En.Citatepedia^®.ro

I Left Your Image Of Me Shining

I left your image of me shining
just where you wanted it
in that glass menagerie
of broken mirrors
you've hung from the ceilings
like chandeliers
like constellations of frozen tears
in the thirteenth house
of the misbegotten
on the wrong side of the tracks
off the beaten paths of the zodiacs
that sometimes like to go slumming down here
when the sun shines at midnight
and the moon's out of town.
I left the light on
but that star is long gone
past these extremities of shining
into the abyss of an unforeseeable future
that disappears into its own illumination
like an eye into its own seeing
or a bad likeness of God
into a human being.
I leave you handcuffed to the dead
like the Standard Model of the Universe
that lost it all
like the physics of the Mad Hatter
to the singularity at the bottom of a blackhole.
I would have met you half way like anti-matter.
I would have found a way
to bend that negative space
that so often distorts your face
into a more comely illusion of time
that isn't stitched together so clumsily
like some patchwork bride of Frankenstein
taking it out on the mirrors
that keep dodging your reflection
by turning their eyes to the wall
everytime you insist
you're the most beautiful of all.
So be it.
You are.
Good-bye.
You're trying to impose
a habitable order on the universe
like the cube of the sphere of life
that would allow you to get by
like Tolstoy
who built a shoemaker's hovel
in the middle of his aristocratic palace
to improve the commonality of his inferiors.
You're like the Taj Mahal looking for a room to rent.
You're a shore-hugger trying to teach
a jumper how to fall toward paradise
without a parachute.
And if I ignore your raging advice
as I do now and have done
it's only because I play Russian roulette
with the lightning
and you come to the table with a cap-gun.
And I'm wholly at home
even immortally alone
in this compatible chaos
that improvises my life
sometimes as a dirty joke
I go along with for a lark
and other times
raises me up above
the web of my furthest horizons
like a spider that's transcended clinging to anything
and dancing in my radiance
like a star that isn't afraid of the dark.
Listen to me, woman.
I'm singing.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Creed For The Desperate

