En.Citatepedia^®.ro

In Certain Moods I Think Like An Ice Age

In certain moods I think like an ice age,
relentless, every insight, the glacier
of a window on the move that cuts like a diamond.
I'm not sentimental about baby mammoths
falling into cryonic crevasses for twelve thousand years.
I could gouge out the eyes of lakes, bully the mountains
like a mile high waterclock with its pedal frozen to the metal of time.
Something brittle and cold as broken glass in my seeing.
A clarity that burns like dry ice born without a personality.
I can still stand in the bottom of a snakepit
and see the stars like the fang marks of so many strikes
at the scared rabbit of my heart beating like a strawberry,
palpitating like the sump pump of a toxin
trying to drain the sweetest of watersheds
like quicksilver from the mirrors of my brain.

Sometimes I feel I've been harbouring
the skull and crossbones in the piratical bay
of a subliminal childhood that washed me up
out of a fire storm onto a more ferocious shore
of civilized savages that take their time eating each other.
I can see as supraobjectively as a reptile from the late Triassic
the asteroid that's heading this way
to shatter the window of opportunity
like an atmosphere that doesn't encourage
growth in a greenhouse, but doesn't mind
genetically tampering with cell tissue
as if agriculture had given birth, not only to war,
but to a mutated child that would redesign her.

Too many nuances are left out of lizards and lenses
for me to look at the world through their eyes
too long. My third eye begins to crystallize like a jewel
instead of a black pearl of a new moon
on the tongues of the waterlilies walking on the water
like the pale flames of the constellations burning their starmaps
like passports to anywhere they're not as homelessly here
as they are now. And there are strange viruses
that can be transmitted from telescopes in port
like heresy through the gullible angel fleets.
People begin to see that the crystal slipper
fits the darkness better than the light
the way a star fits the winged heels of the night
like the Great Square of Pegasus, or Albireo in the Swan,
Al Tair in the Eagle, or Vega in the Lyre,
as if one size for a shapeshifting universe fits all.

Time eventually sands the hardest edges down
like a dentist drill trying to put new crown on the pyramids,
triangular sun dials get rounded out into circular clocks,
and the conceptual sabres of exactitude, learn
to hesitate like humans as their mainsprings go slack
and the tension wears off at trying to insulate themselves
like referees from the vicissitudes and uncertainties of the game
by being more severely disciplined than perfection.
A saving grace I received from my mother
who would send me down to the Fountain Lunch
to buy her a True Detective magazine late at night,
I remember the elaborate ferns of frost on the window,
and spend the rest on candy, though she was down
to her last buck, like a tree with one leaf left,
she taught me how to protest impoverishment
with a flare and generosity that flew counterintuitively
into the brutal impersonality of its defeated face.
And the air full of gleeful butterflies torn up
like an eviction notice issued with a mythically deflated smile
on the deathmask of one of the nabobs among slumlords
sipping empire with their tea like the East India Company
that had a manifest destiny for themselves,
and the obscurity of obscene circumstances for everyone else.

Not a comet falling out of its black halo into the sun,
but a post-demonic clarity beyond symbols
like a fledging learning to fly
by transcending its own wingspan
into an abyss a universe shy of shining,
absurdly sublime and intensely insignificant
as a childhood is, when it's bruised
by one too many atrocities early in the game
to really care whether it's disappointing its despair
with a little hope, or putting a nightmare to shame
by pointing out even the clearest windows
have been known to paint themselves
the world they want to see when they look outside
instead of trying to see it as it is without turning to stone
when it isn't interpreted like sign language,
unless, by some malicious stroke of luck
some delinquent eluding the neighbourhood watch
puts his fist through it
to enlighten his tantrum as the stars
come pouring into the vacuum
like a sea of tears in reverse
where the tide of affairs is always
worse for the wear of coming in
than it is in the ease of going out.
Providence makes a grand entrance
then heads for the exit refused and humbled
by this sinking feeling the stars get
even when they're rising, though fire
doesn't burn its fingers on itself
that doesn't mean it isn't being consumed.
Or if even so little as a single firefly
of inspired rage is glowing somewhere
across the hard-hearted tundra, that's the end
of your eyes being scalded by an ice age
that's been freezing and thawing them out since childhood
until your heart aches like a raw strawberry
as feeling begins to circulate in it again.

