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Everybody Says I'm Too Intense

Everybody says I'm too intense and I say
you sure as hell aren't.
And since I was sixteen in highschool
and before that in the local neighbourhood
in the bosom of my family
people have always thought I was mad.

My highschool graduation yearbook says
most likely to become
a mad teacher mad scientist mad poet mad.
An oracular assessment of my peers
that has haunted me for years.

But I say crazy is the only antidote
to the extreme chaos of conditioned consciousness.
Look at the world.
Lies lies lies.
A coalition of lies
that calls itself
the history of civilization.
Crazy wisdom.
The tantric insight
into the fact
there is no nature to things.
You're not a very wise human
if you don't understand ignorance
is the clearest expression of enlightenment.

You see what I mean?
It's hard to speak of unity
in the split tongue of a snake
without making an oxymoron of it
at the fork in the roads
it mistakes for a direction.

Regard the dead parachutes of Babylon
no one can understand you
I said to myself one day dying with a sneer.

It's the moral obligation of a writer to make things clear.
I forget who said it.
But he was a nitwit.
One of the lice of literature
that makes your mind want to scratch itself raw
for the next half century.

It's that word moral that bothers me.
Not his preconception of clarity
though when it gets down to that
you smear the mirror
when you try to be clear about clarity.
I said that.
It takes an amateur madman
to be a good shrink
and make reality
try to correspond
to what you think.

But what an impoverished way to live your life.
What a distortion of humanity.
If you're mad enough
there's plenty of room in the asylum
to embrace sanity with decorum.
When in Rome do as the Romans do
and try not to make a spectacle of yourself in the Colosseum.

It's been my experience
that so much of what the world calls mad
is only freedom
with the courage to open its eyes.
Most people look into the eyes
of spontaneous freedom
and it terrifies them.
They don't want to know
what's not there.
The world ends at the back of their eyelids.
Things just get too deep
and they drown in their sleep
like pearl divers on the moon.

At every moment of your life
life is more certain than death.
It's all you can say about
where you expect to be tomorrow
and where this is now.
Everybody always wants things
to look the way they seem.
They want to live the dream awake.
They don't go along with their own mindstream.

They're shore-huggers.
They live at the edge
of the great sea of mysterious being
in sandcastles with blowholes
that burp like tiny volcanoes in the receding tide.
Herculaneum and Pompey
are mummified in the flow
down their pygmy mountainsides
but it's easy to see where they hide
thinking they're out of reach.

But who am I to preach
quicksand to cornerstones such as these?
Everybody always tells me I'm too intense
but they've never been through a nightstorm
far out on the Pacific
where the moon's your only lifeboat
and it's just gone down
like a bright penny in a wishing well
like a last longshot in the slots
of an odds-making hell.
And it's seven to five you survive.

They've never fallen in love with a hurricane rose
that's built like a fortune-cookie
and paints her eyelids
with the blood of ex-lovers
who were sacrificial enough to propose.

If you go looking for the meaning of life sincerely
sooner or latter it will find you
like one fact final enough to delude all the others
into thinking it's ultimately true.

Complete one act well
and you've accomplished everything
because one act begets another
until everything is done of its own accord.
Because your birth isn't terminal,
your death is ongoing.
And the same is true in reverse.
How do I know this is so?
I let go.
I blossom like the memories of a dead branch
in the apple orchards of the Hesperides,
everyone of them
a full moon.

I see how innocent my doubt is.
So even my darkness
is a singing bird on a green bough.

I've looked at drops of water
at the tips of the blades of the stargrass
like the thin-skinned tears of the sky in childbirth
and everyone of them
was the seed of a new world.
Worlds within worlds
whose only conventions
are the creative dimensions of the perceivers.

Not one size fits all.
I don't put my finger to my lips
like an ego-I
to eclipse the great silence.
I let it say me with its eyes.

And we both come as a great surprise to each other
when we're standing
on the same side of the mirror
on the far shore of the mindstream
like two eyes of the same seeing
astonished we're here at all
without lying to the miracle
about our reasons for being.

Have you ever considered the enormous distances
in the body of a small bird?
Or how strangely intimate a star can be
from thousands of lightyears away?
A whisper of lucidity in an oceanic ear.
Something you've heard for a long time
but never listened to before.
Never this near.
This clear.

Have you ever wondered which of two sisters
is the older of the elements.
Fire or water?
Or why spring lies about her age
when she's as old as autumn
and then claims
to be the daughter of the grain
when in fact she's the womb of summer?

Is it insane to wonder?
Is it too intense to fear
living my whole life
as if I were never here
to take a good look?
Is it deranged to feel
the enlargement of my seeing
is not the diminishment of my being
because I opened my eyes
and saw they were both
two ends of the same telescope?

It's one thing to let the light in through the gates of your eyes.
It's wholly another to let it get this far
into the palace of your imagination
without being announced
or scrutinized.

Life's a breeze
when you don't look at it
like a disease you're afraid to get over.
If I'm inspired by the vastness of my ignorance
to turn a leaf over now and again
like a new page in an old book
to avoid being obvious
am I looking for a happy ending
or am I just delighting in my indolence
when I read it like a map of my own lifelines
by running my finger over it as if I were blind
and it were the one who could see?

If I don't believe we appear briefly
to disappear forever
because everything here
is a vast collaboration
with creative emptiness
and it isn't going anywhere
what do I care
if you're confused by my endeavours?
What's it to you
if I'm a mirage on a grailquest in a desert of stars?
Or if I practise compassion spontaneously
toward myself and others
as if we were all the same wound
under many scars
and if my lies heal,
are they not the fruit of insight?

If I'm the dark genius
deeply intrigued
by my own misdirection
that you say I am
though that doesn't change a thing
about the way I can't help being
and not being myself,
what makes you think
there's only one star
you can point out
like the needle
in the impoverished compass
of your last course correction
as if there were only one way to go
and the truth were always
somewhere north of you
instead of under your feet
in all directions at once
like the radiance of stars
before the arising of signs?

Today Jesus and the Buddha walk on water.
Tomorrow Lucifer and Kamamara will walk on fire.
But when the opposites
get their baggage together
and realize they can't lift it
and abandon it by the side of the road
like an outhouse on a trailer hitch
or a hubcap in a country ditch
that's stopped spinning around
and come to rest in an oxymoron
posing as the full moon
that's come to liberate
an empty asylum
they both walk on earth
bewildered by their innocence
when they discover
they've never had anything to do
with the course of events
that made them who they are.

Wasn't the Buddha enlightened
by watching Venus in the dawn
lead the sun up
like the morning star
that once was Lucifer
before he took the fall like a ripe apple,
before he stole fire from the gods like Prometheus
the thief of inspiration,
knowing the moment of his perfection
in all realms of knowledge
infernal or divine
was the best time to jump?

And the darkness will always seem like a liar
to those who don't know the truth.

If I don't see life as just a bag of water
with nine holes in it
leaking out of itself
as I once used to
eras and eras ago
and you still do
when I look at what remains
of the desicated parachute of a jellyfish
you've made of your brains
clinging to shore
next to the sewage drains
that poured you out
and washed you up
and wiped their mouths of the taste of a dead ocean
what's it to you
if I run so far out to sea
from so high up
on the down side of the world mountain
I'm swimming with dolphins on the moon?

I'm teaching blind starfish how to shine
like dark matter with a mind of its own
and no sign of a constellation
with feet of clay
afraid to leave home.

Say what you want to say.
Be what you want to be.
Enlighten your ignorance
and then ignore your enlightenment.
Don't drive the darkness out of your lucidity
like a scapegoat into a spiritual desert
you're afraid to enter
because you're not bright enough to see
that under every threshold
between the inside and the out
certainty and doubt
insanity and the sane
the trivial and profound
the homeless and a habitable planet
there's a sphere
spinning on a tilted axis
in the immensity of space
that's so far out it's in.

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Wish Everyone In The World Were As Mad As You Are

I wish everyone in the world were as mad as you are.
I wish everyone in the world talked the same nonsense you do
and meant as much.
Stop crying.
I wish everyone in the world were as good as you are
and didn't lie to anyone else
other than themselves
about what the truth is.
You shape chaos to your mind
like light to space
to make a habitable planet you can live on
and if it isn't round sometimes
and O doesn't always cast the same shadow
that the others mimic with theirs
I wish everyone could put on your kind of airs
and be as good to life as the kind of atmosphere you are.
Come on now.
Here.
Dry your tears with this.
All those constellations you made up
out of the stars in your eyes
are your own private myths and mandalas
and you're free to change them as you will
and I wish everyone made as much
of the light they were given to go by
as you have.
I'm too much of a thorn
to paint the delicate iridescent watercolours
I see smeared on your tender bubbles
like original pictures of the universe
from a thousand spaced-out Hubbles
but I wish everyone in the world
had your kind of genius for vulnerability.
You hold up a single feather of light
like a candle among stars
like a green leaf in the middle of winter
and the world that is inured to three dimensions
for infinitely tedious reasons
would rather put its eyes out
and gape like blackholes
than see as you do
that there are countless seasons to the soul
that burn like a phoenix
and there's nowhere you can point to in the darkness
that isn't an equinox of love and understanding
when the sun shines at midnight
and spring harvests what the autumn sows.
Having a deep cosmic insight
like a stranger beyond lucidity
into the windows of the houses of your own zodiac
might make you look like a maniac to the neighbours
who keep watch in their asylum
against any kind of freedom
that might release them from their lighthouse
like a geni from a lamp
that doesn't conform to anyone's wishs but her own
but I wish everyone had the courage
you have not to be them.
Life isn't fair or unfair.
Life isn't kind or cruel.
It isn't half-Buddha and half-fool.
Neither impersonal
nor sentimental
life isn't a kind of obedience
to its own rules
as if it were bound like God to keep its word.
Or what?
Who else is there to answer to?
All the taboos want to be thresholds
and all the thresholds
want to run away from home.
Could be a curse.
Could be a blessing.
Could be just more idle words.
But you're not like that.
You're not a fountain mouth
that mistakes alphabets for birds
and holds them to the letter of the law
in a world full of music.
It's enlightenment to sing to a window.
It's ignorance to sing to a mirror.
But you don't sing to either
and your song is clear as running water
all the way down the mountain.
The picture-music
of your eyes and your ears
can already hear the ocean from here
that gathers to receive the flowing
like the heart receives blood
like the mind receives your thoughts.
Look out at the world.
You're the host.
Look inward.
You're the guest.
You can break bread with the dead
without being a ghost.
You can drink wine with the living
and it's the wine that gets high on you
flowing into a seabed of shadows on the moon
that hasn't touched a dropp for years.
Don't believe what the cynics say about innocence.
They have the sensibilities of blackflies
trying to draw blood from the Mona Lisa.
Don't grieve if you're a butterfly
that can't follow the flightplans of the maggots.
There's only a slight difference in wingspan
between a waterbird and a phoenix
but it would take lightyears
to measure a single feather of yours.
There's no cult of the rose
that insists it fall upon its own thorns first
or the moon draw first blood
on the blades of its own crescents.
You don't have to scar
your own deathmask with experience
just to prove you knew
how to eat the pain and bleed.
You don't have to wear your face in public
as if it were something you kept up your sleeve.
Dice might be the foundation-stones of the lost
but that doesn't mean
you have to go pearl-diving
for the moon in quicksand
or change your song like a jukebox
playing the slots
when you're a mermaid on the rocks.
I wish everyone had the same chance
to risk it all as you do
and win back their lives
like eleven come of seven
insteading of seeing everything
as if they were jinxed by inasuspicious birds
turning the wrong way on a prayer-wheel
that keeps coming up snake-eyes
with every roll of their skulls.
You can't heal the luck
of a wounded Nazi
by turning his swastika the other way.
You can't teach snakes to bite other people.
And you don't know enough
if there's anything left to say or understand
and even then there's a silence
that still longs to be heard
like a humming bird sipping honey from your ears
or deep in a telescopic wishing well of stars
burning in a dream of mirrors
they walk across
like fire on the water
or the distant blue notes
of the hidden nightbird
that echoes your tears
as if it were crying out in the darkness
from the safety of a secret place
for the same reasons you are.
As if it were trying to befriend its own sorrow
and weep for tomorrow as you do
for all the things of the past
it won't even know it's missing.
I wish everyone in the world
could live the future as you do
as something that is already happening now.
Even when you're crying
because you don't think you're brave enough
not to.
You're not a lame princess
that anyone needs to rescue.
You're a dragon bringing rain.
And if the snakepit hisses at you
like a social structure
and calls you insane sometimes
because you have wings
and they still hug the earth
all tied up in knots
taking their poisons out on each other
to keep from feeling anything
it's just their way of defining sanity
by the standards of the numbest.
It's not you that's crazy.
It's not you that's the dumbest.
I wish everyone in the world
were as warm-blooded and wise as you are.
When the serpent fire at the base of your spine
has passed through the doors
of all your chakras like vertebrae
and you're already a circumpolar constellation j
just a little off true north
shining like Draco
why worry if you're no good
at the game of snakes and ladders
they play like politics and religion back here on earth
to see who gets to be the pillar
and who the quicksand.
You understand way more than that.
I can tell by the fire in your eyes
that you're a phoenix among stars
and you've transcended the eagles and the houseflies
that can't even begin to imagine
the kind of heights you can reach to
or the depth of the view below you
when you're riding your own thermals
like beautiful helices in the mindstream
for the sheer joy of being only you.
Even now.
These tears
that run all the way down to your lips
as if water had fingertips
what are they
but the way you cry for things
that everyone else didn't?
I wish everyone in the world could be like you.
I wish you could teach us all
to stop living a spiritual lie
on the deathbed of an earthly truth
as if that were the only way
to foolproof ourselves
against reality
like a stranger looking through our windows at night
who doesn't recognize herself in us
because most of us aren't as brave and free as you are
to leave the door ajar
and let whatever wants to come in
come in.
Some track in mud.
Some.
Stars.
And the mud flowers in light.
And the stars bloom in fire.
And one looks up
and the other looks down
on each other's likeness
reflected in the other
as if they were engendered by the same being.
Sight is a kind of love
and I wish everyone in the world
were inspired by the mystic dimensions
and intimate clarity of your kind of seeing
that even through these tears
that I'm not having much luck in wiping away
can comprehend a world
that's more wonderful than it thinks it is.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Who Taught You

Who taught you to abhor the savage
within you
as if you were
an intolerant missionary to yourself?
Or walk into the room
and sit down
like a civilization that can't compose itself?

