Related quotes: It's not like the face...

It's Not Like The Face In The Flower Of The Star

It's not like the face in the flower of the star
grows more beautiful the more times it's looked at,
it's just that it's humanizing
the vast, cold spaces within you
with your own awareness of it so that
when you spot Arcturus shining through the trees
as you have since childhood and call out its name
it's you that shines brighter
a magnitude more for the moment.
Affable familiars in a big, lonely space
acknowledging each other in passing
as if, animate and inanimate, the same,
what we all hold in common
since we started kicking in the womb
is this life of perpetual exile. Shape-shifters,
driven out of the bliss of oblivion, to bury the bell
of our agony in the stillness of an alien place
and try to love everyone who'll let us
as if they weren't a stranger at the gate.

O the appellations the mind applies to its formlessness
in a world of forms to befriend its cosmic isolation.
That fills space up with stars and birds
suggested by its senses and then casts a spell
like a grammar of things to turn them into words
to start a conversation with chaos as if we weren't all
talking to ourselves. We put lifemasks on everything
like an old Greek play and act out our tragedy
like a dilemma gored on the horns of the goat gods
as if they had a clear grasp of what we were talking about.
Asking a question doesn't change
the ambiguous nature of the issue
and when no one answers isn't proof
the silence is divine. Bright vacancy, dark abundance,
nothing includes everything in it
like a table of contents for the mind
that plays host to its own imaginary guests.

The door bell rings and the world's
standing in the doorway bearing gifts
that have no other meaning other than
they're addressed to you the way life
nourishes itself on its own emptiness
as if every moment were a cause of celebration
engendered by your own inspiration.
Every song in the distance is the ancestral echo
of your own voice in an abyss
you're trying to relate to by listening
as if you were sounding the depths
of the mystery you must be to yourself
to live among your own creations as if
someone signed you too. Your name
scrawled in cadmium red blood across
a white canvas of albino eyes in the dark.
Imagination obedient to the freedom
of its own lawlessness to create as it is urged to
on a caprice, a gust of stars, the nudge of an atom,
whole new paradigms of space and time
it will answer to as if someone called its name.

If the same eye by which I see the star
is the eye by which the star sees me,
then who's the creator, who's the creation?
So if someone were to ask me the colour of my eyes,
I'd show them a painting I did
of blue weed towering beside a dirt road
or a moonscape I dashed off one starless night
between the clouds. Or even further afield,
if I felt they'd been siderealized sufficiently,
the blue auras of trace elements grinding galaxies
into mirrors they can see themselves in
like leggy gazelles come down to the shore
to drink from their own reflection of themselves
like telescopes alert to the eyes that lie in wait for them.

Everywhere I wander down these pathless ways
through my homelessness, I meet myself
like a mirage at the end of a cul de sac,
and I walk through it like a wall
or two galaxies passing through each other
without disturbing a star, I embody such distances,
and I encounter hypnotists from all quarters
that call themselves seekers of the truth
trying to wake up from their own magic
as if they hadn't caught on to their own minds yet
and were still underestimating the power of their illusions.
Why wash the stars off the windows, or sweep
the scars of the autumn leaves off the stairs
expecting the enlightened arrival
of the lord and lady of the manor any day now
as if you could get a grasp on the nature
of your own emptiness like a servant
looking for a master in your own image?

Everything nasty and blind,
everything beautiful and sublime
are the facets of a clear jewel
turning in the light of the void.
All that is separated, all that is enjoined,
all that are searching and finding
and losing themselves again like solar flares
on a return journey back to the sun
or rivers flowing into themselves
as if every wave crossed the threshold of itself
into an openness exhilarated by
the expansive gesture of its presence,
are just the hidden secret of you
wanting to be known by a world
you whisper into your own ear
as if you'd never heard the sound
of your own voice before the wind
began to throw the sea into turmoil
and you were swept ashore out of
the inconceivability of your own emptiness
like a myth of awareness sadly in need of an origin.

So you end up creating a world
out of your own inner resources and calling it
mother or father in the hopes it might be able
to explain what you're doing here by yourself.
And that's how you get lost in the labyrinths
of your own being, that's how your wires get crossed
in the short circuits of your lifelines
tangled up in kites like morning glory
that wouldn't fly. You keep asking simulacrums
of your own creativity about things
that only you on your own, lonelier than God,
projected imaginatively like a lifemask
you created in your own image
onto the formlessness of an invisible space within you,
can be the answer to. The moment
you say I am to yourself and realize
that you're not even there to recognize it
the little thumb puppet in three pounds of starmud
dematerializes like something solid
into the presence of the real. You revel like a child
in the creative liberty of not keeping your own distance
from anything in existence, knowing
in the crazy wisdom of your second innocence
the only thing that binds you to it
or separates you from it, is a sense of play.
That everytime you say I am without
including the whole universe in it as well
it becomes the wayward paradigm
of another brilliant mistake with feet of clay.
Or as Archibald Lampman said
dead of a heart attack at thirty-six,
poor shining angels whom the hoofs betray.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Related quotes

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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Seeds Of Fire In A Nightsky

Seeds of fire in a nightsky root like flowers
in the ashes of my eyes I scattered on the wind
like the dust of stars I followed even into oblivion
to remain faithful to the life of the light
whatever transformations within me grew
into the starless darkness of the unknown heart
I've carried in my chest for years like the empty shrine
of a dead lantern to the last firefly to go out.

And this is a seeing without the eyes of the stranger
I no longer recognize as who I thought I was
when I could read the constellations like the Linear B
of the lost civilization that was elaborated out of me
to perish in the mountainous silence of what was abandoned
when I burned my starmaps and entered chaos
like the blackhole of the singularity
that could rejuvenate me out of nothing like a grail
I was seeking at the bottom of the deepest grave
I ever descended into, a spider at the end of its silk,
or a caterpillar like the distant rumour of a butterfly
on a tranformational pilgrimage to an unknown shrine
that crawled with it all the way back to the beginning
of the radical innocence of an radiant world,
before time overran it with arrivals and departures
as if it never meant anything in the first place
to aspire to the light in the hope of a deeper intimacy with life.

And in this darkness, there is no letting go,
or hanging on to what cannot be grasped by understanding
until you realize that understanding only ever finds itself
and the vastness of what's expanding before it
into the unknown, is not a journey with a destination
or a threshold that can be crossed into illumination
like a voice meditating in the silence of its mother-tongue.
I was looking for the light by the light
I was given to go by when the wind blew it out
like a candle I no longer needed
to make my way deeper into this homeless darkness
that does not cast a shadow of time on enlightened extinction.

How can you divine what isn't missing within yourself?
The seeker dies by the side of the road
like a cry for help in the dangerous distance
pleading to be rescued by its own echo, and it comes
but not in a language of its own, not
as the event of anything that could have been anticipated,
not as something you can bring back with you
like the taste of water to the lips of a delirious mirage
to prove there's a reality beyond delusion
where everyone drinks from the same well
the muses of wisdom summon them to without a mouth.

As unsentimental as an overnight frost on the garden,
the larkspur rimed by billions of cold stars,
as if my seeing condensed out of the air
and every insight were a sign of farewell to the mystery
that urged me to risk everything like a tribute
to the divinity of nothing that had seized upon my heart
like a sacred clown faithful to the folly of experience.
Like the footprints of space and time that stretched behind him
for lightyears like the forced smile and phony tear
of the painted lifemask that convinced him he was not dead
to the ordeals of the journey he was leading nowhere
but to where he was every moment of the way
trusting in the crazy wisdom of the laughter
that regaled him every step of the way
like the cornerstone of the absurdity
that kept looking for new hills of prophetic skulls
to roll over like dice in a bone-box.
To wander like a rogue planet on an aberrant wavelength
of dark matter that doesn't express itself like moonlight
talking to itself like the open-mouthed seed syllables
of the waterlilies at night on the Fall river
writing love poems back to the stars that inspired them.

You want to overhear what the universe
is whispering to itself like a madman in his sleep
in the unbreachable silence of a fathomless dream
of random atoms engendering the forms of awareness
like a grammar of chaos out of its own unattainability
trying to make some sense of what it's saying,
an asylum of paradigms that undermines it own existence
in the arraying of a conditioned universe?
You have to learn to learn to hear it in a language
no one has ever spoken before you, as if
you'd never heard your own voice before
from somewhere deep within you saying
let it be as the stars broke into light
like the distant echo of an unknown wonder
that perceives the source of its own extinction
in the birth of everything, in the slightest conception
of the inconceivable rooting in its own ashes on the wind.

We all listen to the eloquence of things we don't understand
like a secret we're forbidden to tell anyone,
that keeps giving us away death after death,
birth after birth to our imperceptible selves.
Imagination seeds the mind of our uninhibited potential
to flower into worlds where the fruit comes before the blossom
as the harvest precedes the seed, or the darkness
wakes the nightbird up to its longing for love and light
and all our deaths are already achieved behind us
long before anyone was born to suffer them.
And yet we suffer them like a truce with the absurdity of the act
that establishes peace like a third-eye
in the middle of a hurricane that gives meaning
to the dark abundance of our extinction gathering into light
by sacrificing our emptiness like gods to our own creations
over and over and over again, as we surrender to ourselves
like candles returning themselves like fire
to the the light that inspired them
like water to the river it was taken from.

