Just Before Dawn Venus In Leo Between The Moon And The Beehive Nebula
Just before dawn Venus in Leo between the moon and the Beehive Nebula.
The chimney of the old shoe factory reflected
like a toppled obsidian obelisk in the Tay River.
Couldn't sleep. Now I'm heading home with the bats and the ghosts.
I've firewalked enough tonight, and the coals are beginning to dim
in the ashen light of my waning spirits.
The Perth Soap Factory still hasn't managed to imperialize
the fragrance of the last of the wildflowers crowding
the crumbling parking lots and leftover wedges of field,
but it's trying. I envy a squirrel its quick Zen energy.
And three crows think they know something about me.
Happens a lot in a small town, as I know you know,
because someone you know told me. You must think
I'm crazy talking to the air as if it were you,
but even out here, you've been inside of me all night,
and now it's time to make some space for you beside me.
I like the feline water sylphs that follow me home
like feral cats in the early morning when there's dew
on the brass heritage plaques of the lawyer's offices
with ultramarine peacock's eyes waxing in the windows.
I've been learning to play Jeremy's violin on my spinal cord all night
to see if I can get you up and dancing like a kite with no strings
in a gust of stars. But so far all I've managed in my solitude
with you as my intriguing familiar is a happy kind of hangover
from a seance just you and I attended. But I'll get better.
You'll see. I'll master this new medium of picture-music
half way between witchcraft and mystery. And beyond
if you want to walk with me that far. Or fly, if that suits you better.
Pick a star. Or the softer option of a nebula, knowing you
as I'm beginning to. Alcyone in the Pleiades, perhaps.
Or maybe an unknown destination that exceeds
the wavelengths of the speed bumps of the asphalt starmaps.
I'll go there with you. And I'm as loyal as a skull.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Related quotes
Let Go Of My Mind, Like A Kite, Like A Snake
Let go of my mind like a kite, like a snake
I've grabbed by the tail to make a daisy chain of eternity.
Take the bit out of the Great Square of Pegasus
and pour myself out like the billions of stars in the Milky Way.
I'm hemorrhaging poetry. I'm bleeding to death like a rose.
Let it go, let it go, let it go. Blood knows its own way home.
I'm not weaving straightjackets of circumstantial vetch
into an embroidered chrysalis that never opens up.
I'm not trying to pour the sea back into the cup of the moon.
There's more to me than I could ever drink up.
You can put a burning candle in the window and wait for me
but I'm going to follow the smoke wherever it leads
like stardust on the chalkboard of accelerated space
in a burning schoolhouse that had nothing much to teach
about the unknown in the first place. Order's
only a special mode of chaos like a straight line
is a special form of a curve, and there are snakepits
of wavelengths that only serve as flying carpets
growing thin under the windows the dragons look through
like dark energies that can turn space to glass
like gravitational eyes bending the light to their point of view
as if fire were as good a medium as water to see through.
I'm shucking the worlds off my fur like a wolf
on the far side of the river I've just swum across
and I'm howling at the moon reflected in every single dropp
as if I were a mad multiverse of permutations and combinations
that could be everywhere at once, above the timberline
where I can't be hunted into extinction like a black dwarf
that knows there's another kind of shining on the inside
deeper than the obvious scintillance when the moon
plays the lake like the nightbird of a lonely harpsichord in vain.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Putting It Down To Some Impact On My Heart
Putting it down to some impact on my heart
in my sleep, this sunny afternoon edged
with cold anger like a residual hangover
from some dream I don't remember having.
Did you visit me again last night like an albino nightmare?
Was Venus in Virgo? Were we unaligned?
Was I talking through a window embedded
in heritage brick? Did I mutter things at the sky
that were indignantly unjust without meaning to?
I wonder if the stars after all these light years
they took to get to my heart, are completely happy
with an afterlife without flowers or hermit thrushes.
Who knows why anybody looks back on their past
and risks turning into a pillar of salt,
or returning to the dead by default
but did you let go of my hand again last night?
I'm sick of your absence always being the prelude
to my dismemberment. And those eyes
that always rebuke my poverty as if they'd
been bathing in jewels. Those spiked stars
you bait like red meat you leave out for polar bears.
The brittle sensibilities of a neglected ice age.
Did you break your windows again like a frozen lake
to get at the waters of life in your mindstream?
I hate it when the light goes unappreciated
but this soulless blue of a late autumn afternoon
is beginning to get on my nerves
like a Hallmark greeting card that's chewed
all the real flavour of life out of its feelings like gum
masticating its words for public consumption.
I feel I'm letting some prophecy down somewhere
as if I were misreading the tea leaves at the bottom
of the moon cup of my prophetic skull.
The gash of first crescent early this morning.
A lunar hair on the shoulder of the dawn that swears
it wasn't untrue to the sun the Luciferian morning star
is leading on as if a new fool were born every day.
No matter. By the time I was ready for sleep
I expected a lot less of you than anyone's ever delivered.
And I'll be ok in a while, and you'll hate me for it
when your heart turns into a toxic arrowhead
that didn't have any effect. Just this Clovis point
to say you'd been here once and been wiped out
with the larger mammals of North America
in the dust bowl of another sudden flash freeze.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Faceless This Time Of Night
Faceless this time of night, my skin evaporates like dry ice
into a deepening sense of containment
by a dark space with distant cities of light
trying to colonize the Pythagorean fireflies of Cretona,
or the shimmering mirage of Port Angeles
dancing like a seance at the foot of the mountains
across a hundred miles of the Georgia Strait at night,
the immensity of the freedom that dwarfs the stars
with the sheer magnitude of the labour before them.
The fragility of a spinal cord traversing the abyss
of a one-stringed box guitar made of cardboard
when you were a kid, the mere filament
of an anachronistic light bulb with the lifespan
of the wick of an apostate candle at a black mass,
disappointed it wasn't born a flower,
but a weed more at home among the stars
that uprooted it from its intimacy with the earth
like a kindred spirit of light
that must wander through its own solitude
like music at night from an open window
in the life of the mind to reach out to them
like a tendril of smoke from the embering nugget
of the heart nesting in a private crown of fire
that abdicated its empire of ashes for a single note
of the night bird's longing to sing back up
like a bell for a sad universe that's always on the road.
I hear crying in the distance, the dark lament of the hills.
The night creek weeping unseen through hidden valleys.
