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Faceless This Time Of Night

Faceless this time of night, my skin evaporates like dry ice
into a deepening sense of containment
by a dark space with distant cities of light
trying to colonize the Pythagorean fireflies of Cretona,
or the shimmering mirage of Port Angeles
dancing like a seance at the foot of the mountains
across a hundred miles of the Georgia Strait at night,
the immensity of the freedom that dwarfs the stars
with the sheer magnitude of the labour before them.

The fragility of a spinal cord traversing the abyss
of a one-stringed box guitar made of cardboard
when you were a kid, the mere filament
of an anachronistic light bulb with the lifespan
of the wick of an apostate candle at a black mass,
disappointed it wasn't born a flower,
but a weed more at home among the stars
that uprooted it from its intimacy with the earth
like a kindred spirit of light
that must wander through its own solitude
like music at night from an open window
in the life of the mind to reach out to them
like a tendril of smoke from the embering nugget
of the heart nesting in a private crown of fire
that abdicated its empire of ashes for a single note
of the night bird's longing to sing back up
like a bell for a sad universe that's always on the road.

I hear crying in the distance, the dark lament of the hills.
The night creek weeping unseen through hidden valleys.
I can taste the deaths and sorrows, the broken promises
of the rain, drifting like the fragrance of a waterlily
like a star reflected on the undivined watershed of its tears
saturating the air. Matter a condensation of the light,
I can feel life moving through this body, this flesh,
this scrap of starmud, a rush of water, a gust of stars,
a purple passage of blood, a breath of fire and wind,
and the earth, not solid, but real, animating all my limbs,
my vital organs like the ripening fruit of a rootless tree
as if time wept like a bell in me as well, and its tears,
heavy with the weight of too many separations,
yet wise in the ways of the sky, sweetened the fall to come.

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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Something Said Softly

Something said softly in the night
like a tendril on a windowsill
tasting the moon, a whisper, a word
that walked in the light without
abandoning its shadow,
a phrase with wet wings
dreaming itself out of its chrysalis
not knowing whether it's a leaf or a dragonfly
until the whole tree wakes up beside it,
something sought but rarely said
saturated with the meaningless life of meaning
that could touch space like flesh
and make it feel the thrill of new eyes
running down its arm like tears.
And it's not that I want
to unsay the night or God
to define myself as a human,
and it's of little moment to me,
seed on the wind,
what worlds are born of my words,
what ends, what begins,
what comes of what I cannot say,
but I want to say something
with the savour of time in it
that's worth living for a little more each day
like a small tree rooted like a thought
in a crevasse of eternity,
greening the moon.
Late at night, in the darkness,
while the silence is off preserving something,
and all I can hear is your breath
off in the distance like an ocean,
I want to unpack my vagrant heart
like a patched guitar-case,
a grave-robber in a pyramid,
and attune my afterlife
to the key of this one
in such a way
I can play like a new star in Orion
to all the sad, beautiful fireflies of the moment
that hover over us like living constellations of our own
not bound to any paradigm of light
that can only be touched by a mountain of stone.
I want to paint something
that feels like the flower
that just brushed against your hand,
I want to be inspired by the mystic blue of midnight
like window glass fired in the kiln of a star
that has looked upon the suffering of humans for so long,
their atrocities and deprivations,
their terrors and wrecked joys,
compassion has turned it into an eye so clear
you can sip water from it like tears
that taste of the history of blood and wine
that danced alone like a vine at its own wedding
with a bride of rain that unveiled herself
like falling chandeliers.
Unfailingly, absurdly, obsessively human
in the shadow of thundering magnitudes
that feel like the extinctions of gods
that time has wheeled out
to the enormity of the gravepit
that limes every abyss of the heart
with the stars of a new universe,
I want to add one candle to the shining
in a folly of insight so illuminating
even the earliest galaxies
forever entering the darkness
on the threshold of their first shedding
could see it, something
so profoundly vernal and intimate
even I can believe in it.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Little Thought In A Big Space

A little thought in a big space, I'm falling
through my own immensities here at my desk,
one of my Icarian propensities for plunging into things.
My voice intimidated by the violence of the silence within.
I'm on the dark side of my eyes.
No one's ever been here before.
No window, no wall, no door,
I'm on the threshold of my homelessness again.
I'm looking at stars, but I feel like rain.
I'm talking to ghosts that I don't remember.
Might be the wrong medium, but it's the right seance.
I don't even know what I'm doing here myself
but it seems I'm free to go or stay as I wish.
I'm wearing my shadow like a candling parachute
that didn't step back from the edge in time.
No point in pretending you're an airborne dandelion
when you feel like a rock with a message
someone just threw like the moon through a mirror
disguised as a sky the night birds keep flying into blind.

No one asks your name here on this pyre of a sky burial
if your birth certificate says you were born in fire.
Desire anything you like. It was all written in smoke
before you came. And these words that are saying me here
have been out of the aviary of the lantern for light years.
Who knows where the light goes or what if falls upon?
Trying to shine in a dark time without taking anything away
from the lunar eclipses that aren't in need of enlightenment.
Don't know if I'm a solar flare, a firefly, a matchbook,
or a lightning bolt that keeps stressing my starmud out
by sneaking up on it from behind and overdoing things a bit.

If you find yourself trying to pry the flowers open
with a crowbar or a koan, and it's nightfall, it's
time to turn your hourglass in for a waterclock
and see how the stars emerge out of nothing
as soon as you deepen the dark with a more acute sense of timing
that let's everything happen spontaneously by itself.
Even if you're the lighthouse of your dreams
that doesn't mean you're the nightwatchman
keeping his third eye on you in the shadows
like a theft of fire you can get away with
this second time around with only a warning.

If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
And if you did, whining about it in your sleep
isn't going to help and who's Spartan enough these days
to stash the fox under their tunic to keep
from being caught while it eats them alive?
If you want to be a dragon you've got to learn
to swallow people's hearts like hot coals as if they were chocolates,
without wincing. The stars don't come out
like emergency candles you've been saving
for exactly this kind of situation. And if
you really want to know the truth about illumination,
try and blow one out. Quick, now, look
and see immediately into the clear light of the void
what it's like to shine without a metaphoric reflection.

