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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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Related quotes

The Slipping of Meet Notes

Accustomed to lies.
What does the truth really mean?
Accustomed to lies laying low on the scene!
Accustomed to tell them...
And protect when told.
Accustomed to lies,
Whether fresh released or old held on hold!
Accustomed to lies...
Without a bat of an eyelash moving!

Accustomed to lies.
Dishonesty is accepted and shown.
At the work place
Where the slipping of meet notes,
Does not provoke disdain.
Accustomed to lies...
And that's how our lives remain!

In heated sex away from home!
Regardless of who spies on another,
Both buffer their suffering by what's condoned.
Accustomed to lies...
And what is taught is always known!
Accustomed to lies.
Accustomed to holding on to them,
Until time flys!

poem by Lawrence S. Pertillar
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Feel Like There's A Beast

Feel like there's a beast in the darkness
eating my eyes.
I'm a moon-bull
at a crossroads of solar swords
down on it knees
hemorrhaging like a poppy.
And there are constellations
I've never heard before
playing the harp of my horns
with pensive fingertips.
How strange this rag of life
soaked in tears and blood is.
Everything dies like a snowflake on a furnace,
a rock on an autumn mountain,
no two the same.
There are nights, there are
vigils of darkness
when the mirror can no longer bear
the weight of this feather of fire,
this vision of life
that estranges the spirit
of those who love it most
like a funeral bell
that once drank to the folly of love.
I am a snakepit of lightning
knotted in a glacier of ice
and every emotion
is the undertow of the tide in a sea of eyes
on the cold skull of the moon,
every thought, a stone lifeboat
inundated by the waves
it's convinced it's saving from drowning.
Once I was the dupe
of my own ideals,
now I am the master of none.
This far into the abyss
you forget the name of the god
you died in the name of;
you have squandered your certainty
on greater and greater risks,
the enciphered lotteries of mythic necessity,
only to discover,
though you traversed eras like deserts
that made a skull of your faith,
the donkeys have eaten all the mangers,
and there is as much radiance in the eye
of the dead serpent on the road
as there is the eyelash of a star.
A tear is not a fountain of seeing,
nor a dropp of blood, a rose.
How rare the sword in its silence
among all these chatty scissors at war
trying to cut along the dotted lines
of their border highways
crammed with refugees
they once called lovers,
the horizon slashed
and bleeding like a letter.
I want to calculate the half-life of pain;
the pillar of ore it calls home;
the elemental devolution of its atomic evictions
into the leaden passion of a base metal.
I want to know what I've turned into.
I want to know what's making the stars
throw down their spears of light at my feet
though my heart's out in the open
like a voodoo doll
waiting for a donor transplant.
I want to see myself
opening a door in the mirror
to someone with absolute eyes
irrevocable as yesterday's rain.
Let the star know
the flower it engenders;
let the rose
taste its own honey.
Blind in a dream; blind,
what light roots in the darkness
that I should want to
throw off this robe of blood like a sky
to slip through the eye of the needle
that binds the seams of this world
like a bird
with the single thread of a life in its beak,
washed out of God's eye
like a firefly snuffed
in a torrential downpour of stars?
Why am I
always one heart too many
over the threshold of the truth
I had to leave home to discover?
Am I a hoax in tears
or a tear away from a gate and a rafter?
Let the wave know the sea
that packs its caravan on the moon,
let the silence of the waking abyss
write indelible preludes
with a last kiss
that goes on forever
like the white autumn wind
in a turmoil of seeds
that demonically exceed
the life they're after,
flower by flower,
death by death
like the pulse of a bell
setting the doves free
in the towers of farewell.
It's the eloquence of a tree
to say what life is
when the full moon ripens
in its leafless branches
and the heart beats
like a windfall of silver apples,
though I have tried,
but love is a bridge
on a finger of water
that not even the moon
can slip off like a ring
when the wind rises
like a gaping fish
to swallow the chimes and eyehooks
of its matriculate ripples.
And with each breath of the night
I took and returned,
I have aspired to succeed
at every failure I was ever inspired by.
I raised every sail,
crossed every wave,
every eyelid, every petal
of the sea of life
in the heart of the rose
only to dropp the first crescent of the moon
like an anchor
in the furnace of a dream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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Speak

Theyve given me a mission
I dont really know the game yet
Im bent on submission
Religion is to blame
Im the new messiah
Death angel with a gun
Dangerous in my silence
Deadly to my cause
Speak to me the pain you feel
Speak the word
The word is all of us
Ive given my life to become what I am
To preach the new beginning
To make you understand
To reach some point of order
Utopia in mind, youve got to learn
To sacrifice, to leave whats now behind
Speak to me the pain you feel
Speak the word
The word is all of us
Speak the word
The word is all of us
Seven years of power
The corporation claw
The rich control the government, the media the law
To make some kind of difference
Then everyone must know
Eradicate the fascists, revolution will grow
The system we learn says were equal under law
But the streets are reality, the weak and poor will fall
Lets tip the power balance and tear down their crown
Educate the masses, well burn the white house down
Speak to me the pain you feel
Speak to me the pain you feel
Speak the word [revolution]
The word is all of us
Speak the word [revolution]
The word is all of us
Speak the word
The word is all of us
Speak the word
The word is all of us
Speak!!!

