Enlightenment Isn't Lumpy
Enlightenment isn't lumpy
even if sometimes you've got your heart
stuck in your throat
like a bird in a chimney
warming up like a phoenix
to go the way of the sumac leaves
and the ghosts of smoke
on the pyres of the sky burials
of the Canada geese.
Just because November
can't feel its pulse
and the garden snakes are nesting
like a sloppy knot of wavelengths
deep in the cold heartwood
of a rootless tree that can feel
the brutal chill of serpent fire
running up its spine like a lightning rod
doesn't mean enlightenment's a placebo
you have to keep away from the kids.
It's real enough to be unattainable
without disrespecting the integrity
of the picture plane.
It hides out in the open
where no one ever thinks to look.
The simpler it gets
the bigger the book you need to write
in order to conclude ambiguously
you do and you don't not understand it.
Say not two
and all is well.
And mean it deeper than you can say it
so that pain doesn't adulterate the child
that's trying to transcend it
by hanging on to the lifelines
of his fire-proof constellations
like the kites of distant stars burning in the wind.
Enlightenment doesn't care
if you've lost your integrity.
Your absence of self-respect
for someone who isn't there
is a rare opportunity
to uphold the dignity
of stars and rivers and trees.
Enlightenment's just the blossom.
It's not the fruit
of what there is yet to be.
The smell of autumn
in a windfall of apples
cradled like small planets in your arms.
Enlightenment isn't salvation from pain.
It's an invitation to forsake yourself
in the name of nothing you can explain.
The blossom let's go to make room for the fruit.
The perfumes of the spring give way
to the aromas of decay.
But they're both sweet
because there's nothing about either of them
that's everlasting.
It may be an old root.
But it blossoms in the spring.
It may be a dead branch
but the nightbird stops to sing.
And the full moon shines
like a skull full of signs
above its dark abundance.
Enlightenment isn't out of the reach of anyone
because it's got infinitely long arms
and puts the stars at your fingertips
and says play what you want
as long as it's something
we all can dance to
on our way to the grave
like fireflies in the wake of a thunderstorm.
Enlightenment doesn't take life too seriously
even when it makes a tantrum
of its elemental innocence
and goes supernova.
Deep in the nuclear core of its heart
it's creatively playful on a cosmic scale.
The darkest inspiration
of its genius for making
an art of its existence
is life.
Simple and beautiful
as the laughter of children
collecting sea shells on the moon.
Even when you're severely lost
enlightenment doesn't hand you a flashlight
and say go look for your mind
like the holy grail in a sacred wood.
It deepens your solitude.
It blows the candle out
until you emerge like a star
from the profusion of your own darkness
and stand in the doorway
of your own shining
amazed by what you can see
when enlightenment isn't blinding.
poem by Patrick White
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Related quotes
Enlightenment
Chop that wood
Carry water
Whats the sound of one hand clapping
Enlightenment, dont know what it is
Every second, every minute
It keeps changing to something different
Enlightenment, dont know what it is
Enlightenment, dont know what it is
It says its non attachment
Non attachment. non attachment
Im in the here and now, and Im meditating
And still Im suffering but thats my problem
Enlightenment, dont know what it is
Wake up
Enlightenment says the world is nothing
Nothing but a dream, everythings an illusion
And nothing is real
Good or bad baby
You can change it anyway you want
You can rearrange it
Enlightenment, dont know what it is
Chop that wood
And carry water
Whats the sound of one hand clapping
Enlightenment, dont know what it is
All around baby. you can see
Youre making your own reality. everyday because
Enlightenment, dont know what it is
One more time
Enlightenment. dont know what it is
Its up to you
Enlightenment. dont know what it is
Its up to you everyday
Enlightenment, dont know what it is
Its always up to you
Enlightenment, dont know what it is
Its up to you, the way you think
song performed by by Van Morrison
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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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
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Elighten And Enlightenment
something disturbs
me about the verb
to enlighten and the
word
enlightenment:
as a kid,
-i mean when i was, ....
sometimes I am.... childish and
and unworried irresponsible....party no party gay...-
being enlightened
had to have
some connection with light...
the sun of the day's light,
the candle's light by night,
someone flashes light into your face with force,
or
someone deprive you from light so you can see it
better...
as a kid
light and enlightenment
were two identical twins....
it took me
years....
i mean decades....to figure out that
being enlightened
has nothing to do with light
(any form of photonic, electric-magnet, hi frequency vibration, and strings energy....)
a touch is is an enlightenment,
being disturbed is an enlightenment,
freeing you chest is one of the greatest personal discovery....
being nice is an enlightenment...
being a prince-
....high rank, no starts, multi-galaxies explorer, self earned respect-
being a f-Uker in a good way...i Woman's energy sucker....
poem by Atef Ayadi
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Sometimes The Heart Buries Its Sorrow
Sometimes the heart buries its sorrow
like a bell or an hourglass beside the road
as if it came upon a dead bird it couldn't name
and returned it to the earth like unread mail.