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If You're Braver Than I Am

If you're braver than I am
it's only because you're more desparate you said
and I broke down laughing in tears
as you were tripping on mushrooms
and I was starting to peak on acid.
Why should you love me at all you asked
and I said I like to take subjective risks
and I can still light up at the smile you gave me
because you thought I thought you were dangerous.
Have you stayed dangerous over the years?
Did you ever find enlightenment?
Or have all those Doors of Perception we stepped through
way back then to expand our cosmic consciousness
by crossing all our thresholds
and dotting all our taboos
closed like space behind you?
Have you made your return address a point of view
you can live with
and turned those beautiful Hispanic eyes
into late night windows
that don't see anything that ever goes down in the neighbourhood?
Is your seeing still ambidextrous
or have you shut your eyes to the world
so they're more wall than window
and there's only one way of looking in?
Sometimes I think that night I dropped acid with you
on China Beach under the stars
estranged by the flames and shadows and smoke
of a cedar fire eager to burn its first heretic
I got so high I've never come down
and though forty-four years have passed
I'm still nineteen back there somewhere with you.
Even my mother used to say in frustration
when she couldn't win the argument
that I had a way of turning things upside-down.
That may well be so
but I'd still rather be an oxymoron
that can see all sides of things at once
like a multi-faceted jewel turning in the light
in front of a mirror
that doesn't know which one of its infinite profiles to choose
and doesn't,
than suffer the Great Reversal of the Hourglass
and end up walking on my head
and thinking with my feet
just so everybody would think I was normal.
I'm still nineteen back there somewhere with you
and the fire we lit that night
like something ephemeral
among so much that was eternal
keeps flaring up in me like a phoenix that's never gone out.
Clarity doesn't turn a lie into the truth.
And enlightenment might be so blissed out
it celebrates its own ignorance
because everything is perfect just as it is
but I still think there's more sincerity in the search
than there is in the finding.
I still think life is a mystery that surpasses its own wonder.
I still think every moment contains the whole of space
without beginning or end
like a water droplet contains the whole of the sea.
I still think that whenever people touch one another gently
they leave their fingerprints on the window
like constellations on the sky
that prove our identities are as indelible as light.
I still think there's something more alluringly mystical about action
than there is in the undynamic peace of contemplation.
But the best is to make love as we did that night
as a tantric mode of creative annihilation
that showed the drugs we were on
like flying carpets
what it was like for once
to get so euphorically high on us
the next time they saw us coming
they'd just say yes.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Something Said Softly

Something said softly in the night
like a tendril on a windowsill
tasting the moon, a whisper, a word
that walked in the light without
abandoning its shadow,
a phrase with wet wings
dreaming itself out of its chrysalis
not knowing whether it's a leaf or a dragonfly
until the whole tree wakes up beside it,
something sought but rarely said
saturated with the meaningless life of meaning
that could touch space like flesh
and make it feel the thrill of new eyes
running down its arm like tears.
And it's not that I want
to unsay the night or God
to define myself as a human,
and it's of little moment to me,
seed on the wind,
what worlds are born of my words,
what ends, what begins,
what comes of what I cannot say,
but I want to say something
with the savour of time in it
that's worth living for a little more each day
like a small tree rooted like a thought
in a crevasse of eternity,
greening the moon.
Late at night, in the darkness,
while the silence is off preserving something,
and all I can hear is your breath
off in the distance like an ocean,
I want to unpack my vagrant heart
like a patched guitar-case,
a grave-robber in a pyramid,
and attune my afterlife
to the key of this one
in such a way
I can play like a new star in Orion
to all the sad, beautiful fireflies of the moment
that hover over us like living constellations of our own
not bound to any paradigm of light
that can only be touched by a mountain of stone.
I want to paint something
that feels like the flower
that just brushed against your hand,
I want to be inspired by the mystic blue of midnight
like window glass fired in the kiln of a star
that has looked upon the suffering of humans for so long,
their atrocities and deprivations,
their terrors and wrecked joys,
compassion has turned it into an eye so clear
you can sip water from it like tears
that taste of the history of blood and wine
that danced alone like a vine at its own wedding
with a bride of rain that unveiled herself
like falling chandeliers.
Unfailingly, absurdly, obsessively human
in the shadow of thundering magnitudes
that feel like the extinctions of gods
that time has wheeled out
to the enormity of the gravepit
that limes every abyss of the heart
with the stars of a new universe,
I want to add one candle to the shining
in a folly of insight so illuminating
even the earliest galaxies
forever entering the darkness
on the threshold of their first shedding
could see it, something
so profoundly vernal and intimate
even I can believe in it.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Morning After Everything

