En.Citatepedia^®.ro

Living Off The Grid

Living off the grid in the interstices between the threads
of the spider webs bejewelling the sky with stars
like the net of Indra in the morning dew. Mark one dropp
and they're all marked. Subtract from one
and you take from all. Same way with our eyes
when they see like crystal skulls right through
the ruse of themselves to the glassblowers
of fifteenth century Germany. Cool visuals.
The light refracting off the nuanced smear
above their left front parietal lobes as if
they had something as happy and irrational as water
to be clear about in a brittle kind of way.

And that's ok, that's ok, that's ok, too,
but you've got to get down and dirty in the starmud
like the root of an optic nerve deep in the dark matter of the brain,
if you want to be what you see in the visionary sense of the word.
If you want to fly with the dragons that bring the rain
you can't sip like a hummingbird collecting blood samples
from the hollyhocks. You can't live like a tuning fork
witching for a lightning strike if you haven't got
the circuitry for it. If your axons aren't grounded to the earth
you'll be blown out like the brown out of a power station
that wasn't a fit companion for the sun
because you couldn't handle the excruciating transformations
of your own shining, the disciplined ferocity
of a controlled burn. You're either one of the fire wombs of life
or the ashes of a dragonfly in the furnace of a chrysalis
that breaks like the under-fired pottery of a fortune-cookie urn.

Or a stale koan. Either way you're not a guru of the absurd
that's been enlightened by the crazy wisdom standing
in the backlit doorways of delusion, grateful for a hand out
if you've never shaken your spiritualism down on the street
to feed your hungry ghosts something meaty and sweet.
If you want to build your house in the back starfields
of an off road zodiac, you've got to start like an incipient galaxy
with a big black hole as deep as a godhead in your heart
and the bedrock foundation of an asteroidal avalanche
that brings the mountain down on the valley like a gravestone
that's waiting for somebody to put their name and return address on it.

Even if you've blooded your abstractions with soporific poppies
and you're sleepwalking through dreamland, you're still
not homeless enough to be in exile from yourself.
You're still breathing in and out like a hinge on a gate in space.
And there's a light in your face that tells me you're
a lantern in the dark that's never worn its own deathmask
to a ghost dance without paling like the stars
in the false dawn of the fire that consumes them.
And I've noticed you never take
the cranium of your begging bowl
around to the door of an entrance
from which there is no exit.
And that's ok, that's ok, that's ok, too.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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My Heart Said Yes To Everything My Mind Denied

My heart said yes to everything my mind denied.
Certain women, poetry, doorways, cosmic risks,
a few back country roads that knew enough not
to ask me where I was going that late at night.
My absurd familiarity with sacred clowns
and this ghost dance of stars I see in their eyes
whenever one of them makes me cry in remembrance
of some old rag of laughter that ran before the bulls
like a rodeo clown in a whiskey barrel of fermented sorrows.
I said yes to exile. I said yes to my homelessness.
I said yes to the reflection of the kid
in the broken window of the burning orphanage
he'd just pecked his way out of like the shell of a phoenix.
I said yes to the abyss, to nothing, to emptiness
to the purr of the tides of sand in a desert
combing out the manes of lion-fire
that bloom like spiritual ferocities on the wind.
And I said yes to the rocks on the mountainside
who repeated what my secret teachers had said.
If you're still clinging to one placard of your freedom
you still haven't truly let go. And I said yes
and jumped like a snake at cruising altitude
without a parachute into a sudden enlargement of everything
and said yes to the dragon of that transformation
as it took to the wing like a fire in a furnace.
Yes to the altars when it was time to sacrifice the hero
to the unattainable he surrendered in the name of.
Yes to the dark niches of love
when the candles have gone blind
so much like eye-sockets in a skull beside a wishing well.
Yes was a way of sharing what no
had a tendency of hoarding for a day that never came.
Yes is doing it for everyone. No
does it for no one and can't even make it on its own.
There's something fundamentally revolutionary
and heretical about yes that burns in cleaner fire
than the dirty holy water no washes its hands in
to rid itself of the matter once and for all.
No takes account of every injury like a mandarin
standing off in the shadows of a rain dance of willows
to see who prefers the moonrise to the lightning.
Yes hasn't even figured out it's wounded yet.
Yes is the sacred syllable that all others words aspire to.
Yes opens more eyes than there are stars to look at.
More flowers and doors and hearts to the mystery
than there are keys in the spirit's lost and found
outside the gateless gates to paradise on earth
where no throws its crutches down as things
of no use anymore, and yes, the seed
that everything shape shifts out of
plants them all over the barren mountain side
like rootless trees with a path and a voice of their own
such that every time the lightning strikes another one down,
they say yes, and dropp another pine cone
on the fire that will give birth to them
like an encyclopedic fortune-cookie
whose cup runneth over with assent.

