Related quotes: Holding it in, the pain,...

Holding It In, The Pain, The Doubt, The Solitude

Holding it in, the pain, the doubt, the solitude.
Caging my wild heart out in the open where the stars live,
and the bars are all on the inside like toppled pillars
still holding up the friezes of a few high ideals as much
out of habit, as to show a lot of class
in the way you fall to your knees like a bull
in a tauromachia of the zodiac with seven sunbeams
like acupuncture needles or porcupine quills in your back,
as your ear is cut off like Van Gogh's and thrown
like a rose of blood to a lady in the crowd.

Living in the lunar half light of all my uncertainties.
Trying to see things I've been dying for most of my life
not as expiring consolations on a terminal night ward,
night lights in the morgue, flowers beside the bed,
soft, white shoes whispering down the polished halls of the dead
so they could get a good night's sleep, knowing
there were more nightmares in their lives
than the hard pillows of the world
they lay their heads down on as if
they were getting used to their gravestones.
Stripped of meaning like the frayed ends
of my thinning neuronic synapses pared to the bone
without any insulation to bear up to the next lightning strike,
that would make even the weathervanes shriek like rust
with the pain, the pain I'm holding in, on trust
it's going to transmogrify itself into something
death-defyingly creative, the art of a noble calling,
like a snakepit of gamma ray bursts as if space and time
were hemorrhaging like a miscarriage of the heart.

Biting the bullet, eating the pain like an organic vegetable
that's good for you, hoping the character it builds
isn't Frankenstein, or the missing link in the madness
of some other species of suffering keeping its distance
because it can't believe it's descended from you.
My heart numbed by laughing gas, an ice age of novocaine,
I'm still trying to pull the thorns out with my teeth
like a physician who knows how to heal himself
but if the truth be told, feels more like a toxin
than an antidote milked from the fang of the moon,
a junkie slumped in an abandoned back alley easy chair
like a lotus-eater among the feral cats inclusively alone
to nurse his despair into dreaming of no better life than this one.

I'm still trying to pull the sword out of the stone,
a syringe out of the arm of a lion, the last hinge of the door
that's hanging like a lapwing without a wingspan anymore.
Down on myself like a meteor shower trying to exchange
one hundred and thirty-five million years of dinosaurs
for just one warm-blooded moment with a mammal.
As new a day to me as it is to a baby, and I'm doing my best
to live wholly and now in the moment,
without losing my appetite for time
or letting the starfields be overgrown by underbrush,
but when there are more scars and skeletons on your dance card
than there are wounded new moons making a recovery
on the rebound, you can feel like the abandoned ark of a barn
scuttled on Mt. Ararat like a love cruise that wants its money back.
And time is just a snake-oil salesman that heals nothing.

Space turning to glass. Time in convulsions
having tasted a little of its own medicine
and the light that broke this morning like a halo of hope
around the rim of the black hole that had swallowed me live
I was being so cooly detached about, though my heart,
voodoo doll it may have been in the past, beat as fast
as the rain stitching up the seams of the mirrors on the street
as if they were on the same wavelength as a surgical sewing machine,
until it realized this false dawn was as dark as the last
and all it was doing was patching up the ghosts of the past
with clouds of unknowing that had no secrets to reveal
and pathetic fallacy aside, knew nothing about the way I feel.

Trying to be a human who healed more than he wounded.
Trying to be a man that his jeans aren't ashamed to wear.
Trying to be a Zen hard rock strong enough to climb the mountain
than come down on everyone like an avalanche of cornerstones
giving up like Sisyphus on pushing another moonrise up the hill
even when I'm swimming through quicksand
or paving a way that others might follow as lost as I've been
on this long, dark, strange, radiant road
that isn't just another starmap with pit stops,
that isn't the asphalt of spiritual La Brea Tarpits,
or a labyrinth that ends in a cul de sac of glass ceilings
like the crumbs of the dreams of a habitable planet
I saved like a rosary of near-earth asteroids
just a few fly-bys outside the Van Allen Radiation Belts
I wore like a bodhisattvic warrior without any scalps
to bring things back together that have been too long apart.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Related quotes

