En.Citatepedia^®.ro

Imagine Me

Imagine me being here now this very moment just as I am slipping through my own disembodied awareness like a silver dolphin alone in a sea of shadows on the moon on the eyeless side of the mirror. And you. Just as you are. Doing the very same thing because it's in everybody's nature to swim through themselves as if they were shoreless, looking for islands in the mindstream among the stars. To be free. To delight in the mystery of exploring themselves like a new medium they discover they have an unknown talent for beathing life into. Beyond reality, beyond delusion, beyond enlightenment and ignorance the knowable human divinity of pure sentience omnipresently at home with itself like the homeless everywhere. Everywhere within yourself even at midnight can't you see the aura of the gold in the ore that dreams of being dug up? Or how the fireflies are always trying to get your attention like tiny lighthouses off the coast of continents that have already run aground like mountains? Or gone down with Mu and Atlantis? How many lost civilizations are waiting in the overgrown jungles of yourself for you to let the dead use your voice to decipher their ghosts at a seance of whispering hieroglyphs? If the one word the wise never use is complete then you're a fool to think there's an end of you in sight. But that shouldn't discourage you from looking.
And isn't that what we were born for? To see and be happy. To attain a transformative insight into the tragic innocence of seeing itself that let's the witness go free to delight in its eyes without accounting for anything? Even if you're trying to wash your reflection off your face like a deathmask in a mirage in a desert of stars. Even if you're scooping up the moon to drink from your hands like a lifeboat in the rain. Even if you've crawled into one of the wormholes of space like a prophet in the belly of a snake whispering in Eve's ear things that weren't meant to be heard by anyone other than yourself. Even if you're the most fucked-up, twisted, mutated, incontravertible perversion of yourself, a black dwarf that ate its own children after it had starved them to death by keeping its light to itself. Even if you're dropping breadcrumbs like asteroids everywhere you go or threading the eye in the needle like a spider in a labyrinth to figure a way out of yourself like genetically inherited dice. You're still not a victim of gravity. Whatever excruciating transformations you must undergo like the sea enduring its own weather. Nothing can get you down. Nothing can bring you up. Because the whole universe in all ten directions is wired to surround-sound listening to itself like an old recording of what it had to say at the beginning of things before it discovered its voice. But it's not a Big Bang when nothing's come into existence yet to compare it to. It's not the sound of one hand clapping or the crash of a tree in a forest when there's no one there to hear it. And even if you're holding on to your religion like a superstitious grudge against the world. And it may be hard at first to discover the universe God the Zeitgeist the Cosmic Id whatever you want to call it never had a motive from the very first that wasn't invasively human. But that's just you being godlessly unconvinced of your own existence. That's just you trying to believe in your own inconceivability like an established fact. That's just you trying to spread your angel wings over the earthly turbulence of learning to fly on your own.
So what if you're a dead civilization before you're seventeen? That doesn't make you any less intriguing than the living ones. It's the tragic heroes we remember the most not the ghosts of the bookends who lived to the end of their long and boring biographies wholesome as twelve grain bread. So what if you're gnawing on yourself like a bitter black crust of starwheat? You're still shining. You're still breaking yourself into loaves and fishes. Some people are bright and light with stars in their eyes and smiles that can only be measured in lightyears. And some are dark and deep as Solomon's mines hiding their wealth from the graverobbers in gnostic caves of black matter no one's thief enough to enter. Here's a Zen koan I just made up specifically for you. If a thief stole the moon from your window would your window miss it? If you ever find an answer that doesn't let you in on the know as immediately as your mind. Let it go. It wasn't meant for you.
You get up every morning and you open your eyes like storefronts and informers and for all that appeared and disappeared in plain view before and through them have you ever heard them complain that anything was ever missing from the seeing? Whatever you're looking at. Awake or dreaming. Whose light is cast over everything and then withdrawn like day and night? When it's gone. Stars. When it's here. Flowers. When you fail at finding happiness you discover peace as a way of consoling yourself. When you fall a god or two shy of perfection you master an earthly excellence that's out of reach of the angels. Cornerstones and quicksand. Everything here stands solidly on the unsubstantiated reality of everything else. The defeated don't stand like shadows in the victor's light. An eclipse isn't midnight on the sun when the clock strikes Cinderella with a pendulum like an executioner's ax. You can call it praying if you like but from here it looks like swanning on the block for betraying yourself.
Or is it Chicken Little when the sky's falling in all around her like Leonid meteor showers? Did you raise a false alarm? Did you let the world down? Have your zeniths caught up to their nadirs like snakes with their tails in their mouths? Zero. Forever. Did it become inconceivably unholy to tempt yourself with the earth's believable fruits because they fall back on their dark roots like pregnant rain to climb up the waterslide again like clear fountains everyone can drink from like clouds and birds that pass without a trace? Is that blood or lipstick on the mirror? Was your last loveletter a suicide note full of agitated compassion for what you'd done to everyone else by killing them into life with your absence or were you just kidding when you said life was too hard for the living and what's the point of swimming when the lifeboats are full of the dead?
It's too late for the Mayan calendar to do the Mayans any good. And Nostradamus' worst guess on a bad seeing day is just another unenlightened truism at the wrong end of a telescope looking for signs of intelligent life. And maybe we'll destroy ourselves out of hate and ignorance long before we get any answers that might have prevented the onslaught of doom like a prophetic skull that had spoken. Everything is broken. Fractious. Raptors in rapture they've made a comeback at last like Nazis in the Black Forest. Like Dante in a dark wood. Like children all over the planet tonight turning into young men and women who remember war like the scar of a childhood Caesarian that marked them for life like that which has been rent asunder. Like an olive tree by lightning without thunder. Or the Israeli airforce. A flash of insight without wondering what they've seen that makes them want to kill themselves in a holy war of mirrors vying for perfection of the reflection of a God that escapes detection like a cosmic Houdini whatever chains straightjackets or suicide vests or religions you want to dress him up in.
So why are you crying like a broken teacup you couldn't pour the ocean into? Is your mind too big for your skull? Look at how the trees bag all the stars in the sky into the tiniest dropp of water and throw a hobo branch over their shoulders like a jolly swagman down under and walk away with the spoils of the victors like a windfall at their feet. You say you've lost your purpose for living. But here's one that's as purposeful as evolution. Begin. Anywhere. Now. Like a crowning achievement that returns to transcendence by getting over itself.
When misdirection comes to its senses where are you that isn't always here and now? Because there is no other place to be. If you make goodness the standard of life then you'll end up practising an occult alchemy looking for a philosopher's stone to turn maggots into butterflies with the wormy afterlives of people obscenely out of touch with themselves. Knowledge feeds on ignorance and true wisdom doesn't acknowledge the difference. Great enlightenment doesn't maintain a teacher. You want to be a star. You want to rise and shine. As well you should. But remember this. The darkness is a star's best feature. And beauty and meaning and art don't mean anything to anyone with a heart if they haven't lived through their own passionate annihilation. You won't find a phoenix in an urn on a mantle. You want to burn? You've got to learn to eat your own ashes sometimes.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

I Stand Where The Listening Begins

I stand where the listening begins
as if my voice were just another one of the echoes
and my tongue were the tip of an edgy precipice
that doesn't dare make a move
over an immeasurable abyss of eyes
that nobody belongs to.
This is a seeing that's older than the stars
that were born of it
like a mirror is born of the shining.
Like a body is born of the mind
and takes on the shape of a universe
as an expressionist gesture of classical reserve.
In the great ocean of being before it turned into everyone
our eyes weren't beaded like two drops of water
strung through our nose
like a statement we were trying to make.
They were waves.
Waves of water.
Waves of light.
Waves of thought and feeling.
They were waterbirds that came and went
without leaving.
They were meteorological events
in the emotional life of the sea
when it played alone with itself like weather.
We didn't evolve hands to prove we had a grip on things.
We didn't evolve brains to prove we were intelligent.
We're not nuggets of insight
panned from the mindstream
that runs down the world mountain
in a rush of gold.
I stand where I can hear the night
breathing like a shadow in its own darkness
and whatever I am not
is as real as whatever I am.
And my sorrows dropp away
like the black fruit of ruined bells
and my joys know a freedom
no holy war ever deserved.
Here my death answers to my life
and not the other way around.
My beginnings are not justified by my ends
and my solitude is so wholly itself
it embraces everything
as if it were space
and time were its only friend.
This is a poetic state.
A dynamic mode of creative annihilation.
This is a phoenix blooming in its own fire.
This is life.
This is the universe full of bright ideas
that come to it like stars in the darkness.
This is the white mare of the full moon in the high field
with the gates open
like wings growing out of her shoulders.
This is a space that is so spontaneously immediate
that you receive the reply
long before you've even asked the question.
It doesn't take thousands of thoughtyears
for the light to get here.
A flower blooms.
A star comes out.
It's as simple as that.
You lift one veil of the mystery like an eyelid.
Nothing has a history.
The old man remembers nothing.
The old woman forgets her name.
Once they were seabeds of meaning.
Now they're just water.
And everything is ok with that.
People go grey
and turn into clouds in the mountains
just to catch the last of the light
and give their lives some colour.
And then it's night again
and the dancing chandeliers of the stars
that are burning like legends
to make a name and a myth for themselves
fall like constellations to earth
and shatter like the rainbows of youth.
Every dawn has a taste of the sunset in it.
What's the end of anything
if not the dark side of its beginnings?
I am the fool of a freedom
that lets things be whatever they want to be
deep within the heavy fruit of a compassionate heart
that ripens in its own lucidity.
There are worms.
There are birds.
There's a green star in the apple core.
My skin is the chameleon of the sun going down.
I know how to swim through stone and water.
There are fish in my treetops
and birds in my roots
and when I drown
it's the sun in the sea
and nothing ever really goes out.
Everytime I open my mouth to sing
this is where the muse
puts a finger to her lips
to teach me what I'm talking about.
I'm a star when I write.
First I let go of the light.
And then the children point fingers at me
and say in mutual recognition
of the stories they make up on the go
there you are
just as we foretold.
It's the same way with water
when it's lost in a desert of sand and stars.
Sometimes it takes a mirage to find your way home.
Death gapes like the jawbone of a mummy
and writes like a pyramid
as if it wanted to make all things last forever.
But when life picks up the pen
around the fires of the stars
to whisper into its own ear
things that only solitude
can suggest to the night
its poems are always tents on the move.
The moon sailing paper lifeboats down a river
like waterlilies
blooming in the pale flames
of their lunar immolations
as if each were a white phoenix
rising above its own ashes and smoke
like someone dreaming of swans.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

11 Star

STAR:
'FOLLOW THE SAME STAR'
The truth we see;
How small a part
Of that lovely light
Ever reaches our heart?
If you're looking for the light,
There is a star shining bright,
A dawn to this dark night,
A candle burning bright.

Long ago, a star
Sent forth its light from afar.
And now, no matter how far,
We will follow the same star.
Lost sailors used stars
To calculate their course
Whenever the wind and waves took
Them with their force.