And, yes, even as the night approaches me
like an animal it no longer has to be wary of,
as the shadows of the trees lengthen into rivers
that disappear into the oceanic deltas of the night
like the leafless boughs of the trees of life
slendering into the sky like smoke from a sacred fire.
And, yes, to the crazy wisdom of this life I'm dreaming
I'm living on behalf of someone else
wholly inconceivable to me, not shallow, not deep,
neither near nor far. Not the intimate familiar
of fireflies, nor yet a perfect stranger to the stars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If Only I Could Remember Things For Awhile

If only I could remember things for awhile
as they were before they changed. Savour them.
Let the flavour of the jewel
that's been ripening in my voice
wash through my mouth
like the mystic blaze of a star sapphire
and every word I say be a firefly of insight
that can shed some light on dark matter.

Would that my tears fell fruitfully enough
to feed the world, that one dropp of my blood
after years of preparing the potion, were enough
to immunize a whole planet from affliction.
And what marvels would my eyes not delight
in showing anyone, if they could astonish the blind
like an orbiting telescope that's just had
its cataracts removed
like the reflection of the moon peeled
like an albino eclipse off the black mirror of the lake
only to discover that all this time they groped through the dark
like star-nosed moles, it was their own face that got in the way
of what was shining. If only my hands
knew how to build like the birds
and my bones were strong crossbeams and rafters,
what palaces of light and water and air
would my heart not offer to the homeless
like the growth rings of a maple tree
that threw them the keys like winged samara
and said, move in, its yours. It's built on bedrock
not the quicksand cornerstone of a slum lord.

For the lonely sitting with their cats and their elbows
in half-opened windows, observing
the pigeons and the stars for memorable events,
I would break this long fast of my solitude
like black Slavic peasant bread with strangers
who sat above the salt at the table
as my honoured guests, and ask them, eye to eye,
heart to heart, all ears, as if I were a radio telescope
listening like Seti, if they've heard any news back yet
from Bellatrix or Rigel, and which
of Jupiter's shepherd moons is hiding
a secret affair with life that everyone's dying to know.

It's heart-breaking that we can't all bring our tears to bear
into one cloud weeping over a drought like a dry creekbed
where we're all hibernating in our own starmud
like toads and frogs waiting for flashfloods of the next rain
to underwhelm us like gravestones in a makeshift cemetery.
What would the world be like if we could
walk up a long country road at night far from ourselves
and not have to ask the roadkill for directions in life?
As if we were sure enough where we were going
to risk being followed by the lost like a starcluster of fireflies
within the compass of everyone's bearings, not
out there somewhere like the ghost of a spaced-out lighthouse
but like the porchlight of nearby farm on a summer night
that draws living things out of the dark like the full moon to it,
even if it just be gnats in the air, bats, or Luna moths,
what a seance of life we could be to each other
as if we left the screen door unlatched
for any lunatic of the light on the road this late at night
who might wander in like the seeds of new themes on the wind
to enrich the bright vacancy of our dark abundance
with a starmap to where our buried treasure lies hidden
like diamonds in the ore of the hearthstones of our hearts.

If I could take the whole of my darkness
and enchant its snakepits into the wavelengths
of the light I would have emanate out of me
like the rainbow body of a Tibetan rinpoche
entrusted with the wisdom of the Himalayas
to seek a low place among the stars like a sea
that all things flow down into like the shining images
we retain of ourselves like the reverberations
of experienced luminaries echoing
like seasoned birds to each other
in the valleys and black holes of tears and death below.

Sacred syllables of immortal butterflies
in the orchards of morning and moonrise.
I would shine down upon the abyss of the lovers
like a water star from the bottom up
of all the burning bridges they have yet to cross
like Aldebaran at zenith, or Cygnus at nadir,
to get them to the other side
of what binds them to each other
like water and air, light, earth and fire,
and each moment of my life, every step
I risked anew, I would become the way
that's never taken itself before this deep into the mystery
of what it means to be alive and everywhere
be endangered by the beauty of our own awareness.

Instead of breathing for the dead as long as I can
underwater on the moon, I would invite them
to make a new birthmark in new medium
that calls them back from the night like light
from the scattered ashes of the empty urn of a star
coming together again in a gravitational womb
of their own remains, where everyone achieves
the all consuming illumination of their endless afterlives
by opening the koan of a single flower
in the light of their darkest hour of perennial insight.

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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It Isn't That I'm Looking

It isn't that I'm looking for eagles in a barnyard
or a phoenix in a match-head
when I observe
by the number of wrecks on the rocks
how few lighthouses there are these days
among so many flashlights.

What can the hair say about the horn
or the feather teach the wind
or quicksand preach
for the edification of the cornerstone?