I can taste the deaths and sorrows, the broken promises
of the rain, drifting like the fragrance of a waterlily
like a star reflected on the undivined watershed of its tears
saturating the air. Matter a condensation of the light,
I can feel life moving through this body, this flesh,
this scrap of starmud, a rush of water, a gust of stars,
a purple passage of blood, a breath of fire and wind,
and the earth, not solid, but real, animating all my limbs,
my vital organs like the ripening fruit of a rootless tree
as if time wept like a bell in me as well, and its tears,
heavy with the weight of too many separations,
yet wise in the ways of the sky, sweetened the fall to come.
poem by Patrick White
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That one star
Remember that summer, i used to lie down on the grass.
In the countryside, i used to watch the stars every night.
Were always lots of stars in the dark blue sky,
Were always rich lightened in the deep sky.
And there was only one star that i liked.
Was in different places everyday night,
But i would find it every time.
And there was one special star that i wondered.
Was the lightest one in my eyes,
But no one else could find it.
That one star stayed in my memories,
That one star is still in my mind.
Too far to catch it,
Too close to run away from it.
Every night it would appear in the sky.
Every day it would disappear in the light.
Someday i couldn't wait for the night.
Then i used to pray for the night to come quickly.
Still i see that one star,
Even on the another side of the earth.
Still i see that one star,
Even in the middle of my dream.
That one star never left me.
That one star never came close.
Just like in the beginning,
Same in the end.
That one star.
That one star.
poem by Sukhee Bukhbat
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Factory
Early in the morning factory whistle blows,
Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes,
Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light,
Its the working, the working, just the working life.
Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain,
I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain,
Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life,
The working, the working, just the working life.
End of the day, factory whistle cries,
Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes.
And you just better believe, boy, somebodys gonna get hurt tonight,
Its the working, the working, just the working life.
song performed by by Bruce Springsteen
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Im A Small & Lonely Light
(farrar/best)
The stairs are dark and silent
The morning cold and gray
A last look at the things I knew
And slowly turn away
And as I watch the scenery unwind
My childhood slips a hundred miles behind
Leave the bus in houston
Walk around the town
But all the strange, unfriendly faces
Seem to get me down
And in the park where little children play
I sit and watch the dying of the day
Im a small and lonely light
A bird thats lost in flight
And its too late at night to go home
Im a tall and weary kite
A face thats out of sight
And its too late at night to go home
Always had the good life
Never felt unsure
But now the good lifes not enough
There must be something more
And so I sit and shiver in the dawn
And watch the world and wait to be reborn
Im a small and lonely light
A bird thats lost in flight
And its too late at night to go home
Im a tall and weary kite
A face thats out of sight
And its too late at night to go home
Too late at night to go home
But Ive talked too long my friend
song performed by by Olivia Newton-John
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I'm A Small And Lonely Light
The stairs are dark and silent
The morning cold and gray
A last look at the things I knew
And slowly turn away
And as I watch the scenery unwind
My childhood slips a hundred miles behind
Leave the bus in Houston
Walk around the town
But all the strange, unfriendly faces
Seem to get me down
And in the park where little children play
I sit and watch the dying of the day
I'm a small and lonely light
A bird that's lost in flight
And it's too late at night to go home
I'm a tall and weary kite
A face that's out of sight
And it's too late at night to go home
Always had the good life
Never felt unsure
But now the good life's not enough
There must be something more
And so I sit and shiver in the dawn
And watch the world and wait to be reborn
I'm a small and lonely light
A bird that's lost in flight
And it's too late at night to go home
I'm a tall and weary kite
A face that's out of sight
And it's too late at night to go home
Too late at night to go home
But I've talked too long my friend
song performed by by Olivia Newton-John
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Innocent As Gravity And It's Raining
Innocent as gravity and it's raining.
Trying to paint a Monarch butterfly into a starscape
where all the wavelengths have been woven
by a third eye into a spider web. This morning
the left and right hemispheres of my brain
are separated like an hourglass undergoing
the meiosis of galaxies whose lustre's greyed
by the senile pearl of the sky. I want to play
aspirationally like fireflies among the stars,
but a gust of shadows has snuffed all the candles
and if I'm seeing stars at all, it's like a rainbow
wearing a Joseph's coat of colours
at the bottom of a well that hasn't granted a wish in awhile.
My heart's a loom of dissonant wavelengths
trying to weave my bloodstream like a carpet
it can fly away on braiding all these weak threads
and the light of all these images they carry
like the genomes of the souls of the dead
into the d.n.a. of a stronger spinal cord
I can use like a rope to climb up to the sky and beyond.
All my gravitational lensing has turned into bells of glass
and I'm walking on the splinters and plinths
of things that have come and passed, bearing these urns
transmigrationally like amphorae on a shipwreck
to the bottom of a subconscious watershed.
More sad than depressed, but dark just the same
as if all the dazzling suns and lapidary moons
with stars in their eyes that went into the wine
had just closed them in eclipse. Gone back to sleep
as it seems so many flowers to dream a better dream.
What need of my acceptance of what comes or doesn't
when my denial or assent are absorbed in its presence?
As if I had a say in my own solitude. Or the birds
could get in the way of their own singing. Or the rain
could choose the window pane it wanted to look through.
However I labour to refute it, my awareness
is as spontaneously inclusive as time and space,
or closer to home, the sea its own weather, foul or fair.
I can't extinguish the desert that burns within me
in a mirage of water, nor drown the stars in my tears
like the tiny insects that sometimes fly into my eyes
that wash their wings out like sodden punctuation marks
uprooted like sprouting seeds in a sudden flashflood of insight.
I can't catch up to the light. And I can't run from it.
Whether it stings like a nettle or soothes like an aloe
it's always the muse, the mysterium of here and now, as it is,
firefly, or dragon that brings the rain, that I follow
in this discipline of disobedience to what I know and let go of
so that it rains just as often from below as it does from above.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Nebula
Disconnect and let me drift until my upside down is right side in
Society must let the artist go, to wander off into the nebula
Upon return, I conjure what was seen
I let it pulse and boil within my limbs
I lay my pencil to the porous page, and let my lunatic indulge itself
Wander off into your nebula, see your nectarine of multiplicity
Cum like orgasmatron on overdrive
Wander in off to your nebula
Your tangerine of electricity is ripe and on a vine, so pick your prize!
Do you enjoy your sight inside? in little, black book do I confide!
song performed by by Incubus
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Begining To See The Light
Well, Im beginning to see the light.
Well, Im beginning to see the light.
Some people work very hard,
But still they never get it right.
Well, Im beginning to see the light.
I wanna tell all you people, now.
Now, now, baby, Im beginning to see the light.
Hey, now, baby, Im beginning to see the light.
Wine in the mornin, and some breakfast at night.