The stars here don't hide their nakedness under a cloak
of black holes and dwarfs that take it all in
but give nothing back like the second hand clothes
of serpents shedding their skin. One size fits all
like a bubble in a watershed of dark worlds
dazzled by how much a single eye can contain
whether it's hanging from the lip of a flower in the fall
or going down the drain in spring. I know
you hit it like a snowflake on a furnace
and do your damnedest not to cry. Thing is
as unique among billions as you think you are,
there's not a star in the sky that isn't a rite of passage.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Am A Dragon

I am a dragon,
but I’ve got cloudy teeth.
You are a vase among jars,
a feather among scales.
Obviously you are the sea
and I am the seabed.
In the darkness you are the shining.
I come to you
like lead to an alchemist,
base metal to gold.
Already I am transformed
by your mirrors of fire.
There is a light, a glow,
invisible but more illuminating,
not of the moon, or sun, or a star,
but of the heart and mind,
the light of life itself
when it’s the only candle in the room
dancing behind its veil of shadows,
and in the least filament
of the down upon your thighs,
there are suffusions of fireflies and galaxies,
mystic lanterns
ripening like apricots
over the open doors of worlds within,
over eyes that bloom like wild asters
rooted in the earthly fields of the heart.
I have been a ghost
trying to say itself into existence;
and my bread and my blood
have been the whisper and breath of you.
Not the mountains, not
the mothering floors of the wheat seas,
not the forests or the hills or the rivers,
not the ladders or roads or miles between us,
nor the seasons of the threshing clock,
have kept us one eyelash apart;
we have been wings to each other;
we have been the secret tides of the rose
in a bay of blood to one another;
we have been the substance of a dream
that lingers like the impression in cool grass
of where the deer slept the night before.
In the flights of winter birds,
on moist winter days,
I have rehearsed endless summers to come,
when the sky whispered your eyes
in bells of sidereal fragrance
into the abyss of my longing for you
and love seemed a petal of light on the wind,
and you were that petal,
and I was that wind.
And though I have stood for eras
on this bridge of night alone
waiting for you like a letter, an afterlife,
a voice of fire in a well urgent with stars
I want to live with you,
we have always embraced, not two,
arrow and bow,
pilgrim and shrine,
release and enlightenment
reflected in these visions
the insistent palettes of the heart
paint on the impassioned waters
of the deepening lifestream.
I have been a storm of blood and stars;
I have drowned in the crypts of my own tears
and learned to breathe through a new medium,
set the crown of my fin on a rose of gills,
and bloom in a mythically enhanced
immensity of sorrows,
and the shadows under my eyes
have mourned for me
like black bells in a tower of thorns,
two horses of night chained to a heart
that dragged itself around like a hearse
looking for a lost grave.
I buried myself in women
who were torn like the satin lining
out of a coffin just
when they were about to give birth.
Their pain always tasted of an afterlife
that danced like lightning on the tip of my tongue
until my blood caught fire
like a rose with a voice of wine.
Black, apostate, madonnas
of body, heart, and mystery,
even the moon a bead of devotion
on a thread of their blood,
a dream vow under the eyelid of an eclipse.
I never knew what to say
that wasn’t a life shy
of an inadequate skeleton
trying to reflesh itself with the ashes
of its last sidereal cremation.
I was born again and again
like a sword drawn out of a stone
to hurl my humanity
like a sparrow
against the windows and eyes of the gods.
They knew I was right
to live the prophecy
written in the book of my wings by the wind,
but their tears fell like glass rice
on the stairwells of the bridal mirrors
that wept like silver serpents
at the heels of the moon
and whatever road I walked,
whatever direction I wandered in
like a drunken river
I passed through my own ribs
like an opening gate
to a sealess exile on the moon,
a lighthouse to the sail of a ghost in a desert.
Events of the spirit,
and the imported executioners
of tormented ecstasies
that made our bodies shudder with oblivion
until even our shadows glowed
like feathers of light
that glutted the abyss we pillowed like stone
to lay our heads down upon and dream,
every emotion,
keyed like a highwire
over the infinite emptiness
of a guitar in the corner of a tomb
eating the dust of a blackboard
that schooled the scrawl of the angels
into the writing on the wall.
How many lovers have perished in me
like the rings and eras of a tree,
and what enormities of childhood it takes
to sweeten a single ruby of fruit,
what tides of blood and light
collapsing like eyelids on the mystic circus
that pulled off miracles
under the sheets and skies and skin
of our lascivious tents:
now I am a dunce in a wizard’s hat,
a cone of light,
the pillar of a fallen shadow,
freeing the wings of wounded birds
from the nets and mesh of the stars.
I am a dragon
with the soul of a bridge to here and now,
a weed on the stairs of an unknown temple
to a god that sweeps me away like ashes
with the broom of my shadow,
and my face is the footprint of the wind
as flowers are the footprints of the light,
and my heart is a pebble
I keep dropping down a well
to listen for an echo from the depths,
for a whisper of fire on the water,
to deliver me like a burning dove
with a leaf of the moon in its beak,
a letter from you,
to say there is a south of the heart
that can thaw this arctic desolation
that overtakes me like an ageless night
as my thoughts fall away
like the flames of descending matches,
like angels and demons
tilted from heaven,
from the plane of their orbital hearts,
toppled like towers and lighthouses
by an urge to kiss their own reflections.
I am a dragon
chained to the nightrain
that inks the roots of the locust tree
with thorns and stars and flowers,
and my blood is a dusky mess of dawns and ancient sunsets.
My heart was scaled like the moon
by the phases of an empty cup,
my eyes were birdless skies
and nothing flew higher
than the feathered shadows of the trees
that roosted in the grass like water,
and there were no tears left
in the wineskin of the heart
withered like a lily that bloomed for a day,
the soft clarion of a bruised trumpet.
Now I think of you
so many nights and miles away,
and I walk like a bridge toward you,
and my wings are spread out
like the pages of ample skies
that have yet to be written on by the stars,
and I must blow on my longing to be with you
like a spoonful of hot diamonds
just to keep the deserts of my thought
from etherealizing the tropics of my blood,
my eyes evaporating like crucial oases
in the heat of these visions
that burn the air
with fountains of fire
in this tavern of mystic passions
where I drink alone to you,
the furnace of my blood
silked like a black poppy
when I reach out,
a tree in winter,
the afterlife of lightning,
to touch your face like the moon.
I have been a lonely crusade of one
fighting for the gravestone of a dead god
enthroned in the leaf-fire of his falling,
lost in his dream like salt in the sea of the world,
stars in the seed of the apple,
a shadow devoted to the cause of the wind.
I am an era of scars
inspired by the talons of the moon
seizing my heart like a rag of meat
in these elevated bone-bowls of birth and death.
I have been a poet among humans,
an indignant warrior of the heart
with an army of seasoned candles
reconnoitering distant fires in the night
that bloomed like the breath
of insurmountable divinities
gathering like birds
in the border hills of the darkness
that always took the form of a luminous woman
bathing naked in a sea of eyeless windows.
Crowned like an apple star
for the brilliance of my defeats,
I fall like a key of crazy sugar,
a mysterious elixir of midnight orchids,
a squall of renegade stars
into the transformative valleys and bays
of your forbidden paradise,
happier than a fireproof heretic in the flames,
singing into the abyss of an unknown god
that has robed my heart like a wounded boat,
a solitary on his island,
in these auroral tides
that play my blood like the pulse
of this keyboard of light
where I drown like a stone messiah
true to the excruciations of his faith
in these delinquent oceans of you.
All my poems, chalk-dust,
all my mystic nightbirds iron weathervanes
bent by the lightning toward earth
like the forlorn hope of a battered metal,
all my paintings a bleeding and bruising of snow,
and the sincerity of the ways I got lost
in this labyrinth of mirrors
unspooling like a thread of blood
from an immortally wounded star,
an agony of human fire
rooted in the voice of the wind like a bird
the abyss of a night without bounds
squanders on the supremacy
of the oldest silence
time ever distilled from the eyes of the dead,
the perjury of a perishing light,
if I did not love your ashes and orchards more,
the way you tear your constellations
on the thorns of the moon
and bleed like black silk
for an innocence that never found its way home.
I can taste the dark prophecies
and oracles of infernal delight
written in scars on the dangerous mushroom
of your nuclear body,
and flow like the silt of stars,
white mountain gold and night honey,
through the hives and deltas
that enshrine the ore of the rose.
I can prolong the dawn like the wishbone of a note
broken like a harp
in the throats of the singing masters of the flesh.
I can blood the night with a fever of poppies
and scoop weeping diamonds
from the black fountain
in the furnace-heart of an electric glacier.
I can wield ecstasy
like a blade of the moon bewitched by its wound.
I can untie the knots and nooses
in the spinal cord of the butterfly
pinned like a calendar of eclipses,
a quarantined blossom,
to a dead branch under a bell of glass
and wire Eden back
to the infernal nerve of the lightning
that severed the afterbirth of the moon
from the dark mother in the garden
like an angel with a slash of fire at the gate.
I know how to make love
like an embassy of shadows
to the most distant longings of a woman in exile.
I can pour the oil of winged serpents
into the lamp
and entice a ghost of snow
to dance naked in the fire.
I can lead the lost cloud
out of the mountains of the key
to the doorway of candles and stars
enshrined in the skulls of seeing.
And even when I turn my back
on the darkest flowers of fire in my roots
to rise up like rain
into the immeasurable wingspan
of these desert clarities
that bead me like a caravan
of nomadic moons,
no more than a breath of light
in a gust of stars,
I’m still only a ladder of thresholds away
from stealing you away
from the refugees and shadows
that crowd your room
like the night sky
through the astounded vowel of an open window.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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These Days, This Late At Night