Don't let your bones be softened by fear.
By the time you hear it the lightning has already struck.
Don't listen for the echoes of things you haven't said.
And stop breaking your fortune-cookie skull open
like an old prophetic head
that claims it's been to the dark side
without being dead.
Don't let disaster define you.
You're not the bouquet
of a second class vinegar
hovering over a first class wine.
No crisis ever comes with its own identity
until you give it yours.
Move calmly over your own waters
like clouds in the eye of a puddle.
Walk as if you were already
following your own funeral
and lost your way to the grave.
People make much of being
but seeing is enough
to save you sometimes
from your own obscurity.
And when was there ever any security
in security
as if this flame were safer than that?
How long has the universe risked being you?
Take a chance on your own magic
and pull your life like a tiger
out of your own hat
to eat the rabbit you've become.
Then there's nothing to run from.
Become the sword
and you won't cut yourself.
Become the fire
and you won't burn.
Become life again
and you won't pass away
breath after breath after breath
wishing you could stay
in the negative space
of a comfortable death
that eulogizes your lies.
There are full moons
that don't weigh
like pennies on your eyes
to keep you from seeing too much.
And there are things of the earth
that have followed you into exile
like a new birth of things you can touch
that are wholly yours in passing
like music from a keyboard
or a fire in church.
And you may be down
to your last black beatitude
and righteously uphold the sanctity
of your will not to listen
to anything but the clinking of your own chains
and the mournful whistle
of your distant dying derailed thought-trains
giving up the ghost
but you're just sucking on the tit
of a perverse purity
and you're milking it
like the bitter truth
for all it's worth.
And it's not worth much.
And you may have flattened
all the mountains
and filled all the valleys
of your flatlining event horizons
but there's still life going on
in the crooked back alleys
of secret dimensions
you don't know about
stuck in the house all day
like a child afraid to go out.
You look at a tree.
You see a crutch.
You look at the moon.
You see a scar.
You look at a star
and you're lost for good wherever you are.
And it's not really a dysfunction of your imagination
that you can look at the Taj Mahal
and see a one-room hovel with slumlords
jacking up the rent.
It's good to look both ways
at any spiritual crossing.
But you see a stick in the water
and you think the water's bent.
And to shrink anything as the Tao says
you must first expand it.
But I think the Tao meant the universe
not a used condom on the death's-head
of a stillborn resurrection.
But you'd have to fall
further than you have
to understand it.
You'd have to fall
from your present plight on the world mountain
all the way down until you came to a space
where there were no more opposites in the abyss
and nothing in order
nothing amiss
nothing is meant
to scare you into being
and nothing is trying to hold you back.
What's your lover's mouth
if not a wound
you can kiss into healing?
You can see it that way.
Or you can harden the bruised fruit
with brittle tears
and flint knap chandeliers
to fall from star-crossed mirrors
like rain from broken glass
that hasn't fired up a single root in years
to dream of flowers.
The mind's an artist.
The painting's yours.
A self portrait in the image of God
whom no one's ever seen.
I see a black star in the bottom of a tulip
shining up at me
like the direction it took
to get to the other side.
You see a poisonous spider
like the leftover lees
of a flowerless wine
in the eye of a toxic goblet.
And you might raise it to your lips
like a lunar eclipse
but you never drink up.
And even when you do
it's a bad guest in the house of life
that drinks from his own skull
like the grail of a grape on the vine
with one eye open
as if he trusted the wine
but not the cup.
You're not the cure
that failed the ailing kingdom.
And you're not the miracle
that got up and walked away
to spread the word like a bird at sea
that had just discovered a tree to perch in
you might have sinned as a crow
but now that you've been saved
you're a carrier pigeon.
You can sit here all day if you want
like a buddha on his tatami mat
thinking bituminously
about burning enlightened diamonds
back into eyeless coal.
You can squat like a tree in rings of fat
smashing small thoughts
like eggs on the rocks
trying to read your fate
in their misfortune
like a chromosome
you hold in common
with all those who hate
having been born.
You can heap your afterbirth with scorn.
You can turn your eyes
into a pair of gravitational lenses
like dark matter
and wince at the stars
like cinders of light
that contradict your seeing.
And you wouldn't be wrong
because you can see it that way too.
The same eye by which I see God
is the eye by which She sees me.
Two creative geniuses in one studio
painting each other in the nude.
And she shows you hers
and you show her yours
as she enflames your solitude
by not putting her name on it
though it's a perfect likeness of you.
Your face warped into
a convoluted starless space
like the opening gala
of a staged extinction.
And your soul shrouded in lampblack
like a candle
that soils its own light
by putting on a deathmask of night
like a snakeoil salesman
selling skin to ghosts.
And there where your eyes used to be
two black holes
surrounded by random haloes of light
like lipstick on the mouths of star-nosed moles.
And look at that scar of red she's used
to catch your ambiguous smile.
That's the kind of genius
that leaves the asylum gate open for awhile
for everyone to get into your style
of imploding your eyes
like black dwarfs
with abstract depressionist astigmatism
as if gravity couldn't dig a grave deep enough
or matter make a stone heavy enough
to put on your chest to keep you from rising again
or the gold of the moon in your mouth
ever prove true enough to pay the ferryman
to get you to the other side of nowhere
as if he knew somehow
you huffed life like a paint thinner
trying to escape the race a winner
by never crossing a starting line
that wasn't already
a dark horse lamed by life behind you.
And he couldn't be bothered with anyone
who would fix their own death
and lay a bet against everyone
their pain could outrun their compassion
and in the second heat
their bitterness the truth.
But if you want a way out
like an emergency door
I'll let you in on a little secret.
Life doesn't grow into death
and death isn't waiting
to take your next breath.
And there's an eye of liberation
in the darkest hurricane roses of despair
that frees the light like life enough to care
that all it falls upon alike
should see its own face everywhere
through a crack of black lightning
in the white mirror
where everything that appears
evaporates like a ghost off a lake
or cataracts from the eyes
of the orthodox
who couldn't see straight enough
to thread their keys through their locks
like mystic heretics
to have known
the deepest wounds give birth
to the sweetest spears
that life has ever thrown
like light on a roadless night
or insight like a bird through the sky
that enters the sunset
like a planet following the sun
through the seven coloured doors
of the seven blind seers
who disappear in a vision of one clarity
with many more eyes
than there are lightning bolts and fireflies
whose age can be measured in light-years.
If a fraction of nothing is nothing.
Then a fraction of eternity
isn't a brevity less than the eternal
and every fraction of anything is all.
There now that's not too hard to follow.
The white face of the moon
veils the dark other you never see
because it's all been timed to turn away.
The moon and its month are one day.
Things might be empty
but they're not hollow.
And you're free to go or stay.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Naked Eye