And what strange habits you have for eyes
like ominous seabirds off the coast
of the continent with nowhere to perch
you've just discovered about yourself
that doesn't bear your name.

And o come on now
isn't it the most grievously wounded
who cry out the loudest
in their delirium of pain
and shake their wills
like steel at the ruthless heavens
though all they've ever really done is heal?

And why slash out in your anger
like the moon at everyone
when you should know by now
better than anyone
that whenever you do
it's the sword that bleeds to death?

And you say you've tried to live decently
in an indecent world
but it's a shame
you've never walked barefoot anywhere
without your morals in your hand like shoes.

That's just the mud and water of it
between your fingers and your toes
but I've never joined a Buddha
eating flowers for lunch
who would have it any other way.

Or as Solomon said to so and so,
on his way to the temple
to set an example,
half a baby isn't the same as a whole bunch.
And then broke down in tears.

We all have our fears and illusions
but isn't so much suffering in the world
generated by the fact
we cherish our misery
like self-inflicted voodoo dolls
we won't let go of
because nothing else
looks like us into the void
and sees nothing that looks like us
looking back with stars in their eyes?

But what a surprise to be here at all
stepping in and out
of these coffins and lifeboats
paired like shoes under our beds
where they gape
like mouths before the open sea
that has washed them ashore
like dust out of its one good eye
we just flew into
like birds against a windowpane.

And even more of a wonder
is the day you discover
you can taste the full harvest
in every crumb of a dream
and even in the lamp
that's gone out in the night
clarity is still faster than light.

Within you I swear
on all that is human
are worlds within worlds
like the spherical mirrors of the morning
hanging their eyes like jewels
in the webs of the dreamcatchers
that looked everywhere
through the spiritual lost and founds of the light
but couldn't find us until nightfall
when we each came out like a star
above our own manger
and the darkness was sweet with gifts.

The blind don't diminish
the brightness of the mirror
when they hold themselves
up to it like a shadow
and even when your eyes are open
you don't add a feather of light to the shining
though you burn like Icarus without a starmap
by flying too near the sun
beyond the heels of your aspiration.

And even when we are crazed moths
in a straitjackets of flesh
seeking asylum in the fire,
isn't it the Promethean nature
of every living creature
that has ever stolen from the gods
even in a state of ashes
not to be bound for long by anything
that isn't out of reach?

It's not the art of a petty life
to know how to long
for the impossible for years
without disappointment
knowing that if appearances
can be deceptive
then so must be the illusion
when anything disappears.

The important thing is not
to try to attain anything
by reaching out
a finger shy of God
for things like life and love and light
as if you were a dead battery
asking the stars for a jumpstart
when one of the myriad truths
of the dark matter at hand is
you don't have to work hard
to earn your own gifts
like a beggar in a palace
that doesn't recognize her own face
looking down upon her
like her own reflection in the heavens,
as if her eyes always had to go
in the same place either side of her nose
and couldn't flow along
with the shoreless starstreams
like easy fish dopaddling through space.

And if you must cry out
like an insatiable mirror
for things you've lost
or pine at the gate
of your own homelessness
like a long sad farewell
to all those things that never came
like the sea to your feet
as if every wave
were meant to fit you
like a glass slipper,

then I suggest
with only a whisper
of night in my voice
to tempt the light out of hiding
that the next time you cry
like a wounded sword
that no longer divides
the empty grotto of the pain
that separates lovers
like two halves of the same brain,

look up at the nightsky
as if you were looking into the eyes
of your own prophetic tears
and see and be more deeply
than any kind of telescope
or wishing well
in every single one of them
the dark pregnant mother
of the billion chandeliers
that hang like stars above you.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Things Might Be Drifting Away

Things might be drifting away
like an empty lifeboat
with nothing left to save
but the memory of moonlight
on the rush of a wave of the heart
that rose and fell
like a bell of insight on the night watch
that said all's well all's well for the night.
And so it was for a while.

Time might seem
that it's overstaying its welcome
and you've become the estranged guest
of a bad dream
in your own bed
in the thirteenth house of the zodiac
where the dispossessed
shack up with the misbegotten
and the ghosts of everything you've forgotten
don't give you any rest
until all that you've cursed
out of anger and need
has been immensely forgiven and blessed.
And perhaps it appears
you've been the rogue star
of a sign in long exile
far away from now
and that might account
for your misplaced trust in mirrors
and your lack of confidence in star maps.

Happiness just happens
like good luck and grace
and the creative inspiration
to rejoice in your time and place here
as if the purpose of your voice
were always to praise
even on the darkest of days
when the only thing
that shone in your eyes
weren't the stars you kept
locked away in your tears
like the face paint of clowns
or the crown jewels of the Pleiades
but a bitter farce of black holes
in the veils of the mirage
that eclipsed your enlightenment
with a starless night
it's impossible to get beyond.
And so it may well be
for those who've been
as far gone for as long you have.

But even the blind are shining
though they can't see it
and the deaf are still singing
though they can't hear it
and the dead are still living
though they can't feel it.
And those who have given up seeking
still find what they were looking for
like a loveletter with a return address
and an open door that recognizes them
like the prodigal threshold
of a homeless human
about to cross one more
like the last step of a long journey
that lost its way back in all directions
like the radiance of a star in space and time
that never took its eye off the past.

We cherish the flowers of summer that bloom last
more poignantly than those of the spring
because we feel our own hour of farewell
in the progress of their passing.
The sadness of an earthly excellence
fulfilled and surpassed
we see in the shedding of the aster's petals
and in the lowering of the wild rose's eyelids
and in the lengthening of the black walnut's shadows
that move like cool water
across the dry grass of a late afternoon
signs of the same night approaching us.
And we know it will be dusk soon.

We'll look up at the blue moon in late October
and whether the silos are full or empty
wonder if every harvest
wears the same death mask we do
with the smile of a scythe on its face
or if the goddess of the grain
bears true witness to
the perennial innocence of death
in the way she enhances
the white spectre of the first frost
to shock the garden down to its roots
with the same koan she uses
to enlighten the dew on the stargrass.

And you might dread the coming excruciations
of the scarecrow immolated on the pyre
of its own substance
like the short straw of flesh
that once sustained it
lost in a draw with death.
And come to scorn your heart like an urn
filled with ashes in the aftermath
of the same fire that once filled it
so full of desire to bloom
it could no more contain itself
than a seed can keep a secret from the spring.

You could see it that way.
And who among those clinging
like a blue atmosphere
to this homeless grain of dust
in the vastness of these sidereal immensities
within and without
that animate us like starmud
to join in this dance of life and death
like a legacy of shining
that can't be washed out of our eyes
though tears have fallen for lightyears
on the root fires of what we've loved and lost.
Who among these
could say you were wrong?

Because no river's flowing
the wrong way to the sea
in this reunion of arrivals and departures
at the stations of our afterlives
on this wheel of birth and death.
We're all going to make it back
to where we came from
one way or another.
Some like rain.
Some like ice.
Some like snow.
Some like the lingering ghost
of morning mist on the lake
that's gone before noon
and some like water on the moon.
The flowing of the river
summoned by the sea
to the source of its coming and going
is the calling of life everywhere
to transcend itself
by passing into the unknown
like the available dimension of a future
that's no further beyond us
than the past is
in the light of distant stars.

The sword doesn't wound itself.
Fire doesn't burn itself.
Water doesn't drown in itself.
And life doesn't bleed out of itself
like the dream of a fortune-telling poppy
or a water clock that's run itself to ground.

The eye isn't the seeing.
The ear isn't the hearing.
The tongue isn't the tasting.
The skin isn't the touching.
The voice isn't the saying.
The brain isn't the thinking.
The heart isn't the feeling
anymore than life
is the carrying in
and death is the bearing out.
The darkness isn't a lack of light
and the light isn't the absence of night.
Death is unborn.
Life is unperishing.
Formless in a world of forms.
Two wavelengths of the same awareness.

You say you can see night gathering
under the door you're afraid to answer
long before anyone knocks
and though you dream by your own light
you don't know who's casting the shadows.
Is sorrow any younger in the heart of a child
than it is in the memory of an old man?
Joy any less vivid in the eyes of an old woman
attending to the flowers in her garden
than it is in a girl having tea with her dolls?
Is this day not as new to the widow
as it is to the newly-wed?
Experience is the capstone and dunce-cap
of the sum of destructions
that made us who we are today.
And in life it's the brilliance of our failures
that throws more light on the dark matter
of the issue before us
than all the star power
of the blazing successes
that blind us to our own shining.

You step out of a backlit doorway
into the dark
and slowly the darkness grows
the eyes you need to see the stars.
And maybe death is like that.
Nothing to look at but black
until we blow the candle out
that's been misleading us all the way.
Maybe that's why the jaws of skulls
are always caught gaping at something
that's more than they can say.
But look at the expressions on their faces.
Maybe their eyes
are too overwhelmed by what they're seeing
to want to get in the way.
You could see it like that.
You could see it through the eyes of the rain.
You can taste it on the tongue of a candle flame.
You can read it from right to left
in the Kufic script of the wind.
You can hear it in what the stars are whispering
through the keyholes in the pyramids.
You can feel it all around you
like bubbles of skin and air.
Like empty rooms with atmosphere.
As many ways and roads and rivers as there are
that flow into it down the world mountain
back to the sea
back to the same undifferentiated watershed
of these myriads of mystic specificity
and who could number them all
as many as the stars
or all the grains of sand
of all the deserts and beaches on earth
as many as the dead of every kind who've come and gone
all that blood mind passion dream and imagination
all those tears all that despair lucidity and apprehension
love and familial affection
all that waste and hatred and emotional sewage
dissolved wholly back into the sea
like a watercolour left out in the rain
like a name written on water
by a poet who died young
in a foreign language far away from home
just as birth arrays the universe before us
and says make of it what you can
so death approaches no less a peer of life
than we are in our relationship with all things
and offers us
the same great creative opportunity life does.
Green bough.
Dead branch.
Sunset.
Moon rise.
The hidden night bird alights
on either alike
and folding its wings
like gates and books
and the eyelids of those who dream
at the beginning and end
of a long dark radiant journey,
sings.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Lighting It Up And Blowing It Out