These days, this late at night, I'm usually a lone wolf sage
high above the timberline in a sanctuary of solitude
that occasionally breaks the silence
with the elegaic echo of the anquished shriek of a hawk
wheeling in the abyss like the stars overhead
feeling as if its flightfeathers just caught fire
and for a few brief moments no longer
than the wingspan of a wavelength
it was shining like them and there were jewels
like a woman's eyes cracking the rock
of a heart that's been more of an asteroid
than habitable planet with a few ancestral skulls of its own
for moons and a creative atmosphere where the clouds
can move mountains to tears with the beauty
of what can bloom spontaneously out of nothing
like wildflowers strewn all over the starfields
as if they were expecting someone to come
of the things we really feel are worth crying for.

These days, this time of night, I delight
in looking for the most beautiful nocturnal metaphors
I can compare to you inside and out and beyond both
like a spirit of female serpent fire that haunts me
into paying tribute to her like a muse
who's beginning to possess me like the sea does
when the moon swims out to practise witchcraft
on a lonely island retreat that sings to itself at night.
Even from here, I can hear the song being carried
across the light years like the dove of a deep lament
she keeps like the wind in a locket the size
of the noose around her neck, and the flying carpet
under her feet all that's between her
and firewalking on stars like a burning kite
someone let go of like the umbilical cord
of a lifeboat that had come unmoored in a lunar storm.

Maybe I'm just fossil hunting on the moon
I've been howling at all these years
over the bone pits of dark wisdom I've dug up
on the far side of a black mirror
that doesn't insult your seeing with a night light.
But I swear sometimes when I think of you,
what lies like an archives in the riverbeds
of the sedimentary starmud you put back down
like a book you've read eras of time before,
and look out the window like a door
where you don't have to leave your body
on the threshold like shoes at the edge of the sea
when you walk into your own depths up over your head
to see if your eyes can still swim
with the dolphins and the stars and the flying fish
you left in your wake like a locust plague of urgent telegrams.

I know we're still more strangers to each other
than intimates, that there maybe watersheds
we have in common, and maybe it's still too early
for the fountains to come into blossom yet
as the last stars of the season become
the chandeliers of the morning stars of the next
like dusky candles going out in the blue light of the dawn.
And maybe there are ladders of fire to paradise
trembling like crutches on the edge of a shaky precipice
trying to climb higher than its cloud cover
to break into light like the Pleiades
just above the moon and Jupiter on a good seeing night,
but these days, this late at night, I've been inhaling
a lyrical lantern of oxygen and breathing out stars
like the circumpolar constellation of a healing dragon
pole-dancing with the caduceus of the celestial axis of the earth.

I'm laired with the unmarrowed riddles of bones of my own
I'm trying to read like the yarrow sticks
of a bird skeleton with rose-arbour wings
to see if the light I sense approaching out of the dark
is a mirage of fireflies disguised as a lightning bolt
or the soul mate of a rogue planet
that wants to ghost dance around the third eye
of a first magnitude star that doesn't have any idea
of what I'm doing up here, nor how far
a whisper of light away can seem
to a man fully awake these days, this late at night,
writing in the shadows cast by the candelabra
of a homeless zodiac off the beaten path
like the first draft a waking dream
sleepwalking beside me like the dakini
of a star struck maniac lifting the veils
of the inconceivable like the paint rags
of the night vision shining in the eyes behind them
that even in the dark make everything seem
so incredibly counter-intuitive and lucidly beautiful
I'd be truly out of my mind, like a crystal cranium
that's lost touch with its own translucency
if I didn't find it wholly believable
down to the last mystic detail my enlightened lunacy
howling like a wolf seer at the rising of a new moon
out of a valley where I can hear the distant barking
of the seeing-eye dog that follows Orion around
like a traffic light for the blind compared
to the way you light me up like the Pleiades
whenever I'm trying to get a parallactic fix
on your radiance dancing like a cult of fireflies
on the event horizons of my prophetic skull.

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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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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No Gravegoods In My Solitude

No gravegoods in my solitude, no trinkets
from any spiritual world inside or outside this one.
The totem belongs to the dream that's buried with it
as the flower's engendered by the root it's taken from.
Mind is matter. Matter is mind. And it isn't as if
one is blind to the other because one shore
isn't parted from the other by the flowing
of the mindstream in between. Try to separate
the reflection of the moon from water in a dream state.
The moon is a characteristic of water as the water
is a feature of the moon. If you want to mediate
until you turn the vertebrae of your spine into a bridge
to get to the other side of a life you're already standing on,
that's ok as long as it's burning. Otherwise it's just going
to obstruct your path when you're shooting the rapids
of the Milky Way like your own spring run off
trying to saddle a rush of stars with a rudderless liferaft
and oars for spurs. Better to be a waterbird
with wings of your own, but what a thrill
to ride the snake until you can fly like a dragon
among the stars like Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider,
in the handle of the Big Dipper like a warrior Bedouin
testing his eyes on the dune of a tribal hourglass to see
if he can tell what hour it is by the dance of a distant binary.

