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I'm Having An Unrequited Love Affair With Myself

I'M HAVING AN UNREQUITED LOVE AFFAIR WITH MYSELF

I'm having an unrequited love affair with myself.
It's surrealistically ironic and spiritually annihilating
at the same time, and I can say from personal experience
black holes have a profound sense of humour.
The waterlilies look up at the stars and wonder
if they could shine like that if they ever dried out.
Fire and water. The serpent fire of my electrical potential
jumps the gap like a spinal cord, a bridge is made.
Spiders weave enlightened filaments in a light bulb
like webs of neuronic wiring into dream catchers
and empowering mandalas. I have ignition.
Billions of eyes light up in the dark like fireflies.

I always thought if I really wanted to do the world some good,
I'd lead it away from myself. My alter-ego
shines like a demon in a dark light whose intelligence
is intent on ruining my life compassionately
out of a begrudging respect for sacred rodeo clowns
with red geraniums sticking out of their straw sun hats
like pathetic solar flares of blood trying to wave a red flag
to draw the bullshit off a Pacific mystic Zen cowboy
about to be gored by a horn of the moon in her crone phase.

All the women I've ever loved, lived, left and will live with
on these thresholds of the sublime and the ridiculous
like a seance that can see a future in calling things back from time,
have come to me in an aura of dark energy
like a poem in a dream expanding into space.

Or you could see Ophelia under her deathmask
drowning in wounded flowers. Two witches,
an apostate madonna, one ferocious priestess
from the dark side of the moon, one incubus,
one lamia, a Medusa, a delusional gold-digger
who kept working me like a motherlode
although I told her from the first all you're going to find here
is the slag of meteoric ore that's been mined out.
The last thing I heard her say when I left her
singing like a canary in the belly of an anaconda,
as I climbed out of the grave she was digging for both of us,
was, I thought you were rich. No, I replied,
a little taken aback at my innocence at this late date,
I just gave you everything I had
because I thought it would make you happy
if I gave you what you asked. Who else
should I have given it too if not you? Good-bye,
with blessings on your house and head,
that erotically upgraded body of yours
and all your excellent possessions.
I'm going to sleep with a bridge tonight
that knows there's two sides to every river
holding hands secretly under the mindstream
and the bird can't fly when it's a lapwing
trying to lure danger away from its cosmic eggs
and all the other wing's doing is flapping its lips.
And one Female Principle of the World
that needed me to help her incarnate in bed.

Muses all. Eclipses and full moons alike.
Eras of my life. Legends of my genome.
Each a different planet with a physics of her own.
And me the mere scaffolding of bones,
the passionate snakes and ladders
they climbed up on to paint their picture-music
on the ceiling of esoteric pantheons
where the goddess is always the pearl, black or white,
and when I know what's best for me,
I'm the big-mouthed lunar oyster shell
gaping at the moonrise in desire and wonder
dying to say what leaves me more speechless than silence.

Never knew a woman who wasn't a sky higher
than my wingspan, a sea deeper than my wisdom
despite the oceanic commotion on the surface.
I was always a continental ledge shy of their depths,
and even though I knew how to swim my way
through the darkest diamonds as easily as I did the night,
I've always considered it spiritual bad manners
and an abuse of grace, if I've paused to listen
to a mermaid singing to me, and I haven't drowned
in applause for her as soon as the song is over.
If you're not willing to die for the picture-music
you're just another flatlining event horizon
looking for a lifeboat like a whole note with a tin ear
that can't hear you singing like the fog horn
of a dinosaur mired in a tarpit like a keyboard of bones.

You don't ask a goddess to be a sacrifice.
Your heart gouged out like an organ donor to the moon
you lay it while it's still beating like a bleeding ruby
on her temple stairs and by that she'll know
you were a real king of the waxing year
and eat it like the forbidden fruit of enlightenment
when the jewel is in the lotus like a dragonfly
in a waterlily, and she smears your blood like lipstick
on the petals of a rose that worked witchcraft
with the flavours of life and love she left in my mouth.

Most of the time there's no interrogative scorpion
of bitterness up my sleeve of stinging nettles,
nor in her shoe when I put her crystal slipper back on,
having just removed a splinter of glass from the paw of a lion
I hope will remember my kindness if we're ever
in the Colosseum together as audience to the act
instead of predator and prey of the fact
that the asters at the end of summer that we cherish most
are adorned by time in a romantic rite of passage
and then apotheosized as constellations of the autumn
approaching our lingering ghosts like a seance
of the fruits of the earth that all fell in their own good time
singularly, or a windfall in the night, sweetened by our ordeals
as if our hearts had always been bears in a beehive
of rapture and loss and paper wasps
getting mystically hammered on our tears
like the lightyears of life that have aged like stars in our eyes.

I can still taste the mystery of the dark mirrors
we held up to each other like synchronous swimmers,
that deepened so many insights into the strangeness of human nature,
even long after we entered the abyss of the future
like empty urns, I swear, there's still a dragon in my ashes
that rises up like a pillar of fire or a solar flare,
an eternal flame, a sudden efflorescence of stars,
and makes a deep, sweeping bow to the women I have loved
who left me these gloves of moonlight
glowing on my windowsill when I'm alone in the dark.

And I can hear the Canada geese heading south,
and I remember how vast and eyeless the sky is
when exhausted lovers part like frayed mindstreams
trying to flow past the sacred junction where two rivers meet
without realizing the mingling of their waters is indelible
and it's hard to find reverse in a universe
that just keeps on going the same way
in this time and place, this now and here
the same path of thorns and rose petals
that everyone walks like the wind in love,
leads everywhere like fireflies trying to read a starmap
from the past, that's left its future far behind
trying to catch up to what it just let go of
like an almagest of prophetic zodiacs to come
longing for the Beast Mistress of the animal kingdom
to make them jump through their burning hoops again
like moondogs or the black haloes of comets
that keeping falling through the coronas of the sun,
or a dragon dancing in the ripples of the rain
after it's just swallowed the moon like the cosmic glain.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Since I Was A Child

Since I was a child, this longing in my heart
for something I can't even name, but keeps
drawing me into it like a unfulfilled abyss,
unattainably alluring, but the space
saturated with pain as if time itself were grieving
like the white noise of the cosmic background,
or the love of a created thing for this that has come
would always be left unanswered and unrequited.
Times I've thought the emptiness, because
nature abhors a vacuum, was life's way
of enticing me into the available dimensions of the future,
a furtherance of me as a means of achieving its own ends.
I could blunder my way toward it as the labour of my life
in pursuit of an earthly excellence radiant with stars,
sublime as a root, with the dynamic equilibrium of a tree
that had weathered many storms in the name
of a beautiful absurdity that adorned the heart
with the tenderness of fireflies without losing
any of the impact of a life-changing meteor shower.