Let truth transform you;
It will make your heart and mind new.
If you're not faithful, your heart's in denial;
Take it from me - it's worth your while.
So forget this world with all its cares,
For troubled dreams turn into nightmares.
You have to leave this world behind
If you want to keep what you find.

The stars haven't always been there,
But the love of our Lord is everywhere.
The devil appears as an angel of light;
He does his best work in the night.
One day you'll leave this world of ours,
Taking your place among the stars.
Shine bright with light, my star;
Show the world who you are.

'SHARE THE SAME STAR'
I'm looking at this star tonight,
But will my wish come true?
I can't help wondering,
If you can see the same star too?
Do you see what I see,
As we stand in its light?
Does darkness overwhelm you,
When you look up there tonight?

I am dreaming in the darkness,
About this star that shines above.
I hope that you'll find me,
Looking for true love.
I've wished upon this special star
For my whole life, it seems.
I close my eyes and make a wish
For all my hopes and dreams.

One day, I got my wish;
I finally met you.
You're that special someone,
Who made my dreams come true.
They say you should never tell
What you wish for, it's true,
But I want the whole world to know
That my wish was for you.

Though there are miles between us,
I know our hearts will meet.
At the point this star begins,
The two will have one beat.
Whenever we are apart,
I find that same bright star.
It makes me feel close to your heart,
No matter where you are.

'WISH ON A STAR'
As I wait here, wondering where you are,
I lie in loneliness and look up at the stars.
Soaring on through space like a shooting star,
Still searching - wondering who you are.

As far as you can see into eternity,
Each one is a wish that with you I'll be.
Stare at the sky, on a silent night;
Count the crystal sea of stars, blazing bright.

Staying by your side wherever you may go,
I have to tell you now - I just want you to know
That even as the stars keep shining in the sky,
My love for you will burn forever and never die.

There's just something beautiful about when angels pray;
A star shines brighter in the night than the light of day.
You can't lift a candle to show lost souls the way
Without feeling the warmth of that radiant ray.

'SHINE BRIGHT WITH LIGHT'
Up in heaven, the angels cry;
Another star falls from the sky.
A falling star - a fading light,
And soon it shall pass from our sight.

When the world starts falling apart,
The hope of heaven is hidden in my heart.
I'll make the world a brighter place,
Like the light of a star in space.

Someday, we'll be just like the angels are;
Like the steady light of a distant star.
Someday soon, we'll shine like them,
Radiant as the rarest, glowing gem.

Sing to the stars - sing to the sea;
Let your song echo for eternity.
Truth our hearts alone can see,
A reflection of reality.

'EACH NIGHT I PRAY'
Walking outside, I lift my eyes
To a symphony in the skies.
You are my star - you shine so bright;
When it is dark, you are my light.

Everyday, I'm so grateful
For your warm and glowing light.
Thank you for being so faithful;
You make my whole world bright.

Just like a star, you're so far away.
I think of you - each night I pray,
But I know there's no way
For you to hear the words I say.

I see you in the sky at night,
But I can't touch the star in sight.
I guess I will always be
A friend you will never see.

'WISH YOU WERE HERE'
One night I was out wandering,
Feeling lost and alone.
I looked up into the heavens,
And there a bright star shone.

I picked one to wish on
From every star above.
I closed my eyes and made a wish
To send you all my love.

So look up in the sky tonight
And find that star;
It will shine bright with light,
However near or far.

And when you see our star,
My wish will come to you;
Stars were made to wish upon;
Sometimes wishes come true.

'I SAW THE LIGHT'
I saw a bright ray today
That led me out of darkness.
A little light so far away
In an endless sea of emptiness.

It burned like a shooting star,
In the distance, so very far.
I think it’s getting clearer;
Now it's coming nearer.

A light just as bright as the sun
And almost as distant;
It wasn’t the only one;
You couldn't have missed it.

When I'm lost in the dark and I can't see,0
I just look for the light.
I have hope when it shines on me,
Everything will be bright.

'YOU ARE MY LIGHT'
I looked up at the stars last night,
Just thinking about you,
And wondering what I could do
To make our dreams come true.

Together, we’ll shine like the sun;
Two candles burn brighter than one.
We'll dance just like the stars in space,
Together forever in an endless embrace.

Wherever you go, I will follow;
And it doesn't matter how far.
Without you, my heart feels hollow;
I just want to be where you are.

You shine just like a star so bright;
I'd be lost without your light.
Hand in hand, we'll stand together;
I promise to be there forever.

'A STAR IS BORN'
Every star is destined by fate
To live and then to die.
It glows with light - it just can't wait,
Shooting across the sky.

For a moment, it is there,
Burning bright up in the air.
It falls gently onto the ground,
Without making a sound.

Like a falling star,
Glowing bright with glory,
I'm just another ending
To someone else's story.

Just a dropp of rain in the desert,
Just a grain of sand in the sea;
What have I done that won’t be forgotten?
Will anyone remember me?

'SHINE LIKE A STAR'
I look up at the sky;
It hurts so much saying goodbye.
Every time I think of you,
It makes me want to cry.

Hope is not hope if you can see;
Is there a star that shines for me?
Like a star, you showed me the way;
You led me with your light each day.

I'll say a prayer for you;
I'll make a wish and I hope it comes true.
Put your faith in what you can't see;
I wish you could be here with me.

Sometimes I wish I could be
A star to shine for all to see.
I know the light is not my own;
I could never do it alone.

'YOU ARE MY STAR'
You are my star,
So bright up above;
I can't forget it;
It's you I love.

My star will shine
So bright and true.
It's a light in the night
Made just for you.

When you are lost,
Wherever you may be,
Look for the light,
For it will set you free.

Don't hide your light,
Wherever you are;
Let it burn bright,
Just like a star.

'A SEA OF STARS'
A life is lost;
What can we say?
A bright light burns,
Then it fades away.

And at the sight,
They stop and stare
On this dark night,
But they don't care.

It came and went;
I'm not sure what it meant.
A star fell from the sky,
And I want to know why.

Just for you,
This star fell;
You have one wish,
So use it well.

poem by Daniel Cobb
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Lighting It Up And Blowing It Out

Lighting it up and blowing it out
I try to make my way through the dark
by beginning at the end
as if the coming and the going
were the same door
or good-bye were the first thing
you would say to a friend.
I approach things like a night stream
as if my death were already achieved
and behind me.
And all the atoms of my being
dancing like frenzied gnats
in the sunset glow of a last eye-beam
are certifiably primordial
and any one of them
when they lose it in the light
could begin a world.
And what can you say more of a life
that dreams of what it is
than it's the taste of the same wine
in many different cups?
And as any fox knows
the grape is always sweetest
when you can taste it with your eyes.
Though why foxes eat grapes is anyone's guess
but life makes itself up as it goes
like music in a fish's earlobes.
It feathers its themes in fire and light
and goes up in smoke
like the ghost of a tree
looking for habitable planets among the stars.
New wounds with innocent root-room for old scars.
Chalking the cue to bank the long shot
you're trying to spin off into
the deep, dark pockets
of your game-winning afterlife.
And I don't believe in much anymore
though that hasn't stopped me from crying
like a slow window trying to keep
the stars from leaking out of me
as if there were a black hole
somewhere in my heart
waiting for an iris to make it an eye
whose seeing might be a new way of healing
what can't be healed.
Once here. Here forever.
But whether we're the eternal children of forever
or just another breath on the night air
that doesn't even know we live,
even death is just another way of killing time here.
When everywhere's the center of everything else,
the centre holds,
things don't fall apart.
They disappear.
And that's the mystic art
of knowing how to make the most out of existence
by offering no resistance
to the rocks in your own mindstream
that part the waters like the thoughts
of an exile in the promised land
who can't go back the way she came.
The river can't step into the same you twice.
And in every direction
your eyes have ever burned like stars
you can see the dark jewel of your own life
from the inside
before it breaks into light.
Sometimes I'm the lonely sign
on the only path to nowhere
and others I'm positively amniotic
with the schools of my blue lucidity
the albino dolphins of the moon leap through
without a chance of changing their colour.
A flower of prophetic blood bleaches my skull.
I swallow the snakefire of my last eclipse
like a lump of coal
I'm trying to turn into a diamond
that doesn't burn
and never sloughs its skin.
Reality isn't a religion or a science,
or the back and front of a mirror
that doesn't know whose eyes its looking through.
Religion: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Science: how many pins can dance on the head of an angel?
Totem poles on a telephone booth where no one ever picks up.
Voodoo dolls that hex the cause of their effects.
The apple bloom on the tree of knowledge
lets go of its flightless wings
and follows the wind
like the eyelids of unfeathered angels
who opened their eyes like flawless fruit
as they fell toward paradise
without a parachute of smokey virtue
or the scale of a snake for a vice.
Emergence into the open
like a hidden secret revealed
is the engine of evolution
that empowers the dark matter
of this incorporeal starmud
to arise like the high note of a bird
that's flown beyond the night in its voice
like light beyond its myth of origin.
And the peduncle is lost in the ensuing phylum
as a madman is lost in the scream
that woke up the asylum,
or a god is lost in his own creation.
And the mountains listen
to the holy voices
in the valleys of their shadows
they deepen as they arise
like the guests of an echoless calling
to greet the unknown host.
It's what the moon feels
when she fondles her locket of water
and memories pull at her heartstrings
like tides on earth
and music is the way she recalls
the sirens that used to sing
like the brides of empty lifeboats
that prayed like smashed guitars
for the night to sow the seedless sea with stars.
And in every fish that swims through fire
like the sacred response of life
to the longing in its own desire
she knows they got their wish.
Fireflies in the ashes of the phoenix tree.
And the eggs of cosmic words
like serpents in a bird's nest
learning to fly like dragons
that have just swallowed the moon.
And it's one thing to pull the sword from the stone
but it's a greater power than magic and proof
with no urge to rule
that summons the butterfly from its cocoon
by giving the fool who inches toward the truth
along the green branch toward the apple-bloom
that already tastes like the forbidden fruit
of some radical insight
the whole orchard in a pair of wings
and more than enough night and light on its palette
to start a revolution in seeing among the flowers
who still labour in the chains of their roots
to turn their earthbound lucidities into stars
who might look back for a change
with eyes that have gathered like water out of the shining
and taste the light in the honey
that kissed their eyelids into gold
long before the night was old
and it wasn't enough just to see them.
When you opened your eyes
in the burning clarity of your lone vision
before this matrix of space and time
gave birth to the world
you were free to be whatever you could see.
That's when the light first spoke to you
in the mother-tongue of your seeing
and your voice broke
like a secret name in the mirror
that didn't know who you were
and the moon on nightwater
the thief at the window
your breath like stars on the cold, night air
summoned the whole of being
in every particulate shard
and radiant plinth of the mirror
to drive your shining into the shadows
so myriad things can appear as they are.
Many eyes open. Night. An eclipse. One star.
And the darkness an anti-romantic
in love with the moon from afar.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

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
Vote! | Copy!