Well, Im beginning to see the light.
Here we go again, playing the fool again.
Here we go again, acting hard again.
All right!
Well, Im beginning to see the light!
I wanna tell you, ooh-oh-oh!
Hey, now, baby, Im beginning to see the light!
It comes very softly now.
I wore my teeth in my hands so I could miss the hell of a night.
Hey! well, Im beginning to see the light!
Now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, baby,
Im beginning to see the light, now!
It comes softer!
Hey, now, baby, Im beginning to see the light.
I met myself in a dream, and I just want to tell you,
Everything was alright.
Hey, now, baby, Im beginning to see the light.
Here comes two of you.
Which one will you choose?
One is black and one is blue,
Dont know just, what to do.
Alright!
Well, Im beginning to see the light, oh, now, here she comes!
Hey, yeah, baby, Im beginning to see the light!
Oh-ahhhh!
Some people work very hard,
But still they never get it right.
Well, Im begiing to see the light.
Ah, its getting a little softer, maybe, in there.
Now, now, baby, Im beginning to see the light.
Ah, its coming around again,
Hey, now, now, now, baby, Im beginning to see the light.
One more time.
There are problems in these times,
But, woo!, none of them are mine!
Oh, baby, Im beginning to see the light.
Here we go again,
I thought that you were my friend.
Here we go again,
I thought that you were my friend.
How does it feel, to be loved?
How does it feel, to be loved?
song performed by by Velvet Underground
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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These Days, This Late At Night
These days, this late at night, I'm usually a lone wolf sage
high above the timberline in a sanctuary of solitude
that occasionally breaks the silence
with the elegaic echo of the anquished shriek of a hawk
wheeling in the abyss like the stars overhead
feeling as if its flightfeathers just caught fire
and for a few brief moments no longer
than the wingspan of a wavelength
it was shining like them and there were jewels
like a woman's eyes cracking the rock
of a heart that's been more of an asteroid
than habitable planet with a few ancestral skulls of its own
for moons and a creative atmosphere where the clouds
can move mountains to tears with the beauty
of what can bloom spontaneously out of nothing
like wildflowers strewn all over the starfields
as if they were expecting someone to come
of the things we really feel are worth crying for.
These days, this time of night, I delight
in looking for the most beautiful nocturnal metaphors
I can compare to you inside and out and beyond both
like a spirit of female serpent fire that haunts me
into paying tribute to her like a muse
who's beginning to possess me like the sea does
when the moon swims out to practise witchcraft
on a lonely island retreat that sings to itself at night.
Even from here, I can hear the song being carried
across the light years like the dove of a deep lament
she keeps like the wind in a locket the size
of the noose around her neck, and the flying carpet
under her feet all that's between her
and firewalking on stars like a burning kite
someone let go of like the umbilical cord
of a lifeboat that had come unmoored in a lunar storm.
Maybe I'm just fossil hunting on the moon
I've been howling at all these years
over the bone pits of dark wisdom I've dug up
on the far side of a black mirror
that doesn't insult your seeing with a night light.
But I swear sometimes when I think of you,
what lies like an archives in the riverbeds
of the sedimentary starmud you put back down
like a book you've read eras of time before,
and look out the window like a door
where you don't have to leave your body
on the threshold like shoes at the edge of the sea
when you walk into your own depths up over your head
to see if your eyes can still swim
with the dolphins and the stars and the flying fish
you left in your wake like a locust plague of urgent telegrams.
I know we're still more strangers to each other
than intimates, that there maybe watersheds
we have in common, and maybe it's still too early
for the fountains to come into blossom yet
as the last stars of the season become
the chandeliers of the morning stars of the next
like dusky candles going out in the blue light of the dawn.
And maybe there are ladders of fire to paradise
trembling like crutches on the edge of a shaky precipice
trying to climb higher than its cloud cover
to break into light like the Pleiades
just above the moon and Jupiter on a good seeing night,
but these days, this late at night, I've been inhaling
a lyrical lantern of oxygen and breathing out stars
like the circumpolar constellation of a healing dragon
pole-dancing with the caduceus of the celestial axis of the earth.
I'm laired with the unmarrowed riddles of bones of my own
I'm trying to read like the yarrow sticks
of a bird skeleton with rose-arbour wings
to see if the light I sense approaching out of the dark
is a mirage of fireflies disguised as a lightning bolt
or the soul mate of a rogue planet
that wants to ghost dance around the third eye
of a first magnitude star that doesn't have any idea
of what I'm doing up here, nor how far
a whisper of light away can seem
to a man fully awake these days, this late at night,
writing in the shadows cast by the candelabra
of a homeless zodiac off the beaten path
like the first draft a waking dream
sleepwalking beside me like the dakini
of a star struck maniac lifting the veils
of the inconceivable like the paint rags
of the night vision shining in the eyes behind them
that even in the dark make everything seem
so incredibly counter-intuitive and lucidly beautiful
I'd be truly out of my mind, like a crystal cranium
that's lost touch with its own translucency
if I didn't find it wholly believable
down to the last mystic detail my enlightened lunacy
howling like a wolf seer at the rising of a new moon
out of a valley where I can hear the distant barking
of the seeing-eye dog that follows Orion around
like a traffic light for the blind compared
to the way you light me up like the Pleiades
whenever I'm trying to get a parallactic fix
on your radiance dancing like a cult of fireflies
on the event horizons of my prophetic skull.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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And It's Not Hard To See I'm Wandering In A Dry Abyss
And it's not hard to see I'm wandering in a dry abyss
trying to squeeze tears as readily out of the stars as the desert
that turns everything that lives here into a chronic exile.
Don't know if I'm talking to a mirage, a reflection of some
aspect of the dark side of the moon I can't see from here,
an eidolon, a fractal of my self-similarity, a 3D projection
of my pineal gland emanating images into a creatively holographic space
and one of them is wearing your face like smoke from a fire
I'm sitting around like a frog at the autumnal equinox
beside a burning waterlily with a parched mouth.
Matters a lot, but that's ok. I've had visitations before
and I know this kind of seance can either go ethereal or carnate
and sometimes, though it's a lottery, not a spiritual discipline, both.
If my solitude talks to its own echo like a water sylph
in a housewell full of stars, who's to say that isn't
my kind of telescope? That some eyes can see further
than mirrors and lenses, and space is riddled with them
like the golden ratios behind galaxies and black holes
I keep throwing sunflower seeds into hoping they'll root and bloom.
I am immensely aware of my inconsequence in the world,
and the fact that there's vanity even in that. No matter.