It's getting late. Nightwatch at the well. The town
unpeopled by sleep. A choir of train whistles
practising their inquisitive requiems at every crossing
like Canada geese migrating south when the autumn stars arise.
More lonely than mournful, I can taste the shadows
in the honey of life as readily as the light. I can smell
the fragrance of time like the first snowflakes
in a lover's hair, trying to turn her into a constellation
to sweeten the night air. And even in the ashes
of the starmaps the shining sets afire
and scatters like a library in the urn of the heart
on a wind that carries away the passions of this art
of exhuming more life out of a shallow grave than went into it,
I can still burn in the dark like the ore
of undisciplined diamonds. I can still squander my light
on the eyelids of the fallen flowers like a final kiss farewell.

Time wastes a death on me. Years ago the wind arose
and blew that candle out in the open window
of an abandoned house and ever since I've been
drifting like a ghost of smoke in a diaspora of stars.
I bequeath to the rose, the blood of my wounds.
To the thorns of the moon, my scars. To the night
I leave my eyes. To the wind, my breath. My voice
to the nightbird whose longing put my lyrics
to the picture-music that's haunted me all my life
like the song of someone who loved me once
before I was born and began to forget. But my heart
that I could judge the worth of like a bell bound to the earth,
or a feather of fire in hell, in the palm of my hand,
I give that to everyone like the windfall of a tree in a storm.

Black walnuts and wild apples. Solar systems
of peaches and pears in the leftover orchards
of organic gardens bearing the fruit of a habitable planet
at the autumn equinox of the New England asters
and modest suns of the Jerusalem artichokes
for the birds and the squirrels and the bears.
You can't keep what you won't give away
and it's no good to you in a grave when it comes time
to throw yourself overboard to stay afloat
and weather the squalls on your own sea of awareness
like an empty moonboat drifting through the fog
calling out to anyone who'll listen on the coast
of a new universe that discovers you like Atlantis
to a ghost of the old world looking for a passage
back to the more familiar labyrinth of home.

Liberation is freedom through creative form, not from it.
Liberation is life. And life is all entrance, no exit.
And you weren't asked at the door for any i.d.
And no one's going to stop you from lowering the fire escape
to get away from yourself. And if you were to ask
the mirrors of your own awareness, they'd stop staring at you
as if they'd never seen a new world savage before.
Everyone's going to leave an empty chair at the table
sooner or later. Like the skull cup of the moon
you've got to pour your prophetic lees out upon the earth
if you want to give your abundance another chance.

You can make lanterns out of fireflies in canning jars
or you can abandon them to the spiders
in the corners of your eyes like dreamcatchers and kites,
but if you want to shine of your own accord,
albino fish in the darkest depths with stars in their eyes,
you've got to see the sun flowering at midnight,
you've got to greet Venus in the Pleiades at dawn.
You've got to unsilver the mirror like a stripper
until you disappear like a bird in the house of life
through an open window like a crack in a cosmic egg
to feel the vastness of the sky that transcends
the limit of your wings. Despite the eye-witness
in the mirror, where time is always in arrears to eternity,
you've got to give it all up like your shining reflection
if you want to stay here for your own protection.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Country Wife

She makes her way through the dark trees
Down to the lake to be alone.
Following their voices on the breeze,
She makes her way. Through the dark trees
The distant stars are all she sees.
They cannot light the way she's gone.
She make her way through the dark trees
Down to the lake to be alone.

The night reflected on the lake,
The fire of stars changed into water.
She cannot see the winds that break
The night reflected on the lake
But knows they motion for her sake.
These are the choices they have brought her:
The night reflected on the lake,
The fire of stars changed into water.

poem by Dana Gioia
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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You Are Crazy

You are crazy and beautiful
and wounded and wild
and the youngest daughter
of a coven of poetic sea-witches,
and dangerous as the moon in your changes,
the fragrance of night
hovering over the blue star-honey
of your seductive hive of candles,
the skulls you drink from naked,
anointing the fire
with libations of blood and wine,
dancing to the passionate lament
of ancient serpents
unfolding their wings
like eras in the lives of stars,
constellations that have come and gone like leaves,
seasons that are only distant whispers
in the hourglass of the hills,
voices that have outlived the ears to hear them.
And we are no more contained
than is the wind, the white cloud
in our approach to lucidity,
and we have been wave and shore
many times for each other already,
and I have heard how
the night flute of your solitude
suffers like an island,
and the wizards have worked
an extra contemplative shift
to make you the gift of a gate
when my love of you
alloys my will
to the light of the urgency.
There is a wholeness to your being such that
even when the night shatters like a mirror,
all of you is reflected in every piece,
and your eye at the keyhole
unfolds me like a starchart
trying to locate a deep sky object
burning ferociously in wavelengths of black.
I am enrobed in your mystery like a waterfall
and you swim, a silver fish,
through the roots of my mind like the moon,
and the shadow of every thought
is a likeness of you
that I’ve conjured out of space like an aurora,
a feather of smoke
to limn your features mystically
in apricot-violet fires that flower like paint
and I take you away with me sometimes
where I can savour you alone like a mountain
where the silence prowls like a cougar
and you keep the wilderness to yourself
and your presence is enough of a fountain
to turn my heart into a mouth
entranced into speaking in the tongues
of the hidden grammars of blood
that pi the spirit with golden ratios
and passionate incommensurables.
You are a star caught
in the curtains of my seeing
and we are only eyelids away
from finding a flower
worthy of the sight
as you seed the darkness with light,
and I carve your face,
your transformative beauty,
out of a block of eyeless uranium
that glows invisibly like an emotion
that only blooms in exile,
a genius among elements
that gives herself away
like an orchard in a storm,
a serpent in the labyrinth,
the blessing of a weapon.
How could I know you in any other words;
how could I win the trust of your riddles
and climb the stairs of your neglected shrines
to the reluctant priestess
chanting in the shadows
of her own eclipsed altars
for a sacrifice that would answer
the impiety of a lifetime?
If I don’t touch you there,
if you don’t feel my breath upon the nape of your neck
like the wind on a lake,
if your blood
doesn’t turn into a red light district
without emergency exits
at the thought of being caressed
on the other side of your skin,
on the other side of the tapestry,
how could the hidden clarity
ripen into the crazy wisdom
of the bird that was born of a jewel
and you exceed yourself like wings?
You are all flavours of the fire
that bewitches the tongue of the snake
to divine the air for grails of water
with a branch of conscious lightning
that wants to taste you through its fingertips
like a note in a tuning fork
that will open the dark gate of your radiance
like the key to a secret release.
And I know how often
love is a dream in a graveyard
where only the rootless flowers say
what they can about severance
and the abyss of the heart that falls from its crown,
and the urgent vacancy of a throne
that governs lying down
beat like grief against the cageless door of a cold stove;
I have wept on stone,
trying to make a lie come true,
a mirage turn solid,
a ray of light linger in my bloodstream
like a locket dropped from a bridge,
I have been the timely extinction
of mystic alarms
that woke me early to grief
and what the thief left of my afterlife,
and I have been the razorblade,
the knife that bled to death,
that cut itself out like the tongue of a wound
rather than inflict a law upon love
that would tin the waterlilies
with savage indignation.
I have made one infinity of two zeroes,
and handcuffed myself
to the top of a tree
to throw the pack of chainsaws
that chased me up it like a scared messiah
off the scent of blood
that rippled through the heartwood,
and climbed down
like a quiet last judgment
when nobody was around
and stood in the doorway of my grave
like a letter delivered to the wrong address,
and cursed myself
for all the things I couldn’t save.
I have tried to knit honey
from the smoke of the fire
that spread like pollen over the fields,
but it was always tainted
by the taste of a black saint
retreating into a starless night
like the shadow of a bird
that had nothing to sing to the dawn.
And I withdrew from life
like the cult of virulent addiction
and lived like a ghost in detox
parsing planets like flaws on a rosary
and idling among the late night shadows on the walls
like a stone fish among the reeds.
And my name
was a word in a foreign language
I didn’t understand
until you said it like a wind of light
that had wandered like a road through time
to breathe me again
and pick my body up like a lost glove
lying by the lifelines in the wineskin valleys of your hand.
Until you were you
among the veils and interpretations,
black swan enthroned in a sky of fire,
the ghost of a bell
in the rain mirror
that arrayed your face like a whisper of islands,
I had never looked into my own eyes
as if they belonged to someone else.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Flowers Adrift On The Fragrance Of Their Own Foregoing