Out Here Alone

Out here alone so late at night
with all these spectacular stars
burning through the clean glass
of the freezing winter air
I can almost hear them thinking
behind the myths of the cover stories
they've told for years
dark truths about life and light
it would be madness in a man to understand.

Don't try to stuff the impersonal secret
of the universe
into your sentimental heart.
How could you ever fit its likeness
into a locket
and finger it lovingly as your own?

Out here alone so late
even if you have come
like a thief in the night
to steal from the light
when nobody's home
there are no cracks no facets no gaps
no backdoors, unlocked windows
or emergency exits,
no stairwells or entrances
in these jewels of insight
that can feel your eyes falling upon them
like rain running down a mirror
that shuts you out
like someone in the bathroom crying
for reasons that are light-years beyond you.

However deep and sincere your tears are
they're still only dry wells
in that vast ocean of awareness,
black snowflakes
on the roaring furnace of the abyss
and if you reach out with affection
hoping to make things better
by embracing it all
you're still only tendering a kiss
to the gaping jaws of your own lipless skull.

There's a silence older than space
in the bottomless heart of things
that makes intelligence seem
the unlikeliest of exaggerations
a human could ever mean
holding his mind up like a lamp to the stars
as if he could find his own way back by his own light
without the dream that themes his mindstream with creation.

But as foolish and futile as it is to surmise
or try to get a leg up on the wise
I don't think the darkness
is the negative space
around the troubled face that appeared
after all the dots were connected
like rising constellations
in a child's colouring book.

And I don't think there are gods
squatting like frogs
on the lotus of the world
making us up as they go along
like wheels and roads
to the grunts and groans
of an axial mating song
anyone could mistake for a joke.

And I don't think the stars
believe the things we say about them
or even remotely feel the mystic dread
of what it is to be a human
looking up at their shining
out of deeper darknesses within
where no direction can be given to the lost like eyes
that would never find their own way home again
were it not for the stars and fireflies that mislead us
from one illumination to the next
by giving the finger to the braille of the text
that would school a gust of stardust into us
like God gave life to Adam
and Eve gave life to God
long before there were any laws to blind them
like Satanic lightning bolts
uprooting their eyes like rain from the clouds
to put those fires out.

I look up at the stars
with the eyes of an exile
through the diaspora of my breath
and I want to think them all to death
like the people and things I've left behind me
when it was time to go my own way
anywhere into the darkness inside me
to see if I could shine a light upon myself
that didn't blind me to the fact
neither in the beginning
nor in the end
was I there to witness the act
that made a certainty as good as a doubt
to the great indifference
that wasn't trying to find me
like a needle of light in the heart of a haystack.

I look up at the stars
like a scarecrow in winter
trying to put its pants on
one leg after another
like a man
with nothing but time to burn
scattering his ashes among the stars
urn after urn
skull after skull
of the heretics and mystics
that were martyred by his scar-crossed heart
in the name of nothing real.

I don't know what they feel
but I look up at the stars
like a black rose
of blood and starmud
in the last death throes
of self-immolation
and see in my own image
what I've always had
in common with creation.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

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
Vote! | Copy!

Trying To Express

Trying to express a more immediate intimacy
with the life of the mind
without attributing a form to madness
might just be another way
of looking for comic relief
from the actual facts
of the tragic folly that confronts us
like a world that won't tolerate any mask
you want to put on it for long
to lie about the atrocity of your irrelevance
and pretend you don't know
what you're looking at.
I dream I suffer the same
corpuscular purpose as a paramecium.
I wake up from these desert mirages
and it's true.
OK it's true.
Next.
Because nothing in life is an endgame.
And despite the full stop like an empty cup
at the end of a thought
with the lifespan of a punctuation mark
my cup runneth over like the new moon
and everything is drunk on the lunacy of its light.
It's not the content of life that matters
as much as the way space bends
to accommodate it.
It's not the wine
it's the emptiness of the cup
that shapes the forms of our knowing
so that they can be grasped
by our eyes and hands
as separate things in the world.
Mind is a poet a potter a painter a parent a prophet
that will not be bound by its own works
or the laws of the defenceless who expound them.
Look out into space
and the furthest you will ever see
is a face in the mirror that's older than matter.
Space is a vehicle of transformation
that doesn't go anywhere
because anywhere it goes
its wheels are centered
in the still points of themselves
as we are to our navels.
And all lifelines
straight or otherwise
are emanations of its radiance.
Order and logic and reason
are the dry wishbones of the fearful
looking for predictability in a world
that can't be contained
by a unified field theory
or an elaborated straitjacket
on the fashion ramps of science.
Physics says one size fits all
but by the time the spiders
are finished weaving it
the sleeves are always too short
to keep up with a universe
that's growing at the speed of light
and I'd rather walk naked
in the skin of my own clarity
than be clothed
in someone else's hand-me-downs.
I'm not out hunting birds and butterflies
with a dreamcatcher.
I'm not looking for peace and healing
by abstaining from myself
like a promise I broke to my ancestors.
Everyone was born a lifeboat
in an abysmal sea of awareness
or they wouldn't be here to know it.
So who needs to be saved?
Or is there some kind of holy war going on
between the lifeboats and the waves?
And where does Jerusalem go
to free itself of infidels
when it goes on crusade?
All waves are waterbells
that never stop tolling
and the mindstream
they're raised upon
is in everyone
the sum of what's holy about life.
Learn to transcend your certainties
if you want to get over your doubts.
Don't hoard the effects of your efforts
in the name of a good cause
that's so blinded by its own light
that it can't see
that there's as much randomness in the wonder
as there is in the horror.
That what's most terrifying about life
is that it's free
of anything you can say or feel or think about it.
That every part in every moment
is not the sum
but the consummation of the whole
that roots and flowers in everyone
as if it were a secret
that bloomed for them alone.
To know the names of things
like the names of stars and flowers
is to look at them from the outside.
Who called you Eve?
Who called you Adam?
If you know your name
you're already in exile.
But it was not us
who were driven out of the garden.
Knowledge drives the garden out of us.
It turns our eyes around
so we can't see Eden from the inside
where our beginnings are always now
and we are no more dispossessed
of our innocence
than the passion expressed by a flower
in a loveletter to the light
can be disenchanted
of the insight that inspired it.
What's truly tragic about life when it seems so
is not that it's evil
but that it's innocent
and its innocence is older than compassion.
The moon sheds its phases.
The flower its petals.
They're always coming and going
from the same abyss they're heading into.
The emptiness engenders this abundance
out of its own potential for growth
and even death is not culpable.
This is space.
That is space.
But the two
can no more be separated
than a wave can be from water.
You don't need a unified field theory
to understand unity.
You don't need to hold a mirror up
to your face
to see your own reflection
when you can see yourself in everything.
What does space look like to space?
Mind to mind?
Light to light?
The dreamer to the dream?
What could God possibly say to herself
that she didn't already know?
There's nothing hidden.
There's nothing secret.
There's nothing that escapes detection.
There's no simulacrum for the void
that elaborates everyone's likeness.
There's no dead metaphor in the word
waiting to be resurrected.
The absolutes may be in denial
about the way things seem
but even when their eyes
burn through glass like stars
lost in their own immensities
they can't impress the darkness
with a theory of cosmic shadows.
They don't need to look
any further into space
than the ends of their noses
to see the constellations
casting them
across the universe
like the shadows of the stars
that aren't there anymore
trying to throw a light on black matter
by noting its absence.
Gravitational eyes devoid of light.
Black holes without keys
in the doors of perception.
Dry wishing wells on the moon
that have never plumbed the depths
of their bottomless longing
to hear something irrevocably truer
than the echoes of their own voices
coming back to them
like crows and doves to an ark.
By the time you know it
any event is over.
By the time you see the dawn
the sun has already set.
In the seed of every insight
you can read your own gravestone.
You can see there's as much death in it
as there is life.
You can feel the spring coming on
as if you were already buried
under the savage tiger-lilies.
And you can ask
until you're as blue in the face as a hyacinth
what it all meant
after you're dead
out in the incredible open
that's closed to the living
just past the end of their fingertips.
Or if it ever meant anything at all.
You can see and be it this way.
You can go on a long journey
to a prison or a shrine or a hospital
and return home
with no more insight
than you had when you left.
And still wonder if it was all worth it.
Because no experience of life
is truer than another
reality is not separated
from our awareness of it
nor subject to reform.
There is no norm
that isn't a prevailing illusion by consensus.
But the desert isn't looking for water
and only the one-eyed fools
mistake their eye-patchs
for an eclipse of the moon
and their own mirages
for a new way of thinking
when it's thinking's best virtue not to have one.
People and things are ok as they are
but they don't realize it.
They keep trying to live up
to their own reflections.
They keep trying to sweep
the stars and the deserts
off their front stairs
looking for a stairway to heaven
where the dust of the world
can't find a place to rest.
But time is a pulse of the heart
not the heavy pendulum
of a grandfather clock
and as Pablo Neruda once wisely said
the poetry is under your fingernails
and I would less wisely add
as is heaven.
No one's on the wrong path
once they open both their eyes
to what's underfoot
whether you're walking
on water stars or fireflies
or riding dolphins.
Whether your road
is a shoelace or smoke
or the lifeline of an umbilical cord
measured in wavelengths and lightyears
or your journey's still
an astronaut in the womb.
Mirrors holding mirrors up
to judgement for their spots.
Narcissus doesn't like what he's looking at.
So what?
The roads don't suddenly
turn back on themselves
because they lack floors
and a place of their own.
Heaven uses the same return address as hell.
But when death comes knocking in Aleppo
and you're out walking your own mile
in your own shoes
to nowhere in particular
free of arrivals and departures
no one's ever home
and every threshold you cross
is not hindered by an exit or an entrance.
Some walk.
Some run.
Some swim.
Some fly.
Some crawl.
Some ride.
Some dance.
And some sit still by the window
growing younger by the moment
the longer they look into the distance.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Who Taught You

Who taught you to abhor the savage
within you
as if you were
an intolerant missionary to yourself?
Or walk into the room
and sit down
like a civilization that can't compose itself?

And what strange habits you have for eyes
like ominous seabirds off the coast
of the continent with nowhere to perch
you've just discovered about yourself
that doesn't bear your name.

And o come on now
isn't it the most grievously wounded
who cry out the loudest
in their delirium of pain
and shake their wills
like steel at the ruthless heavens
though all they've ever really done is heal?

And why slash out in your anger
like the moon at everyone
when you should know by now
better than anyone
that whenever you do
it's the sword that bleeds to death?

And you say you've tried to live decently
in an indecent world
but it's a shame
you've never walked barefoot anywhere
without your morals in your hand like shoes.

That's just the mud and water of it
between your fingers and your toes
but I've never joined a Buddha
eating flowers for lunch
who would have it any other way.

Or as Solomon said to so and so,
on his way to the temple
to set an example,
half a baby isn't the same as a whole bunch.
And then broke down in tears.

We all have our fears and illusions
but isn't so much suffering in the world
generated by the fact
we cherish our misery
like self-inflicted voodoo dolls
we won't let go of
because nothing else
looks like us into the void
and sees nothing that looks like us
looking back with stars in their eyes?

