiades without feeling
I'm in the boudoir of the sibyls trying to make
a decent man of the boy in me they adopted
as one of their own and taught me how to burn
the darkness out on the pyre of a sky burial
devoted to nightbirds like a dragon that emptied
its furnace of a heart out like the skull cup of an urn
or a coal scuttle pouring its ashes out like diamonds
of Zen costume jewellery from the mended tea pot
of Aquarius on the cold side of the moon
to warm things up a bit like a compassionate heretic
with a cosmic emergency exit at either equinox.
That's when my tears began to thaw like glaciers
on a long inter-reflecting firewalk of waterclocks.

poem by Patrick White
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Scouring The Patina Of Time Off With Stars

Scouring the patina of time off with stars
the way I used to grind pyrex plates
with varying grades of carborundum
down into telescopic mirrors, then silver them
with a vapour of aluminum to add
to the luster of their parabolic eyes.
Been looking into the darkness so long
I'm beginning to shine on my own.
Now from moment to moment
there's as much darkness coming out of the light
as there are black holes sand-blasting
the hour-glass shape of this bubble of the multiverse
with firestorms of desert stars as I make my way
from one oasis to the next where the mirages
wander in out of the night to drink
from the reflections of their own faces
with hands cupped like the hulls of leaking lifeboats.

I don't believe a life of delusion is any less painful
than a life of enlightenment, even if
your scarecrow self is finally standing naked
under a full moon that's come to realize
that an orbit isn't the same as an enlightenment path
that can loop back on itself like a snake or a shoelace
or the retrograde motion of Mars, without
wandering off the road you were meant to walk
because that's the way you went. Give them both
sixteen ounce gloves and let reality
have it out with delusion in eternity
like two siblings of the same dark mother
trying to get some rest from the racket
after giving up on interceding
by putting some distance between them
light years out of earshot of the nightbirds
that have been longing for her return ever since.

Even the first bliss of the blossoming of illumination
grows sad if it's not wholly shared like an orchard
with everyone as the wind turns around like a fist
flowering into a more open-handed approach to life.
Enlightenment is in everyone like a wavelength
is in a particle when no one is watching.
And if today you're an angel in a coma of ice
tomorrow the diamonds will fall out of your dark halo
and slowly thaw you out as you get closer to the light
like a comet plunging into the sun like the vapour
of a bridal veil you've finally shed like a snakeskin
that had to come off like the white-out of the eclipse
you were living, to see the stars that were rooted
in the darkness within emerging out of your own starmud
like waterlilies and larkspur and the peony buds
of the remote observatories on cold mountaintops
breaking into life like planets at a suggestion from the ants.

Stations of our perishing, perhaps. Phases of the moon
topping my skull up again like the cup that she drinks from
with the crazy wisdom of the lunatic she takes for a companion.
First crescent after the crone. Death's door left ajar
to let a little of the light out for those of us
who like to walk down long country roads alone at night
brindled by shadows, runged by black flames
like ladders of prophetic fire with nothing left to lean on
but the event horizons of their own imaginations
exploring the inevitable exits and entrances
of the passage of life like a waterclock of stars
descending the dark stairwells of the night with the maple keys
to the secret cellars where they age the best wine
by letting it stare into the dark so long
it begins to shine like a blind dream with a light of its own.

poem by Patrick White
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Someone's Cut The Tongues Out Of The Bells Tonight

Someone's cut the tongues out of the bells tonight.
Even the silence isn't singing to itself.
The windows are generously tolerant of intruders
but I'm locked into the splendour of my isolation
empathizing with things I don't love.
Full moon. Fruit moon. Moon of berries and grain.

I thought I'd be happier at this time in my life,
but I'm threshing a harvest of shadows
for having sowed all my wild oats on the moon.
I'm intrigued by the fragrance of occult raptures on the air.
Dark intensities that can only end in immolation.
Black roses that only bloom in fire. Mystic disobedience
that lifts the flesh and blood taboos off
whatever comes to it naturally
as a late night 24-7 convenience store
or the fire that started in the kitchen of the Chinese restaurant
three doors down from my apartment yesterday.

Late night moods. The mind dogpaddling in its immensities.
Heritage town standing down from its fieldstones.
No drunks on the street, and all those angry voices
I didn't recognize, gone home to sleep off their disappointment.
I sit like an air traffic comptroller mindwatching
behind these panes of glass as Arcturus goes down
over the tar paper rooftops I poetically associate
with clouds, stars, seagulls and hand-held mirrors of rain
after a thunderstorm has shattered its reflection in them
like a love affair that wasn't going anywhere.

Doing time on earth, but of little consequence.
The bank across the street makes me feel depreciated.
Ask me this moment what legacy I've left
for the half century I've laboured creatively here
and I'd probably answer indignantly, a garage sale,
then reassure you by saying, for a good cause,
and mostly mean it, and partially wish I didn't.

poem by Patrick White
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Moon Light

Moon Rises High Into The Sky
The Moon Is Gray
The Moon Is Bright
The Moon Is Full
Every Night The Moon Comes Out And Goes Down.
The Moon Shines Onto The Earth.
Brightens My Path.
I Look at The Moon And Say 'Moon Light Moon Light Bright My Path As You Shine My Way'
The moon Looks down And Shines My Path.
I Walk To The Pond And The Reflection of The Moon The Moon Is Beautiful And Bright.
The Moon Will Never Disappear.
The Brightness With Alwayz Shine My Path.

poem by Sonya Wesley
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This Is An Old Sorrow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
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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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The Brighter The Light, The Deeper The Shadow

for Rebekah Garland

The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow.
Shine. And anyone who can see will follow.
Just make sure the stars are real and not tinfoil.
You don't need to know where you're going
to be a good guide when you yourself are the path you're on.
Shine. You're the blue orchid in the Pleiades.
You're the firefly in the skull that kicked in
like a bioluminescent emergency light
when the dead woke up to discover they had no eyes.
You're the last candle dancing to the pulse of the dragon's heart.
You have suffered and lost. Suffered and won.
Suffered and healed like wounded water on the moon.
Shine like a fountainmouth. Shine like a watershed
that can feel the galaxies swimming through it like starfish
whirling like Sufis at the crossroads of a black hole
like the navel of the wheeling world with the singularity
of a hidden jewel in it like the third eye of a lump of coal
shining out like a diamond of the first magnitude.

