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I'm A Savage Mystic With Chamelonic Passions

I'm a savage mystic with chameleonic passions.
Serpent fire with meteoritic nano-diamonds for eyes.
The black slash of the wounded crescent of the new moon
bleeding to death like a thorn among the willows
who grieve for me like Arab women under their veils.
I'm a house of ill-repute on the outskirts of the zodiac
and under my eaves and eyelashes I can hear
the storm cloud pigeons cooing like shepherd moons.
I'm dark ore with a star in it, a star
giving birth to dark ore where I mine the eclipses
that pour out of me like igneous swords and snakes
I temper in the dead seas of my mystic watersheds
hissing in the cool bliss of a cosmic riverbed
waiting for the next flashflood of insight
just to hear the frogs singing again among the wild irises
who come with blades of their own as sharp as mine.

And this could be the slipppery slope to solipsism,
subjective idealism, rabid Narcissusism,
Vishnabandu's eighth century Mind-only
non-conception of inconceivable enlightenment
being everything all at once the moment being
ceases to exist chasing its own tail around the mulberry bush,
I'm never all that sure myself, but for the moment,
I'm swimming through stars like flying fish,
I'm drying the painted tear on the face of a clown.
I'm trying to put a smile on my deathmask.
I'm listening to Mayan calendars and crystal skulls
in the gloomy backrooms of human sacrifice
weeping like chandeliers of prophetic lightning
shattering my peace of mind like black mirrors of insight
thrown down at my feet like the ten commandments
brought up from the valley of death like imported brides
to marry those brought down from the mountain.

And all I can say, is, aw, come on now, give me a break,
I can remember when you guys used to feed
your Pythian pythons sweetcakes after every oracle.
What have you got them on now, Qualuds?
And even if the world does end
when the sun rises in the west at midnight
and no birds sing in the eucalyptus trees of Israel
where bull-dozed Arab villages used to stand,
and the shepherds of the black camel
build tall buildings in the desert in the Kuwaiti desert
where the black camel is obviously oil,
and the last man in the world is Chinese
and grovels in the dust at his sister's feet,
and the Nazca lines turn out to be a starmap
to the place where extraterrestrials used to stage
the discus throw for flying saucers
when they put on the Olympics once every four light years;
right now while I have a rare chance to,
I'd rather sword dance with enlightened fireflies
to the hillbilly fiddles of the summer crickets
against your gathering storm on the hillside
on the thresholds of life and insight
than goose-step to your martial requiem
on the event horizon of a black hole.
And who knows, if you go a little deeper
into the dark with all three of your eyes open
you might find a dragon like me
full of serpent fire with the alpha and omega
of crescent moons for fangs and claws,
one of which kills you, and the other cures,
spiritual antidotes to toxic cosmic glands,
this remedy in the heart of the disease,
this herb of the moon on the tongue of a snake,
this Eden I've flown into off course today,
not a cinder, but a nightbird in the eye
of the hurricane rose of Armageddon,
where the nations meet on the plains of Jazreel
to dance themselves to death in a moshpit
at a rave of wavelengths out to save the world.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Nightbird On A Winter Branch

Nightbird on a winter branch.
Dark blossom of the new moon,
Last kiss on the eyelids of the dead
As the snow falls like apple bloom.

I see you’ve left the door ajar:
The backdoor of an eclipse
To let the first crescent of the light out.
The sacred syllable of the mistfits

Lost in the silence and the solitude
You raise like heretical mystics into songs
That only you alone can sing
So that each in their homelessness belongs

To the false dawn of the same secret
They weep over like empty lockets
That stole the moon from their windows
As they burned at the stake, rockets

Martyred in the fire of the holy books
That inspire them deeper into exile
This late at night far from anywhere
Distance is measured by the mile

And not the wingspan of the light-years
It’s taken me to write this.
Like a bird that flew out of the darkness,
That left no trace of the witness

As it blew a kiss of sudden insight.
A word in passing from the dead
About who’s behind the death mask
Of the snow that’s covering my head

Like the polar ice cap of a planet
With the prophetic wisdom of a skull.
Life in the birthmark of the new.
Death in the harvest of the moon at full.

Emptiness devoid of all light.
The first sign of renewal in the urn
Of a nightbird on a winter branch.
Diamonds of ice and insight that burn

Like coal in the eyes of a snow man
With the passion of a phoenix born
A star in the cold furnace of the sky.
Where every passage is a rite of return

That hides its brightest jewels
blossoming like enlightenment on the wing
In the dark ore of a nightbird
When a deathmask opens its mouth to sing.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Cinder In The Sun's Eye

Cinder in the sun's eye, there's fire in your tears.
You plunge into the light like a moth on a mission
and it's the sun that disappears to shine at midnight
in the black mirrors of your eyes. Dark light, intense,
starling, charred swan, you know as well as I do,
the occult approach to the optimism of an eclipse
is to act radically in the name of things you can
only unattainably conceive of. Love on your wrist
like a hawk whose wing you healed, dwelling
in your homelessness without a fear of eviction.
No truth in the mouth of the snake that's pulled
the fangs of its conviction out of the sky
like crescent moons, pins from the eye
of a voodoo doll you've nursed for light years
on the nightshift of a morgue that's aroused by death.
Milk of your left breast kills. The other practices compassion.
Whole snakepits in the shrines of the wavelengths
mourning the death of Medusa, as if snakes too
had something to mourn that makes them shine within you.

Ten thousand photos from an orbiting satellite
with X ray vision and a spectrographic trajectory
couldn't improve upon the license of your beauty
like a black pearl at the magmatic core of planet
trying to make herself as habitable as she can to visitors.
And for those who aren't used to your kind of light,
you hand out sun-visors and starmaps
and black candles to show them the way home
through the same old doorway they came in by.
You're an ambassadorial firefly from the third eye
of dark matter where the roots of the light are embedded
and you've got a message for the blossom
that looks like a love letter. The moon
budding on a dead branch like a crack in the door
you left ajar like an orchard in waiting on a cold spring night.