The distance of the journey of life is a wingspan
that cannot be estimated in shadows.
And though you master all the meanings in the world
and learn to love their subtleties like the taste
of mystic wine, or enlightened tea,
you're still the guest that's never met its host face to face
because everything you say is always behind you
like the light of a star whose immediate life
is always ahead of it hidden in the darkness like a jewel
that has yet to know the light of a direct encounter.
If you want to see deeply into the shining
you have to grow your own eyes to accommodate
the perennial insight into the restive vision at hand.
And you must learn to live without knowing
what it is you've come to understand
about the ashes of the dragons in the afterlives of the stars.

Don't let the scars intimidate the innocence of your wounds
as if you could never be hurt again by what
you cherished the most in your search to find yourself
in the absence of anything you could be attached to.
Look at the fireflies emerging from the valley fog
of a passing storm like a shapeshifting constellation
dancing at its own wake like a blissed-out drunk at a funeral.
You can taste the whole history of life
like a wandering myth of origin in every sip of water
flavoured with the reflection of things that changed along the way.
Don't mourn the transformations that enabled you to stay awhile
like snow on the mountaintops, dew on the tongues
of the new leaves of the apple-tree that emerge
like the sacred syllables of lovepoems
to the unknown windfalls of the mystery they facilitate
out of the urgency of their own becoming.

Here, where we speak for awhile, in the diction of things
arranged in the mystic grammars and paradigms
of our own likeness reflected like starmaps
to the shining that ripened our eyes from within
as if the whole world were turned inside out
and you had to descend into yourself to see the stars
like an arrangement of chaos expressed in metaphors,
the liars speak clearly in the language of other men's mouths
that can be easily understood, as the tongue-tied sages
blunder like an ineffable silence into the deepening mystery
of the creative eloquence of the unsayable things
that life speaks through them like the facts of a dream
that trues their wisdom to the disparate harmonies
of the illuminated chaos deep within the heart of life
that keeps contradicting itself like a pulse among the dead.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Gray Rain

Gray rain
but the trees
are teaching the stars how to break into leaves.
Good rain on the good earth.
Autumn's a long passage.
Spring is full of thresholds.
Rainbow bridges in the distance
over urgent streams.
Everything's in a rush to become something.
I thought I knew once
who I was supposed to be
but more and more it eludes me
like a future that's already behind me.
I leave it to the world
to finish what I began
and include myself in the mystery
and try to carry on like a man
who looks at a star he won't follow
through the branches of the burgeoning trees
as the history of who I am
now that I'm not anymore.
The less I am the more there is to be.
And one eye doesn't get in the way of the other as much.
There is just this as it is
and what am I beholding
if I'm not looking upon myself as I am
in common with everything
that's changing all around me
like a mind that can't contain itself
in any fixed mode of being
anymore than the eye
can decide what it's seeing.
Everything is burning with life in the rain
and change is the dangerous bliss
we feel when we cease to exist.
The trees might have fingerprints
graven into their bark
and you might accord them
an identity in the dark
and approve of their names
and let them pass as if you knew who they were
but that doesn't make them
any less of a stranger than you are
or the clouds carry passports.
Praise be to the abundance of oblivion
and the cornucopias of blackholes
in the hearts of the galaxies
that keep wounding themselves into life
by falling on their own swords
like a knife that heals.
By day the light gives.
But at night
it steals.
And the mirror lives
and pours water over the eyes of the blind
and suddenly the stars can see again.
And the grape hyacinth is drunk on blue wine.
And I'm walking on water on the moon
even as the moon walks on my tears
without knowing which ones
flowed from the bells of my sorrows
and which overwhelmed me
like birds in the fountains of joy.
First I am a man.
And then I am a boy.
Spring takes itself for granted.
And autumn comes on with regrets.
But they both know
this is as good as it gets
and nothing's missing
in the mind's lost and found.
It's just the way things get around
when you throw the world back in the water
like a life of your own
you gave up years ago
to be who you are now.
Praise be to the stars
that stop by the gate this late
to chat about gardens
and how to keep
the roots of the roses alive
when the ground hardens.
Even if you're a demon in steep descent
or an angel rising from hell
life has the power of a flower
and the genius of a universe
to turn falling into a calling
like planets and Canada geese.
You can walk out alone
into a wide open field at night like I do
and stand there under the stars
that have been staring at you since childhood
like someone they should keep an eye on
and say: This is me. This is who I am as I am
to the whole twinkling lot of them in self-defence
to uphold the savage dignity of the difference.
You can stand there in the vastness
of that one definitive thought
that goes on forever like a silence older than birds
and feel the sweet release of upending joy
trying to master its new freedom
when space morphs into a mouth for a moment
and says softly
o so softly
in a voice that's been singed by compassion:
No.
You're not.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Drag On My Cigarette

I drag on my cigarette
and pull the coffee up to my mouth
as if I were officiating at a sacrament
and it were some holy bell
extolling the black wine of the bean.

I am always more in the morning
than I will be again all day
and the light is creative until precisely noon
and I am at peace in the impersonal intimacy
of flowing along like a star or a man or a leaf
in this great dynamic that never goes anywhere outside itself
like a bloodstream, a mindstream, the nightstream
that flashes in the woods like the eyes of a beautiful woman,
and yet all these worlds within worlds move with it
as fluently as thought and feeling
in a mind that is not divided by decisions
or trying to locate itself like a constellation
on a starmap in the rain,
insanely fitting every dropp
with the axis of a pin
to divine the source of the shining.

And it's always been a mystery to me
how I can be so ignorant and all-seeing simultaneously
but what keeps me alive, breathing, beating, baffled and alert,
a gust of awareness, of wheeling air and images
in a moment of joy and dispersal
where the light touches the dirt like a lover
and the dirt rises,
is this infinite instance
of an inconceivable intelligence so intimately close
the flame leaps from the fire,
and the moon falls from its flower
like the petal of an hour that overslept
and the birds are swimming in the shadow-waters of the trees
like elegant, inexhaustible pens in ink
that leave no trace on the sky of anything
beyond what the mind can think
until it stops turning the days like the pages
of a journal only the wind keeps
like autumn leaves and mindless sages
and learns from the seed-mouth how to sing
of the abundance that flows from its undoing.

Stop trying to prune the rose with its own thorns.
You can't put serpent fire out with water
or grasp a question by the neck
to milk the crescents of the moon for an antidote.
Would you put a bit in the mouth of the wave?
Would you uncoil your cravings like flypaper
to catch a star
then green it through the glass of a canning-jar?
Is the you of what you do
the you of who you are
or deep inside is there a blind jewel
that's waiting for you to turn the light around
and give it eyes
so you can see through yourself
and stop trying to net fish with the moon's reflection?

But if you think the answers will put the matter to rest,
get the world off your chest
like the shadow of the stone twin
that mimicked you into self-consciousness
and stalks you even now unseen
like a dog or the moon or eclipse of the blood
closing the mouths of the lilies that speak for the starmud,
you have not followed the questions
far enough into your life
where you have never been
to understand how little the answers really mean
when the ant moves the mountain
and the grass is green.

I stand in the furnace of the worlds like wax
and know the fury of the fire is everywhere at peace with itself,
and the only holy wars are lonely and creative.
As I am, as I am, as I am,
my singular appeal and pulse,
my homely simulacrum for the event I call me
when I knock like waves on my own door
to ask whose footprints line the shore
and only the moon's face on a threshold of water
rises like the gentile coast of a skull
to say I don't live here anymore.

You can't wash the night off
by taking a bath in an eclipse
and there are darknesses so intensely clear
that colours would only pollute the brutal purity
of the eye that dispossessed them,
poured them out like a delirium of words and wine
that could no longer dumbfound the emptiness
with the enlightened delusion of being forsakenly me.

And to say whatever this is before me now is nothing
is wrong
and to say this darkness myriads into form
and lucidly fills the world with things
is wrong,
and it is not mind or death or dark matter
nor me nor you nor God nor the devil
and yet its utter stillness mountains into mushrooms and fountains
and the whole issue is apparent in every event
like the taste of salt and stars
in the mouth of an open wound.

Is your skull honoured by what it must contain,
is the stone you lay your head upon
appalled by what it props up
when its metals reveal
the swords and crowns
you've poppied with blood,
or is your head still cooling
like mystic bread on a windowsill
like the universe
straight from the ovens of hell
in a purgatorial breeze
your goodness defanged like a whip?

Or maybe you're writing love poems
on the sails of a boney ghost ship
to a lifeboat on the moon
bobbing in a sea of shadows?
Or the leaves at your door
who show up with maps to save you
don't know what autumn is anymore
or how to follow the wind to the far shore
where the straw keeps faith with the grain
and the scarecrow is feathered with fire
and there is no distinction between joy and pain
and the stone dances as fleetly as moonlight
silvers the vein of the garden snail
that smears the slow stream of its going
across my radiant path
like the enlightened thought of a tiny brain?

Have we not already come again and again
to a place we have never existed,
is this not the effusive locus of every moment,
the inceptive finish of every breath we give back
to the sustaining intimacy of the unconceived
who nourish conception with their emptiness
and confide themselves like seeing to the seen
and shape space like water into eyes
deeper than a full eclipse of the moon?