But what a surprise to be here at all
stepping in and out
of these coffins and lifeboats
paired like shoes under our beds
where they gape
like mouths before the open sea
that has washed them ashore
like dust out of its one good eye
we just flew into
like birds against a windowpane.

And even more of a wonder
is the day you discover
you can taste the full harvest
in every crumb of a dream
and even in the lamp
that's gone out in the night
clarity is still faster than light.

Within you I swear
on all that is human
are worlds within worlds
like the spherical mirrors of the morning
hanging their eyes like jewels
in the webs of the dreamcatchers
that looked everywhere
through the spiritual lost and founds of the light
but couldn't find us until nightfall
when we each came out like a star
above our own manger
and the darkness was sweet with gifts.

The blind don't diminish
the brightness of the mirror
when they hold themselves
up to it like a shadow
and even when your eyes are open
you don't add a feather of light to the shining
though you burn like Icarus without a starmap
by flying too near the sun
beyond the heels of your aspiration.

And even when we are crazed moths
in a straitjackets of flesh
seeking asylum in the fire,
isn't it the Promethean nature
of every living creature
that has ever stolen from the gods
even in a state of ashes
not to be bound for long by anything
that isn't out of reach?

It's not the art of a petty life
to know how to long
for the impossible for years
without disappointment
knowing that if appearances
can be deceptive
then so must be the illusion
when anything disappears.

The important thing is not
to try to attain anything
by reaching out
a finger shy of God
for things like life and love and light
as if you were a dead battery
asking the stars for a jumpstart
when one of the myriad truths
of the dark matter at hand is
you don't have to work hard
to earn your own gifts
like a beggar in a palace
that doesn't recognize her own face
looking down upon her
like her own reflection in the heavens,
as if her eyes always had to go
in the same place either side of her nose
and couldn't flow along
with the shoreless starstreams
like easy fish dopaddling through space.

And if you must cry out
like an insatiable mirror
for things you've lost
or pine at the gate
of your own homelessness
like a long sad farewell
to all those things that never came
like the sea to your feet
as if every wave
were meant to fit you
like a glass slipper,

then I suggest
with only a whisper
of night in my voice
to tempt the light out of hiding
that the next time you cry
like a wounded sword
that no longer divides
the empty grotto of the pain
that separates lovers
like two halves of the same brain,

look up at the nightsky
as if you were looking into the eyes
of your own prophetic tears
and see and be more deeply
than any kind of telescope
or wishing well
in every single one of them
the dark pregnant mother
of the billion chandeliers
that hang like stars above you.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

I Wish Everyone In The World Were As Mad As You Are

I wish everyone in the world were as mad as you are.
I wish everyone in the world talked the same nonsense you do
and meant as much.
Stop crying.
I wish everyone in the world were as good as you are
and didn't lie to anyone else
other than themselves
about what the truth is.
You shape chaos to your mind
like light to space
to make a habitable planet you can live on
and if it isn't round sometimes
and O doesn't always cast the same shadow
that the others mimic with theirs
I wish everyone could put on your kind of airs
and be as good to life as the kind of atmosphere you are.
Come on now.
Here.
Dry your tears with this.
All those constellations you made up
out of the stars in your eyes
are your own private myths and mandalas
and you're free to change them as you will
and I wish everyone made as much
of the light they were given to go by
as you have.
I'm too much of a thorn
to paint the delicate iridescent watercolours
I see smeared on your tender bubbles
like original pictures of the universe
from a thousand spaced-out Hubbles
but I wish everyone in the world
had your kind of genius for vulnerability.
You hold up a single feather of light
like a candle among stars
like a green leaf in the middle of winter
and the world that is inured to three dimensions
for infinitely tedious reasons
would rather put its eyes out
and gape like blackholes
than see as you do
that there are countless seasons to the soul
that burn like a phoenix
and there's nowhere you can point to in the darkness
that isn't an equinox of love and understanding
when the sun shines at midnight
and spring harvests what the autumn sows.
Having a deep cosmic insight
like a stranger beyond lucidity
into the windows of the houses of your own zodiac
might make you look like a maniac to the neighbours
who keep watch in their asylum
against any kind of freedom
that might release them from their lighthouse
like a geni from a lamp
that doesn't conform to anyone's wishs but her own
but I wish everyone had the courage
you have not to be them.
Life isn't fair or unfair.
Life isn't kind or cruel.
It isn't half-Buddha and half-fool.
Neither impersonal
nor sentimental
life isn't a kind of obedience
to its own rules
as if it were bound like God to keep its word.
Or what?
Who else is there to answer to?
All the taboos want to be thresholds
and all the thresholds
want to run away from home.
Could be a curse.
Could be a blessing.
Could be just more idle words.
But you're not like that.
You're not a fountain mouth
that mistakes alphabets for birds
and holds them to the letter of the law
in a world full of music.
It's enlightenment to sing to a window.
It's ignorance to sing to a mirror.
But you don't sing to either
and your song is clear as running water
all the way down the mountain.
The picture-music
of your eyes and your ears
can already hear the ocean from here
that gathers to receive the flowing
like the heart receives blood
like the mind receives your thoughts.
Look out at the world.
You're the host.
Look inward.
You're the guest.
You can break bread with the dead
without being a ghost.
You can drink wine with the living
and it's the wine that gets high on you
flowing into a seabed of shadows on the moon
that hasn't touched a dropp for years.
Don't believe what the cynics say about innocence.
They have the sensibilities of blackflies
trying to draw blood from the Mona Lisa.
Don't grieve if you're a butterfly
that can't follow the flightplans of the maggots.
There's only a slight difference in wingspan
between a waterbird and a phoenix
but it would take lightyears
to measure a single feather of yours.
There's no cult of the rose
that insists it fall upon its own thorns first
or the moon draw first blood
on the blades of its own crescents.
You don't have to scar
your own deathmask with experience
just to prove you knew
how to eat the pain and bleed.
You don't have to wear your face in public
as if it were something you kept up your sleeve.
Dice might be the foundation-stones of the lost
but that doesn't mean
you have to go pearl-diving
for the moon in quicksand
or change your song like a jukebox
playing the slots
when you're a mermaid on the rocks.
I wish everyone had the same chance
to risk it all as you do
and win back their lives
like eleven come of seven
insteading of seeing everything
as if they were jinxed by inasuspicious birds
turning the wrong way on a prayer-wheel
that keeps coming up snake-eyes
with every roll of their skulls.
You can't heal the luck
of a wounded Nazi
by turning his swastika the other way.
You can't teach snakes to bite other people.
And you don't know enough
if there's anything left to say or understand
and even then there's a silence
that still longs to be heard
like a humming bird sipping honey from your ears
or deep in a telescopic wishing well of stars
burning in a dream of mirrors
they walk across
like fire on the water
or the distant blue notes
of the hidden nightbird
that echoes your tears
as if it were crying out in the darkness
from the safety of a secret place
for the same reasons you are.
As if it were trying to befriend its own sorrow
and weep for tomorrow as you do
for all the things of the past
it won't even know it's missing.
I wish everyone in the world
could live the future as you do
as something that is already happening now.
Even when you're crying
because you don't think you're brave enough
not to.
You're not a lame princess
that anyone needs to rescue.
You're a dragon bringing rain.
And if the snakepit hisses at you
like a social structure
and calls you insane sometimes
because you have wings
and they still hug the earth
all tied up in knots
taking their poisons out on each other
to keep from feeling anything
it's just their way of defining sanity
by the standards of the numbest.
It's not you that's crazy.
It's not you that's the dumbest.
I wish everyone in the world
were as warm-blooded and wise as you are.
When the serpent fire at the base of your spine
has passed through the doors
of all your chakras like vertebrae
and you're already a circumpolar constellation j
just a little off true north
shining like Draco
why worry if you're no good
at the game of snakes and ladders
they play like politics and religion back here on earth
to see who gets to be the pillar
and who the quicksand.
You understand way more than that.
I can tell by the fire in your eyes
that you're a phoenix among stars
and you've transcended the eagles and the houseflies
that can't even begin to imagine
the kind of heights you can reach to
or the depth of the view below you
when you're riding your own thermals
like beautiful helices in the mindstream
for the sheer joy of being only you.
Even now.
These tears
that run all the way down to your lips
as if water had fingertips
what are they
but the way you cry for things
that everyone else didn't?
I wish everyone in the world could be like you.
I wish you could teach us all
to stop living a spiritual lie
on the deathbed of an earthly truth
as if that were the only way
to foolproof ourselves
against reality
like a stranger looking through our windows at night
who doesn't recognize herself in us
because most of us aren't as brave and free as you are
to leave the door ajar
and let whatever wants to come in
come in.
Some track in mud.
Some.
Stars.
And the mud flowers in light.
And the stars bloom in fire.
And one looks up
and the other looks down
on each other's likeness
reflected in the other
as if they were engendered by the same being.
Sight is a kind of love
and I wish everyone in the world
were inspired by the mystic dimensions
and intimate clarity of your kind of seeing
that even through these tears
that I'm not having much luck in wiping away
can comprehend a world
that's more wonderful than it thinks it is.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Things Might Be Drifting Away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Some People Go Looking For Happiness