You can come inside
Come into the naked eye
My only world falls in again
I see your face fall in again
Its so dark
I dont know your name
Its so dark
And I dont know your name
Only mirrors lie only mirrors lie now
Only mirrors lie only mirrors lie now
Through the needles eye
Through the needles eye now
Only mirrors lie
Lie lie
You can come inside
Come into the naked eye
Naked
Naked
I feel so high
Going up on the wall
And youre down below me
Look all around look all around now
Look all around look all around now
Only mirrors lie only mirrors lie now
Only mirrors lie only mirrors lie now
Through the needles eye
Through the needles eye now
Only mirrors lie
Lie lie
You can come inside
Come into the naked eye
Naked
Naked
Just wanted a special view
Just me and you
Just just just the two of us
Just two of us
Going up on the wall
Up on the wall
Going up on the wall
Up on the wall
Naked eye naked eye
What do you see
And whats there to learn
Reading your books
Third diagram
Someones in the room down below
Someone someone
Someone below
Insects
Cherries
To the cherries
On the wall
Spider
Lyrics : j kerr music : simple minds (c) emi publishing ltd reproduced without permission

song performed by by Simple Minds
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Shining Starr! !

shining star, shining star,
for how you shine so bright
your my wonderful delight.

shining star, shining star,
why is it you?
is is because i loved you to much?
too much i couldnt see.

shining star, shining star,
my heart is breaking,
i didnt have a clue what to do,
until the day come when i met you.

shining star, shining star,
i feel so used,
but why is this?
i have no clue.

shining star, shining star,
its not only you personality that shines to me,
its you insanity.

ohh shining star, shining star,
what am i going to do without you?
i need you in my life again,
to tell you its alright,
because i love you soo much,
its more than words could write,
now back to reality,
so time to go for now,
but i shall be back.. I MISS YOU! ! !

poem by Kirstiie Chapmann
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Shining Star

Maurice white, philip baily & larry dunn
Yeah, hey
When you wish upon a star
Dreams will take you very far, yeah
When you wish upon a dream
Life aint always what it seems, oh yeah
Once you see your light so clear
In the sky so very dear
Youre a shinig star, no matter who you are
Shining bright to see what you can truly be
That you can truly be
Shining star come into view
Shine is watchful light on you, yeah
Gives you strength to carry on
Make your body big and strong
Future roads for you to pass
Love to watch your mug past
The shining star, lucky you
The sinful redeeming shall be true
On an adventure of the sun, yeah
Yeah its all awake and just begun
Yeah, thought I had to stir the mood
Thats it now I got my own oh yeah
So if you find yourself in need
Why dont you listen to his words of heat
Be a child free of sin
Be some place, yes I can
Words of wisdom: yes I can
Youre a shinig star, no matter who you are
Shining bright to see what you can truly be
Youre a shinig star, no matter who you are
Shining bright to see what you can truly be
Shining star for you to see, what your life can truly be
Shining star for you to see, what your life can truly be
Shining star for you to see, what your life can truly be

song performed by by Earth Wind And Fire
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The Closer To Death, The More Risks You Take In Life

The closer to death, the more risks you take in life.
Whatever's left of your dark abundance, you spend it here
on things you know you won't be able to take for granted
in a few light years, windows and wildflowers, dragonflies
and Venus going down blazing blue-white in a tangerine sunset,
the haiku novel you write spontaneously in your head
about the future of the red-haired kid with floured skin and freckles.
The way the light waxes lyrical about the larkspur.
Even the hairy scab of the spider you found
stranded in the bathtub after he'd put himself in peril
to come out of the darkness for a drink. And the long
pathway to heaven you laid over the side
like a two ply Milky Way of toilet paper
so it could be gone, as it was, in the morning
with blessings on its head and house. So much time
and then there's forever. We don't run out of it
we just plunge into one hell of a lot more of it
than we can use.