song performed by by Queensryche
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Amazing As The Stars In The Darkness My Eyes

Amazing as the stars in the darkness, my eyes,
though I've never seen them directly, only
as a reflection I take at its word they're blue.
And when I look a little deeper, there's
no part of me that isn't eventually invisible.
Everything's like that, the seer and the seen,
so wholly absorbed in each other,
there's no sign of either of them, just the seeing,
the heart and its feeling, the mind and its thought,
the flower and the eye, crocus, turk's cap, tiger lily, lilac
all one spontaneous happening without distinction,
one infinitely collaborative creative event flashing
out of the dark resources of the plenum-void
to give it a name for the sake of rendering experience
communicable through a delirium of form.

If you've ever walked by a mirror and the mirror's disappeared,
mercury into mercury, water into water, fire into fire,
a mother into her child, an unsuccessful lover into his longing,
that's something like it. You're everything
and in that everything you're nothing, you're selfless
to the point of not even knowing what that means anymore
except it's of no significance whatsoever. There's just
this star flashing out of a night it's surrounded by,
just these dark hills where the dead buried themselves
as they did their children, as they had lived, secretly
under the leaves that covered their gravestones,
lichens, moss, growing hundreds of wild columbine
on a modest rock of ages with the sensibilities of a butterfly.

If you stand by a gate that doesn't latch by itself anymore,
and the garden's been left to its own inner resources,
because no one lives there any longer, as, perhaps, even you once did,
o in a dream, how long ago was that? And watch the moon rise,
as if the healer and the wound were remembering
an old love affair that's gone well beyond the inseparable
because there never was a time, a prelude to seeing,
they were ever apart. You'll understand passing
as a perpetually new approach to things, you'll see birth in why
the flowers fall, and death, in why they rise again.
The simultaneity of the life and death of all things.
How present you are in the midst of your longing.
How clear in the absence of everything you're missing.

I've spent much of my life preparing gardens for planting.
Shaking out roots, rocking fields. Wondering
whose house of life the bones I dig up once belonged to,
cornerstones and rafters in arrears
to the temples they once upheld to themselves.
And come nightfall, my work finished for the day,
I've paused and looked to see if I could identify
through the trees, the whole of a constellation
from a single star. As if gazing in wonder at it
in the mutual solitude and hugeness
of the unknown immmensities that surround us both,
and bind us to a weary body and a still heart
leaning on a shovel in a garden, as if the silence
could look up or down, either way, were made sacred
by the poignancy of a momentary insight
that penetrated both our hearts as if time and space
were mere bubbles of awareness in a dream.
And in a differentiated union of not-two,
I saw myself shining through the eyes of a star
as it laboured over what flowers it intended to grow.

Without a thought or a feeling I could call my own
I was a desert of stars without a mirage
to keep up appearances. I was a single point of light
with infinite distances in it, and even the word, one,
had gaps in it I learned to jump like a star.
And I saw with the certainty of water, that
when one was a wave, the other was an ocean
and separation was simply the blindfold we put on
at midnight in front of an imaginary firing squad,
as if our whole life depended upon it, to watch
the stars shoot flowers at the sun like blanks
I seeded the garden with like constellations
breaking ground through the tree tops like Vega in Lyra.
Astro-flowers. The Pleiades approaching
the larkspur like bees. Honey in a new hive.

Light years of perceptions in a garden of starmud
encompassing strangers only an insight away from home.
It's an immensely intimate universe. Go out.
Get down on your knees in the soil. Plant flowers.
And when you go in look at your hands, at the stars
shining under your fingernails as a sign
of some honest cosmic work well done.

poem by Patrick White
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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Tenderly The Evening Descends Into A Dark Bliss

Tenderly the evening descends into a dark bliss
and lays its poultice like a cool leaf against my forehead
and draws the fever of the day out of the night.
I ease back on my elbows like an easel down by the river.
When I'm burnt, I make a blister
and cushion myself with water,
a more useful approach to tears.
The mosquitoes swarm like insistent circumstances
that thin my blood, but a soft wind
is blowing them away from Pearl Harbour.
The long blue grass yields as easily to a man as a deer.
I want the stars near enough to overhear what they're whispering.
Still amazing to me I can embrace all of them with a thought
as if they were my idea in the first place
and feel humbled and exalted at the same time
by the sublimity of their radiance and the strangeness of my own.
The river sustains its clarity by wandering.