Maybe I'm just chasing ghosts of the unborn
who should have been and my longing's
a kind of mourning that confuses the past
with what's missing when it's really the future
that's suffered a miscarriage, and the way
a woman's body grieves like a planet
for a shepherd moon that's lost, I sense
the devastation of the coming years and my heart
aches with compassion for what is yet to be lived through
and all I can do is retain a future memory
of the bloody rose I can see in the bedsheets
of a spiritual hemorrhage we'll wake up beside
one morning like a shattered window
into the souls and hearts and minds we denied
any possibility of life to because
we hoarded our potential for love so lethally.

Life keeps its balance by constantly adapting
to its growing awareness of what it's made of itself
as do we making it up as we go along approximating
the probable concourse of affairs spontaneously.
You might say consciousness, the light that each
has been given to go by, is what evolution
looks like on the inside, urgent with creation.
The gathering. The mingling. The dissipation.
All the eddies and currents of thought and emotion
writing on the mindstream sometimes in Kufic script,
sometimes Irish kells, or maybe just heavy-hearted bells
that like to write their own songs and sing them
to no one but themselves, as if the mystery
of their sadness were sweeter kept than told.

I came like a stranger to the burnt gate
of my unsurvivable longing, and it was open
as if it had been waiting for me, and I walked barefoot
in the ashes of the flowers that were being emptied
like the urns of many past lives on the wind,
until I came to one that bloomed like a waterlily of fire,
a blossom of enlightenment, a sun that shone at midnight,
and for awhile, as still happens from time to time,
I walked in my own profusion like a garden again
so alone with a blue moon in Pisces only
the most courageous of lovers could enter my solitude
like the fruits of the earth, like a windfall of stars,
like a gust of fireflies out to make constellations of us all
that evolve, as circumstances change, into intimate zodiacs
that keep us all fire walking on our mindstream
like maple leaves in an autumn that just won't go out
like inspiration and life and longing, the mystery
in the beautiful eyes of the muses of crazy wisdom.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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And Should I Recall Whose Eyes

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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
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The Lament Of The Last Train Whistle

The lament of the last train whistle
has disappeared into the distance
mournfully looking for its lost child.
October night in the woods
around an old fire pit of prophetic skulls
blowing ghosts of smoke in my face
that bring me to tears, a neolithic calendar
of all the old and new moons that have passed.
So many, so much, that used to matter
doesn't anymore. Dream figures
that shed their skins like the longer wavelengths
of watersnakes in an infra-red mindscape
of serpent fire dying like the sun
that can tell the hour by the taste of its ashes.
I throw more well-dried thresholds on the fire
like branches that used to be green with the tears
of sweeter departures and arrivals over the years.

All the light's jumped from orbitals
of the tree rings that sag like bags
under the eyes knotted like islands
in the heartwood of their xylem and phloem.
Here where the river parts like long hair
on the skull of a stone, I sit like a demon
in a sacred place, clarified, alert, and alone
as any nocturnal animal in the woods.
The chalkdust of my bones trying
to connect the stars to their constellations
snagged in the trees like the rags of spiderwebs
on the blackboard of a starmap as wide as the sky
and deep as the subconscious of the Burgess Shale.

It's not a betrayal to let go of your faith
when you had none in the first place
and you don't need a parachute on the edge of space
to plunge from paradise, or a weather balloon
of a bad Christian poet to shepherd Dante
like a moon out of hell. Be yourself,
especially when nobody's watching
except that same drone in the sky
that occasionally flashes a flake of silver off
its stone cold third eye to flint your awareness
that it's still there in the cosmic background
like a witness to your dreams and schemes
for a luxuriously appointed life of enlightenment.

Be yourself. The direct copulative imperative
that has supplanted the light as the first word
out of the mouth of creation. Be yourself.
And then let there be light by the side of a good fire
to let you see who that is as acutely
as you can see in the dark who that is not.

The migration of the Canada geese might seem
a broken rosary of new moons calling out
the names of God to you, and one unknown,
or silhouetted against the moon they might
suggest the afterbirth attached to a cut umbilical cord
and your heart might feel reborn somewhere
in the autumn of your life, a child of the fire,
a flower in the full bloom of its solitude
dancing with its own mercurial apparition
on the waters of life in the mindstream
always out of season enough to lag behind
so it can tell the time by the widening gaps in its passage
as it's waiting for the night to catch up to its own shining
like a thief of fire unchained from the rock
that broke the glass window of its transfixed seeing
with a meteor in the hands of an enlightened delinquent.

Or you might read the falling leaves as occult lifelines
on a Tarot deck of overlapping lifespans
like the scales of a dragon playing solitaire
beside the small inferno of a signal fire to the stars,
to let them know you're coming faster
than the time it takes for a thought to make it
all the way to death and back to birth again
as if you were pinging your emotions
like stray wavelengths from the oceans of your awareness
off the horns of the moon the way
you used to skip rocks out over the sea as a boy
to see how long they would keep on going
like a waterclock of stone before they sank
like the flying fish of the hard, cold facts of life back into
the numinous depths of your collective unknowing
where the stars aren't fixed to anything that isn't
flowing along with them like the wind on the mindstream
or a small fire catching its breath in the silence and the solitude
of so much radiance, before it's on its way again for good.

poem by Patrick White
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The Light Doesn't Talk To The Flowers Anymore

The light doesn't talk to the flowers anymore
the way it used to. I can feel a lot of shadows touching my face
as if it were written in braille. Acid in the rain.
Tears of dry ice in the housewell. Weathervanes
knocking at the door to get out of the storms
they used to revel in, and the storms themselves,
no kamikazes riding a divine wind against the Mongols,
at best, a mango-flavoured tempest in a Japanese teapot.
And even Zen can't put an edge on the full moon
to cut through everything like a harvest being threshed.

No songs from the birds that used to wake me up in the morning,
only these spiders weaving their smokey laryngeal webs
like a voice that got stuck in the throat of a chimney
when it forgot, when you sing from the heart,
you don't need a medium or a seance. Not even an art
that's interested in what you're saying unless
you're obeying a grammar of headstones that don't know
what you're talking about until it's not worth
bringing up anymore in anybody's language
whether the metaphors are living or not. Words in a bonebox.
Locks and bars on our eyes. Dumb-bells stuck through our tongues
like someone was doing voodoo on the leaves
or the baton of a drum major in a parade
that's never going to come, afraid to leave home on its own.