for Luke Cochrane

Saturday morning rain in Perth
and things seem as intimately far off and strange
as the new maps of water running down the windowpane.
No birds on the black boughs of the November trees
and black mirrors in the empty funeral home parking lot
and on the other side of me
the stalwart bloodbrick of a wet church
that looks better in the nicotine lingerie
and dusky seaspray
of a single yellow floodlight at night
that can't get it up to be a lighthouse.
It would be a lie to say that I'm not in love
and happily alone, but I most wistfully am,
as I excuse myself for being me
and put myself off like the small death of another way
I could have taken to get back home, but didn't.
November's an orphanage after the last kid has left
and I'm sure there's an ancient chthonic wisdom
under the duff and detritus
of all these slick, leechy leaves
that the earth has applied to herself like a poultice
to draw the violets and worms out in spring,
but right now my mouth is not a wound
with anything deep to say
about things too deep to be said
and there are memories of women and friends in my head
sleeping like keys in the bottom of a drawer
that I have saved for when the day comes
to open the flowers and doors
that I've forgotten,
all the soft sorrows that rime the radiance
of the halo around a black hole
haunted by these ghosts of light.
I am absorbed like tears in a tenderness of grey
and there's more healing than thorn
in the cool aloe of the air
moist with a seance of emotions
that gust lightly around me
as if yesterday were merely a fragrance
hovering over an eye of wine
like the dust and smoke of today
that bottles its purity like water.
Sometimes love passes like a glacier over you
and there are runes and scars and striations on your skin
and lakes and craters and eyes the sky fills in
and the sun comes out like an exorcist
and you feel like you've been baptized in ice
or tucked into the crevice of a wailing wall
like a baby mammoth, or an unanswered prayer
and you try not to care
that you're a freak of your own evolution
trying to clone yourself out of the museum into a zoo
and that all these people are staring at you
like a missing link between the parentheses of your tusks
that have unhinged you from the gate of time
you once swung on like your next breath,
and if you were asked about the extremes of mercy
you would say, without hesitation, death.
Sometimes it's that hard to accept
that nothing that happens here, including death
is ever over, and that the absence of something or someone
doesn't mean they've ceased to exist
like footprints that lead down to a river.
Because we all live the same beginningless beginning
that is the once and forever of this universe
even if it should call itself home occasionally like an eye,
we go on living and dying each other alone
like an extinct species always asking the time
when the moonlight burns like lime in a grave
and then, once more, absurdly never the same
riots of flying fish leap from every dropp of rain
that remembers the passion of the wave
offering itself in the life of every moment
like a jewel thawing, or an icecap over the eye
or the opening of a brittle window
to be scoped out by the nightwind
that longs like a thief for the sea
to gather him up like one of its belongings.
But you can't pour the universe out of the universe
where the whole is sustained by every part
anymore than you can empty the human heart
that is renewed by its own exhaustion like a tide.
Time is always prelude
and death has never known when
to take down its sail like a tree in the fall.
And because things are never the same twice
and the road back is not the road taken
the world and everyone in it
just as they are, have always been here.
Things don't come and go
like migrating geese ascending southward out of a field,
or things fallen returning to their leaves
because there's nowhere to come from
nowhere to go to
that isn't now and here
as intimately far as it is impersonally near.
Ask almost anyone who they are
and they'll look down a well in a mirage
to haul up their reflection on a wheel
and insist it's real
when they ladle their face to their lips
like the moon on dark water.
Or they'll tell you a story around an unending fire
where the shadows are always truer than the flames
and the most illuminating themes burn like stars without names.
Mind is space and there is
nowhere inside or outside of anything
that is closer or futher than anything else
because everything is mind as far as you can be.
So I can stand here in my lengthening shadow
like a long departure
turning into the wind like a sail or a sundial
as if I were the last of my species of eclipse
and life were merely the long, hard discipline
of unmastering the art
of saying hello to the living
and good-bye to the dead,
or turning the telescope around
and saying good-bye to the living,
hello to the dead as I please,
but I'd rather shed myself
like all these falling maps to anywhere
that once arrived like the fleets of the leaves like me
on the shores of this rootless tree
that doesn't let go of things for its own survival
but lives in itself like a stranger come
to the opening gate of an endless arrival.
I let the birds come and go, the apples fall,
the stars build their webs in my crown,
and grow like a holy road I take as my own,
like geese passing overhead at night,
or the small birds that come to me like voices
a moment here then gone
who taught me that it's always dawn
because there's no end of the beginningless beginning
and it may be a green bough
or a dead branch
you hop up and down on like the hidden notes
of something you're singing
on the rungs of these crazy snakes and ladders
that long like flesh and bone in the night
for things they can't see anymore in the light,
or fish dying of thirst in a fathomless pond
or a fire putting itself out in its own eye
or someone dying and someone else asking why
and the whole of creation left alone at home
feeling it doesn't belong under its own sky
like this Saturday morning rain in Perth
the day after your death
that falls like a loveletter too late upon the earth
or the harvest moon of a delinquent heart
above an untimely skeleton
that can't decide whether it's a tuning fork
or a witching wand
looking for answers like water
under every stone on the moon,
the way we cry for people we think are gone,
but green bough, dead branch, Luke, same song.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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
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Haven't Seen A Star In Four Nights