Single male in the autumn of life, I've let go of so much
the only thing left to let go of is the letting go itself.
I've forgone the commotion of inducing myself into creation.
Things will fall out by themselves. Playfulness
return to surrealistic perversity
to explain the shape of the universe
and fools like me counter-intuit the crazy wisdom
of squandering their lives on voices in the distance
leading them on deeper into the subtleties of a poetic narcosis
that haunts them like the face
of a beautiful woman they once knew.
Don't we all belong to a nobility of longing, even though
we don't live up to it, and start to grasp and scratch
like dead branches screeching across
an intransigent windowpane on a stormy night
that let's us look at the fire, but doesn't let us in?
Where do you go with your serious spirit
when you've been rejected by your solitude?
Do you know the secret art of being enhanced
by the qualities of anything you're not attached to,
without killing off the desire for what you're missing?
Live with gratitude for the abyss in your heart
it's impossible to fill like a grave
that took more out of you than it put back in.

You can be adorned by your failures.
You can be humiliated by your victories.
Coming and going, your path can be strewn
with roses or thorns. You could be walking on stars.
You could be lying down beside a river at night like I am
savouring a sorrow you like the poetic taste of,
because it includes everything within it
like the skin of the dew and the moon as the source of life.
Even sweeter than a rainbow body of light
or an atmosphere with ocean to match,
this last touch of clinging before you evaporate
into the mystery of everything you're leaving behind.
No more than you can pour water out of the universe
through a black hole, can your mindstream be poured by time
into the uncomprehending darkness of the black mirror
you're looking for an image in tonight
in the eyes of all these stars shining down upon us,
knowing our starmud is just as old as their light
and we're not wandering orphans lost in their shadows.
We're firewalking on water like stars in the shapes
of self-immolating swans, two parts flammable
from the start, and one of oxygen like a toxin
we depend upon for life like an alien export we adapted to.
Same with death. Until you include it in the nucleus,
inviting your enemy in to feast behind the gates
that laboured like water to keep life in the seas,
you're vulnerable to the delusion of your own exclusion
like the face of an exile in your mirroring awareness.

Don't underestimate the creative potential
of the dark genius of death to come up
with new paradigms of seeing and being
that make us feel we lived our whole lives
confined and blind in the coffin of a seed
that stored a harvest of what we've reaped in a silo.
Out of the dead ore of the moon
pours the white gold of wheat
like metal from a stone in a starfield
that yields more life than can be lost
in the living of it. Without a sword. Without a ploughshare.
Isn't it in the nature of our evanescence to move
like light and water and wind from urn to urn
of one sky burial to the next at sea and then the earth
like a water clock that runs so urgently
from full to an emptiness that has to keep expanding
like the human heart just to contain it
so when the cup's broken like a skull
you can drink the whole of the sea and the sky
in every single dropp of your mindstream
and the stars will still be climbing your roots
up to the flowers within that bloom every year
like a deepening insight at zenith into
the dark generosity of becoming something
even beyond the scope of death to imagine extinct.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Coming Out Of A Blue Funk

Coming out of a blue funk, this seal,
under a sky thickening like sheet ice all day
has found an airhole it can breathe through for awhile.
Been wondering about my life. What
it's been doing to me for the last fifty years
for the sake of poetry, for the sake
of pursuing an earthly excellence
though it hardly matters why anymore.
I used to have an answer on the tip of my tongue
when I was young and thought more
with my mouth than my heart. Less so now.
Time, death, suffering, love and the devil,
certain intense realms of creative bliss
attuned to the dark harmonies of hidden roots
that flow back like the delta of a river
to the watershed of a single dropp of water
that got it in its head to do something big with its life
and turn something trivial into the sublime.
Did not the sun and the moon, the whole of the sky,
fit it like skin? And that was just the outside.
It would take more than light years to measure
the wingspan of the abysmal spaces within.
Even time would run out of itself
before it got to the end of anything.

My life in art has been like keeping a fire alight outside
in a rainstorm of tears. To see clearly
through windows that thawed in the heat
of looking through them with the compassionate ferocity
of a crystal skull poured out of a terraforming meteor impact
like a prophetic lump of coal, a diamond in the rough,
that refused to burn in the furnace to prove it had the right stuff
to shine like a star, no one could follow, on its way to somewhere else.
Not a sign post. Just a sign. Your eyes
once you see it, are never going to be the same again.
You won't look at a starcluster like the Pleiades
as if you were waiting for the traffic lights to change.
You'll take your three and a half pounds of brainy starmud,
like a meteoritic kissing stone, a falling star,
and run it through a diamond tipped bandsaw
and discover the jewel of life that's been glowing
in the core of the ore since time immemorial
like a dna molecule wasted on space
that transforms the medium and the messenger
into a voice, free of content, that's the whole of the message.

I walked out to this dark, deserted place, redolent
with the duff and detritus of life, the flotsam and jetsam,
where the half life of the rate of decay of my insights
into your heart, eludes being used as an atomic clock
to determine the agelessness of either of us.
I came out to look at the stars but I've been startled
by the photonic discharges of your bioluminescent fireflies
ever since I started looking up like a starmap to make sure things
were where they were supposed to be. One moment
you get in my eyes like the sandstorm of a mandalic power painting,
a masterpiece of the wind, and the next,
I can feel the intransigence of your vulnerability
dyeing your hair like a comet to attract the attention
of the sun at midnight looking for asylum from a black hole
where it's third eye used to be.