And must I put a healthy leg
at the service of a broken crutch
to limp along with the mob
at the end of a dying culture
that insists that all roads end
in a cult of cripples?

If I'm walking alone to the stars
on a pilgrimage of one
finding my way in the going,
my heart aligned like the needle of a compass
to a darkness brighter than the light,
and the only map the clarity of my eyes,
why should those
who weep in their ashes like rain,
trying to put glasses on a fly,
who have never dipped
the thorn of the moon
in the night of their blood
and written a love poem
to a skull in a desert,
care if I want to roam
in the hills and valleys of myself
like some homeless shepherd of the wind
taking the stone of the earth for a pillow to dream on
in the high grasslands
where the stars walk
whispering eternal intimacies like black swans
barging the ores of a vacant throne
through my bloodstream,
as all along the shores of my flowing
ancient flowers wake mysteriously
like candles in an eclipse?

If I take the sky for the walls of my house
and leave the rest
like an autumn of junkmail
looking for a door and a last known address,
if I choose not to contrive a world
to accommodate my absence
in the available dimension of the future,
wiping my shadows and ghosts
like mirrors off at the threshold,
even letting go of the door
to enter empty-handed
as the applause
for an understudy of the dawn
that never got over its stage-fright
in the abyss of an abandoned theater,
happy to let the river pan itself for gold,
not laying a claim to anything,
making sure the gate-latch
clamps down like a dog on a bone
when I close it up
like a straitjacket in its own thoughts,
not stringing my spinal court to a wishbone
or the warped neck
of an obvious guitar,
but taking my voice with me
like a wounded bird in my hands,
a star struck from a stone,
moonlight in an empty boat,
the taste of silence
in the mouth of a mask,
my name a rainmark
on the eyelid of a dusty bell
I've left to the dream it keeps returning to;
why should it matter to anyone
who lies to the bleeding door
that is wounded by their entrance
everytime they say it's just me
as if a pillar answered?

I can't find anything
less than everything to call a self
and there are no mirrors
in an abyss more naked than the sky
to consult like the oracular flights of words
that litter the windowsill of this seeing
like flies that spent themselves,
flints on an empty lighter,
wicks on a glass candle,
consuming the ferocity
of their lives against the illusion of the world outside
they brain themselves against again and again
like small meteors
doused like torches in the eye
of the upper atmosphere
just above the open window.

When everything is absurd as this,
and even the tuning forks of the rain
are an era off in their pitch,
and music is merely
the coming and going of ants
in an abandoned syrinx,
and the drum of the heart alone
isn't enough to start a band,
and the only melody
is a road the wind blew away
like a hair off the shoulder of the night,
and everyone's trying
to unmarrow the moon like a fortune-cookie,
and every snowflake in the furnace
of this dark fire
thinks it dies like a galaxy
when it's only an inflection of tears,
am I not free to walk in harmony
with the savage senselessness of it all,
without hanging a bell of advice over my head
like the only corpse
on an island full of gravediggers
who can't get out of the holes they've dug
to bury me in?

I don't want to live waiting for yesterday
like the light of a star
that's already gone,
or dream like a seed of constellations to come
like a roll of the dice,
or watch the surplus of your smile
rotting on the docks of a famine.

And don't think these harvests I leave you
like a trail of breadcrumbs and dead flies
out of this wilderness of thought
are any more than stars
caught in the throat of the labyrinth
that follows itself like a snake with its tail in its mouth,
trying to find a way out of itself
by eating its own head.

And by some chance
if you ever make it out this far,
I've mailed back
the same map of fireflies
with its legend of smoke,
three lifetimes a lightyear,
you once handed me to find you
and marked every place I'm not
with a black hole.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Eyes In The Shadows, In Blood, In Space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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There's A Black Lotus In My Heart

There's a black lotus in my heart, black hole
of enlightenment, black waterstar, sacred eclipse.
Nothing worth attaining that isn't unattainable.
And all the gates are upside down and backwards.
Albino starmaps with black dots shining
on the other side of the mirror, zodiacs
of black matter looping back on themselves
like solar auroras of the sun that rises at midnight.
I don't know what all this means. I may have gone
too far into exile and actually managed to get
to the dark side of the moon. Or I'm a warehouse
of shadows at noon that have lost track of the time
like blind sundials that feel they're being followed.

The light illuminates, but I bloom nocturnally.
I've got the burn marks of stars all over my skin.
I work on the nightshift at the foundry of a constellation
busy pouring itself out like iron and oxygen, blood and air,
forged out the afterlives of hydrogen I've gathered over the years.
A fire-womb engendering one you fill with water.
Fire the midwife of its own daughter. I'm envious
of creative immolations I know I'll never attain.
Though my left brain is in full communication with the right
and I'm a full moon of the bright vacancy, dark abundance
of both sides, and the harvest is ripe, I'm always
a star ahead of my light, so I don't end up
like a dead school furnace in the basement
writing my memoirs like a manuscript of ashes in an urn.