Since I was a boy in the late Cretaceous,
I've always wondered about the timing
of the asteroids and comets and why
they had such an impact upon the dinosaurs.
But I hear they were already on their way to extinction
because of the earth's own volcanic activity,
and, at worst, the asteroid just accelerated
the flywheel of birth and death a bit.
Bad spin on an antiquated myth of origin.
Better luck next time, but right now the mammals
have evolved so far beyond that they're destroying themselves
in a long, slow nuclear winter of attrition
that's putting a pillow over everybody's face
like the cloud cover of a screening myth with an air force
that buffers the light with our own ashes
and much prefers smouldering to ignition.

What did Berryman say in a letter to Wang Wei,
centuries after the fact, just before he jumped from a bridge
into an ice-covered river with the Pulitzer Prize in his hands? -
O to talk to you in a freedom from ten thousand things.
Be dust myself pretty soon. Not now. Or words to that effect.
But just the same, it's hard to get into the skull
of the man anymore without the flame of a candle or a dragon
to see where you're going in case you nudge an atom the wrong way
and bring on another astronomical catastrophe inadvertently.
Minefield covered in snow like a pioneer cemetery
buried on the hilltop of an avalanche with a view of the valley below.
Dangerous, too, to move among the stars freely
like a rogue planet without a starmap, causing perturbations
in the orbits of the shepherd moons on an exploratory flyby
to see if there's any kind of intelligent life you can identify with.

The nights are getting darker. The stars are moving further apart.
Sooner or later everything tends toward empty space
until there isn't even any room left in it for itself.
And nothing ever dawns upon you there but endless entropy
and time comes to a sudden halt where spaces runs out
and the bones of the fossilized stars are left like empty chairs
in a dark auditorium with bad acoustics.

I'll write it on the wind now, while I have the chance.
I'll write it like a fire in smoke at a ghost dance.
I'll write it in blood and tears and rivers and stars.
I'll write it in scars and wounds as deep as roses.
I'll write it on the skins of the snakes that I've shed
like serpent fire running up the lunar thread of my spinal cord
like a lightning rod tattooing the clouds of unknowing
with the insights of fireflies into the mysterious darkness of life,
who know that one glimpse is enough of a Big Bang
to satisfy even the blind who go looking for their eyes
with their eyes like a windfall in a thunderstorm of picture-music
though they're still hanging on to the same old lifeline
like an umbilical cord between the backdoor and the barn
in blizzard of stars and butterflies. I'll write it in light.

I'll write it on the eyelids of eclipses and occultations alike.
I'll write it on the foreheads of the mute rocks
in runic striations of glaciers retreating north in tears,
I'll write it on my bones before I'm buried under the hearthstones
with a big rock on my chest like an asteroid
rolled over a cave to make sure I'll never rise again
like Jesus and Muhammad said I would if I was good,
or Ali Baba and the forty thieves muttering their shibboleths
on the thresholds of an artificial paradise, in case I wasn't.

Now is the light. Now is the loving and the living.
Now is the hour for the hidden nightbirds to raise their voices
in the sacred groves of the moon to celebrate
the brevity of their own longing for the unattainable
blossoming on the dead branch of their aspiration.

There's only so much time, and then, in a moment or two, forever.
The heart sings awhile like a red-winged black bird on a green bough.
And then the eyeless silence of the stars
who have looked down upon nothing for 14.3 billion lightyears
and watched the fireflies dancing to the music
of their own tiny hearts, lockets of light, of insight,
that open like seeds and eyes sown into the abyss
to let all winged things, and even star-nosed moles can fly,
out of the cages of their earthbound solitude like dragons
taken down like occult books from their hardwood shelves,
with the wingspan of constellations singing in the night to themselves.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Faceless This Time Of Night

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
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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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No Gravegoods In My Solitude

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If Only I Could Remember You As You Were

If only I could remember you as you were
for a few, brief radiant moments as indelible
as light in space and not as time would have it
the way things have changed. To see you
lingering in the doorway on a winter night,
the snow lying lightly on your hair like the Pleiades
over your shoulder descending below the treeline
as if it knew more about saying good-bye than you did,
and o how I loved you for it. If only I could
remember that lonely ghost of a mirage
that hovered over the watershed of your tears
and looked at me like the first lifeboat
you'd seen in a thousand years respond
to your s.o.s. in a hourglass. If only I could remember
the fragrance of the summer rain on your skin
as if it had mistaken you for one of the flowers
and how I used to like wiping your tears away
with my opposable thumb like plum blossoms from your cheeks.

Eternity coming to the surface of time
like old corduroy roads and bones in a makeshift graveyard.
Not likely I'll ever see you again in this life
but if only I could remember you before circumstance
underwhelmed itself and killed the ambiance
of our last dance by turning all the lights on at once.
But there you go, no help for it. The nightbird
transits the moon and the eternal sky as is said in Zen
doesn't inhibit the flight of the white clouds.
And this moment, too, though it's endured
a thousand deaths to come to this afterlife,
always saying good-bye to some aspect of you
that symbolizes the evanescence of love and life
in metaphors that buff the open wound
like scar tissue on the moon, like fireflies
welding living insights into the dead brain coral
of this encyclopedic coma life
can sometimes seem without you, even after
all these ensuing misadventures it would take a fire
and half a dozen bottles of wine to tell you about
if only I could remember you as you once were
like the lamb that laid down with the lion without fear.

For light years, images of you have flashed out of the abyss
as sharp and quick and vital as moonlight
wielding a sabre, or a bird quickened by a purpose
out of the unknown into the unknown
and I recognize them as blossoms that have blown
far from the tree that was lovelier
than the whole orchard to me, though angels
attended upon it like scripture from its roots to its leaves,
you were the locust tree with your demonic thorns
I wanted to tear my heart on like a rag of blood
on the galactic razorwire that encircled your heart
like a storm of dark matter with unlimited potential
for creative destruction that got the light out of the way
long enough for us to see what glowed behind it.
If only I could remember you as you were
when we both made eye-contact with each other
like exo-planets in the void, and understood spontaneously
it wasn't going to take much of a wavelength
for either of us to understand this immediately
as if we could read each other's shadows like Mayan calendars.

Water hemlock, wild parsnip, sometimes
the memories scald like volcanic dew on bare skin,
but seldom have I ever regretted
that I lived through you for awhile,
when the stars raged in my heart like a madman
obsessed by the crazy wisdom of a woman
who had the wingspan of a bow on a bent event horizon
but knew enough about compassion
to push the burning arrow of my fascination with her
all the way through like a blood sacrifice to love and life
and the mystery that moved in the darkness up ahead
like the fork in the road that separated us,
like a wishbone that had granted all it had to give.