There's no gate where I'm going, the air
will tremble a bit and that'll be it. Maybe
a firefly or two, to liven things up,
but no sign of lightning tearing its hair out.
I shall evaporate like a dream someone
couldn't remember having, and what seems
so crucially significant now shall disappear,
disperse, dissipate like smoke from of a fire
and all that will remain of this passionate burning
will be an odd fragrance among the stars
that doesn't arrest the attention of the bees.
And these things of my mother that she gave to me,
Blood, flesh, bone, breath and my love of poetry
and compassion for the world you need to write it,
deeply involved in an unrestricted love affair,
will be scattered like urns on the wind as if
my ashes had no respect for their individuality.
The waterclock ended in a desert of mirages,
not the afterlife of an embryo off to a good start.
The death of an art, the extinction of a species,
not the fall of a sparrow anyone notices,
and I'm not even saying they should if they don't
anymore than they feel the loss of a skin cell.
Some people prefer umbrellas to wild flowers.
Icons of the moon without the dragon.
A mouthful of fire to the taste of water.
Tigers in a zoo, to the dangers of an open door.
It's wrong to make love, music, poetry, colour,
compulsory, anymore than you can demand a friend.
Got to give time and space to the black swan
of a nugget of coal to realize it's a motherlode
of diamonds born out of its progressive dissolution.
Translucent effusions of insight into
a speculative nothing, a flying carpet of wavelengths
unravelling on the loom of the moon,
just because the stars have left their genes
on a helical stairwell of flypaper like a chromosome,
doesn't mean you're a replicant of eternity,
or to see the onceness of life in everything
it's becoming without consulting you
is some kind of exemption you can seek for yourself.
Enlightenment isn't a ticket to pass, it's
not to see the beauty of the chains in the bliss of delusion.
Not to make choirs out of your Maenadic desires.
When have you ever not done this, when
have you ever not realized you were the summum bonum
of your own conspicuous consumption?
But who asks you to die before you're dead
to sabotage your artistic pursuit of happiness
whether you achieve it or not? The absurdity
of the search is enough in itself to make it profound.
Enlightenment ploughs you back into the ground
you came from like grass on the moon
and as a bigger fool that I could ever hope to be
once said: if the cold doesn't go through your bones once
how can there be apricot blossoms in the spring?
poem by Patrick White
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There's A Black Lotus In My Heart
There's a black lotus in my heart, black hole
of enlightenment, black waterstar, sacred eclipse.
Nothing worth attaining that isn't unattainable.
And all the gates are upside down and backwards.
Albino starmaps with black dots shining
on the other side of the mirror, zodiacs
of black matter looping back on themselves
like solar auroras of the sun that rises at midnight.
I don't know what all this means. I may have gone
too far into exile and actually managed to get
to the dark side of the moon. Or I'm a warehouse
of shadows at noon that have lost track of the time
like blind sundials that feel they're being followed.
The light illuminates, but I bloom nocturnally.
I've got the burn marks of stars all over my skin.
I work on the nightshift at the foundry of a constellation
busy pouring itself out like iron and oxygen, blood and air,
forged out the afterlives of hydrogen I've gathered over the years.
A fire-womb engendering one you fill with water.
Fire the midwife of its own daughter. I'm envious
of creative immolations I know I'll never attain.
Though my left brain is in full communication with the right
and I'm a full moon of the bright vacancy, dark abundance
of both sides, and the harvest is ripe, I'm always
a star ahead of my light, so I don't end up
like a dead school furnace in the basement
writing my memoirs like a manuscript of ashes in an urn.
Deconstruct me wholly down to my last atom
and I promise you, if that's all I've got to work with
like one stem cell to another at the beginning
of a matrix of causes and conditions into which
we'll be placed by a Hox gene assessing the chi
of which direction our eyes should face, and how many
degrees of separation there should be between our ears,
I promise you, I'll still burn with the fireflies
and the supernovas like a blind prophet
who saw two wavelengths copulating like snakes
and has been tied at this stake of of a spine,
an oracular heretic of both sexes in synchrony
like the hybrid of a phoenix and a waterbird
burning in visionary serpent fire ever since
for the sake of a muse that always comes
in the nick of time like rain on the moon to my rescue.
When it's night in the diamond of my third eye
is the light not more mystically enhanced by the darkness,
more mystically specific than the white wash of the sun?
The moon is the mitochondrian that tempers
the toxicity of the light so the nucleus of the solar system
can blaze with alien oxygen meteorically across the night.