The Death

I’m hit. It’s come at last, I feel a smart
Of needles in ……My God …. I’m hit again!
No pain this time……no pain….. and yet…..
my heart……
Where is my heart? ‘Tis strange I feel no pain.
The night is still, the night is very still
I feel the April rain upon my hair.
I see the lights upon yonder hill
Agleam and shining in the silent air.
How soft the grasses seem-how soft and cool!
How long the valley looks-how long and deep!
How warm the rain! I feel a little pool
Beside my hand. I feel…..Can this be sleep?
Can this be sleep…. This buzzing in my head?….
Good God! A light! A light! The pool! I’m ***

poem by Leon Gellert
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Art Of Life

Desert Rose
Why do you live alone
If you are sad
I'll make you leave this life
Are you white, blue or bloody red
All I can see is drowning in cold grey sand
The winds of time
You knock me to the ground
I'm dying of thirst
I wanna run away
I don't know how to set me free to live
My mind cries out feeling pain
I've been roaming to find myself
How long have I been feeling endless hurt
Falling down, rain flows into my heart
In the pain I'm waiting for you
Can't go back
No place to go back to
Life is lost, Flowers fall
If it's all dreams
Now wake me up
If it's all real
Just kill me
I'm making the wall inside my heart
I don't wanna let my emotions get out
It scares me to look at the world
Don't want to find myself lost in your eyes
I tried to drown my past in grey
I never wanna feel more pain
Ran away from you without saying any words
What I don't wanna lose is love
Through my eyes
Time goes by like tears
My emotion's losing the color of life
Kill my heart
Release all my pain
I'm shouting out loud
Insanity takes hold over me
Turning away from the wall
Nothing I can see
The scream deep inside
reflecting another person in my heart
He calls me from within
"All existence you see before you
must be wiped out :
Dream, Reality, Memories,
and Yourself"
I begin to lose control of myself
My lust is so blind, destroys my mind
Nobody can stop my turning to madness
No matter how you try to hold me in your heart
Why do you wanna raise these walls
I don't know the meaning of hatred
My brain gets blown away hearing words of lies
I only want to hold your love
Stab the dolls filled with hate
Wash yourself with their blood
Drive into the raging current of time
Swing your murderous weapon into the belly
"the earth"
Shout and start creating confusion
Shed your blood for pleasure
And what ? for love ?
What am I supposed to do ?
I believe in the madness called "Now"
Past and future prison my heart
Time is blind
But I wanna trace my love
on the wall of time, over pain in my heart
Art of life
Insane blade stabbing dreams
Try to break all truth now
But I can't heal this broken heart in pain
Cannot start to live, Cannot end my life
Keep on crying
Close my eyes
Time breathes I can hear
All love and sadness
melt in my heart
Dry my tears
Wipe my bloody face
I wanna feel me living my life
outside my walls
You can't draw a picture of yesterday, so
You're painting your heart with your blood
You can't say "No"
Only turning the wheel of time
with a rope around your neck
You build a wall of morality and take a breath
from between the bricks
You make up imaginary enemies and are chased by them
You're trying to commit suicide
You're satisfied with your prologue
Now you're painting your first chapter black
You are putting the scraps of life together
and trying to make an asylum for yourself
You're hitting a bell at the edge of the stage
and
You are trying to kill me
I believe in the madness called "Now"
Time goes flowing, breaking my heart
Wanna live
Can't let my heart kill myself
Still I haven't found what I'm looking for
Art of life
I try to stop myself
But my heart goes to destroy the truth
Tell me why
I want the meaning of my life
Do I try to live, Do I try to love
in my dream
I'm breaking the wall inside my heart
I just wanna let my emotions get out
Nobody can stop
I'm running to freedom
No matter how you try to hold me in your world
Like a doll carried by the flow of time
I sacrificed the present moment for the future
I was in chains of memory half-blinded
Losing my heart, walking in the sea of dreams
Close my eyes
Rose breathes I can hear
All love and sadness melt in my heart
Dry my tears
Wipe my bloody face
I wanna feel me living my life
outside my mind
Dreams can make me mad
I can't leave my dream
I can't stop myself
Don't know what I am
What lies are truth ?
What truths are lies ?
I believe in the madness called "Now"
Time goes flowing, breaking my heart
Wanna to live
Can't let my heart kill myself
Still I haven't found what I'm looking for
Art of life
I try to stop myself
But my heart goes to destroy the truth
Tell me why
I want the meaning of my life
Do I try to live, Do I try to love
Art of life
An Eternal Bleeding heart
You never wanna breathe your last
Wanna live
Can't let my heart kill myself
Still I'm feeling for
A Rose is breathing love
in my life

song performed by by X JAPAN
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Art Of Life

song performed by by X JAPAN
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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It Doesnt Have To Be This Way