Lighting it up and blowing it out
I try to make my way through the dark
by beginning at the end
as if the coming and the going
were the same door
or good-bye were the first thing
you would say to a friend.
I approach things like a night stream
as if my death were already achieved
and behind me.
And all the atoms of my being
dancing like frenzied gnats
in the sunset glow of a last eye-beam
are certifiably primordial
and any one of them
when they lose it in the light
could begin a world.
And what can you say more of a life
that dreams of what it is
than it's the taste of the same wine
in many different cups?
And as any fox knows
the grape is always sweetest
when you can taste it with your eyes.
Though why foxes eat grapes is anyone's guess
but life makes itself up as it goes
like music in a fish's earlobes.
It feathers its themes in fire and light
and goes up in smoke
like the ghost of a tree
looking for habitable planets among the stars.
New wounds with innocent root-room for old scars.
Chalking the cue to bank the long shot
you're trying to spin off into
the deep, dark pockets
of your game-winning afterlife.
And I don't believe in much anymore
though that hasn't stopped me from crying
like a slow window trying to keep
the stars from leaking out of me
as if there were a black hole
somewhere in my heart
waiting for an iris to make it an eye
whose seeing might be a new way of healing
what can't be healed.
Once here. Here forever.
But whether we're the eternal children of forever
or just another breath on the night air
that doesn't even know we live,
even death is just another way of killing time here.
When everywhere's the center of everything else,
the centre holds,
things don't fall apart.
They disappear.
And that's the mystic art
of knowing how to make the most out of existence
by offering no resistance
to the rocks in your own mindstream
that part the waters like the thoughts
of an exile in the promised land
who can't go back the way she came.
The river can't step into the same you twice.
And in every direction
your eyes have ever burned like stars
you can see the dark jewel of your own life
from the inside
before it breaks into light.
Sometimes I'm the lonely sign
on the only path to nowhere
and others I'm positively amniotic
with the schools of my blue lucidity
the albino dolphins of the moon leap through
without a chance of changing their colour.
A flower of prophetic blood bleaches my skull.
I swallow the snakefire of my last eclipse
like a lump of coal
I'm trying to turn into a diamond
that doesn't burn
and never sloughs its skin.
Reality isn't a religion or a science,
or the back and front of a mirror
that doesn't know whose eyes its looking through.
Religion: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Science: how many pins can dance on the head of an angel?
Totem poles on a telephone booth where no one ever picks up.
Voodoo dolls that hex the cause of their effects.
The apple bloom on the tree of knowledge
lets go of its flightless wings
and follows the wind
like the eyelids of unfeathered angels
who opened their eyes like flawless fruit
as they fell toward paradise
without a parachute of smokey virtue
or the scale of a snake for a vice.
Emergence into the open
like a hidden secret revealed
is the engine of evolution
that empowers the dark matter
of this incorporeal starmud
to arise like the high note of a bird
that's flown beyond the night in its voice
like light beyond its myth of origin.
And the peduncle is lost in the ensuing phylum
as a madman is lost in the scream
that woke up the asylum,
or a god is lost in his own creation.
And the mountains listen
to the holy voices
in the valleys of their shadows
they deepen as they arise
like the guests of an echoless calling
to greet the unknown host.
It's what the moon feels
when she fondles her locket of water
and memories pull at her heartstrings
like tides on earth
and music is the way she recalls
the sirens that used to sing
like the brides of empty lifeboats
that prayed like smashed guitars
for the night to sow the seedless sea with stars.
And in every fish that swims through fire
like the sacred response of life
to the longing in its own desire
she knows they got their wish.
Fireflies in the ashes of the phoenix tree.
And the eggs of cosmic words
like serpents in a bird's nest
learning to fly like dragons
that have just swallowed the moon.
And it's one thing to pull the sword from the stone
but it's a greater power than magic and proof
with no urge to rule
that summons the butterfly from its cocoon
by giving the fool who inches toward the truth
along the green branch toward the apple-bloom
that already tastes like the forbidden fruit
of some radical insight
the whole orchard in a pair of wings
and more than enough night and light on its palette
to start a revolution in seeing among the flowers
who still labour in the chains of their roots
to turn their earthbound lucidities into stars
who might look back for a change
with eyes that have gathered like water out of the shining
and taste the light in the honey
that kissed their eyelids into gold
long before the night was old
and it wasn't enough just to see them.
When you opened your eyes
in the burning clarity of your lone vision
before this matrix of space and time
gave birth to the world
you were free to be whatever you could see.
That's when the light first spoke to you
in the mother-tongue of your seeing
and your voice broke
like a secret name in the mirror
that didn't know who you were
and the moon on nightwater
the thief at the window
your breath like stars on the cold, night air
summoned the whole of being
in every particulate shard
and radiant plinth of the mirror
to drive your shining into the shadows
so myriad things can appear as they are.
Many eyes open. Night. An eclipse. One star.
And the darkness an anti-romantic
in love with the moon from afar.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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My Lonely Island Music

My lonely island music,
already I see in your eyes, devastation in the dead zone,
skulls littering the field, autumns wandering away
weeping like windows that mistook themselves for the sky
and murdered a bird. Mystic September, vamp of this vision,
how could the moon not leap from my tongue
in praise of the world that shines through you
bathing alone in the dawn of every moment, utterly
alive, your beauty the page of a unwritten scripture
poised in the ink at the nib of every blade of grass to say
beyond the saying
what can’t be said. How unbearably sad
in this defeated hour that so few know the truth
that walks ahead of them like their own footprints
returning to the door they left by, already lost,
their houses, foundation stones of quicksand. Get it right in the seed,
get it right in the root of the eye, let the wind
take the ashes, sweep the shadows from the stairs,
and all the moons of yesterday are caravans of blossoms on the water.
Get it wrong and you’re a widow plundering corpses
for wedding rings and pocket-watches, black rain
on the open eyes of the dead. Devoid of transcendence
in the mirroring awareness, on a diet of fire,
you’ll end up combing your hair with a ladder.
Can you hear this bell of green before it rings, can you see
the painting in your blood before the brush is lifted
like a maggot of consciousness to the rose?
If you can, then check your shadow at the threshold
and walk naked into the far fields of your seeing, your feet
on the ground, your head in the stars; if you can’t,
you’re deepening your ignorance by ignoring your depths,
your light passes over itself like an eclipse or the hand
of a black magician, conjuring. Peril in the seeing.
A mask of frost over the surgical face of the heart. Understand
deeply and with authority that this dream cannot be understood,
taste this dream for yourself and look once
into the brilliant darkness that lies beyond wisdom and forsaking
and acknowledge in a crown of water
you are queen of that, your own teacherless realms.
Can’t you feel the roots of the black orchid of this space
wounding the soil with the stars of another night-sky
already opening above and below you? Rightly and brightly,
you are that opening, the sum of all the awareness of the whole of your life
expressed in the unborn no-point of a star of perception in space,
blue knowledge beyond the scope of the death-sighted.
Why study your own legends like snapped twigs on the trail
and send yourself in a straitjacket to school
when you already know by heart
the book of the breath you must live? Open your fist. Where
did it go? What’s in your hand? Do you understand? Our lives
are the shadows of birds sown like seed across the skies,
fish-maps printed on water, compasses looking for directions
that don’t exist. We are brief and we are vital, pilgrims
on a bridge of ancient zeroes, angels under every stone,
gypsies at home. Hold your life up like a match to a mirror in a dark room
to see whose face it is
then blow yourself out like an orchard
before blazing becomes a kind of blindness.
Put the world to your lips like a finger
in the black clarity of the silence. Do you see, do you see
the white songbird of the moon enter the throat of the well
to flaunt its plumage privately in an empty theater,
the roar of the ghosts of the infinite aeons for applause,
the sound of one hand clapping? Anciently, you were so
and now you are so
and tomorrow after tomorrow you shall be so, hidden
right under your own nose, calling yourself like a girl to her friend
when the game is over to come out of hiding. Most people
never understand more than a keyhole and a whisper of themselves,
trembling behind the dangerous doors of their own names
when they’re called to come out and play
with a universe that begins in every moment,
a fire-fly in a canning jar. They graze on the fodder of illusions,
domesticated by their own cupboards and cowardice,
peopling the wilderness beyond their artificial paradise
with demons that threaten to behead them in a palace coup
for the genuine liberation of an empty throne.
The blossom doesn’t know its own beginning,
nor the snowflake, its end. Can you find your true face
in this mirror of echoes,
the one you wore before the birth of silence?
I shall come looking for you like the wind
and I shall find you among trees and flowers
and among the grasses of the fields
and in the living light that breathes over the harvest
and in the water-mind of the stream that flexes the reeds
and playfully graces the ripe honey of the sun
with a sweetness unknown to the business of bees. No inside, no outside,
everywhere I step is the arrival and the walking of my blood
the whole of the way to you from whom I cannot be separated,
slipped like a letter under a door that opens, a mouth in space,
to paint the moon on an eye of scarlet water. One leaf falling,
the whole history of the world
in the way I love you by letting go; in the way
when you are closest, your heart, the thunder
of subtle intimacies in a lost well,
I drown in the vastness like a bird in the reflection of the sky,
happy refugees all along the side-roads of my nerves,
my mind, a fool of the moon, all parade and passage.
Do you understand? Not different, not the same,
we are rain on a window, faces beyond
the blindness of mirrors that use our eyes to see.
In every feather, in every leaf, in every flight of the word
ten thousand dawns, all of the earth,
this emptiness within emptiness singing to itself in the void.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You Were The Intimacy

You were the intimacy
of the things I loved
that were so impossibly far away
I could never reach out and touch them
except by touching you.
In the long silence of these past thirty-seven years
I have never been able to look at people again
the way I used to see them before I met you.
There's a fear in the way I love them
that I learned
from living your absence.
A deep black wounded space within
that has sadly outgrown the stars
like October outlives its fireflies.
And every threshold I've crossed ever since
has turned into a long road
with a precipice at the end of my spinal cord
swaying like the first night I met you
on the Capilano Suspension Bridge
and you said
the only way
to overcome your fear of falling
is to have the courage to jump.
And I laughed and said
staring into the gorge
and the thin silver water down below
what's to fear
if you know how to fall toward paradise?
And you knew right away
I was your kind of challenge.
And I knew you wanted
to sword-dance with razorblades
you laid out like the Tarot
later back at your place
as if you wanted to convince yourself
you were still silly enough to believe in tomorrow.
The candle beside the cards on the floor
didn't turn out to be
enough of a lighthouse
to warn us of the approaching storm.
We were sincere in the darkness
for a little while
astounded by the expert innocence
of our mindless flesh.
You shone like the sun at midnight
and I came undone like Icarus
to prove I was falling
without regrets
like a spent star
into the singularity
of a whole new universe
where everything that didn't happen in this one
came uncannily true in the next
for both of us
as if we were at last worthy
in each others' arms
of our own happiness.
When happiness is brave
it's bliss.
And when it's afraid
there's nothing sadder
than a gift that was never opened.
Joy is a warrior that risked hoping
there was nothing left dying for.
Sorrow comes up with a million reasons.
The only way of life
is not making a way of life.
Nor making
not making a way of life
a way.
One day you just get off the road
and start taking the long way home through the starfields.
You stop looking in the mirror
to see if you still have eyes.
For years after your death
no matter what I looked at
I always saw the same thing.
The black clarity
of your existential absence
staring me in the face
without turning me into stone
because that would have been mercy.
Try how I might
I could never quite
shut the lid on your coffin
or accept
that you were buried in me for good
or that my blood burned
like the infernal red
of an emergency exit
to show me the way out
of heaven and hell
by falling on them both
like a two-edged sword
that killed me deeper into life
than your death ever did.
Either life's unfair
or I'm not man enough
to live up to your suicide
but I remember how I used to love
feeling the weight
of the nightstream of your hair
as it poured through my hand
like a landscape that could feel
for the first time in a long time
water running in the dry creekbeds of its lifelines.
Things woke up.
And I saw the flowers
among the thorns
that had been guarding them
like the secret names of God
you had to know
to get past the burning angels
through the gates
of your sad return to Eden alone.
The eloquence of your flesh
when you walked on the earth
as if your heart danced to your blood
like an old song we both knew
now a broken harp of bone,
a wounded guitar,
someone laid down for good.
A prophetic skull
without a future
anyone can foretell.
The full moon going down
like a spare penny
into a dry wishing well.
Me looking at the dark hills
like the contours of your corpse laid out
under a collapsed tent
as they wheeled you into the ambulance
to spend your first vast impossibly long night in the morgue
among the dead
who don't catch their breath
or break their bodies like bread
alone in the stillness
that can't distinguish one death from another.
However I wept for you
all the hard bitter baffled tears
all the sweet radiant wellsprings
that washed the dust like stars
off the wings of the birds
that had laboured to carry the souls of the dead
far to the west
when I remembered
how blessed I really was
that things had been
so beautifully dangerous for awhile.
And all the dark fathomless watersheds of lucidity
I drowned in like a eye in a grail
looking for butterflies in a suicide note.
All the black pearls
the diamond skulls
the eclipsed chalices
all the precious jewels of my grieving
that death hoarded underground
nothing in the end
but nameless water
frozen between the cracks
of a gravestone as old as the moon.
I remember how I loved your ice-blue eyes
and how they burned with an Arctic clarity
you had to dress warmly for
if you didn't want to suffer from frost-bite
but there's more nightshade in them now
than chicory
when I look into them like tundral flowers
and the light turns hurtful and eerie
when I recall how the melting snow
washed itself clean of itself
all those years ago
when we didn't know
what all this meant.
It's of little relevance
that we once loved each other
the way we did
and once you've exhausted
the meaning of signs
like galaxies expanding
ever more deeply into space
less significance.
What does it look like from Mars?
Your death was a koan
not a fortune-cookie
and the koan broke me
like a man it couldn't understand
rationally.
There is no scar for you.
You will always be
this open wound inside of me.
When I look at the stars
I can't dissociate beauty from absurdity.
I cherish their clarity
as something that can't be
contaminated by my eyes
when they're nothing
but two black holes in space
a snake-bite of the light
in the middle of my face
like a colon without the following:
the kind of faith
that makes what little is left
so incommensurably greater than what's been lost.
I can see the blue morning glory in the garden
as if moonlight had turned to skin
just to feel what it's like to flower
but I can't forget the frost
that fell like your death over all of it
when I went so numb
space turned into glass
and time pulled the blind down on the window.
I closed my eyes like a mirror
content to let the stars make sense
of their own reflections.
I gave up on directions
and burned my starmaps
and followed who I was
without caring what I became.
Absolutes of ice
spread like cataracts
over the relativities of the river
that went on flowing
as if nothing had changed
and my life was still a dream without eyelids.
A ghost would be easier to deal with
than the fact
that you don't exist anymore
except as bare bones
denuded of the world
like yarrow sticks
thrown before the Book of Changes.
But then I expect
you'd exorcise yourself
at a suggestion of the night
that the stars would be so much brighter
if you only blew out the candleflame.
You'd do it just to see
if things got better.
You'd leave me in the dark again
staring at the stars
like white ink
on a black loveletter
you left unsigned
as you disappeared into death
like your last breath on a cold windowpane.
I've long since forgiven you my solitude.
I've long since forgiven you
the severity of the wisdom
that hardened my eyes
like diamonds in the darkness
that could cut through anything
except my attachment to you.
I have forgiven you
for the way I have grown through suffering
to realize
how much I owe your death
and the terrible eyeless abyss that followed it
like an enlightened insight
into the impersonal nature of compassion.
I have forgiven you
the way I am spontaneously compelled
to love a world that is so estranged from me
I feel like water on the moon
trying to imagine what it must be like
to fall like rain on the intimate earth
with a reasonable expectation
of coming up flowers
that weren't destined
to be laid on your grave.
I've gone grey gathering them up
and bringing them to you
like bouquets of paints and brushes
that are ready at hand
should you ever wish
to pick them up again
and show me what the world looks like
without a body for a picture-frame
as you play the part of the upstart genius
who lived the black farce of creative pain
like the agony of the wick
burning at the stake like a heretic
between the flesh of the wax
and the spiritual aspirations of the candleflame
thrusting spears into space at the stars
as if the only way you could ever know God
if you ever met up
was by the scars.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Wired To Looking For Gardens of Eden