The black mirror, brighter than the white,
shows you your reflection on the inside
where you're arrayed like a faceless world
that's given up trying to second guess
who's the unerring witness under the lifemask
of the surreal cosmology that doesn't recognize
it's not a self, at first glance, and that all physics
is the psychology of ridding yourself of the delusion
you can, even if you're riding a flying carpet
out into this desert of stars to sweep the constellations away
like mirages that have been throwing bad meat
down your holy wells like sacred crocodiles.
Ignite even so much as a matchbook at this distance
or turn on a flashlight to see what's in the dark
as if you were looking for your mind with your mind on the light
even though it's as abundantly clear as your eyes it's night out,
and the billions of stars in the next closest galaxy,
Messier 31, at eleven o'clock above the middle star
in Andromeda on the rocks, and two million light years
of enlightenment will gently recede back into the cosmic hiss
and disappear from your field of view subliminally
knowing, because the timing's yours, you're a daylily
covering your insight with the petals of your own hands
because you don't know how to open them sidereally yet
from the outside in, where your darkness shines
and the night you turn your face away from
like the bright side of the moon blinds you
by a reflected glory to the radiance of the origins
of your own vision, deep within, where it all begins
emanating stars of the darkness of your own eyes.
poem by Patrick White
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Nightbird On A Winter Branch
Nightbird on a winter branch.
Dark blossom of the new moon,
Last kiss on the eyelids of the dead
As the snow falls like apple bloom.
I see you’ve left the door ajar:
The backdoor of an eclipse
To let the first crescent of the light out.
The sacred syllable of the mistfits
Lost in the silence and the solitude
You raise like heretical mystics into songs
That only you alone can sing
So that each in their homelessness belongs
To the false dawn of the same secret
They weep over like empty lockets
That stole the moon from their windows
As they burned at the stake, rockets
Martyred in the fire of the holy books
That inspire them deeper into exile
This late at night far from anywhere
Distance is measured by the mile
And not the wingspan of the light-years
It’s taken me to write this.
Like a bird that flew out of the darkness,
That left no trace of the witness
As it blew a kiss of sudden insight.
A word in passing from the dead
About who’s behind the death mask
Of the snow that’s covering my head
Like the polar ice cap of a planet
With the prophetic wisdom of a skull.
Life in the birthmark of the new.
Death in the harvest of the moon at full.
Emptiness devoid of all light.
The first sign of renewal in the urn
Of a nightbird on a winter branch.
Diamonds of ice and insight that burn
Like coal in the eyes of a snow man
With the passion of a phoenix born
A star in the cold furnace of the sky.
Where every passage is a rite of return
That hides its brightest jewels
blossoming like enlightenment on the wing
In the dark ore of a nightbird
When a deathmask opens its mouth to sing.
poem by Patrick White
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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
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Enlightenment
ENLIGHTENMENT
Wonder revolves word
whirlwind of change resolving
s[tr]a[n]ge conundrums stirred
s[tr]a[n]ge = sang strange sage stage an age range rang
4 April 2005 revised 3 January 2009
robi03_1190_robi03_0000 HXX_EIX
for previous version see below
Enlightenment
Wind whirls wonder word
beyond deaf and resolve, solves
all conundrums stirred...
12 April 2005
Enlightenment poem © Jonathan Robin
poem by Jonathan Robin
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As Darkness Leaves
It is what it is...
No matter what the technical device used,
To prevent the extended presence of truth.
Or the evolution of a higher consciousness.
It will be done as truth is pursued.
Regardless who deems the effectiveness,
Of a censorship losing this battle.
The process of enlightenment,
Has begun!
As darkness leaves...
To usher in an enlightenment that comes.
To no longer shun those targeted as wished.
poem by Lawrence S. Pertillar
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If there is a lid that doesn't fit, then there is a lid that does. To a person that does not wander, there is not enlightenment. Fall seven times, stand up eight.
One Side Of My Face
One side of my face what the world
looks like on the inside,
a mindscape I’m walking through
that changes shape whenever I do.
And the other just a clay bust of the moon
that somebody keeps working on
like erosion in Death Valley.
But tonight I’m tired
of looking for signs of life
where there are none.
The air is as smudged with cigarette smoke
as the dirty winter windows
I’m staring numbly through are.
Infra red aura of the town lights
reflected off the big-bellied clouds
as if something were burning
across the highway as those
who are awake yet listen
to the Doppler Effect of the sirens
to know if they’re still safe or not.
A pastel green wall
through an open window
across the street from here.
But I haven’t seen anybody in it
for nearly a year since I moved in here
where every second thought
ends in so what?
Like a cynical kind of cowboy zen
that’s had it up to the proverbial
with koans and haikus
that provide you with spurs to enlightenment
but no winged horse
that isn’t already a corpse
lying by the side of the road like roadkill.