Flowers adrift on the fragrance of their own foregoing.
In the night that takes me under its wing
to shelter me from myself, arrival and passage of spring.

Fish nibble at the wafer of the moon on the tongue of the lake.
The wind bitter as a green apple with an innocent cruel side.
Saturn at dawn, Venus at dusk, things abide in their own good time

without knowing for whose sake they shine until the mind
can't keep a secret anymore and let's the heart know
what the heart has always known. Reason is colour blind.

Everything that's hidden out in the open isn't invisibly camouflaged
to look like God at a quick glance. Flowers don't dance
with their deathmasks on. Things may have changed

since I last walked here, but they haven't aged. Autumn
not an older season than spring, spring not younger than yesterday.
Water's never heard of a virgin birth that ends in a real death.

Silence of time as it appears to the spirit in a deepening sea of awareness.
Nothing disfigured. Nothing restored. Nothing scarred.
Nothing wounded in the moonlight, pleading to be healed.

Earth pungent with the expectations of urgent ghosts.
And dust in the eyes of the stars, the cries of Canada geese
with more longing in their voices than celebration

like the wailing of a train disappearing like smoke in the distance
from a sad fire in danger of going out. Exits and entrances galore
there are as many ways out of here as there is space and time to stay.

Bush wolves on a far hill agonizing over something in the night
like blues harps of blood. And in the heartwood of every leafing tree
I can hear the first violins of a symphony tuning up to the light

as if something sublime were about to begin with the first dropp of rain
pinging like a tintinnabulum beside the kettledrum of thunder at the back.
To speak now would be to conceal what I really feel in words.

Lavish with life, I reveal my voice in a rush of waterbirds
startled off the lake like a mantra of sacred syllables
that nuance the ripples they leave in their wake

with a whole new way of phrasing the light with eyes
that see things musically as they fall away from their wings
like the meaning of things when meaning isn't necessary.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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In You

In you I come to the end of roads,
and an alphabet of burning wings
falls from an indigo sky
like meteors trying to write
the unsayable in a slash of light,
in a language of luminous scars
the night beatifies with mystic knowledge
that wants to name you
so deeply in thresholds and stars
the charged silence
is giving birth to an indelible mouth,
a doorway of blood,
an ancient grammar of fire
the wind puts on like a robe
to scry the darkness for a voice
that could fill the goblets
of the moon's dead seas
with the wine of a radiant wound,
so much within me
already the tongue of a bell
that can taste you like blackberries.
The whole of you
in every single dropp of your eyes,
you are the black swan
of the eclipse that rares its reflection in water,
the dark orchid in the shadow of the dragon
that sways like a bell in the night,
even your absence a shape of cherishing,
a harvest of shadows beyond the light
of the lamp that burns for you.
Within the deepest abyss of myself
where the heart stands alone
like a single black pillar
in the twilight wasteland of the world,
a mysterious temple to the ultimacy
of having been here once
to suffer the passage of form and time,
everything a gesture of space
that thaws back into itself,
I have written your name
in the hourglass of my blood
like a whisper of secret ink
that once voiced the light to be
and shook the stars like wheat
out of its blind abundance
and will be remembered forever
as the first intimacy of the sea,
and there is the rumour
of a dream in the air,
the fragrance of an approach,
that out of an ocean of light
the tide will embody a woman
like the shore of an island
littered with fingertips and kisses
enmeshed like galaxies and starfish
in the exhalation of her veils
and our lips will meet like archers,
and our bodies will sing like arrows
sunk like orchards through the heart
and long after the last flame of life is shed,
the night will silence the birds
in the groves where we bled like poppies
to open the gates of the mystery
like keys and rain, or the rosary of black pearls
that chants its prayers to the night
like the slow alarm of autumn geese
in the eyes of a human face.
I try to say what can't be said,
pouring my spirit
into the wineskin of every word,
but my heart is a larger apple
than the bough of my voice can bear,
and the silence
that would erect temples everywhere like flowers
spun from the auroral silks of my soul
and perfume the air with the pollen of sacred fireflies,
every emotion a priest with a shaven head
to honour the moon
climbing the stairwell within me
of a million horizons at once
in every breathless step,
falls away behind me like the wake of a sinking ship
that lowers me into my coffin like a lifeboat
or a message in a bottle
that pleads like wine with the emptiness
for an alphabet that isn't in arrears to time
to say you to the night
in a lightning breath of life beyond
these elemental likenesses I carve
from a quarry of stars.
And I know I ask for immortal children
from a human womb,
and wide as my powers are
to exceed the sky with homing birds,
to adorn the dead branch with windows
that dazzle the roots of dawn,
I am the ashes of a black star in daylight,
a stone man with a chain for a tongue
when I try to swim like Atlantis
through the depths of your shining within
and the last word, the last life
to flash across my mind as I drown
again and again like a pulse
in the embrace of your beauty
is always the world as it is
before anything was said.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Undevoted, Free, And Wild

Undevoted, free, and wild,
no one to answer to, no one to answer for,
the urns shattered, and the ashes scattered,
and the fire liberated to perfect its own combustion
and the stars without anyone to walk home,
and the solitude silent, dark, and deep, cool
as the bliss of a wine-cellar talking in its sleep,
I have grown mad in the heat of the purple sun.
I have spoken from the mouths of the caves in the desert
and not expected the echo of my own voice
to return to me like a pilgrim stashing a gnostic gospel
deep in the sand, without realizing
how much closer to the stars dirt is than I am.