Haven't seen a star in four nights
and the windows are pining for more than lamplight.
It's darker in than it is out, but suddenly
through the breaking clouds, hey, there's one
and I'm momentarily thrilled by the delight of a child
spotting her first firefly rising like a chimney-spark
above this ashen town on a cold, autumn night.
Small pleasures in the aftermath of great intensities,
the immaculate focus that burned eyeholes
in the sockets of my crystal deathmask
that left me feeling like wounded glass
thawing into the long slow tears I carried back
from the wishing well like the empty buckets
of a waterclock that acts like a volunteer fire brigade
that never put anything out before it was too late.
Wouldn't be the first house of the zodiac to burn down
and probably not the last, but, at least,
it's not a plague door to the past facing east.
It's not blood leaking out of the nostril of a bell,
but who knows? You can never really tell.

Anyone here ever go through a transformation,
emerged from a chrysalis of solitary despair
like a dragonfly with a retroactive message of hope
shining like Venus in the false dawn
of a real enlightenment experience? Do you see
how the light breathes on the darkness
and it's morning everywhere at midnight?
I'm off to the woods to listen to the laughter
of the falling leaves abandoning their dissertations
on the nature of perishing as if the answer
had always been a breeze of effortless effort.

Truth is just the sound we make for something
we're never going to stop looking for.
In the company of birches and the ghosts
of lake mist Druids it's easier to sit still long enough
to recognize it. Let the starmud settle in the puddle
as if a vapour of metal were silvering a mirror
like dew in the night, a silk cloak of auroral insight,
without trading your eyes in for a Zen telescope.
To a dead man, is it folly to hope?
To a live one, is it wisdom to despair?

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Pyro Maniac

A pyro with a flame.
Just writing your name in the sand.
Time tics by and fire after fire does not end the desire.
It's passion.
It's love.
It's a child's laughter.
Nothing left untouched.
As he makes his mark.
Personal and distant.
He's lived it.
Through the the fires eyes.
He can't help it.
He just want to watch everything burn.
Burn, Burn, Burn.

He speak to the eternal flame.
And she rise from the ashes.
Back again just the same.
Glowing so bright, so hot.
So appealing he can not ever turn away.
A obsession everyday.
No he doesn't care.
His mind is most certainly else where.
He can't help it
He just wants to watch everything burn.
Burn, Burn, Burn.

As holy body it rises from the grave.
As a scientific miracle it saves.
Staving off the cold.
Turning something into nothing.
It's just so amazing.
Captivating.
A star studded glaze.
An everlasting stare into nowhere.
Exhilarating is the feeling he gets.
Ever single time.
He can't help it.
He just wants to watch everything burn.
Burn, Burn, Burn.