My mind soars like a turkey-vulture
when my heart
wants to swim like a swan
down river with the stars of the Milky Way
as I did one suicidal May in a six man raft
with no rudder or guide
in the spring run off of the Ottawa River
to raise money for
the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario.
But the cheap thrill
of risking my life for virtue
has worn off like chalk on a pool cue
and if light is the function
of the body of the lamp
right now I feel like
a blackhole with a bad complexion
that’s gone snowblind
in the glare of a computer screen.
I figure if I stare back long enough
sooner or later
one of us is going to blink
and discover what’s on the other side
of what the other one thinks
it’s looking at
when it puts an hourglass
up to its eye like a telescope
to know what time it is
and how many light years there are
between solitude and exile.
Between staying in and going out.
The tin gas pipes crackle
like ice breaking underfoot
or a bird in the chimney
trying to peck its way out
of a black cosmic eggshell
that’s as starless as hell on the inside
and tarred and feathered on the other,
assuming, of course,
it ever does crack the koan
in the liberty bell of enlightenment
and emerge with the wingspan of a dragon
into a room full of cigarette smoke
and patchouli incense
rising like the ghost of a white horse
as if someone who just fell off
the cutting edge of the flat earth
were trying to get on again like Icarus
waning in a wax museum on the moon.
poem by Patrick White
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The Rain's Falling Upwards
The rain's falling upward
and I'm rooted in the clouds.
I'm riffing with the greening of my leaves
without a flute, letting my thoughts grow
like musical serpents each
according to their need.
It's the snake's turn to charm me,
to entangle me in its form
like forbidden fruit
swaying from my highest boughs.
In the chalky, moist grey air
I'm scraping my fingernails
down a blackboard like crows
because my desires are vaguely out of reach
and my mind is a teacher with nothing to teach.
I want nothing more
than the freedom of my own humanity
thumbing its own heart
like a well-read book
or a worn guitar I taught myself to play
when no one else was around
to hear the sound of one hand clapping.
If my mind brings forth an abyss
like a vast womb where there's only room
for my solitude
I'll slip into it
under the reflection of the moon
on the unwitnessed side of my eyelids
without abandoning the boat of my body
and drift like stars across the timeless spaces
of anywhere the light doesn't taste like physics.
Being is Knowing. I don't need a web
to prove I'm a spider
and I don't need a constellation
to shine out like a star
when I'm not being humbled
by the blind insignificance of it all.
Even when I mean bees and earthworms
too often my voice
is an urn full of dead fireflies.
Yesterday's astonishment before the stars
in the open-mouthed fields
comes down today
like chandeliers of mystic trivia
on a scarecrow who lets the birds
in on the joke
that everytime he begins to burn
in his fireless martyrdom
his tears fall like an ice storm
to put him out.
But I don't always want
wisdom oozing out of everything
like the sententious candle
of its own enlightenment
even if I am wounded by the compassion of it.
Sometimes I am content with the futility of things
just as they are.
poem by Patrick White
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As Much As I Love The Stars
As much as I love the stars, I know
the spirit must seek its lost radiance
in the midst of the filth of this world,
even when its third eye is trying
to wash it off in tears it really means.
Under the half-closed eyelid
of the pine cone pagoda in oceanic meditation
is a fire-seed waiting for immolation
like an overdue urn about to give birth.
And do you see how the moon
feathers the waves with silver,
and the breathing waters so much
like the flesh of a woman undulating
under the caress of an unaccustomed hand
shines back like fish swimming through a starmap?
As above so below. Same with inside and outside.
Astrophysics is psychology. Noumena, phenomena.
Are you looking for a unified, field theory of your mind?
Study that small sacred syllable of a black ant
with the torn wing of a butterfly
under full sail in its mandible
it's taking back to the heap
of a thriving passage tomb burial
like a high card it's going to lay on the table
without intending to call anyone's bluff.
The moon on the lake isn't timed.
Death's not too late. Life's not too early.
Not all the flowers bloom at once
in a wave of mass hysteria at a sports stadium.
Time is as generous to the dandelion
as it is to the hyacinth or the rose.
When a total eclipse of the soul
can be as illuminating to a firefly
as the enlightenment of the full moon
can be to the mad at harvest time
and the night bird sings on the same branch
out of the same longing
as the mourning dove does
on the burgeoning bough,
how far must a wave look for the grail
before it realizes it's swimming in it
and by virtue of it having never been lost or found,
like the universe you're surrounded by
dipping its other wing in the cup you drink from
like blood from your own prophetic skull
or an elixir of love from the goblet of a black tulip,
as an antidote to falling into a cult of trances,
trying to teach rattlesnakes to ghost dance for rain
when everywhere you look as far as the eye can see,
nothing but the bleached bones of their vertebrae
crumbling like aqueducts across a sea of sand
looking for the holy hourglass to green it again?