Wired to looking for Gardens of Eden at the wrong end of my dopamines.
Want to move back to the country
and live in a secluded place
you couldn't find unless I led you there.
Want to take pride again
in knowing all the names of the trees and stars and flowers
as if they all lived in the same small community
of intimate immensities that I do
like pebbles on the edge of an avalanche.
Tired of playing Russian roulette with the asteroids.
Want to live somewhere even the animals know
the plants know more about healing than they do.
And it would be great
to have a woman who knows how
to think and feel and make love there with me
to laugh at what a brilliant idiot I am
to know how to make soap out of the sap of flowers
that smell like their names.
Bouncing Bet.
Pride of London.
Lady at the Gate.
I'm not looking for purple noons and honeybees.
I'm not trying to make a big splash like Basho's frog in Walden Pond.
Just want to lie down in the tall yellow grass of a September hillside
and feel like a freshly baked loaf of bread
cooling on a windowsill
like a philosopher's stone
as the sun goes down over the hill
and the dust of many roads
gets in the eyes of my starmaps
like gusts of stars
that makes them water with the wonder
of being here at all to know how lost and homeless I am
even in the depths of the dark womb that first imagined me like water.
I cling like a tree to my lucidities
and I'm rooted in the light
as much as I am the dirt
and I sprout poems and paintings like flowers and leaves
and even when I've been struck by lightning
the dead branch blooms like the moon
and you can hear the drums of silver apples
marshalling at my feet
like a troupe of white-winged horses.
Like the pulse of the windfall
when death first entered the garden
to let me know how alive I am
in this present moment
that has no death or birth in it
no beginnings
no ends
and goes on forever
as the only feature of time
that doesn't need a calendar.
But I'm not waxing Biblical about the brevity of days
and I've always been grateful
that I was born too stupid to be a cynic
and looking up at the stars from anywhere
one of the greatest wonders of life to me
is that so few people are amazed.
They've never listened with their eyes to the night
so that when their eyes speak
they don't understand
the mother language of the light
and the fireflies forget how to talk to the stars
and everybody's looking for an interpreter
to tell them the meaning of things.
They don't know how to enjoy
being alone
with everything they don't understand.
That's why I like New England asters and purple loosestrife.
That's why I like being kept at home by snowbound roads
and unanswerable fires.
I want to sit at a carved picnic table
under a locust tree in the morning
when it's in full bloom
and humming with thousands of bees
and wonder aloud in a poem that's writing me why
whenever you find nectar
there's always thorns
as if my life depended upon it.
I want to approach my material confinement
with the suppleness of water
given that's what I mostly am
and have no fear of spiritual evaporation
after I'm dead
and gone beyond into
the transformative darkness of my original watershed
because I've seen the same thing happening to the shapeshifting stars
that everyone says are fixed.
I am not deceived by appearances
into believing there's any kind of reality behind them
as if a mirage were lying to a desert.
Water's no less of a window
when it reflects the moon on its surface
than it is in the depths of the sea
that grows it like a pearl.
If you can only see with the eye
and not through it
as Blake suggested
then you're inundated with visuals
as impersonal as the camera lens
that follows you through the city
like an upgraded form of state shadow.
But out in the country where no one's watching
but the occasional squirrel
once you let the light in
your seeing isn't just
a phenomenological reaction
to photonic randomness
but a creative response to chaos
that makes images out of visuals
and symbols out of visions
and facts out of purposeless experience
like tiny mouse skulls
and abandoned herons' nests
that don't make a liar
out of your imagination.
I want to live somewhere in peace
without thinking I'm selfish or a coward
to observe the world around me
as if it were the expression
of the beautiful absurdity
of this reclusive artistic discipline
that keeps making me up as it goes along
to fill in the lyrics
of a half-forgotten song
it's singing to itself like water.
I'm tired of the gibbering of the sacred monkeys
who don't know what's holy about life
unless it's washed in blood.
I'm tired of the intrusion of the good and bad
into my solitude
as if the mob
and the government
civilization
culture and education
had a right to homogenize
the taste of life in my mouth.
Not the same.
Not different.
Not exclusive.
Not effacing.
I'm sick of gaming the rackets of life
for my daily bread.
Sick of the maggots
laying claim to the pedigree of butterflies.
Sick of the tapeworms
trying to convince me they're spinal cords
and shoelaces
or downed powerlines that are the envy of cobras.
Sick of never underestimating
the violence and ignorance of humans
without always being right.
Are there ants that go to sleep hungry tonight?
Are there bees in the hive without honey?
Just want to walk out late at night up to a high field
with a broken gate
by myself
or with someone else
that hasn't been closed in years
and delight in going creatively mad under the stars
exalting in the radiance of human eyes
in an exchange of lucidities
that proves we are not strangers to the light
here on earth
or in any other place
where we greet each other like guests without a host
wondering why we are gathered here to ask.
My heart is torn under its own weight
and all my dreamcatchers
have turned into unsustainable spiderwebs
by accumulation.
My soul is the swan of the full moon
unfeathered on dark waters
by a snapping turtle
that keeps rising from its depths like the world.
I've walked so long down this long road on crutches and stilts
it's forgotten the feel of my feet
and all the mystic auroras of my spirit
robe me in meat
and chameleonic anxiety.
Sick of technological progress
that is the equal and opposite reaction
to the devolution
of what's beyond comprehension
into the truth
into wisdom
into knowledge
into facts
into data
into lies
that upstage the myths of the stars
with mutative alibis.
Want to go somewhere I can scream
and the hills will understand the echo.
Want to go somewhere I can look at the spring columbine
growing out of the green moss toupee
on the lichen-covered rock
and not see it covered in the blood of children.
Want to walk out into the darkness
even on a starless night
and feel like a vulnerable mortal
made wary by the innocence of natural dangers
and not the deranged perversities
of ghouls off their meds in the cities.
Want to get away from the maggots and tapeworms
that govern the body politic within and without
like the corrupt flesh of a dead horse
that died of exhaustion
pulling the milkwagon uphill.
Don't want to walk any more roads that turn into quicksand.
Just want to kick my cornerstones like pebbles
down a dusty lane
as if I had all the time in the world
not to explain to anyone
why it seems so crucial
to get the colours of the New England asters right.
And I know it's a dream.
I know it's an illusion.
A mirage of the way I feel.
But sometimes even water
is wounded by this desert
where the only roads are snakes
that make paths in the sand and the stars
and it takes a mirage to heal.
Sometimes it's better
to let yourself be deceived by appearances
to be relieved by the compassion
inherent in the way things seem to the mind
like a cool herb on a severe burn
than go blind.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Things I Would Say To My Daughter If She Were Here

for Jody

The important thing
is to stay ahead of the pain
like a debt you'll pay tomorrow with your life
they're calling for today.
Tips for survival:
Luck has nothing to do with intelligence.
Stupid will get you killed faster than evil.
The most dangerous assassins
conceal themselves under the eyelids
of those who say they love you best.
And as any bruised heart knows
there's more power in an open palm
than there is in a fist
and the best way to get someone
to taste their own effluvia
is not to point to it.
A lot of opinions
is the frenzy of gnats in the sunset.
Silence walks like a tiger on soft paws.
Take a hint from the moon
who only bares her crescents twice a month
to show what's she's got up her sleeve
at the beginning and the end.
Keep your claws retracted
like laws you haven't enacted yet.
And never pass judgment on a friend.
A free mind is a godsend
but don't measure your liberty in chains.
And if you feel the need
to attach yourself to someone
attach yourself to them
like the full moon to water when it rains.
Think with your heart.
Feel with your brains.
And don't expect the Red Sea to part
into a thousand miraculous pirate-swept sea-lanes
just to let you get away because you're special.
You turn a legend into a farce
the minute you start to believe in it.
You can't make a commercial for one
of the light that falls on everything alike
so don't abuse your shining
like a fire eclipsed by its own soot.
Greenwood blows the most smoke
and gives the least heat.
Stay a jump ahead of yourself like a real star.
People might point to you and say your name
and write your story into the Pleiades
thinking they're only a finger's length away
from where you are
but cherish your darkness
like a secret you keep to yourself.
And remember when you transit zenith
everything you see in the sentient mirror
isn't having an illicit affair with your eyes.
You should receive your life in every moment
like a constant surprise
if you want to stop aging,
if you want to grow up like the wise
who are always the first born of time
to inherit eternity
like a bloodline without a beginning
that leads to everyone as if they all bore
the creative likeness
of your closest ancestor
like Castor and Pollux in Gemini
like the history of your breath
in every gust of wind
that sows the dust
of countless generations
in the features of your face
as if everyone's story were told by the same voice
in the same spontaneous tone
of all things passing away into fruition.
Don't track a hovel of impoverished thought
into a palace of thoughtless intuition
and expect to be invited back.
Thirty chiefs of autumn
sit around every fireleaf
that's ever fallen
telling stories about things that last
no one believes anymore.
All the reasons for yesterday
turn into today's folklore
and if you're trying to look into the future
from anywhere other than now
trying to separate the light from the darkness
like gold from its ore,
trying to anticipate the harvest before it's sown,
you're only prying the petals of flowers open
before they're ready to bloom.
You're just peeking under the eyelids
of the embryo of a new moon
as if you could crawl into the womb with it
to see what's it's dreaming
before it comes to light
as if you could get an angle on life
to take the shot
without sinking the table
or load the dice in your favour
with the third eyes of prophetic snakes.
Insolent with disobedience
you turn yourself into a slave,
but bound by duty
the great sea of awareness
is mastered by the sloppy salute
of any green recruit
passing in review like a wave.
The stars don't need to convince anybody
they're stars
and the flowers aren't trying to be beautiful.
Live as if your death were already achieved
and lost in the shadows behind you.
Life flowers in the valleys of death
and if our beginnings weren't
our ends are equal
and there's an eternity of a chance
more than not
there's a sequel
but live your afterlife now like water.
You can't pour the universe out of the universe
anymore than your mindstream
can flow out of the sea of awareness
like blood from an irreparable wound
or a theme of unrequited love out of its music.
In what space you don't already occupy
can you bury the corpse of all things
as if you could fit your boundless mind into anything
as if you could dig a blackhole deep enough
to bury God
as if there were ever anywhere to go in the first place
that wasn't already in your face?
The delusions of a coward cast longer shadows
than the things they're the images of.
There are dragons that know more about love
than the doves we send out looking for land
and who among sphinxes knows more than the sand
they come to in time like wisdom?
The mysteries are the mysteries.
They're not looking for answers.
The meaning of life
is the life of meaning
as waves are the life of the sea
or even in late autumn
leaves are the life of the tree.
Let go of things as they do.
Blossom bear fruit and fall.
It's not such a long way down to your roots.
Not long at all.
No further than the boots you're walking in.
And if someone should ask you your name
say it like a constellation
that doesn't shine its light on fame
though everyone sees it rising in the west,
not an inert all night marquee
with letters missing
that burned out like candles
that gazed too long
at their tiny tongue-tied celebrity
as if they were on a visionquest.
Sophocles said never to have been born is best
but he was just trying
to get the world off his chest through denial.
He was a bad guest with tragic manners at a great feast
who had forgotten
because he was born Greek
that life's negation is its oldest affirmation
and what is lost in life is lost solely to those who seek.
Gratitude is the truest measure of wealth.
Squander yourself lavishly like an orchard in spring
knowing generosity is the spontaneous sign
of a spiritual being in good health
that doesn't need money to prove she's rich.
Let life adorn you in its robes and ashes
as if they were just so many cloaks of the moon
slipping from your shoulders
like petals in the starfields of space.
And don't heed the blind fool
who calls for chandeliers
when she's already got tears in her eyes
she's been dancing to for years.
And remember this for the rest of your life
long after my tongue is a leaf
and my eyes are clouds on the wind:
once long before you were born
I asked how I could best return my life to the water
as clean as the reflection of the waterbird
that had just left it
and when the stars of Cancer
granted me you as my daughter
since then I've never needed to look
any further than their light in your eyes
for the answer.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Out Here Alone

Out here alone so late at night
with all these spectacular stars
burning through the clean glass
of the freezing winter air
I can almost hear them thinking
behind the myths of the cover stories
they've told for years
dark truths about life and light
it would be madness in a man to understand.