You can do cartwheels across the sky
as if your legs and arms were spokes.
You can listen for a voice in the abyss of time and silence
until your ears turn into radio telescopes
turning like calla lilies on a jinxed prayer wheel
looking for signs of extraterrestrial rural life
like pendulous Zen pagodas hanging like bird feeders
on the errant limb of a locust tree, waiting for birds.
Shine like a sword of fire outside the gates of your re-entry
from a long return journey of the smokey dove
that wasn't sacrificed, but volunteered
to go see what happened to the crow that was sent out first
to witch for land with an olive branch of lightning in its beak
as a sign of the truce we seek with the rain,
we seek through our tears, we seek like the new moon
wholly reflected in every plinth of our shattered mirrors
of what appeared to be real, until, like hungry ghosts
we tried to grasp it and it slipped through our fingers
like an hourglass full of stars, a rosary of Canada geese,
a slaver's neckchain made of gold like a Celtic torgue.

Shine. I know there's a genie of blue hydrogen in your lamp
and you don't need a nightwatchman to ignite it every night,
though I expect you'd meet up later at a seance,
like the creative medium of a spiritual adept at sensual silence.
But when you do, you fire up hell like a school furnace
as easily as you illuminate paradise with a poppy and a sunflower.
Shine. This is your hour. When it's darkest and it matters the most.
Be a lighthouse off your own shipwrecked coast.
Be the many-petalled matchbook of a flower that blooms in fire
once every seven thousand years, and when the wind
doesn't feed it anything but the milk and bread of ghosts,
I know you've got the ferocious courage
not to blow it out just because you can. Shine
like a wavelength ploughing the dead seas of the moon
like a garden it intends to plant in its wake
that will keep on expanding like the growing edge
of tree rings emanating like cambium from the heartwood
of a cosmic tree that never stops bearing fruit
even when it feels like a Pre-Cambrian tree in a petrified forest
under the Arctic ice of a new polarized ice age.

Don't hide in the weeds and the shadows
of the star you were meant to be at this zenith
of your ascendency whether you're peaking or at nadir.
Shine. And let me see if I can recognize by one star alone
what constellation you're shapeshifting into
like a starmap with flightpaths and insights of her own
through the eye of the hurricane
in the crowns of the black walnut trees
where the nightbirds are waiting as autumn's coming on
for you to show them how to make their own way home.
Be a lamp in the arms of your own journey.
Just as the moon that's apprenticed like a sorceress
to all the phases of your beautiful, crazy wisdom is.

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Unbuckle Your Heart

Unbuckle your heart, undo the luggage strap.
Wash the smell of old lovers out of your laundry.
Sow the dreams you've carved from your skull
like dice in sacred ground
and let's see what springs up.
There's the bathtub you can renew
your virginity in, and there's a corner
you can stand your bass guitar in
like an Irishman at his wake in a coffin.
And there's the garden for that persona
you took on the road like a scarecrow
for a travelling companion with a limp.
All the flowers taste of hummingbirds.
And it's ok the raccoons come for the corn
like second storey cat burglars in the night.
They never take more than they need
and in a world of greed, that's integrity.
I always leave a smile ajar to let them in.

But with you, my heart's an open doorway
the moon's standing in, and my blood's
a transfusion of black roses into the occult.
My eyes, a rare conjunction of fireflies
that won't happen again for another hundred years.
Doom can spend all the time it wants
messing with its calendars to co-ordinate
the apocalypse in all zodiacs at once
so the year of the rat and the year of the swan
don't synchronize their prophets to the dawn
like waterclocks who think things are
just going to go on and on as they always have
like imperially inclined aqueducts without a rupture.

Eclipse, millennial poseur, you're a lyric of carbon
that makes the diamonds flow like tears
to realize there's galaxies of white sweet clover
more to you than appears under the cloud cover
of a hundred billion stars burning into the silver nitrates
of the photographic plates I take of you
in the humbled mountains of my all night observatories.
And even at this distance, alone in the cold company
of these one-eyed telescopes, I'm tempted
to cross your event horizons into your black holes
and see what worlds might come of us
on the other side. Throw caution to the wind
like a rodeo clown and take the ride
as if you were not too wise or wild for tenderness.

Even when you hurt I've seen how you wear
the corona of the sun so lightly in full eclipse
all the haloes shining by a reflected glory
seem mere brassy moon dogs by comparison.
Out of fury you insist upon your originality
like a gamma ray burst in the path of the earth
as you weave your interlocutory wavelengths
into the flying carpets and labyrinths
of an alien cartographer mapping out the stars
with your third eye open to the loneliness of beauty
and how everyone's threatened by an intelligent orchid.

I imagine sometimes you're almost as unloveable as I am
when I'm at my best, when I've been accurately blessed,
not too much, more or less, beyond my aspirations
and I see at the speed of light how time stops,
and my mass and volume become as infinite
as my body and mind, and everything
is perfectly inconceivable in a fallible eternity
that's adapted to us like the medium of a mystery
in a graveyard of dead metaphors we keep giving
new meaning to as if we were all randomly immortal.