When things are like this, why send
a caravan of mirages like thought-trains
on a pilgrimage for water on the moon?
Is a course correction more innocent
than its original direction or is it
just another change of heart on the part
of a weathervane that thinks linearly
it's got its hand on the rudder of the wind?
Best thing to do in a storm
is let go of the wheel of birth and death
and either go down with the ship like a constellation,
or trust in a bubble-shaped universe you still might float
like a turbulent waterlily above the turmoil of it all,
anchored to the bottom like a key on a kite
to lure the lightning to your spinal cord
the way copulating snakes make their own caduceus,
twin wavelengths from the same inner matrix
ascending like helical thermals under a dove's wings,
so that dragons are born of cosmic eggs
that know how to heal fire with fire
that can consume itself like life
without ever getting burnt out
even when autumn's coming on
and you can begin to smell
the smoke and ashes on its breath.
Enlightenment the inspiration of the search,
the spirit returns to the candle in your hand,
to dance with the flame of life within you
on your own threshold, in your own doorway as you realize
like someone waking up from a dream
in their own bed, their head on a softer pillow
than they imagined a moonrock could be
at one sixth the gravity of earth, what
was there to aspire to that could possibly be
higher and wiser than a cloud circling a mountain
or down in the valley where the stars slum
once they get off the night shift, more compassionate
than a honey bee in the eye of a stargazer lily
smothering it in a rusty ochre dust storm of pollen
the way we prepared our dead when we lived in caves
to bloom like a hive when its spirit returns to matter
in its next incarnation as a gust of wildflowers on Mars.
Hawkweed and Indian paintbrush I would think.
And the unusual fruits and flowers that can sprout
from a windfall of intensely radiant meteor showers
flung out of the darkness by the hands of generous sowers
that were ploughing the moon for themselves
long before the ox of the mind showed up
like the blessing of a delusional dependency
that makes you think, gone to seed, you need it.
When the truth has always been mindful
and mindlessly green as the thorns and the leaves
of the locust trees in spring coming into blossom
as easily as the mindstream follows its own lead everywhere
with nothing but its own flowing for a navigator.
No gate, no lock, no pivot, no hinge, no waterclock
trying to put the fire of life out in a bucket brigade
of community-oriented arsonists, departure
never any further off the beaten path from home
than its arrival can be lead astray
by the shadow of the return journey
it casts behind it like the widening wake
of a waterbird's wings unravelling
the flying carpet of the water that wove it
like wavelengths of the hidden harmonies
that are on your side like your eyes are
when you step out of the blazing house of life
once in a while, into the expansive solitude
of your own inimitably creative darkness,
without a candle, a firefly, a lightning strike
for a guide, and look up, just look up
in any direction you wish, and don't pick any one
of the six thousand stars you can see
with the naked eye in the country,
no matter you don't know their names
or myths of origin, or much about shepherd moons,
or what an antikythera is, then run around
looking for an underground circumpolar sage
to show you on a starmap where your shining is at
like the light of the star, though you cry
in bliss and sorrow, delusion and insight,
you can't wash out of your own eye
anymore than you can Venus in the dawn
when you're sitting on a mountain under a Bodhi tree
trying to attain the unattainable empty-handed
in the same breath that's been giving it all away
for light years, inexhaustibly, like a flower-mouth
of enlightenment in everything you say or do,
the world in the creative wake of whatever medium
that's shapeshifting into you like water into fish,
darkness into star, sky into a bird on the wing
in a homesick sunset, or the shining of the source
like the lantern in your hand you needlessly labour
at keeping lit to go look for it without realizing
it's your own blazing that blinds you to the gift
of what the darkness arrays before you like candles and stars
and nocturnal waterlilies opening like a new moonrise
amazed by the occult mystery of the fire that burns
in the subliminal watersheds of your fathomless eyes.
In this boundless space, why should you be surprised
behind all the masks of God, her best disguise
when the hidden secret wished to be known
and she revealed herself, was your own face,
your eyes, your mouth, your ears, your voice alone
pouring the universe like the light of picture-music
into your own ears like the spirit of a word
that can't be enlightened until it's been heard by you.
poem by Patrick White
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Flights of Fancy - Acrostic Sonnet
For generations, since prehistory,
Life rising symbolised the soul’s redemption.
In flights of fancy all religions mention
Gesture rites to set bright spirit free.
‘Here’ and ‘now’ mean little. Ecstasy
Takes man’s kaa beyond mundane convention
Seeking enlightenment where apprehension
Or instinct’s fears, dissolves, and where ‘to be’
For once is not an empty phrase. ‘To see’
For once may stand for inner comprehension,
Adds up to enlightenment’s obtention –
Never can be gift hereditary.