You're a mermaid on the rocks of Andromeda singing to a telescope
to look up to see how far its got to sink in an ocean of stars
before it hits bottom like a shipwrecked moonrise
gone pearl diving for habitable planets
that can say I love you and mean it like an atmosphere
it's not going to lose again. Only in the Braille
of the scars on your heart so far, but I can read your pain
like the glyphs of an Aztec temple
I'm still clearing from the jungle of my indirections,
that recorded in imported stone how many times
it's been torn out to please the gods with a kidnapped sacrifice
worthy of the priestcraft in the sacred abattoirs
of modern drug cartels when you're too susceptible
to feeling too much, the same as me, when I'm thinking mythically
about what I've endured to be acceptable in my own eyes
that might shine across these aloof distances like a star into yours
that lights you up from the inside like an intimate familiar
whispering into your ear like a dream grammar of sacred syllables
that have liberated themselves from the syntax of the stars
just to speak subliminally in the same sign language as you
like the chaos of fireflies I see in the black mirror of my mindstream
bending space like the surface of a lake at night
where you can hear the echo of a loon ululating
like the wavelength of a mysterious love song
among these dark hills shapeshifting in the moonlight
toward you like a mirage of picture-music
emerging as something real in this wilderness of transformation
like a new constellation of fireflies I want to overhear with your heart.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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The Morning Light

Say hello to the dawn’s arrival
Open your eyes to a brand new day
Lift your head to feel the sun’s blessing
The morning light will show you the way
The morning light will show you the way
Each gentle ray blesses the living
We all reach out for its energy
Its gentle warmth it will caress you
The morning light will show you the way
The morning light will show you the way
For every tree and every flower
That dances in the sun
For children playing in the daytime
And having their fun
For every broken heart that sees the
Light of day
The morning light will show you the way
The morning light will show you the way
Illuminating all that it touches
Brings out the color of the world
Its warmth it gives us good feelings

The morning light will show us the way
The morning light will show us the way
For every tree and every flower
That dances in the sun
For every childhood smile
That touches everyone
For every life that we are given
For every dream realized
The morning sun will show you the way
The morning sun will show you the way

poem by William Lindenmuth
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Late Spring Snow