When you're no one but the wind in disguise
you don' need to be humble, you don't need to wise,
nothing to trust, and no one to rely on,
you can watch the dead at night
streaming toward Orion
like a blue-white ribbon of light
undoing the gift wrappings off the bodies and eyes
of people who can see and be again.

And you know it comes to everyone
like a nebular orchid with a fragrance of stars,
that the Sahara will green and bloom again
and the wind sing hymns to the grass
and the gazelles sport their elegant legs,
adolescents in the spring brush,
running like violins succulent with beginnings,
and it doesn't matter you're alone out here
listening to the ashes of a mirage
make up legends to tell the fire
about its ancestors buried on the moon anonymously
and how their blood once stained the earth
like a scarlet letter even the stars couldn't wash off.

The mystic anti-hero of my own dragon myth
I exalt in my isolation like a shriek of revolution
and overthrow myself like a book in the flames
to keep something I don't understand alive in me
as if I had to keep on dying to sustain myself
and the distinction between one and the other were lost upon life.
It's a touch, it's a feel, it's a hole in veil
with one eye looking out at me to see
if I've intensified the dark enough to break into stars,
if I can unravel my heart like smoke like water like fire
and perfectly disappear into the atmosphere of my dispersal
without a shudder of farewell to the masks I wore like scales.
Not to be constrained by even so much as
the single thread of a straitjacket, the husk
of an abandoned sanctuary left to the imagination
of the hermetic flowers to do with as they wish.

I shriek freedom across the heavens like the death cry
of a hawk waking the valley up in the morning.
I whisper to the water things the wind was never meant to hear.
So faithful to my calling, I lead those who come, away from me,
as if it were the perennial custom of the universe
to meet like this for a moment in time and space
and then disperse into the darkness alone like a unlit candle.
I'm a riot of fools in the sublimity of the presence within me
that elates the crazy wisdom of my spontaneous ignitions
and schools the black lightning of its absence
in the folly of trying to enclose my spirit in gates
like a candle in the niche of a tempestuous vision.

Yeeeeeeessssss, I scream into the face of nothing
like the efoliant scripture of my confession and protest
that life doesn't need an alibi to live and die by,
no extraneous, no outer, no other, no object, no subject
no flying buttress to act as a bridge
over a flowing river of Gothic stone,
no strong tree standing on its own to cut down
and carve into a crutch, no cork to keep the ocean out,
no bucket to bail the moonlight out of the lifeboat,
no jade Buddha to make your supplications to,
no footprints on the water Jesus walked,
no cave in Ramadan to receive the angel of light,
no Kabbalah to baffle your way through the night,
no Schmidt-Cassegrain reflecting telescopes
on clock driven equatorial mounts geared to the heavens
to thread the golden needle of the mystery
without any knots in your spinal cord,
to penetrate the vulva of the sea like a sacred shell
that once gathered armies on a burning hillside
to contest their revelations with the tongues of swords.

I shall tell you, my brother, I shall hasten to you my sister
like moonlight through your window, I shall not
hold back from you the least shadow of the furthest star
releasing its dark wisdom like the black doves
of its own excruciating ashes glowing like the pain
of horrendous transformations into light.
I shall not bring you the skins of the dragons I've shed
but inspire you with a fire you've never been burned by before,
a spiritual immolation into a godhead without a metaphor
to guide you by, a torch you can't drown in your tears,
a long firewalk down to a river of stars,
and there you shall cross on a burning life raft
of the bones you've been carrying around for lightyears like a body.

And it's a heresy of silence to say, but there
you shall you shall lie down in the nocturnal emptiness
in the long blue seagrass of the moon
and empower out of your own creative abundance
whatever worlds your longing inspires you to embrace
to amuse the bright vacancy of eternity with time, like love,
and the dark abundance of unperishing potential
with space, like wisdom, and the clear light of the void
and the unspeakable absence of any other voice
to ruin the silence with the bliss and sorrow of seeking
the mystic night you found within you longing like a bird
for the stillness to write it like a lyric of the wind,
a passage of blood through the labyrinth of the heart,
a shadow against the moonrise of a compassionate awareness
there's a divinity that sings like a human
in the heart of everything that breaks its long fast of nothing
with praise and celebration, with fire and light and rain
with the firstt sacred syllables to touch the lips
of the black rose charred in the heart of the dragon, like poetry.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Flying at Night

lost in the universe
counting stars
hurtling through space
this spaceship
for six billion years
shunting through
crevices, corners
dark as the dark sky
the stars its guiding light
from corner to corner
this realm ever expanding
casting mysteries of its origin, vastness
only one or two manage to touch
its workings in figures and letters
einstein leading the pack
but the spaceship waits for no man
the realm waits for no one
every sphere expanding
moving us to somewhere
the corner of our mind
the corner of the realm

inspired by

Flying at Night
Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.
Ted Kooser

poem by John Tiong Chunghoo
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Nightwind