Create within your mind that freedom where
Your soul discovers flightpath through the air...
poem by Jonathan Robin
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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
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The Night's A Black Hole Of A Begging Bowl
The night's a black hole of a begging bowl
that doesn't know what to ask for anymore.
Shall I throw the new moon of another beginning in
like good coin of the realm, in passing,
or bite the bullet of a counterfeit eclipse
in the silver silo of the dark abundance
I'm trying to trigger into stars again
like apocalyptic insights going off in my brain?
The heavens roll like an old thirty-eight
I raise to my temple for old times' sake.
But the gate I used to close behind me
in the high starfields to keep nothing in
is hanging on like a lapwing by one rusty hinge
to the wing and the prayer it's dragging on the ground.
It's getting a little late for suicide. The timing's
overtaken the importance of the content.
And this close to the end, it would be a shame
not to see yourself out like friend in the doorway
saying farewell to yourself as you say in return
I'm glad you came to the stranger whose threshold
you crossed like a star in transit at zenith.
My pulse is still hammering swords of light out
on the anvil of my heart for me to fall upon,
but lately I've been bending them like horseshoes
to put them out of use and return them in tribute
to the water sylphs in the sacred pools of my mindstream.
Inspiration ages into crazy wisdom that still
doesn't take its own advice but never fails to sing
in a voice worthy of a wolf or hermit thrush at moonrise.
I've been firewalking my way through this
long, dark, strange, radiant dream since I first
opened my eyes and the stars began to shine
but I've never lived the same thing twice.
Though the morning star falls like Lucifer
in the false dawn of enlightenment, the abyss
cannot be bridged by anyone's trajectories
however high we ascend, how ever deep we plunge,
until we're burning like maple leaves and shooting stars
in the second innocence of our return journey back to earth.
Fletched arrowheads of the sky, even the birds
falling short of the unattainable miss the mark
and return to the green boughs of their beginnings
just like the flight of these words in the sunset
as the night overwhelms us all unspeakably
with the proto-nostratic of the stars
like a mother-tongue of light that leaves nothing unsaid
in the autumn darkness fragrant with the decaying dream grammars
of the dead slipping their shadows like secret messages
under the door of the book we're writing between us,
the beginningless prelude of the endless epilogue
of the memoir of the love life we had with Venus in Virgo
when the new moon was in the claws of sensuous Scorpio.
Big, red-hearted, archaic Antares
threshing the green wheat of Spica
as if the harvest had been achieved before the seed was planted.
Just because we die doesn't mean that life
is finished with us like the draft of a manuscript
we threw into the bonfires of the maple trees
to inspire our ashes to rise out of the open urns of our firepits
like the feathers of a dragon enflamed by the wind
so our spirits could ride their own legends a breath
higher and closer to the stars every time we open our wings
to re-read the lyrics it took a lifetime to write in scars
like thorns in defence of the mystery of the black rose
we were happy to bleed for as if our blood had no other use
than the ink in the pens of these leafless woods
dreaming of new foliage in the spring returning
like the plumage of eagles to the lonely flight feathers
of their skeletal quills. Fossil constellations
in the darkness that whisper between the lines
of the alpha and omega of the life themes that once ran
like purple passages of the mindstream
that can still shed light on our afterlives in a book of shale
long before we had eyes to read what we were writing
like loveletters to ourselves on intimate terms
with the inconceivable solitude of this distant future
we're all living now in celebration of yesterdays yet to come.
poem by Patrick White
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The Chaos Of My Unravelling Self
The chaos of my unravelling self, a snake pit
of dissonant wavelengths that yesterday the moon
wove into a flying carpet, and then undid again.
Or maybe I jumped. I don't recall.
Knowing isn't the same thing
as making sense of it all
as if you were rewiring a zodiac.
Sometimes it's wiser to know
a lot more about what you don't
than it is the little that you do.
More room for the stars.
The mystery doesn't feel so cramped.
If you're a river you've got no choice
but to trust the way things fall out
and when's the last time you heard a fire
asking for a starmap? A garden
might be a menu but most of the earth
bears what it will, and the clouds
don't ask the wind for directions.
Everything in existence is either
the will of a star or the whim of a flower.
Longing or enlightenment the same,
two sides of the same windowpane,
one floods the room with moonlight
and the other looks out in silence at it.
A good night is when you throw the moon through it.
No more distinction between outside and in.
The aviary sings differently when there's no cage
or your voice leaves the door open
for the birds to come and go.
Same with words, thoughts, emotions.
These are the waves of an oceanic universe
responding to its own weather.
Halcyon, the stars in its eyes,
or a holocaust of nautical widows
frozen in time like upstairs windows.