Late spring snow on its way.
Dead ochres and colourless greys
that have never heard of the impressionists.
It's a landscape
it's a mindscape
but it behaves like a still life.
I've been staying up late
trying to paint my way
out of my life
until dawn every morning.
The windowpane a ripening phthalo blue.
It's compositionally deranged
to hear the birds singing
when you're totally exhausted.
Mentally physically spiritually emotionally financially
gone gone gone altogether gone beyond.
All my happy endings orphaned.
A sum of depletions.
I'm living this creative life
scribbling down the notes of the picture-music
that doesn't just run through my mind
but is my mind
colours and words
down on canvas and paper.
When I'm writing
when I'm painting
when I've wholly disappeared into what I'm doing
for a few holy hours of life
immensities open up like the multiverse
and I've got a window a wormhole
I can fly through
and out out out among the starfields
with the evanescence of smoke
or a bird
putting itself in the picture
as a finishing touch to the sky.
And I am free to explore the intensities
of my own creative peace
as I keep saying to myself
one eureka moment after another
turning into a mantra
no no I can't leave that.
I've got to bring that back and show them.
They'll be delighted with that.
They won't believe it.
You've got to write and paint with an open hand.
Let the brush hold you.
Let the pen.
Then you're the meaning
of what the words are trying to say
and it's o.k.
you don't have to look any further than that.
Sublimity slips into the mundanities of the world
by creative accident
and you stand down from bliss
and spend a reverential moment
in its presence
just looking at it
not knowing where it came from
or whose work it is.
And it's the wonder of that depth of ageless being
expressing itself as a gesture of time
that's kept me at it
for forty-eight excruciating years.
I get off this chain gang
where I've broken down more rocks than a junkie
or saxifrage in the rain
and the pain the labour
the enervating futilities
and terminal successes
of all those ambitions
that run counter to the flow of life like salmon
disappear from my bloodstream
like apparitions in the morning.
And I am more me
the less I grow aware of it.
When I consider the chronic agony of life
I sometimes think that God created the world
not because she was a hidden secret
that wanted to be known
but because she wanted to forget she was God
and lose every cosmos and atom of herself wholly in it.
Paint till dawn and you'll know what that means.
As the great Zen master sort of said
you can swallow the whole of the river you're painting
with a single gulp.
You can chug the well of the muses
with every drop.
And just when you think
you're working in a medium of illusions
that are playing you like a gravedigger
that likes to get to the bottom of things
they all begin to taste of life.
The mirages water the flowers
in this desert of stars
and everything blooms.
You're back in the garden again
before anybody knew anything but the names of things
to distinguish them from the angels
and life was too vital to need an explanation.
As you go to write
you can take all your dark energy
and intensifying it
by letting it empower you
bend space into a gravitational eye
that gives you a deep insight into
how even a blackhole can be creative.
How what's been left out of the shadows and lights
says as much as that which was included.
Who you are not
is just as much of an artist
as the one who signs the painting.
And don't think you can do things by half measures
one foot in the boat
and one foot on the shore.
Talent knows the tear
but genius knows what hurt
the feelings of the watershed that let it fall.
It's the same in art poetry love enlightenment life.
You've got to let a mask every now and again
wear your face just to play fair
and see how things look from the inside out.
You've got to let the fireflies
make up stories about the stars
that haven't got anything to do with shepherds.
You got to be free enough
to let the world be all kinds of things it isn't.
You can only hex yourself
by taking a voodoo doll out of the arms
of a sleeping child
like the new moon out of the arms of the old
because you deny the darkness within you
its return to innocence
and try to separate the roses from the thorns.
Living your life
as if you were always
applying yourself to the world
like the task of the business at hand
is as destructive
as trying to pry the petals of a flower open
with a crowbar
because you haven't got the time to wait.
Paradise is effortless.
It doesn't have a gate.
It doesn't have a custodian.
It doesn't maintain a teacher.
Adam was born knowing the names of things.
Not how to keep books
on the comings and goings
of the saints and the miscreants.
The first lie out of a tempter's mouth
is to ask Eve if she believes
she's worthy of the truth
as if it were something that could be acquired
without her.
There's more innocence
in running the risk of being left out
than there usually is among the deluded
who play it safe by dissing their doubt
to be included.
You've got to take your church your mosque
your zendo your synagogue off at the door
as if they were hats and shoes
when you enter a holy place
or you'll track the world in
like starmud at your heels
and desecrate it with religion.
And this is as true of Druidic birchgroves
in an abandoned Westport field
with the wild geese flying overhead
just as the stars are coming out
as it is of a poet climbing burning ladders
up to his beloved
as if every rung were the vertical threshold
of a mutable transformation
that estranges and illuminates her face like water
as it changes his eyes.
Don't add your feather of flame to the fire
like the flightplan of a faint-hearted phoenix
with ambulances standing by
in case things get out of hand
but light yourself up like a Buddhist monk in Vietnam
or a filial vegetable seller in the souks of Tunisia
who set the Middle East on fire
and consume yourself wholly
until there's nothing left of the geni but the lamp.
When you let the way come to the end of you
how can you say you're lost?
That's where your freedom begins.
When the object of your quest
can't find anyone to look for it
and there's no one there to know,
King Lear writes Shakespeare.
David sculpts Michelangelo.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Good Morning Dear

Mickey newbury
Were the nights any sweeter
The mornings any cooler, when she was here?
Or was the mind grown accustomed to hearing good morning dear?
Should I still feel all the sunshine
That remembering brings to mind with my thoughts of her?
Lord, we both know things could never be the way they were
Her little girl illusions
Built the wall of confusion between right and wrong
That stands between her and the dream I had cherished so long
Now faded and tattered, once all that mattered when she was here
And a mind grown accustomed to hearing good morning dear
Were the nights any sweeter
The mornings any cooler, when she was here?
Or was the mind grown accustomed to hearing good morning dear?

song performed by by Roy Orbison
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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When Imagination And Reality Are One

When imagination and reality are one
and there's no recourse for civilization
to distinguish between them by usage and consensus,
and the light of the stars isn't condemned
to a life of hard labour as a torch in a coal mine
looking for diamonds you can drink by the grailful
until you're as satiate as oblivion, there's no doubt
the mind is an artist riffing on the new strings of the rain
or painting it in picture-music like a poet or a scientist
who look deranged to those who've averaged out
the crucials of the mindscape like the odds of a lottery,
convinced as they are like pilgrims walking
from one end of their sacred asphalt driveways
to the other, that one size fits all, and that these
enlightened journeys without destinations
are just circles that haven't been squared yet.

But if you're off on your own,
making roads with your walking you're the first
to set foot on like the moon of a spaced-out planet
you're trying to turn into something habitable,
remember it's an act of compassion not to lock the door
to the available dimensions of the future when you leave.
Remember that all six of your senses
live in the world you creatively visualize
like the aura of the life that surrounds you
like an ongoing masterpiece of incompletion.
Without them you might be a master of making trees,
but, hey, man, where are the birds?
I don't hear anything singing.
There's nothing to taste or touch or listen to.
No appearances to deceive your consciousness with.

When your eye's got an idea of the kind of star
it wants to be, before it's learned to see, it never shines.
Wondering what flora to root where in the expanding abyss
of the night before you, scatter the stars across the firmament
as if you were sowing the unknown seeds of the wildflowers
that scuttled themselves like arks
in the cracked creekbeds of your neocortical starmud
and waited patiently like hibernating frogs
for the conditioned chaos of the rain
to come like a flashflood of life-nourishing insight.