Deconstruct me wholly down to my last atom
and I promise you, if that's all I've got to work with
like one stem cell to another at the beginning
of a matrix of causes and conditions into which
we'll be placed by a Hox gene assessing the chi
of which direction our eyes should face, and how many
degrees of separation there should be between our ears,
I promise you, I'll still burn with the fireflies
and the supernovas like a blind prophet
who saw two wavelengths copulating like snakes
and has been tied at this stake of of a spine,
an oracular heretic of both sexes in synchrony
like the hybrid of a phoenix and a waterbird
burning in visionary serpent fire ever since
for the sake of a muse that always comes
in the nick of time like rain on the moon to my rescue.

When it's night in the diamond of my third eye
is the light not more mystically enhanced by the darkness,
more mystically specific than the white wash of the sun?
The moon is the mitochondrian that tempers
the toxicity of the light so the nucleus of the solar system
can blaze with alien oxygen meteorically across the night.
The black mirror, brighter than the white,
shows you your reflection on the inside
where you're arrayed like a faceless world
that's given up trying to second guess
who's the unerring witness under the lifemask
of the surreal cosmology that doesn't recognize
it's not a self, at first glance, and that all physics
is the psychology of ridding yourself of the delusion
you can, even if you're riding a flying carpet
out into this desert of stars to sweep the constellations away
like mirages that have been throwing bad meat
down your holy wells like sacred crocodiles.

Ignite even so much as a matchbook at this distance
or turn on a flashlight to see what's in the dark
as if you were looking for your mind with your mind on the light
even though it's as abundantly clear as your eyes it's night out,
and the billions of stars in the next closest galaxy,
Messier 31, at eleven o'clock above the middle star
in Andromeda on the rocks, and two million light years
of enlightenment will gently recede back into the cosmic hiss
and disappear from your field of view subliminally
knowing, because the timing's yours, you're a daylily
covering your insight with the petals of your own hands
because you don't know how to open them sidereally yet
from the outside in, where your darkness shines
and the night you turn your face away from
like the bright side of the moon blinds you
by a reflected glory to the radiance of the origins
of your own vision, deep within, where it all begins
emanating stars of the darkness of your own eyes.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You Look Ahead At The Slice Of Light At The Opening Door

You look ahead to the slice of light at the opening door
and you're tempted to look back at what
you're not going to be anymore once you walk through it
without knowing whether it's an entrance or an exit.
A station of change. A bardo state that slipped between the lines
of the Tibetan Book Of The Dead you're karmically
sowing your way through to synchronize your seed to the harvest.

Dawn soon. False or otherwise blanching the nightblue
like any other day of life upon earth, into the starless hue
of waking up from the mystery of being alone in the dark
shining into a vast solitude of hidden insights
like the eyes of shy animals warily observing you walk
through the woods like a nightwatchman without a lantern
looking for a light to go by like lightning and fireflies.

In vino veritas, mystically speaking, I've been intoxicated
by the grails and skulls of life like a drunk for so long
I speak in the oracular voices of my own exhausted honesty.
I squandered my potential on the actual, applying
my imagination to the surrealistic factual aspects of life
like an oyster bed on the moon pearling whole new worlds
out of a grain of starmud. If work is a form of worship
as the Upanishads say, I've laboured long and hard creatively
like a heretic at play in the flames of the staked-out starfields.

And the shadows I've cast upon the earth like scarecrows
to look after things in my absence have never depended
upon a light source that wasn't sublimely human.
I've reflexively responded like a shapeshifter
to any fixed image it's been imperatively suggested
I was created in the name of to mimic like a dead metaphor
I was living like the lyric in the heart of a man
with nothing left to lose when I breached the boundary stones
of the usual taboos like a labyrinth of seawalls, locks and dams
in the liberation path of an emotional tsunami
of oceanic awareness after every earthquake that shook
my foundation stones into an avalanche of quicksand
sliding down the unstable slopes of the world mountain
like an otter down the mudbanks of my own mindstream.

Compassion's a ruby. Innocence, an emerald. Insight,
a star sapphire. And I wore those like the corona
of an eclipsed crown on the head of a pauper prince,
but it was the diamonds that intensified out of the darkness
like coal in the furnaces of the star clusters I beheld
like luminaries in the black mirrors on the far side of my eyes
that intrigued me the most as an adamantine example
of how to live my life in the midst of decay
with feet of clay and my head among the stars
like the catalytic agent of my own transformations,
the mercury and sulphur of the royal quaternion
of the philosopher's stone I was enthroned upon
like a beggar king with a dynastic history of self-abdications.