Some people go looking for happiness.
Some prefer power or beauty wealth and fame.
Some crave intensity.
Some seek peace.
Some search for food and shelter.
Some want to die with a good name.
Everybody takes their lead from the way they came.
And everyone says they're looking for love
though no one knows what it looks like.
They try to fit their thoughts to their words
like skin they can touch
that doesn't scar like the moon
or shed like a petal too delicate for the senses
but most just end up trying
to mummify the mindstream
by laying thousands of years of starmaps
down on troubled waters
like autumn leaves
that don't know where they're going.
Eventually everything's swept away
in the undertow of a dark ocean
that only smells sweet from a distance.
And longing shifts like infra-red into the blackness.
And bones on the moon are the only signs
that life once perished here.
Orphic skulls whose jaws dropped
like gates before their own gaping prophecies.
Time flows like a non-existent future into us
and it fills us with a hunger
for everything we've lost
or feel somehow was always missing.
One of the cardinal features of the emptiness
we are conceived again and again out of
is there's nothing behind its face
you can fix like an identity to space.
For fourteen billion years
the universe has been nothing
but one long beginning without end
making everything up as it goes along
out of nothing
like a man whistling down a long road
far from home
late at night
to let anything that might be listening in the darkness
know he's there
so nothing can take him by surprise.
And every step he takes
he steps across a threshold like a star
just coming into being
whose light goes off in all directions
looking for blind water it can turn into eyes.
Bosons hadrons leptons neutrinos wimps and quarks
the deeper you look into the matter
the more you realize
out to the furthest galaxy and beyond
seeing is being
and being is all fireflies.
And every one of them
is true north of nowhere.
Some people follow their own beginnings
like laws into the future
hoping to become someone else
that doesn't recognize them anymore
for who they were.
The peduncle's lost in the ensuing phylum.
Their future's rich
but their past is always poor.
The planet doesn't spin on its axis for them.
It's hinged like a door
that only opens one way
though it's a two-faced god
that begins them like last year.
But the leaves of autumn
aren't the laundered money of spring
because if our fulfilment
weren't already behind us
we wouldn't be here
trying to true the last to the first
of an unfinished multiverse
like the best to the worst
as if red were the past of blue.
Stop thinking birth is the past of death
or spring is the future of winter
as if they weren't the same breath
and one breath of life weren't enough
to keep the fireflies glowing in your ashes for eternity
and everywhere you look
you will flower like a vine
that divines its way to the wine
by ripening the grapes of gratitude.
You will understand
for all that you have grasped
and brought to fruition
your most exalted aspiration
is a heap of dead branches in the spring
burning like leaves of fire
still reaching out for the sun
and you will hear the mind-mirror whisper to itself
like the wind on far off waters
Narcissus is drowning in his own reflection
like the flashback of a life he left unlived
but everything is immersed in me
like a mind
like a sea in a fish that ran aground
on the uncharted landfalls of its own teaching.
And the wine will flower in your mouth like a grail
that's given up preaching
and finally found its own voice
like a bird returning to a tree at nightfall
to call out in its solitude
to the stars as they appear
we are here we are here we are here
where we belong
at peace with everything we're missing
everything we long for
everything we are and are becoming
that overtakes us like music from within
transforming the silence into song
the water into wine
small beings into a big space
looking into the passing face
of everything's that's mortal about us
with our eyes fixed upon the divine
not to see it in any one place
but with the presence of mind
to be wholly and impurely not that not this
without anywhere a trace of ultimacy
in this world that we take for a sign
we are here we are here we are here
and things are as they are
not as they must be.
Nothing got here legally.
What's the expanding universe
if not a refugee in its own country
somehow exiled from itself for reasons
only it can express?
Citizen Universe
show me your papers
your paintings your poems
show me how you dance on your own
show me how you put your children to sleep
show me how you bar an F chord
show me what you weep for
what you delight in
what you esteem
what you despise
what you ignore
what darkness of yours
feeds that inferno of stars above you
burning its constellations like passports
that aren't going anywhere
show me the black mirror
that says you don't belong here
like some misplaced night of the full moon
not marked on any calendar
show me the law of being human
that says this little piggy has one
and this little piggy has none
show me where it's written
the guest shall turn strangers away
from his host's generosity
like a dog at the door
that bares its teeth at the table
show me the home-made honey
of your wisdom
show me the dead lamps
of the apocalyptic fireflies
that designed your chaotic cosmology
by plagiarizing the light
to prove the stars
don't reserve
a space in the universe
for any insight of yours.
Nothing got here legally.
No one followed a coyote or a law
to cross the border
into this insurgency of being
no one checked the colour of your eyes
or profiled the light
to see if they were fit for seeing.
You don't need a constitution
to verify your liberty.
Well before you were born
you were free and ever shall be
to belong here as we all do
to pursue what makes us
sad mad bad or happy
the way we all got here
the way we all get through
the way we're all alone here together
with one another as we are with you
as we are with her and him and me
as we are with everything
as we are with ourselves
when we don't know who we're becoming
when we don't know the stranger on the bridge
watching the water flow
that's waiting to greet us on the other side
in the only way the unblighted heart of reality
we're all looking for
like blood on a grail-quest for our humanity
accepts the darkness that seeks us out
like a miraculous elixir of insight
so the kingdom won't fail
so the garden doesn't ask us
for a green card to know and grow
in the only way we truly belong here
in the only way we know how to be
so the lifeboat we're all in
like the same boundless mind
is always as full
as it is empty
so no one gets left out at sea
like a wave that couldn't be saved
and no one gets in
who doesn't know how to swim
the way we all got here
and continue to be
all these thresholds of the sea
that steps across us
even as we move like waves
breaking discipline with our own continuum
creatively.
Just to be here.
Just to crawl up on the shore of a new medium
like a refugee planting flowers
we brought from home
hoping we'll still be here
to watch them bloom.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

So Far Down This Road

So far down this road
without a destination
my childhood doesn't
recognize me anymore.
So far into this life
I've never been outside of
I can speak to myself
in a foreign language
that no one can understand
as if it were the ancient dream-grammar
of a past tense
that talked its way into the future.

So far into what I've become
the peduncle is lost
in the ensuing phylum
and of all thought
I'm the first monkey
to look for its origins in an asylum.

The crow on an autumn branch
in the white rain
laughs more than it ever did
at the specious foundations
of my ephemerid profundities
dropping like apples at my feet.

The minstrel warrior of the forlorn hope
I took up arms in a holy war of one
I was doomed to lose
like a sad generation of demons
who knew the wound would never close.

If heaven isn't a club-med in a specific place
but saturates all of space
like mystically dark matter
then we're all falling toward paradise
like particles and wavelengths of water.

Heaven may be the whole cup
and hell a crack in the wine
and earth the place you sober up
like a bad hangover from the divine
but it's a party I walked out of aeons ago
more a stranger than when I came
like a manger without a sign
like a magus without a logo
to an inn that had been empty for years.

I don't presume to teach people
what they already know.
Even hanging on
is going with the flow.
This is a delirious place
where the mysteries cut deep
and silence is the native tongue
God speaks to herself in.

So far down this mindstream
like a paper boat I made of a poem
and set aflame like an orchid of fire
to honour a poet
who said it right in China long before me,
I bloom on the water of a prophetic dream
true to the unpredictability
of a sleeping dragon
to wake from the brevity of oblivion
with the eyes of a narcoleptic chameleon.

Joy binds
what sorrow releases.
And thought might prick the lifelines
of an amniocentesis
and offer up my embryo like a thesis
on whether I should have been born or not,
but I drink from my own skull like the moon
when it's full to the brim
above the starwheat in the Virgin's hand
to the stealth of the wind that dropped me here
like a lone seed in a huge empty silo
I'm trying to stud like the Venus de Milo.

It's not easy rooting in stone
like the invasive metal
of a sword that will make you
king of the waxing year.
Things just fall apart on their own
like grain from the chaff of a fickle harvest
that rose from the dead
like the bitter bread
of an abandoned homestead
that walked out on itself too soon.

But I've never been one to talk
about leaving it all behind
like some dark gate of the mind
I could pass through
like a unilluminated comet through space
to shine in the light of a star
that was alarmed at my approach
and blind to my passing.

I'm more at home in the dark
with a firefly and a chimney spark
rolling koans like constellations of loaded dice
as if they were two diabolical buddhas
in the back alleys of enlightenment
pushing their luck to the wall.
They rise
and I fall.
I rise
and they fall.
Readiness is all.
Ripeness is all.
Lear shakes his fist at Hamlet.

The blue harvest moon in total eclipse.
All loveletters die like political pamphlets
up against a closed door.
So far into this cloud of unknowing
I have given up hoping
will ever become a star
and break into light in all directions
to show me where I'm going
I give up on myself like rain
and release my waterbird eyes
to fall wherever they might.

Readiness is spring.
Ripeness is fall.
Seven come eleven.
No one wins it all.
Two squared skulls
up against a crooked wall.
I shake the dice
and you call.
You shake the dice
and I call out to luck like a random goddess
to see if she still loves me
as she did once tomorrows ago
when I won everything back.

Whether you're giddy with happy truths
or more profoundly belled by the sad facts
it's scary at night in the spirit's lost and found
when the lights go out
and no one's around to look for anything.

Gardens of black umbrellas,
the wings of folded bats
stacked like unseasonal eclipses
that have lost the will to bloom
like flowers at a lavish funeral
for impoverished aristocrats.

And courage isn't a home
that's all that easy to return to
when you're out here on your own
like a lifeboat full of midnight on Mars.

So far along this long homeless road home
I have worn out my faithless friends like shoes
I took from the feet of the dead
to walk on ahead of myself
like a star with a jump on where it's been.

Now even I don't know what I mean
when the words say me
like some black benediction
over an unknown grave
as I mourn the roadkill
and try to bless the turkey-vultures.

Earth. Air. Water. Fire.
Four cultures that bury their dead differently
but all to the same end.
Who could have guessed
the angels that came to earth first
had the wingspan of loitering scavengers?
I give my soul up to the birds.
I give my eyes up to the sky.
I give my voice up to these words.
I give my mind up like water to water
light to light
darkness to darkness
to the star that has misled me this far
into this wilderness of myself
where I'm preaching stealth to shadows
and air to ride the wind.

I give my heart up
to the thorn that gored the rose
like a deep insight
into the nature of the moon's
bright vacancy
dark abundance
like two sides of the same face.

I give my will up to chance.
My blood to the conviction of the poppy it's fire.
So far beyond my last event horizon
I'm never coming back this way again
what does it matter if the path
is crooked or straight?

I lay my tiny wisdom down like a hazelnut
on the track of the silver thought-train
to see if it can crack it like a koan.
I lay the mantle of my dynastic ignorance
over the shoulders of an avalanche like snow.

However much
you love the valley
it will be the mountain
that sweeps you off your feet.

I give my imagination up like a black wine
that tastes a little like me
to the muses who bruised it
like the great night sea
they drank from my skull
whenever the moon was full.

Among so many sages
it was good to be a fool.
One by one the schools
dropped out of me
and settled like mud at the bottom
of a clarified way to see
that everything that passed through my head
like a shapeshifting cloud
was just water looking into water,
me looking into me with water for eyes.

Why be shocked
by the predictability of death
when it's life that always comes as a surprise?

I may have been lame
in my approach to things
and limped my way like an iamb into wings
but I wanted to look down
from way up there
as if I were a star without strings
and be the way things are
when they shine down on nothing
until a nightbird in a far tree sings.

Carrying forth into the carrying forth
eternity might be the ghost
in the starmud of time that perishes
to give forever a meaning
but it's this life now
that talks the talk
and walks the walk
of a human being.

I give my eyes up to the seeing.
So deeply lost upon myself
like an empty lifeboat drifting through
these veils and visions of things
that appear like sails in the fog a moment
and then evaporate into their nebularity.

I give my blessing to the waywardness
of the course
that took me the way I am.
I give up my pain
I give up my sorrow
I give up my love my joy my laughter
like orchids and ashes on the mindstream
that flows out of me like a waking dream
that doesn't insist on seeing me here tomorrow.

But most of all
I give my gratitude
to the mystic vagrancy of the great solitude
I approached like a friend
on my way to nowhere like the sea
as if everything came to an end in me
like a life I couldn't foresee.

Though I have mourned
life's preemptive reverses
I have not scarred my lips with curses.
I have not tainted the well I drink from.

And nothing's ever spoiled
the bread I broke with others.
The feast is free
but it isn't hunger or thirst
that makes us sisters and brothers
it's the way we raise
the cup to each other's lips
like a lunar elixir to a solar eclipse
as if we knew we would pass
long before the darkness did
but still made the gesture anyway.