You cannot fathom the strangeness of this moment you are,
you cannot assess the span of your being with wings
or appeal to a god like a bloodstream
you can pour yourself back into like wine
seeking tomorrow's delirium with yesterday's vine,
when the whole of creation is the merest suggestion of you
out to the furthest star
that puts itself out like a torch
in its own reflection of who you are.

You don't have to study your eyes to see
or cultivate your features like a holy book to be.
Because there is no intention in the emptiness
there is no karma to redress
and nothing to bind or separate
and no witness to affirm or deny
and nothing to diminish or enlarge
and no wisdom in the waterlily
nor ignorance in the swamp,
and the clouds let go
and the chains lay hold
and the lead doesn't taste of gold
but the union doesn't differentiate
among its exquisite distinctions
and the old woman is not old
and the cripples run
and the road outpaces the racers
like a long finish line
and there are no fractures when everything is whole
and no god when everything is.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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It Isn't As Far As You Might Think

It isn't as far as you might think
from this spiritual lost and found
coiled like a labyrinth of cul de sacs
or a snake of time spiralling down
the seven degenerative metals of man
through the rib gates in the belly of a dragon
that's flamed out like a red-tailed hawk riding
the last of its cooling thermals down with the sun,
not as far as you might think, according to the moss
that grows all over your north side
from this circuitous blossoming into knots
in the hardwood of a rootless tree
to the threshold of where your heart belongs.

Dig yourself out of that old National Geographic
like an explorer that never got to go
and unfold that free starmap someone included
like a flag of protocol awarded a dead celestial sailor
and start connecting the dots like ports of call
in the eyes on the dice of a long shot against the odds
that nobody believed could be made until you took it.
Where was it ever suggested that the return journey
would be any less dangerous than the first time
you left yourself like a stranger in the doorway
of this house of life, waving farewell in the rain
as you carefully put the chain back on the gate behind you?

The object of the grailquest isn't so much
a matter of finding it as it is learning how
to lose yourself wisely in the search. You can
orient your mindscape to the direction of your shining
like a circumpolar constellation, but to sip
from the Little Dipper isn't going to green
that dead branch of a divining rod in your hand.
The journey isn't lost upon you because
you're out there on the road alone
with nothing but departures behind you
and the only arrival on your horizon
more of the unknown without a return address.

What if the stars you take your bearings from
set out to find the source of their shining
and turned their light back on themselves
like solar flares to see where they were going? Do you think
you could see them from here on this hillside,
to assign them names and myths of origin
they whisper to your eyes at night like fairytales
and lullabies to help you get to sleep
when you lay your head down like moonset
on the cold stone of the world by the roadside?

The moment you go looking for yourself
do you leave the part that's beating the bushes for you at home?
Have you ever checked out who's in the search party?
Go ask the diamond sages. They aren't the masters
of an enlightenment no one can attain. They sit
like stars in the throne rooms of dark matter,
lords of the darkness, confusion and chaos
that have mastered them spontaneously like ore
to the indirections of an undisciplined way of shining
so the dark mirror you wander in looking
for a lifemask you can recognize as a face of your own,
is brighter than the white one of insight
you've had so much trouble adjusting your eyes to
like a telescope to the weather of a habitable planet.

No ray of the light you're looking for
ever started out with a sense of direction.
No star, no beacon, no lantern, no insight,
no firefly, lightning bolt or lighthouse
ever plotted a straight path through the abyss
that wasn't omnidirectionally bent
by the gravitational eyes of space it passed
on its journey to nowhere in particular
though it bumped into a few planets and wildflowers
along the way it was exactly meaningless to take.

No one's ever really lost. They're just
not very adept at reading their own starmaps.
They look for what shines though the eyes of a crow
remembering how white its feathers were
before it found the continent it was sent out
before the dove to look for. And Noah cursed it black
for not coming back. Lost innocence longing for light.
Long wavelengths on the night sea of awareness
looking for land like particles and cornerstones
they can found their spiritual temples upon
like aviaries for the wrens and sparrows
buffeted back by the winds they're flying against
like the ashes of disinterred aspirations in their own face.

Lost in the woods, everyone looks at the constellations
like light in the windows of a distant farmhouse.
But no one ever consults all the darkness beyond
the blazing midways of the zodiac like deer paths
off the ecliptic or wolf packs above the timberlines
of their celestial equators. Aldebaran
is sixty-five lightyears from here as we're
eight light-minutes from the nearest sun.
But how far does a human who is the measure of all things,
have to go before he or she realizes the darkness
was always the truest sense of direction for anyone
trying to shine a light on where the light has gone
without them, so they can see in the dark
how their eyes emerge out of the search for themselves
and the night whispers like a homecoming embrace
in the ear of the prodigal do you finally recognize
who I am? Even when you most deeply eclipsed
the shining of the black mirror of awareness,
blinded by the candle of your own lantern
there's never been a son or daughter of a star
that was ever lost in me since the light began.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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He Has Kept The Key In Us!

He created everything,
Yet he can't perceived by anyone,
He is behind every creations,
yet no creation is immortal or eternal,
He dwells in everyone as light in every shining stars,
He is the formless gives forms to any formless,
He moves everything, remaining himself unmoved,
Not only he is creator,
But also sustainer and destroyer,
He is playing with universe,
He paints everyone with his own ideas!

He who has created everything,
Has created that fire of right knowledge,
He gave everyone the right,
To think right, work right, and live right,
Only the righteous gets the key,
That key lost in own self,
One can open the door of heaven or hell with that magic key,
When one learns the deception of senses,
And illusion of play of light,
Turns to that pure bright light within,
Where he can see the love and peace for ever!

He is formless behind all forms,
He paints on vacuum,
He illuminate the forms,
and lift the veil of illusions,
And show his true nature,
His presence everywhere,
He is the one who fills the breath in the toys,
Make them think and work,
He is selfless,
Yet look selfish,
Sometimes play with nature,
Sitting on that magic mat called space,
Here every one are protected,
When he feels enough,
fold the sky as if we fold the mat, everything has to go into that from which they are projected!
and he himself plays his game,
We have nothing to gain or nothing to lose,
He is the one regaining,
his lost glory in Us back!

poem by Ramdas Bhandarkar
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poem by Patrick White
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No Ray Of The Star

No ray of the star in the lead,
none following, no one vector of light,
the compass needle for all the rest.
Eye to eye, side by side,
like the spikes of an onion gone to seed,
companionship and parity,
even after billions of light years,
every one's still shining among their peers.

Even your best efforts
to make it all into one when it already is,
are in musical harmony
like dissonance in jazz
with every wavelength of heart and mind
in a great creative collaboration
with every thread on the loom of a flying carpet
as big as the universe, growing
into the vast expanse of the chaos
it's spinning itself out of like the three fates,
the daughters of night with their thread and shears
severing the lifelines of passion birth and death.

Let them. Because there's a little green thread of love
coiling around your spinal column like serpent fire
that can't be cut by scissors or tears,
a dragon of dna with rainbow chromosomes
riding the stairwells and thermals of its own flames
like a wild grape vine, or trout lilies
down by the night creek
holding up their blossoms
like masterpieces to the stars
apprenticed to their shining
like one genius to another
revealing what can be done with light
when everyone's working in the same medium.

Every star, a kiss on the eyelids
of a wildflower in a far field
that's gone back to seed for a while,
every rose and mushroom alike.

Every ray of light, a mystic spear
through the heart of a disbelieving telescope
that's just had a major revelation
not only about the true nature
of the radiance within
but the ore of the darkness
that includes it like a diamond close to its heart.

Every lucid needle in the haystack,
in the pin cushion of every star,
laying out the pattern of a constellation
like a star map with a ray of light in its teeth,
and every angel that dances thereon,
and every angel that keeps its place under a stone
as a junkie London poet once wrote,
and every demon of a black dwarf
that gave its all and everything up
until there was nothing left but a black hole
or a massive cosmic match head that's burnt out
like the ashen bud of a heretic that bloomed in fire
like the seeds under the eyelids
of the pine-cone of a Zen pagoda,
and returned the universe to the darkness it came from
like a child it discovered wandering
too far from home without a threshold of its own,
is patching the wounds of the sacred clowns
with the whole cloth of the rags they're standing in
with roses and rainbows at midnight
and big ripe tears in a windfall of pears
that keep falling to their destiny
without realizing they're plunging toward paradise
every time they lose their grip on things.

In my unified field theory,
whether you call it fana, nirvana, tauhid,
the godhead, the plenum void, the blaze,
the rapture, dropping off body and mind
once the Japanese plum blossoms
have turned into fruit and realized
no sweetness in the apple bloom
no ripeness in the apple, God,
Brahma on his lotus, Muhammad on Buraq,
Jesus on the cross, Moses on the mountain,
or you've just had a serious falling out with your lover,
in a world so boundlessly unified
we have to resort to stars for boundary stones
like illusory barriers between too much and too little,
where the sweet water meets the salt;
in my intimately impersonal skew
of the crazy wisdom of what's happening here,
the most accurate thing
you can whisper like a poem
into your neighbour's or lover's ear,
is not two, not two, not two, like the vital pulse
of a musical cult of oxymorons
at a gathering of opposites in the wilderness,
everything clings to one another inseparably
like the primordial atom to its table of contents,
like a fish to water, a bird to air,
a star to the darkness, the heart and the mind
to every thought and emotion
of the space-time continuum it works in,
or insight into the mystery that inspires it
to go looking for more grails
than there are ailing kingdoms
to hold them up to their lips
like rain on ripe blackberries
or the full moons of magic mushrooms
because every dropp of rain's a grail in itself.