He's a maniac.
No doubt it.
Completely reckless to t.
But its his divinity.
His saving grace.
His ace.
And he has a constant need to play it.
Even if someone dies.
He's not worried about it.
It off to the next.
He can't help it.
He just wants to watch everything burn.
Burn, Burn, Burn.
Yeah just burn, burn, burn, oh burn.

poem by Ace Of Black Hearts
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Out Here Alone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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
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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
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Last Night

Well, there's a light in your eyes
That's guiding my way to your doorstep
And your voice called my name
With a sound that I've never known
I was a kid in a comicbook-world looking for answers
When out of the darkness she came
Like a cat on a crown
In the middle of the night
Doesn't care if it's late
Doesn't matter if it's right
And I laugh when I think
I may never have knocked on your door
(Chorus:)
Last night
You turned a frightened little boy into a man without shame
Last night
We tore the hands off a clock and it read just the same
Last night
I had a crazy little dream and you turned it all around
Last Night
We took a chance, we shook it up, and now the world's upside down
All the fire in your heart
And the heat of your touch I'll remember
And you're dancing like a flame
Perfection in motion
It was the masterpiece from the start
Only you and I could have rendered
And I'll never be the same
I'm a cat on a crown
In the middle of the night
Doesn't care if it's late
Doesn't matter if it's right
And I laugh when I think
I may never have knocked on your door
(Repeat chorus)
(Instrumental break)
Like a cat on a crown
In the middle of the night
Doesn't matter if it's late
Doesn't matter if it's right
'Cause I laugh when I think
I may never have knocked on your door
(Repeat chorus)
Last night...

song performed by by Toto
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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On the Christmas tree

She flew over the fallen snow,
Looking for the lonely soul,
Maybe it was for me,
I don't know.

I saw her light,
one cold Christmas night,
She flew over the forest,
With tears in her eyes,
She found a place to rest,
In the winter skies,
God looked down from above,
His heart was touched by her love,
He said I hope,
that the world sees.
A angel 's light,
shining though the trees,

It's Christmas time.
And God must smile,
For it's the birth day of His child,
He prays that the world,
will someday find peace.
As His heart finds sweet ease,
With the angel's light,
that He sees,
shining through,
His Christmas trees.

She looked up toward heaven,
with tears in her eyes,
She said.,
Im crying for all who,
doesn't know christ,
For those who are blind,
and need to see,
I shine a light,
on the Christmas tree.

It was a cold winter night,
that chilled to the bone,
When I saw the light,
now the angel is gone,
But I will always remember,
that she let me see,
The light of heaven,
on the Christmas tree.

poem by Judy Arline Puckett
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Little Thought In A Big Space

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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When Rage Broke Down Into Tears

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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On Into The Next Dimension

On into the next dimension
like a measure of thought
sitting full lotus
on a flying carpet of feeling
that's on the same wavelength as the stars.
I've been an intimate of windows long enough.
I trust them.
But they don't shine.
They're confined to the news
of what's going on beyond them
that's brought to them live
by skies they flip through
like old Time magazines in a doctor's office.
Their eyes are long on views
but shy on visions.
Cataracts in the eye.
Flowers in the sky.
If you look through them long enough
you'll kill all the wildflowers
in your field of vision
and your third eye
will start grinding lenses for a living
like Spinoza
for a spiritual telescope with myopia.
Clarity will start writing messages in your breath
you're meant to take to heart
as you watch the universe shrinking
like expiry dates on the hot gusts of stars
evaporating like ghosts
from the cold glassy stares
of windowpanes
that have been crying in secret for years
because they're not taken as seriously as mirrors.
It takes a rock of a will
and the passion of an angry delinquent
to break free of them
but once they're broken
like the link of a koan
that liberated you from your own thought-chains
you can still see the whole in every piece
of the primordial atom
that precipitated the Big Bang
but it doesn't get in the way of what's beyond it.
You stop lifting fingerprints
as evidence that you exist
and start lifting veils
begin shedding skins
stop asking sacred clowns
if they can still recognize you
under all the facepaint
you use to express your emotions.
You let your masks blossom and blow away
like Ezra Pound's images
of faces on a wet black bough of the subway.
You empty your streets
like a dangerous part of New York
and step out of the doorway
where you've been waiting for yourself
to return home.
You exchange the key to the lock
for a fork you can fly from a kite
like a lightning rod in an electrical storm
that sends the snake pit of serpent fire
that moved like a glacier in a dream of thawing
racing up your spine
like a dragon of life
urgent as spring rain
that sheds its scales
like waves and ripples of water
but wakes up feathered in flames.
And this time it's the sun that drowns
for flying too close to Icarus
like the event horizon of a black hole
that smears its dimensions
like peanut butter
around the rim of a subliminal halo.
Free of the past
whatever you see
confirms your secret intuition
that the world hasn't happened yet.
That everything you see
in the ubiquitous solitude
of your unwitnessed sentience
is merely prelude
to a greater event
that transcends
the inconceivability
of what's self-evident about the present.