Are you the supple bubble of effervescence
in a tsunami of sorrow that could keep my spirits up,
or a methane moon waiting for an airlift of oxygen
to light you up. You're too incandescent
to shine like a brown star, too imaginatively immense
to be a black dwarf. Are you the omnipresence of a particle
or the oracular wavelength of an apostate saint
when no one's looking but me and you
through your holy books to see if what we said
came true or not? If we kept our word
to the innovative absurdity of it all in peace and war
or threw the moon through the window
like an alarm clock that didn't go off in time
to save the earth? I know you're not
the existential bricklayer of the paradoxically sublime
outside the gates of Babylon, nor the whore within.
I've seen you wing your way from one planet to the next
trying to thread your lifelines into a nest
that wasn't a begging bowl in the hands of tree
that came on like a slumlord in a ghetto of birds.
There are no aviaries for the hopelessly free.
But could you live with me in this homelessness
like a tent in the wind that scours Mars for survivors
of the last expedition of seeds that tried to bloom here?
I'd build you a palace of black water that eclipsed
the beauty of the Taj Mahal and plant stars
all around it that would fountain into waterlilies
and we'd be so full of moonlight and solitude
in the silence of each other's eyes, the darkness
couldn't help but envy us the danger of the enterprise.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Could Bring You A Shattered Windowpane

I could bring you a shattered windowpane,
I could bring you a musical whip that's been trained
to read the stops of your flute
and how your fingers move like windproof spiders.
I could bring you the red brick of dried blood
that was left of my heart when I threw it through the window,
and it broke into a thousand chips of rose petals
that shed like flakes of dried paint off the eyelids
of a revolution that hasn't woken up yet
to finish what it started in a recurring dream
of mystic junkies flagging their fits
until Faustus sees Christ's blood
streaming across the firmament like mother's milk.

Should I ever come to know you well enough
to let you drink from my hidden starwell in my field of view,
I could raise your spirits up like a candelabra
to be whatever constellation you wanted
among all these myriad stars dying to be given a focus.
And if at first you didn't know where you were, I'd be your locus
until you got your sea legs on the moon,
and learned to walk on fire without getting burned.

You could be the punk mermaid who beguiled
the seasoned sailor of my oceanic awareness
you were still flinging your nets far and wide over
like spatial tides of ionized wavelengths
keeping time with the stars in a Babel of voices
that stratified the lyrics of the seven visible celestial spheres
that could be seen with the naked eye
like the black grammar of the multiverse
trying to keep the light in some kind of context.

And if I drowned to compliment your singing.
You could write a biography of bubbles
about my life and times in the depths with you
and I'd be happy to sign it in the cursive spring
of the year's first seance to prove
every word I've said to you is a cult of the true,
even before I began to write secret loveletters to you
in the nebulae and clouds of unknowing in the stars
that precipitated out of my breath on a glacial windowpane
of an ice age that couldn't thaw fast enough
for me to open my eyes and see you shining
in ten thousand lakes all at the same time
like the orbits of a prophetic skull at vernal equinox.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Never Alone With A Candle

Never alone with a candle
a firefly in a valley,
a star above the hill,
is your seeing less beautiful
than that stranger in the mirror
who takes you by surprise?

Can you hear your eyes
your eyes your eyes your eyes
falling like rain
on the plectra of the flowers?
Is that a coffin or a harpsichord?
Scarlatti playing the columbine
or the midnight requiem
of a dolorous pine longing
for a nightbird that never comes?

I can sense you count yourself
a dandelion among delphiniums,
a brown star without solar flare,
a moon with a complexion of coral,
and even from here I can hear
that happy bell you wear
like your heart on your sleeve
to let people know you’re coming,
and either fake it or leave.
Fashionable mirages of make-believe.
Black roses of mascara
with comets for eyebrows,
their noses stuck up in the air
like the wrong end of a telescope.

Born this crude ore of a man
what can I know of a woman’s feelings
moving around inside of me at night
like underground rivers of gold?
But, sweetness, if I were to guess,
there are stones much more lustrous,
more polished, more shapely
than even the linghams and yonis,
unenlightened cosmic eggs
with nothing inside to reveal,
no stars, no jewels, no chandeliers
of sad insights into dark mirrors
of what’s inconceivably real
and what’s merely the fossil
of an extinct species of fish
trying to swim through brimstone.

Does the sea envy its waves
because its ambient eyelashes
aren’t long enough to paint
a black velvet masterpiece
signed by a cosmetic line
of flash in the pan movie stars?
Isn’t it enough the moonlight
adorns your eyelids like a lake?
I haven’t touched a woman’s breasts yet
when I didn’t feel like a sailor
lost at sea without a lifeboat
in an ocean of heaving roses.
And I’ve slept with enough women
to know beauty isn’t only skin deep.
Sometimes it’s a shipwreck on the bottom.
Sometimes it’s a blood diamond
on the black market of a cheap eclipse
that bleeds out like haemorrhaging slaves.
Sometimes it raves like Medusa
at the snakepit of a hairdo in the mirror
that turns her reluctant heroes into stone.

You weep for this? You curse your body
your lips, your nose, your legs, your thighs,
the white-out of your smile, your eyes,
your hands for not being doves,
your hair because it doesn’t flow
like long blonde tresses of honey
from a hive of killer bees,
because you don’t think
you can please Adam well enough
with the apple you hold out to tempt him?

Ask Majnun about Laila,
it’s not the goblet, it’s the wine inside,
and from what I know of night and desire,
I’ve never met a man
who wouldn’t drink from his own skull
just to taste it like a mirage in an hourglass
or a message in a bottle on the moon.
Don’t judge the potency of the elixir
by the popularity of the flower
it’s taken from like a love potion
nor the strength of the poison
by the dowdiness of the snake.