Don't try to stuff the impersonal secret
of the universe
into your sentimental heart.
How could you ever fit its likeness
into a locket
and finger it lovingly as your own?

Out here alone so late
even if you have come
like a thief in the night
to steal from the light
when nobody's home
there are no cracks no facets no gaps
no backdoors, unlocked windows
or emergency exits,
no stairwells or entrances
in these jewels of insight
that can feel your eyes falling upon them
like rain running down a mirror
that shuts you out
like someone in the bathroom crying
for reasons that are light-years beyond you.

However deep and sincere your tears are
they're still only dry wells
in that vast ocean of awareness,
black snowflakes
on the roaring furnace of the abyss
and if you reach out with affection
hoping to make things better
by embracing it all
you're still only tendering a kiss
to the gaping jaws of your own lipless skull.

There's a silence older than space
in the bottomless heart of things
that makes intelligence seem
the unlikeliest of exaggerations
a human could ever mean
holding his mind up like a lamp to the stars
as if he could find his own way back by his own light
without the dream that themes his mindstream with creation.

But as foolish and futile as it is to surmise
or try to get a leg up on the wise
I don't think the darkness
is the negative space
around the troubled face that appeared
after all the dots were connected
like rising constellations
in a child's colouring book.

And I don't think there are gods
squatting like frogs
on the lotus of the world
making us up as they go along
like wheels and roads
to the grunts and groans
of an axial mating song
anyone could mistake for a joke.

And I don't think the stars
believe the things we say about them
or even remotely feel the mystic dread
of what it is to be a human
looking up at their shining
out of deeper darknesses within
where no direction can be given to the lost like eyes
that would never find their own way home again
were it not for the stars and fireflies that mislead us
from one illumination to the next
by giving the finger to the braille of the text
that would school a gust of stardust into us
like God gave life to Adam
and Eve gave life to God
long before there were any laws to blind them
like Satanic lightning bolts
uprooting their eyes like rain from the clouds
to put those fires out.

I look up at the stars
with the eyes of an exile
through the diaspora of my breath
and I want to think them all to death
like the people and things I've left behind me
when it was time to go my own way
anywhere into the darkness inside me
to see if I could shine a light upon myself
that didn't blind me to the fact
neither in the beginning
nor in the end
was I there to witness the act
that made a certainty as good as a doubt
to the great indifference
that wasn't trying to find me
like a needle of light in the heart of a haystack.

I look up at the stars
like a scarecrow in winter
trying to put its pants on
one leg after another
like a man
with nothing but time to burn
scattering his ashes among the stars
urn after urn
skull after skull
of the heretics and mystics
that were martyred by his scar-crossed heart
in the name of nothing real.

I don't know what they feel
but I look up at the stars
like a black rose
of blood and starmud
in the last death throes
of self-immolation
and see in my own image
what I've always had
in common with creation.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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To See The Glee In Your Eyes At Eighty

To see the glee in your eyes at eighty
as if you were about to achieve something as big
as you did at three.
And you, there, shy one, freaky adolescent
day after day in the same corner of the restaurant
like a bruised mermaid
riding the clock out like a sea turtle
until it’s time to go home again and face the music;
you who drive your pen so deeply
into the fleshy paper
of your black arts journal
as if you were carving up a body
or intensely wedging the tiny bird tracks
of your hieroglyphic footnotes
like some bitter aside
into the shin of that Ramsean gigantism
you’re standing in the shadow of
waiting for it to get dark enough
the fireflies might come out.
To see you light up like a rainbow at a black mass
when I ask if I can look
and you turn your book over like a leaf
and show me a breakthrough masterpiece
that’s good enough to start a school of crocuses
with no instruction from anyone.
To see you afraid to believe in your own excellence
the juno of your aristos
yet risking the possibility it might be a fact
you’re the mysterious matrix
of a genuinely creative act;
that you might feel
like you’ve got a lump of coal for a heart
and a La Brea tar pit for a mind
but when the mascara comes off
like a Gothic eclipse
you’re a new moon
and you’re starting to shine like a diamond.
To see the black dove in your eyes
liberated from the cages of disapproval
imposed on you by white crows in disguise
is to know
what human beings are doing on earth.
To see what softens the angry blue eyes
of the next generation
of gram masters of Gore Street
with their heads shaved like Auschwitz
or the Stalinesque inmates of the Thief’s World
with its rock pile laws
trying to stay true to the Rosetta Stone
of their prison tattoos
like the sacred syllables
of the mother tongue of darkness.
To see in the glee in their eyes
when their girlfriends take them back
that their hearts are not hard enough yet
to be immune to alienation
and for all the rocks that blister in spoons
the occasional angel still keeps its place
as Francis Thompson knew better than these
under the stones that love turns over
like eclipses of the moon
that weren’t indelible enough to last.
To see the glee in the eyes of a child
when it looks at an animal
and sees the same instinctive innocence
that’s just as wild as it is
and watch their minds go crazy
trying to give their tongues
a jump up on their amazement
at meeting a senient life form
that speaks the same language they do
and shares in the original parity
of the undifferentiated freedom
they still enraptures them in Dilmun
Shangri La
Queensland
and the Garden of Eden.
To see such ecstasy in their eyes
is to know how much wonder is lost
how much joy in just being here with everything else
is driven out of us
as we age our way into separation
deluded by the truth
that perfects our isolation
from the small and big furry things with startling eyes
and the Bolshoi Ballet of fins and veils
that makes my gold fish Toke a dancer
or an underwater comet
high above Atlantis
like a good omen on the eve
of some catastrophic decision
to rise again with more imagination to live
than the dead have reason not to.
To see the glee in the eyes of a friend in winter
like the bouquet of good brandy
beside a warm fire mythologizing
the first drafts of the stories
that are being told and retold
by the blind poets of an oral tradition
sipping red gold
from the snifters of inspiration
they swirl like the whirlpools of the muses
warming to their palms like the head of a glass rose
with its stem between their fingers.
To see in their eyes how good it is
to recognize we’re all linked like tree rings
to the same heartwood
through all four seasons of our lives
is to make a friend of your own human nature
by remembering even in the midst
of this blitz of blazing that blinds the world
on the frantic midways of its cheap thrills
like a heart under a roof heavy with snow
the best things in life
like fires and friends
and goblets of auburn Courvoisier
still glow without diminishment.
To see the glee in the eyes of the rain
that they can behold the whole of the sky again
and all its stars
in the single dropp of a tear
though the rain doesn’t know who it’s crying for
is to understand in a flash of insight
even though you fall
like the small flower at the tip of a blade of stargrass
like a grain of sand down the slopes
of the oxymoronic mountains in an hourglass
you contain it all within yourself
and you can’t pour the universe out of the universe
anymore than you can be driven out of paradise
or be obliterated out of existence
whether humanity immolates itself
or dark energy accelerates us
into an entropy of starless ice.
To perceive the stars and the fireflies in the eyes of the rain
is to comprehend that your mystic specificity
is so unique and broad-shouldered
that down to the slightest detail
what makes you so crucially you
is that it upholds the whole of the rest of the world
in every cell and grain of gold and dirt
like a mountain of a cornerstone
that’s as boundless and high
as its bottomless valley is deep.
To look into the eyes of the stranger
the child the friend the lover the corpse
the eye of the hurricane the enemy the Medusa
the wounded white tail buck in the barbed wire fence
the black-eyed Susans the English ox-eyed daisies
or the yellow suns in the hydrogen clouds
of the New England asters
or the white eclipse of the black holes
in the eyes of the shark as it rolls to kill
or to attune the expression
to the sensibilities of the moment
as a fourteenth century German mystic once wrote
the same eye by which I see the multiverse
are all the eyes by which the multiverse sees me.
What you see
everyone sees.
When you understand
everyone understands.
Lost causes flaws and imperfections.
The lamp the road the night the light the journey.
You can ask the fireflies.
You can ask the galaxies.
But when you’ve exhausted all your cul de sacs
it’s going to be your own seeing
without starmaps
that gives you the right directions
like true north on the inside
and then reminds you in a gentle aside
that it’s impossible to be off the path
because it’s as wide as your field of vision.
When you see for yourself
who’s watching you in this dream of life
even the blind are enlightened
and as many as the ways
and as myriad as the eyes there are
to see in and through your mind
like a jewel turning in the light
it reveals like infinite insight
from the dark source of its own radiance
we rejoice in the genius
of compassion and courage
who took a Pax gene and a moonbeam
and in a moment of omnidirectional inspiration
that included all points of view at once
made it the muse of our eyes.
When you realize
that sight is a kind of love
as I once read on a poster in the sixties
everyone realizes
when you open your eyes
like an expanding universe
even our imperfections shine
in the available dimensions of the darkness before us
and born from the very beginning of everything else
to see and be happy
eye to eye with your own vision of things
as they appear and disappear
like thorns and roses from your heart
like leptons axions and quarks
like the stem cells of your own creative potential
to enter the dark spaces of your own imageless realms
and revel like a child in the art
of making worlds within worlds
like an opening night that everyone’s invited to.
Comets bombarded the earth
and the waters of life
broke from their fire wombs
and for the children of that union
there’s never been a way
to look into the eyes of their opposite
without seeing themselves.
Whether in sorrow or joy
whether in love despair ignorance or wisdom
out of our minds
or biding our time within them
like a flower that knows when to bloom
our shadows cast on a winter night
by the approaching light of Venus
or exalted by the crazy wisdom of life
in the thriving tides of the moon
eyes in the sky
like spy satellites extraterrestrials
and Hubble telescopes
eyes in the water
eyes in the blood
eyes in the wine
eyes in the wheat the apple the pomegranate
eyes in the forbidden fruits
that make all things believable
two eyes and a third
in the word for imagination
to conceive of the inconceivable.
When you see this
through your own eyes
even the mirages the delusions the lies
confess to themselves creatively.
Don’t judge the immensity of the world within
by the grain of sand it comes in
or the density of the pyramid
by what the thieves left of its grave goods.
Imagination is a dragon fly
that can take the fallen and broken
the duff and decay
the twig the leaf the petal
and glue it into a small house of transformation
so the worm comes out breathing fire
like a burnt matchstick with wings.
Point is.
Don’t waste the creative potential
of your own imperfections.
You can find holy water in a tainted well
if you know how to look for it.
The moon dips her cup
in the waters of life
because she has none
and as she raises it to her lips
what looked like a skull
turns into a long-stemmed goblet.
Doorways of light.
Doorways of night.
We open them both alike.
White sails.
Black sails.
We part the veils of space
to see who’s wearing our face
like a mask in the guise of a universe.
Bad.
Worse.
Perfections.
Imperfections.
When you understand
everyone understands.
We weep rivers of stars
into our own hands
to drink from our own reflections
just to taste the light and the life
of the mysterious insight
that burns within us
when the sun shines at midnight.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Imagine Me