So given what I know
as one of the few certainties that have
brutally enhanced my intensity for life,
is going to happen to me sooner than later,
twenty springs, twenty summers, twenty autumns
if I'm lucky beaded out like new moons
on the optimistic abacus of my fingers and toes,
how could I not, like Tolstoy walking with Turgenev,
at the crepuscular end of an epic life,
crush flowers against my face, or let the stars
tattoo my skin with whatever constellations they wish?
How could I not admire the immensity of the light
thinly smeared on the delicately leaded stained glass window
of the fly's wing, lying like a black maple key
on the windowsill at the foot of the sky it couldn't unlock?

I absorb every mystically specific detail
the way I breathe. The inconceivable uncanniness
of its being here, just as it is without amendment, at all,
and me as well, to witness that all there is
to my unlikely presence is the fly on the windowsill.
Is the unknown star I'm trying to name
the constellation it's so furiously from
shining through the crowns of the birch groves
pulling their leaves up around their throats
as autumn approaches for all of us. So far
not moribund about death or the passage of the flowers.
If it were a bad thing, the animals would know,
and be afraid of it, and yet I've witnessed
some of the highest summits of dignity
in the way an animal dies, accepting what must be,
with such grace and dignity, even in the clutch
of great agony, I just have to remember
what I saw in their eyes as they looked at me calmly
as death underwhelmed them on the inside
without the slightest disappointment
that this was the end of life. And no panic,
no sense of possibly having lived it wrong.
Just the calm of a flightfeather making a soft landing.

All my life I've tried to have the courage of my calling
and look into dark spaces and forbidden realms,
fathomless abysses that staggered the imagination
with their imageless prolixity, the hidden harmonies
of archetypal starmud subliminally suggesting
themes and metaphors of picture-music that might
shed light upon my emptiness and yours as if
we, too, were hidden secrets that wished
to be known creatively, the way the moon is,
when the seminal dew is on the grass like the waters
of a breaking womb, though a lunar life is strictly visionary,
or there's an orgasmic frenzy of silver fish
flashing their lunacy like sabres of light
in their urgency for life in the rising tide
of a providence that inspires them when it's high
to do or die, or expire in a tidal pool of shore-huggers.
I've looked into the dragon's eyes directly
like two switchblades in a back alley
and recalling Rilke's advice, tried poetically
to kiss them back into princesses I've neglected too long,
to humanize them back into my good graces again
like the dark side of the moon taking off its deathmask,
and turning around, showing me its face, eye to eye,
as if mirrors hadn't been invented yet,
and I wasn't a bird that had to be afraid of turning into stone.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Silly Confusion

Meet me on the moon very very soon
Meet me on the stars jupiter and mars
Fly me to a star
Burning out in space shining on my face
Fly me through the night on your silver wings
Over crystal seas valleys of the kings
By the lilac shore where the dragon flies
In the diamond skies
Silly silly confusion
And tangle of wild illusion
Were living in a wonderworld of fantasy
We spent all our times in sweet living dreams
Its a silly silly confusion
Like a flower of wild profusion
You can do the things in life
You always wanted to
Within your heart you know it always will come through
Take me for a ride in your dream-machine
To a time and place where no one has been
Let me look upon worlds Ive never seen
In your dream-machine
Fly me to a star burning out in space
Let me feel the light shining on my face
Sail on solar winds sail on silver birds
Through the universe
Silly silly confusion...
Its a silly silly confusion...
Silly silly confusion...
Its a silly silly confusion...
Silly silly confusion
Silly silly confusion

song performed by by Boney M.
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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It Isn't As Far As You Might Think

It isn't as far as you might think
from this spiritual lost and found
coiled like a labyrinth of cul de sacs
or a snake of time spiralling down
the seven degenerative metals of man
through the rib gates in the belly of a dragon
that's flamed out like a red-tailed hawk riding
the last of its cooling thermals down with the sun,
not as far as you might think, according to the moss
that grows all over your north side
from this circuitous blossoming into knots
in the hardwood of a rootless tree
to the threshold of where your heart belongs.