How tenderly painful the brevity of what
we actually relive again as if some moments in life
are illuminated by a different light than that
we read by in bed late into the night
looking for translucency in the windows of insight
that keep on opening their eyes in this recurrent dream
like the black waterlilies of new moons coming into bloom.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Even When Life Sometimes Seems Like A Black Hole

for Rebekah Genevieve-Dolorese Garland

Even when life sometimes seems like a black hole,
a dark furnace full of the ashes of burnt roses,
it shapes the galaxies into sunflowers and starfish
and it's whirling with stars like a Sufi in rapture.
All my life I've tried so hard not to be afraid of my joy
and at home with my grief like a comfortable chair
that was beginning to take on the same airs as my body.
A holy war of one, carrying the true cross of the sixties
I thought was worth fighting for even long after
I realized I was doomed to dancing to the music
for the rest of the duration. And it's been as true
as Jim Morrison living the afterlife of Arthur Rimbaud
in deserts so desolate even the stars were shy of the darkness.

And I have wept bitterly as the moon went down
like a toxic goat skull into the only wishing well
for light years around, and it seemed, and it's
still dangerous to remember because time doesn't blunt all knives,
I was witnessing an ideological madness, that had
mineralized all the best ideals into fossils, froth
like rabies at its own hydrophobic reflection.
Biting at its own wounds in vengeance upon itself
for the way the water tasted polluted and there was acid rain
in the wavelengths of its tears more venomous than a recluse spider.

I saw how people brought armfuls of poppies and wheat
to lay down on the stairs of the temple in tribute and love
like a sacrifice from the heart they gentled down
upon the grave of a loved one that had died too young
and hoped would return the blood they were missing
as a sign that the roses were mending their severed petals
like eyelids being stitched back by the very thorn
that had made them bleed in the first place.
In a schizzy world, whatever you sacrifice like a lapwing
sooner or later, because everything tends toward its opposite
like twins that weren't anymore separated at birth
than the first and last crescents of the moon,
engenders in the nest of cosmic eggs it's dying to protect
farce and desecration that tar and feather it like an eclipse.

But every once in awhile that comes as often as now,
you meet someone inconceivably shining
in her solitude like light through a mysterious jewel
into one of the sacred weeping pools of the mindstream
and the moon silvers your heart like a sword
you were about to fall upon to save your face the trouble
and you take the hilt and the blade in both your hands
like an autumn equinox that's just bumped into spring
wandering off the beaten path to tend her lunar garden
and you lay it on the waters because choice isn't an option
like the flightfeather of the other wing of the bird
that can't take the measure of the immeasurable wingspan
of these event horizons, transits, zeniths and thresholds
I'm crossing with you like Leo and Virgo
across a heartscape of enlightened taboos
that have been singing to me all these years from a dark wood
like a lucid wavelength hidden in the ore of a particle
that only seemed so when you looked at it from afar,

that drew the sword out of the stone, the star
out of the darkness, the waterlily out of the marsh,
the heart of someone like you out of the nightsky
like a meteor with a panspermic rosary of life at its core
falling on the Fertile Crescent of a habitable planet,
or a whole new universe, with a punk version
of the Garden of Eden where the birds are all listening
to the Ramones, and Eve is raving with Adam in a mosh pit
teeming with infinite permutations and combinations
of love and life, of colour, poetry, light, energy, joy and devotion,
as if we'd both disembarked from these empty lifeboats of the heart
on the shores of this thriving island of stars
where the Milky Way meets the ocean
and all the constellations that travelled this Road of Ghosts
like the long, dark, strange radiant trip it's been
wash the deathmasks off their faces like old myths of origin
from the starcharts of our comets and scars
that have me smiling at you in wonder like this
as if my third eye had just shed its last telescope like a cataract
and I were the mesmerized gaping witness
to the first moonrise of an avatar of dark bliss
studded with the eyes of Isis raising new pyramids
in a desert of stars, as light as feathers, as light
as the crucibles, chrysales and cocoons of the nebulae giving birth
to these poems that break into butterflies of light,
fireflies and dragons that roar like supernovas
across the firmament, waking the valley up
to the morning of a whole new creation
as I firewalk along these oceanic shores with you
like two constellations when their myriad plinths and petals open
and one flower blooms like a bird with two wings
and sings because this universe isn't the shape of an hourglass
with dry oases and creekbeds dreaming
of solar flares behind the mystic veils
of flashfloods of the heart long over overdue,
but in every illuminated detail of the form you've taken
to enter my life, my love, my art, is a perfect likeness of you
that I am created again and again in the image of,
standing in the doorway of this stargate to love
without your metaphors on, so that after all these light years
of looking for you like a star through the eye of a needle
that felt it had seen enough to know when to turn around and go
a firefly like you out of the midnight blue
suddenly comes into view and ignites the air around me like the aura
of a inflammable passion without a fire extinquisher
to put it out because, at long last, as it is above so it is below.

And whether you drink it long and slow, or deep and fast,
or sip like a humming bird from your own skull
there's an oasis at the bottom of the hourglass
that's greening the sands like the grail of a woman
passing it to you like the love potion
of a water sylph of practising astronomical witchcraft,
standing by her well like Circe on her island on the moon
turning a man like a vapour of longing in a desiccated wasteland
into the full-blooded ocean of the black rose she holds
like the sidereal high tide of my life and my love in her hand
as the birds are singing in the roots of dark matter
like the loveletters of a punk band to the psychedelic sixties
and all the trippy, heavy metal flying fish
are swimming like cults of urgent stars
through the thorns and the crowns of the blossoming locust trees.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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This Is An Old Sorrow

This is an old sorrow, almost beautiful in the way
it underwhelms me from above, a sky caving in
like a circus tent under the weight of the rain,
a ghost of fruit that could not bear the weight of its tears.
This is a random sadness that's got me as its only friend
when it thaws like a mirror
looking back over its shoulder
at its glacial past, ex-lovers, friends, certain pets,
and eyes that were glass weeping
in the intense mystic heat of a blast furnace full of stars
for how little they understood at the time, things pass
like Canada geese migrating across the moon
like a river you can't step into twice.
Though it doesn't make any sense to say so.
This is an ancient sorrow. And though one direction
is as good as many, I'm still following
the herds of the grazing stars as far north as I can.

O we shall sit down on the good earth half lotus sometime
and cry together for the wound of being alive.
The rose has teeth. And celebrate the scars
in the herb garden as if they were crescent moons.
Or the eyes of a powerful wraith of sadness
saturating the atmosphere with the pathos
of a lament that's been sublimely burning
through its heart for lightyears
like some deep emptiness it knows can never be filled.