Sometimes alone at night I lie and wonder --
Was breaking up the only thing to do
We live our separate lives like perfect strangers,
But in the end, were really perfect fools --
Maybe in time well shake the memories,
Maybe in time forget the pain --
But baby tonight, this heart remembers
*it doesnt have to be this way --
We dont need to live the lie anymore
I want you back, Im holding on --
It doesnt have to be this way
Here we stand -- loves an open door,
It doesnt have to be this way*
With breakin up there comes this empty feelin
The child within you, lost without a prayer
So you run a little wild searching for some meaning
Deep into the streets of your despair
What does it take to shake your memory --
What in the world could ease the pain
How can I make your heart surrender
( * repeat)
( * repeat)

song performed by by Survivor
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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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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Red Hill Mining Town

]from father to son
The blood runs thin
Our faces frozen (still) against the wind
The seam is split
The coal face cracked
The lines are long
And theres no going back
Through hands of steel
And a heart of stone
Our labor day has come and gone
And you leave us holding on
In red hill town
As the lights go down
Im hanging on
Youre all thats left to hang on to
Im holding on
Youre all thats left to hang on to
The glass is cut
The bottle runs dry
Our love runs cold
In the caverns of the night
Were wounded by fear
Injured in doubt
I can lose myself
Im holding on
Youre all thats left to hold on to
And we scorch the earth
Set fire to the sky
Stoop so low to reach so high
A link is lost
The chain undone
Now we wait all day
For the night to come
And it comes
And it comes
Like a hunter (child)
Im hanging on
Youre all thats left to hang on to
Im hanging on to
Youre all thats left to hang on to
We see love slowly stripped away
Our love, has seen a better day
Im hanging on
Youre all thats left to hold on to
Im holding on
Youre all thats left to hold on to
See the lights go down on red hill town
See lights go down on red hill town

song performed by by U2
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Want to Be Brilliant, Want To Shine Like A Black Star

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sad Holidays

The holidays are getting near
Bringing most people great cheer
These days bring back pain from the dead
The holidays I always have to dread
Thinking back through the many years
Trying to be happy, holding back the tears
Getting through life one day at a time
Out of the darkness I must climb
I can't live in the pain from the past
Please let it be over, don't let it last
I love the warmth from the summer sun
So let this time of year be done
I like the green grass and flowers in bloom
They make me happiest, instead of this gloom
So hurry up summer and come back around
And I won't be sad, happiness I'd have found
I have a good life and what's wrong with me
When the holidays come, I can't feel free!

poem by Donna Nimmo
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Lifes A Journey

I say life’s a journey, because life’s something we have once and everything we do and say is something we can’t go back and change. So I look at life as a journey. That I have to live full out, with no regrets. I don’t have time to live in the past or think about all the bad things. Almost all human being takes life for granted, and I don’t want to be one of those people. So I promised my self to never ever live with regrets, so I try to do whatever my heart tells me. And I try to stand up for all my believes, and I can’t do that if I live in the past or with regrets. It’s a waist of time,
Because life’s a journey.

I usually say if you got a dream go for it, because giving up on a dream is like giving up on life and giving up on life is like sitting and asking god to die. I know it’s hard to go for your dream when people tell you, that you won’t make it. So I just tell my self, whenever I fall I get back up, because I won’t give up without a fight.
Because life’s a journey.

What you’ve got if you don’t have faith, I know it’s hard to hold on to, when we live in a world like this. But I always hold on to my faith and my hopes.
My believes is what often keeps me going,
Because life’s a journey.

Life is hard, we all know it isn’t fair but I say stop worrying about what you/we don’t have and appreciate what you/we have. Because whenever you/we have a bad day someone else has a worse day and in worse case someone might be dying,
Because life’s a journey.

This world need some love, I know it’s easier to hate than love but at least could we try to respect each other. We would get so much more out of this journey then, I really believe that. Maybe sometimes we should just start to think about our self’s than everybody else. Because if we keep hate on each other, we will soon see world war 3, and I don’t think any one wants that to happen. I wish we could all respect each other, black and white, blue and yellow, bigger and smaller. Because at the end of the day we all human being on a journey that can end any time. It’s sad but it’s true,
Because life’s a journey.