Dig yourself out of that old National Geographic
like an explorer that never got to go
and unfold that free starmap someone included
like a flag of protocol awarded a dead celestial sailor
and start connecting the dots like ports of call
in the eyes on the dice of a long shot against the odds
that nobody believed could be made until you took it.
Where was it ever suggested that the return journey
would be any less dangerous than the first time
you left yourself like a stranger in the doorway
of this house of life, waving farewell in the rain
as you carefully put the chain back on the gate behind you?

The object of the grailquest isn't so much
a matter of finding it as it is learning how
to lose yourself wisely in the search. You can
orient your mindscape to the direction of your shining
like a circumpolar constellation, but to sip
from the Little Dipper isn't going to green
that dead branch of a divining rod in your hand.
The journey isn't lost upon you because
you're out there on the road alone
with nothing but departures behind you
and the only arrival on your horizon
more of the unknown without a return address.

What if the stars you take your bearings from
set out to find the source of their shining
and turned their light back on themselves
like solar flares to see where they were going? Do you think
you could see them from here on this hillside,
to assign them names and myths of origin
they whisper to your eyes at night like fairytales
and lullabies to help you get to sleep
when you lay your head down like moonset
on the cold stone of the world by the roadside?

The moment you go looking for yourself
do you leave the part that's beating the bushes for you at home?
Have you ever checked out who's in the search party?
Go ask the diamond sages. They aren't the masters
of an enlightenment no one can attain. They sit
like stars in the throne rooms of dark matter,
lords of the darkness, confusion and chaos
that have mastered them spontaneously like ore
to the indirections of an undisciplined way of shining
so the dark mirror you wander in looking
for a lifemask you can recognize as a face of your own,
is brighter than the white one of insight
you've had so much trouble adjusting your eyes to
like a telescope to the weather of a habitable planet.

No ray of the light you're looking for
ever started out with a sense of direction.
No star, no beacon, no lantern, no insight,
no firefly, lightning bolt or lighthouse
ever plotted a straight path through the abyss
that wasn't omnidirectionally bent
by the gravitational eyes of space it passed
on its journey to nowhere in particular
though it bumped into a few planets and wildflowers
along the way it was exactly meaningless to take.

No one's ever really lost. They're just
not very adept at reading their own starmaps.
They look for what shines though the eyes of a crow
remembering how white its feathers were
before it found the continent it was sent out
before the dove to look for. And Noah cursed it black
for not coming back. Lost innocence longing for light.
Long wavelengths on the night sea of awareness
looking for land like particles and cornerstones
they can found their spiritual temples upon
like aviaries for the wrens and sparrows
buffeted back by the winds they're flying against
like the ashes of disinterred aspirations in their own face.

Lost in the woods, everyone looks at the constellations
like light in the windows of a distant farmhouse.
But no one ever consults all the darkness beyond
the blazing midways of the zodiac like deer paths
off the ecliptic or wolf packs above the timberlines
of their celestial equators. Aldebaran
is sixty-five lightyears from here as we're
eight light-minutes from the nearest sun.
But how far does a human who is the measure of all things,
have to go before he or she realizes the darkness
was always the truest sense of direction for anyone
trying to shine a light on where the light has gone
without them, so they can see in the dark
how their eyes emerge out of the search for themselves
and the night whispers like a homecoming embrace
in the ear of the prodigal do you finally recognize
who I am? Even when you most deeply eclipsed
the shining of the black mirror of awareness,
blinded by the candle of your own lantern
there's never been a son or daughter of a star
that was ever lost in me since the light began.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Star Speaks

In this universe so vast and wide
why do we humans run and hide
from the fact that there just might be
other beings different than we?
So many stars up in the skies
shining down like so many eyes
look right down and say to you
'There are others out there
that are in my view.'

Do not fear the multitudes of others
that just like you have sisters and brothers.
The day will arrive when all will say
if only you weren't so far away
you could teach us how to live with love
and how not to kill a soul.
We have never learned that here on earth
and still we play that role.

As a star that's shining in the night
I see all that's not in your sight.
I've watched and learned for eons of years
that the humans on earth cry too many tears.
And as I burn up and exist no more
my light still shines on each distant shore.
I wait for all to find each other
and revel in the differences in one another.