And I don’t say this waxing insincerely
like the false dawn of a consolation
for something you’re austerely missing.
You’re not a nun among flowers
about to take vows
of silence and celibacy
because you don’t know how
to attract bees to your cult of one.
You’re not a black mass
with a rose petal on your tongue
instead of the thorn of the moon.

Why do you desecrate
the vases and urns of the wildflowers
that bloom like New England asters
in the starfields of your windowless room
like the prophetic heads of the dead
because they’re not sunflowers
or waterlilies and wild irises
in full bloom along the banks
of your cresting mindstream?
Why do you pass the hours
snuffing fireflies out in your tears
like a constellation of match heads
on the sill of a broken windowpane
in a misbegotten house
of a wayward zodiac for rogue stars?

You’re not a calendar of scars
marking time with razorblades
on the bone of your wrist
like some Neanderthal
who’s just discovered time
because there’s no view of you
scenic enough to cut out and save
that isn’t nicked by crescent moons.

Have you not seen the envy
in the eyes of those first magnitude
fixed stars showcased
on a starmap, jewels under glass,
butterflies pierced through the thorax
for the garishness of their wings?
Take a look for yourself.
Do you not see
how deeply they envy
the beauty and freedom of fireflies
who’ve gotten off the grid?

It’s not just the light that’s beautiful,
it’s what it shines upon as well.
That’s how the flowers talk to the stars
in the same universal language.
Not as lesser avatars of shining
but as one beauty to another
in an alphabet of loveletters
they leave unsigned, unaddressed,
for anyone who wants
to walk in the moonlight awhile
neither in nor out of style,
as beautiful in their own skin
as the auroral silks of the northern lights
or the moon a vaudeville stripper peeping
through the boas of the clouds
when that’s all she’s wearing
like a changeable wind, a radiant sky
revealing and veiling simultaneously
the bright vacancy of one side
and the dark abundance of the other
more intriguing face
she’s turned away from.
The one you can easily see
on the other side of your own eyes
when you turn the light around
and let the mirrors labour to perfect
the artless beauty of their reflections
by imitating you like a ballet
in the feathered death mask of a swan
learning to move with the beauty and grace
of someone flowing
like a river on the moon,
a white Taj Mahal reflecting
the pale towers of a torch
that burns like stars and lilies
in the black waters of its dark opposite.

Ask any Luna moth at the window.
it’s not the shape, colour, scent
of the votive candles or fragrant lamps
you’ve devoted to your solitude
that draws them in out of the night.
It’s the intensity of the light
that summons them to you like seance.
Ghosts, poets, lovers, artists all alike.
The way things are here, not
as they seem to appear and disappear
like fireflies in a mirror
but as they are and will ever be
the translucency of stars by night
the clarity of flowers by day,
the sun shining at midnight,
the moon keeping its shadows a secret
from the occult powers of noon,
all the beautiful shapeshifters,
all the moody chameleons,
each with a face of their own
as unique and revealing as the universe.

In every dropp of water
the depth of the sky
as in every tear an eye
that can see straight through you
to the beauty within
when you’re as easy on yourself
as a starfish on the moon
a dolphin with stage fright
on the catwalk of the stars
changing wardrobes like weather,
night seas of habitable planets
wholly at home in the mindscapes
of their luminous atmospheres,
their immaculate waterskins,
as they are in the rags of those mirages
you keep drowning your radiance in.

A constellation in the desert
that’s underwhelming itself
by forgetting that fire knows
how to swim in the deep end
of shadows on the moon
like the flame of a candle or a goldfish
even you for all your tears,
your weeping willow chandeliers,
your wishing wells, your watersheds,
your shaded windows, your broken mirrors,
the torn nets of those dreamcatchers
you gouged the eyes out of
like semi-precious jewels
that didn’t measure up to diamonds.

Even you, for all you relinquish
of your native beauty to comparisons
with the costume jewellery of other eyes
than your own, try as you might
to unfeather the plumage of the moon
you could never extinguish,
you could never eclipse or blow out,
no more than you can hold a mirror
up to the dead like a portrait of smoke
and convince them beyond
the shadow of an unreasonable doubt
it’s a simulacrum of your solitude,
though it looks nothing like you
sitting alone by a candle in the nude.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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And Though It's Dark And Cold Now