And who but you could stand eye to eye with the bravery
you practise like a World War II canary
in an underground armaments factory that isn't bomb proof?
There's nothing yellow about the skin of your ammunition.
You confront cosmic dangers in the intimate details.
You ignite and defuse the supernovas and black holes
that endanger the lives of those who follow you like a cult
and though you like their company, you'd much rather be
maculately alone with someone who can see for themselves
that those who were driven out, exiled
into the emptiness of the unknown extremes of the mind
often return with their hands full of the strangest gifts
that time and distance have ever offered anyone
to prove how off course the shore-huggers are
in assessing the course of a life as far out
and comprehensive as the sea. Deeper than stars.
Emotionally more expansive than the immensity
of any shining that can be palmed off cheaply
in the pawn shops of the retinal tidal pools clutching
to the relics and icons of disembodied crab claws.
You don't live like the collateral damage of the sun
and the sea. You don't ask amputees to show you
a way out of the labyrinth by the light of spent candles.
Cinder in the sun's eye, there's fire in your tears.
A luminosity that flows unceasingly
from the watersheds of broken mirrors.
You just have to cry. And dragons as immutable
as diamond cutters take up flower arranging
in a Zen teahouse enlightened by the rain.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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As If Beyond Death

As if beyond death today,
as if I lay already under the eyelid of the moon,
the echo of my heart
pumping shadows
through my perfectly preserved corpse
in a silence that's never known the wind,
a fallen wharf without arrivals or departures,
and sad enough not to care why,
blood on the dolphin in the black tide
that pours me out of the horseshoe of the bay
like a road from its boot,
wipes me like the pollen and dust of dark matter
off the windowsills of the constellations,
my unknown mass crucial
to the cosmic contractions
that might give birth to the world again,
and I'm here alone in the high field
drowning in the twilight with the wildflowers
and the sky a last exhalation of the blue-green luster
that flirts with the mystic violet
on a homing crow's head
as the shadows assemble the wings
of a total eclipse
and a new dragon is born of the pain
that shrieks like lightning in the mouth of the abyss,
a torn animal
peeled out of its own skin like an eye
to add its darkness to the furnace of the black rose
that roars in the night
to blood the hungry mirror
with the thorns and talons of clarity,
to feed the wound of its existence
its existence.
And when I walk to the end of myself
through the golden rod and waist-high asters,
the seed of the stars that sleep with the daughters of men,
some of the flowers close up like fists and kisses
and others grasp themselves like a key
to a door that the whole universe can walk through,
and there are strange birds
flying from the eyes
in the rising skull of the moon
that sing like the pyres of cremated guitars
that died like trees in their solitude
and even the gates are weeping like wild dogs.
And there's a wind, intelligent, dark
the ghost of an ancient serpent
horned without ears,
an ocean of mind that exceeds itself like a wave
that howls like a secret it can't tell itself,
like a root blind to its own flowers,
that wants to lead my voice away in chains,
that wants my tongue to try
like a leaf in the updraft of a fire storm
to scream its agony out in the night
so that even the furthest star shudders
with the horror of its final liberation
like an arrow through the throat of a caged hawk.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Would Speak To You In My Night Voice

I would speak to you in my night voice
if you were still here. If you were even as near
as the stars commingled in my breath,
I'd thaw my secret zodiac of crystal skulls
and let my mindstream run wild at your feet
like a flashflood waking the dry creekbed up
from its long dream of making the desert bloom
with real flowers in a mirage of metaphors.
I would ignite the pilot lights of a thousand stars
to blaze in an honour guard of mythic starmaps
waiting for you to bless their colours,
because wonder's never been known to start a war
with a world it's amazed by in every mesmerizing detail
without annihilating itself first, bursting
its own bubble in an efflorescent multiverse.

I'm a surrealistic mystic to give it a funny name,
and you've seen my hidden housewells, sacred pools
receiving the moonlight on the water like the blades
of ceremonial swords that tasted my blood first
like a rose bleeds on its own thorns, now let me
show you my watersheds, the fathomless voids
of dark abundance and bright vacancy
where my eyes swim like the Circlet Of The Western Fish
that never swim out of themselves
or the oceanic awareness they're luminously
immersed in up to their gills in the clear light
of the emptiness shining back at them like a distant mind.

Under the icy eyelids of methane seas on shepherd moons
I can feel life stirring like the muse of itself
and though it's too early in evolution to see yet
I've jumped ahead of myself like the light of the Pleiades
and gathered up a herd of wild telescopes
grazing on the stars like big-eyed, thin-legged antelopes
waiting for you to make an appearance on opening night
and watch how they'd dance and leap for you
like grasshoppers in the Bolshoi Ballet
who didn't give a damn that autumn was on its way
to throw cold water on the fire because in this universe
imagination is the physics of the place, and the ants
might busy themselves gathering butterfly wings
like the covers of slender chapbooks of poetry,
but I'm drunk on these lyrical elixirs of the mind
that I take as a sign that you are near in the night
and who has to worry about snow,
when they can live in your light on an occult planet
where myriad seasons can pass in a moment of spontaneity
and the fruits of life invariably fall toward the sky?

Are we both not rooted in the ancient fires overhead?
Nervous systems of black matter, scaffolding the mind
climbs up to paint the origin of worlds before their grand openings,
dark palettes of our third eye, skeletons of pictographic bones
beneath these scriptures of flesh we can read with our fingertips
like holy books and X rays written in the boustrophic signs
of the last time we ploughed the dark side of the moon together
and filled the siloes of the stars with galaxies
that spun like Tibetan prayerwheels, or Moroccan Sufis
or dust devils at the heels of winged messengers
conducting us like the flightfeathers of the dark arcana
we can read in each others eyes like loveletters
written in the cursive dream grammar the heart sings to itself in
when it's a lonely nightbird, and you're there like the stars.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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There's A Black Lotus In My Heart

There's a black lotus in my heart, black hole
of enlightenment, black waterstar, sacred eclipse.
Nothing worth attaining that isn't unattainable.
And all the gates are upside down and backwards.
Albino starmaps with black dots shining
on the other side of the mirror, zodiacs
of black matter looping back on themselves
like solar auroras of the sun that rises at midnight.
I don't know what all this means. I may have gone
too far into exile and actually managed to get
to the dark side of the moon. Or I'm a warehouse
of shadows at noon that have lost track of the time
like blind sundials that feel they're being followed.

The light illuminates, but I bloom nocturnally.
I've got the burn marks of stars all over my skin.
I work on the nightshift at the foundry of a constellation
busy pouring itself out like iron and oxygen, blood and air,
forged out the afterlives of hydrogen I've gathered over the years.
A fire-womb engendering one you fill with water.
Fire the midwife of its own daughter. I'm envious
of creative immolations I know I'll never attain.
Though my left brain is in full communication with the right
and I'm a full moon of the bright vacancy, dark abundance
of both sides, and the harvest is ripe, I'm always
a star ahead of my light, so I don't end up
like a dead school furnace in the basement
writing my memoirs like a manuscript of ashes in an urn.

Deconstruct me wholly down to my last atom
and I promise you, if that's all I've got to work with
like one stem cell to another at the beginning
of a matrix of causes and conditions into which
we'll be placed by a Hox gene assessing the chi
of which direction our eyes should face, and how many
degrees of separation there should be between our ears,
I promise you, I'll still burn with the fireflies
and the supernovas like a blind prophet
who saw two wavelengths copulating like snakes
and has been tied at this stake of of a spine,
an oracular heretic of both sexes in synchrony
like the hybrid of a phoenix and a waterbird
burning in visionary serpent fire ever since
for the sake of a muse that always comes
in the nick of time like rain on the moon to my rescue.