I got down in the dirt under my fingernails
where Neruda says the poetry is. I planted
the withered crescent moons of zinnia seeds
in the furrows of my brow like terraced gardens
I ploughed with the needle of a boustrophic lp
like a palindrome that sang the same
whether you were coming or going either way.
A Satanic message from the angel in the mirror
trying to play both sides of the fence in reverse.
Like the moon, I've never lingered in the window
of enlightenment for long, without looking
for an unlocked, backdoor I could enter with effortless ease
like a thief returning what had been taken from me.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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No Matter How Far

No matter how far into the past the star travels,
plunging its white fingers into the expanding womb of the past
to pull its own damp head out of convulsive space,
it will never find a beginning, the widening cleft between two thoughts
opening like a mouth full of silence, a sluice gate of thick water,
a dark prelude, the first letter alpha breaking like an eye
out of the eclipsed envelope into a splendour of light
to hang its jewel, its dropp of flammable water
from the incredible webs of the night,
to shine alone in the dark with millions,
the elemental heart of an abandoned lover. The void
became a tuning fork and struck itself, became
a nugget of gold and dropped itself into the world pond
sinking like a throne through a center of infinite haloes,
disappearing into the origin of its own undulant pulse,
a fish leaping out of the stillness of the mirror
into the encircling waves of its own event
or an arrow into the target of its own ripples,
or God lost in his own universe without a return address.

Where now is the desolate monkey
forced down out of the trees
to stand up in the high conquering grass to look for leopards
who first shrieked into consciousness
or sat down quietly on his heels
to ponder the odd blue stone of a thought he couldn’t grasp?
Where is he who has gone on expending himself
like the first violin of a tribal symphony
through the blind abyss of the blood all the way to me?
Is there a skull that lies cracked and quarried somewhere,
a fallen idol in a temple of shattered bones,
a small, moldy moon clotted with earth
who was the first to become aware of himself
as a paling star who would be washed out
in the brightening flood of the following dawn? Did he glimpse it all in a flash,
as the seed contains the whole of the tree, the blossoms
the singing branches, the closed eyelids of the apples,
did he see in the lightning gap between matter and mind,
in the first atom of self-brained sentience
all the murderous troupes of civilization
that would walk out of that first step, that progenitive initial
that goes on unspooling the maple samara
of the helical generations down even
into the bloodstreams and wellsprings of the lines of this poem?
Did he see the continuum of his own beginning
moving outwardly in time like a viper
through the oceanic fire-wombs of a nubile cosmos,
the world serpent that would marry the world
with a rib of light? Did he see me as I am this morning,
elaborated in all directions like rain from his watershed,
trying to make lifeboats out of the leaves to survive
this oblique sliding into the depths
of my own gashed being, the vagrant omega
of a maritime disaster morsed between two sibilants,
like an egg between the forked tongue
of a torn chromosome, this feeble S.O.S. I’ve sent back
through the anguish of the years to find me, to find him,
to shut the eye of the circle, a tail
in search of a mouth that could create what it consumes
in a single breath, a single word wholly sufficient
for all eternity, unborn, unperishing?

And it is not enough to say that the peduncle
is lost in the ensuing phylum, the root in the tree, the tree
in the seed and the seed again in the leaves and branches;
am I given eyes and nothing to see, wonder
and nothing to be amazed by, the blue wheel
of a flowering heart and nothing to feel? Homage
to the fallen bell of my unsung ancestor, male or female,
and the way he picked himself up off the ground,
homage to his pendulous walking across the plain;
and the tracks he followed through the luminous mud of his brain,
saying his name with his feet; homage and compassion
for the brute in lunar shock
before the rising of the moon through the startled dark,
homage to the lightning and the firefly
that jarred him out of his uterine revery
like metal from the ore of a stone. Homage
to the horror and grief and genius of the huge hope
he buried in himself with red ochre and bird-bone flutes
like the bodies of his children under the fire and ashes of his cave;
I bring black cherries, wheat, and scarlet poppies,
I bring the immaculate weave of the starfields,
sapphires and silk, and the wisdom of the wind,
the passion of fire, the will of water, the beauty of light,
and the freedom of infinite space,
and I scatter the worlds like opal grains of sacred rice
over the wedding carbons of your baffled remains
and I fill the clay moulds of the footprints you left behind
with the fleets and caravans and flights of mind
that were born of your bruised heel,
your circuitous pilgrimage toward bison and berries, you
the brutal mile zero of the highways through the mountains, you
the first dropp of rain in the headwaters of the river, you
the first feather of empathy that danced to fly, you
the first prayer to divine the green valleys of an afterlife
where the silver gazelles came down every night
to the water’s edge, gifts of the great mother’s thighs.
Like a prodigal son returning to the boneyard of his cannibal parents,
without judgment, I bring you the sugars of a ripened mind
and the fat of my sedentary flesh
to gorge on as you wish. And though we shudder with progress
over the excavated skulls in the hovels of the homophagoi,
we unmarrow each other no less. So praise
to your broken, battered, disease-ridden body,
your muscled weapon and your withered breasts
that hung like oriole’s nests from a rack of bone; praise
to the beast master and savage cauldron of your mind
from which you drew the elegant visions of a predator
you charred at the end of your tunnels on lime.
This morning I practice the same art for the same mysteries
on the same dank womb-walls of efflorescent time,
following the spoor of these migrant histories
back to you. Faster than light I must outrun myself to regress,
and I come with poems and paintings and problems
and a forwarding address.