It's the way we hope
we know what we mean
when we say we love people
we've never seen
as if they were everyone in particular
and love's mute theme
were helplessly gesticular.

You can't keep
what you won't give away.
Life's a long sleep
before a short dream
that wakes you up far from home
beside the unknown road you're on
that winds like smoke among the stars
whispering ghost stories around the flames
of their unbelievable fires.

By all means pursue what is true
but don't forget
mercy has its liars too.
I give my life up
to the mystic specificity
of the medium that sustains it
like a wavelength of light
to a sea of dark matter.

And more than I could have ever lived
living alone together with everyone
crammed into the same planetary shoe
I give up all the vastness
of my awareness of the space within
and how far there is to go like light
before you can open
even a single flower of insight
to end your long winter night.

I give up space
like my place at the table
where I stood like a tower of salt.
I give my imagination up
like an underground cult
that gave its secrets away to everyone
like dark spots on the sun.

And whatever beginnings
are behind me now
like things I'll never finish
I give my past and future up
to the omnipresence of time
in all I live today
as if something
were always coming my way
without expectation
from lightyears beyond my eyes
like letters from home
that never reach me
in time to call me back.

If I have shone among luminaries
like a firefly in an ice palace
of radiant chandeliers
that froze in their own tears
it was as a small lighthouse
on the coast of turbulent mirrors
that kept a nightlight on.

I spent the gone on the going
and trusted the darkness
to keep things flowing along
like a river coming down a mountain
without knowing about the sea
that summoned me to the lowest place
like an unfathomable watershed
in every eye of the fountain
that cried out to the birds
in words that feather the dead
for their long flight through the mystery
I am I am I am
the future memory
of my own prophetic history
before I wrote it down
like the path I took
on my way out of town.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Eyes In The Shadows, In Blood, In Space

Eyes in the shadows, in blood, in space, incubating the light
that has yet to be born, wild asters in the deflowered fields of death,
and the return of the living out of the eyeless abyss, delinquent,
and a redness in the air of this September night,
saturating it like a deep wound it holds under its breath,
a black rose, a fossilized thorn that no longer grows old,
memories fixed like crucified bats to the sticky brown stars
of the fanatical burdock trying to wear me like a starmap
as if every day of my life has felt like the approach of autumn
watching the constellations turn like the pages of a calendar,
a waterclock of new moons flowing like dark matter,
sundials at midnight encircling me like shark fins
slashing the water like sabres with surgical precision
and their eyes, oblivion, a focus of shadows, perennial night
after a supernova of dismemberment, dehumanizing horrors
in a hydrodynamic abattoir. Spirits of old root fires
smelling of pine and cedar at large in the dark like hunting magic.

And the clouds a wolf pack of shapeshifters among the stars,
the exhilaration of spiritual wariness out in the woods alone at night
where it's unwise to trust anything too beautiful at first sight,
and a sudden flash of inspired self-destructive courage
to do just that in protest of the abuse of beauty as a Venus fly trap.
But it's not hard to tell a real muse from a false one
because a real muse never wastes her passion on the sane,
and if there isn't an occult side to a poet who works his madness
like a medium in the dark he had to sacrifice his eyes to see
beyond the visuals of the retinas and the cameras
with lizard eyelids that blink like guillotines, into
these visionary realms where galaxies are shed
like the feathers of migrating swans, gravity's gone,
and if you want to go up, you've got to go up without a parachute on.
Mystic physics. The illogic of the heart delighting
in the absurdity of itself just because it can and you can hear
a sword master of black Zen singing his heart out in a brothel:
A good heretic never disciplines his disobedience.

The brutal moon offers me the cup of my own skull
and says drink, and I know it's death to hesitate
because you lose control of everything in the moment
if you do, so I drink it like an elixir of dark tears
from the eye of the shark in eclipse, and I peer
into the black mirror of a midnight lake to see
if I'm still alive or dead, and the mirror breaks
like the unleavened bread of a gnostic gospel in my hands,
wholly enraptured by a spell I wasn't ready to wake up from,
and I can feel the lustrous radiance of a light
so inconceivably darker than the one I go by
like a shadow of that, the ferocity of the clarity
immolates my heart with a terrible joy
in a prophetic furnace of hot diamonds
that howl like the insights of a firestorm of dragons in extasis
breaking out of their cosmic shells like stars out of the void
shining out of the dark heart of things within
like eyes seasoned by compassion
for the low hanging bells and fruits of the earth
trying to express the infinite solitude between birth and death
where we walk alone together forever with everyone
and everything, like pilgrims sleepwalking
in the unattainable dream that animates us all
to keep on divining the inspired limitations of the impossible.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

The Western Light

The western light
comes right in through my windows
and glows in a golden haze on the dirty panes.
It slashs geometric shadows on my landscapes
like some mad abstractionist
who took them way too personally.
And all they said
was moon tree star light stone flower river sun
as if that were enough of a vocabulary
to say the whole of creation
quietly under your breath
like a secret that’s shared by everyone.
Guess I’m not enough of an ideologue
to comb the swamp for my own skeleton
like the ancestor of modern art.
I’ve gazed too long and hard
at the waterlilies in the Fall River
as if I were meditating on koans
that effortlessly open by themselves
not to waste my mind on anything
that didn’t include my heart
like a work in progress
like a river on its way to the ocean.
Dark soon.
The night sheds petals of insight
like moonlight making waves
on the shoreless seas of enhanced awareness
where I stand like a human candle
with my little standard of flame
trying to light up the universe
so I can see what I am in the depths
of my own eyes.
If I’m the tragicomic clown of my own catastrophe
or if there’s something more profound
going on around me
than time and light
glancing off the mindstream
like birds against the delusive skies
that lie like the windows of insight
until you break through them
like the sun at midnight
shining its light
on a conspiracy of mirrors
against the moon.
I must have been mad before I was born
to see things the way I do now.
Everything is inconceivably probable somehow
like a fortune-cookie
that’s had its tongue cut out
for telling lies to the emperor
or the lack of a sign
for the thirteenth house of the misbegotten
in the neighbourhood watch of the zodiac.
Even when you lose your purpose in life
like a passport in a borderless country
you can still hang on to your identity
like a willess work engendered out of nothing.
You can still firewalk the ghost road of smoke
like stars under the feet of the dead
or follow your own breath
like a dancer that no one is leading.
It’s a surprise when you first come to see
that the greatest liberty of all isn’t death
but to cry as if you were bleeding
from a wound
so much sharper and deeper
than the poignancy of the knife that opened it
like a posthumous loveletter from the gods
you feel
reading your own fate
in the silence between their voices
as if forever hereafter
you could only be killed into life
and that every rafter of delusion
you ever sought shelter under
were the overturned hull of an empty lifeboat.
Sometimes I look at my life
like one of the splendid ambiguities
of a subtly nuanced godsend.
I try to befriend the way I feel
like the generous host
of a dangerous stranger
too cold and aloof
to introduce himself
as my shadow
my eclipse
my potential assassin.
I have tried to stay true to the lies
that led to the myth of my lucidity
like a mirage in a desperate desert of stars
I could drown in like an island
up to to the neck of an hourglass
in tidal waves of quicksand
laying my life down
like the foundation stone
of an inverted pyramid
that yearns for the state of mind
he enjoyed before life
more than that that won’t come after.
I have refused to put the torch out in its own reflection.
I have not tried to uproot
the beauty of the waterlilies
opening their eyes like stars
from the decay and the lies
and the scars that sustain them.
I have put to good use
the dysfunction of delusion
to make a credible raft
to get me to the other side
of this river of shadows
swollen like a flashflood
in a lunar seabed.
I have danced with ghosts
like a lonely shaman
around the unappeasable fires
of desire and death
entreating the nightsky
to rain on my flowerless roots
and sweeten the severity
of the dragon’s eyes
with tears.
I have lived in such a way
to actualize the nameless reality
of a few common words
like love and understanding
I’ve kept alight like fireflies on the wind
and cherished them
as if the seeds of insight
were the perennial beginning
of enlightened orchards
that taste like the fruit of compassion.
I have lived in such a way
like a thief of keys
to relieve the locks
on the nightwatch
of their tunnel vision
that it’s not safe
to give my new address
to my old mailbox.
But even in a black out
I have not kept the light out
by plastering my windows with starmaps
or gone underground
like a blind star-nosed mole
that put its eyes out
to share something
in common with the dead
who would never have dreamed
they would all end up sleeping with their mothers.
I open them to receive the sun.
I close them to remember the stars
I’ve been dancing under
for lightyears
against the gathering storm
like a poor man’s chandeliers.
I have celebrated my defiance
of hitching a winged horse
to a hearse
by expressing the joy I take
in the revolutionary spontaneity
of my unself-reliance.
But of all the things
I’ve ever outgrown
or overthrown
like a sword from a bridge
I gave back to the sacred waters of life
the last to fall
was the ghostship in the mirage
of the image I had of me.
I poured myself out
like imaginary water
from a fountainmouth
in a real drought
to green the secret Edens
at the sacred crossroads
of the four rivers
that might come of it
as if X marked the spot
where I was standing
as the best place to start a garden
on the waterwheel of the mindstreams
that radiated out of its stillness like spokes.
Sometimes you end up stealing fire
when all along
you thought you were meant
to invent the wheel
or make up a new language
out of the echoes of dolphins
breaking into birdsong
as if they had turned in their feet
to go back to the sea
but had not forgotten
that their fins
could fly as easily
as the wings they once wore on their heels.
Many rivers flow into the one sea
and the sea returns to transcendence
back the way it came
without stepping into the same mindstream twice.
And I prefer to think
that the same thing is true of the multiverse.
Everything that shines in the night
or in the mind
down to the smallest spark of insight
locked like a firefly
in a lighthouse of ice
on the same omnidirectional course.
And true north
just the magnetic attraction
of a voodoo doll
in a haystack of needles
trying to get a bearing on things
like the right ascension
and correct declination
of a lost soul
summoned like a deranged galaxy
to the singularity
at the bottom of a blackhole
to exchange the light it goes by
by upgrading its eyesight
to search for itself in the night
on the higher frequencies
of X-ray vision
on board an experimental satellite.
And yet for all the myriad universes
that bubble up in hyperspace
like the last breath of the drowning
I have refused to live
like a diving bell in a wishing well
trying to understand
why nothing came true but the coins.
If you’ve never resolved anything in your whole life
maybe you were meant
to keep the mystery alive.
The medium is not the message
when the message is the mystery.
A meaningful medium
is nothing but meaningless words.
The sky doesn’t intend to say birds.
The water doesn’t mean fish
anymore than an infinite number of other things.
Nothing lives like a machine
for something as small as a purpose.
You don’t have to live like a lens
to keep the sun in focus.
And maybe one of the greatest blessings
of being on the nightshift
is that when the universe is out of work
it has no use for us.
We’re free to be when and whatever we want.
Or thoroughly protean.
Or nothing at all.
A full eclipse of the clock on the wall
or a chromatically aberrant nightlight
like a colour crazy star
low on the horizon of the hall.
As for me and my house
I’ve lost track of the number of times
I’ve brought my starmud to enlightenment
like a horse you can lead to water
but you can’t make drink.
The words crawl.
The words swim.
The words take to their wings
like eagles and dragonflies
and startled waterbirds.
Half a sliced pear
looks like a short-necked Spanish guitar.
Looking for the meaning of this
isn’t the same
as listening to the music.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Everybody Says I'm Too Intense

Everybody says I'm too intense and I say
you sure as hell aren't.
And since I was sixteen in highschool
and before that in the local neighbourhood
in the bosom of my family
people have always thought I was mad.