And when my light is gone and dies
I'll remember the song of children'; s eyes.
'Twinkle, twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are? '

poem by Edwina Reizer
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Shining Star II

Shining Star the light of my life
your that one star, I wish upon every night
Everyday, hour, min, sec. that goes by
I think about my Shining Star
wishing it was here next to me
Hoping I would see my Shining Star soon
Holding me and never letting go
Reminiscing on how we met
something that I'll never forget.
You are my guiding light I don't want to let go of
Oh Shining Star how much joy you
bring to this lonely heart
May I ask Shining Star,
Do You Love Me the way I Love You?
We'll see Shining Star
if you really do...
But once again my Shining Star
I would say,
You are my one wish
my one love
my one and only
Shining Star

poem by Ivana Suazo
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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Sometimes Think

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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Shining Star[Makin My Love]

Eddie boy lit like paraffin spending two weeks in a crack house
Burns on his brain like chernobyl
Dean was seen with a two bag purchase
He was lying dead on his mothers bed
Someone to pray for-till I met you
Life is like a broken arrow
Memory a swingin door
I could be your great misfortune
I can make you happy every day of your life
Making my love like a shining star
Takin my love just a touch too far
Tessie turns tricks with a soul like ice cause love left holes
And four swell kids breaking her heart
Ive got windows, Ive seen much vice, Ive touched down with vermin,
Cowardice, lice,
And I say
Nobody cares what you do
Please be yourself to death
I could be your great misfortune
But youll never find a
Bet youll never find a better man.
Making my love like a shining star
Taking my love just a touch too far
Peter met frank formed a dummy run gang
Worked heist or hit for 10 gs flat
Blew heads outta shape for the name of trotsky,
Sinn-fein, hitler cashdown
No hope heroes cover this page with depts in hell
And fingers in blood
Poor little bodies all covered in scabs
Threw it all away
Have a life in the grave
Have a life in the grave
Life is like a broken arrow
Memory a swingin door
I could be your great misfortune
Well I could make you happy every goddamn single day of your life
Making my love like a shining star
Like a shining star
Babe thats what you are
Like a shining star
Making my love like a shining star
Taking my love
Just a touch too far
Making my love like a shining star
Taking my love
Just a touch too far
Making my love like a shining star
Taking my love
Just a touch too far
Making my love like a shining star
Taking my love

song performed by by David Bowie
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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When Rage Broke Down Into Tears