And when you're annihilated
by the mystic terror of your own freedom
jimmying with the G-spot on your prison locks
to get them to open up like a coven of doves
that want to release their omens like feathers on the wind
that can scry and fly where they want,
don't linger in the doorway of your liberation.
Hesitation is the flypaper of light.
Stare straight into the eyes of the Medusa
until she's the one that blinks first in the savage snake pit
and the stone bird of your heart thaws like a volcano
potting islands in the draconian heat of its bloodstream
and the Gorgons start dancing to the music of their classical hair-dos
as if they could hear the wavelengths
of a pan flute lapping nearby like water.

Kiss the serpent fire on the head
if you want to honour the shapeshifter
that sets your dark energy free to assume the form
of the world that moults the chrysalis of your imagination
that reassembles the rubble of the last gasp
into a house of transformation that fits you
like a bubble of supple skin where you alone
are the myth and physics of its origination.
And whatever world provides you with the mindscape
of your exploration, you recognize by the style
it's painted in as everywhere a work of your own
signed by the wind in the left hand bottom corner of the sky.

Hard to tell the wells from the fountains
in the mingling mindstream that flows like life lines
into the frayed deltas of your palm. And what madness
hasn't always alloyed its backbone to the swords of the sane
defending their indigenous traditions of soft metal?
Don't stare into your cauldron as if you were trying
to read the future by the lint in your belly-button.
Actualize your magic and stir the womb a bit like a master of departures
with an intuitive genius for unitive metaphors.
Mix the paint on the palette into necromantic shades
of new underworlds weeping jewels on the roots
of the fireflowers bearing forbidden fruits
they'll carry by the armful with them out of the garden
like refugees running from an abandoned embassy
that used to give them shelter from themselves with impunity.

No limit. You can live in as many worlds as there are
grains of dust and pollen, where you're not allergic
to the stars, and the constellations come like the empty baggage
of a book that hasn't written a word to anyone,
nor appointed an alpha like the book end of a beginning
to balance the long vowel of omega at the other extreme
to let you know when it's all been said, and it's time
to lay the cornerstone of a myth of origin of your own,
a pebble in the random tide of providential events,
that doesn't need more than one leg to stand on
like a heron hunting fish in the bestiaries of the moon
that's finally given up its dead like a graveyard of Orphic skulls.

Imagine your way like smoke through the eye of a keyhole
into spaces you create by your very being there
to summon them from the abyss, a carillon of dragons
on a holy day of reptiles when the lowest are blessed with wings,
or wall yourself into an aesthetically sealed garden
where the rain perennially washes the blood of the children
who finger-painted the flowers on your thin skin off,
and luxuriate in your fastidious appetite for insignificant details.
Mind is an artist. Able to paint the worlds as a sin of omission,
a sum of destructions, or the negative space of a hand
breaching stone with a spiritual tattoo on its palm,
indelibly invisible as nothing for whom nothing is out of reach.
Make heaven. Make hell. Who you are is where you live.
Nest in a bell like a bird under the roof of your mouth
or root like lightning in a cloud you left unweeded.

Out of the random ignitions and annihilations of dark matter
bombarding your senses like anti-photonic fireflies
emerges a world of shadows into the light
of your imagination like the rising of a new moon
engendered out of you restoring yourself to it
like a lost atmosphere that got carried away by wings.
You can say things into existence word by word
or you can talk them to death in the silence
that follows the ghost of ideas like darkness follows us.
Or you can let the night bird deep
in the solitude of your heart sing
your fervent yearning for a companionable world
into being sweeter than the immensity of your creative freedom
to long for it as if what were missing
would always seem somehow more real than what was not.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Dead To The Living

Work while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.

IN the childhood of April, while purple woods
With the young year's blood in them smiled,
I passed through the lanes and the wakened fields,
And stood by the grave of the child.
And the pain awoke that is never dead
Though it sometimes sleeps, and again
It set its teeth in this heart of mine,
And fastened its claws in my brain:
For it seemed so hard that the little hands
And the little well-loved head
Should be out of reach of my living lips,
And be side by side with the dead--
Not side by side with us who had loved,
But with these who had never seen
The grace of the smile, the gold of the hair,
And the eyes of my baby-queen.
Yet with trees about where the brown birds build,
And with long green grass above,

She lies in the cold sweet breast of earth
Beyond the reach of our love;
Whatever befalls in the coarse loud world,
We know she will never wake.
When I thought of the sorrow she might have known,
I was almost glad for her sake. . . .
Tears might have tired those kiss-closed eyes,
Grief hardened the mouth I kissed;
I was almost glad that my dear was dead
Because of the pain she had missed.
Oh, if I could but have died a child
With a white child-soul like hers,
As pure as the wind-flowers down in the copse,
Where the soul of the spring's self stirs;
Or if I had only done with it all,
And might lie by her side unmoved!
I envied the very clods of earth
Their place near the child I loved!