As if God would never be enough for herself
and the whole of the universe were
one long maternity of endless creation
that is manifested in its entirety in each one of us
the way the moon's reflected in a dropp of blood
hanging from the thorn of a rose
with the last of two beautiful sunsets for eyes
like the sheen of auroral silk glancing off the scales
of a black watersnake at nightfall when the swallows go in
and the bats come out on the nightshift
like the winged heels of some demonic messenger
with minions that squeal in a frequency too high to hear.

But however you send it, by sound or by silence,
by light or by night, be assured the message you send
however time and space bend things
is the message that's received, like a bee by a flower
or a star by the eye that transcribes it creatively
into hieroglyphic metaphors of picture-music
following a dream grammar of starmud
with a bird stuck in its voice like a phoenix in the Arctic.

Time washes the dust of the road off
by shedding the moonlight like a snake's skin
and skinny-dipping in the fathomless lakes of eternity
it finds along the way like eyes along the mindstream
full of stars and fireflies and what blooms in the soil of its sorrows
beside the stairs at the back doors of all those tomorrows
that left the way they came without saying good-bye.

Volcanic lunar oceans that are only as deep
as the dark tears I have left within me
when I dip the leaking cup of my heart
like the goblet of an impact crater
into a watershed of compassion that looks like the holy grail
and share it with my fellow mirages in this desert of stars
as if they were all as thirsty as I am and everyone
deep down inside somewhere within them
like the green star you can find at the core of an apple,
had a fountain within them like a moon dial or a wine glass
they smashed on the high notes of the nightbirds
just to express their joy as a kind of defiance
in the face of their lots in life, though, in fact
nothing is longer or shorter than anything else in eternity
just as there's only so much time and then there is forever.
And it's the black magic in the roots of a demon
that blossoms like Venus in the west
or New England asters up around Westport in the fall.

And though there's something beautiful in this sadness
that eludes me like a Braille starmap
I can't quite put my finger on to see what's shining
like Aldebaran through the tree line of a bride in a widow's veils,
as I listen to a whisper of flesh
pleading in the darkness not to be excluded
from the presence of time, or left behind by the spirit
like a false clue of cast off rags on a hawthorn bush
to say where it's gone forever and ever and ever
as if whatever the spirit and the flesh had
going on between them never mattered,
whenever the clarity cuts through
the thin-skinned mirror like this
as if it were trying to slash my eyes open
like an insight into what's beyond the obvious,
immediately out of a wounded mouth
I am healed by the balm in a voice of compassion
that rises sweetly like the new moon from the womb
of a scarred guitar that didn't know it had such music in it.

And it says in moonlit windows and nightbirds
that make all the dreaming children wake up and listen
to the intimate strangers that speak as gently as fireflies
to the vast nightskies of their own imaginations,
that the world that casts these shadows on your wall
like a crow preening its feathers, or a bell
that's lost its faith in knowing, and plunges like an apple
into its next afterlife, are merely the holy petals
and sacred syllables taken like pages from the Book of Life
left out like an orchard in a nightwind for every one to read
like a story each of us writes for ourselves
to help us drift gently off into sleep again
to find out how it all ends in a dream that goes on forever
like the fragrance of lilac in an old woman's memories
or the marrow of the apple bloom
that clings like the moon to our bones
or stars to the flypaper stairwells of our chromosomes.

No other way to explain the shining of this sadness deep within
as if my very blood mourned the passing of the things
that have drowned and disappeared into it over the years
like honey-bees in the lees at the bottom of a black tulip
full of rainwater, and by that I know
this is a sadness common to all
that's worthy of the stars in its windows,
and the dreams in the mirrors that paint our faces
like quick watercolour life studies of rainbows in tears.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Looking For A Little Black Water After The Fury Of The White

Looking for a little black water after the fury of the white.
Dark energy after the light as peace
settles down gently upon me,
the sediment of the eras and rivers of my life.
And this cool night in early autumn,
a woman in a dark cloak and hood
I could almost caress if I could just breathe
a little more deeply than the abyss
I've been dogpaddling in because
there's nowhere else among all these stars
I can swim from the shallow end of myself
into the watersheds of my last drowning.

And there's an unprescribed silence,
a herb of the moon that's salving the wound
of the lunar thorn I just pulled out of my heart
delicately with my teeth. I'm trying
to tune my spinal cord to the guitar string
of the Tay River, so I can resonate in harmony
with the flow of things. Starfire walking
on the water of the mindstream without
the crutch of a miracle to help bear me up.

It's not so much a matter of power or self-discipline
as it is well within the spontaneous capacity
of everyone's emptiness to do so because,
labour exhaustively as we do just to find the path
let alone stay on it, all we've had to do
right from the start, is to let life
give us a narrative of our own we can be true to
as it makes you up going along with it
like a lonely survivor singing to himself in a lifeboat
at the last watch of the night. Arcturus
at the tip of our eyelashes, enmeshed
as it sinks in a western treeline of beached shipwrecks.

Reach out, but don't grasp. Accept and let go.
Scatter your blossoms, even when you're
down on your luck, like ripped up lottery tickets
whether they end up in the gutter
or on an impressionist table cloth somewhere
playing checkers with a patient still life.
I've seen whole Japanese plum trees in blossom
be brushed aside like perfect haikus
by a street sweeper at three in the morning
when no one else was watching but me and Basho.

My blood is saturated by an overdose of stars
and I can feel a light from deep within
rooting in my limbs like nightfall
as my awareness is enhanced
by how much unknown compassion
there is the silence, love in a dark time.
Blue moons on the wild grape vines,
approaching the autumn equinox in Virgo
as if they could read my mind like a purple passage
intoxicated on the wine that can be pressed out of its own decay.

The waterlilies are gone with the fireflies,
and the reupholstered cattails are beginning
to show signs of wear already. And soon
the Canada geese will be flying high overhead
bearing the souls of the dead to new latitudes of seeing
where the starmaps fall from their hands
like the feathers and leaves of being
flowing along with the mindstream
like the wiverns, wavelengths, and water sylphs
playing on the shores of the Milky Way
with as many burning bridges,
as there are flames on the phoenix
in the immolated sumac, as there are eyes
to see across these circuitous waters
to the other side of where we've always been going
alone together with everyone who's ever come aboard.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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My Back Aching Like The Sky Goddess Nut Doing Yoga

My back aching like the sky goddess Nut doing yoga
over a sidereal painting that's burning like a bridge.
I've been many kinds of fool before, some just silly, some profound
but this is the work of a sacred clown hemorrhaging in the heavens
like the supernova of a pot of gold at the end of a ragged rainbow
still shining through the remnants of a colourful wardrobe.
I've been accelerating into space driven by a muse
of dark energy with an expansive heart. Time stops
as I exceed the speed of light across a threshold of starclusters
flowering in my wake like New England asters
with cadmium yellow suns with auras of orange coronas
glowing in their eyes. The apartment is silent
except for the trickling of the water pump in the aquarium
and a dance arrangement of goldfish that are swimming
in synchronicity with my thoughts and feelings
as if the heart of a human can speak through many voices
like the wind through the harps of the trees,
like the angels that descend among the daughters of men
when they're feathered in their beds at night like black swans,
or stars rooted in their own decay like waterlilies
that just don't know when to quit making beauty
out of the muddy deltas of their creative bloodlines.