When it's night in the diamond of my third eye
is the light not more mystically enhanced by the darkness,
more mystically specific than the white wash of the sun?
The moon is the mitochondrian that tempers
the toxicity of the light so the nucleus of the solar system
can blaze with alien oxygen meteorically across the night.
The black mirror, brighter than the white,
shows you your reflection on the inside
where you're arrayed like a faceless world
that's given up trying to second guess
who's the unerring witness under the lifemask
of the surreal cosmology that doesn't recognize
it's not a self, at first glance, and that all physics
is the psychology of ridding yourself of the delusion
you can, even if you're riding a flying carpet
out into this desert of stars to sweep the constellations away
like mirages that have been throwing bad meat
down your holy wells like sacred crocodiles.

Ignite even so much as a matchbook at this distance
or turn on a flashlight to see what's in the dark
as if you were looking for your mind with your mind on the light
even though it's as abundantly clear as your eyes it's night out,
and the billions of stars in the next closest galaxy,
Messier 31, at eleven o'clock above the middle star
in Andromeda on the rocks, and two million light years
of enlightenment will gently recede back into the cosmic hiss
and disappear from your field of view subliminally
knowing, because the timing's yours, you're a daylily
covering your insight with the petals of your own hands
because you don't know how to open them sidereally yet
from the outside in, where your darkness shines
and the night you turn your face away from
like the bright side of the moon blinds you
by a reflected glory to the radiance of the origins
of your own vision, deep within, where it all begins
emanating stars of the darkness of your own eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sit Warmly Here With Me Awhile

Sit warmly here with me awhile
and I will smother you in fireflies
until your aura looks like
a dandelion constellation
or a globular cluster of first magnitude stars.
My scars have exhumed the knives of old wounds.
And though I confide in the void
like an echo returning to its own voice
or a breath to the sacred groves of the lungs at sunset
and superseded my quota of regrets
to make an expandable universe liveable
every firefly of insight's
got the engine of a dragon behind it
and it burns like a dark clarity within me.
Wrap your silence and mystery around me
like a chrysalis or cloak
and let me rest in your indivisibility awhile
until I disappear deep in your eyes
like a nightbird into its longing.
Let me sit around the lonely fire of your heart
as if I were the only house of the zodiac
who comes to you like an illicit love affair
with its lights still on
long after all the others have gone out.
My solitude is bruised by an abyss
that keeps digging deeper into me
and sometimes it feels as if
it's looking for water and a well
and then other times it's a midnight burial
of someone I can only catch a glimpse of
once and a while under a full moon
that looks like an undertaker
through the leafless veils of the weeping willows
digging his own grave
but feels just like a spade hitting my skull
like a strange form of paydirt
buried like the black pearl of the new moon
in a hope chest of star mud.
Take the coin from under my tongue
like the last sacred syllable
of my unconditional humanity
and throw it down this black hole in my heart
like the moon in a wishing well
and embrace me as if I were not dead awhile.
Out of the ashes the smoke and the flames
like two candles under the stars
let's make up myths of origin
where the gods have no names
until the wildflowers that have outgrown
the gates of the Garden of Eden
look back at where they come from
like a long way away
and give them one
like the elders of an Ojibway tribe
decide on the names of the new born
each according to the totem of a dream.
Pull this thorn from my eye
like the eyelash of the last crescent of the moon
and let me see you face to face
without a thousand and one tears between us.
I shall glorify you like a mosque in lapis lazuli
that can no more contain your image
than the day the night
or one constellation
the whole of the Milky Way.
I shall paint your portrait in picture-music
like the moon reflected on the black water gardens
of the Taj Mahal in mystic hues
of nocturnal waterlilies and cobalt blues
to highlight your eyelids when you sleep
and on your lips rose drops of blood
to wake you like a kiss from your dream
when the waterbirds rise from the lake.
Receive me like a sword into your depths
I throw in tribute from a bridge that crosses over
to the other side of myself
as if you were the far shore of my mindstream
come near to sit with me here awhile
and reminisce like water
on the things that have been and passed
as we listen to the tender laughter of the waves.
I will lift up my shirt
and show you the scars of all the holy wars
I've fought with myself like a faithful heretic
who knew he was doomed to lose
and the spots where the spearheads of insight
penetrated my heart like a voodoo doll
baptized in hot whiskey and cold blood
to take a message to the gods
about human suffering
in a language they could understand
wasn't just the echo of their own voices.
Sit with me here awhile like a face beside a mirror
looking out upon the same starfields
without a trace of our own reflections in the view
and I will teach you
the healing powers of a wounded mouth
like the secret grammar of a grail that seeks itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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What's To Keep You From Dancing?

What's to keep you from dancing if you've got nothing to live for?
Dance naked in your tears. Cry through your laughter.
Plunge into a black hole and come out the other side,
renewed, a virgin, no more feathers and tar pits.
No more dead petals in a dry fountain. Absurd, isn't it?
When you begin to compare skulls with the moon,
not at all what you imagined you would see, not even
the prevailing consensus of delusion that passes for reality,
this neo-primordial soup of logos and memes
we're all swimming in like fish in radioactive water.
This pre-Cambrian efoliation of multitudinous sentience
re-inventing cuneiform to write it all down in the Burgess Shale
three hundred million years from now, fossil by fossil
and one among myriads, the lucky lottery ticket
of a fish with a spinal cord that will lead eventually
back to the saddest excuses in the world for the likes of us.

I've stood on bridges late at night by myself
watching the waters flow as if my mindstream
were going on without me, and the pain were too much
even for a poet to sublimate his way out of,
and I've lived my way to the end of a labyrinth of cul de sacs
and wearied of their chronic recurrence like a water wheel
at an abandoned mill that used to gamble on a river boat
things would stay afloat long enough to make shore
before the ship goes down. The crucial point here
is not to live with regrets as if you had something personally
to do with all of it. There's no starmap
for the burrs of the sorrows that smoulder
like brown constellations in the slums of an inflammable zodiac.

You diminish your arrogance at the expense of your humility
that's grown as gigantic as God, when you think
you know enough about the unknowable to fix the blame
as if you'd just come up with a new alibi for you and the world.
Could be a curse. Could be a blessing. Could be
an improbable concourse of unforeseen events
that's been chain-reacting well before
the infinite beginnings of the multiverse.

You cut your skin with razors as if you were
playing tic tac toe on your thighs, hoping someone
would come along like an antidote and suck the poison out.
But life isn't sweet when you've learned
to weep through your fangs. Go ask the moon.
There's no holy crusade going on as if the rose
aroused its petals to go to war against the infidelity of its thorns.
Even the predators, in their own way, are the children of their prey.
The longer the fangs. The sharper the talons. The harder the armour.
Ever seen what an owl can do to a snake? Yes,
things can be bad, but not necessarily for your sake.