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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When You Look At A Star

When you look at a star
can you see
how the night leaves
the intimate doors
of intuitive eventuality ajar?
I'm all future with a prophetic past.
Aviomantic signs of liberated doves.
So many lifespans in a single moment.
How many light-years to the nearest star?
And how many shadows back?
Trying to say the inexpressible in words is like
to trying to thaw a snowstorm
on the tip of your tongue
flake by flake syllabically
or trying to explain bubbles to a glacier
in a momentary suspension of disbelief.
When you look at a star
do you see
that's it's you
that's shining up that far
and it's you down here
receiving your own light back like a ball
you made of your childhood
and threw up in the air
like a celestial sphere
when you had
all the time in the world
to come back and catch it later?
And as I grew older
not waiting for it to come back down
I learned to play vertical pool with the stars
to move things around
that were once considered fixed.
When you look at a star
if you want to clear the table
if you want to make the longshot
if you want to change the birthmark of misfortune
into an upturned elephant trunk of good luck
you have to chalk the cue with your skull.
But I ask you earnestly
if no one's ever failed their death
is it probable
anyone's ever failed their life
despite what their tears and fears have told them
about where they've ended up?
But a good beginning doesn't lead to a good end
because a good beginning never stops.
A good beginning is without conclusion.
It doesn't need to look beyond itself
because nothing's missing from the very start.
When you look at a star
do you see the ancient wisdom
in a child's heart
do you feel the depth
of all the eyes that have looked at it before
with longing wonder and sorrow
asking you to give them some direction
by adding yourself like another dimension to the past?
Is there a firefly of human suffering
mingled in the shining?
A window makes a better starmap
than a ten inch mirror
in a Schmidt-Cassegrain reflecting telescope
on an equatorial mount with clock drive
following them around like paparazzi
but when the stars want to know
where they're at
it's your eyes they parallax
at both ends
of the wingspan of your orbit.
It's your seeing that gives them a fix.
The same eye by which I see God
is the eye by which God sees me.
It's the same with everything
from fireflies to supernovas.
The donkey looks into the well.
The well looks back at the donkey.
Tat tvam asi.
You are that.
The lampshade and the blue parrot.
The donkey and the carrot.
When you look at a star
do you dress your destiny up
in hand-me-down constellations
like clothes you'll grow into one day
or do you wear them like patchs on myths
you're trying to give up
about how rough it's been
to be chosen beauty queen
and bear the diamond tiara of the Pleiades
like the Northern Crown?
When you look at a star
is it the chip of a broken mirror
the plinth of a shattered chandelier
the Holy Ghost of fireflies
a fire-womb of immaculate fusions
that bear the transgender features
of their ancestral elements
like Abrahamic hydrogen?
A burning bush
in the valley of Tuwa
that eventually talks itself out like a candle
when the conversation begins to harden
like an auditory hallucination
into a puddle
of earwax shadows and wicks?
Or do you discern something more
you can't quite put your finger on
or point to
not a presence
but there
an absence
but everywhere
and you standing there
like this tiny insight
with the precipitous extremeties
of a human being
trying to discover your own nature
in the inexplicability of all that shining
wondering if the rumours of awareness
the universe has been spreading about you
are true or not?
When you look at a star
have you ever thought
if mass is energy
maybe matter is mind
and thinking of one
as something that has to get over the other
is like expecting a wave to transcend water?
Light and lamp.
Body and mind.
Not one of two
but two in one
and even that's one too much.
The flower opens
in the light of the sun
like a kiss on the eyelid
and the sun blooms
as if it had a crush on the flower.
When you look at a star
can you feel how the light
touchs your eyes as gently as a butterfly
as if all the eyelashs you've lost in a lifetime
like the ribbing of broken kites
or the spokes of a bike
or the straws of overworked brooms
had come back to you
as a living thing
with antennae legs and wings?
Have you ever looked at a star
and wondered how far away it would be
if you were to measure the distance in thought-years?
And such a small thing the mind
a child's hand
and yet within its grasp
all that mass black matter energy light space time?
How could you fit
all those cosmic immensities
and the abyss that contains them
into such a small place