As close to selfless as I want to get for awhile.
I paint a lot. I write even more. But the best things I see
come to me spontaneously in the early morning
before the light turns apostate at noon, and late at night
when I'm haunting the Tay River with the willows,
or watching lightning in a tantric rage above the rooftops of Perth.
And more than once I've talked my ghost
back into the grave before dawn evaporated us both
like morning stars in the mist on a lake rising
like the wild swans of the moon above the ragged elms.
Within me, where the universe lives, you're a muse
of dark energy expanding the starfields like space into the unknown,
and I'm growing new eyes like the T Tauri stars in the Pleiades,
and I'm digging up my own fossils in the bone pits
on the shepherd moons of all my most sacred annihilations,
and I'm adding a new shrine to my visual lobe
to see in the dark what shape of the universe you are,
and if you look at the moon, sometimes, as I do,
like the cold stone of an enlightened skull,
or a nocturnal scar that lucidly transcended the wound.
Right now my mouth is an occult grammar of black diamonds,
a fountain at midnight, learning to articulate your stars
like the glyphs of new metaphors that are still deciphering me
to adorn the mystery of this encounter with you
like the moon in the night mirror of the Black Taj Mahal
in sacred syllables that will leave the frogs and the nightbirds
as tongue-tied for awhile as the gargoyles and ghouls
on a Gothic cathedral. Wanted to be an archaeologist
when I was a kid and ever since I got waylaid by poetic cosmology,
I've been brushing the leaves away like the wind
from the ribs and the vertebrae of the trees
in the late Cretaceous of autumn just to get down to essentials,
and see what kind of utensils they took to the grave with them
for eras now. You see how it is with me, all oxymoronic metaphors
trying to bridge duality into a unified field theory
that includes the spiritual like a prodigal wavelength
that might make a difference to the dark matter at hand
as well as the light in the other. I'm an ambidextrous nightbird.
A discipline of longing and renewal that isn't for petty people
terrified of the truths that sting and sing within them
like dragons of rage and bliss who don't need a voice coach,
a mentor, a guru, a nightschool, an intercessor or a crutch
to be told how to hold a note like a bird disappearing into the nightsky.
An hourglass, even when it's filled with the sands of Mars,
gets bored with its own lies over the years, and I'm intrigued
by the earthly candour and sidereal wonder in the way you look at life.
Your ferociously indignant compassion for people, and the passion
to translate the mysticism of contemplation into action,
and the savagery of the solitude that snarls at them to go away
when you need to lick your own wounds, and mix up
a new potion of stem cells with starmaps so they can get
to the furthest parts of your body and mind, those outposts
on the borders between sanity and crazy wisdom
where the silence won't divulge whether everyone died
in the last assault, or just ran out of ammunition.
And I've seen your eyes narrow like crescent moons
in the eyes of a cat that wants to get to the point like a pencil-sharpener.
You're hydra-headed, sapiosexual, as you've said
and your face is as chameleonic as the birthmark of a black Isis
from Merovingian France seven centuries before
the troubadours of Occitania. You're the Aquitaine.
You're Eleanor. You're the yellow planta genesta
that grew wild all over the hills like a stubborn field fire
of radical sunshine that burns all the way down to the roots.
Then you're foxfire potted in the ashes of the urns
of your old lovers transplanted to an open windowsill where
you can give them some air and some light
and you get a chance to bloom again in your own right.
I'm a dragon, a wolf, a warrior son of Virgo,
a demonic familiar doomed to do good despite himself
by trying to lead other people away from me toward themselves,
though I admit it's an ironic sacrifice to be
so gift-wrapped with flesh that few have torn my lifemasks away
to see how I burn in excruciating immolations like a root-fire inside.
Boo hoo, for me, if the moon cuts its finger and doesn't
ask me to kiss it better. Fire doesn't burn itself and the blade
is never sharp enough to make the distinction
between the moon on the waters and its reflection,
between creative annihilation and its extinction.
I've seen swords cry like dew at the tips
of the sabres of stargrass bent towards the earth
like the hands of a clock commemorating the ravages of time
saluting its purple hearts on review in a parade-ground of flowers.
I can see deadly nightshade in you, the palette of a witch,
and the orchids you mix into the brew like the petals
of a new moon, like a lonely wish against hope,
some warlock with gravitational eyes who can bend the light
like water, is going to see the masterpiece of the mandala
that could empower his darkness like the first sight of Venus
over the occluded hills of Lanark where these shadows
only want to serve your lustre to enhance its radiance,
to make you the threshold and gold standard
of his prodigal homelessness parsecs across
at the narrowest ford in my mindstream beyond
gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond
where Morpheus bends the river like a flight of crows and doves
like a zodiacal, shape-shifting Etruscan king releasing them
from an aviary of fixed stars, to let the constellations
assume whatever paradigm and legend of shining they want
into the perennially true meaning of
here, here, here, altogether here and now.
Venus approaching Regulus in Leo
and a torch of burning starwheat like Spica in Virgo.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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My Back Aching Like The Sky Goddess Nut Doing Yoga
My back aching like the sky goddess Nut doing yoga
over a sidereal painting that's burning like a bridge.
I've been many kinds of fool before, some just silly, some profound
but this is the work of a sacred clown hemorrhaging in the heavens
like the supernova of a pot of gold at the end of a ragged rainbow
still shining through the remnants of a colourful wardrobe.
I've been accelerating into space driven by a muse
of dark energy with an expansive heart. Time stops
as I exceed the speed of light across a threshold of starclusters
flowering in my wake like New England asters
with cadmium yellow suns with auras of orange coronas
glowing in their eyes. The apartment is silent
except for the trickling of the water pump in the aquarium
and a dance arrangement of goldfish that are swimming
in synchronicity with my thoughts and feelings
as if the heart of a human can speak through many voices
like the wind through the harps of the trees,
like the angels that descend among the daughters of men
when they're feathered in their beds at night like black swans,
or stars rooted in their own decay like waterlilies
that just don't know when to quit making beauty
out of the muddy deltas of their creative bloodlines.
She's firewalking in her sleep by now I hope, watching
a documentary of how the universe works in another city.
I'm flipping through the pages of the rooftops of Perth
outside my window like a weirdly bound heritage history book,
trying not to get any paint from my fingers on the view of the stars overhead.
Arcturus in Bootes still flying its kite in the west.
I need some rest. I've been bleeding like a cut rose
on the blades of the moon all day, and I feel threshed,
a cylinder of hay left out in the open starfields
for the black horse she told me to put in my last painting
to show something grazing under the full moon
like an eclipse that just discovered it had life on it
lyrically at peace with the siloes of light in the distance.