They can be good, too, but if you think it's for you,
you're going to end up telling lies about suffering in your sleep
like a flashflood in a dry creekbed trying to wake the frogs
that have burrowed deep into the starmud for the duration
by singing to themselves in the rain as if they'd just had a revelation
it's wet on the moon again. I'd could give you any one
of a thousand interpretations of your eyes. I could
turn your sacred snake's tongue where the rivers part
into a green witching wand twitching over the watersheds
of mystic lightning. I could scry the self-sacrifice of your next breath
like the smoke of a distant fire on an autumn hillside
and try to explain the fireflies as the popular demotic
of the proto-nostratic of the stars and how that relates
to the scars on your leg. Befuddle you into a salvation
that would last at least a couple of decades before
you could ever find your way back by your own lights
to where you were going with the rain before I met you.

You're not wrong. You're not right. I could say that and mean it
as easily as a principled astrolabe looks upon a starless night
and doesn't try to see what isn't there. It isn't dark.
It isn't bright out. It's clear all the way to the next star
if you don't bind yourself to a mental atmosphere
where the mind suffers at the hands of its own weather
like a child that thinks it needs to be taught to wake up
from its own nightmare when, in fact, once things
begin to bottom out it's as over as a bubble rising to the top.

Pop! No more delusion, no more enlightenment.
No more mirages taking charge of the wellsprings
in the desert of stars in ruins around Jericho
as the wind shapes the sands in an hourglass
like a potter or a sculptor into a sea of eyes
that can actually flow like tears of glass in the heat
you can drink from like a dragon on the moon
just before it begins to rain. And the grasslands awaken
of their own accord. And everywhere guitar-shaped gazelles
are getting up on their own four legs like amputees
that haven't forgotten how to dance to the elegant thunder
of their own leopard skin drums. And the rain
comes back to your drought-stricken eyes again
and runs like rivulets and the unravelled threads of your lifelines
through the starmud gullies of your brain breaking
into waterlilies of insight on the banks of your mindstream
tempering the broken swords of moonlight
that are offered to it in tribute, not surrender,
because there is no war, into alloys of reality and dream,
delusion, enlightenment, imagination and awakening
no one before you has ever fallen upon like a dancer
who was cut to the quick by a life she's not been out of step with
by not so much as one angstrom of a wavelength of a firefly
for all the billions of lightyears along the way
you've been leading a pilgrimage of shadows deeper into the night
like a calendar of shepherd moons
you've been slashing like a sundial on your legs
moments away from the shrine of broken promises
you intend to keep like a vow you made to yourself
sleepwalking your way across the corals of your grief in bare feet
as if sooner or later you could tread all that blood into wine.

Put your dancing shoes on. Crystal slippers. Moonboots. Winged heels.
Stop carving your body like a deathmask you can wear in the world
like an alphabet with omega as its only child.
Why lie down on the grave of that morose saint of clowns
you prayed to deliver you from yourself like the spade
you were using to dig your own ditch on the moon
for the mass assassination of the innocent and obscene?
I'm a poet. And to me you're as beautiful inside and out
as a blank piece of paper after the first snow
has had a taste of moonlight and softly glows in the dark.
Not Joan of Arc singing at the stake of her own serpent-fire
feathering her body in flames, in boas of smoke to cover up
the glyphs of the bird tracks on the secret loveletter
she's been writing to herself in the flesh to really mean
what she says when she says I want to live, I want to love,
I want to give and receive the way I breathe without
meaning anything by it. I want to see, because I have
brave eyes, deeply into the light, into the dark, the mystery
of a life that keeps on going without knowing where it ends.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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When The Blue Dove Turns Back

When the blue dove turns back,
exhausted by looking for things
she hoped to find,
blue blood to the dark side of the heart,
no land in sight, no blithe word,
no sprig of olive in her beak,
and the bruised sky turns black
and there’s nothing to seek
but the misdirections of the stars,
she looks for shelter
under the wing of the dragon
that takes her into his darkness
like the night takes in the moon.
Just for her he disarms
the claws on one wing and a prayer
like a dead branch to receive her blossom.
She thaws like snow in the heat
of his ancient serpent fire
and weeps like a window
for things that go on forever.
Like the homeless continuity
of her random flight plan.
He speaks to her tenderly
like silence out of the enormity
of his solitude within
as if she were standing
in the shadows of opening doors.
No lover, no assassin, no eclipse,
no starmap to anywhere,
not a sage of snake wisdom,
his yellow eyes slashed like full moons,
he says, you’ve got wings, just like me
and maybe it’s not landfall you’re looking for
not something continental
to rest upon like a mountaintop
but the wind, whichever way it blows,
wherever it goes
that is always vagrantly at home
and everywhere in touch with itself.
Just as the night sea never
severs itself from its own weather
whatever mirror it wears
with or without a facelift,
you might think you’re so far out of it
you’re flying a kite on string theory,
a high note on a stave of power lines.
But what are these if not
your own umbilical and spinal cords
attached like wavelengths and lifelines
to everything in the womb of the dark mother
who keeps on giving birth to you
from one bucket of a waterclock
to the next forever?
And when you’re lost in your own eyes,
is the night not compassionate,
does it not lay out a starmap before you
and say go whichever way you want,
follow whatever star you choose.
In an omnidirectional world of light
they’re all true north
even when you’re walking
in the shadows of your own shining.
Even when you’re trying to reach landfall
by cooking rocks in a tinfoil crack spoon
like the feminine gender of Columbus
in the Caribbean islands
when you break up
like Pangaea into continents
as if you were fracturing prophetic skulls
that didn’t take their own advice,
hoping someone might name one after you.
And I can think of a few
that could be immediately renamed after you
though you’re not the first
nor the last to discover them.
Mu and Atlantis.
But they’re not the kind of place
you want to pilot an ark to.
And if you think it’s hard now
try tugging a shipwreck up from the bottom
to see if even one of a kind survived.
There you can eat the carrion of corpses
like the white crow
Noah sent out first
to look for dry land
then cursed the bird
for feeding off the drowned
with a hoarse voice
and an eclipse of black feathers,
turning diamond back into coal
you can cook in a spoon
like forty nights of new moons
that never open their eyes
because they’re as stillborn
as the porcelain doorknob
of a cosmic egg
you can only break out of
on the inside
by letting the world
unfold your wingspan
like a loveletter to yourself
you finally decide to send back like word
of a blue dove at peace with herself
at the first sight of real land
even from the crow’s nest
you’re living in now
from hand to mouth.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Guardian and BloodRose

BloodRose,
Rose of my love,
My love for Dark moon,
Dark as my heart,
Black as my soul,
And gave me my rose.

The rose of blood,
With petals soft and black,
Never as a rose so beautiful,
Grown not in light,
But under a dark moon lit sky.