When rage broke down into tears
over the shattered chandeliers of stars
that crashed against your windowpane
before they thawed in the furnace
of a Promethean thief of fire
human enough to burn,
and you cried, yes you did, I was there,
I took the splinter of light out of your eye
with the corner of the sky where Venus
goes down in the west like the crumb
of a radiant dream that wanted to break
loaves and fishes with the masses
only to find you were swimming through glass;
you cried as if all the birds in the world
had died under your windowsill
like the words to the song
you were dancing to at the time.
And you picked them up one by one
and cradled them in your hand
like a midwife with a manger
and stroked their soft bodies with your finger
as if you would give their lives back to them again
by way of apology for being human
in an ice age of rain
that had lost its purpose in life
like the seeds of flowers on the moon.
And that’s when the wind, that’s always
the moment when the wind cools your eyes
like a glassblower dipping crystal blue birds
in the fountains and watersheds of the moon
and strews your path with the flight feathers
of a nightbird that can see beyond a starmap
fireflies shining in the distance.
And you suddenly realize
a thousand and one ways home ahead of you
like a Nazca landing strip
for alien artists blown off course
into the third eye of a spiritual hurricane.
And you can’t help but fly through it
like an open window into your soul
seeking repose and shelter
among the human totems
of more habitable emotions
scratching fish, birds, monkeys, spiders
jaguars, flowers, trees, fallible people out
in the desert plains of coastal Peru.
Zoomorphic geoglyphs of greeting and return
in every conceivable sign of life
as if the whole planet came out
all at the same time to say hello
and welcome back
like a vow they kept for you
until your myth of origin
returned to its fulfilment,
a nightbird singing
in a rootless tree on the moon,
as if love, rage, life, joy,
death, separation and sorrow
were all pilgrims of one voice.
A pageant of medieval notes
bearing the banners of knights
the hoods and habits of monks,
unholy vocables of middle English
on the tip of your tongue
like the wicks
of holy candles at a black mass
where a young girl dances naked
around a pale fire on the moon
as a flower blooms in the flames,
or sparrows on a stave of power lines,
when the music makes its return journey
like Canada geese in the spring
bearing the souls of the underworld back
like the eyes and stars
and new moons of the dead
to the night of the living
making love in the dark.
Pelvis to pelvis,
heart to heart,
crescent to crescent,
two halves of a broken wishbone
conjoined again into one harp,
one cithara, one guitar
in the ashes of a blue moon,
the second harvest of loaves and fishes
at the spring and autumn equinox.
Every year a new zodiac,
the growth rings in a tree.
Something protean about memory.
The dark matrix of the muse.
A wavelength with its tail in its mouth
that doesn’t ricochet off anything else.
Lamentations, bewitchment, rapture,
time in the hold of the abyss
for not mastering your own powers.
You either cast the spell for yourself
or you wind up gilled
in your own sidereal nets,
a firefly in spider webs of dark matter,
and it’s not likely
you’re being hauled into a life boat.
There are realities, there are windows,
some broken, some whole
even the moon won’t dare look through.
And there are rooms in a palace of water
that move like fish on the moon,
and starmaps that are used to start a fire.
Birds that are the sacred syllables of the sky
that nest in chimneys like hash pipes,
every one of them the Rosetta Stone
to a language of your own
only you can learn for yourself
even if you’re the only one
who was ever born to speak it.
Most people sip spit
from other people’s wishing wells
but they’re always two echos shy of an original
and it’s enough if they put a seashell up to their ears
like a hearing aid to listen to the ocean,
a tidal pool dying like a starfish
out of water and sky,
a shore-hugger that’s afraid
to go along with the ebb and neap
of the dream that gives a pulse to the moon,
your own mindstream
returning to its homeless source
to realize that life and death are both redundant.
That whatever passes away, stays.
And that which doesn’t, goes.
And there are places so deeply secret
that everybody thinks they know
what’s happening to them as it unfolds.
But this is just a way of using knowledge
to keep your eyes closed to the world.
Only a fool would build a gate
and live in a guardhouse
of sword swallowers and fire-eaters
to keep the birds out of the garden.
Or a refugee camp for turtles.
True clarity doesn’t know the light
for what it is.
Reality is as blind to its own translucency
as a painted window.
Two blades of stargrass in a hurricane.
But if you were to take them away
like the long and short straws
of something to win or loose
like the luck of the draw
and chew on them like cud
to get to the deeper meaning
you might get a gesture of it,
you might get the flavour of it
like a dry wad of gum
stuck to the bottom
of a school room desk,
but you wouldn’t get the use of it,
for any reason at all
that should or should not concern anyone.
Have you ever noticed
that time might be
an hourglass full to the brim on top
but it always begins at the peak
of an inverted pyramid
stuck like an arrowhead
in a flesh wound of sand that’s bleeding out?
What’s the point of trying
to claw your way up the heap
to the top of the bottom
when even Sisyphus knows
enough about absurdity
to realize the mountain
climbs its own reflection
all the way down like an avalanche
of all those little rocks
you used to roll up a hill
convinced you were getting somewhere.
And it’s true there’s a different universe
in every grain of sand
and every grain of sand is us.
So why go looking
for what’s already been found?
In any universe there’s no up or down.
And everywhere anywhere you are
from the smallest pebble on the beach
to the most radiant star beyond reach
the gates of the lost
are the end of the search.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Shining Star

When you wish upon a star
Your dreams will take you very far
But, when you wish upon a dream
Life ain't always what it seems
What'd you see on night so clear
In the sky so very dear
You're a shining star
No matter who you are
Shining bright to see
What you could truly be
You can be what you wanna be
Do what you wanna do
As long as you know there's a star in you
Believe in yourself
Shining star come in to view
Shine its watchful light on you
Gives you strength to carry on
Makes your body big and strong
On an adventure of the Son (that's S-o-n)
Thought my work had just begun
Found out, found out
Thought I had to stir the mood
I can do all things through You
So, if you find yourself in need
Why don't you listen to these words of heed
Be a child that's free of sin
These are words of wisdom
"Yes I can, yes I can," because

song performed by by Yolanda Adams
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Shining Star