My highschool graduation yearbook says
most likely to become
a mad teacher mad scientist mad poet mad.
An oracular assessment of my peers
that has haunted me for years.

But I say crazy is the only antidote
to the extreme chaos of conditioned consciousness.
Look at the world.
Lies lies lies.
A coalition of lies
that calls itself
the history of civilization.
Crazy wisdom.
The tantric insight
into the fact
there is no nature to things.
You're not a very wise human
if you don't understand ignorance
is the clearest expression of enlightenment.

You see what I mean?
It's hard to speak of unity
in the split tongue of a snake
without making an oxymoron of it
at the fork in the roads
it mistakes for a direction.

Regard the dead parachutes of Babylon
no one can understand you
I said to myself one day dying with a sneer.

It's the moral obligation of a writer to make things clear.
I forget who said it.
But he was a nitwit.
One of the lice of literature
that makes your mind want to scratch itself raw
for the next half century.

It's that word moral that bothers me.
Not his preconception of clarity
though when it gets down to that
you smear the mirror
when you try to be clear about clarity.
I said that.
It takes an amateur madman
to be a good shrink
and make reality
try to correspond
to what you think.

But what an impoverished way to live your life.
What a distortion of humanity.
If you're mad enough
there's plenty of room in the asylum
to embrace sanity with decorum.
When in Rome do as the Romans do
and try not to make a spectacle of yourself in the Colosseum.

It's been my experience
that so much of what the world calls mad
is only freedom
with the courage to open its eyes.
Most people look into the eyes
of spontaneous freedom
and it terrifies them.
They don't want to know
what's not there.
The world ends at the back of their eyelids.
Things just get too deep
and they drown in their sleep
like pearl divers on the moon.

At every moment of your life
life is more certain than death.
It's all you can say about
where you expect to be tomorrow
and where this is now.
Everybody always wants things
to look the way they seem.
They want to live the dream awake.
They don't go along with their own mindstream.

They're shore-huggers.
They live at the edge
of the great sea of mysterious being
in sandcastles with blowholes
that burp like tiny volcanoes in the receding tide.
Herculaneum and Pompey
are mummified in the flow
down their pygmy mountainsides
but it's easy to see where they hide
thinking they're out of reach.

But who am I to preach
quicksand to cornerstones such as these?
Everybody always tells me I'm too intense
but they've never been through a nightstorm
far out on the Pacific
where the moon's your only lifeboat
and it's just gone down
like a bright penny in a wishing well
like a last longshot in the slots
of an odds-making hell.
And it's seven to five you survive.

They've never fallen in love with a hurricane rose
that's built like a fortune-cookie
and paints her eyelids
with the blood of ex-lovers
who were sacrificial enough to propose.

If you go looking for the meaning of life sincerely
sooner or latter it will find you
like one fact final enough to delude all the others
into thinking it's ultimately true.

Complete one act well
and you've accomplished everything
because one act begets another
until everything is done of its own accord.
Because your birth isn't terminal,
your death is ongoing.
And the same is true in reverse.
How do I know this is so?
I let go.
I blossom like the memories of a dead branch
in the apple orchards of the Hesperides,
everyone of them
a full moon.

I see how innocent my doubt is.
So even my darkness
is a singing bird on a green bough.

I've looked at drops of water
at the tips of the blades of the stargrass
like the thin-skinned tears of the sky in childbirth
and everyone of them
was the seed of a new world.
Worlds within worlds
whose only conventions
are the creative dimensions of the perceivers.

Not one size fits all.
I don't put my finger to my lips
like an ego-I
to eclipse the great silence.
I let it say me with its eyes.

And we both come as a great surprise to each other
when we're standing
on the same side of the mirror
on the far shore of the mindstream
like two eyes of the same seeing
astonished we're here at all
without lying to the miracle
about our reasons for being.

Have you ever considered the enormous distances
in the body of a small bird?
Or how strangely intimate a star can be
from thousands of lightyears away?
A whisper of lucidity in an oceanic ear.
Something you've heard for a long time
but never listened to before.
Never this near.
This clear.

Have you ever wondered which of two sisters
is the older of the elements.
Fire or water?
Or why spring lies about her age
when she's as old as autumn
and then claims
to be the daughter of the grain
when in fact she's the womb of summer?

Is it insane to wonder?
Is it too intense to fear
living my whole life
as if I were never here
to take a good look?
Is it deranged to feel
the enlargement of my seeing
is not the diminishment of my being
because I opened my eyes
and saw they were both
two ends of the same telescope?

It's one thing to let the light in through the gates of your eyes.
It's wholly another to let it get this far
into the palace of your imagination
without being announced
or scrutinized.

Life's a breeze
when you don't look at it
like a disease you're afraid to get over.
If I'm inspired by the vastness of my ignorance
to turn a leaf over now and again
like a new page in an old book
to avoid being obvious
am I looking for a happy ending
or am I just delighting in my indolence
when I read it like a map of my own lifelines
by running my finger over it as if I were blind
and it were the one who could see?

If I don't believe we appear briefly
to disappear forever
because everything here
is a vast collaboration
with creative emptiness
and it isn't going anywhere
what do I care
if you're confused by my endeavours?
What's it to you
if I'm a mirage on a grailquest in a desert of stars?
Or if I practise compassion spontaneously
toward myself and others
as if we were all the same wound
under many scars
and if my lies heal,
are they not the fruit of insight?

If I'm the dark genius
deeply intrigued
by my own misdirection
that you say I am
though that doesn't change a thing
about the way I can't help being
and not being myself,
what makes you think
there's only one star
you can point out
like the needle
in the impoverished compass
of your last course correction
as if there were only one way to go
and the truth were always
somewhere north of you
instead of under your feet
in all directions at once
like the radiance of stars
before the arising of signs?

Today Jesus and the Buddha walk on water.
Tomorrow Lucifer and Kamamara will walk on fire.
But when the opposites
get their baggage together
and realize they can't lift it
and abandon it by the side of the road
like an outhouse on a trailer hitch
or a hubcap in a country ditch
that's stopped spinning around
and come to rest in an oxymoron
posing as the full moon
that's come to liberate
an empty asylum
they both walk on earth
bewildered by their innocence
when they discover
they've never had anything to do
with the course of events
that made them who they are.

Wasn't the Buddha enlightened
by watching Venus in the dawn
lead the sun up
like the morning star
that once was Lucifer
before he took the fall like a ripe apple,
before he stole fire from the gods like Prometheus
the thief of inspiration,
knowing the moment of his perfection
in all realms of knowledge
infernal or divine
was the best time to jump?

And the darkness will always seem like a liar
to those who don't know the truth.

If I don't see life as just a bag of water
with nine holes in it
leaking out of itself
as I once used to
eras and eras ago
and you still do
when I look at what remains
of the desicated parachute of a jellyfish
you've made of your brains
clinging to shore
next to the sewage drains
that poured you out
and washed you up
and wiped their mouths of the taste of a dead ocean
what's it to you
if I run so far out to sea
from so high up
on the down side of the world mountain
I'm swimming with dolphins on the moon?

I'm teaching blind starfish how to shine
like dark matter with a mind of its own
and no sign of a constellation
with feet of clay
afraid to leave home.

Say what you want to say.
Be what you want to be.
Enlighten your ignorance
and then ignore your enlightenment.
Don't drive the darkness out of your lucidity
like a scapegoat into a spiritual desert
you're afraid to enter
because you're not bright enough to see
that under every threshold
between the inside and the out
certainty and doubt
insanity and the sane
the trivial and profound
the homeless and a habitable planet
there's a sphere
spinning on a tilted axis
in the immensity of space
that's so far out it's in.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Enlightenment Isn't Lumpy

Enlightenment isn't lumpy
even if sometimes you've got your heart
stuck in your throat
like a bird in a chimney
warming up like a phoenix
to go the way of the sumac leaves
and the ghosts of smoke
on the pyres of the sky burials
of the Canada geese.
Just because November
can't feel its pulse
and the garden snakes are nesting
like a sloppy knot of wavelengths
deep in the cold heartwood
of a rootless tree that can feel
the brutal chill of serpent fire
running up its spine like a lightning rod
doesn't mean enlightenment's a placebo
you have to keep away from the kids.
It's real enough to be unattainable
without disrespecting the integrity
of the picture plane.
It hides out in the open
where no one ever thinks to look.
The simpler it gets
the bigger the book you need to write
in order to conclude ambiguously
you do and you don't not understand it.
Say not two
and all is well.
And mean it deeper than you can say it
so that pain doesn't adulterate the child
that's trying to transcend it
by hanging on to the lifelines
of his fire-proof constellations
like the kites of distant stars burning in the wind.
Enlightenment doesn't care
if you've lost your integrity.
Your absence of self-respect
for someone who isn't there
is a rare opportunity
to uphold the dignity
of stars and rivers and trees.
Enlightenment's just the blossom.
It's not the fruit
of what there is yet to be.
The smell of autumn
in a windfall of apples
cradled like small planets in your arms.
Enlightenment isn't salvation from pain.
It's an invitation to forsake yourself
in the name of nothing you can explain.
The blossom let's go to make room for the fruit.
The perfumes of the spring give way
to the aromas of decay.
But they're both sweet
because there's nothing about either of them
that's everlasting.
It may be an old root.
But it blossoms in the spring.
It may be a dead branch
but the nightbird stops to sing.
And the full moon shines
like a skull full of signs
above its dark abundance.
Enlightenment isn't out of the reach of anyone
because it's got infinitely long arms
and puts the stars at your fingertips
and says play what you want
as long as it's something
we all can dance to
on our way to the grave
like fireflies in the wake of a thunderstorm.
Enlightenment doesn't take life too seriously
even when it makes a tantrum
of its elemental innocence
and goes supernova.
Deep in the nuclear core of its heart
it's creatively playful on a cosmic scale.
The darkest inspiration
of its genius for making
an art of its existence
is life.
Simple and beautiful
as the laughter of children
collecting sea shells on the moon.
Even when you're severely lost
enlightenment doesn't hand you a flashlight
and say go look for your mind
like the holy grail in a sacred wood.
It deepens your solitude.
It blows the candle out
until you emerge like a star
from the profusion of your own darkness
and stand in the doorway
of your own shining
amazed by what you can see
when enlightenment isn't blinding.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Begin