poem by Patrick White
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When The Spirit Moves

When the spirit moves it's the summation
of everything I am without definition,
the averaging out of all my existential crucials,
the dark matter of the moment
expressing the perennial insight
not as signs in the light, but light itself.

I don't know what it is or it is not,
maybe just an enculturated meme of antiquated emotion,
or a way of hallowing the next breath I take.
I could be cynical and say it's fake.
But then I'd have to eat my own ashes
with a long spoon, and what would I do
for an encore? Boring if the truth
doesn't leave you gaping in wonder at something.

I've seen the wind at night in full moonlight
silvering the hot gold of the wheat
as if it were cooling a sensitive burn on human skin.
I've seen the fireflies in the valley
illuminate the cloud of unknowing
after a summer thunderstorm
like a chaos of lighthouses on shore
signalling to an empty lifeboat.
I've been engulfed by the fearful immensities
in the heart of a woman when her dark energies
start to accelerate space up to the speed of light
and even the most quotidian moments,
lipstick on a rumpled kleenex on the kitchen table
beside the abandoned mirror that couldn't
get a handle on things, blood on the bedsheet,
the cooling red of a farewell rose, all,
supercharged with chameleonic frequencies
of eternity forever the silence of time and the void
when you're mystically terrified by the passage
of beauty and passion into the carrying forth
of a waterclock just back from the wellsprings of it all.

Who knows where the time goes and everything with it?
I suspect it follows me home like a feral cat
that wants me to adopt it so it can bring me in
out of the cold. I used to think that spirit
was a smudge of a ghost, a gesture of air,
an aurora borealis in a twilight zone
where the sun shines at midnight and the snow blooms.
I used to try to touch the intangible with my imagination.
The void arrays the things of the world.
Can the mind do any less as a serious creator?
That's when I discovered the fingertips of the very hand
I reached out with was the spirit reading Braille
because I was blind to what the dark constellations
in the black mirror were trying to tell me
engaging the spirit as a scribe and interpreter
one moment, then blowing it in my face, the next
like a squall of stars in a vertiginous gust of wind.
Snuffed out like a matchbook just when I thought
I had things flaring away like sunlight at a rave.

The spirit that witnesses is not a cartographer
with a surveying team on the dark side of an Orphic skull
to assess if all its softer continental plates
had synarthritically reassembled themselves
like Humpty Dumpty back into a cosmic egg.
The lamp might be shattered but that doesn't mean
the light's broken. The spirit never really mends.
It just keeps on shining in a wounded space
until it doesn't feel the swords of the assassins of water
arming their shadows for a firefight with a dragon
that brings the rain like a medic to a battlefield
where the slain forgive their slayers for healing the moon.

The heart governs in silence. But the spirit moves
like a processional stillness through the mind
that shakes the diamonds out of the cuffs of your crazy wisdom
like dew from the mandalic cobwebs of the morning
and turns the lint in your empty pockets out
to show you you were richer than you thought
before you left home to seek your treasure elsewhere.
You cherish the jewels at the expense of your eyes.
One star tweaks your devotion more than the rest.
And they all go out at the same time. The spirit
doesn't refuse the mind anything that allures it.
The full moon doesn't obstruct the flight of the blue herons.

The spirit isn't the voice coach or dream grammar
of what gets written about your life long after
you're too far, too long, the moment you're gone, to read it.
The spirit is like sentient space. It doesn't come
with an entrance or an exit. The axis of the earth
might be the tent pole of a circus going up in a starfield,
and all the constellations swinging on a trapeze
in a travelling freak show of ring masters
and snake oil salesmen pitching their wares
on a blazing midway meant to befuddle the senses
into buying a peek at the grotesque and ugly
so you can secretly gloat at the shapeliness
of your own reality depending upon the comparison
for your sense of ascendency, your shaky rung
on the ladder out of the snakepit it's got a foothold in
like a black hole cornerstone in an avalanche of galactic quicksand.