The nightwind is dancing with the leafless trees
under a new moon
as if they were crutches
that couldn't keep up with its moves.
April night.
All potential.
Lilac month in the valley
and blue hyacinth soon
in the corners of forgotten yards
and for the first time today
down by the Tay where the willows
are going blonde
that bruise of a flower
that looks like a cross
between a broken egg and the moon.
A crocus
like a dab of violet paint
in the foreground of a drab impression.
The apple-trees are waiting for their brides like blossoms.
Saturn's in Virgo
and I'm out for stars
on my hobby-horse of a telescope
that's jealous of the easel I paint on
because it thinks it's the unheralded genius
and can do more with light
than that other moron.
More Copernicus for the moment
than van Gogh
I cut through fields
that look like November all over again
now that the snow's gone
to keep from being blinded
by the blazing of the town
attentive as a doe to the barking
of distant farmyard dogs.
I'm a one man band of snapping twigs
and slashing branches
moving deeper into the silence
away from windows and doors.
My telescope sneers at the vanity
of birches posing in the nude
because they've heard I'm a painter
into feminine nocturnal effects.
And I've been here before
looking for suitable subjects
but tonight I'm out for stars
and the wounded mystery of being alone
in a place that everything's adapted to
but where nothing feels it belongs
to judge by the way they keep to themselves.
Wherever I am
the stars have always reminded me of home
as if this were the place of exile
and the testing ground
of life on earth
to see who makes it back
and I am stilled and mindbound
by such a commingling
of longing wonder and sadness
my blood burns like a lovesong
to the great absence that keeps us apart
and how much time and distance it takes
to abandon a heart that clings
like colour to the clouds.
How much darkness
must be intensified by a human
into black matter
before the ore
is prodigal with light.
All the good stars are going down with Taurus
though I can see the snakes
still flaring lethally in Al Gol
like the Medusa's severed head
and there's that poor man's chandelier
the Pleiades
still enchanted with the charms
of Alcyone and her sisters
though like me
they're getting on in years.
Longer wavelengths
Longer shadows
shifting into infrared.
All the blue-white fury
that was the frequency of my youth
the mellow yellow of the autumnal truth
that the seeing might be as ageless
as the perennial insight
into the beginningless birth of the mind
but my eyes are estranged from the light
like two drops of water on a starless night
ripening like bells
sweetened by thoughts of perishing
above the abyss below them.
Hanging from the tip of a blade of stargrass
they're trying to remember
without crying
what became of the wedding
that wore them like an orchard up the aisle
before they're lowered
like the eyelids of a crocus
and disappear
into the source of themselves
like a well that can't hold back its tears
when it remembers
light on the mindstream
like a voice in a dream
they haven't heard for years.
What can you say?
Life is a breathful.
And if I were to guess
it's probably better that way.
Don't wear the silver off the mirror
with too much looking
but glance at it out of the corner of your eye
in passing
as if to say under your breath
o.k. you've got my attention
what now?
You should stay alert to things
without crowding them out of their eyes
the way a snakecharmer
listens to the cobra
not his flute
and maintains his dangerous distance.
And don't judge things by their magnitude.
Sometimes it's the dim stars
like the pale one above the middle
of the brightest three in Andromeda
that can lead you to a galaxy.
But there too you have to look askance
even to see hundreds of billions of stars
shining at such a great distance
right next door.
When everything in the knowable world is relative
it's because of the interdependence of its origins
on everything else
and blood is thicker than water
except when it's not
but when all is said and done
we're all the seventh son of the seventh son
of an identity theft.
Muddy Waters
there's another mule
kickin in your stall.
Born of fire without smoke
you're a jinn.
Born of water without ice
you shine like a sea urchin.
Born of earth without roots
there's starmud on your boots.
Born of air without clouds
you're welcome everywhere.
Born of stars without eyes
you come as quite a surprise to them.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Fire and Light

Fire and light, fire and light
we were fire and light
before the world began
we shown like stars

now enclosed in flesh
like fireflies in jars
we forget we emit light
and a flame that consumes

Like the earth inside the core
or the lamps inside a room
we are like our Maker
fire and light, fire light,
a love that consumes the cold and night.

poem by J. E. Carpenter
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Journey

I’m on some kind of journey
but I don’t know where it’s going;
I’m growing wings and shedding them,
and I’m true to every thought in my head.
I’ve got a heart, worn down at heels,
a used voodoo doll quilled like a native,
a meteorically battered planet
that wobbles between a kiss and a fist
in the way it keeps running itself around.
I spend too much time alone.
There are no obstructions in any direction;
and barefoot, I’m walking on stars and poppies,
talking to myself like a candle,
weaving my way among the shadows
like a fish through the supple harps
of the silver river reeds. I see
that I’m taking a bath in my own grave
to wash the soiled skies of the painted world
off my eyes, to behold
the brief career of the leaf of life
and how the light gusts out from the windows
like curtains and bird-nets. Life is short
and the new temple never gets further built
than a hole and a single cornerstone, the rest
left to the business of the earth,
all that beauty and magnificence,
unravelled among the mud weavers.
I was inoculated against death
by a splinter of the moon;
by how little time there is for love,
for the root to get drunk
on the fruits of enlightenment and compassion,
by how little I will ever know
of the road to the doorway I stepped through
to stand in awe before the moonspill
on the raven blue waters,
and to look so deeply into the eyes of a woman
who has just conceded an island in her passage,
and the fragrance of unheard music
that I am a pillar of wonder
before the unsayable
as she lets dropp her shadows and feathers of light,
and the blood-god assumes
his flowering crown of fire
to enhance the splendours of his courtly intensities.
What I have lost in the river
I will find in the river
and what I have taken from the sky
I will give back to the sky,
and there shall come a day
when the eclipse will be the brighter mirror,
and the darkness that overtakes me now
will be a gate of stars to a water palace
where the dragonflies and waterlilies
are the sceptres and crowns of a human divinity
that will endure like a whisper of radiance,
a more haunting taste of light,
the rumour of a black rose
that outshines the angels
that coax the lanterns out of the night.
I will evaporate like the flaring of fireflies
on the windy shore of a trembling lake,
like the blue hat plume of smoke
from a gallant winter chimney
into the vastness of my own mind
like a waterbird without a trace into a sweeter, wilder solitude.
And these words will come and go
like the tides of the ocean I was,
like the providential leaves
of unfurling fortune-cookies,
like an avalanche of gold
washed down from the mountain upstream.
I write them in flowing diamond,
I write them in auroras of blood,
in dawns bluer than the iris of a peacock’s eye,
in fire and water and the mystic inks of the night
in the fleeting, indelible dream
of doors and hands and moons,
in warm breath on a cold window,
in a halo of comets
smeared into light by the sun,
in the sidereal wines that bled from bitter wounds,
I have said what it was mine to say
on a page of the wind
that whistled through me like life
greening the sands of the hourglass
with visions that ripened the bell of blood in my heart
to fall like wisdom from its tower
toward a fallible paradise
that won’t leave me as I am for long.
And I will jump again
into this cauldron of joys and sorrows
to string my spinal cord
over the abyss of the guitar-shaped universe,
walking upright
to plead with my own answers
to thaw like a mirror
estranged from the world it reflects
in the self-effacing flames
of the passionate gardens that dance on the wicks.
The awakening seed
echoes these flowers of fire
in the valley of a voice in the furnace
that lies down in the cool grass
by a stream of idle stars
and arrays its vagrant heart
like a breeze of blood in the dust
to the refugees in the shadows.
They move like eyelids
through all the phases of the moon
from an unspooled well of darkness
to the slash of a razor of light
to the threshing of the full harvest
in the siloes of the nightwind
enthroned like a breath of life
in the midst of its own dispersal.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Anyone Can Say What They Feel

Anyone can say what they feel
but how few can sing what they dream.
You put your heart into any art
and people will follow you like a bloodstream.
In self defence against the omnipotence
of being interdependently originated,
you can substantiate your absence
to prove you're not living in the same world
we all do, but where's that going to get you in the end?
You can true your delusions anyway you want
but that's not going to clear you for the truth.
The destroyed see deeper than those who survived.
That man puts a straitjacket on
everytime he says he's arrived.