And though it’s dark and cold now
in this ice palace of broken windows
that don’t know whether to bite their lips
or cut their wrists like a suicide
that took it one step too far
like an eclipse that went into exile
I remember the swell and release
of your breasts in moonlight,
rising and falling like a lunar tide.
I remember coiling my finger around
the soft chestnut tendrils of your hair
as if I were dialling a long distance call
to someone I knew light years from here
who was living her dream
like the black sheep of a shepherd moon
she was giving her life up to.
You were an atmosphere on the nightshift
on the intensive care unit of a hospital
applying a cool poultice of moonlight
to the volcanic burns
of more terminal passions
than I ever aroused in you.
Or thought I ever could.
Though time stopped
dead in its tracks like a coma
whenever I was around you
and everything the good doctors
found incurably bad about me
suddenly went into remission,
I knew I was merely
a minor miracle in your life.
Intermission. Time out. One day
every four years to tune up the calendar
A blue moon in late October
after the harvest’s in
and the small birds
are gleaning the rags of a garden.
Canada geese in the cornfields
shredding the last documents
of an abandoned embassy heading south.
We were Indian summer
together for awhile both knowing
the frost would come soon enough
and one morning I would wake up
and look through the window
on your side of the bed
and say, hey, look, it’s snowing
and you wouldn’t be there.
And when the time came, you weren’t.
And I spent the next six years of my life
numb with understanding
in the snake pit of a Zen morphine drip
blessing the beauty of the knife
and the wound you left me with
like a thorn of light under the eyelids
of a new moon in full eclipse.
An eyepatch over the third eye
of an enlightened planet
that felt just like any other
starless night on earth without you.
And though I hurt like a lamp
that couldn’t see you
even when the sun shone at midnight
I knew enough about attachment even then
not to hold up hope
like a cage to the wind.
I never laid a trap line
along the path you took to leave.
I let the silence and the solitude
I returned to like a night bird
to a white-out deep in the woods
efface your footprints in the snow.
I knew I had to stay.
And I knew you had to go.
That one mile east is one mile west
like two feet going in opposite directions
down a road that doesn’t have any.
And though sometimes I look
at the moon these days
and say to myself
what a little scar it is
to cover so much
that’s dark and wounded
about the human heart,
I still haven’t changed the broken windows
I often find myself standing before
to take a long, good, hard,
dark, radiant look at life
to see if it’s still crying outside,
for a thermal-paned, fire-walled website
prophetically updating the virtual weather.
I’m still throwing stones
with loveletters attached to your absence
like the moon through the windows
of a glass palace in an ice-age
I know will thaw by itself in time
like the whirling Castle of Arianrhod,
the hot gem of Celtic heaven shining
in the afterlife of the Northern Crown
down upon these small human acts
of estranged encounters with our own kind
where we meet each other in passing
at the gate of a cosmic garden
that no one was tending at the time,
and long after the one has gone their way
and the other has gone inside.
Long after the flowers have died
that were strewn across
each others’s paths through life
like the spring on a windy night;
no matter how vulnerable it makes us
to being a prime candidate
among many with their sensible shoes on
to firewalk barefoot
on a starmap of burning thorns
into the darkness of enlightenment
to stay attached to the unattainable
the way we both were to the same stars.
Even when the morning glory
overruns the New England asters,
we leave the gates thereafter open
as if the whole heart of the dark matter
of why we love and suffer, bloom
and come to fruition
in the light of each other
as if the aurora borealis
that mystified our nights on earth
with the sheen of cool Persian silks of insight
blowing over the flesh and blood of mystic serpents
then die back into our brief lifespan
like a solar flare back into its sunspots
were still hanging
on one star
one eye
one wing
one prayer
one hinge.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Voices Of Dead Friends, Departed Lovers

The voices of dead friends, departed lovers
aimlessly feather the night air like the fragrances
of wildflowers and burning guitars thriving in the dark.
I'm out to see the Delta Aquarids down by the river,
leaping like a man with faith in his precarious footing
from skull to skull like a chessboard of oracular rocks
keeping their heads above water like a half-hearted bridge
dog-paddling in its own collapse, trying to cross
the same mindstream they're in up to their eyes
for a better view of the sky in the clearing on the other side.

Clouds of cometary junkyards in decaying orbits.
Placental remains of unilluminated afterbirths.
I delight in watching how wasted things shine the brightest
on their way down like blossoms of paint
flaking off the windows of heaven like rose petals
revealing these thorns that gore and slash the night
like matadors and meteors with razorblades
hidden under the screening myths of their eyelids.
It's natural when opposites come together,
enjoining disparate elements into more enduring alloys,
it's the clarity that seems confusing to the untrained eye
and chaos that foreshadows transmorphic reality.

All my aspirations emanate from the same radiant
like sudden cremations in the upper atmosphere
that disintegrate and flame out upon re-entry
like Icarian candlewax at the black mass
of a waning eclipse factualizing the omens
of its own self-fulfilling prophecies of subliminal descent.
All the matches I strike like fireflies
and phosphorus flower buds against my heart
are put out by the same bloodstream
they once illuminated like wild columbine
and the hydrogen blue of the star clusters
burning like irises along this highly siderealized river.

Meteors. Two an hour. Bayonets of light
making the rounds on the nightwatch.
The tree line blows through the open window
of the wavering lake like an old curtain
about to be shed like the veil of the Queen of Heaven.
Indigo the eyes of Isis. With a white wavelength for a smile.
Here where she gathers up the severed hearts
of the light's dismemberment like body parts
she heals by leaving the waterlilies on all night in the morgue
and staring so long and immaculately
into the darkness like a lump of coal
for the third eye of a spiritual snowman
washing his hands of himself like a pilgrimage
weeping diamonds all along the way
like the excruciating tears we all shed
in the shrines of the black suns that rise at midnight
like broken mirrors from the graves of dead metaphors.

poem by Patrick White
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A spring evening

Outside the irises flower yellow and purple
and I haven’t seen a red one yet
and there are some pink and white blossoms
on the fruit trees
and the streetlights burn continually
glowing orange-yellow
all day and all night
as if the municipality
does not know how to do things right
and in the fading evening light
the moon is full and white
and the evening star is already shining bright
and a hot breeze sweeps in
through the open windows
and I wonder when the first spring rain
is going to fall
and in the distance I see thunder
crashing down
in blue-white flashes, but the storm
is blown away and again the sky is clear
and the black speckled by stars.

poem by Gert Strydom
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Till You Come!

I will be the gurgling stream,
Surmounting all your hurdles, I shall unwind,
By the head I will drown a hundred sorrows,
And lend you the quiet mind.

I will be a distant star,
On all your sojourns my lights shall burn,
Ask me for whom I shine, for a hundred light years,
And your name, they shall not learn.

I will be the dark night,
Wait till the moon returns every fortnight,
Watch over you with my ten thousand stars,
Till the dawn restores light.

I will be the bird’s call,
In my dawn song sing your praises & promises,
But in none of those ten thousand notes shall fall,
The skip my heart misses.

I will be the blue skies,
That gives your each day a new expression,
Up there lie written a thousand sighs,
And you can’t erase one.

I shall be the gentle breeze,
Seeking you, glide through all your paths chosen,
In my path bend a thousand blades of grass,
And not rest on one.

I will be the tender blossom,
Like a string of dewy pearls wear all your burden,
In a day’s deadline, brave a thousand woes,
And not cushion from one.