Begin anywhere.
Topple fall jump stumble plunge
into the eyeless abyss
into the roadless homelessness
of not knowing where you're going
or who'll you'll be by the time you get there.
Slash your way through the stretched canvas
of a painted sky
like a rogue star
with the blood of Betelgeuse
dripping from your brush if you must
perform your own Caesarian
to get out of yourself like an egg
into the Big Abide Beyond
and stretch your wings from dusk till dawn.
Don't hover like a cloud over starmaps
trying to work out a flight plan
waiting for the weather to clear for take-off.
In an infinite universe such as this
wherever you are
in this spatial lost and found
you're always the center of everything.
How could you not know where you are
or who
when there's nowhere to go
and no one to be
that isn't centred in its own origin eternally?
But it helps to get a jump on your own light like a star
now and again
if you want to stay in the game
long enough to turn your farce into a legend
that isn't hard on the eyes.
So begin.
Like a surprise.
Like a leftover birthday you found in the attic
you were saving for a special day that never came.
Get it on.
Begin.
Break the mirror.
Throw a rock through your own reflection.
There's no countdown
for a firefly or lightning bolt
no fuse on the Big Bang that became the universe
so let's just have ignition
spontaneously timeless and complete
go off
get out
get down
like the primordial atom
with your own expression of yourself
before the arising of signs
teaches the flowers
they mustn't colour
outside the lines of themselves.
Don't let the Lilliputians tie Gulliver down again.
Don't imperil Pauline
by tying her to the tracks
like a rehabilitated junkie
to wait for a train in vain
on the same old beaten path
your thoughts tread like cattle
back to the barn of your brain at dusk.
Or horses when it's burning.
Begin in your aftermath.
Shoulder the world that weighs
like a rock in your grave
meant to keep you from rising
and blow it off like dust.
Come down on yourself like a meteor
and begin a new species of life
among the bones of the dinosaurs.
Get lost in this desert of stars
like the Rosetta Stone
of a new language of scars
no one's ever spoken before
around a fire in the night
and be the first word of your own light
to give names to things in the garden.
The happy genius of your own beginnings.
How many nights must pass?
How many days?
How many full moons wane
and ice ages come and go
and trees turn into grasslands
and continents shatter like skulls
that grind their teeth in the night
before you finally let go
and begin.
Mercury had wings on his heels
when he took off on the wind
but look at you
standing there
at the edge of the world
with parachutes on your shoes
like a medium without a message.
Take them off.
Go barefoot over the stars of your firewalk like water.
Take off that used straitjacket
you bought at the Salvation Army
like the larva of a dragonfly
looking for a hand-me-down chrysalis on the cheap.
You can't read your fate like dna
in another man's fortune-cookie.
And there's already enough sky around us
for everyone to share
like a planetary cocoon
without anyone running out of room
for worms to turn into butterflies
wolves into whales
raptors into birds with feathers and scales.
Where things end is where they begin.
They're Siamese twins
you can't separate like a loveletter
into before and after
because they've only got
the one birth
the one breath
between them both
and the same is true of their death.
So if you're already over before you begin
why hesitate?
What have you got to lose
when there's nothing to choose
between lying in wait like yesterday
for what you think you know
will come along in its own good time
and what you can't anticipate
that comes up on you from behind
like eyes to the blind in a dream
and says it's later than it seems.
Where have you been?
You're on in the next scene
right after the death of the old queen.
Let the lines memorize you for a change.
Friends fall apart
when they stop being strangers to one another.
Babies stop turning solitude into single mothers.
You can gnaw on the bone of the known for years
to get down to the marrow of things
and still not be satisfied when you do
and then the hunger you never taught to hunt
begins to eat you.
So jump.
Like a fish in a still pond.
Like a frog from a lilypad.
Go mad.
Go ballistic.
Go beyond that place
where even to say you're lost in space
doesn't make any sense
and nothing's ever moved in a straight line
that wasn't a special form of a curve.
Why wait for the apocalypse
to come down on you like an old rafter
that breaks with every firecracker that goes off
when your own explosive potential
makes that look like a firefly with a wet fuse?
How long have you lepered your stars in the sun
or your constellation paled in the dawn
like a tattoo you had taken off your arm
like an old love affair that's over and gone?
Live on.
Jump from the top stair.
Slide down the bannister
in the opposite direction
like a double helix
in the southern hemisphere.
Do something
you can get away with
that stays true to your disobedience
like evolution.
Draw a line in the sand
then overstep the bounds
like a crosswind that wipes it out.
The measure of a human is a human
without a forwarding address
that can find its way back
like an abandoned cat
to the threshold and doorway
of our homelessness
where we left like a loveletter to the world
that returns unread
with nothing to say
that would have made any difference anyway.
A phoenix might be born in fire
but it doesn't nest in the flames.
You can't keep what you won't give away
so if you want to stay here
like a chameleon in front of a mirror
that likes to reflect things as they change
you have to do it like air
and grow wings.
You have to become a dragon.
Or a snake who knows
how to rise above things
like an eagle or a sea on the moon
that got caught like a fish out of water
in the first and last crescents of its own talons.
Don't let yourself be tossed around
like an overturned lifeboat
that set out to rescue you
from the undertow of reality
and got swept off its own feet
before they could turn into oars.
Don't be a shore-hugger
on the dunes of your own mindstream.
Go along with the flow
like the oxygen in your blood
that was conceived in a fire-womb
in the belly of a star
in outer space
and then took a meteor to this place
where it's bagged by your lungs
and rushed to your face
like a lip transplant for a kissing-stone.
Just as every question is the prelude of the answer
so every prayer for direction
is the direction of prayer.
The Kaaba waits like a pilgrim
for the first crescent of the moon
to circumambulate you
in all directions at once
and in all months of the year
like the sun through the zodiac
when it shines at midnight
and the sky is unusually clear.
The mystery of life
that seeks you out
like its best guess at everything
is just that
is just this
a mystery
not a secret waiting to be told
like a baby without a name
that's grown post-mature
and gummy in the womb
like matter in the matrix of being.
And when things let go of the green bough
like the singing bird in your heart
or a windfall of silver apples
shaken from a dead branch by the wind
when the moon goes down over the hills
and all that's left of the view
is two elbows on a worn-out windowsill
watching things return to themselves for the night
like stars and dust and dew
and love when it's over
tastes autumn on its breath
like long sad thoughts of last September
that always seem to end in death and sorrow
it helps to remember
the seeds in the green apples of spring
that are buried in their birth
as if there could never be a tomorrow
that wouldn't open their small sad eyes
like fireflies in the orchards of earth
that age like the truth
in a purple passage
on the second to last page
they burn through falling asleep
thinking of things to come
as if each were either a lighthouse
or the evening star in the morning
or a tiny Armageddon in a mason jar
as big and bright as the universe
that goes off without warning
everywhere all the time.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Over And Over And Over Again

Over and over and over again
you return to me each time
made more beautiful by the pain
I embrace you with
like the aura of fireflies
in the afterlife of the lightning
that was struck by you.
Over and over and over again
I have watched the birds leave in the fall
and come back in the spring
and whether they were coming or going
especially at midnight when you couldn't see them
high overhead like the souls of the dead
I've always heard the same longing in their call
for something I've never been able to wholly comprehend
except as the way I miss you
on this journey without end
where the destination isn't always
the friend of the road
as the stars foretold it would be.

And I don't know why
I always associate pain with lucidity
like the price of shattered glass
when you hurl the moon through it
from the inside
to let the light in through the damage
and you back into my life again
like the radiant sorrow of a lonely tomorrow
that today already lives in vain
like a weathervane
trying to give the wind a direction
it's never taken before.

Over and over and over again
I have looked for your hidden mystery
in the history of gone
for some living intimacy that lives on
but I've run out of doors and gates and windows
flowers and skies I can leave open
hoping you might find your way back in somehow
from those spaces greater than skin that fit you now
like the dress you were buried in.

The random singularity of death's one demand
might shake the tree
into the soft hooves of the highest fruit
that gallop off like wild horses
spooked by their own windfall into the silence
but over and over and over again
I turn the fact that you once existed
like a jewel I once knew from the inside
into an act of insight
that over and over and over again
rocks me like the aftershock of an earthquake
as if your death weren't once but many
and I would live my way through them all
listening to the geese depart at night in the fall
wondering which one embodied your soul
like a star-bound angel in earthly feathers
and whether you noticed me as you left

over and over and over again
standing in the light by the window
a tiny dark figure down below
listening for you in the darkness
like a vase of full of ashes
wishing it had wings.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

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
Vote! | Copy!

I Sit At My Window

I sit at my window
trying to translate the Kufic script
of the shadows of the trees on the snow,
smoking the invisible ink of the light
over the flame of my mind
to clarify my seeing
by realizing there is no deep or shallow
in the fathomless depths of I am,
nothing hidden, nothing revealed.

And it's not so much that I am in the presence of the world,
but that the presence, the world, is me,
and if I go looking for it,
only my fingerprints will be found
like these violet shadows dusted by the snow
under my multitudinous mugshot in the mirror.

So I open my mind and my eye, my heart and my hand
and let things arise as they will,
knowing that even this is a blunder
that advances my tardy illumination by another eclipse.

This morning blue is the taste of the sky
and I am alive again at my desk
to wonder who or what or why I might be
this wondering spontaneity
circling like a bird in the abyss,
feathered by feeling and thought
for a tree or a meaning to perch in
that hasn't already been struck
by the lightning of my homeless insight.

Indwelling energy in the turmoil of a terrible silence,
I am an ambassador of water to an unknown star
that foils my blood with light the closer I approach
and I don't know what the message is
or who it's from, but every time I deliver it,
my head comes off like the moon.

At some point you have to give up looking
to go on seeing, you must
come to a full stop
if you want to liberate the pen
that indicts you like an assassin
with his ear to the wall.

So I go by night, unheeded and alone,
a constellation of my own
that doesn't read the braille of itself
reflected like direction in the starchart on the lake,
cored like eyes into the dice of my bones,
or mummified by a legend in a straitjacket
interred in the long-standing consensus of a guess,
knowing I would only be following my own footprints
like the shadows of these words
that flow from the trees in the snow.

And there are squirrels that leap from branch to branch
of these arboreal letters like commas
that don't know where they go
and wrens that perch like quotation marks
around things that can never be said
that everyone claims they know
as they call out their name
like the echoless vocabulary
of a febrile grammar in a mad dream
as if their whole life were ingathered into one last scream
that might shatter the mirror of the way things inevitably seem.

I listen to the world and hear in each person and form
the mindstream moving through the night
like the voice of a mystic alphabet
returning to the sea
with news of itself
whispered into its own ear.

And if sometimes the stars think
my seeing goes too far,
my seeking exceeds the bounds of the light,
as it turns planets like doorknobs
to open new rooms in a dark mansion
that stands like an abandoned cornerstone of the night on a hill
waiting for me to return like a lost threshold,
or the faceless side of the moon to a window,
then let me here and now confess to my own denial
and knock on the door of the next false address
to see if I can find who wrote
this loveletter that slashes me open like a smile
and reads me out loud to the stars on the wind
as if I were the last flare from an empty lifeboat.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!