Imagine me being here now this very moment just as I am slipping through my own disembodied awareness like a silver dolphin alone in a sea of shadows on the moon on the eyeless side of the mirror. And you. Just as you are. Doing the very same thing because it's in everybody's nature to swim through themselves as if they were shoreless, looking for islands in the mindstream among the stars. To be free. To delight in the mystery of exploring themselves like a new medium they discover they have an unknown talent for beathing life into. Beyond reality, beyond delusion, beyond enlightenment and ignorance the knowable human divinity of pure sentience omnipresently at home with itself like the homeless everywhere. Everywhere within yourself even at midnight can't you see the aura of the gold in the ore that dreams of being dug up? Or how the fireflies are always trying to get your attention like tiny lighthouses off the coast of continents that have already run aground like mountains? Or gone down with Mu and Atlantis? How many lost civilizations are waiting in the overgrown jungles of yourself for you to let the dead use your voice to decipher their ghosts at a seance of whispering hieroglyphs? If the one word the wise never use is complete then you're a fool to think there's an end of you in sight. But that shouldn't discourage you from looking.
And isn't that what we were born for? To see and be happy. To attain a transformative insight into the tragic innocence of seeing itself that let's the witness go free to delight in its eyes without accounting for anything? Even if you're trying to wash your reflection off your face like a deathmask in a mirage in a desert of stars. Even if you're scooping up the moon to drink from your hands like a lifeboat in the rain. Even if you've crawled into one of the wormholes of space like a prophet in the belly of a snake whispering in Eve's ear things that weren't meant to be heard by anyone other than yourself. Even if you're the most fucked-up, twisted, mutated, incontravertible perversion of yourself, a black dwarf that ate its own children after it had starved them to death by keeping its light to itself. Even if you're dropping breadcrumbs like asteroids everywhere you go or threading the eye in the needle like a spider in a labyrinth to figure a way out of yourself like genetically inherited dice. You're still not a victim of gravity. Whatever excruciating transformations you must undergo like the sea enduring its own weather. Nothing can get you down. Nothing can bring you up. Because the whole universe in all ten directions is wired to surround-sound listening to itself like an old recording of what it had to say at the beginning of things before it discovered its voice. But it's not a Big Bang when nothing's come into existence yet to compare it to. It's not the sound of one hand clapping or the crash of a tree in a forest when there's no one there to hear it. And even if you're holding on to your religion like a superstitious grudge against the world. And it may be hard at first to discover the universe God the Zeitgeist the Cosmic Id whatever you want to call it never had a motive from the very first that wasn't invasively human. But that's just you being godlessly unconvinced of your own existence. That's just you trying to believe in your own inconceivability like an established fact. That's just you trying to spread your angel wings over the earthly turbulence of learning to fly on your own.
So what if you're a dead civilization before you're seventeen? That doesn't make you any less intriguing than the living ones. It's the tragic heroes we remember the most not the ghosts of the bookends who lived to the end of their long and boring biographies wholesome as twelve grain bread. So what if you're gnawing on yourself like a bitter black crust of starwheat? You're still shining. You're still breaking yourself into loaves and fishes. Some people are bright and light with stars in their eyes and smiles that can only be measured in lightyears. And some are dark and deep as Solomon's mines hiding their wealth from the graverobbers in gnostic caves of black matter no one's thief enough to enter. Here's a Zen koan I just made up specifically for you. If a thief stole the moon from your window would your window miss it? If you ever find an answer that doesn't let you in on the know as immediately as your mind. Let it go. It wasn't meant for you.
You get up every morning and you open your eyes like storefronts and informers and for all that appeared and disappeared in plain view before and through them have you ever heard them complain that anything was ever missing from the seeing? Whatever you're looking at. Awake or dreaming. Whose light is cast over everything and then withdrawn like day and night? When it's gone. Stars. When it's here. Flowers. When you fail at finding happiness you discover peace as a way of consoling yourself. When you fall a god or two shy of perfection you master an earthly excellence that's out of reach of the angels. Cornerstones and quicksand. Everything here stands solidly on the unsubstantiated reality of everything else. The defeated don't stand like shadows in the victor's light. An eclipse isn't midnight on the sun when the clock strikes Cinderella with a pendulum like an executioner's ax. You can call it praying if you like but from here it looks like swanning on the block for betraying yourself.
Or is it Chicken Little when the sky's falling in all around her like Leonid meteor showers? Did you raise a false alarm? Did you let the world down? Have your zeniths caught up to their nadirs like snakes with their tails in their mouths? Zero. Forever. Did it become inconceivably unholy to tempt yourself with the earth's believable fruits because they fall back on their dark roots like pregnant rain to climb up the waterslide again like clear fountains everyone can drink from like clouds and birds that pass without a trace? Is that blood or lipstick on the mirror? Was your last loveletter a suicide note full of agitated compassion for what you'd done to everyone else by killing them into life with your absence or were you just kidding when you said life was too hard for the living and what's the point of swimming when the lifeboats are full of the dead?
It's too late for the Mayan calendar to do the Mayans any good. And Nostradamus' worst guess on a bad seeing day is just another unenlightened truism at the wrong end of a telescope looking for signs of intelligent life. And maybe we'll destroy ourselves out of hate and ignorance long before we get any answers that might have prevented the onslaught of doom like a prophetic skull that had spoken. Everything is broken. Fractious. Raptors in rapture they've made a comeback at last like Nazis in the Black Forest. Like Dante in a dark wood. Like children all over the planet tonight turning into young men and women who remember war like the scar of a childhood Caesarian that marked them for life like that which has been rent asunder. Like an olive tree by lightning without thunder. Or the Israeli airforce. A flash of insight without wondering what they've seen that makes them want to kill themselves in a holy war of mirrors vying for perfection of the reflection of a God that escapes detection like a cosmic Houdini whatever chains straightjackets or suicide vests or religions you want to dress him up in.
So why are you crying like a broken teacup you couldn't pour the ocean into? Is your mind too big for your skull? Look at how the trees bag all the stars in the sky into the tiniest dropp of water and throw a hobo branch over their shoulders like a jolly swagman down under and walk away with the spoils of the victors like a windfall at their feet. You say you've lost your purpose for living. But here's one that's as purposeful as evolution. Begin. Anywhere. Now. Like a crowning achievement that returns to transcendence by getting over itself.
When misdirection comes to its senses where are you that isn't always here and now? Because there is no other place to be. If you make goodness the standard of life then you'll end up practising an occult alchemy looking for a philosopher's stone to turn maggots into butterflies with the wormy afterlives of people obscenely out of touch with themselves. Knowledge feeds on ignorance and true wisdom doesn't acknowledge the difference. Great enlightenment doesn't maintain a teacher. You want to be a star. You want to rise and shine. As well you should. But remember this. The darkness is a star's best feature. And beauty and meaning and art don't mean anything to anyone with a heart if they haven't lived through their own passionate annihilation. You won't find a phoenix in an urn on a mantle. You want to burn? You've got to learn to eat your own ashes sometimes.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I look Into People's Faces

I look into people's faces
and I see the same wound
under many different scars.

I look into their hearts
like a stranger at night
through a passing window
and I see how suffering through
the agonies of life
has ripened some
with sweetness and compassion
and others are already
rotten before they fall.

I look into people's eyes
and some are vast starlit skies
and some are the iota subscripts
of scholarly fireflies
that footnote the constellations
at the bottom of the page
with details off the beaten path
of their MLA mainstream cosmic thesis.

And some are like moons
with parenthetical crescents
with nothing in between
both sides of their smile
that isn't a cynical aside
about the lost innocence
of a phase they've already gone through.

And some stare back like eclipses
that have pulled the blinds down
over their eyes
like sunglasses disguised
by a witness protection program
but you just know
they're oilslicks
on the Sea of Shadows
as they were in the womb
and in the Gulf of Mexico
the black blood
of an incorporated miscarriage
that hemorrhaged like the pot of gold
at the end of the oleaginous rainbow.

I look into people's souls
and I see how afraid
they must be of life
to hide out in the open
like an ocean
that hasn't kept faith
with its own depths
and tries to pretend it's
as airy and light as the sky.

The birds are flying through the roots.
The fish are swimming in the treetops.

I see judas-goats chained
to the stakes of their ego-Is
like sacrificial tiger bait
devoted to their cunning.

I see the anti-muses
that shadow Mt. Helicon
like black holes
in the death valleys
of human imagination.
And I wonder how they ever got here.

What bend in space
led them to this twisted place
like a forsaken road
they keep taking
like a wormhole through time
into the womb
of a stillborn universe
where the moonlight
burns their embryos
on pyres of lime
beside the dry creekbeds
of nameless rivers going nowhere?

Along their flowerless banks
I see the rib-cages of dead snakes
that went witching for water
with tongues and tines
of Kundalini lightning
that ran up their spines
like time through a waterclock
and the hulls of empty lifeboats
that died in the desert
at the bottom of the mirage
they drowned in
hoping to find themselves
among those who survived
by learning to swim through sand
like fish in an hourglass aquarium.

I'd rather walk on stars
reflected in the shattered mirrors
of my last self-image
than repay
the generosity of my solitude
with mass ingratitude.

I listen to people's voices
and they all seem like the same echo
with many different mouths.

I've tried to respect
the mystic specificity
of the thousands of fierce individuals
I've met over the years
but the more I've learned
about myself and others
the more I see the same mind
in many different skulls.
The same genius of inspired water
that poured an ocean
of sentient awareness
into everyone of our cells.

Union differentiates.
Separation binds.
I look into people's faces
however young or old they are
and I see infinite spaces
moonlighting as time
on the nightshift of the stars.

I see horror and compassion.
I see butterflies sipping
the nectar of diamonds
like honey in the promised land
and maggots born in excrement
thriving on offal
like the janitors of the dead
because everything grows best
in the soil it was born into
like karma in the fortune-cookies
of wombs and eggs and cocoons.

I look into people's eyes
like sad stars
through the generous end
of the telescope
that brings the far near
like impact craters
and I see how some people
cling to the memory of themselves
like underground seas
in frozen lockets
of water on the moon.

I look into people's secret shrines
they build like birds
in the eye of the storm
looking for salvation.
And I can hear
the echo of their prayers
bouncing back off hydrogen clouds
like a nineteen twenties radio show
thousands of lightyears away
as if they just said them yesterday
and the universe as usual
threw the words back in their face
like the cosmic background hiss
of snowflakes on a furnace
going out like stars.

I've seen the innocence of fireflies
making halos
and the blood-rose weaving thorns
around the massive blackholes of death
as if they were merely
a pinprick in a voodoo doll
that got into white magic by mistake.

I've looked into
the nuclear blaze of madness
like an A bomb with shades on
and seen the flash and shadow
of embryo silhouettes
spit out like cave paintings
on the firewalls of the fusion wombs
that give birth to the heavier elements
it takes to survive.

But the water's not mad
just because the moon's a lunatic.
The mirror might seem
just as angry as you are
but it doesn't feel a thing.

Learning wisdom is learning space.

It doesn't eat flowers
and the weeds don't sting.
It takes everything it embraces to heart
and nothing's left out
from the very beginning.
Like the whole of the moon and the sky
in every eye of water
that's ever looked into me
and seen that everyone
is the heart of a mystery
whose lucidity
is their only true identity.

It's our seeing
that makes the flowers open
and the stars shine.
It's our hearing that gives
the wind something
meaningful to say
and the grass something
to whisper about.
Whatever you touch
walks in your skin from thereon.
Whatever you taste
be it roses and nettles
or sulphur and wine
or the sour-sweet radiance
of the stars on your tongue
you're the flavour of the day
in everything.

It's your nose
that gives the burning leaves
in the urns of autumn
the spectral fragrance
of chrysanthemums
that are barely holding on.

And it's your mind.
Your heart.
Your blood.
Your body.
Your imagination.
Your intuition.
Your wisdom.
Your ignorance.
Your darkness.
Your light.
Your spirit
enlightened or deluded
whatever you think or feel
is abundantly missing
or dream you're waking up to
that makes the world real
in every mystically specific detail
of who you are.

Who else?
I look into myself
as far as the stars
at the edge of my seeing
fourteen point five billion lightyears away
and I can see how much time and space
how many species of life
generation after generation
have been born to give birth and die.

All the roses swept
from the stairs
of our hopeless tomorrows
because they were a tribute to love
meant for someone else.

All the spontaneous joys
that cast their long random shadows
like occasional fireflies of insight
across the lunar mindscape
of this afterlife of sorrows
where every church is the gravestone
of an unsuspecting god.

I look into my own seeing
like light upon light
in the vast expanse
of an unknowable night
and I'm cosmically astonished
by how many worlds within worlds
eyes within eyes
minds within minds
lives within lives it takes
to make a single habitable human being
meaning everyone of us sacred fools
fit as a genius
for the crazy wisdom
of a creative life
in a self-inspired universe.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sometimes Think

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Every Morning Of The Moment, A New Creation

Every morning of the moment, a new creation,
the distillation of the dreams of the night before
when the moon was as fertile as the dew we were born from.
I start out each day with a new face. By nightfall
it's just another phase of the same old ageless deathmask,
heavier than a bell that's been talking through my mouth
for more light years than I've got tears to measure in mirrors.
That's usually when I start thinking like a potato about stars.
Blood sugars in my mindstream ripening me like a vision
I'll only ever get to see backstage like a forlorn clown
trying to hang on to his faith in laughter.

You can pursue happiness, but it will only
run from you like the light, or you can cover your eyes
and try to avoid it for fear of losing it like the last time,
but when you turn around, it's right behind you,
flirting with your shadow. Better to let it come and go
of its own accord, like a waterbird in a moonrise
reflected on a lake. Then when you speak of things
you increasingly know less about the more
you're intimate with them, your voice isn't
a bird net trying to cage words on the fly
but an aviary as open as the sky when
Cygnus and Aquila are up, and the Lyre's
a larynx for the asking. And you're free
to sing your heart out as if no one were listening
but you and the trees and the stars you hit like high-notes.