Just because it's absurd doesn't mean
it isn't believable. Me sitting here
writing this to a caste of albino stars
I haven't reconfigured into a constellation yet
because my imagination keeps shape-shifting me
like a gust of fireflies into myriad myths of origin
since I realized, cosmically speaking, one size
doesn't fit all like a house of transformation
in an Etruscan zodiac. Or a prayer wheel.
Or the ecliptic of a mystic head band
still bound to the skull of a Druid who died young.

Fifty years, a poet, but I don't expect
this is as mad as it's going to get.
I've been deepening my ignorance aesthetically
for light years, but when I cry for things I regret
my tears are still wet, and my mindstream suggests
there was no other way of flowing at the time.
I hang on the hook of the moon prophetically
until the pain grows profound
and ten scribes in a tower write it all down.
I am blessed. I am cursed. I am hunted and ignored.

I love disingenuously to keep from being bored.
And when there's nothing else for the fire to feed on
I offer it my body, my soul, my solitude
and the rare acquiescence of a tumultuous mind
like the third eye of a hurricane with a corneal implant.
I don't keep the impersonality of what I feel about life
in a little drawer with a skull on a keychain
I use to master the coffin doors of the slumlords
that won't open of their own accord
like rosebuds in a rusty locket that's come unhinged.

I don't pour the ocean into a teacup anymore
as much as I used to and there's a little more wisdom
in my love lyrics I haven't completely
taken to heart yet, but I'm trying. I stand
an intimate distance away from the things I cherish.
I'm dying as we all are, but it doesn' t feel
as if I'm going to perish. My emotions are ageless
and inspiration's only the whisper of a star away
and though my dark energy keeps expanding the starfields
further apart, so I have to walk further
to find a wild flower I can identify with,
the dark's beginning to shine like a black candle
with my spinal cord dipped in serpent fire
like a total eclipse of dragon's blood as its wick.

I rave like the vision of a sacred clown who's become
the misfit of his own crazy wisdom, heretically so,
to live up to the standards of my own disobedience,
a saintly truant in the labyrinths of spiritual malfeasance.
A shepherd of wolves, I don't drive the stars
up into the high fields like a small herd of scapegoats
like a hard rock on a mountain keeping
its fossils to itself like apocalyptic alibis
for the silence in the voice of the void that unwords me.

No truth ever mattered a damn to me
if it defeated people who were just trying
to get on with not knowing what to do with their lives.
No beauty ever took my breath away for long
that wasn't emotionally siderealized
or hadn't drowned like a sorceress on an island
in the oceans of the black rose of a new moon.
I prefer to look at the blessings of life
through a broken window more than
the polished mirror of a purified mind
blinded by its own blazing to the diamonds
that pour like stars from the eyes of weeping meteors
that have initiated the extinction
of too many, too much, without rancour
for the fragility of the afterlives in the ashes
that emerged from the inside out
into the available dimensions of a random future.

Time might observe the protocols of its waterclocks
for some who still drink from wishing wells
and hourglasses that are always pouring another
for the road, but in the intimacy of my solitude
time acts extemperaneously upon my heart
like a stranger who could always feel his way past
what he didn't know about what could hurt him
if he ever stopped long enough anywhere to find out.
I'm grateful to the abyss for the black hole
in the centre of my life that can't be fulfilled
galaxy after galaxy at a feast of light that keeps
my appetite for the moonrise of the mystery
intrigued and hungry. My mind was never an experiment
nor my heart the rube of experience.
I didn't map the rain to know where to go.
I let the mountain be my goat-footed guide to the top
and when it came time to come down,
I won my wings falling toward paradise
with more joy in taking the plunge
than I relished in the angelic aviary of my arrival
where nobody jumps unless they've got a parachute on.

Buff the risk with a safety net or you'll candle
like a daylily all the way down into an early grave
people used to say to me when I was a young precipice
ferociously faithful to exploring the nether depths of myself
like a comet jumping the orbitals of a dark halo
to shed a little light like a petal of the sun
on why I'd rather perish in the night like a firestorm
on a purple passage of the wind, than blossom
like the wildflower of a savage mystic
in the genetically engineered garden of a false dawn.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Have Become My Own Season

I have become my own season
living through these renewable eras of you
that come and go
like the fragrances of passing stars
that sometimes stop by the gate
to talk about the garden blooming late.
Some flowers wait for the moon to open,
to throw their arms around space
as if they could encompass everything
in the brief embrace of their petals,
and their seeing is one eye under multiple eyelids
as they burn like jewels in the night
to keep it all shining and bright.
But I've worn out the elbows
of my insatiable longing
on the windowsills of a different insight.
Saddened by the distance, the time, the circumstances,
delinquent desires still hanging out their shingles
like green apples on a dead branch in winter,
withering like the inconsolable eyes of old men
who have died like sons
and now must die like fathers,
mine is the darker radiance
of the faint halo of light
around a black hole
that summons everything
down into it like the sea
sitting below its own salt
at a stranger's table.
You can't look into
the black mirrors in my house
with your eyes open
because they only reflect
what's on the back of your eyelids
where the only light is your own
and you are the road
and the lantern you go by
and everything you feel and think and imagine
is your own true face without skin
not the gate between outside and in.
How could I ever recognize you
in these dark spaces
if it weren't for the trees
and the stars and the moon
and the night stream that runs through me
like a lifeline on the palm of my hand
down from the mountains
in a rush of diamonds and gold
that pour out like the pent-up emotions
of a sword that's just been pulled from a stone?
And how hugely alone the night is
when you love someone as they are
and you realize without effort
that if you hold them a moment in their transience
you hold them like a star in a locket of water
that tastes like the past.
There are people
like treebound barrels of rain
and then there are people like me
who leak out of their lives
like radioactive water
that couldn't pool the pain
long enough to stop the meltdown
long enough to cool the brain,
long enough to let it kill me.
Now in the darkness
seeded with the dust of black dwarfs
trying to clench a fist of coal into diamonds
my auroras are weeping neon dew
like a cheap enlightenment
all over the watercolours of dawn.
And I'm wondering
what kind of an afterlife is this
that I might have foregone
if I were indifferent
to how my solitude deranges me
like a lost continent
wandering through its own mindscapes
like an extinguished star
that wants to make up
just for one luminous moment
a constellation of its own
that doesn't wait upon anyone's eyes
for the themes of its seeing.
And though the skies have changed
like the slides of childhood dreams
with every blink of an eyelid
whenever night approaches me
and asks to sit by my fire
and let the flames and the smoke
of our past lives
speak for the both of us
I look up to give my eyes
like two drops of water
back to their oceanic immensities
and it's always unattainably you
that is shining
like a woman in the window
of a secret house of the zodiac
far off the beaten path
that leads everywhere like a firefly.
And your stars speak to me
as if my flesh were light again
and my heart
that bumps its way through the dark
already a lamp beyond
the Lazarus of wax
that's buried in his own lucidities
like a candle I left for dead.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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