For every star, an imaginary number
of lifemasks like metaphors
as many as there are flowers
and children of the earth to wear them
as if dressing up for life were the embodiment
of how awareness made its first appearance
like a hidden secret that wished to be known
through an infinite number
of ongoing myriad things all at once forever.

Ergo: we're all in the same lifeboat together
looking for one and the same threshold
in our homelessness like rogue planets
dancing around one another as if each
were in reach of the sun of the other,
sister, brother, and lover, mother and father,
bonded by the light and life
we've all been looking for long before
we were born to shine upon one another like this
as if there were no difference
between the crests and valleys
of one wave and another,
our fullness and our emptiness
on the great night sea of the abyss
that is always as pregnant with us
as it is with the membranous wombs of the multiverse
whenever we kiss in deep hyperspace
and a whole new world gets off on us.

In this realm everyone receives one another
like a gift they weren't expecting
and are never sure they deserve,
down to the last atom of the drunk in the doorway,
the exile in the embassy yard
looking for sanctuary in his own country
by asking you to let him in
like the angel of immigrants in disguise,
like a teen age girl on the sidewalk,
crying like a star-crossed chandelier of rain
shattered like a crystal slipper at her feet
into the plinths and shards of a constellation
you can only see on the dark side of the mirror
like the secret reflection of who she is
inside the locket she hangs around her heart
like the moondog of an innocent suicide
no one would have ever guessed she had in her
like a conversation that never took place, face to face,
heart to heart, when timing was as important as content.

If you hold up a mirror to your own lifemask,
a puddle where the starmud's settled down
like the cornerstone of the moon in a tent
that's comes to flower in the backyard
of a house of the zodiac, you can see in your own face
the faces of everyone who's ever been, or is, and will be,
you will see in the single eye of a seed
how many Japanese plum blossoms had to be
scattered down the street like a Milky Way of the ancestors
you're descended from, to implant their vision
of light and love and life in you. And how
transience learned from the wind
how to let go and give it all away
like the passage of birds and the winged samara
of maples across the full moon, all the fruits
and flowers, stars and seeds of a generous autumn
shaken like the apple orchards of the Hesperides into your lap.

And to begrudge one atom
of this inexhaustible plenty to anyone
is to starve to death in your own garden
is to deny your own children bread
you didn't break with them like a harvest of light
so their darkness wouldn't hunger
for stars the rest of their lives.
Is to live in the shining
and grow possessive of shadows.
Is to break off a love affair with the waters of life.
Is to never feel your eyes ripen from
something green and bitter
into a mirage of wine in the desert
that drinks time spiced with stars
from an hourglass of a blissful delirium
where even the vipers have learned to dance in the sand
among the bones of skeletal keyboards.

Anyway, you get the point, and once
you've got the point, you've got the wavelength by the tail
and you're centered everywhere in a boundless universe
and the circle is as complete as a dropp of rain,
or the growth rings of a tree
making ripples in the heartwood of spring
to give the birds and the stars and the trees
something to sing about they weren't expecting.
That no sum of zeroes ever added up to nothing
as if something were missing from the very start
like blackholes that don't write their names
on the galaxies they make out of their emptiness.
Out of nothing, one, and in that one
that includes everybody you can see
how the zeroes got carried away by the billions
into an infinite elaboration of their radiant vision
of a universe of overlapping circles making waves
and all it takes is one insight
into the creativity of compassion
that steals the breath of the stars away in amazement
that one ray of light from the least expected quarter
when you least expect it is more than enough
to touch your heart with a feather of love
fallen from a passing nightbird above
that has been calling to you all night in the darkness
to see how enlightened everything is as it is
when you open up the black holes
in the wild irises of your eyes to it.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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By The Light I Have Been Given To Go By

By the light I have been given to go by,
I can see how homeless the journey truly is.
How provisional the shrines along the way like milestones
we stop to paint like the inside of our skulls
or the caves we first dwelled in with our dead
buried under fire and the numinosity of our picture music
impregnating the womb walls of a space made sacred by fear.
The darkness bears my secrets, and in the torchlight,
in carbon and red ochre, a diary of shamans
gored by defecating rhinos speared to death.

I have imagined my way into an understanding
that is a rite of passage into a space that is
a vast abyss of intelligence, a nothingness
that speaks through an intuitive grammar of things
as if a galaxy, a star, stone, tree, raindropp were each a thought,
a sign, a word, the syntax of a growing paradigm
of creative awareness that we're completely alone
and lost at sea like fish on the moon crawling out of its tides
as if nothing bound us, not even detachment,
nor a god that exists as a confession of the way we do,
nor any medium we work in as reflection of our presence
labouring away at an unattainable world that won't exist
until we do, and it's 7 to 5 against anyone making it that far.

But what a joy to emerge out of our own nothingness
like a secret we're letting ourselves in on,
making it up as we go along like a deportable myth of origin
we can adapt to our infinite beginnings
because for starters, it has none of its own.
We were born to express ourselves like apple trees.
We were born to see and be happy marvelling at the event.
To enjoy longing for things we were never missing
and be guided by wise men we never listen to
back to a silence that has nothing to say for itself
that we didn't already know in the first place.
Everywhere is the threshold of the return journey.
Life is either an exile, or it stays at home like a follower.
Bless the enlightened apostates of the dangerous religion
that desecrates the mind by worshipping it.
Why make a chain out of your umbilical cord
and get your head wrapped around it like a noose
because you forgot meaning was an art
and not a way to take yourself way too seriously to heart?
Why go to war with your own mind
just to administer to the needs of the suffering
when you can paint a god in blood and ashes
and decultify yourself with the creative freedom
of your imagination deconstructing the fable of your belief
that it's the being, not the becoming, that endures.
And you can do this without even knowing how to draw.
A starmap doesn't shine. A blue print doesn't open a door.
If you ask a crutch to do your walking for you,
it's going to throw you away like a miracle
at the top of the stairs of Notre Dame de Coeur.
Better to be the sacred whore of a thousand profligate gods
than the unrepentant nun of one who shuts the world out,
like art for art's sake, to revel in her own extinction
in a mystical connubium with an unregenerate imagination.

You can burn your gates and cages in a wild field if you like
for not being able to keep the flowers in, or keep the wind
from rioting with the leaves way past curfew,
but there was never any risk of being granted what you ask
because life is the unpredictable moon rise
that deepens the calendars with a renewed humility
towards the extraordinary mutability of time.
What have you ever been that baffled your imagination?
It isn't reason that inspires us to become a stranger tomorrow
to the self we knew today. Genuine faith isn't
an artificial life support system to keep something alive
that should have been allowed to die quietly away yesterday.
Millions upon millions of facts like a graveyard of skeleton keys
to a door we can't find open within ourselves
as if we'd just stepped through it to be here where we live
deciphering the shapes of the clouds as if we lived in code.

Hide your secret deep enough if you want it to be known.
Walk alone as far as you can until you can't
if you want the world to walk the rest of the way with you.
The white demon that knows heaven and hell experientially
mentors the senses in the spiritual subtleties of the black angel
that comes like the new moon of a third eye
to help the exegetes of light see further into the dark
by blowing their candles out like flowers.
All seekers are roads looking for a map to follow.
Preludes after the fact, that set out to look for their own endings.
Be a star. And keep your afterlife behind you
like the shadow of the last form you cast upon the earth.
Be an eye that doesn't leave any room between the moon
and it's reflection so that the substance of life is seeing
not that you're a distinct and separate entity
that cosmically identifies with your exclusion
but that you're wholly within easy reach of everything
that depends upon you for its existence. Just as every leaf
you let fall in the autumn like an adage of wisdom
about how you can know the world by its fruits
first came to the tree like a smile to your face
when you realized your imagination was
the inconceivable dynamic of a creative state of grace.

poem by Patrick White
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Nature’s Christmas tree

I saw the most beautiful Christmas tree,
Adorned with a star,
For the world to see,
Standing proudly in the night,

On the top of the tree
Was a bright shining light,

Soft blankets of snow,
Covering the leaves,

This is the time,
For the world to find peace.

Inside the heart of that tree

there may be natures
Small creatures of the wild,

On top of the tree,
in the world so dark,

A star shines for the wonders
of man, woman and child,

The birds sing sweet songs,
That words can’t speak,

Look into your heart,
For the truth you seek,

The proof is
The star
,
Shining through the trees,

Don’t you think it’s time
For the world to find some peace?