Or shriek like a rabbit seized by the coydogs
if you run out of lucky feet and that's what comes up
like snake eyes. Lap the experience out of the bone
until there's nothing left to eat but your appetite itself
and among the myriad flavours of life you've exhausted
that will taste the sweetest of all to that emptiness
that harvests the world like a blue moon that's never full.
Is the moon not the equal of its waxing and waning alike?
Is it trying to enlighten its dark side?
When the candle goes out, does the light have any trouble
handling it? Fear returns to what it knows the best.
It hugs the shore like a tidal pool beside the sea,
a dead starfish or two it can get its arms around
like a worm's-eye view of the galaxy, and the shell
of a red sunset in the morning on the carapace
of a crab that left its hovel for a house in
a more upwardly mobile zodiac. Sometimes
it comes down to that. Quantum level gravity.
A gravitational eye with myopia that bends the light
like a stick in the water, a mirage of sand in an hourglass
that's afraid of being swept out to sea
with nothing to hold onto but the lifeboat
of a shucked clam Venus just stepped out of onto land
to have sex in a new medium like an artist
who's just switched from water colours to oils.

You've got to accept the down times as all part
of the same wavelength you've been riding
like a snake scaled in white caps of light
that break on shore in a turmoil of kelp.
The cosmos doesn't need to be put in order
and chaos doesn't need any help. Listen to your sorrows.
Summon them to a seance of yourself
and apologize to their ghosts for not having the voice
to let them speak through you about
learning to swim with the stars further out of your depths
than you've ever been before. First you drown
in the fathomless immensities of even the smallest detail,
and then you bubble back up to the surface
of a multiverse with an oceanic awareness
of what's been hiding under every eyelid of a wave
like a overturned lifeboat that's waking up
to the fact that everything floats like the moon
in the reflection of its own mindstream.
And whatever sail you spot coming up over
your event horizon, whatever constellation
or black hole you take for a sign of salvation
or salvage, it first had to sink
before it could rise to the rescue.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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So Far Down This Road

So far down this road
without a destination
my childhood doesn't
recognize me anymore.
So far into this life
I've never been outside of
I can speak to myself
in a foreign language
that no one can understand
as if it were the ancient dream-grammar
of a past tense
that talked its way into the future.

So far into what I've become
the peduncle is lost
in the ensuing phylum
and of all thought
I'm the first monkey
to look for its origins in an asylum.

The crow on an autumn branch
in the white rain
laughs more than it ever did
at the specious foundations
of my ephemerid profundities
dropping like apples at my feet.

The minstrel warrior of the forlorn hope
I took up arms in a holy war of one
I was doomed to lose
like a sad generation of demons
who knew the wound would never close.

If heaven isn't a club-med in a specific place
but saturates all of space
like mystically dark matter
then we're all falling toward paradise
like particles and wavelengths of water.

Heaven may be the whole cup
and hell a crack in the wine
and earth the place you sober up
like a bad hangover from the divine
but it's a party I walked out of aeons ago
more a stranger than when I came
like a manger without a sign
like a magus without a logo
to an inn that had been empty for years.

I don't presume to teach people
what they already know.
Even hanging on
is going with the flow.
This is a delirious place
where the mysteries cut deep
and silence is the native tongue
God speaks to herself in.

So far down this mindstream
like a paper boat I made of a poem
and set aflame like an orchid of fire
to honour a poet
who said it right in China long before me,
I bloom on the water of a prophetic dream
true to the unpredictability
of a sleeping dragon
to wake from the brevity of oblivion
with the eyes of a narcoleptic chameleon.

Joy binds
what sorrow releases.
And thought might prick the lifelines
of an amniocentesis
and offer up my embryo like a thesis
on whether I should have been born or not,
but I drink from my own skull like the moon
when it's full to the brim
above the starwheat in the Virgin's hand
to the stealth of the wind that dropped me here
like a lone seed in a huge empty silo
I'm trying to stud like the Venus de Milo.

It's not easy rooting in stone
like the invasive metal
of a sword that will make you
king of the waxing year.
Things just fall apart on their own
like grain from the chaff of a fickle harvest
that rose from the dead
like the bitter bread
of an abandoned homestead
that walked out on itself too soon.

But I've never been one to talk
about leaving it all behind
like some dark gate of the mind
I could pass through
like a unilluminated comet through space
to shine in the light of a star
that was alarmed at my approach
and blind to my passing.

I'm more at home in the dark
with a firefly and a chimney spark
rolling koans like constellations of loaded dice
as if they were two diabolical buddhas
in the back alleys of enlightenment
pushing their luck to the wall.
They rise
and I fall.
I rise
and they fall.
Readiness is all.
Ripeness is all.
Lear shakes his fist at Hamlet.

The blue harvest moon in total eclipse.
All loveletters die like political pamphlets
up against a closed door.
So far into this cloud of unknowing
I have given up hoping
will ever become a star
and break into light in all directions
to show me where I'm going
I give up on myself like rain
and release my waterbird eyes
to fall wherever they might.

Readiness is spring.
Ripeness is fall.
Seven come eleven.
No one wins it all.
Two squared skulls
up against a crooked wall.
I shake the dice
and you call.
You shake the dice
and I call out to luck like a random goddess
to see if she still loves me
as she did once tomorrows ago
when I won everything back.

Whether you're giddy with happy truths
or more profoundly belled by the sad facts
it's scary at night in the spirit's lost and found
when the lights go out
and no one's around to look for anything.

Gardens of black umbrellas,
the wings of folded bats
stacked like unseasonal eclipses
that have lost the will to bloom
like flowers at a lavish funeral
for impoverished aristocrats.

And courage isn't a home
that's all that easy to return to
when you're out here on your own
like a lifeboat full of midnight on Mars.

So far along this long homeless road home
I have worn out my faithless friends like shoes
I took from the feet of the dead
to walk on ahead of myself
like a star with a jump on where it's been.

Now even I don't know what I mean
when the words say me
like some black benediction
over an unknown grave
as I mourn the roadkill
and try to bless the turkey-vultures.

Earth. Air. Water. Fire.
Four cultures that bury their dead differently
but all to the same end.
Who could have guessed
the angels that came to earth first
had the wingspan of loitering scavengers?
I give my soul up to the birds.
I give my eyes up to the sky.
I give my voice up to these words.
I give my mind up like water to water
light to light
darkness to darkness
to the star that has misled me this far
into this wilderness of myself
where I'm preaching stealth to shadows
and air to ride the wind.

I give my heart up
to the thorn that gored the rose
like a deep insight
into the nature of the moon's
bright vacancy
dark abundance
like two sides of the same face.

I give my will up to chance.
My blood to the conviction of the poppy it's fire.
So far beyond my last event horizon
I'm never coming back this way again
what does it matter if the path
is crooked or straight?

I lay my tiny wisdom down like a hazelnut
on the track of the silver thought-train
to see if it can crack it like a koan.
I lay the mantle of my dynastic ignorance
over the shoulders of an avalanche like snow.

However much
you love the valley
it will be the mountain
that sweeps you off your feet.

I give my imagination up like a black wine
that tastes a little like me
to the muses who bruised it
like the great night sea
they drank from my skull
whenever the moon was full.

Among so many sages
it was good to be a fool.
One by one the schools
dropped out of me
and settled like mud at the bottom
of a clarified way to see
that everything that passed through my head
like a shapeshifting cloud
was just water looking into water,
me looking into me with water for eyes.

Why be shocked
by the predictability of death
when it's life that always comes as a surprise?

I may have been lame
in my approach to things
and limped my way like an iamb into wings
but I wanted to look down
from way up there
as if I were a star without strings
and be the way things are
when they shine down on nothing
until a nightbird in a far tree sings.

Carrying forth into the carrying forth
eternity might be the ghost
in the starmud of time that perishes
to give forever a meaning
but it's this life now
that talks the talk
and walks the walk
of a human being.

I give my eyes up to the seeing.
So deeply lost upon myself
like an empty lifeboat drifting through
these veils and visions of things
that appear like sails in the fog a moment
and then evaporate into their nebularity.

I give my blessing to the waywardness
of the course
that took me the way I am.
I give up my pain
I give up my sorrow
I give up my love my joy my laughter
like orchids and ashes on the mindstream
that flows out of me like a waking dream
that doesn't insist on seeing me here tomorrow.

But most of all
I give my gratitude
to the mystic vagrancy of the great solitude
I approached like a friend
on my way to nowhere like the sea
as if everything came to an end in me
like a life I couldn't foresee.

Though I have mourned
life's preemptive reverses
I have not scarred my lips with curses.
I have not tainted the well I drink from.

And nothing's ever spoiled
the bread I broke with others.
The feast is free
but it isn't hunger or thirst
that makes us sisters and brothers
it's the way we raise
the cup to each other's lips
like a lunar elixir to a solar eclipse
as if we knew we would pass
long before the darkness did
but still made the gesture anyway.

It's the way we hope
we know what we mean
when we say we love people
we've never seen
as if they were everyone in particular
and love's mute theme
were helplessly gesticular.

You can't keep
what you won't give away.
Life's a long sleep
before a short dream
that wakes you up far from home
beside the unknown road you're on
that winds like smoke among the stars
whispering ghost stories around the flames
of their unbelievable fires.

By all means pursue what is true
but don't forget
mercy has its liars too.
I give my life up
to the mystic specificity
of the medium that sustains it
like a wavelength of light
to a sea of dark matter.

And more than I could have ever lived
living alone together with everyone
crammed into the same planetary shoe
I give up all the vastness
of my awareness of the space within
and how far there is to go like light
before you can open
even a single flower of insight
to end your long winter night.

I give up space
like my place at the table
where I stood like a tower of salt.
I give my imagination up
like an underground cult
that gave its secrets away to everyone
like dark spots on the sun.

And whatever beginnings
are behind me now
like things I'll never finish
I give my past and future up
to the omnipresence of time
in all I live today
as if something
were always coming my way
without expectation
from lightyears beyond my eyes
like letters from home
that never reach me
in time to call me back.

If I have shone among luminaries
like a firefly in an ice palace
of radiant chandeliers
that froze in their own tears
it was as a small lighthouse
on the coast of turbulent mirrors
that kept a nightlight on.

I spent the gone on the going
and trusted the darkness
to keep things flowing along
like a river coming down a mountain
without knowing about the sea
that summoned me to the lowest place
like an unfathomable watershed
in every eye of the fountain
that cried out to the birds
in words that feather the dead
for their long flight through the mystery
I am I am I am
the future memory
of my own prophetic history
before I wrote it down
like the path I took
on my way out of town.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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No Ray Of The Star

No ray of the star in the lead,
none following, no one vector of light,
the compass needle for all the rest.
Eye to eye, side by side,
like the spikes of an onion gone to seed,
companionship and parity,
even after billions of light years,
every one's still shining among their peers.

Even your best efforts
to make it all into one when it already is,
are in musical harmony
like dissonance in jazz
with every wavelength of heart and mind
in a great creative collaboration
with every thread on the loom of a flying carpet
as big as the universe, growing
into the vast expanse of the chaos
it's spinning itself out of like the three fates,
the daughters of night with their thread and shears
severing the lifelines of passion birth and death.

Let them. Because there's a little green thread of love
coiling around your spinal column like serpent fire
that can't be cut by scissors or tears,
a dragon of dna with rainbow chromosomes
riding the stairwells and thermals of its own flames
like a wild grape vine, or trout lilies
down by the night creek
holding up their blossoms
like masterpieces to the stars
apprenticed to their shining
like one genius to another
revealing what can be done with light
when everyone's working in the same medium.

Every star, a kiss on the eyelids
of a wildflower in a far field
that's gone back to seed for a while,
every rose and mushroom alike.

Every ray of light, a mystic spear
through the heart of a disbelieving telescope
that's just had a major revelation
not only about the true nature
of the radiance within
but the ore of the darkness
that includes it like a diamond close to its heart.

Every lucid needle in the haystack,
in the pin cushion of every star,
laying out the pattern of a constellation
like a star map with a ray of light in its teeth,
and every angel that dances thereon,
and every angel that keeps its place under a stone
as a junkie London poet once wrote,
and every demon of a black dwarf
that gave its all and everything up
until there was nothing left but a black hole
or a massive cosmic match head that's burnt out
like the ashen bud of a heretic that bloomed in fire
like the seeds under the eyelids
of the pine-cone of a Zen pagoda,
and returned the universe to the darkness it came from
like a child it discovered wandering
too far from home without a threshold of its own,
is patching the wounds of the sacred clowns
with the whole cloth of the rags they're standing in
with roses and rainbows at midnight
and big ripe tears in a windfall of pears
that keep falling to their destiny
without realizing they're plunging toward paradise
every time they lose their grip on things.