I will be the mighty river,
Thirsting to meet the sea, rush driven,
Let thousand springs flow in my path,
I shall not quench from one.

I shall be the raging storm,
Through me all your tempers shall run,
I will rumple the hair on a thousand trees,
And not uproot one.

I will be the brilliant rainbow,
Where ever your dreams have trodden,
In ten thousand wishes, gift you all my colors,
And not save one.

I will be the spring,
Paint you flowers as bright as a beacon,
Shall brave the wrath of a hundred winters,
And not a leaf will I burn.

I will be the bumble bee,
And whine away all your inattentions
Shall steal the scent of a thousand perfumes,
And not breathe of one.

I will be the cool wind,
That wraps around you in the sun,
I will part a hundred clouds,
And not drench in one.
TILL YOU COME!
x--x--x

Seema.Joglekar.
5th Dec -2009

poem by Seema joglekar
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Cinder In The Sun's Eye

Cinder in the sun's eye, there's fire in your tears.
You plunge into the light like a moth on a mission
and it's the sun that disappears to shine at midnight
in the black mirrors of your eyes. Dark light, intense,
starling, charred swan, you know as well as I do,
the occult approach to the optimism of an eclipse
is to act radically in the name of things you can
only unattainably conceive of. Love on your wrist
like a hawk whose wing you healed, dwelling
in your homelessness without a fear of eviction.
No truth in the mouth of the snake that's pulled
the fangs of its conviction out of the sky
like crescent moons, pins from the eye
of a voodoo doll you've nursed for light years
on the nightshift of a morgue that's aroused by death.
Milk of your left breast kills. The other practices compassion.
Whole snakepits in the shrines of the wavelengths
mourning the death of Medusa, as if snakes too
had something to mourn that makes them shine within you.

Ten thousand photos from an orbiting satellite
with X ray vision and a spectrographic trajectory
couldn't improve upon the license of your beauty
like a black pearl at the magmatic core of planet
trying to make herself as habitable as she can to visitors.
And for those who aren't used to your kind of light,
you hand out sun-visors and starmaps
and black candles to show them the way home
through the same old doorway they came in by.
You're an ambassadorial firefly from the third eye
of dark matter where the roots of the light are embedded
and you've got a message for the blossom
that looks like a love letter. The moon
budding on a dead branch like a crack in the door
you left ajar like an orchard in waiting on a cold spring night.

And who but you could stand eye to eye with the bravery
you practise like a World War II canary
in an underground armaments factory that isn't bomb proof?
There's nothing yellow about the skin of your ammunition.
You confront cosmic dangers in the intimate details.
You ignite and defuse the supernovas and black holes
that endanger the lives of those who follow you like a cult
and though you like their company, you'd much rather be
maculately alone with someone who can see for themselves
that those who were driven out, exiled
into the emptiness of the unknown extremes of the mind
often return with their hands full of the strangest gifts
that time and distance have ever offered anyone
to prove how off course the shore-huggers are
in assessing the course of a life as far out
and comprehensive as the sea. Deeper than stars.
Emotionally more expansive than the immensity
of any shining that can be palmed off cheaply
in the pawn shops of the retinal tidal pools clutching
to the relics and icons of disembodied crab claws.
You don't live like the collateral damage of the sun
and the sea. You don't ask amputees to show you
a way out of the labyrinth by the light of spent candles.
Cinder in the sun's eye, there's fire in your tears.
A luminosity that flows unceasingly
from the watersheds of broken mirrors.
You just have to cry. And dragons as immutable
as diamond cutters take up flower arranging
in a Zen teahouse enlightened by the rain.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Trying To Interpret The Silence Like Glyphs In A Jungle Ruin

Trying to interpret the silence like glyphs in a jungle ruin.
Afraid of what they might say if I cut the vines away
like a Medusa's head of spinal cords connected to my brain,
or this octopus of major blood vessels plugged into my heart.
My dna is the long molecule of a Zen cowboy,
with the Mongolian genes of a shaman practising
hunting magic that ensnares what he loves
in the nets of constellations that do no harm
to the wavelengths of the prey. You've got
to keep on dying every day if you want
to be born again in the dream tree of a shaman.
This is the way you avoid taking possession of your transcendence.
This is the way you break out of a cosmic egg
like a dragon without making an aviary of your solitude.

So many voices all at once in my head,
trying to say something in the living languages of the dead
about annihilation in a time urgent with the mystery of need.
When space isn't expanding the potential of its own medium
into the available dimensions of a future
that's already behind us by the time it gets here
like a delinquent s.o.s. from a star we were hoping
had got a fix on us like the maidenhead of a lifeboat,
it breeds. It proliferates like punctuation. It bonds
disparate elements into oxymoronic metaphors
that leave you as elated as a vertiginous Sufi at a crossroads
knowing that ultimate union doesn't have to be
about one or the other of infinite ways to make it through life,
you can shine like a star emerging from its own ancestral ashes
and take them all at once. Or as Dogen Zenji
said to himself one night when the moon was clear:
The place is here. The path leads everywhere.

I emerge from my own flame like a genie of fire
without smoke, and burn invisibly in my own art
like a crucible of the heart. Hermes Trismegistus,
the Thrice-Blessed, in a biochemical retort
bubbling over like the multiverse getting out of the bathtub
without leaving a ring around the womb of hyperspace.
I've washed so many lives off like the moon
it's a wonder I'm not a virgin again, but the return journey
of the second innocence is better than the first
because it's been sweetly seasoned by a universe
looping in reverse through all the stations
and excruciating transformations of my life
that don't have the same sting in their glands
when they first struck out at me like mystic acetylene
and scaled flashes of insight into the psyche of lightning.