She's firewalking in her sleep by now I hope, watching
a documentary of how the universe works in another city.
I'm flipping through the pages of the rooftops of Perth
outside my window like a weirdly bound heritage history book,
trying not to get any paint from my fingers on the view of the stars overhead.
Arcturus in Bootes still flying its kite in the west.
I need some rest. I've been bleeding like a cut rose
on the blades of the moon all day, and I feel threshed,
a cylinder of hay left out in the open starfields
for the black horse she told me to put in my last painting
to show something grazing under the full moon
like an eclipse that just discovered it had life on it
lyrically at peace with the siloes of light in the distance.
Even when love is cosmically oriented, God
how it loves to focus on the mystic details of everything
right down to the eyelashes of the ruby throated hummingbirds
hovering in a Pleiades of first magnitude larkspur.

Sometimes I feel like the fossil of a dreamcatcher
in the Burgess Shale, but right now, my third eye's wholly open
and I'm casting silver nets I've woven out of
my axons, blood vessels, nerve ganglia,
lunar fuses of serpent fire coiled around my spinal cord
like a helical riff of a bass run on a burning guitar
I'm holding like a metaphor for the body of a woman in my arms.

When I told you I was a sacred clown. I didn't invent it.
I meant it. I feel it. I can dance for ghosts at a seance.
I can dance for rain and war. I can paint my face blue
with moonlight and wode, and dance for peace, dance for fire,
dance for someone like you to step out of the darkness
as if someone had shaped a jewel out of the northern lights
and I was looking at it from the inside out through your eyes
on a a night of the new moon that isn't on any calendars
that are going to hang doom over my my voodoo heart
because there's never been a curse from the mouth of a Druid or Mayan
that could stand up to the courage that it takes
to receive a blessing without worrying what mistakes
inspiration might make when your muse is as flawless
as imagination obedient to the laws of her own myth of origin
and your art elucidates the crazy wisdom of your folly
like a discipline that isn't for the petty or sane at heart.

The stargates just don't open for those who are still in their right mind.
Just as the maple key to your entry, isn't about
what you leave out like a sin of omission that's culpably blind,
but what you leave innocently behind you
like mountain streams, and morning snails,
and the long uncombed comatose trails of sleepwalking comets
plunging from their dark haloes like Icarus
into a sun that only shines at midnight
like a candle on a windowsill calling out
like a poet for a new medium that's lightyears beyond words
to the first of the autumn stars purring like a cat in her dreams
when she hears the holy nightbird just before the dawn
knowing Regulus and Spica and all the stars of my art
won't pale in the lotus of the heart like real jewels in the eyes
of a sacred clown whenever he looks for her
shining in the ascendent of Leo long after
the Lyre, and the Swan, and the Eagle have all gone down
and all these poems I write on the wings of Luna moths,
enraptured by the sphinx of her radiance, are irrevocably skybound.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sitting Here Becoming Whatever Drifts My Way

Sitting here becoming whatever drifts my way.
Cedar boughs smouldering in an attic to smoke the bats out.
Thought-watching without looking for the answer to anything.
Spiders like badges walking on the waters of my mind.
The autumn's new, but it's the same old passage of things.
Apples like bells in the trees of the steeples, shepherd moons
of sloppy solar systems strewn on the ground
with seeds that are going to take them down
a notch or two yet before they make a comeback.
Seven times down. Eight times up. Such is life.

I watch the picture-music flowing through my mind
like a home movie that's happening as fast as I am
playing the role of everybody else in the universe
all at once as if every ray of light incarnated
in the emanation of an essential existential insight
into the nature of every mystically specific human being
could all be traced back to the root of the same star.
And what does the star do when the many return to it
if not apocalyptically go supernova into transcendence.
Just because the ashes sleep sweetly in their firepits and urns,
doesn't mean they're not dreaming and scheming
to wake up from themselves

I'm firewalking in the ether like a sad volcano.
I'm alone in life and it's not as bad as I thought.
Prolonged solitude blurs the distinctions between
the trivial and the sublime. Beauty seems
the most engaging waste of time I know of.
I think about love more as an event than a thing,
and I've made enough attempts in my life
to convince me it wasn't for lack of trying
that I'm walking alone with the Alone like Plotinus
trying to keep my telescope in focus and stay open-minded.
But as John Keats said. If it come not as naturally
as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.

Space, too, has its sirens. And time, its lamias.
A gust of stars and the desert's full of fantasies.
A star blooms and a comet falls from its dark halo
like a queen bee looking to start a new hive
and I've seen enough oases with hourglass figures
turn into bag ladies in paradise to stay shy of gardens
that don't have any weeds in them that might
uproot me as so many have like a botanical mistake
as if I were some kind of hallucinogenic angel of death.
Amanita ocreata. A mushroom in the death cap
of a nuclear winter when all I am is interspecially creative
in the way I adapt to my extinctions. Attentive and tender
toward the flora and fauna that inhabit my solitude.
Though the peduncle is always lost in the ensuing phylum
as I am like the star in the eyes of the women
who've drowned me like a firefly in their tears,
I still send bouquets of constellations to the asylum
like the last of the New England asters this time of year.
Sanity might smudge the tomb with a noose of sweetgrass
but the madness stays clear as the waters of life
in the womb of enlightenment giving birth
to bubbles in hyperspace that can spontaneously pop
as easily as they cohere like skin to the shape shifting multiverse
for better and worse, and all the permutative modalities in between.

God bless them all. Each, a rite of passage
I stumbled through like the blessing
of an excruciating ordeal that seasons you
for what's to come, or who. I must have loved them
better than I thought to miss them as much as I do
now that I do not. Incubus, muse, sphinx, witch,
oracle and water sylph, I gave to each my crystal skull
they could wear around their neck like a prophetic locket
to remember what we were to each other once
before the moon in the corals fossilized the shipwreck
to set sail on this sea of shadows without a star to go by.