And my soul rose up in revolt at life,
As I stood dry-eyed by her grave,
When sudden the grass of the churchyard sod
Rolled back like a green smooth wave;
The brown earth looked like the brown sea rocks,
The tombstones were white like spray,
And white like surf were the curling folds
Of the shrouds where the dead men lay;
For each in his place with his quiet face
I saw the dead lie low,
Who had worked and suffered and found life sad,
So many sad years ago.
Unchanged by time I saw them lie
As when first they were laid to rest,
The tired eyes closed, the sad lips still,
And the work-worn hands on the breast.
There were some who had found the green world so grey,
They had left it before their time,
And some were little ones like my dear,
And some had died in their prime;
And some were old, they had had their fill
Of bitter unfruitful hours,
And knew that none of them, none, had known
A flower of a hope like ours!

Through their shut eyelids the dead looked up,
And without a voice they said:
'We lived without hope, without hope we died,
And hopeless we lie here dead;
And death is better than life that draws
Pain in, as it draws in breath,
If life never dreams of a coming day
When life shall not envy death.
Through the dark of our hours and our times we lived,
Uncheered by a single ray
Of such hope as lightens the lives of you
Who are finding life hard to-day;
With our little lanterns of human love
We lighted our dark warm night--
But you in the chill of the dawn are set
With your face to the eastern light.
Freedom is waiting with hands held out
Till you tear the veil from her face--
And when once men have seen the light of her eyes,
And felt her divine embrace,
The light of the world will be risen indeed,
And will shine in the eyes of men,
And those who come after will find life fair,
And their lives worth living then!
Will you strive to the light in your loud rough world,
That these things may come to pass,
Or lie in the shadow beside the child,
And strive to the sun through the grass?'

'My world while I may,' I cried; 'but you
Whose lives were as dark as your grave?'
'We too are a part of the coming light,'
They called through the smooth green wave.
Their white shrouds gleamed as the flood of green
Rolled over and hid them from me--
Hid all but the little hands and the hair,
And the face that I always see.

poem by Edith Nesbit
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Out Of So Much

Out of so much experience
so little to signify it
in a language
extraterrestrial life could understand
about our relationship with gravity
and what's crudely human about being a human
we don't even have in common with ourselves.
Out of so much sorrow
so many tears shed
like oceans of wounded salt
like bruised orchids of blood
like the lightyears between windows
living next door to each other
there is so much vastness between us
in an expanding universe
in the way we reach out to each other
like the stars in wavelengths of farewell
toward the red end of the spectrum.
Out of so much radiance
so much shining
not even the ash of anything
to show for it
when the last ghost has left town
with leaving so much
as a loveletter of smoke
propped up against the mirror.
Out of so much that was seen once only for good
and for a moment understood
until we started thinking about it
my eyes taste of what they've seen
like iron apples ripening in the rain
no one can take a bite out of
to improve their education
by learning how to bury the dead
because most of what I've seen
is pain without insight
pain without eyes
like impact craters in the skull of the moon.
A war of windows in a world without vision
without stars
without dawn and moonrise.
Viral eyes that abhor stained-glass
as much as they do the godless clarity
of the most advanced telescopes
playing Russian roulette with the stars
to prove the Big Bang was cosmic suicide
and we're here like living proof of the afterlife
of its bad karma
like a hunting religion in an agrarian society.
Out of so much mystic specificity
so little sense of earthly union
in the fractious sameness
that tries to blame everyone else
for why things are falling apart
as fast as they're coming together.
Five petals open.
And no flower blooms.
The sun rides a victory chariot through Rome.
The moon a deathcart through a slum.
But the stars know
how much the night keeps to itself.
How much it can't say
when the silence clears the sky of birds.
How much there is to express
that leaves even the dead speechless.
Out of so much verbiage
so many words
so many opinions
stuck like bats in burrs
just beyond the porchlight.
Out of so much hatred of life
out of so much hatred
of light and water
air earth and fire
compressed like a fist of coal
around the blood diamonds of the ideologues
who write political suicide notes
for whole nations by proxy
who don't know how to bleed for themselves
or convince the dead
they died for someone else.
Out of so many words
so many civilizations
from the Tower of Babel
to the New York Metropolitan
with its polyglot fire alarms
warning Alexander
about the approach of Caesar
and his love of books.
Out of so many voices
that spoke like trees in the wind
or out of burning bushes
and the light of the stars
or the thunder that follows the revelation
that it's raining on a lifeless Mars.
Out of so much clamour and noise of insight.
Out of so many whispers of stars
and rumours of waves
held up to both our shell-shocked ears
like skulls of oceanic awarenessness
that found us washed up on a beach somewhere
after some serious weather.
Out of so many poems and paintings and heartfelt polygraphs.
Out of so much confessing.
Out of so many speechs.
So many prayers and blessings
So many dead languages that carried their mother-tongue
like mitochondria in the DNA of their mouths
down through the generations
so that every living word
contains the corpse of a metaphor
like a mummy under a pyramid
or Lazarus catching his breath
to be interviewed
about a life after death
that looked exactly like his
when he woke up to this all over again
with nothing much to say about anything.
Out of so many with so much to say
how few are listening
as if their lies depended on 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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You Never Became A Memory