Life’s a journey till the day it ends and when it ends there is no looking back or taking back. We had our changes only doomsday will show us if we wasted our time on our journey or if we enjoyed the journey and appreciated what we had. When we are at the end of our journey that’s when we have to face death. Many people forget we have to die because they might be afraid, but I’m not because it’s a part of life.
Life’s a journey till it ends.

poem by Precious Mason
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Your Eyes For Awhile

Your eyes for awhile
were the only eyes
I could see through
to catch a glimpse of god;
were windows into my own soul
that I could look through from the outside
without throwing the moon
through my reflection like a stone
in the hand of an angry boy.
And it was always as true
as the way your heart grew
that you could love strangers
easier than I do even now
after all these years of learning how
to talk to mirrors in their own language.
And you were not one woman
but all women forever
when I saw you once
bending down like the dusk
to touch the last of the flowers
as if you would never see them again.
As serene as the evening
there was no labour in your beauty
and I swear when I saw you that night
I felt as if I were the whole world watching
time put a finger to its lips
and pour its fountain
into the flow of your body
as if it were the sum of all passage.
And though I was your friend in all things
every evening since
the candle went out
in the lantern of a lost tomorrow
I have walked out into abandoned fields alone
and asked the saddest questions
of the most distant stars
knowing there is not enough light sometimes
even in the eyes of God
to be a companion of our sorrows.
And the questions grow longer
as the darkness deepens
the echo of my longing
in a well as dry as my skull
and closes its gates like scars.
And then those nights come
like a life or a day
or even just this moment
when I stop asking
why human suffering
is always indescribably true
and joyful as an irreproachable buffoon
sword-dancing alone with the moon
who writes me dangerous loveletters
as if she were the Lady of the Lake
receiving me back
like a funeral ship
into this mysterium of you,
I can almost believe that you know
even though the night mocks the crow
that pines for mercy
and turns its lightless face toward you
as if it could still feel
the warmth of the sun at midnight
in your eyes again
like the afterlife of light
playing with fireflies in the abyss
now that the summer constellations have gone down;
that somehow you must know
like a guitar
on the far side of a room
where someone is singing
as if they had their ear
to the womb
of your irrevocable absence
that binds me to you with every breath
I take for two
as if I had learned to live on death
to keep you alive in me
where you still flow through the seasons
on the nightstreams of my blood
like blossoms and leaves and stars
and the moon leaves no scars on the water;
must know. Or a demon’s a kinder face
to bestow on the darkness
than a black hole without eyes,
though it’s taken many, long, painful years
for the night to share the light with its jewels again
and as many schools as there are fools to fill them
that even just one
of those slightly compassionate smiles
you would send across the room
to cool the furnace of my heart
with the lightness of one snowflake,
one feather
gracing a change in the weather,
knew more about love
as a raindropp knows the sea
than all of us
who have been washed up
on this cold, lonely shore together
thinking we may have been saved
for something more
than this tidal longing
to brave the sea again
and even if doomed to drown
as I have learned
from this shale of pain
that has carbon-dated the eras
of my missing you
like a life that didn’t
flash before my eyes
as I went down for good with everything,
to thank-you, o, yes,
with nothing but love and light in my heart
and your face in the eye of my solitude
as I stand before the sea in gratitude
to thank-you
as you well knew one day I could
for the generosity of the wound
that has run like my life
down these eyes
these windows
this page
these empty mirrors
of autumn rain
that have wept for years without you
just to see you again
for one moment more
than the time I have left
to know that I never will.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Timeless Visions

Try to rape your mind with your drugs and your guns
And try to change the world, for your time will never let go
Of all of the industries of hate, all of the industries of crime
All of the industries ov time
They leave you once again
They rip apart your mind
They steal up all your time
They never ever let go
We always left, so live it up
All in the back they scrape apart the flesh on your mind
They never believe in treachery
They never opened their mind
They are the ones who steal your life
They are the ones who get out of sight
We are just here to live our lives
They always win the war with their pride
They all live in death
They all shine in it
They are death unleashed to the world
They all breath undone in your head
Tomorrow's time is your past alone in being
And dying is your past, a lie
Feel the pain, the cross on your back
Now, die, we'll feel the pain on your mind
On the edge, on the edge, on the edge
You'll melt away
You'll fade away
Life is a double edged sword for you to choke on
And cry some more
No vision, no light, no nothing, empty inside, no time
Just a void eating up your mind for space and time, no one realign
Your mind is junk but you just eat it up
No feeling no light feel your head after all this time
You run with these ideas to explain your disposition.