Guardian,
Yes a guardian of BloodRose,
With teeth long and sharp,
Claws hard as diamonds,
Scales as dark as night.

My dear sweet guardian,
Guardian black as my heart,
Fire in your eyes,
Shadows in your soul,
A dragon of the dark moon.

A single rose,
With petals so fare,
As dark as my heart,
I now hold in my hand,
The rose of blood.

You are my darkness,
Fear of this love,
This love for you,
Love for darkness,
The cold shadows in my heart
That makes me yearn for you.

Now as you lay dying,
I hold a single rose,
The rose you gave me,
And as I hold it tight,
The thorns slice my hand,
Covered with blood,
My blood.

I have one fear,
The fear of death,
Symbol of my lost love,
Rose as dark as me,
Laying in a pool of blood,
Blood from me.

As I lay dying,
I remember my name,
BloodRose,
I am the rose of blood,
And I died of my own creation.

A creation of perfect beauty,
Petals dark black,
Thorns like small daggers,
Grown from my love,
My love for a dragon,
A dragon as dark as my heart.

Even in my death,
I think of you,
And the rose you gave me,
The rose that killed me,
The Rose of Blood.

poem by Nicolette Gonzalez
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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God, I Hurt Sometimes For Reasons I Can Only Guess

for Sally

God, I hurt sometimes for reasons I can only guess.
Don't know what it is, too much love, too little,
but it feels like I'm giving birth to fog,
or my heart is standing in the doorway
of an abandoned chrysalis asking if
we could do it all a little differently this time,
and ingather like the nebulae of the stars
instead of the circus tents of these gypsy moths
swarming the Dutch elms like fake starmaps
that don't know much about shining in the dark,
but eat mini blackholes through the leaves
that have known greener days of radiance,
and more creative things to do with the light.

I can see the stars even in daylight
from the bottom of this fathomless well
only the snakes and the frogs and the fireflies
descend into to drink from the dark watershed
of the mystery I'm swimming through
like an albino bioluminescent fish through black ink
trying to find the words to express this sorrow
that overtakes me from time to time
as if life's waterclock had confined itself
to one bucket for awhile. And time had stopped.

It's as if I could feel every wound in the world
pierce the hummingbird of my heart on the thorns
of a black rose, as if I could feel the secret grief
of the yellow star in the violet eye of the beautiful lady
who toxically weeps like the belladonna
under the chandeliers of the deadly nightshade
that cures what it kills in love
administering death like mercy to put her lover
out of his misery with an oceanic love potion
he can't help but thrive upon like nectar and ambrosia.

As if I were picking up the small body of a sparrow
in the cradle of my hands and seeing in it,
its random extinction in the face of the windowpane
that lied, the death of the sky. And it's strange
that I do, that my eyes should fill with unprompted tears
that I'm digging a hole with my bare hands
in the same bed of tiger lilies I buried my goldfish in
like the big June bugs lying on their backs
perfectly preserved out in the open on the cement sidewalk
where I stopped to bury them with a finger for a spade,
when no one was looking who might laugh at me,
and mark their graves with two blades of grass,
on my way back from rugby practise, on King's Street,
to make sure nobody stepped on them just for fun,
as if death itself weren't already enough of a desecration,
a seeming destruction, to satisfy them for awhile.

And it's silly, I know, to bury the dead
in the soil of my heart as if they were bulbs
I planted in the fall to bloom in the spring
like the bells of the blue hyacinth
and the white gold daffodils of a pagan Easter
emerging like the high priestesses of a mystery religion
that returns resurrection to the womb of a woman.

Amorphous pain, homogeneously dispersed,
like the afterbirth of the background universal hiss
that miscarried into the post-natal depression
of an emptiness that keeps reversing its spin
on the state of things like synchronous happenings
in the charged particle field of a duplicitous politician,
like a ghost in the rain, like a faraway train,
my heart's the red lantern of a Chinese box-kite
way down the line at the last stop
where no one gets off, and no one arrives,
and there are no starmaps like tourist brochures
to point out like cabbies, the hotspots
of what's shining down upon nothing tonight.

I can feel the inhuman solitude
of eighty thousand prisoners sentenced
to years of isolation in the third eye of the pen
chewing on their shadows like leg-hold traps,
and the contemplative vengeance of their keepers
walking the night rounds with socks on their feet
in the wee hours of the morning as if it were they
who had avoided capture and mastered failure
by defeating these uncaged in their sleep.
As Robert Louis Stevenson said, or was it Walter de la Mare,
tread lightly for you tread on my dreams,
some like mushrooms, some like landmines.

But it isn't the kind of pain you can factor
a cause into like fireflies into the Slough of Despond,
or the Valley of Death, after the storm has passed
like an electric chair that's just thrown the switch.
It's softer than that, inclusive, embrasive, almost
lunar in its compassion for the least of things
from flies with wings torn off like the pages
of a calendar, June bugs, to the orphanage of asteroids
that nobody wanted when the solar system
was first forming into myriad nuclear family ways.

Not the kind of sorrow that brings rain, but
pain like the condensation of hydrogen clouds
that have been lingering like ghosts of the stars
they used to be, waiting to break into light
like the constellation of a new myth of origin
to explain being exiled this far from home.
No grave in sight, but still I mourn
for all the wishing wells that
didn't get what they wanted
when they kissed the moon
like a coin they had blessed
and returned to river they had retrieved it from
only to discover the dark side of their luck
when it popped up again like a sacred syllable
under the forked tongue of a lottery ticket.

Pain without locus, pain without focus,
a blur, a smear, a smudge, an atmosphere, an aura,
cataracts in the eyes, flowers in the sky,
and everywhere I see the belongings of the Beloved,
her passion for lightning and fireflies,
scattered all over this unbegotten house of life
like battered flowers and shattered trees
and power-outages that make the stars flicker
and black out, for days at a time, like an ice-storm
in the middle of summer, passing over the distant hills,
like a glacier following its own melting
all the way to the dark night sea
as if water, as it is to a river a raindropp and a tear
whether it's painted on a clown's face or not,
or just trying to make the mascara of the poppies run,
were the only guide it could trust.

And these are the green swords of the gladiolas
and wild violet irises down by the river
where the waterlilies and the corpses flow by
like floats in a parade of burning flowers
that make the river's eyes run with grief and bliss,
hello, farewell, good-by, as if you just saw
the silouhette of a bird fly across the moon
with a few beats of its wings, a small pulse,
the brief thought moment of a passing wavelength,
like my own, a braille dot on the starmap of a blind star,
with the emotions and aspirations of a Cepheid variable
trying to keep pace with the measure of the death march
beating on the drum of my heart
like dollops of funereal rain on a tin roof.