if they weren't your own ideas?
When you look at a star
do you ever get the feeling
you're swimming through your own gene-pool
your own meme pool
the Pierian spring
where it meets the sea
at the bottom of your mountain mindstream?
When you look at a star
do you ever turn the light around
and look into yourself
through its eyes
and realize
you've been communing with your own reflection
inconceivably
for billions of years
and that little insight
is the cosmic light of awareness
that fills the night with everything that is
when is is not the opposite of is not
and there's no separation in the first atom
between thought life light mind matter and form
and the lion lies down with the lamb
and the old woman says she is not old
and the sparrow lays her egg in the serpent's coil
and the old man who has seen everything says
my eyes are as young now
as you were back then
and your beauty is today?
When I was a boy
growing up in a garbage can
like a diamond in the rough
everyone wanted to cut
and buff the edges off
to polish me like a lens
so everybody could see how focused I was
when I looked up at the stars
from the bottom of a spent wishing well
where you could see them even during the day.
Though I was taught
they were responsible for my fate
and I should blame them for what I am
and not the black dwarfs of hate
who perverted the space around me
like slumlords
until even the buds of the flowers
were white as the knuckles of clenched fists
I never thought for a moment
that anything that clean and beautiful
that far away
from the scene of the crime at the time
could ever do anything here
that needed an alibi.
When I looked at the stars
I was enraptured by their mystery.
I was exalted by their unattainability
and the age of the silence
that surrounded their fires
knowing they've burned longer
than the light has lived
and seen more
than their eyes can forgive
of human life on the planet.
And the greatest agony of my childhood
from seven till ten
such that I would weep
my bitterness to sleep every night
like a child abandoned to a hospital
was that I was born way too early
to get to Aldebaran.
When I looked at a star
I didn't gape like a telescope
into the depths of its utter solitude
but looked upon it like a far intimacy
I could draw near
until I could feel it breathing like silver
all over the mirror
that was as clear
as any dark spear
that ever wounded a mystic with bliss.
Strange whisperings of exiled sages
pouring stories of home
into a young boy's ear
like my mother used to talk about
her childhood in Queensland
as if she were in the Garden of Eden.
When I looked at a star
and listened to its picture-music
I was so deeply moved
by the beauty and sadness of the song
like inspiration in utter solitude
I went into exile with it here
and it was my blossom
no wind could blow away
and it was my root
in the starmud
nothing could pull up
and throw away.
When I looked at a star
I was enthralled
by the dispassionate attachment
and creative dynamic
that burned me like a sacrificial heretic
in the ice of inspiration.
I could forget the small orbit
of house arrest
that a circumstantial planet
had affixed like an electronic anklet around my leg
for being born unforgivably poor.
When I looked at a star
it was as if the flightfeather
of a bluewhite fire bird
landed on the windowsill of my cell
to take pity on me
and share its freedom
with someone living in a cage.
When I looked at a star
it was the synteretic spark
I sent out like a dove from the ark
with two of every mind
in the zodiac aboard
after forty days of flood
to look for Atlantis
like the next best thing
to Mt. Ararat or Cathay.
It was the angel that always looked back
with the same mystic fury in its eyes
that were in mine
when I looked up.
When I looked at a star
I could prognosticate the future
like the distant memory
of someone returning to their origins
waking up from exile
to discover it wasn't a dream.
You can tell by the way a star
flashs like a panicked chameleon
on the event horizon of a blackhole
things are what they seem
when you're peering through atmospheres
with tears in your eyes.
I used to make telescopes when I was young.
I would grind their pyrex eyes
with ever finer grades of carborundum
until they could see just right.
I shaped their fibre-glass bodies
until they were as smooth as a woman's skin.
And I took them out into the open fields naked
far beyond the intrusions of the city lights
and exposed them to the stars
who revered them like clear-eyed mirrors
and adorned one with leaves
and the other with sidereal veils
and said like the elders
and old midwives of an Ojibway tribe
when they name the newborn.
This one shall be called Eve.
And this one Isis.
And to celebrate their birth
opened a third eye
and said
as it is on earth
it shall not be in the sky.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Trying To Get Centered In The Middle Of Chaos