Look into the distance,
It shines near and far,

For the prince of peace
God sent a shining star

For the world to see

Look on top of Nature’s Christmas tree

poem by Judy Arline Puckett
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If I Ever Get To Look Back On All Of This

If I ever get to look back on all this
even if it's just to show me how wrong I was
about so much, how much I risked for so little,
I don't want to have been mean and petty here,
I don't want to have lived short-minded
as if my brain never grew to its proper height
and I had to live close to the ground
with burrowing wasps and centipedes
trading toxins in the grass like slumlords.
Tried to live like a magnanimous man
with an open hand whenever my luck kept pace
with my generosity. Didn't want to die
knowing nothing about the stars, that shining
that grew in time even brighter in the dark within.
Wanted to know the fury and compassion, genius,
the affable kindness, madness and love of humankind.

Used to say we were born to see and be happy,
and if you couldn't find a meaning that suited you,
make one up of your own. Don't waste
the great creative potential of the absurd
and try to fit yourself like a little polyp of sentience
into the fossilized coral reefs of the past.
Go for the galaxies. What's to lose?
If you're going to fall, fall from a height.
Sooner a brilliant failure than a mediocre flight.
You'd be surprised at what the timing of one comet
falling out of the black halo around the sun
can mean to millions watching down below for signs.

Sensible shoes, or starmud on your winged heels,
Icarus or Neil Armstrong using his foot
to take a big step for humankind, walk your mile
standing up as if you were scanning for leopards,
your simian continuum at a fork in the road.
Danger is a capricious muse, but it can still
rivet you with inspiration. The hunters get eyes.
You grow an exoskeleton, then rib
the walls and rafters of the house and soon
the sun decides where the windows are going to go.
The Hox genes talk, and you're the topic of conversation.

You start listening as if
you were listening in on yourself,
all those voices and things
for words you don't understand,
bliss, butterflies, sorrows and assassins,
the victimized heroes of egoistic tragedies,
and the poetry in the pity of unexpurgated passion.
Lovers in the last throes of unmitigated catastrophe.
The rush and turmoil of the picture-music
going on all the time, shapeshifting
from one musical scene into another
and even you with your hands over your ears
sick of listening to the cosmic hiss,
climactic cymbals in the great performance
just waiting to come together like a hadron collider
deep underground where black holes in space
are born of the impact. If you're not already
too calculating, or mesmerized like a stone bird
by the snake-eyes of the dice, put some money
down on yourself as if you had one to lose,
and if for nothing more than the exercise,
kiss your prophetic skulls for luck and let them roll.

And when you love, don't approach a seabed on the moon
with a spoonful of water you can both sip from.
Return like an ocean with a convincing atmosphere.
If fools rush in where angels fear to tread
the angels will follow soon enough, with blessings
on the horns of your head. Learn
every gesture of her eyes like pictographic signage,
of her heart, a grammar for two, of her mind
be the no one to lift its veils, of her body,
apprentice yourself to the genius of her starmud.

Everything that lives is a gesture of the absurd
the imagination delights in elaborating
like people with the personalities of apple-trees
or the encyclopedic prolixity of the Burgess Shale.
I am is not the cornerstone of anything.
I imagine. And the wind is the threshold of the tent
that sheds the desolation of a self like a flower
that blooms in fire. Why water a mirage? Live large.
Squander stars on your vision of this, swallow the abyss
to keep your emptiness well fed, let your wisdom
be the private life of space, your time on earth
be passage and transformation, and your heart
cherish the bliss of all, animate and inanimate alike,
who suffer the same dream of being awake that you do.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Isn't It Obvious

Isn't it obvious by now
matter is the language
of the spirit
that expresses itself
as flowers and trees
and you and me
just as we are.

Matter is the mother-tongue
the alphabet
the periodic table of elements
of what can't be said about God
without resorting to signs
like water and oxygen.
The runes of the mountains.
The purple passages of the sea.
And the moon who couldn't find
anything beautiful in her bleakness
long before Samuel Beckett.

Out of an almost perfect vacuum
out of nothing
out of space
its thirteen atoms of hydrogen
per cubic centimetre
like magic beans
a longing for existence arises
spontaneously out of the abyss
as if it just remembered the name
of something that came back to it
like a lost thought
and happily blurted it out like the Big Bang.

God mind the abyss nothingness
the cosmic id
call it what you want
they're all just waves of the same sea
iridescent bubbles rising out of the depths
like independent cells with shapeshifting nuclei
or the membranous worlds in hyperspace
that start with a kiss
and end with a face in the window
staring out into the same old darkness
like a syllable of dust
in awe of the silver-tongued stars.

Mind does its best
to take a good guess
but it doesn't really matter
if you're right or wrong
because everything's
been clear and true all along.
The point is.
There's no point to this.

You just break into song
like a bird that can't help itself.
You gather everything into yourself
like a blackhole
with a creative affinity for stars
and a key turns deep inside you
and suddenly you're walking
through an infinite number of doors all at once
that have freed you from yourself
like a replicating cell.
Water looking at itself
with eyes of water.

Mind looking for mind with mind.
The snake trying to swallow its own head
as a sign from infinity
that it's going to take forever.
Illusions of light
burning like jewels
in the mirror of rain
rooted in the starmud
of the human brain
that thinks if it elaborates enough laws
it can hold the universe to account
for the cause of its behaviour.

Oceans roll off its tongue
like drops of water
from a blade of grass
and things keep on happening
like galaxies and starfish.

Be the bright vacancy
that shines out of your dark abundance
like a waterlily putting a white spin
on the death and decay of the swamp
that aspired to it
like the Buddha watching Venus in the dawn
or a magnanimous loveletter
as long as autumn
at the end of a mean affair
that sweeps it like stars and leaves
off the helical stairways to heaven forever
like the memory of mutant genes.

Be the eleven that comes of seven
and dot the dice with the starmaps
of the chance constellations
that rolled your way
like a genome
without asking for your advice.

If you were really down on your luck
you wouldn't be here to know it
so why not risk it all
like a universe in the beginning
in one throw against
the wall in a dark back alley
that's been breaking banks
and bringing the house down ever since
like an incommensurable decimal
that escaped the confines
of a whole number
that couldn't restrain it like a straitjacket?

Add yourself to things like zero
and amplify their effect
like a deep canyon foretells
the echo of things to come
that are well beyond your voice.
You don't need to choose
when there's nothing you can't refuse.
There's nothing to win or lose.

Time may well be
the adolescence of eternity
that puts cracks in its vinegar
and wrinkles its wine
but who wouldn't rather play
than work at being who they are?

Honour the wound with a scar
that's worthy of what you have suffered
to express yourself as you are
like a firefly in a palace of light
with a deep insight
into the black mirrors of dark matter
that multiply your afterlives like stars
in the eyes of the windows
in the house of life
that were broken from the inside out.

Astound your own vision
with the kind of crazy wisdom
that knows the crown of the universe
doubles as the dunce-cap of a cosmic egg
and say what you have to say
to add yourself to the conversation
like a bridge to the few bars of picture-music
that look and sound just like you
when you refused to crush
the head of the serpent under your heel
like the end of the long interminable road you were on
to salvation.

And you were amazed
when it struck you
like an elixir of life
emerging from the eclipse
of a dark venom
you didn't get up off the ground
like St. Paul who had been Saul of Tarsus.

And you weren't the Tiresias of either sex.
There was no blind catharsis.
But your heels sprouted wings
that mastered the wind like words
and the snake flew away like a dragon
with a lot in common with birds.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If You Had Any Compassion For Yourself

If you had any compassion for yourself,
others wouldn't have to suffer for you
and the world wouldn't show you
such a sad, woeful, wounded face.
You wouldn't see the withering leaves
and petals of the rose in autumn
as merely the scar tissue of its thorns.
In winter, mend your severance.
In spring, attend to your joys.
Like fishing nets and snow fences.
Like delphiniums in a garden bed
that's beginning to bloom like a starmap.

And you know that stranger inside
that's always witnessing everything we do
like a perfectly clear mirror, even in dreams?
Take another look, you might be surprised
at whose face you see at a meeting of eyes.

It's important not to pass judgement on yourself
for fear of condemning the world.
Show me a mirage that isn't a friend to water
or a wishing-well that resents a rainbow
for the pot of gold at the end, though
no one ever knows which end at the time.

Be kind to your delusive paradigms of life,
as you would an old skin you shed like the moon
when your serpent-fire could no longer contain itself
and broke out of its sacred chrysalis like a dragonfly
that had made itself a house of life out of matchsticks
and went up in flames like a snake with wings.

If you could see your life for what it is,
a teaching device for mentoring your own enlightenment
you might read the books of all the sages
rooted and flowering in you like the wisdom of a seed,
or the star in the ore of a panspermic universe
that was planted in you like the garden you've been from birth.

You might think that the wildflowers
are looking up at the stars to understand themselves
but, in truth, they're looking up at their roots
like rain reveres the lightning that engenders it.

You don't need to convince the wind of your freedom,
you've just got to ride it out to the end,
a friend to yourself, a worthy companion,
the intimate familiar of a cloud with a clear blue sky
or a subliminal lover of the darkness
love mushrooms up in like a moonrise.

If you knew how to nurture yourself
by breaking bread with the spirit of life within you
there wouldn't be millions of children
all over the world who will go hungry tonight.
They'd be licking the spoon with stealthy laughter
like cookie-batter out of the begging bowl of your heart.