Whatever it is, God, light, life, love,
shape it how you will out of bone or obsidian,
out of the transparent medium of your spirit,
out of the tusks of the telescopes you're poaching,
and cherish what you need to believe
like a child of your own, if you want
your family around you when you die,
but if there's more rogue in you than rabbi,
more salmon going against the flow of the bowl
than there are goldfish, set out alone
into the waywardness of your solitude
without making an art or discipline of the abyss
by apprenticing it to your emptiness as if
you'd finally found something to belong to
that inconceivably exists, the shadow of nothing.
Be the prince that paupered his humanity
without really knowing what that was
until he walked out on himself one day,
and said enough of that. Sick of staying
within the lines, or breaking crayons
filling in the emotions of a chameleonic colouring book.
Understanding is simultaneous with living,
if you're quick enough, and if you're not
insight still travels faster than the speed of enlightenment
because it travels as light headed as you do.
Old Zen walnut. Seek it, it runs. Run from it,
it follows. Better to walk with it like a wolf
or a star peering through the crowns of the trees.
Live politely estranged from the curiosity that wonders
who you might remotely be. If it suits you.
If it's a kingdom you don't need to rule over,
acres of homelessness with a burnt out fireplace
left standing like some blackened fieldstone shrine
the birds still build their nests in like a larynx
in the throat of the wind that can sing, but can't write.
I never wanted to live like the book of total knowledge,
volume L. Knowledge has always seemed
more of a shovel to me than a door. You can
dig a garden and bury a corpse with the same tool.
Such is the paranoia of human ingenuity
we go to war with ploughshares in the defence of swords.
The painted asses of infuriated clowns.
Underground radio broadcasts of insincere love codes.
When you're the way, what else can anyone offer you?
But don't belittle yourself by mistaking it for madness.
poem by Patrick White
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Sometimes The Clarity Comes Too Late
Sometimes the clarity comes too late
to realize there was never
any need for forgiveness
and nothing to expiate
about the way we made our gracious farewells
into works of art
that would go on hurting forever.
We had a genius back then
for making death seem more beautiful than it is
because we lived on the edge of things
and not their surfaces
and o if we'd only felt all those things
that made us weep at the end
dying in doorways that were more cruel
than any threshold we had to cross to stand there.
If only we could have felt those immensities of good-bye
from the very beginning
what reason would we have had to cry like candles
when the wine turned back into water
and the roses wiped their lipstick off on their leaves?
One goes out.
One goes in.
Because severance
no less than the dance
takes two to make a difference
and as the years go by
the silver flakes off the memory of the mirror
and you can see clear through to the other side
experience is just another log
you throw on the stars
to keep yourself warm on a cold October night
by a small fire out in the open
where it's easier to sublimate
the intensities of fate
by opening the cages you keep them in
and burning your loveletters
like the flightfeathers of half-forgotten songs
to spread their wings in the flames
and give them the freedom to rise higher
than the nest of ashes they were born in.
History isn't the muse
the immeasurable mystery is
and if you don't learn to let things go
you'll never know
how to live lyrically alone in the wild
unbounded by your solitude
by the side of a river whose flowers are dying.
The green bough hisses and blisters in the fire
but the cracks in the heartwood
burn far into the night
and give off way more heat in the autumn
than the pre-emptive lightning strikes of spring.
It's a rite of passage as old as migrating geese
mournfully bearing souls south
whose bones have turned to dust
to take all my prophetic skulls like moon rocks
out of the house of the dead
and arranging them into the ring of a firepit
stand in the middle like the eternal flame
of an unrepentant heretic
to rekindle the dance
even among the skeletal shadows
of a persecuted romance.
Even in sorrow.
Even in the silence
of the great distances
that add their aerial perspective to time.
Not to call ghosts back to a seance
as if they could tell me anymore about death
than I've already lived through
but every year at the second full moon in October
after the harvest is in
and the scarecrow has come down off his cross
and left it to the ravens of nevermore as a church
I lay a blue violin on a funeral pyre.
I stretch my heart out like a skin on a drum.
Dressed in the plumage of solar flares
I enter a trance of firebirds
that have long since disappeared back into the sun
and like Icarus in eclipse
or the last grasshopper
who didn't take the advice of the ants
to drag the leaves and wings of things
piecemeal into a shelter
to prepare for deeper separations yet to come.
I take my chances by the hand out here in the open
and I dance.
I dance with heresy.
I dance with the angels and the demons
that were martyred in the name
of what is unforgiveable about my human nature
and yet more sacred than the rain I dance for
to put the war I dance for out.
I dance with whole asylums of noetic visionaries
who went insane
trying to explain me to myself
like the origins of life on another planet.