Trying to get centered in the middle of chaos
isn't going to turn me into the third of eye
of a hurricane rose, or square the circle
with the clarity of a lens with a seeing-eye dog.
The rags of the clouds are teaching the dandelion seeds
how to drift with a good conscience,
just let things go awhile. What's done, what's not.
Why labour at either when together they're just
the human way of walking away from things
one moment after another? Chaos has a way
of conditioning itself into people like me
who relax because they know it's all out of control.

Been feeling like a dead branch, a maple witching wand,
these past few days, because I've given up
divining water with a snake's tongue,
and I thought I was blossoming again
when I saw the first bud of the moonrise
but now it seems to have gone down
behind a screening myth of eyelashes and trees
and my heart is so disappointed in me
there's no help for it, it's crying in my bloodstream,
and when all my childhood insecurities
come mocking me like a fox in my sacred hole,
I don't even bother licking my wounds anymore.

Hope. But it's dogpaddling just beneath an airhole
in the middle of a seal hunt on a bloody ice floe
that's grinding its molars in its sleep like sheet ice.
Always hope. A crack in the door left ajar
for the light to get in and the darkness out.
Only a fool would make the exceptional a rule of thumb,
and hope is a palace of water with so many windows
even the best thieves of moonlight
don't know whether they're breaking in or out.
Just the same, my blessings on everyone's head and house.
The wingspans of two birds hinged to a gate
that doesn't need a guru to teach it to open,
where I'm a stranger who stopped to talk
on the roadside of the fence, and on the other,
I'm a nocturnal wildflower in a secret garden of bliss
that doesn't notice the difference in the way I bloom.

Anyway, who's got the eyes to see any further
into their fate than a pair of dice do, and if things
don't break your way, you're not washed up
on Circe's island like a love affair with the moon,
the manuscript of your first loveletter doesn't
regrettably meet anyone's needs at the time
but feel free to submit again if you're a masochist,
so what, there a more mirages of fish in the desert,
and the star you wished upon digs its spur into your eye,
Giddy up. After you get over a little death,
an emotional stone age when Perseus meets Medusa
on his way to rescue Andromeda from a killer whale,
rejection can be the burr under the saddle of Pegasus
and there's nothing in the way of these high, wide open starfields,
that have never known a fence or a gate, to obstruct you
from burning a little dark energy off
by taking to the air like a mythically deflated weather balloon
in an expanding universe that's just taken
its thumb and forefinger off your throat to let you breathe out
as if you'd managed somehow again
to exorcise yourself from your own self-possession.

A lot of gurus have to like that. But I'm sick of the sound
of one hand clapping like an overly-disciplined seal
with one flipper left while Orca eats its trainer.
I want to take a leap of faith, not death, like the rain
through a circle of my own making whether
it amuses the crowd or not. Or meets the approval of rainbows.
Attachment too is a buddha activity once you get back
from the sad, cold, desolated shore of enlightenment
and the spell has unsilvered the back of the mirror
like flakes of moonlight, and effaced it with a clarity
that lets you see right through yourself
like the stars in an autumn sky into nothing.
What is it Dogen Zenji said in medieval Japan?
When the truth doesn't fill your body and mind
you feel you've had enough. But when it does
you always feel as if something were missing?
God, what a lot of empty truth I must embody
to be so hungry for the taste of all my lost illusions.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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