I'm a big boy. The acquiescent khan of millions,
the Golden Horde who would rather make love than war any day
of the Great Tectonic Year, trying to read the fault-lines
in my own skull, volcanic fissures between continental plates
and the surrealistic empires crowding my stargates.
I can take the pain. I was born for it. Raised in it.
Even if I'm deciphering my own gravestone,
brushing away the stardust like a patina of mirages
with my eyelashes for a broom, my tongue for a dustpan,
ripping away the roots like the nervous systems
of the things that cling to it like the cornerstone of a ghost.
Been alone so long in the company of stars,
raising this hourglass of time to the beauty of their eyes,
even quicksand can look like the oasis of a distant galaxy to me.
And this skull of a headstone, crumbling like bread for the birds,
not a ruin, but just another phase of the moon I'm living through.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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And It's Not Hard To See I'm Wandering In A Dry Abyss

And it's not hard to see I'm wandering in a dry abyss
trying to squeeze tears as readily out of the stars as the desert
that turns everything that lives here into a chronic exile.
Don't know if I'm talking to a mirage, a reflection of some
aspect of the dark side of the moon I can't see from here,
an eidolon, a fractal of my self-similarity, a 3D projection
of my pineal gland emanating images into a creatively holographic space
and one of them is wearing your face like smoke from a fire
I'm sitting around like a frog at the autumnal equinox
beside a burning waterlily with a parched mouth.
Matters a lot, but that's ok. I've had visitations before
and I know this kind of seance can either go ethereal or carnate
and sometimes, though it's a lottery, not a spiritual discipline, both.

If my solitude talks to its own echo like a water sylph
in a housewell full of stars, who's to say that isn't
my kind of telescope? That some eyes can see further
than mirrors and lenses, and space is riddled with them
like the golden ratios behind galaxies and black holes
I keep throwing sunflower seeds into hoping they'll root and bloom.
I am immensely aware of my inconsequence in the world,
and the fact that there's vanity even in that. No matter.
As close to selfless as I want to get for awhile.
I paint a lot. I write even more. But the best things I see
come to me spontaneously in the early morning
before the light turns apostate at noon, and late at night
when I'm haunting the Tay River with the willows,
or watching lightning in a tantric rage above the rooftops of Perth.
And more than once I've talked my ghost
back into the grave before dawn evaporated us both
like morning stars in the mist on a lake rising
like the wild swans of the moon above the ragged elms.

Within me, where the universe lives, you're a muse
of dark energy expanding the starfields like space into the unknown,
and I'm growing new eyes like the T Tauri stars in the Pleiades,
and I'm digging up my own fossils in the bone pits
on the shepherd moons of all my most sacred annihilations,
and I'm adding a new shrine to my visual lobe
to see in the dark what shape of the universe you are,
and if you look at the moon, sometimes, as I do,
like the cold stone of an enlightened skull,
or a nocturnal scar that lucidly transcended the wound.

Right now my mouth is an occult grammar of black diamonds,
a fountain at midnight, learning to articulate your stars
like the glyphs of new metaphors that are still deciphering me
to adorn the mystery of this encounter with you
like the moon in the night mirror of the Black Taj Mahal
in sacred syllables that will leave the frogs and the nightbirds
as tongue-tied for awhile as the gargoyles and ghouls
on a Gothic cathedral. Wanted to be an archaeologist
when I was a kid and ever since I got waylaid by poetic cosmology,
I've been brushing the leaves away like the wind
from the ribs and the vertebrae of the trees
in the late Cretaceous of autumn just to get down to essentials,
and see what kind of utensils they took to the grave with them
for eras now. You see how it is with me, all oxymoronic metaphors
trying to bridge duality into a unified field theory
that includes the spiritual like a prodigal wavelength
that might make a difference to the dark matter at hand
as well as the light in the other. I'm an ambidextrous nightbird.
A discipline of longing and renewal that isn't for petty people
terrified of the truths that sting and sing within them
like dragons of rage and bliss who don't need a voice coach,
a mentor, a guru, a nightschool, an intercessor or a crutch
to be told how to hold a note like a bird disappearing into the nightsky.

An hourglass, even when it's filled with the sands of Mars,
gets bored with its own lies over the years, and I'm intrigued
by the earthly candour and sidereal wonder in the way you look at life.
Your ferociously indignant compassion for people, and the passion
to translate the mysticism of contemplation into action,
and the savagery of the solitude that snarls at them to go away
when you need to lick your own wounds, and mix up
a new potion of stem cells with starmaps so they can get
to the furthest parts of your body and mind, those outposts
on the borders between sanity and crazy wisdom
where the silence won't divulge whether everyone died
in the last assault, or just ran out of ammunition.
And I've seen your eyes narrow like crescent moons
in the eyes of a cat that wants to get to the point like a pencil-sharpener.

You're hydra-headed, sapiosexual, as you've said
and your face is as chameleonic as the birthmark of a black Isis
from Merovingian France seven centuries before
the troubadours of Occitania. You're the Aquitaine.
You're Eleanor. You're the yellow planta genesta
that grew wild all over the hills like a stubborn field fire
of radical sunshine that burns all the way down to the roots.
Then you're foxfire potted in the ashes of the urns
of your old lovers transplanted to an open windowsill where
you can give them some air and some light
and you get a chance to bloom again in your own right.

I'm a dragon, a wolf, a warrior son of Virgo,
a demonic familiar doomed to do good despite himself
by trying to lead other people away from me toward themselves,
though I admit it's an ironic sacrifice to be
so gift-wrapped with flesh that few have torn my lifemasks away
to see how I burn in excruciating immolations like a root-fire inside.
Boo hoo, for me, if the moon cuts its finger and doesn't
ask me to kiss it better. Fire doesn't burn itself and the blade
is never sharp enough to make the distinction
between the moon on the waters and its reflection,
between creative annihilation and its extinction.
I've seen swords cry like dew at the tips
of the sabres of stargrass bent towards the earth
like the hands of a clock commemorating the ravages of time
saluting its purple hearts on review in a parade-ground of flowers.