song performed by by Velvet Acid Christ
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Someone Lingers In Your Absence Like An Icon

Someone lingers in your absence like an icon, a gate
to an open field where the white horse
that stood in the tall grass, grazing on its solitude
like a phase of the moon come to earth
is gone. A bird, a purple martin with so much
distance and disappearance in it wings
and the open vastness of the skies it was absorbed by
I can barely hear you singing from here
over the raving of an unkempt wind on a crazy night
when the ghosts are rioting in their graves
like old leaves without attachments at the feet of the new
and gravity receives the grave goods of the tree
as do I these strange epiphanies of you
that haunt me retroactively like apple-bloom.

And the depth of the emptiness that informs
the substance of my imaginings, devastates me
like an eclipse slowly swallowing my heart
like a black cataract of snake skin I keep
trying to shake like a cosmic egg without much luck.

As if I were bleeding out like a rose after
the green thorns have hardened into fangs
that are killing and curing me at the same time.
Some nights I just want to join my emptiness to yours
and be done with it, no more of this, no more.

No more of watching the beauty of the world
burn out into a dark radiance that makes me
want to gouge my eyes out so I can see it without wincing.
Without feeling so wounded by the abundance of the rose
that blooms and disappears like the auroral apparitions
of a widow in veils of spider webs and black lightning,
thinking it might be you under there somewhere I can't go
without losing you again. Check-mate. Pain.
And it isn't anything either of us can do anything about.

It just goes down that way. The absence of your shining,
small nonrenewable gestures of your heart and hands
vividly recalled like modest butterfly volumes of poetry
blowing down an abandoned street at night in the rain, you
sewing a patch on my heart with the delicacy of a needle
mending a flying carpet grounded like a wavelength of light.

As I am now that you've become that rip in my heart
all the stars are pouring out of like a puncture wound
I let go right through me like needles and gamma rays
piercing the heart of a voodoo doll of dark matter
that makes me feel like wooden puppet of light
carved out of one of these black walnut trees.

Endure. Participate. See. Wonder.
Praise. Celebrate. Mourn. Do the next best thing.
And when you're hurting your worst, sing.
And even when I'm soldiering my way through stone
like a flying fish in the wrong medium,
or walking alone with the Alone through the woods,
just to meet you where you ask me to when you call
and I come like a burning bridge down to the river,
wondering if I might have lived here once in another lifetime,
I do say these things to myself like medicinal chants
and preventative medicine, healing totems with benign effect
hung in the medicine bag slung around my neck.
Sweet grass and a pinch of sacred earth, just in case
I forget how to dance on my own grave
with grace and flare and style and an enigmatic smile
that really means it if it really means anything at all.

Or not succumb to this ice-age of a bell
my tongue is stuck to like a child's to a wire fence,
or this black diamond nightbird
that cuts my darkness to the quick
because it's got nothing to sing about
that can answer the call of the living for someone
on a foggy hill to come to the rescue of the empty lifeboat
drifting like the corpse of a dead swan downriver,
except the dead air of this strange place
where space is indelibly bruised by the passing
of the beauty it once contained like stars in a Mason jar.

Like a candle in the lantern of a skull
I've carried before me like a nightwatchman
on the edge of a dangerous precipice for lightyears
until I lost my footing and fell in one night,
as I once did into love, and learned to see in the dark
I was growing wings where I had none before
and looking up from the bottom of an empty wishing well
noticed the dead still blooming like stars
in the white shadows of the sun at midnight.

And out of the corners of my eyes
when what I can't see what need to know about being alive
comes looking for me like the sacred syllable
on the lips of a pearl diver on the moon in total eclipse
like a kiss out of nowhere, comes like the singing bird
to the dead branch in my heart
that's having trouble remembering how to blossom
after a long winter, as if you'd summoned me to the trees
like a purple passage in the Book of the Dead,
to teach me how to take the pain
and through the alchemy of the grief
that flows through my heartwood like light and rain
turn it into life again, as if every leaf
were a new loveletter from the dead
I've been saving for years like expurgated starmaps
illustrated by exiled constellations in Braille
to a spiritual lost and found at my fingertips
where they know who you are, and they've seen you
like a soft moonrise glowing through the willows
down by the river that weeps like a black mirror
for the stars and waterbirds in passing
that appear and disappear each in its time
and you wait for me like the longing of the dead
to make some kind of sign, however simple and austere,
the withered star of a wild rose without a flower,
that let's me know you're near, you're here
rooted in me on earth where we've both come
to renew our shining from the bottom up to the blossom.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Desperate Heart