Even when love is cosmically oriented, God
how it loves to focus on the mystic details of everything
right down to the eyelashes of the ruby throated hummingbirds
hovering in a Pleiades of first magnitude larkspur.
Sometimes I feel like the fossil of a dreamcatcher
in the Burgess Shale, but right now, my third eye's wholly open
and I'm casting silver nets I've woven out of
my axons, blood vessels, nerve ganglia,
lunar fuses of serpent fire coiled around my spinal cord
like a helical riff of a bass run on a burning guitar
I'm holding like a metaphor for the body of a woman in my arms.
When I told you I was a sacred clown. I didn't invent it.
I meant it. I feel it. I can dance for ghosts at a seance.
I can dance for rain and war. I can paint my face blue
with moonlight and wode, and dance for peace, dance for fire,
dance for someone like you to step out of the darkness
as if someone had shaped a jewel out of the northern lights
and I was looking at it from the inside out through your eyes
on a a night of the new moon that isn't on any calendars
that are going to hang doom over my my voodoo heart
because there's never been a curse from the mouth of a Druid or Mayan
that could stand up to the courage that it takes
to receive a blessing without worrying what mistakes
inspiration might make when your muse is as flawless
as imagination obedient to the laws of her own myth of origin
and your art elucidates the crazy wisdom of your folly
like a discipline that isn't for the petty or sane at heart.
The stargates just don't open for those who are still in their right mind.
Just as the maple key to your entry, isn't about
what you leave out like a sin of omission that's culpably blind,
but what you leave innocently behind you
like mountain streams, and morning snails,
and the long uncombed comatose trails of sleepwalking comets
plunging from their dark haloes like Icarus
into a sun that only shines at midnight
like a candle on a windowsill calling out
like a poet for a new medium that's lightyears beyond words
to the first of the autumn stars purring like a cat in her dreams
when she hears the holy nightbird just before the dawn
knowing Regulus and Spica and all the stars of my art
won't pale in the lotus of the heart like real jewels in the eyes
of a sacred clown whenever he looks for her
shining in the ascendent of Leo long after
the Lyre, and the Swan, and the Eagle have all gone down
and all these poems I write on the wings of Luna moths,
enraptured by the sphinx of her radiance, are irrevocably skybound.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Looking For A Little Black Water After The Fury Of The White
Looking for a little black water after the fury of the white.
Dark energy after the light as peace
settles down gently upon me,
the sediment of the eras and rivers of my life.
And this cool night in early autumn,
a woman in a dark cloak and hood
I could almost caress if I could just breathe
a little more deeply than the abyss
I've been dogpaddling in because
there's nowhere else among all these stars
I can swim from the shallow end of myself
into the watersheds of my last drowning.
And there's an unprescribed silence,
a herb of the moon that's salving the wound
of the lunar thorn I just pulled out of my heart
delicately with my teeth. I'm trying
to tune my spinal cord to the guitar string
of the Tay River, so I can resonate in harmony
with the flow of things. Starfire walking
on the water of the mindstream without
the crutch of a miracle to help bear me up.
It's not so much a matter of power or self-discipline
as it is well within the spontaneous capacity
of everyone's emptiness to do so because,
labour exhaustively as we do just to find the path
let alone stay on it, all we've had to do
right from the start, is to let life
give us a narrative of our own we can be true to
as it makes you up going along with it
like a lonely survivor singing to himself in a lifeboat
at the last watch of the night. Arcturus
at the tip of our eyelashes, enmeshed
as it sinks in a western treeline of beached shipwrecks.
Reach out, but don't grasp. Accept and let go.
Scatter your blossoms, even when you're
down on your luck, like ripped up lottery tickets
whether they end up in the gutter
or on an impressionist table cloth somewhere
playing checkers with a patient still life.
I've seen whole Japanese plum trees in blossom
be brushed aside like perfect haikus
by a street sweeper at three in the morning
when no one else was watching but me and Basho.
My blood is saturated by an overdose of stars
and I can feel a light from deep within
rooting in my limbs like nightfall
as my awareness is enhanced
by how much unknown compassion
there is the silence, love in a dark time.
Blue moons on the wild grape vines,
approaching the autumn equinox in Virgo
as if they could read my mind like a purple passage
intoxicated on the wine that can be pressed out of its own decay.
The waterlilies are gone with the fireflies,
and the reupholstered cattails are beginning
to show signs of wear already. And soon
the Canada geese will be flying high overhead
bearing the souls of the dead to new latitudes of seeing
where the starmaps fall from their hands
like the feathers and leaves of being
flowing along with the mindstream
like the wiverns, wavelengths, and water sylphs
playing on the shores of the Milky Way
with as many burning bridges,
as there are flames on the phoenix
in the immolated sumac, as there are eyes
to see across these circuitous waters
to the other side of where we've always been going
alone together with everyone who's ever come aboard.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Watching The Sky Turn Blue
for Steve Forster
Watching the sky turn blue
in the last hours of the night.
Up like the stars dreaming myself awake.
Insomniac watchman making the rounds
of my own private zodiac
on the graveyard shift
looking for signs of an afterlife
that’s in spiritual alignment with the pyramids.
Tabla rasa.
A clean slate.
A new day.
The world a new creation every morning.
Empty streets empty stores empty sidewalks.
The vertebrae of bridges sheathing the Tay River
like a spinal cord that’s stopped
sending messages to the brain
like wavelets and rain
to put the serpent fire out
that’s rooted at the base of my spine.
And the windows that couldn’t get over
the loss of the moon
aren’t talking to those
anticipating the sun rise
like the trickle of water music
arising from the willows of Stewart Park
slowly leaking out of the silence
like a crescendo of birds that come out
one by one like the stars
until you’re washed away
in the undertow of it all
like the words of this poem
riding the mindstream like a paper boat
all the bumpy way down to my heart.
The leaf and starmap of a lost art.
The dew on the cool blue green grass
has taken the spit shine off my boots
and turned their anthracite
into a flat Mars black nineteen-fifties Ford.
I can see the glass tears of a streetlight
that’s been crying all night like a candle
in front of the broken mirror
that’s been seen with another lover
slowly turning like a mood ring
into the sapphire blue of a new birthstone
with the occasional star in it.
A runaway Milky Way of lapis lazuli
pops into my head like Indian jewellery
in the showcase marinas of Dragon Moon.
Dolphins and flying fish
are leaping off the prow
in the fathomless depths
of the subconscious mind
floating ghosts
from my shipwreck
like the nautical find of the century
up to the surface
to mark where I went down.