And what do you learn when you die like this
for the things you lived in the name of too long
to bear the loss of the world mountain
on the turtle of your heart when the black swan
of the new moon has been snapped up from below
as if the only way you can come to the end of things
is to run out of beginnings, and that hasn't happened yet
since the universe first broke into stars and went prime time.

All opening nights. Everyone of them. And there are
scimitars of the moon at last crescent and poems and lovers
you can cut your wrists on like the brass moonrise
of a tuna fish can, if you don't really want to talk
to the ambulance about anything unreal as reality.
And you can be rushed to the emergency ward,
like a rose that's bleeding out, and there'll
you'll meet a nurse, not a nun, at the end
of a long tunnel of light that isn't estranged from death
but embodies the female principle of life
with a smile like a silver herb of the moon
and she'll inser the other fang of the snake that heals
into your vein like a boomslang of blood
hanging on the branch of a a chromium tree
with mandalic wheels that wobble like planets down the hall.

And there she'll teach you as you heal
that just as your lungs have learned to trust
the oxygen in the air that others are breathing along with you
like the Amazon jungle, fish in the sea, the flower
of the candle that blooms in fire, so your heart
that imbibes the skull cup of the moon down to its lees
to read the partial eclipses of your prophecies and dreams
like shipwrecks at the bottom of lunar seas
that have been drained of water,
drained of atmosphere and wine
looking for signs in dry creekbeds
like the lifelines on the palms of your hands,
must water the dust at your feet,
the stars above your head like the Milky Way,
the Road of Ghosts, your passage on earth,
with as many boodstreams in life
as it takes to float your lifeboat
on a bubble of the moon at high tide.

Such is life. Such is the flashflood of love
that makes the seven year long sleep of the frogs
up to their voices in starmud, sing
that their dream has finally come alive again,
and the voodoo doll of the cactus pierced with thorns,
flowers, and the serpent revels in the rain
that falls on its scales like the petals of a marigold
or the keys of a piano with its eighty-eights straight
and plays such music as it's never heard before
its scales turn into the feathers of a bird, or if
it's enlightened, the wings of a dragon of serpent fire
running up your spine like the sign of a healer
coiled around the axis of the earth like a caduceus
because even a single blade of grass here
is a strong enough medicine to give
the whole world vertigo like a Sufi
at a crossroads on the moon
dancing alone with dust devils
when things begin to overflow again
like a cup, like a heart with a crack and a broken handle,
like a watershed in a hourglass,
or a mirage in a desert of stars
because love, when it leaves home,
always forgets to turn the faucet off
like the four rivers flowing out of Eden
to water the root fires in the star gardens of paradise
when love jumps up stream like a salmon
coming home to the womb it will be buried in
like a loveletter from the sea to the moon.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Come To Me In Rags Of Blue Fire

Come to me in rags of blue fire, you, muse, you,
the gardenia face on the other side of the black gate
whose ancient spears are tipped with the taste
of wounded moons and iron roses; do not be swayed
by the blossoms on the cherry bridge,
or why the shadows of the brick children
on the walls of atomic decisions
haven’t been signed by the artists; give up
your fixation for amateur comet-watching in the rain
and come to me, touch me, hold me, consume me
in the flames of your igneous dispositions,
pierce me with stars, tear me on the thorns of your light,
as you have loved me in revery, distress, and tears,
as you have loved me in horror and humiliation
and then yourself lain down with me
in the mass graves of the student guitars
that were raped and murdered in the limelights
of the show-bizz army trucks,
antidotes weeping all night from the crescent of your kinder fang
to keep my heart alive like a toad in winter,
bring me now the night fire of your tigers
and the fragrance of wild sapphires blooming on the wind
when you return like an atmosphere to find me
as only you know how to find me
listening to my scars eat through the silence of dry creekbeds
revising the flash floods of their nervous breakdowns
with the short hands and amputated fingers of cactus alphabets.
Shall I call you dark names, and season my calling
with black swans and histrionic willows;
shall I summon you by silvering the Russian olive,
or bleeding the cherry to paint a man without lips,
or will you make me labour for nothing
in the sweatshops of the underpaid cocoons
when my tongue’s already as thick as a shoulder-pad?
Come, just come, come with wings, come with fireflies
and trust I’ve always preferred you to suicide,
come with bells and starfish calendars, come with candles and cedar
and tears in the mirror that don’t belong to anyone
and remember what I’ve died for when you asked,
come with fish and peacocks and orchids,
with squandered lakes bruised by the moon,
with black roses shedding their crows like witches,
come to me like an emerald that needs healing,
come with fingertips, breasts, eyes, a windfall of soggy peaches,
and believe in the poor goat whose piety’s a broken horn,
lift him up like rain above the sphinx in a desert ripe with diamonds,
and let him know, softly remind him, caress and confine him
like a cemetery covered in a keyboard of snow
until he confesses there’s an asylum in the heart of chaos
that sings to itself like an emergency constellation,
more enthralling than all the rest, a black waterstar
you are compelled to turn the lights off everywhere to be.

poem by Patrick White
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Compassion Is The Sweetness That Enters

Compassion is the sweetness that enters
the wounded apple of knowledge after
you've taken your first bite out of it.
It's not an antidote to the facts of life and death.
And you should know by now if you've suffered at all,
and it's impossible not to from the moment you open your eyes,
the night is not a reward, nor the lantern of the light
that goes before you on a graveyard shift of the stars.
Compassion is the oldest instinct of the heart
and first muse of the mind that can taste only
the blowing blossoms and bitter green apples of the spring,
gripe brain, before it ripens like a sunset in your blood.

That's why the heart knows more about it than the head.
And I expect, on that basis, no one is more capable
of loving us who must doubt that we're worthy of love
to live up to the truth of it than the dead who can open
the tiny koans of the seeds at the core of things
like the lockets of fortune-cookies that break
like twisted cosmic eggs in a rush to spread their wings
like waterbirds who write the lyrics of their songs on the fly.

Words for the eye. Words for the ear. Words
for the voice of the wind like black walnut trees
and kites in a storm. And if you really know how to listen,
I mean if you can hear the wavelength of a black snake
swimming across your blood like a mantra
of terrifying, beautiful wisdom that keeps its secrets
to itself, or hear the unfathomable oceans in the black rose
whose petals and eyelids are always smashing
like white eyelashes in a squall of sunbeams
against the breakwater of a white dawn that passes
like an albino eclipse in a moonlit leper colony
of extinct black rhinos. If you even remotely
hear what I mean when I speak like this sleepwalking
through a dream grammar like a prophetic skull in a trance,
words that dance like light on the mindstream
rejoicing in the clarity of the voice that expresses
the hidden message encoded in the genes of the fireflies.