When you wish upon a star
Your dreams will take you very far
But, when you wish upon a dream
Life ain't always what it seems
What'd you see on night so clear
In the sky so very dear
You're a shining star
No matter who you are
Shining bright to see
What you could truly be
You can be what you wanna be
Do what you wanna do
As long as you know there's a star in you
Believe in yourself
Shining star come in to view
Shine its watchful light on you
Gives you strength to carry on
Makes your body big and strong
On an adventure of the Son (that's S-o-n)
Thought my work had just begun
Found out, found out
Thought I had to stir the mood
I can do all things through You
So, if you find yourself in need
Why don't you listen to these words of heed
Be a child that's free of sin
These are words of wisdom
"Yes I can, yes I can," because

song performed by by Yolanda Adams
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Twinkling Evening-Morning Star.

The best time to see the Evening star
Just before dark when I search the sky near and far.
All year the Star is passing high above my home,
Only in the middle of October I see it was always around my dome.

I sit in my chair; look into the darkening sky,
Following with my eyes as it's passing by.
The Evening star is the first one to shine above,
It takes long time until the rest follows that rare dove.

It is the first in the sky after the sun goes down
And the last to disappear when the morning sun takes away its crown.
Nobody is wasted, everything just comes and goes and immerse,
As everything and everyone is the child of the Universe.

As it was known in the past that the strong will survive,
Never give up, be strong, face life as it arrive.
Just have faith in goodness and loose the negative,
See the NOW as a privilege, open up to be progressive.

poem by LaSoaphia QuXazs
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Broken Windows Shattered Mirrors

Broken windows shattered mirrors
The tiny slivers fall like tears
They cut me till my arms run red
They make me wish that I was dead
And though I try to carry on
I know my time here's almost gone
Broken windows shattered mirrors

Broken windows shattered mirrors
I'm surrounded by these fears
I know I shouldn't be afraid
I feel like I'm locked up in a cage
I push and pull try to get out
I scream until I just can't shout
Broken windows shattered mirrors

Broken windows shattered mirrors
I'll have bad luck seven years
I know it's just a superstition
But I also know it's pure intuition
That made me stay not fade away
So I could live another day
Broken windows shattered mirrors

poem by Anonymous Ghurl
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Unknown Star

I was born of an unknown star, of a mother who did not know herself-
From the very beginning I was a canary that could not sing and who
Would fall to the ground every time I lifted my wings to fly-
Trapped inside a cage of my own delusions,
I was alone looking upward towards that clouded sky, searching for that unknown star,
Where by chance I could find a place where I would belong-

My mother wept a wide stream of tears
Not to be consoled from the deep pain that tore at her heart-
The day I lost myself to another world, she abandoned me as agony wrenched her soul-
A phantasmal canary lying still at the bottom of my cage-
Hiding behind a rainbow looking for rays of hope,
Trying to deafen the voices only I could hear,

Searching for that unknown star,
I would dance in the rain beneath the faint light of the moon at night
Seeking for myself, that person I could not find, however
All I could find was a shadow upon the wall-

A shadow upon the wall I hardly recognized as myself,
A reflection within a pond which was that stream of my mother’s tears-
Dancing in the rain trying to become somebody,
Somebody famous or a perhaps an angel or a saint,
Trapped inside a cage of my own apparition where dense cloud cover barred me from
That unknown star where I might feel at home-

Looking about me at hillsides I might have tried to climb-all I could see was my shadow.
A shadow upon a hillside or inside, a shadow upon the wall,
A vague reflection within a pool of tears- Seemingly eyes of a ghost staring into mine,
Reading the demonic thoughts that raced inside of my mind-
Born of an unknown star, I had never found a home and
Born of an unknown star, I had never found myself-
Searching inside and outside all I could ever see was
A dark shadow of a lost person with no destiny or direction-

That canary that could not sing or fly, or perhaps a being who
Tried to come to life dancing in the rain beneath the faint moonlight- I became
A shadow dancing beneath the light of that unknown star I could not reach-
Hoping someday I would save the souls of those who despair and expectantly
Someday I would become that canary, but lifting my wings to fly and bursting into song,
Joyfully watching the sunrise as the moon would vanish
Behind disappearing dark clouds of despair.

poem by Claudia Krizay
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Never Alone With A Candle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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