Maybe the Perth Courier will carry the news
in black slug lines of mourning
indelible as the darkness I feel
whenever I walk past the office door
and remember when my buddy
was Clark Kent editor by day
and Big Steve Forester and the Mudcats by night
singing Kansas City rhythm and blues
to night owls and feral cats
prowling and howling
into the wee hours of the morning.
And his death may have passed
like yesterday’s obituary
into local history
but there will always be
some events in the lives of poets and reporters
that will always be breaking news to the heart.
He’d come to my place
at seven in the morning
and we’d sit at the kitchen table
like seven year old boys
dealing with death and cancer
trying to find an accurate answer
among all these rumours of an afterlife
about what it was going to be like
to wake up one day
any day now
without eyelashes ears
fingers toes a nose and skin
and your eye for picture-music
the braille stops of a bird bone flute for the blind
buried beside you
as if you were an Archaic Indian
who died young
five thousand years ago
by the Straits of Belle Isle
knowing timing’s just as important as content.
We corroborated each other’s testimony
on the wild side of things
and whenever I’m down
by the Perth Soap Factory
lavishing its thick floral scent on the night air
I look up at his old apartment window
that the new tenants look through now
and though he and I would both agree
that it blows the public cool
of a private clown
to be so sentimentally foolish
even when no one else is around
I say God bless you Steve
wherever you are now.
And I think I can almost hear you
rocking out with the celestial spheres
like a blues harp among the angels
and I like the new underground sound
that’s taking heaven by storm
though it brings me to tears
that water the root fires
of this whiff of wildflowers
working on the nightshift
to think of you gone.
Gone gone gone
altogether gone beyond
like the riff of a base run
on a guitar-shaped universe
under the travelogue of play-dates
and places you gigged
stuck to the lid of your coffin
like the leaves and constellations
of an autumn that always comes too soon.
God bless you man.
I sing it out
like a one man band
with soul and heart
under your window
like a wolf pack
howling at the moon
for the loss of one of their own.
God bless that big awkward heart of yours
and the lonely boy you told me about
playing by himself
in the abandoned World War Two airfields of France.
I’ve tried to get closer to him over the years
as I always did when he was near
by impressing him with
the smoothness of my take-offs
and the fireworks of my emergency landings.
You were the first unimperial Englishman
that ever convinced me
he could wear cowboy boots convincingly.
And that you knew what it was like
to be down and out with George Orwell
in west Vancouver
sleeping among violent drunks
that kept waking up
just to spit into your wishing well.
I know you spent your whole life wondering
whether you were or not
and wandered off the horse trails
of the bronze riding academy often enough
just to prove you were
to me and to yourself
but you were real.
Outlaw blues man
with a lot of good habits
you were addicted to like your upbringing.
I’ve ridden with a lot of bad dudes
and seen a few hung along the way
like identity thieves caught red-handed
branding their names
on other people’s logos
but none of them knew how
to head off a stampede
in a lightning storm
like you could with a mike
and an edgy audience in front of you
as if you’d just pulled a gun in a bank
like Robin Hood.
I don’t know if it does any good
to lay food and tobacco and beer
bread and a baggie
of Lanark County homegrown
with colas the size of treetops
frosted with the galactic radiance of stars
with crystal healing powers
and wine-tipped Old Port cigarillos
at the eastern doors
of the burial huts of the dead
approaching the autumnal equinox
as the Ojibwa at this time of the year
believe it does.
Or if our souls go east or south
in the bodies of migrating Canada geese
when the moon takes them off
like lockets and rosaries around her neck
as the Ojibwa Pythagoras the Persians
and the Christians
who caught on to the thought
all said they did.
Or if the Great Spirit
has a wingspan that includes us all or not.
Hard to imagine nature
comes pre-prepared with a womb
but not a tomb
that’s big enough for all of us.
And maybe there’s no more distinction
to be made between the exit and the entrance
than there is to be made between
a sacred grove and a parking lot
and in the clear light of the void
we’re all bound to see for ourselves
you don’t notice the difference
between the living and the dead
the way I do
looking up at your window
as if the oldies and goldies
of the rhythm and blues
had turned into the base metal
of an alchemical universe in reverse.
And maybe everyone ends up here
sooner or later
beside a soap factory
below somebody’s window
trying to throw
a philosopher’s stone through it
like a grain of sand
through the blank stare of an hourglass
whose timing is as bad as eternity’s
always half a note off the tempo
like a white boy playing jazz
with one foot on shore
and the other in a lifeboat.
And maybe you’ve got to
syncopate the backbeat
to stay on your feet dancing
long after the music’s over
and the lights have been turned off
like stars and streetlamps in the dawn.
I don’t know Bud.
I’ve just lived on
doing what I’ve always done.
And I hear they put that painting
I did of you dressed up
like one of the Blues Brothers
bending the music
like a mike stand
up against your coffin
and I was happy to hear that.
And there have been two elegies
I’ve written for you since
that have tried to say farewell
in a way that could convince my heart
but they both failed like a funeral
and it looks like
given I’m standing here tonight
watching the sky turn blue in your window
that it’s going to take more than your death
to make me say good-bye
at the end of the gig
when they’re breaking down the music
like roadies disassembling a Rubik’s cube
or typesetters yesterday’s news.
So I’ll just keep saying thank-you
over and over again
for being a friend of mine
until you hear me
wailing like a wounded blues harp in pain
and not just another banshee
scratching at your window
like a cat that wants to come in
and make a demo
with fading stars in the studio.
I’ll watch the sky turn blue
over the Old Brown Shoe factory
that’s given over to body builders
and tomorrow’s ballerinas now
and intrigued like the bees
by the smell of soap
I’ll jack into the sun like a power-amp
and you’ll grab the mike
like the bud of daffodil
or a streetlamp around the neck
and we won’t play
Should Old Acquaintance be forgot
on the deck of the Titanic
as it’s going down
like the moon and the stars
but as I heard you once sing
Kansas City on stage
in Stewart Park.