Amor vincit omnia. Maybe. But I'm more a pirate
with the eclipse of my third eye for an eyepatch
and a parrot that's teaching me to keep my mouth shut
than I am a navy even if there isn't a rudder on this lifeboat
or a bay to sail into of my own. And I'm not looking
for a northwest passage to Cathay through a periscope
that's stayed under too long to know where it's going
without a starmap. I'm not interested in exploring decay
from the inside out like some submersible in a lunar ocean.

I've sailed under the skull and crossbones all my life.
And I'm not about to strike my colours like the maples,
lay them down like the burning blades of the angels
at the gates of dying garden. I'm going to hold out
long after the irises have surrendered their rainbows
to a retinal circus without any sacred clowns or animal acts
where the judas goats train the tigers to jump
through the brindled hoops of their own screening myths of fire.
It's wise to tread cautiously among the duff and detritus of death
like a protocol of your own instinct, good spiritual manners
among the extinct so the dead don't sink into oblivion
like a garbage barge. I revere the autumnal exorcism
as much as the vernal summoning to a seance.
I'm as sincere about my farewells as I am my hellos
as I watch the wavelengths shift from blue to red,
lowering the frequencies of fountains into watersheds
as if a musician were putting his guitar back into the coffin
he carries it around in. Green bough. Dead branch. Same song
as far as I've learned to sing to myself in the dark coming on.
The snakes can tie themselves into knots and hibernate
as long as they want, and all my summer visions
can turn into hard cold facts. I've still got a dragon of serpent fire
walking my spinal cord like a high wire act
without safety nets because I've always made it
a point of balanced awareness along this dangerous coast
to sail with the wind behind me like the light of a star
a wingspan ahead of my fall. The ghost of a battle scar
that's made it this far into a wounded future
without a pyre or a lighthouse to chart the course
of my desire not to live like yesterday's flowers
strewn on the corpse of tomorrow's hearse.

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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Something Deeper Than Stars

Something deeper than tears to weep for you.
I weep blood. I weep the silence
on the backstairs with the screen door
that bangs like the sound of one hand clapping
all through the night at the slightest gust of wind
as if a constellation were trying
to strike up a insightful conversation
with a wet match, the sceptre of a spent blossom.
I need a moon deeper than water to drown in.
I need to dance the pain away
in a sword dance of serpents
that know how to carry a tune
like a well fledged arrow, a beautiful toxin,
straight to the heart of the mysterious apple
that's sitting on top of my head like a prophetic skull.
No flower can say. Not any number of song sparrows
returning to the budding tree in spring,
no green leaf of an innocent tongue,
not even this dry leaf of mine in autumn
writing lyrics on the wind no one can read,
not even among ghosts, can find a voice
that isn't already the dead language
of an absence that can't be adorned
by a seance of words.
I light no candles. I summon no gods.
No pretence of knowing where you've gone.
No black hole that's as empty as
your ring on the table, no halo
that ever fell as far from heaven.
Good-bye's too optimistic and farewell's
the rudder of a grave on the rocks.
And if I were to raise the paper sail
of another poem like the waxing phase
of the funereal moonboat
that carried you away,
I'd make it black. I'd raise it
like the shroud of a black magician
that can make things disappear,
like an eclipse at half mast
and patch it with the skull and crossbones
of a different phase of the moon on the dark side.
I wouldn't return your personal belongings
back to the morning like starlings and doves.
But there aren't enough sacred syllables
swimming like moonlit fish
in the watershed of the silence
to open this fountainmouth of grief
like an aviary of flightless birds.
Nor would I risk having you remember me,
and turn around like a false start,
supposing you can still recall anything at all,
like a light you left on in the hall
the night you left home for good.
You were magic while you were here to work it.
You were the black nun of an enlightened cult of one.
You were the black mass of the sun at midnight
and the blood sister of the moon
that nicked your finger
on both her crescent thorns at once
so one was the cure to the other's wound
like the eyes of a cat, the fangs of a snake.
Given how close to the moon you were
it didn't come as a surprise
when you started writing me loveletters
inscribed in bone as if you'd just invented
a whole new language out of your claws
to make love to a poet in the nude when the moon
didn't lay its silver sword down between us
to keep us a threshold apart from our fingertips.
And it wasn't long before the elixir began to work
and I lost count of the number
of consensual metaphors I had for your lips,
similitudes for the night skies
that surrounded your eyes in a delirium of stars
that revelled in the crazy wisdom
of their mystically inspired atmospheres.
As just as beautiful as they were,
so were they irresistibly dangerous.
How many light years now
have I poured this memory of them
like a love potion over my roots
and waited for you to bloom in my bloodstream
like stars and blossoms streaming
through the heartwood of an ageing tree
that has as many dead branches on it as it does leaves,
and like an orchard anticipating moonrise,
knew you weren't coming anymore,
and the night bird had no one to sing for?
But, hey, I'm still a better seance
than I am an exorcism and if you can hear me
calling the faithful to prayer
in all directions at once like a paper airplane
the boy in me has sent out to search for you
like a loveletter in a hurricane of razor wire,
dripping with clusters of blood
the size of hemorrhaging grapes,
fireflies caught in a spider-web
of starless constellations that aren't a sign
of anything except I miss you worst at night.
If you could sense the tremor
in even the slightest wavelength of light
I'm trying to shine on the darkness to find you,
I'd write you a holy book of sacred silence
inspired by the shadows in my blood
that overtake me like strangers from behind
with an urgent message not to return home
to what isn't there anymore.
I'd sit out here all night by myself
beside the black waters of this night creek
unravelling like a ribbon in mourning,
that's been talking to itself
as it walks in its sleep on the water,
and I would beseech the stars with my eyes
to let me know if they've seen you,
and in my heart I would entreat them
with the solo of a wounded wolf
raising its head up in a wild prayer
to catch a trace of you on the chilly night air,
to give me a starmap to when and where
I can see you face to face again
and touch your eyelids in your sleep
like crocuses coming up through the snow.
Like moonrise in the apple blow of the storm
that scattered us to winds like all these poems
I've tried to write for you ever since
as if you were still somewhere nearby
like another pair of eyes
in my pain and my solitude
watching from the woods
the stars, the water, the moon,
under the stones in the river
that mark your grave and name
above the flowing of this endless epitaph
of leaves and blossoms and poems
as if you alone could still read them,
like the comings and goings,
of waterbirds on the moon,
the first draft of words on the wind,
maple leaves and keys on the mindstream,
and still understand what I was trying to mean.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Won't Mean Much If Your Eyes Aren't Open In Your Blood

Won't mean much if your eyes aren't open in your blood.
If the stars can't see you because you don't know how
to read them poetry in the small cafes of your heart
accompanied by spoons and plates and broken goblets
of the cheap house wine that smash just like love affairs
dashing your skull against the rocks, hoping the mermaids come back.