One night, one empty room, one man gettin over you
One star, one lonely moon, I make a wish, I know will never come true
You call my name, and you beg me to hold you again
But the truth remains, Im only a fool who cant help but pretend
Chorus:
Its all over but Im holding on, I cant let go until the love is gone
Its all over but I keep holding on with a desperate heart
With my desperate heart
Some nights, I try in my mind, I see myself learning someone new
Still I know, Im wasting my time, no one can take the place of you
So I close my eyes, I swear I feel you here by my side
But its all only a lie, I need to believe for my heart to survive
Its all over but Im holding on, I cant let go until the love is gone
Its all over but I keep holding on with a desperate heart
With my desperate heart, I keep holding on
(guitar solo)
All this time Ive been drowning in hopeless illusions Im keeping inside
That someday youll walk out of the shadows and back into my life
Its all over but Im holding on, I cant believe your love for me is gone
Its all over but I keep holding on (with a desperate heart)
Yeah with my desperate heart, I cant let go until the love is gone
(all over but Im holding on) I keep holding on
(all over but Im holding on) I cant believe your love for me is gone
(all over but I keep holding on)
(all over but Im holding on)
(all over but I keep holding on)...

song performed by by Starship
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Before This Night Is Through

(cantarelli & a anderson)
Producer for bonnie: jim steinman
I been crazy for you, so long
How could something so right turn out so wrong
Words, never mean what they say
Words just get in the way
Before this night is through
Gonna make you see
How l been blind to you
You been blind to me
Before this night is through were gonna get to the truth
Before this night is through
Gonna heal the pain
Before this night is through
Youll be back again
No matter what we do I know well be all right
Before this night is through
Hearts broken in pieces no time to mend
Without loving they fall apart in the end
Fools, never admit theyre wrong
They live their lives alone
Before this night is through
Girl were gonna see how I belong to you
You belong to me
Before this night is through were gonna get to the truth
Before this night is through
Well get past the pain
Before this night is through
Youll be back again
No matter what we do I know well be ll right
Before this night is through
Come inside close the door come to me now
Well find our way we know how
Let the past be the past let it all fall away
Baby I know we told lies and to lie is a sin
Well get to the truth we will simply begin
Instrumental.before this night is through were gonna get to the truth
Before this night is through
Well get past the pain
Before this night is through
Youll come back again
No matter what we do I know well be all right
Before this night, before this night is through

song performed by by Bonnie Tyler
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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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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And Should I Recall Whose Eyes

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I want to be a bird that dissipates
in the mauve distance like water in the air.
I want to be a fire whose flames
never stop aspiring to the stars,
though every time they're almost within grasp
they disappear like petals on the wind,
the pages fall out of the book I'm burning
like a sacrificial rose of galactic hydrogen,
and I'm left with a handful of ash
I can stuff my pillow with like the down
of a phoenix in the urn of his worst nightmare.

And being strong seldom helps.
Or feathering your dragons
to convince yourself they're bluebirds.
Strong means condemned to solitude.
Hanging on to the mountain with one arm
to keep it from falling to its death
in the valley it dug like its own grave
in the valley below. Biting the bullet
like a crystal skull until your back molars break
and you're swallowing little flakes of glass
like the beginning of a snow squall
even as you're smiling like a grimace
on a death mask trying to hold its tears back
like a glacier trying to discipline the mindstream.

Strong means you don't use the fossils of other birds
as crutches for your lapwings. Your calender of scars
begins to smile more affectionately at you
as you get older like waxing crescent moons
and this avalanche of meteoric life
looks more like a windfall of ore and apples
with seeds like snake-eyed dice inside
or the seven come eleven of a coal mine
that finally clarified its darkness like diamonds.
When bad news comes you fall on it
like a hand grenade in a daycare center
as you strain to keep yourself together.
Strong means being taken for granted
like the solid cornerstone that can take the weight
of the world that towers above it like quicksand.

Strong means you don't hesitate to eliminate
your distinctions when someone's drowning,
whether they're a fly in a toilet bowl,
Icarus falling out of the sky because his wings
were insincere, Narcissus plunging into his face,
or a siren caught up in the undertow of her song,
you show up like a lifeboat with a lighthouse
full of fireflies for a lantern, words for a rudder
and a star to set sail by and pull everyone in
to your emptiness, happy you've finally found a use for it.