The amplified echo of your voice
long after dark
all over town.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Faster Than The Speed Of The Night
(Jim Steinman)
I don't want to let another minute got by
They're slipping tho ough out finger, but we're ready to fly
The night'll be our cover and we'll huddle below
We got the music in our bodies and the radio
And when the mourning arrives it'll all be gone
Disappearing in (to) the crack of dawn
We better make our move now before the sun is awake
It's time to put up or shut up and to pick up the pace
And I don't want to let another minute go by
Love is going to get us while the moon is in the sky
We may be running out of night, but never running out of steam
We're acting on a hunch, and we'll be acting out a dream
There really isn't any time to lose
They're going to catch us if we wait until it gets too light
You're such a pretty boy
Let me show you what to do, and you'll do it
But you gotta move faster
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
It's all we ever wanted
And it's all we'll ever need
And it's slipping through our fingers
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
It's all we ever wanted
And it's all we'll ever need
And it's slipping through our fingers
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Let me show you how to drive me crazy
Let me show you how to make me feel so good
Let me show you how to take me to the edgeof the stars and then back again
You've gotta show me how to drive you crazy
You've gotta show me all the things you want to happen to you
We've gotta tell each other everything we always wanted someone to do
I don't want to push you now and I don't want to rush
We're getting closer every second now, but close is not enough
The night'll be our cover and we'll huddle below
We got the musicin our fingers and the radio
There really isn't any time to lose
We're going to lose it if we wait until it gets too light
You're such a pretty boy
Let me show you what to do, and you'll do it
But you gotta move faster
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
It's all we ever wanted
And it's all we'll ever need
And it's slipping through our fingers
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
It's all we ever wanted
And it's all we'll ever need
And it's slipping through our fingers
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
song performed by by Bonnie Tyler
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Beginning To See The Light
(reed)
Well Im beginning to see the light.
Well Im beginning to see the light.
Some people work very hard,
But still they never get it right.
Well Im beginning to see the light.
Well Im beginning to see the light.
Now Im beginning to see the light.
Wine in the morning
And some breakfast at night.
Well Im beginning to see the light.
Here we go again
Playing the fool again.
Here we go again
Acting hard again.
Well Im beginning to see the light.
Well Im beginning to see the light.
Now Im beginning to see the light.
Well Im beginning to see the light.
Im beginning to see the light.
I wore my teeth in my hands
So I could mess the hair of the night
Well Im beginning to see the light.
Hey Im beginning to see the light.
I met myself in a dream
And I just wanna tell you - everything was alright
Im beginning to see the light.
Here comes two of you,
Which one will you chose?
One is black, one is blue.
Dont look just what to do.
Well Im beginning to see the light.
Well Im beginning to see the light.
Now Im beginning to see the light.
Well Im beginning to see the light.
Well Im beginning to see the light.
Some people work very hard
But still they never get it right
Well Im beginning to see the light.
There are problems in these times
But none of them are mine
Baby, Im beginning to see the light.
Here we go again,
I thought that you were my friend.
Here we go again,
I thought that you were my friend.
How does it feel to be loved?
How does it feel to be loved?
song performed by by Velvet Underground
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Someone To Rejoice In
Someone to rejoice in. Foolish thought.
Epiphanous absurdity. My interminable longing
for a treasure, a happiness, a companion
I'm not even sure I deserve, is agitating
oceans of emotion again,
and wants to run before the wind,
wants to raise up apple blossoms
like sails with the skull and crossbones on them
and skirt the rocky coasts of extinct volcanoes
that once served as lighthouses in the distance
when I was island-hopping
like an infidel among the angel fleets.
The dragon's howl in the dead skull.
Moments when my heart shrieks with life
like a red-tailed hawk falling upon a snake.
I am a ravenous man who wants to eat the light.
The night flows into my bloodstream
like an atlas of arteries.
As time has passed, the pain in me
has shifted wavelengths from the ultra violet
to the infra-red of a less lethal frequency.
I'm at the wide-eyed end of the hourglass,
but I can still bare my fangs
like the moon when I need to.
I can still come down off the mountain
like a hashashim and run the shadow of my knife
like an eclipse across the dreamscape of anyone
who takes too much for granted in their sleep.
So why is it after refueling and buying
a well-upholstered cheesey sandwhich in plastic skin
at the all night Kingston Esso just before you cross the 401
at one thirty in the morning, and begin to enter
the long, dark way home up the old Perth road to Westport,
did I begin to miss you
as if you had sat beside me my whole life?
And I pondered your absence like a hitch hiker
I had just picked up for the first time
and the impact of the encounter
left an indelible impression on my emptiness
as if someone had written something
so eloquent and intriguing as a ribbon of blood
letting its hair down in the water
I couldn't help but feel like a flying carpet
that was unravelling mile by mile of asphalt
like a glacier that couldn't wait to get back to you,
thawing time into rivers to speed things up?
And the night sang as I hadn't heard it in a while.
And the stars flew in through the window like fireflies.
And I rode the road like a rat snake past Devil's Lake
where we agreed to paint en plain air
when the waterlilies were in bloom
like huge starmaps laid upon the water.
Are you the tuning fork that tames the lightning?
Are you the power of silence that shames the word?
Are you the thread of blood on the sword that blesses it?
And I wanted to kiss you good night.
I wanted to embrace you like a nebula
of blue-hearted hydrogen and the dust of dead stars
just to see if I could make you shine or not,
but I thought it was too early in the year,
too premature for the Pleiades to break into light
and I might scare you with the intensity
of what was ingathering out of
the immensities of the last million light-years
of crossing these homeless thresholds
without a star to go by, alone and unconvinced
I hadn't missed the turn several lifetimes back.
Now I sit upright in my bones at my desk
like dice with their eyes fully opened like blackholes
wondering if I should chide my skeleton for cowardice
or alea iacta, risked my luck, and crossed the Rubicon
like an event horizon that's never known a compass or a guide.
And I'm looking under every leaf and stone
and heart I've ever worn upon my sleeve
like a fresh strawberry in a field of burning scarecrows
that started out as potential messiahs
but ended up being immolated as faithful heretics
true to the fire that consumed them from within.
And you, their felix culpa, their happy sin.
The one forbidden thing you must risk your life for to live.
I'm dogpaddling in space and time like a shipwreck.
I'm holding my breath like a lungful of stars
trying to stay afloat long enough
not to see my life flash before my eyes
like a lantern whose last remaining firefly's gone out
like the solar flare of an s.o.s. that bloomed to no effect,
until your lifeboat returns like the moon for survivors.
A swallow again lost in a hurricane of volcanic ashes?
A simian in a cage with a piece of coloured glass
that transfixes it with vulnerable awe and wonder?
The aura of a woman who doesn't know yet
quite how beautiful she is, lingering in the air
like the smell of wild roses when you're out
painting alone in the fields of abandoned farms
and you can feel the uncanny chill of another person
walk right through you like the moon through a summer window.