If you can't hear in the parking lot of a raucous industry
the colours of your emotions, you're a deaf chameleon
and who could make you listen to what you can't listen to
even if you had enough people who loved you around you
to want you to try to listen to your own tears when you cry?
Your ear on the same wavelength as a corrugated tin roof,
maybe you can see what I'm trying to say to you
if you close your eyes, and just listen to the rain without
trying too hard to make a big effortless effort to be
auditorily enlightened by the racket of your delusions.

I can't remember when my life stopped being my own
and I went to bed one night, and I was as human as my toes are
and I awoke, I was merely the afterbirth of a visionary
I didn't recognize, as my eyes were being igneously wrung
from a cope of dark ore like stars out of the distant hills.
Not a lot of self-respect from the beginning, maybe
it wasn't that hard becoming everyone and everything else,
and I was a prime candidate for effacement
but when I looked into the mirror of my
ten inch, equatorially mounted, clock-driven, reflecting telescope
I used like a canning jar to capture and mount stars and fireflies
on a black velvet starmap, all I could see
was this abyss staring back at me that couldn't say
where I'd gone, but the last I thought I heard
was that I got a job as a janitor in an hourglass
sweeping mirages out of a desert of private school stars.

I say what I see as it occurs to me spontaneously.
And I'm compelled to say it without hesitation
so the vision isn't tainted by the colour of the jewel
it's passing through, from one eye to the next, ad infinitum.
No light pollution in the shining, though there's something
about the idea of purity that continues to appal me
because I never had so much against chaos from the beginning
and I sense a deep hatred of all that is soiled and flawed,
in which case, I'd rather be an outlaw than one of these monks
who disdain me because I can't help seeing their discipline
as uncreatively redundant. Eventually, if they're blessed,
all our faces are going to fall off by themselves
like the scabs of sunspots that healed the wounded light
like a wildflower shedding its petals like nurses' caps
and deathmasks frozen like a moment in time meant
to last forever though we go on being estranged by them forever.

Uncanny transformations of the solid into the real.
Maybe it's time to let the mindstream flow as it will
and let the burning bridges of our delusions cross us for a change
to get to the other side of a life that's only got one bank
and it's as clear as space, we're not even standing on that.
Hang on. Let go. It's just your hand opening and closing
like a door in a dream, and you'll find your falling
just as fast as you ever were and if you were to ask your eyes
they couldn't tell in this vastness whether your were falling up or down.

When you've dismantled all you've desired,
post neo-deconstructionism sets in like spiritual rigor mortis
and you can't tell if you're sleeping with the living or the dead
when you haven't got your mask on. You can wear holes
in your shoes, and windows and carpets, pacing
like a waterclock of the heart in an hourglass of waiting
like a boy at the edge of the curb with his elbows on his knees
and his face in his glum hands, waiting for a parade
with sacred clowns throwing away free candies
like stars along the route of the mystic Milky Way.
Just be sure to keep your eyes open like a spring thaw
so the light can recognize you like the flower that brought it
to full illumination this time last year like a candle
that keeps blowing its petals out so you can see
the black matter of what you are not deeper
into the eyeless dark than you've ever bloomed before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sometimes The Intimacy Of The Silence

Sometimes the intimacy of the silence
can grow so profoundly intense
it seems impersonal. Or the heat of life
burn like the dry ice of the holy ghost
as you shudder with spiritual chills in the cold.
And when you see things whole in and of themselves
it's always as if you were looking through a broken window.
Truly fulfilled, you realize everything you're missing.
The more you explore the mystery of what you're doing
just walking around on the earth, aware
of your awareness, the more of a stranger
you seem to yourself, decultified of your identity.

The birches are glowing in skin tight moonlight
and there are sixties hash burns in their white leotards
and the leaves are falling and the river's flowing
and the Canada geese are sowing themselves
in the wake of the plough of the moon
like black and white sunflowers seeds further south again
and my heart is saturated with autumn's sad sugars
like a mournful apple at the pathos of their passage
as if time had abandoned everything and all
the solitary soul can do is harvest the loss like a human
with a romantic sense of irony as we dance
on the graves of the dead to celebrate
the bright vacancy, dark abundance of our starmud
occluding and enlightening our solitude
until you're enthralled to conclude, the darker the night,
the brighter the light. And appearances are only deceptive
to those who haven't broken on through to
the other side of the mirroring awareness yet like a hymen
over a virgin black hole that's all iris with no pupil
so all it can ever see are moondogs of exclusion
that begin to look like haloes after awhile.

I'll write an epithalamion on my wedding night with death,
but while I'm alive I like to toy with euphoric elegies
that weep like old rivers in the discrete depths
of their watersheds. I spend hours by myself
watching the spiders of time stringing contellations
like bird nets between the sacred upper branches
of the aspens to catch fish on the fly the way I
wait for insights to start riffing on the blues guitar
in the corner jamming with the silence of itself
like a poignant wildflower blooming unfashionably late.

If you stare intensely enough into the emptiness,
if your focus is searing enough to burn holes in space,
seemingly self-contained things will emerge like particles
you can elaborate in time and space like the fractals
of worlds within worlds engendered by your own seeing.
But turn the light down, turn your eyes away, dissipate
your concentration, everything reverts to the wavelengths
of the flying carpets unwoven on the waning loom of the moon.

Things done. Things undone. Does the water remember
the growth rings of its ripples, does the snake cling
to the loss of its skin, or fire reminisce in its ashes?
Or scars in autumn long for the springtime of their wounds?
Nights like this sensation haunts me like the ghost
of an amputated heart I dedicated to poetry to add my pulse
to a dying art like the blood of a noble enemy who knew
without saying, the only way to keep the calling alive
was to practice an excruciating discipline of heretical infidelity.

And that's why I'm out here alone in the woods,
still trying to think my way out of the bone box of my decline
by taking my mind off things by letting go
of the paradigms and symbols that kept me afloat
like the lifeboats and wandering starmaps
of the habitable planets of the past bobbing
like the prophetic skulls of black walnuts back down
the mindstream to Mitylene in Lesbos
where Orpheus still dreams of singing himself
back up from the detritus of his cosmic dismemberments
like Vega in the lyrical grip of a dreamcatcher
casting spells like a widow's veils on the water
to snare the stars like a fisherman who drowned on the moon.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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