You have mouths. Speak for yourselves.
Some like lighthouses along the banks of life.
Some like thieves with searchlights for eyes on a bomber's night
when everyone is underground and the bummers are out
plundering the evacuated houses of the zodiac.
Might be the ravings of a star struck maniac talking to himself
to make sure nobody else is listening. Might be
the surrealistic lament of a Dadaist night bird
singing out loud in its sleep for things it doesn't know
it longs for, or maybe a lunatic is waxing prophetic
in a labyrinth of his own echoes trying to sound his way out
of the mountains without end he's being trying to befriend
like a cloud or an eagle silvered a moment
like the ore of a dream in the corner of the eye
of a moonrise coming on like a hurricane
with a black pearl in its teeth. The eclipse of a sacred lie
compassion concedes to an alibi without a myth of origin.

Compassion is the child of imagination that identifies
with its simulacra of suffering by applying the heart
like a bloodbank to the wounded eidolons of eyeless images
that didn't know how to bleed, or breathe, or cry or see
until compassion tempered their impression of themselves
as paradigms of rationality, by shedding real tears
in an ice age of lenses that kept their illusory distance
from the stars that came out after the rain, wet and shining,
laughter radiating through our tears, because life isn't a dry fire.
It's the hand on the rudder of a lifeboat
that keeps you from drowning from the day you were born
in the undertow of the tides of the new moon
until the night of the full when you haul everyone aboard
who's been swimming through glaciers of tears
like baby mammoths for the last twenty-five thousand years
afraid of extinction if they ever stopped to catch their breath.

Compassion is accepting everyone's death as a portion of your own.
Everyone's life as your third eye, a vital organ of your own body.
Compassion is an undisciplined action of the heart.
Compassion arises like a moonrise of inspiration
in the eyes of the older sister of the muses
who walks too much alone as if she'd devoted her solitude
to the suffering of a wounded stranger she met along the way
when she let her hair down like willows of rain
to cool the scorched earth and slake the roots of pain
until they bloomed like foxfire in the shadow of her passing.

Most poets sit around the lesser fires of their art
trying to divine the smoke of what's burning in their hearts
like autumn leaves they've heaped into books
that smoulder in tears more often than they break into flames.
But if compassion turns her eyes toward you
like a star in the darkness beyond your blazing
the Milky Way runs like a bloodstream through your veins
and you see in terrifying clarity the great mystic details
in the deep watersheds of picture music efoliating
like wildflowers and galaxies, grails, fountains,
lunar herbs, and starfish raised up off the ground
to take their place among the shining, radiant with life,
in the low valleys and high fields of an imagination that heals.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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One Day You Realize You're Looping

One day you realize you're looping,
Mars retrograde in Virgo,
through all the stations in life
you once progressed through,
and the door you return to
is a second innocence
more profoundly seasoned
than the one you first left by.
Everything else in the universe
is regressing ahead in accord with time
like a night sky doubling back on itself
to take its tail in its mouth
as a symbol of regenerative eternity.
Or moonrise. How likely is it
I'm not? That I'm
the only long-haired wavelength
that got straightened out
on a nineteen sixties ironing board
like the girlfriends
I was always waiting for back then.
That there's no twist in my stairwell?
No wheeling red-tailed hawks in my thermals?
No spirals in the sunflowers of my genomes?
No starfish in the bend of my galactic propellers?
No Sufis at the dance. Straight-laced crucifixions
of corkscrews and bottles of wine
that nailed it wrong
and turned back into sober water.
Not a chance. Or as they say in calculus
a straight line is just a special form of a curve.
Ask space. Ask the atoms.
I'm always one step behind my next birth
at an unexpected bend in the river.
You remember that old Etruscan god,
Vertumnus, whose name meant river's turning,
and later, adopted by the gullible Romans
turned into Morpheus, the shapeshifter?
I think the zodiacal kings of Etruria
got it more right
than the perfectionists who keep
trying to get it righter,
and water and light and dream
are closer to my original nature
than this snake of a road
I've been riding like black ice for light years
in a holy war of spurs and fangs,
the sacred thorns of a black rose
in a last duel with the first
and last crescents of the moon.
And as Lao-Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching
what isn't soft and supple
turns brittle and breaks
like a cataract of thin ice
over a flowing lens
it's easy enough to drown in
if you lose you're focus in the rapids.
Even glassblowers must need to cry
real tears now and again
that splinter like rain at their feet.
The fittest cornerstones all do Yoga.
Their twisted like the roots of trees
not a square uncarved block
of disciplined quicksand.
Look at the synchronous swimmers
in the undulation of an hourglass,
the S curve of a woman's figure,
the sign of a long distance snake in the desert
the Egyptians used as a glyph for intelligence.
Can you hear the same creek at midnight I do
whispering its way through the woods
as if it had no one to tell its secrets to but itself
taking the long way home like waterlilies
just coming into bloom
along the banks of the mindstream?
Makes me want to float poetic moonboats
like enlightened shipwrecks down river
when the fleet comes in
like Japanese plum blossoms in Atlantis
with a cargo of koans and haikus on board
that could be easily mistaken for loveletters.
And, hey, whether it's Cygnus above
in the Summer Triangle,
or a black swan on the Ottawa River,
I'm happy to take this trip alone
shooting the rapids of time
like an urgent waterclock
afraid of drowning in a flashback of its life
or a lifeboat full of moonlight
that came to the rescue of itself.
I won't beat the dust
out of the thread-bare wavelengths
of the flying carpets of life like stars
or houseflies that got in the way
of my broken window.
And o when I was young
I used to pray the day would never come
when I would talk like this,
but as the years turn into eras,
you can't help but see
a lot of things in life
some of which you wish you hadn't.
The beauty and the terror.
The candle in the dark doorway
at the back of the morgue,
whose light can go no further
than a prayer for the dead
behind closed eyelids.
Ferry, chariot, or limousine
it's still Charon at the toll gate.
No exit, no entrance,
thresholds of light upon light,
petals of a black rose
blooming in the shadows
on the far side of the moon
like the flight plan of a crow feather
that doesn't consult the tower anymore
for permission to take off and land
and leaves the trees to the night birds
to exorcise their longing
and by their singing,
as their fruits, be known.
Every step of the way
I've stood at the gate of a stranger
that looked a lot like me yesterday
without this death mask on
that doubles as a blossom
of the full moon on a dead branch.
Green bough. Dead branch.
Same song.
And the lights play on
long after the music's over.
You can see and hear it
in the picture-music of the stars
that shine over you even after
both you and they
ahead of your own light
by the time it gets
to where it's going are
are long gone, gone, gone,
altogether gone beyond
firewalking with virgins on Mars
like bridges and crosswalks in transit.
You can't pour the universe
out of the universe
like a fish in a waterclock
that jumps up into your moon boat
at the strike of midnight at noon
to tell you what hour it is
when you know that every hour
every step, every breath,
every river, road, gate and doorway
is a death in life experience of this one.
Not the wounded wavelength
of a heartbeat on crutches
come to a game of snakes and ladders
that can't find anything to lean on
on the opposite side of the river
because the mindstream has no banks
and the bridges go on forever
like the wavelengths of snakes
with their tails in their mouth
going the way they came
like bouquets and fountains,
tears in the valley
that echo on the mountain
like snow at the feet of the stars
back into their deep watersheds
where the dry seas of the dead mingle
with the ebb and neap of the living
like the moon on the waters of life.
And I mustn't forget
as I sometimes do
even when I'm drowning
like a starfish in my own waters
that this flash of life,
this brevity of a firefly,
this lifespan of an insight
into this life, this death,
unborn, unperishing,
is just a galaxy's way
of bringing me back down to earth
without forgetting where I come from.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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PsychoBabylon Wouldn't Trade One Real Star