And o to worry about so many little things again
the world pivots on moment by moment
as if it were a privilege and an honour to cherish them
like signs of love in a Druidic tree alphabet
that whispered coniferous prophecies to the moon
but held a few sacred syllables back under its tongue
that were just meant for one alone to hear
like a secret message between a butterfly and a star.
Or this woman who's just summoned me
like a nightbird to the moonrise of her smile
as if I'd never flown to the end of my longing before
without finding a noose to hang myself with.
But as I do, I do again with less fear than before
and though the shadows in the valley of death
are just as intense, the warmth of a sprightly optimism
that keeps this firefly of insight alive in my heart
to want to see this all the way through
as if it were a rite of passage
that proved the comets true
or the rush of a wild northern river
with a rudder and a sail and a hull
going over a waterfall like the Milky Way,
or a moonboat panning for gold in the mountains.
The rustic pauper prince of Perth, I hadn't
realized what an undernourished bush wolf I had become
after all these years of living in the wilderness
until I understood someone had baited the trapline
with kindness I had forgotten the taste of in my exile.
And though I don't travel with a begging bowl,
by god, I'll hold my skull out to her next time
if I have to, just to taste a sheaf of light
from that harvest again, as if the dark side of the moon
had just broken its long vow of silence and darkness
and she were lingering in space like the aura
of an atmosphere I had lived too long without.
As if a dakini, an elixir of light, had appeared
like the planet Venus in the dusk again
and I could feel an updraft of stars
wheeling under my wings
like a winding stairwell of serpent fire
threading through all nine open chakras
and eleven dimensions of a sky wide third eye
in an easy rapture of something unearthly, ascending
to sterling altitudes of blissful vertigo
that whirl me in a wind of fire at the crossroads
of everywhere and here
like the ashes of a mad Sufi
ghost dancing on his funeral pyre for rain
as the first few drops wash his fate from his forehead
like the sheet music of an old song
perched like aging birds on a downed powerline
returning its energy like lightning to the earth
she walks upon in the flowing raiment of fireflies
and the hydrogen negligees of the blue star clusters
embroidered with the harvest gold of the sun
seasoning the grain with the bright vacancy
and dark abundance of the light
still warm in the lunar locket of her heart
as if she'd just put a loaf of bread
out on the windowsill to cool for a moment or two.
And how can I, this famine in an hourglass
beside this silo of the plenum void full of manna
resist whatever befalls me in this desert of stars
whether it be vipers or wheat fields
along the way to the unpromised land of milk and honey,
barefoot on thorns, or walking on soft petals
like the dunes and waves of the ocean in the rose?
Flammable poet, sacred clown of the holy mirage,
mad monk alone in your hermitage, dragon seed
of island pirates wearing the night like an eye-patch
to navigate the stars like a canning jar of fireflies
burning on the inside of their eyelids like starmaps
to the cherished singularities I buried
at the bottom of the fathomless blackholes
firing up the galaxies all over again like the wellsprings
of a muse renewing her wings like starfish and birds
in the fountainmouth of the mountain at a loss for words.
Or as the poet said, what's madness
but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
And did you not say, I heard you as if my life
depended on it, you were attracted to crazy people,
and did I not ask, if crazy wisdom were close enough,
and you replied, yes, and my heart freefell
a thousand feet without a parachute
when space bent like a longbow into flight.
And I shuddered like a witching wand in ecstasy
over the watershed that swelled under me
when I divined what that could mean to a sailor
lost at sea on the moon as far from shore
as any lunatic has ever been out of his asylum
his heart his mind his body soul and spirit
without dying like a message for the sake of the medium
it was delivered in like longing in the song of a nightbird.
Love in the sound of a word.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Fearful Traveller In The Haunted Castle
Oft do I hear those windows ope
And shut with dread surprise,
And spirits murmur as they grope,
But break not on the eyes.
Still fancy spies the winding sheet,
The phantom and the shroud,
And bids the pulse of horror beat
Throughout my ears aloud.
Some unknown finger thumps the door,
From one of faltering voice,
Till some one seems to walk the floor
With an alarming noise.
The drum of horror holds her sound,
Which will not let me sleep,
When ghastly breezes float around,
And hidden goblins creep.
Methinks I hear some constant groan,
The din of all the dead,
While trembling thus I lie alone,
Upon this restless bed.
At length the blaze of morning broke
On my impatient view,
And truth or fancy told the joke,
And bade the night adieu.
'Twas but the noise of prowling rats,
Which ran with all their speed,
Pursued in haste by hungry cats,
Which on the vermin feed.
Those creatures crumbling off the cheese
Which on the table lay;
Some cats, too quick the rogues to seize,
With rumbling lost their prey.
Thus man is often his own elf,
Who makes the night his ghost,
And shrinks with horror from himself,
Which is to fear the most.
The cat growl'd as she held her prey,
Which shriek'd with all its might,
And drove she balm of sleep away
Throughout the live-long night.
poem by George Moses Horton
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Faster Than The Speed Of Night
(jim steinman)
Producer for bonnie: jim steinman
I dont want to let another minute get by
Theyre slipping through our fingers, but were ready to fly
The nightll be our cover and well huddle below
We got the music in our bodies and the radio
And when the morning arrives itll all be gone
Disappearing in (to) the crack of dawn
We better make our move now before the sun is awake
Its time to put up or shut up and to pick up the pace
And I dont want to let another minute get by
Love is going to get us while the moon is in the sky
We may be running out of night, but never running out of steam
Were acting on a hunch, and well be acting out a dream
There really isnt any time to lose
Theyre going to catch us if we wait until it gets too light
Youre such a pretty boy
Let me show you what to do, and youll do it
But you gotta move faster
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Its all we ever wanted
And all well ever need
And its slipping through our fingers
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Its all we ever wanted
And all well ever need
And its slipping through our fingers
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Let me show you how to drive me crazy
Let me show you how to make me feel so good
Let me show you how to take me to the edge of the stars and then back again
Youve gotta show me how to drive you crazy
Youve gotta show me all the things you want to happen to you
Weve gotta tell each other everything we always wanted someone to do
I dont want to push you now and I dont want to rush
Were getting closer every second now, but close is not enough
The nightll be our cover and well huddle below
We got the music in our fingers and the radio
There really isnt any time to lose
Were going to lose it if we wait until it gets too light
Youre such a pretty boy
Let me show you what to do, and youll do it
But you gotta move faster
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Its all we ever wanted
And all well ever need
And its slipping through our fingers
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Its all we ever wanted
And all well ever need
And its slipping through our fingers
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
Faster than the speed of night
song performed by by Bonnie Tyler
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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