I can see deadly nightshade in you, the palette of a witch,
and the orchids you mix into the brew like the petals
of a new moon, like a lonely wish against hope,
some warlock with gravitational eyes who can bend the light
like water, is going to see the masterpiece of the mandala
that could empower his darkness like the first sight of Venus
over the occluded hills of Lanark where these shadows
only want to serve your lustre to enhance its radiance,
to make you the threshold and gold standard
of his prodigal homelessness parsecs across
at the narrowest ford in my mindstream beyond
gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond
where Morpheus bends the river like a flight of crows and doves
like a zodiacal, shape-shifting Etruscan king releasing them
from an aviary of fixed stars, to let the constellations
assume whatever paradigm and legend of shining they want
into the perennially true meaning of
here, here, here, altogether here and now.
Venus approaching Regulus in Leo
and a torch of burning starwheat like Spica in Virgo.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Old Sorrow, I've Forgotten Your Name

Old sorrow, I've forgotten your name,
you've been with me so long, pouring
the iron in my blood into the heavy bell of a heart
that's climbed back up this sad tree of my spine
so many times out of the afterlives of my windfall,
these sad planets collapsing in on themselves
under the decaying weight and water of their own tears
from the inside out, and gone to seed
like a small fleet of lifeboats in this floating world,
trying to make it up out of these watersheds
to run the vertical deltas of this autumn orchard
whose roots I keep falling upon like a radical place to begin
climbing back up toward the stars again,
until one night I'll raise my sail
like the moonrise of a blossom on the Milky Way
and be gone like a ghost ship in the fog of a nautical legend.

Old sorrow, I know you like the smoke of a thousand fires
I've danced around alone like the only child
of a midnight sun that abandoned me on the threshold
of a black hole I orbit like the rain in a broken mirror.
Who did you bury that we weep for, what
did you aspire to that you were too earthbound to reach,
what love of yours was so betrayed when it had
its eyes pecked out by the song birds
you never sing anymore when the bees
are in the locust trees, and the ants are opening
the peonies like loveletters from the Pleiades,
except there's a wound in your voice the lyrics
are bleeding out of like a thorn in the eye of a hurricane rose?

Old sorrow, are you the tears deep down in things,
the lachrymae rerum that fill the wishing wells
with oceans of disappointment like the run-off
of our hopes and dreams descending the world mountain
after we'd talked to God like bathyspheres
trying to get to the bottom of our tears
like glass bubbles in our crystal skulls,
our third eyes frozen like the lenses of a telescope
fixed on a star above a shipwreck in Arctic ice,
looking for a northwest passage out of ourselves
toward a mythic Cathay beyond our continental shelves?
And what did God have to say that you kept to yourself
when you came back down from your tete a tete,
and returned your commandments like a library book
that was way overdue in Alexandria?

Old sorrow, I can sense in you how many seasons
have scarred you like a calendar of crescent moons
as you hang like the pine cone of one dolorous note
of the silence you sustain like a blues guitar

ripening in the corner of the room where the spiders
are writing music you'll never play like the wind
in the hair of the willows down by the Tay River
when the black walnuts are floating by
like the scorched planets of sunless solar systems.

Old sorrow, I know you like a heavy boot cloyed in the starmud
of all these roads we've walked together to get
nowhere in particular but wherever we are now
in this graveyard of shadows
that talk to the stars who have none
about how to wash our names and faces off
like deathmasks that are tired of trying to light up the darkness
like a candle at a black mass at high noon
with an eclipse high overhead the flowers won't look at
for fear of burning their eyes. Compendious companion,
you bend my boughs toward the earth
with the low hanging fruit of a giving nature
seasoning your inconsolable wisdom with compassion.

Immoveable buddha, are you the ancient echo
of the birth pang of life, the groan of sentience
being torn up by the roots out of the indwelling forms
of things you used to take shelter in like lenses and mirrors
you could blow into bubbles of the mind
like the multiverse through a keyhole into the abyss of hyperspace?
Old sorrow, were you rounded like a shepherd moon
in the undertow of time, your teeth blunted
like the molars of the asteroids eating stoney wheat
growing wild in the starfields of the neolithic grasslands?
Sometimes I can feel you possessing my heart and body and mind
like the corpse of an ancient ancestor, my spirit
like a prophetic skull on the dark side of the moon
lamenting the loss of its atmosphere like one of its eyes.
Other nights, I look upon you like the ruins
of a palace of water that once greened this desert of stars
like a Persian gardener that ruled an empire of flowers.

Venerable exile, do you despair of ever
finding your way home again through your lion gate
or have you encamped like so many other nations
to weep like Zion beside the rivers of Babylon?
Is your diamond corona occluded by the protocols of coal
that sully your face like the memory of darker days ahead?
I shall call you, friend, given how long
we've known each other like shadows of the valley spirit
blinded by the sundials of the unaging mountains of the moon.
I shall open my heart like a fire to you
and we can share the silence together for hours at a time
on long winter nights when the wind is howling outside
and there's no need to speak of things
that neither of us understand about why
the fountains with the deepest watersheds
are always sadder than the last of the flowers
in a late autumn rain, or the willows along the Tay.
Slowest of rivers, you can sit saturnine and soporific,
red shifting into the longer wavelengths
of the oldest of your dreams, if you still dream yet,
and I'll work on a poem in the shipyards of the mindstream
that will displace its weight in tears, and hopefully,
though you probably know better, keep us both afloat
like a paper boat shooting the rapids of a waterclock
that's been running a little late like the two of us for light years.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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