PsychoBabylon wouldn't trade one real star of his implausibility in
for the smallest flake of that tinfoil spiritual life you're passing off
as an iron pyrite cure all. PsychoBabylon knows the serenity of the dragons
who've learned to make peace with their own fires
even when they're bringing the rain to temper the swords
they forged in hell to kill people back into life
who've stuffed their pillows with too many feathers
and not enough scales to be credible even to the shadows they cast,
not to speak of the torment they put their dreams through
trying to divine and sign them like a message from the dead
for their eyes only. PsychoBabylon suppley practises
a discipline of subtle tenderness and recurrent doubt
in the face of his ambiguous revelations of what it's all about.

PsychoBabylon might tilt at the hull with the mast of his moonboat
from time to time, thinking he's whaling with the Kwakiutl,
but he doesn't turn his lions loose on the blackflies of insinuation
knowing their prowess depends as much upon
the quality of their enemies as it does their friends.
And surely it's the folly of flowers and stars that have led him
to certain incongruous conclusions about life that constitute
enough of a starmap of independence to go his own way
like a rogue planet sustained by the dark abundance
of his own homelessness as if every orbit he jumped
like the looping threshold of the mystery of life discharged
another photon of light on the black matter of space and time at hand.

PsychoBabylon would rather light candles and fireflies in the abyss
with his incendiary insights than blow them out
with the kiss of a fraudulent angel who traded her harp in
for a fire-extinguisher foaming at the mouth like a rabid cloud
to smother the protected species of hell in the first snowfall
of a nuclear winter. PsychoBabylon doesn't demonize
the third man on the match for smoking in No Man's Land
in front of a firing squad looking for scapegoats as a way
out of the irreconcilable dilemmas that keep breaking them
like wishbones and the horns of the lapis lazuli bull harps
strung between the crescents of the moon like spider webs
disguised as dreamcatchers apprenticed to Venus fly traps.

Sick people go to hospital. Bad people go to church.
PsychoBabylon heads out to the woods by himself with a noose
as often as he does a telescope. He risks a wary kindness
toward everything he sees, and even more excruciatingly
he doesn't replace the thorns of the wild rose bush
with the fangs of the rattlesnake coiled under it
that struck him in his throat in the middle of a song of longing
like a rat snake in the nest of a nightbird whose blood
has just turned to moon rock in a transfusion of toxins
to counteract the mystic elixirs of his enlightened lunacy.

If you can't hold the prophetic skull of the moon
in your own two hands by now, without fretting it
into foretelling a lie, PsychoBabylon blues his view of you
in the aerial perspective of his compassionate distance
as the victim of your own siege works when you're the first
to start throwing stones at the windows of your own crystal palace
because where there used to be chandeliers of stars
radiant enough to open up the chakras of the dead
now there's nothing but a mobile of swords above your head
and all the tongues of serpent fire you split like cedar shakes
to go witching for enlightenment in your celestial watershed
are now swimming on a different wavelength like a holy book
someone read in passing, and like a folder of soggy matches
that smouldered, but never flared, threw into a cosmic ditch
along with the angelic road kill and the rest of the spiritual junkmail.

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

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

poem by Patrick White
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The Angel In The Way I'm Wrestling With

The angel in the way I'm wrestling with
won't box. I don't get a choice of weapons.
My hip dislocated by a greater intensity than I am,
I'll walk away the stronger man,
a sacred king with a limp, Richard the Second,
or Vulcan, or Byron swimming the Hellespont.
Down on a sunny day, snarly in the sunshine,
too disheartened to get with the picture and bloom.
Nothing against the vases of sappy daffodils
in green vases on open windowsills,
but I feel like tracking starmud into the living room.
Heavy green diamond steel-toed work boots
with their laces undone, their tongues hanging out,
clotted with earth, so the nuns of the narcissi
don't forget they've got dark, dirty roots
and bulbs like prophetic skulls
that have been buried in the garden a long time
who predicted all this would happen in due course.
Everyone clear-eyed as a haiku in a mirror.
Wholly out of season, my heart feels
like the heavy bell of a requiem for all those
who worked themselves to death for so long
like sweating horses hauling this death cart
of a planet around to change its point of view
like the bent axle of a prayer wheel
inclined toward the sun. On this blue-eyed day
and in the morning before dawn, euphoric commotion
of birdsong in celebration of the return of the light,
but I think of how much darkness, the cast off ore,
extinct forests, Jurassic coalbins,
had to clarify themselves
for the sake of a single diamond of equinoctial insight.
The apple trees are wearing their appearances
on their sleeves, and the willows
are adding blonde streaks to their hair
after their long widowhood of veils.
God I wish I didn't have to be a poet sometimes
warped into revealing things from the inside out
like a canary in a coalmine on a sunny day.
I try to imagine how sweet it would feel
just to be in the world like a lackadaisical dandelion
blooming like an average G type sun
in the fresh painterly green of the grass
with a couple of ants for planets.
What a miner I'd make. Always
looking for a motherlode of ore in a gold mine.
Reading between the lines of the spring constellations
to admire the brilliance of the darker messenger,
the deeper clarity of a more pellucid view of the world
as it appears on the nightshift
in the black mirrors of the blind chandeliers
I've been romancing at a dance of celestial spheres
by tracking my footprints all over the ballroom floor
for those who dance iambically with a limp like me to follow.
And my only alibi for looking at things on the dark side.
You can't plumb the depths, or judge the age
of a black hole in light years. And it's totally lost upon me
how you can truly claim to see anything, even spring
if you're not a two-eyed telescope, one eye on day,
one eye on the darkness, and both open simultaneously
like the sun and the moon at opposite ends of the sky,
and the earth in between like the third eye
of a spiritual refugee with an extra lens for backup
in case I should feel as I do today
like a star-nosed mole with tunnel vision
trying to shine above ground with the tulips.
Even as observatories all over the northern hemisphere
are opening their eyes to the light
just to let a little fresh air in
like house plants on open tenement windowsills
sinking their roots deeper into the darkness,
like back lightning into a mystic watershed
to keep from going blind
in the blazing of the blossom overhead.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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