And I dance again to the music of the women I've loved
whether in pain or bliss
whether I was hung by the tail
like a plague rat over the abyss
of my cannibalized emotions
like a famished snakepit
or I fell sidereally under the spell
of the fragrance of summer stars in their hair
I dance not as if it were all worth it in the end
but something inestimable to celebrate
that gives the chartered undertakers pause
about what they do for a living
when they see how a poet can dance
to the picture-music of the crazy wisdom
that sings the dead up out of the earth to their feet
without looking down from the mountaintops
or back at the valleys behind
to take the measure of their heart
to see if it's empty or full.
I let the new moon
feel the old moon's arms around it again
like the bright vacancy and dark abundance
of what's joyfully absurd and playful about life
whether it's doing a sword dance with words
or dancing in blue heron feathers
like a shaman among waterbirds
longing for enlightenment
like a tantric star map
to break the jinx of their prayer-wheels.
Or dancing to bullets like a greenhorn
in the main street of nineteenth century Dodge
or like me out here in the country dark
alone with six thousand visible stars
eleven miles outside of Westport
spreading my wings under the sign
of the Eagle and the Swan going down in the west
to add my phoenix to the feathers of the burning sumac
and grabbing the lightning lance of the thunderbirds
like a serpent from their talons
hold it up to the stars to the east and the west
like the wavelength of a crazy insight
into the dark word of the living light
that makes me dance my way
out of time
out of place
out of my mind
without leaving anyone or anything behind.
poem by Patrick White
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When Grief Grows Savage And There's Nothing To Hunt
When grief grows savage and there's nothing to hunt
and all your mandalas are turning back into cave paintings
running down a limestone wall like spears
in the tears of weeping shamans, and you want
to tear your heart out and eat it to nourish your emptiness
but you're not sure if it's still the noble enemy it used to be,
or if the power of its sympathetic magic has past
the expiry date, and you think you might be
the last of the big mammals to go extinct in the ice-age,
time to sit down on the ground and have a good laugh
at how the things we take most seriously in life
make sacred clowns of us all in the last analysis
just before enlightenment. Put your lifemask on again,
coax a star or a firefly out of the tinder of that nebula
you're blowing on until you've got a good blaze going
then throw all your grave goods on it as if
you were sending them on ahead of you
while you danced the pain away like the sky burial
of the ghost of another age that's been haunting you
like a glacier that's slowly beginning to wash itself clean of itself
as the numbness in your heart thaws like a baby mammoth
that fell into a crevasse of ice, and your fingertips
are melting like elk horn candelabra at a native exorcism.
And, yes, it stings for a while just as things are starting
to warm up, but that too will pass like a wet snowfall in April,
when your blood will begin to flow again
as if it were teaching the wild columbine and gypsy poppies
to waltz to the picture-music of the wind without banshees
howling and scratching at your eyes like dead branches
as if they were raking their fingernails against the glass
of a cold, crystal skull disappearing like an ice-cube in a night cap.
Sit down on the ground and have a good laugh
on the tab of everything that's ever wounded you
and you just watch how easy it is to wipe
that gruesome grin off the face of the moon
like the sabre-toothed Smilodon that mauled you
and replace it with the smile of a Chesire cat
that just ate the canary in a coal mine of fossilized constellations
because grief can intensify the darkness into diamonds
that can see through the translucency of the tears in your eyes
new stars breaking out all over like waterlilies in the night skies
waiting for you to name them and give them myths of origin
derived like starmaps from the legends of your own shining.
Eventually the jesters of crazy wisdom will come to us all
and wipe the tears from our eyes and paint stars in their stead
we can point out to the cloaked ones
under the covers of their death beds
as if the deeper and darker the night the better to see
trillions of fireflies flung off the wheeling
of the celestial spheres like compassionate insights
into what we suffer for, what we lose whenever
we try to possess forever by trying to pour
the universe out of the universe like a waterclock in Aquarius
when we're already swimming through eternity
like Pisces and there's never a moment that passes in life
that isn't a vernal equinox in a locket we hold close to our hearts
that doesn't bloom in the fires of enlightenment
like star seeds hidden under the eyelids
of last year's dolorous windfall of pine cones
because however the wind screams
through the broken wishbones and harps
of our shattered limbs, our torn dreams,
the eighth time we get up from our seventh time down
we get up and stand our ground like evergreens in the starfields.
poem by Patrick White
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Who May Open Sealed Books?
Who can know
understand
the vast weight
of history
prophecy
stretching back
into remote
epochs of time?
Who can know
understand
interpret
implications
sealed into
God’s holy
word sealed
unto end time?
None can
understand
what is sealed
until God
gives authority
enlightenment
at God’s
appointed time.
No man no
prophet
has authority
until God
gives prophet
authority
enlightenment
at appointed time.
No man no
Angel of God
has authority
to open any
sealed books
to know any
decisions of God
until appointed.
poem by Terence George Craddock
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