Enlightenment isn't going to add one ray of light
or a single star to the night you're already shining in,
and whatever wavelength you're on, regardless
of the mystic polarities your potential flows between,
like dark matter and light, whether the journey you're on
is orange or infrared or the blue white violet of the Pleiades,
absorption or emission spectrum alike, no wave
of thought or mind, light, heart or water
is discontinuous with the oceanic consciousness
they rise upon, so why turn back to the source
like a solar flare to ask for directions from a starmap
that sent you out like a bubble in the multiverse to look for land.
You know, if you were more of an explorer
without a preconceived destination, more
of a space probe leaving the solar system periodically,
the rest of us wouldn't feel so lost or out of place at your table.

And even if you've made a vehicle
of the wheel of birth and death
and think you have a firm grasp on things
with your arm out the window in the driver's seat,
enjoying the passing view with the wind in your hair
without clinging to anything along the way
it still might be a good idea to learn how
to come down off your throne like a pauper
and change a flat tire now and again.

Your life is not an untimely interruption of eternity.
The eternal sky does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds,
and it even bends down sometimes toward the earth
to pick up Venus like a lost earring in the sunset.
It's your point of view that turns your back on yourself
like the retrograde motion of Mars, not
the planet itself playing rope tricks with your spinal cord.

Why go looking for your mind
like a lighthouse with a flashlight,
a flame for the source of the fire
or a star for the constellation it belongs to,
or the homeless for a home when everyone's
the foundation stone of their own habitation
wherever they are at the moment.

If you chase the wind, it will be you
that loses its breath like the atmosphere of the moon.
And when you run out of air, breathe light, breathe space,
and don't try to fix an expanding universe
to your nostrils like a bicycle pump
to get you back on the road again.
Or you'll find you're swimming out of your depths
to run to the rescue of an empty lifeboat
that's already unloaded its contents ashore.

If you don't want to go blind as a starless night
it's prescient to eclipse your blazing from time to time,
turn the lights down low, snuff the candle,
and learn to see in the dark there's just as much reflected
in the depths of the dark abundance
of a black mirror, though it takes time to focus,
than there is in the expansiveness
of the bright vacancy of the white
that takes things in at a glance.
The seed of a every glimpse of insight contains
the whole of the vision in advance,
and at the core of the apple of the issue
is a green star with dark auburn eyes
on the nightshift of the maternity wards of spring.

And o come on now, how long can you hang on
to being this box kite on a string
watching another phoenix ride your thermals
like inspiration on the wing, without feeling
like the premature ghost of yourself at the onset of spring,
all smoke, and no fire, your flightfeathers smouldering
like a pyre of wet maple leaves who haven't got the courage
to break into flames and flap their wings and rise above it all.
Better to be a weather balloon losing altitude like Icarus
or even a candling parachute taking the fall for all of us,
as daring said feathers and falling took flight,
than not risk falling through the black holes of life to paradise?

And what if I were to tell you're they're just the pupils
the light enters through like your eyes into your imagination
to be transformed from a visual into a vision,
the visible form into the invisible shining of the spirit
that raises everything in the known and unknown multiverse,
and the trees and the stars, the rocks and the clouds
are all counting on you to do this for them,
because this is what you're here for,
if you've ever wondered,
to raise them up to eye-level
with a human who knows the names of things
like parents know the names of their own children
running toward them down the street. It's how
we were meant to meet and greet the universe.

So if once, just once, for my sake, your sake, the sake
of the forsaken with their elbows on the windows of the world tonight
watching it all go by like stars on the firewalks beneath their noses,
that are not embedded in cement like a mausoleum
of movie-stars that refused to become fossils
before their shining was spent,
you took a chance, and that's all it would take,
one step forward with no return address,
to risk falling down at the dance,
and seven times down, eight times up,
such is life, get up on your own two good feet again
and discover you've got wings and spurs on your heels
the rest of us wouldn't feel so lame
when we came over to your place
like a riot of erratic fireflies to celebrate
the lightning moves of the rain that's dancing on our graves
where the dead lie down like the corpses of candles
knowing they'll be reincarnated
as wildflowers and Luna moths
because nothing that's ever given its life up
to this business of shining on everything alike
from a first magnitude star, to the night light in the hall
that shoos the ghosts away from their portraits on the wall
so the whole world can bloom in the tears of your eyes,
the fire in your heart, and in the human divinity
of the spirit of your imagination, can ever be put out
because every shadow of doubt
leads back the light that cast it
in love and sorrow, time and space
like the life and death mask of your own face.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Sky Or My Reflection?

The sky above me is blank
and it's empty!

It's not like the beautiful sky
that saw me
over the waterworks
beyond the fields
The sky
that merged into the water
and created a vaccuum in space
towards the left side of the bridge.
and for a moment,
ended the differences between the mighty heavens and the lowly earth
and for a moment,
made me feel the unity,
the being and the nothingness.

It's not like that dark starry sheet
that mesmerized me on the mountains,
and made me wonder
about the infinite galaxies
that might be staring back at us,
and made me forget the swirling road
in front of me,
and made me happy.

Its not like that womb of the virgin moon
that covered the ocean,
that transcended into the web of my thought
and very nearly inspired me to drown.

This sky, however, is blank
and dusty
and it seems to fade away
into an unknown oblivion.
It seems to have lost its reason to live.
It seems to be dejected, miserable.
...or maybe its me.
My eyes, that see it so!

Perhaps it is me
I have never been this gloomy

That night when the sky
was bright
with beautifully lit stars,
infinite shiny scars,
we had walked by the shore
tracing an infinte bewildering pattern
in the plains high above in space
the sky was happy, that night.

that morning when I woke up
and thought that in a petty bollywood flick
someone had given a nice remedy of calming the nerves
and I had stood before the rising sun
to rejuvenate my senses
The sky was a clear blue blanket
The sky was happy and full, that morning.

But today
when
I trudge on a dusty road,
on a dusty afternoon,
fatigued and tired,
finding a lost way
that leads to the place I call my home,
the sky is blank
and miserable
there are no birds up there today
no wisps of furry clouds
just vast dusty emptiness
no tender curves
just blunt edges

....or is it me,
my eyes, that see it so?

poem by Waqas Naeem
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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In You

In you I come to the end of roads,
and an alphabet of burning wings
falls from an indigo sky
like meteors trying to write
the unsayable in a slash of light,
in a language of luminous scars
the night beatifies with mystic knowledge
that wants to name you
so deeply in thresholds and stars
the charged silence
is giving birth to an indelible mouth,
a doorway of blood,
an ancient grammar of fire
the wind puts on like a robe
to scry the darkness for a voice
that could fill the goblets
of the moon's dead seas
with the wine of a radiant wound,
so much within me
already the tongue of a bell
that can taste you like blackberries.
The whole of you
in every single dropp of your eyes,
you are the black swan
of the eclipse that rares its reflection in water,
the dark orchid in the shadow of the dragon
that sways like a bell in the night,
even your absence a shape of cherishing,
a harvest of shadows beyond the light
of the lamp that burns for you.
Within the deepest abyss of myself
where the heart stands alone
like a single black pillar
in the twilight wasteland of the world,
a mysterious temple to the ultimacy
of having been here once
to suffer the passage of form and time,
everything a gesture of space
that thaws back into itself,
I have written your name
in the hourglass of my blood
like a whisper of secret ink
that once voiced the light to be
and shook the stars like wheat
out of its blind abundance
and will be remembered forever
as the first intimacy of the sea,
and there is the rumour
of a dream in the air,
the fragrance of an approach,
that out of an ocean of light
the tide will embody a woman
like the shore of an island
littered with fingertips and kisses
enmeshed like galaxies and starfish
in the exhalation of her veils
and our lips will meet like archers,
and our bodies will sing like arrows
sunk like orchards through the heart
and long after the last flame of life is shed,
the night will silence the birds
in the groves where we bled like poppies
to open the gates of the mystery
like keys and rain, or the rosary of black pearls
that chants its prayers to the night
like the slow alarm of autumn geese
in the eyes of a human face.
I try to say what can't be said,
pouring my spirit
into the wineskin of every word,
but my heart is a larger apple
than the bough of my voice can bear,
and the silence
that would erect temples everywhere like flowers
spun from the auroral silks of my soul
and perfume the air with the pollen of sacred fireflies,
every emotion a priest with a shaven head
to honour the moon
climbing the stairwell within me
of a million horizons at once
in every breathless step,
falls away behind me like the wake of a sinking ship
that lowers me into my coffin like a lifeboat
or a message in a bottle
that pleads like wine with the emptiness
for an alphabet that isn't in arrears to time
to say you to the night
in a lightning breath of life beyond
these elemental likenesses I carve
from a quarry of stars.
And I know I ask for immortal children
from a human womb,
and wide as my powers are
to exceed the sky with homing birds,
to adorn the dead branch with windows
that dazzle the roots of dawn,
I am the ashes of a black star in daylight,
a stone man with a chain for a tongue
when I try to swim like Atlantis
through the depths of your shining within
and the last word, the last life
to flash across my mind as I drown
again and again like a pulse
in the embrace of your beauty
is always the world as it is
before anything was said.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Should Lie In The Sun And Melt Into The Grass

I should lie in the sun and melt into the grass.
I listen to the bikers throttling up like chain-saws.
I sit here urgently trying not to pollute time.
A poem's got one foot on shore and one in the boat.
Let Atlantis rise or sink as it will. I can wait.
Even when it's calm, my heart is an idling storm
and every third thought is a voodoo doll
as it sees itself on the inside
behind the eyelid of a visionary eclipse.
Nothing to worry about. I'm not going to put
the eyes of the telescope out for looking at Lady Godiva.