In my unified field theory,
whether you call it fana, nirvana, tauhid,
the godhead, the plenum void, the blaze,
the rapture, dropping off body and mind
once the Japanese plum blossoms
have turned into fruit and realized
no sweetness in the apple bloom
no ripeness in the apple, God,
Brahma on his lotus, Muhammad on Buraq,
Jesus on the cross, Moses on the mountain,
or you've just had a serious falling out with your lover,
in a world so boundlessly unified
we have to resort to stars for boundary stones
like illusory barriers between too much and too little,
where the sweet water meets the salt;
in my intimately impersonal skew
of the crazy wisdom of what's happening here,
the most accurate thing
you can whisper like a poem
into your neighbour's or lover's ear,
is not two, not two, not two, like the vital pulse
of a musical cult of oxymorons
at a gathering of opposites in the wilderness,
everything clings to one another inseparably
like the primordial atom to its table of contents,
like a fish to water, a bird to air,
a star to the darkness, the heart and the mind
to every thought and emotion
of the space-time continuum it works in,
or insight into the mystery that inspires it
to go looking for more grails
than there are ailing kingdoms
to hold them up to their lips
like rain on ripe blackberries
or the full moons of magic mushrooms
because every dropp of rain's a grail in itself.

For every star, an imaginary number
of lifemasks like metaphors
as many as there are flowers
and children of the earth to wear them
as if dressing up for life were the embodiment
of how awareness made its first appearance
like a hidden secret that wished to be known
through an infinite number
of ongoing myriad things all at once forever.

Ergo: we're all in the same lifeboat together
looking for one and the same threshold
in our homelessness like rogue planets
dancing around one another as if each
were in reach of the sun of the other,
sister, brother, and lover, mother and father,
bonded by the light and life
we've all been looking for long before
we were born to shine upon one another like this
as if there were no difference
between the crests and valleys
of one wave and another,
our fullness and our emptiness
on the great night sea of the abyss
that is always as pregnant with us
as it is with the membranous wombs of the multiverse
whenever we kiss in deep hyperspace
and a whole new world gets off on us.

In this realm everyone receives one another
like a gift they weren't expecting
and are never sure they deserve,
down to the last atom of the drunk in the doorway,
the exile in the embassy yard
looking for sanctuary in his own country
by asking you to let him in
like the angel of immigrants in disguise,
like a teen age girl on the sidewalk,
crying like a star-crossed chandelier of rain
shattered like a crystal slipper at her feet
into the plinths and shards of a constellation
you can only see on the dark side of the mirror
like the secret reflection of who she is
inside the locket she hangs around her heart
like the moondog of an innocent suicide
no one would have ever guessed she had in her
like a conversation that never took place, face to face,
heart to heart, when timing was as important as content.

If you hold up a mirror to your own lifemask,
a puddle where the starmud's settled down
like the cornerstone of the moon in a tent
that's comes to flower in the backyard
of a house of the zodiac, you can see in your own face
the faces of everyone who's ever been, or is, and will be,
you will see in the single eye of a seed
how many Japanese plum blossoms had to be
scattered down the street like a Milky Way of the ancestors
you're descended from, to implant their vision
of light and love and life in you. And how
transience learned from the wind
how to let go and give it all away
like the passage of birds and the winged samara
of maples across the full moon, all the fruits
and flowers, stars and seeds of a generous autumn
shaken like the apple orchards of the Hesperides into your lap.

And to begrudge one atom
of this inexhaustible plenty to anyone
is to starve to death in your own garden
is to deny your own children bread
you didn't break with them like a harvest of light
so their darkness wouldn't hunger
for stars the rest of their lives.
Is to live in the shining
and grow possessive of shadows.
Is to break off a love affair with the waters of life.
Is to never feel your eyes ripen from
something green and bitter
into a mirage of wine in the desert
that drinks time spiced with stars
from an hourglass of a blissful delirium
where even the vipers have learned to dance in the sand
among the bones of skeletal keyboards.

Anyway, you get the point, and once
you've got the point, you've got the wavelength by the tail
and you're centered everywhere in a boundless universe
and the circle is as complete as a dropp of rain,
or the growth rings of a tree
making ripples in the heartwood of spring
to give the birds and the stars and the trees
something to sing about they weren't expecting.
That no sum of zeroes ever added up to nothing
as if something were missing from the very start
like blackholes that don't write their names
on the galaxies they make out of their emptiness.
Out of nothing, one, and in that one
that includes everybody you can see
how the zeroes got carried away by the billions
into an infinite elaboration of their radiant vision
of a universe of overlapping circles making waves
and all it takes is one insight
into the creativity of compassion
that steals the breath of the stars away in amazement
that one ray of light from the least expected quarter
when you least expect it is more than enough
to touch your heart with a feather of love
fallen from a passing nightbird above
that has been calling to you all night in the darkness
to see how enlightened everything is as it is
when you open up the black holes
in the wild irises of your eyes to it.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I See Myself Happening

I see myself happening
in the flight of a bird across the moon,
in the appearance of the leaves
and the leftover flowers
that have gone on blooming
in the corner of the yard
longer than anyone ever thought
and in the light of the star
through the branches of a tree
that's rooted in me like an emotion
that's grown beyond its rings.
For a moment the moon
holds the spring leaves up before her
like the cards of a new hand
to make sails and water of their shadows
and I am all arrivals and tides and departures,
the skeleton of a battered ark
scuttled in the mountains of the moon
after the flood receded
and everything was land
and I was the two of every kind
that disembarked like a mind
to elaborate itself through a bloodline
that wound many threads
into one strong rope
that might bind me like a spinal cord
to a place in an empty lifeboat.
We all have our protean myths of origin.
The wounded lies we use to exempt
our intimate extinctions
from the obvious suicides
who trusted death not to judge.
One voice says it's merely a witness
while another tries to interpret
the meaning of the life that's going on
without consultation
and another scoffs at them all
as if bitterness could save you from being a fool.
And tired of having my teachers
interrupt my truancy
with rational voices
that always knew better,
I suspended the school
with an unfinished loveletter
that got things off my chest
like baby crows in a nest.
No rule, no fool. And now I'm free
to taste the moon for myself
and know it tastes like scars.
And there are commotions of life in the grass
that don't violate
the incredible privacy of creation
by trying to assert what they are
to the secret that gave them birth.
What child was ever of no worth
in the scales of a grieving mother?
The moment you affirm you exist, you don't;
and denying you do won't do either.
In a single scale of the fish,
the whole ocean
and in a feather, the sky.
Sometimes reality hangs
like a tear from an eyelash
or a dropp of water from the tip of your nose,
reflecting the entirety of the world
and sometimes it's a grain of dust
that humbles the mountains.
The moment you go looking
for the meaning of things
you pry the jewel out of the ring
and all that's left is the eye-socket
of a skull full of fire ants.
No exit, no entrance,
no inside, no out,
isn't it obvious by now
there's no theshold, no door,
no far shore
no road to follow or not
no passage to anywhere
no aspiration or desire
no sage or liar
no mirage on the moon
or shadow born again
in the fires of the sun at midnight
pouring itself into forms
to ensnare you like love and war?
There's no need to air
your private or public ordeals.
Just realize your formlessness,
your lack of beginnings and ends.
Mind is space. What's to liberate?
Nothing gained, nothing lost,
nothing large or small,
nothing wounded or healed,
full or empty, bound or free,
and yet nothing is ever missing
because time and mind and space
are three echoes of you in the same empty well.
Why struggle exhaustively
like a wave that takes up arms
against the sea
or a light at odds with its lamp,
a flame that sobs in the ashes of its fire,
or a breath that holds itself aloof from the wind
stringing yourself out like beads
along the spinal thread
of your hydra-headed rosary,
trying to pry the pearl of the moon
out of every dropp of water
that falls from the tip of your tongue?
If you think your life was attained at birth
then surely you will lose it when you die,
but when you realize
that origins and ends
are both eyes
of the one seeing,
the same breath
on the threshold of now
without an eyelash in between
like the moon on water,
everything you've ever looked for
asks you
where you have been,
and what, if anything,
among the inexhaustible answers
you might possibly mean.
You'll finally realize
though you've looked everywhere
on worlds as numerous as grains of sand
and plunged through the darkness
like the only fish in an infinite, eyeless sea,
and cobbled the road
you hoped would lead you home
with the prophetic skulls
of all your past lives,
and pondered your purposeless beginning
like a funeral bell that never knew you well,
the source of the mind you look for
is as close as the lamp in your hand
and everywhere your eyes inspire the light to dare,
you see the black squirrel in the blue patch of grape hyacinth
watching you watching it
and thought-years beyond the exhibits of meaning,
you understand.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Stranger In The Leaving

Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
Is it not always so
when people separate?
Lovers who knew each other intimately for years
close their gates to each other
and say each others' name
as if they weren't philosopher's stones anymore.
And the base metal outweighs the gold that comes of it.
Alone with the alone
in the abyss of the absolutes
what was vivid and vital
turns numb as glass
and what was mystically specific about the other
is no longer a shrine that holds the secret name of God.
Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
You leave with some of my memes
as I leave with some of yours
and we are both no doubt slightly changed for good
by the reciprocity of the encounter
like hydrogen and oxygen make water.
Though now it's all tears frozen on the moon.
Good-bye my lovely
I shall miss your eyes and your skin
and the thrill of your dangerous heart.
I will miss your wounded mouth
I tried to heal with messianic kisses
that never walked on anything but the earth.
And there's no blame
you couldn't fit my lunar month
into your solar calendar.
We had everything in common except time
and our faults were as compatible as our virtues.
I will miss the rumours of alien life in the wavelengths of your hair.
I shall miss losing myself like a firefly
in the wishing wells of your eyes
even if now my own seem more
like impact craters in the prophetic skull of the moon
when I consider what's leaving like an atmosphere from this mindscape.
And I shall always remember
that your heart was as generous as your breasts
and whenever we made love
how the earthly was the envy of the spiritual fact.
You didn't want anyone to know you were gentle.
Not even me.
But I could see through that mask
eyebrow to eyebrow with you
as if we both were intent on showing the same face to the earth
like the crescent fangs of a Georgia moon that said
don't step on me
because we were afraid.
More than enough to have you in the nude
I wasn't a glutton for your nakedness
that demanded you take your illusions off
to prove you loved me.
It would have been an irreverence
beyond the aspirations of heresy
to witness you renewing your virginity
like the new moon bathing in a sea of shadows.
I never tried to pry the petals of the flowers open
before they were ready to bloom.
I was never the ant
that told the peony what to do.
I never tried to look under the closed eyelids of the rose
to see what it was dreaming.
Though I'm not into voodoo
I never desecrated
the bird shrines
of your involuntary taboos.
But now I look in your eyes
and see that yesterday
is less vivid than tomorrow
though neither of them has happened yet.
The new moon is all potential
The full moon all used up.
There are effigies of potential
standing like scarecrows
in late autumn cornfields
and paragons of actuality
who love to star in constellations
that make them out to be the hero.
I try to stay
and I end up going.
I try to go
and the earth moves underfoot.
The root feels the death of its flower
as the autumn stars turn into frost
and burn its petals like old loveletters
to the immensities that didn't have time to read them.
The harmonies of life
are distinguished from the harmonies of death
by a single breath
taken in
and turned out
into the vast expanses of where it came from in the first place.
And the spirit that isn't shy of its own lucidity
knows that everything it illuminates
whether by day or by night
has the lifespan of light
and light is the brainchild of the darkness.
So even when the lights go out
like people and candles
and us
the shadows go on blooming
and even when the stars
are a gust of ghosts at our heels
the dust is rich
with the memory of all the roads
that once got lost in us
trying to find their way back home
like blood and fire and spirit
as if their final destination
were always the place they started from.
And if in the lightyears ahead
you should ever wonder if I remember you
be deeply assured
I shall remember you
as if every footstep I took
were a threshold of this homelessness
I am brave enough to cross without you.
And I shall thank you for this courage
inspired by the muse of your absence
and the feel of my blood Doppler-shift toward
long meditative wavelengths of red
that stream from the intensity
of the wounded white-hot blue of a renewed beginning.
You can't teach a bird to fly in a cage
or snakes to bite other people.
But when I first met you
it was as if the serpent-fire at the base of my spinal cord
that was running to keep its thoughts aloft like kites
suddenly had wings
and all my dirt-bag myths
that crawled on the earth among the lowest
were elevated into constellations
that burned like dragons among the chandeliers.
And when the muses of life well up in me like water
as they will
and ask me back
for all the tears they've shed on the sorrow
of the way things had to be
between you and me
for them and us
to happen the way we did
I will show them the eternal flame
of the nightwaterlily
blooming in the clear fire
of its lonely lucidity
not even the rain
the dragon brings
can aspire to put out.
I will show them the sun.
I will show them the moon.
And I'll say
you see?
That's us forever.
That swan in the heart of a phoenix.
And they will be well-pleased with the beauty of the lies
I use to shadow the truth with compassionate alibis
for why the flowers fall.
Sometimes it's the bird that swims through stone
and the snake that flys
in a profusion of fire and water
shadow and form
darkness and light
intensity and death
madness and wisdom.
Sometimes you meet someone
and you realize
this fallible flesh just as it is
is the deepest longing of the spirit fulfilled
like light in a perishable garden.
That there are no flaming swords
in the hands of the angels
at the wounded gates of our exile
trying to keep anything in or out.
Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
The knowledge we have of each other
might want to keep things the same
but like all living things
in this garden of creation
the only way to sustain our innocence
is change.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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