A holy book says that no one's asked to bear
more than they can carry, and it's probably true
from one direction of prayer, but I swear, lately,
one camel isn't enough to shoulder what
it's going to take a caravan on the moon to walk
this cargo of heavy metals to a nuclear dump site
to the dark side where it's always midnight at noon.

One moment there are funeral bells dissolved in the rain
like sugar-cubes of acid in a wishing well
and the next, a spear of insight penetrates my heart
and I can' t tell if it's a pin meant for a butterfly
or a voodoo doll, or as a dance floor for the angels
to learn how to waltz without bumping into each other
like Canada geese taking off from a trashed corn field
as if they needed an air traffic controller and a runway
to bear the souls of the dead west and south
as I begin to wonder if death really is too pricey a ticket
to unload all these camels of their burdens
like sacs of genetically modified bee pollen
I've gathered radioactively from the starfields
so it doesn't derange the hive or taint its honey and flowers,
and travelling lighter than life, go with them.

Yet I know I won't because my heart's
mortared into my Mongol blood like a brick
in the Temple of Life at Samarkand
and I would think of it as genocide
to kill even so much as a single human
who's ever stood nightwatch in a crow's nest
for a fleet sailing into a divine wind.
Sooner or later I'll be washed up
on the event horizon of another black hole
at the center of a galactic starfish
all my lucidities will stick to like myriad universes
nacreously gathering their pearls
like planets and new moons out of the nebulosity
of these lunar sandstorms whipping my eyes
with the radiance of a hundred billion burning stars
that get thrown in my wounds to cauterize
the scream of my fountainmouth hemorrhaging
in the dead silence I keep like a vow to myself
not to shriek out in pain at the arrows
that strike the hearts of the clear-eyed hawks in autumn.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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End Of The Road (Instrumental)

spoken)
Girl you know we belong together
I have no time for you to be playing with my heart like this
You'll be mine forever baby, you just see
We belong together
And you that I'm right
Why do you play with my heart,
Why do you play with my mind?
Said we'd be forever
Said it'd never die
How could you love me and leave me and never say good-bye?
When I can't sleep at night without holding you tight
Girl, each time I try I just break down and cry
Pain in my head oh I'd rather be dead
Spinnin' around and around
CHORUS:
Although we've come to the End Of The Road
Still I can't let you go
It's unnatural, you belong to me, I belong to you
Come to the End of the Road
Still I can't let you go
It's unnatural, you belong to me, I belong to you
Girl, I know you really love me,
You just don't realize
You've never been there before
It's only your first time
Maybe I'll forgive you, hmm
Maybe you'll try
We should be happy together forever, you and I
Can you love me again like you loved me before
This time I want you to love me much more
This time instead just come to my bed
And baby just don't let me, don't let me down
REPEAT CHORUS.
(spoken)
Girl I'm here for you
All those times of night when you just hurt me
And just run out with that other fella
Baby I knew about it, I just didn't care
You just don't understand how much I love you do you?
I'm here for you
I'm not out to go out and cheat on you all night
Just like you did baby but that's all right
Hey, I love you anyway
And I'm still gonna be here for you 'till my dying day baby
Right now, I'm just in so much pain baby
Coz you just won't come back to me
Will you? Just come back to me
(Lonely)
Yes baby my heart is lonely
(Lonely)
My heart hurts baby
(Lonely)
I feel pain too
Baby please
This time instead just come to my bed
And baby just don't let me down
REPEAT CHORUS

song performed by by Boyz II Men
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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If Only There Were One Word I Could Say