Look at me tracking myself all over this paper,
mouse and bird letters in the snow at the base of a juniper.
How human it is to forgo yourself for a future that doesn't exist.
God, I wish there were more fireflies in my life than street signs.
Do you see the lack of meaning in how things are understood?
Thought will get you as far as a frog on a lily pad
but once you get there it's easy to see it's the lily that shines
in a whole other realm of language
that everyone understands but no one can speak.
I watch the honeysuckle burn the gate I came through.
I note the blue eye shadow of the damselfly
applying herself like a cosmetic pencil to the heavy petals
of the wild roses tangled in the fallen birch.

What a shock it would be if I were to take off my lifemask
and you were to discover me infinitely closer to you
like a dimension you hadn't detected in your awareness
than the light is to what you see when
you're sitting up in bed alone in the dark at three in the morning.
What a world, hey? What do you make of it?
The marvel and the horror and the mystery
and the way destiny manifestly unrolls like a lottery
for every living thing on a planet that occasionally plays
Russian roulette with the asteroids, and our tiny part in it all,
this mere speck of nothingness that can embody
in its formless spaces within, the superclustering of galaxies?
And the pain and the anger and the sorrow and the fear
and the way things change and disappear
as you look for the forms of your expectations everywhere
and everything's either an approximation or consolation
of what you can see so clearly, it burns the air?

I should lie down in the sun and melt into the grass,
but forgotten among buildings here, I am unbound
and not even the dead are as free as I am right now.
The whole universe is one big solid insight
where inanimate things are just another mode of motion
sitting in the room like Latin, dogpaddling in space and time,
and I'm tucked under your eyelids like a loveletter
you weren't expecting in a language that could read you
like any one of the seventy-two scholars of the Septuagint.
I've been listening to you for lightyears like leaves
listen for the wind and the rain and the moonlight
and what you have felt about being alive
to say hello and sing farewell, has been my feeling,
and when you have wept at the intransigence of angels
and the generosity of their expansive interventions,
I have been humbled by the eyes of my own exaltations.
And my feet swept out from under me
like an undertow of shadows on the moon.

Sister Lunacy, who can stand in the light
of these intensities and immensities for long
this vertigo of stars and skulls, bells and scars
without reeling in the delirium of simply being here
to witness them as if they somehow depended on us
to embody them in our hearts and minds and voids
as if they were no different from us than we were,
all waves of awareness the wind blows up on the ocean.
The imagination transforms everything in to us.
The stars reek of the eyes that have gazed up at them
like pyres and telescopes and censers, it's
in the hair of a comet like the smell of a lover,
it's what makes the meteorites as kissable
as the head of a snake to the lips of a gentle enemy.

Sister Lunacy, my heartfelt muse, my dark-side dakini,
what have you been dancing for all these years?
Have you been pearldiving among the castanets
for a moonrise in the mouth of a seashell
that could sing to you like the ocean you're lost upon?
You're the station every seeker gets to
on a pilgrimage he doesn't know he's taking
where he damns the consequences and blessings alike
and enters into the spiritual life as a rebel of compassion
as he addresses himself to what's arrayed before him
as if there were only one voice between himself and another
like a bridge that flows, like a star
that doesn't drown in your eye like a firefly.
And if there were anything I could ever say I was
it would have to be this just as it is, this
endlessness I keep being poured out into
as if my heart were the only waterclock I could live by
and disembodied space the only medium
that could accommodate my shapeshifting adaptations
like goldfish coming to the surface to feed on the stars.

Sister Lunacy, the moon reaches down to the roots of the river reeds
and the catfish thrive among the wild rice in the shallows,
and eyes in the darkness high overhead, as if
someone shattered a mirror into a billion bits of awareness
see you standing on your barren precipice
and long to know what it is you're thinking.
In order to understand you must become the thing itself.
You must abdicate your own presence to be
remotely at peace with the world, it's a strawdog anyway,
and it burns too fast to be much of a lighthouse.
And o my darkness, there are so many skins you have yet to shed
like the moon trying on a wardrobe of water
laying her gown across the lake like an early frost of sequins.
I shall come to you at first as a premonition
as lightly as a cloud touches the mountain, an aberrant insight,
a synchronistic intuition of our simultaneity,
and in your breath my breath shall be an atmosphere
and in your eye my eye shall lavish the most intimate of stars,
and in your blood my blood shall be the poppy and the rose.

Sister Lunacy, even after the house has burnt to the ground
my passion stands like a blackened doorway in the rain
and though I look at you through a broken window,
the moon is whole, and the sky is not torn or bruised.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Enraptured By The All-Inclusive Mystic Specificity

Enraptured by the all-inclusive mystic specificity
of terrestrial things.
Appalled by the inhumanity of the way
humans can so easily inflict
what they fear the most
upon each other
as if there were some strange alien duty
in their reptilian cruelty,
some small nugget of the meteor that struck the earth
back in the late Triassic
that we've retained like an R-complex
savagely jealous of the rest of the brain.
I can get along without matter
as does most of the universe
and the eastern dawns of Asia do
but mind and form are a different issue.
When water thinks deeply
about what it might be
it's always a sea
with a small stream of consciousness running into it like me.
It's a way of picturing the inconceivable for a moment
when time wants to be seen
walking in a world of forms
it effaces like the meaning of dreams.
A provisional scaffolding of smoke
to climb up on and paint
the miraculous birth of water
before it became a saint.
I've sat around the old fires
of autumn ghosts on a distant hillside
and listened to the stories they tell
of how wild and free words were
to name things in the garden as they liked
until God discovered his voice.
And flowers and stars
were no longer mystic gestures
of existential glee
that expressed themselves spontaneously
as if the gene-pool of the fireflies
were always dreaming up
new myths to explain to the constellations
how they came to arise
over the event horizons
of our cosmic windowsills
after so many years of longing,
but a choice they're compelled to make
atom by atom
star by star
as if they were trying to say
something as enduring and meaningful
as an aqueduct flatlining
like a waterclock without a pulse to speak of.
The sun doesn't tell the wildflowers where to grow.
You can't dispel the mystery of being here at all
with the things you think you know.
Let go.
Let go.
Let go.
There's no freedom in a fist.
There's no captive in an open hand.
There's no way to get a grasp on space
without giving it your face.
You can look at life as if it were all absurd.
Credo ergo absurdum.
I believe because it's absurd
according to St. Jerome.
Or you can venture further from home than that
and explore life as if there were nothing to understand
because you already do
or you wouldn't be you
trying to give the word
to every new creation
as if the last thing you wrote
like hieroglyphics in quicksand
kept returning to where it began
like the pearls of wisdom
that come of all these
cosmic grains of the universe
that agitate the tongue of the absurd
into saying something crazy to the moon
she's never heard before.
All things are modes of expression
but the muse doesn't open her door
to the pimps of inspiration
who think she's a whore.
And it's a death worse than neglect
to turn your calling into a project
and build a palace of ice in the desert
to house your accomplishments
like snowflakes in a furnace.
Say what you must say
as if the words weren't your own
but the natural eloquence of the lifestream
saying the moonlight in passing.
Like a man on a long dark road
in an unknown country
who talks to himself
as if he weren't alone with everything
like a foreign language
that asks him his name
and he says it in a way
it can't forget
that water is wave
fire is flame
air is wind
earth is dirt
body is flesh
mind is form
and the seven sisters of the Pleiades
going down over the rooftops
of the abandoned farm
and the roses that have kept on growing
and the hills that have learned
to keep things to themselves
and the gate that hangs by one hinge
like last year
now there's nothing
to keep in or out
are all radically rooted
in what must disappear
in the now and here
of the mysterium tremendum
in order to become
you and I and us and them
looking for signs
of where we come from
to ratify our intellectual pursuits
though our original home
is the same long road
we've been walking for years
that still clings like starmud to our boots
that keep tracking us
like homeless silver thresholds
and the Milky Ways of garden snails
into the house of life.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If You Could See