Spirit is flame, muse, familiar, sybil and friend.
No more than butterflies need to be liberated from their cocoons,
or dragonflies from their chrysales, the gerry-mandered huts
of their koans and fortune-cookies, does the spirit
need to be liberated from its earthly transformations. Who
can liberate the wave from water. Who can liberate
space from space? Just because the blossoms blow away
doesn't mean they're trying to flee the apple tree.
Let the spirit dance to its own picture-music.
Let the spirit play like the sea with its own weather.
In a bifurcated world that revels in reflecting its opposite
to get a rise out of consciousness, need one eye
be the disciple of the other? Speak quickly
or you'll regret you forgot the answer
and start looking for intercessors to do it for you.

Dark watershed and radiant wellsprings of the muses
hauling up buckets of stars to bathe in like a moonrise,
your spirit a fountain, what need for it to drink spit
out of other people's mouths, or masticate
the sacred syllables of someone else's rapture at being alive
but its own? Whether you're at a foodbank
or sipping nectar from the birdhouses of the gods,
even the angels can't chew your spiritual food for you
and have it do you any good. Say, ah,
when you look at the world with infantile appetites
like gaping new moons trying to add to their collection
of silver spoons. Let the thief run off with them
like a crow with an eye for shiny things. The sooner
you get rid of the tinfoil, the sooner the shining
will get real for once and everything you rejoice in,
everything you feel and think and grieve for,
your commonsensical ignorance of the goat paths
up the mountain, and the avalanche of asteroids
you bring down on yourself as if your valley were a grave
the mountain dug for itself, to the enlightened lunatic
of your crazy wisdom raving in laughter with the wolves
at the rising moon, everything thereafter will taste of stars
in the eyes of the ageless friend you've made
of your own presence sweetening the air of a late October night.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Boy with Fire in His Eyes

The boy with fire in his eyes
Stands there waiting.
It is his soul inside;
It keeps him standing.

And if ever the fire goes out,
He will freeze in the cold.
It is his heat
And all that keeps him living.

Or if it never is put to use,
It will consume him;
He will burn to the ground
His ashes left behind.

But if the fire blazes,
If kindled, kept and carried,
If the boy with fire in his eyes
Finds life inside that fire,

His fire will light the world,
Will pierce the mist,
A fire to drive the dark away
Forever and ever more.

poem by Daniel Nairn
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If You've Come This Far

If you’ve come this far
by the very fact you could
your solitude is marked for exile.
Those who sustain
are threatened by those who enhance.
There’s a soft night breeze
blowing through the open window
and a chandelier trying to teach a mobile to dance
and a man looking up at the stars
into the abyss beyond
wondering how to be grateful
that chaos took advantage of random chance
and he’s here
amazed by the accident.
Being without intent.
Meaning without a basis in fact.
And a passion for darkness that surpasses the stars.
His longing must have reached them by now.
His compassion must have brought them to tears.
Wavelengths of insight can burn for light years
like fireflies with astrolabes
trying to get a fix on their event horizons
as if their own shining
were the only lead they had to go on.
A mirage in a desert of stars
when you’re lost
can give you a sense of direction
to the watershed of your radiance
as well as any other approach to the vastness can.
He picks a few yellow leaves off a green plant
in a bone-dry apartment
and for a moment he’s Adam in the garden again.
He realizes that promoting life
is his way of cherishing his own.
And then he ruminates on its perishing
on his way to the garbage can
to dispose of the heart-shaped leaves
like phases of the moon
on the pages of an obsolete calendar
with pictures of the scenic past
inviting you to come and visit.
What’s a guest to do by himself
when there’s no one else
in the lighthouse
to play the host
but the ghost of God
wandering like smoke along this lonely coast
trying to make the sea stand still
knowing that’s the one commandment
it can’t fulfill
and probably what got him killed?
Prayers are more sincere at a seance
than they are at church.
Widow watch in a dark tower
long after the search has been called off.
He lights a candle.
He blows it out.
He sits down at his desk
and listens to the raging rant
of a heart-broke drunk outside
smashing the love letter he meant to write
like an empty whisky bottle
in the indifferent street light
on the rocks of a lip-syncing mermaid
who’s just jumped his shipwreck
for a lifeboat that likes her singing.
He gets the message.
He’s not one of her new friends.
The man at his desk
reassesses his loneliness
and decides one bodymind
a lifetime
might be a brighter lamp
than any two a genie could wish for.
New lamps for old.
But the fire doesn’t change.
Desire takes root in its own ashes.
Two birds perch like hinges
on the door of a grand entrance
to a Janus-faced New Year
though it’s only August
that looks both ways at once
at the valley it’s just passed through like a death mask
and the view from the peak
of the mountain it’s on
speaking to God face to face
as if there were no come down to the future
of its unhinged celebrants.
Is love the long binge of a periodic alcoholic
who can’t remember
the damage he’s done
to the weather of a loved one?
Or is there something more to it
that greets the heart
with everything that’s missing from the mind?
An inexplicable mystery
that reveals a starmap
of fireflies for the blind
that no one can follow
like the white cane of a tall ship
witching for water in hell
like a lightning rod.
And in heaven
a bloodline that isn’t wounded
by a grail of sad heavy wine
that cures the ailing kingdom of its symptoms
but not the longing of the disease
for the delirium of the dream
that broke it
like a water clock with a fever.
More heretic than believer
a crow balances
like a black umbrella
on a power line outside his window.
Looking at it
he sees an eclipse of the moon.
Total.
No exit
but time
maybe time.
Even the darkness must pass.
He takes it as a sign
that if he’s come this far
the future is well behind him.
He’s a star beyond shining
and there’s no way
even if he’s recalled from exile
even if he receives a look from someone
he can return to
they’re ever going to find him.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Crazy, Sunny Day Outside, Blue Sky