You never became a memory.
You remain as you are in my life.
A living compassionate presence.
I have forgotten more of me
than I ever could of you.
Whenever I want to see beyond the light
I see through your eyes
everything you wanted to show me
that was not petty or tragic or cruel.
I was a profound fool
but you taught me how
to add my darkness to the night
to enhance the shining.
And even now
when things aren't flowering well
I still reach out for you by deepening my roots.
As if I could touch your face again
like a muse of water
lost in her own reflection.
As if I could ignite the same fires again
that blossomed on the dead branch
of the witching wand
that inspired the stars
who thought they had seen everything
to marvel at their own perfection in you.
Inspiratrix of the blue waterstars
that burned like chandeliers
among the constellations of the lilies
pluming themselves like swans
in the feathers of the moon,
how I long to be eclipsed and enlightened again
like a chameleon reflecting the mood of your beauty
as I did before these windows came
like glass-eyed calendars between us
to prove that time isn't space. It's pain.
And change is an absolute
that doesn't like its relatives.
My angel misses you.
My demon misses you
so badly at times
I can't look into the abyss for long
without impeaching my mind
for its awareness of an emptiness
that aches like an existential absurdity
to be put out of its misery
for being born blind deaf and dumb
about whose wind on the waters is rocking
the cradles and crucibles of creation.
The Medusa holds her tits out
like snakepits and grails
and I never know which one to drink from
or if the poison and the antidote
are just the opposite fangs of the moon
as it grows through its waxing and waning
as if a physician found a way
of healing herself
by sloughing her wounds like skin.
The mindstream weaves its way at night
like a garden snake
through myriad blades of grass
like the shuttle of a loom
that doesn't know what theme of life
unspools in the flowing.
And my eyes miss you like light.
I'm a lighthouse on the shore of a dead sea
trying to walk on water like the moon
as the waves chip away at me
like shale flakes off the cold stone
that edges slowly through my heart like a thorn.
And it may make a king of me
to draw the sword out of the stone
but that doesn't close the wound
of having first to fall upon it
to vacate my throne with honour.
If life is the truth
then lying is the only way
to describe death to a god
who doesn't understand it.
What's a church without gravestones?
Aspiration without an expiry date?
And so many different kinds of death
not enough generations of humans
have been born yet to know them all.
Death tries to trivialize the relative
as if the things I miss most about you
had never been.
But your mindwaters are mingled with mine inextricably
like the shoreless starstreams of space
panning for planets in our flowing
we might live on
and have our being and our breath
unblighted by loss. Separation. Death.
And there is no more of the sadness
I used to see in your eyes
as if they were my own
that I still see everywhere in the eyes of all living things
when I know as you would have had me know
as clearly as you did
that even though the neverness
of implacable circumstances and lost last chances
may have separated us like the threads of the rope
you used to climb up to heaven before me
like one who took the short-cut
and one who took the long way home through these starfields
taking his painful time
like the unfulfilled hope of a child
he's not alone when he opens his eyes
like a dream within a dream
that looks but can't find him,
you can polish the missing into a mirror
and wait like a fox by a black hole for things to appear
that will never be the same again
or you can open your tears like windows
and let out the birds of pain
that I have kept as close to me
as the whisper of your voice
in this cold, dark chimney
telling me to let you go as I do now
to rejoice on the dead branch and the green bough
like the flower and flame
of what became of us.
We cannot be the song or the singer
for very long
as our voices dim like candles in the darkness
that have given it all away.
And as you used to say
as if it would always be today without you
and all we have given is all we could keep of each other
like water returned to the river
we raised to our lips to taste
the sad, last drops
of these eyeless elixirs of the moon
that linger like vapours
in the empty goblets of the morning glory,
and I need to believe you more than I do
in this neverness of now
that has come before me without a beyond
or a word from all that has irrevocably gone.
Yes. But the singing. That goes on.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Transperancy

I see your tears even when you don't cry infront of me
I hear your pain like tear drops falling inside of you
Let me in, so I can try to fix you
I'll bleed your pain and repair every damaged tissue
You say you fine, but your eyes tell me a different story
You living a disguise trapped in hell although you are holy
You are emotionally scard, pain tattoed within your heart
You no longer know what living is, because life and death for you don't seem far apart
You died the day you failed to live
Because you living a painful death (living a life that has no life)
You see yourself through a mirror
But the mirror sees your hurt at first
I know your sky will never be blue
Your brain forms those dark clouds, hence those rainy tears
You've lived with so much pain throughout all these years
Its now a part of your life hence your dreams are your fears
You need a friend, someone to comfort you, its just you don't see me
Or maybe its you in my mind and you IS me
No wonder why I can see you so clearly
I have my eyes shut and yet..Transperancy

poem by Kgagamatso Chimelwane
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If Only There Were One Word I Could Say

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