If you could see into the nature of a single thought,
what it really is, though you think you know already,
if you could for one moment as old as the world
stop casting all these handshadows on the moon
as if they were the birds and bedrock of your intelligence,
as if the waves hauled the sea around in chains,
as if the leaves were a language without roots,
you would stop reading yourself like a prophecy in your own bones,
and be brought to your knees like a bull
penetrated by the seven swords of insight
and realize the unwitnessed clarity of the emptiness
that suggested you to you out of its dark abundance
is also the bright vacancy of this world that keeps you company.
All these intimate secrets of yourself
you keep posting to the sky like stars
or the single shoes and milkcartons of the missing
when you go looking for yourself like knowledge
in the eyeless spirit's lost and found;
why don't you, just for once and ever,
treat yourself to a season of your own, and shed them;
open your fist like a tree and let them go into the big O of omega,
hold yourself up like a candle to a black hole
and see what's deep inside
when the world's turned inside out
like a gallery at night without pictures?
If you listen, if you learn to listen deeply
with your eyes and your blood
with the intensity and focus of a hunting cat,
you can hear the crazy keys to freedom
jingling everywhere like flowers jailed by the rain
or the sun held for ransom in the siloes of the brain
the moon ploughs and seeds with thoughts of shining.
Once you stop looking for continuity in the emptiness
you'll come to realize that emptiness
is the fountain-mouth of its own theme
and it's the dream not the dreamer that's in play
when a fish suddenly jumps like a thought
and there are ripples on the moon.
Who comes like an explorer without a flag
before an undiscovered sea of light
and stands before it like a spoon?
Raise the well of your darkest night up to your lips
and drink it drier than the eyes
of the lover who gave up crying over you
once she opened up like the mouth of a river
and entrusted herself like an aimless thought to the sea.
Hold yourself up like the Hubble
to the vastness of the darkness and the shining
to the largesse of the night in its open-handed radiance,
to the imageless wisdom of the mother you don't know
who abides in your seeing like a compassionate shadow
and the intangible mystery of the mother of forms that you do,
and drink yourself down to the last star
to ever lay eyes upon you.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Undevoted, Free, And Wild

Undevoted, free, and wild,
no one to answer to, no one to answer for,
the urns shattered, and the ashes scattered,
and the fire liberated to perfect its own combustion
and the stars without anyone to walk home,
and the solitude silent, dark, and deep, cool
as the bliss of a wine-cellar talking in its sleep,
I have grown mad in the heat of the purple sun.
I have spoken from the mouths of the caves in the desert
and not expected the echo of my own voice
to return to me like a pilgrim stashing a gnostic gospel
deep in the sand, without realizing
how much closer to the stars dirt is than I am.

When you're no one but the wind in disguise
you don' need to be humble, you don't need to wise,
nothing to trust, and no one to rely on,
you can watch the dead at night
streaming toward Orion
like a blue-white ribbon of light
undoing the gift wrappings off the bodies and eyes
of people who can see and be again.

And you know it comes to everyone
like a nebular orchid with a fragrance of stars,
that the Sahara will green and bloom again
and the wind sing hymns to the grass
and the gazelles sport their elegant legs,
adolescents in the spring brush,
running like violins succulent with beginnings,
and it doesn't matter you're alone out here
listening to the ashes of a mirage
make up legends to tell the fire
about its ancestors buried on the moon anonymously
and how their blood once stained the earth
like a scarlet letter even the stars couldn't wash off.

The mystic anti-hero of my own dragon myth
I exalt in my isolation like a shriek of revolution
and overthrow myself like a book in the flames
to keep something I don't understand alive in me
as if I had to keep on dying to sustain myself
and the distinction between one and the other were lost upon life.
It's a touch, it's a feel, it's a hole in veil
with one eye looking out at me to see
if I've intensified the dark enough to break into stars,
if I can unravel my heart like smoke like water like fire
and perfectly disappear into the atmosphere of my dispersal
without a shudder of farewell to the masks I wore like scales.
Not to be constrained by even so much as
the single thread of a straitjacket, the husk
of an abandoned sanctuary left to the imagination
of the hermetic flowers to do with as they wish.

I shriek freedom across the heavens like the death cry
of a hawk waking the valley up in the morning.
I whisper to the water things the wind was never meant to hear.
So faithful to my calling, I lead those who come, away from me,
as if it were the perennial custom of the universe
to meet like this for a moment in time and space
and then disperse into the darkness alone like a unlit candle.
I'm a riot of fools in the sublimity of the presence within me
that elates the crazy wisdom of my spontaneous ignitions
and schools the black lightning of its absence
in the folly of trying to enclose my spirit in gates
like a candle in the niche of a tempestuous vision.

Yeeeeeeessssss, I scream into the face of nothing
like the efoliant scripture of my confession and protest
that life doesn't need an alibi to live and die by,
no extraneous, no outer, no other, no object, no subject
no flying buttress to act as a bridge
over a flowing river of Gothic stone,
no strong tree standing on its own to cut down
and carve into a crutch, no cork to keep the ocean out,
no bucket to bail the moonlight out of the lifeboat,
no jade Buddha to make your supplications to,
no footprints on the water Jesus walked,
no cave in Ramadan to receive the angel of light,
no Kabbalah to baffle your way through the night,
no Schmidt-Cassegrain reflecting telescopes
on clock driven equatorial mounts geared to the heavens
to thread the golden needle of the mystery
without any knots in your spinal cord,
to penetrate the vulva of the sea like a sacred shell
that once gathered armies on a burning hillside
to contest their revelations with the tongues of swords.

I shall tell you, my brother, I shall hasten to you my sister
like moonlight through your window, I shall not
hold back from you the least shadow of the furthest star
releasing its dark wisdom like the black doves
of its own excruciating ashes glowing like the pain
of horrendous transformations into light.
I shall not bring you the skins of the dragons I've shed
but inspire you with a fire you've never been burned by before,
a spiritual immolation into a godhead without a metaphor
to guide you by, a torch you can't drown in your tears,
a long firewalk down to a river of stars,
and there you shall cross on a burning life raft
of the bones you've been carrying around for lightyears like a body.

And it's a heresy of silence to say, but there
you shall you shall lie down in the nocturnal emptiness
in the long blue seagrass of the moon
and empower out of your own creative abundance
whatever worlds your longing inspires you to embrace
to amuse the bright vacancy of eternity with time, like love,
and the dark abundance of unperishing potential
with space, like wisdom, and the clear light of the void
and the unspeakable absence of any other voice
to ruin the silence with the bliss and sorrow of seeking
the mystic night you found within you longing like a bird
for the stillness to write it like a lyric of the wind,
a passage of blood through the labyrinth of the heart,
a shadow against the moonrise of a compassionate awareness
there's a divinity that sings like a human
in the heart of everything that breaks its long fast of nothing
with praise and celebration, with fire and light and rain
with the firstt sacred syllables to touch the lips
of the black rose charred in the heart of the dragon, like poetry.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Bared Of Its Leaves Like Native Peace Treaties

Bared of its leaves like native peace treaties
with the westerlies who never kept them,
the last red planet of the chokecherry falls
into the claws of a black squirrel eyeing it
like a space rover looking for life on Mars.
O the myriad worlds you can see in a single mystic detail.
Bring me a hair of God and I'll pass through it
like a wormhole into the dark matter of the mind
going on behind the light like vital events
that are deeper than skin and blood on stage.

Just count the number of pathways through the woods
compared to the roads to know whether
you're in a good space or not. If people
wander to work in their own good time
or rush from one abyss to another
trying to get ahead of an ion waterclock.
Take the solitude out of society
and there's not much left worth talking about.
So I enjoin the silence to keep the acuity of my wonder
sharp as the thorns of a heart with nothing left to guard
after the wild rose ran off in one of her phases with the moon.

I have long conversations with the stars
without a word or a gesture of grammar being said
in either of our mother-tongues that can't be understood
immediately, without the intermediary of a metaphor
or a dictionary that gets to the roots of things
like a star-nosed mole with no flowers in its soul.
No end of the distance between us when you measure it in miles
but insight travels faster than the speed of light
and both of us are shining in the same dark space
like an eye looking back at itself from a long way off.

The night is lonely, cold, and ageing but there's a fire
blazing in my heartwood the trees huddle around
as the shadows of the flames dart from trunk to trunk
with the alacrity and cunning of a wolf
that knows it's the last of its kind in these darkening hills
to embody the magic of its elders in its way of life.
Fear is the mind-killer. So I stay enthroned
by the stone navel of my firepit flowering
all around me like the corona of the sun at midnight
just to say I know the protocols of being as well as the rocks
when I rise to embrace strangers in my solitude
as the new spiritual familiars that will accompany me
on my long firewalk to the stars that are never
any further away than my future is from my past
or now is from here to there every step of the path

The stars spin their webs in the crowns of the trees
into dreamcatchers with mythically inflated origins
that answer the paradigms of the constellations
by connecting the dots like wild grape vines
to the shapeshifting starmaps of the mind
I keep shedding like leaves and feathers and scales
to understand the underlying scaffoldings and skeletons
I climb up on like monkey bars
to repaint creation in everybody's image
but my own. My fire. My heart. I'm the host
of an expansive space that's generous enough
to embody it all without standing in jubilation
like an angel in the doorway as if there were
somebody home no one could account for.

A stranger in the thirteenth house of a misbegotten zodiac
of birthmarks driven out into the wilderness
like maniacs, prophets, poets and astronomical wise men
as scapegoats for the fate of upper class tattoos
that don't wash off any easier than the wind
teaching the stars that have just learned how to print
this cursive script I'm writing in like a mindstream
punctuating its passage with toadstools and pine-cones,
chokecherries, black walnuts, wild crab apples
and shepherd moons in decaying orbits around
the black hole at the center of the universe
we're all attached to like hinges to a gate
that only has to swing open once to everything
and it's good for as many lifetimes as you want to go through
like a labyrinth of exits leading into a clearing
deep within your heart where nothing exists
and yet inconceivably everything insists upon shining.

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

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