If only there were one word I could say
that could reach out and touch your sorrow,
a cool kiss of moonlight on the eyelid of a widowed rose.
If there were a way to make it better,
to wake you up from the pain you are living,
a dream of rain on a kinder windowpane in the morning.
If I could mend what was broken
beyond feeling and thought and goodness
how could I not feel the piercings of the wounded voodoo doll
victimized by her own mortality
as I am by my own
and pull the pins out of her butterflies
as readily as I would pull the quills out of a dog's nose?
Accustomed to grief, accustomed to hearing
someone crying in the backyard of the house next door,
at three in the morning, accustomed to observing
the angry solitude of the skate-boarder
always out alone on the abandoned street
as if that were his lonely girlfriend,
trying to figure out why the embittered old woman
never smiles back, or a child will sometimes look at you
as if it were a vicious heart attack
that wanted you to feel as paralysed as it does.
Accustomed to the skin that grows over our eyes
like mother-of-pearl cataracts
so we can fake something beautiful of our indifference
because how much helplessness in the face of pain
and complicit suffering can one person take
before they go mad walking in a world of nettles
with no skin on, no atmosphere to burn
the meteoritic slag of incoming
astronomical catastrophes off before they hit ground zero?
Accustomed to the agony of enduring innocence
inspiring the genius of the malignant
to greater atrocities than anyone's even aware of,
accustomed to the shock of depravity
leaving a more indelible impression upon my blood
than the acts of the heroes who show up
in desolate dangerous places with tents and oxygen
to stay longer than the news, whose life
isn't half a sin of omission, and the other half
constrained by a straitjacket for their own good?
If there were a way to imagine pain away
as easily as we imagine it into being,
and have the work of one be the healing of the other,
before sitting here in silence as my only bedside manner
before the dying and the dead
painting death masks for the living
that might make them feel like children in disguise again,
I'd greet them at the happy gates of hell
like some spiritual good guess of an earthly intuition
that a liberated imagination isn't just
the placebo of another culpable superstition,
but a way to reverse the curse we've laid upon ourselves
like a sacred syllable of innocence
said backwards in the mirror
without slandering our own human divinity
by denouncing our delusion at the expense of the real.
It's been well said that the mind is an artist,
able to paint the worlds, and I would add,
for the slow and thorough like me,
it's also a carpenter, able to build them
and that's how you understand the world
from the ground up as if everything had to be on the level,
or the healing herb of a nurse, the first
to arrive like spring with a white flower on her head.
Or a lumbering bell of wisdom and seasoned sorrow
sees the world as a tortoise that's been asked to dance
at its own funeral as if there were no more weddings to celebrate.
The same eye by which you see it
is not the floodgate between imagination and reality
as if one were the shipwreck of the other,
as if the mountain were separate from the avalanche,
but the way you'll live to be it after awhile.
A tear can no more be distinguished from the rain
than the light can be from flowers,
than eternity can be from time
or you from the mysterious powers of mind
that are living through you
in a creative turmoil of absolute freedom
that isn't second-guessing what kind of universe
you want to live in, if you were to live in it alone.
If the stones to you are merely dead languages
that have had their say, having said nothing
for millions of years, if you can't see
your home constellations
gleaming in the starmud all over your feet,
whose skull, other than yours, rolled the bones
and came up snake-eyes in your vision of life
as ritually unluckier than death, if not yours, you, who else?
If there were one mondo, shibboleth, mantra, or blessing
I could say that would show you
just as a mirage is a near relative of water,
the dream of what the desert's longing for,
the memory of what it used to know,
so delusion is just as much a friend of reality
as the left hand is to the right hand of the wheelwright.
Nor pain the enemy of joy, nor winter, spring.
No more than the silence of the dead is hostile
to those who would sing, nor the helplessness of who you were
a hurtle in the way of the sufficiency you've become.
Out of its dark abundance the inconceivable illuminates the flower
as well as the star, the mind, the heart, the tree, the rock, the river,
and the candles cry along with the abandoned lover
as once they lit up like fireflies in an ecstasy of insight
that made them wholly, solely, hopelessly the other
in a union of one revealed by the bonds of separation.
If only I could speak one improbable word of truth
that might absolve you of seeking irresolute resolutions
for the empty grails and fables of pain
you left like the skulls of milestones
and wounded roadsigns along the way.
It wouldn't matter at all to me
whether your chains were iron or gold,
or you were snared by the crescent thorns
of the birdnets and dreamcatchers
that slipped like fireflies between the lines
like insights into time and space
that couldn't be grasped until
it was well understood and forgotten
the life isn't solid, it's real.
If only there were one word I could say
one sound, sign, star, dropp of water
I could offer you in the goblet of a flower
that only blooms an hour in the morning
like the tear of a distant ocean of time,
that would lay a kiss upon your heavy eyelids,
or that stone of a forehead you've dreamed upon
so long now like the pillow of a sleeping mountain
that circles it like a cloud that refuses
to believe it hasn't already risen from the dead
and leaves an unsigned loveletter from a shy star
just like you who are learning to shine underwater
as if there were no end of the message or the messenger.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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