Crazy, sunny day outside, blue sky,
and my shadow's got me in a choke-hold
so I can barely breathe. I'm wrestling
with the black angel in the way, my own vacuity,
the absurdity of the burning gate that affronts my emptiness.
I'm in a truce with a room that tolerates me well enough.
Sometimes a hush falls over it like a nuclear winter
or somebody's about to read a poem,
but it's got big windows, and it's safer
living above people than it is on eye-level
and I don't mean that in any kind of way
except everyone's afraid and that's when
they're at their most dangerous. But you can
see them coming from afar off from a second storey.

Most days I've got a fix on what I'm doing.
I follow the star in my eye. Portable north.
I lay my strange gifts of refuse and lucidity
on the temple stairs of a goddess I'm beginning
to lose my faith in, and as far as I can tell they're cherished.
Wonder what it would be like to send a muse packing for once.
Ungenderize inspiration, be the wellspring, instead
of drawing from it with a desert at your back
eyeing you from the crests of the sand dunes.
But how would you get the flavour of sex
into a bottle of water without it
souring into a message for help?

Even the salmon-flaked brick walls
of the chic boutique across the street
that caters to witches and fairies, seem bleak
behind their facade, with a darkness fairies can't people.
Utter black, impenetrable, unregenerative,
and every petal of sunshine, trivially epiphenomenal,
every gust of stars that wheels into a galaxy
like the evolutionary emergence of birds,
neither the cause nor the effect of anything cognizant.
Life just the flimsiest of distractions
on the skin of a bubble walking on thorns.
There's a black hole in my heart
that's lapping blood from the rose.

I'm trying to upgrade my eyes to be able to relate to it.
I'm cloning eclipses out of the stem cells of the night.
I'm grinding lenses out of anthracite, colour cones
without irises or chromatically aberrated rainbows.
I'm transplanting the eyes of all my dead flowers
with black diamonds on the same wavelength
as the X-ray star I can sense shining behind everything
that ever mattered to me, to achieve some kind
of nefarious harmony with the unilluminated doorway
that is neither the exit nor the entrance of being.

Everybody seems mesmerized by the temperance of the day,
all the things they've seen before, they're looking at again,
as if the light could ever be new in yesterday's eyes,
but I'm inside the seeing like a dragonfly in a chrysalis
trying to pass through this black hole
into an entirely new world that isn't
just another sketchy metaphor for this one.
I want to see the roots the blossom's wired to
if at all. Or if it's just one big disconnect
and all understanding is playing unplugged
like a downed powerline with the oracular powers
of a snake-oil salesman selling holy water to the fish.

Disoriented in the starlessness of the blazing afternoon,
I'm waiting like an image of the imageless
for the darkness to adjust to my eyes as if this time
it was up to God to get used to me, and evolve accordingly
and there were no other recourse for getting around me
except creatively. Except to tell the Hox genes
where to put your eyes, where to fit your mouth
in that lifemask that disguises you like a surrealistic scar
grappling with experience with nothing but your innocence
to fall back on for an alibi no one accepts when you lose.

Farewell to all that. Evolution can take its cue
from me for a change, and branch out dendritically
like a flash of lightning rooted in my starmud like a cedar fire
sweeping underground through the valley I just passed through
like the mirage of a waterbird through
a shapeshifting hourglass of stars
that are not fixed, but protean myth givers responsive
to the darkest insights of the human imagination
that doesn't create worlds in the likeness
of a preconceived image but each to their own medium
turns the light around on them like a revelation
of what they conceal like a jewel of water in their eyes.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Let It Go, Let It Go, Let It Go

Let it go, let it go, let it go, as if my soul
were sweeping out a season of unleafing,
sodden feelings, sodden hearts, the rose ruined,
cumbrous clouds gusting over the eyelashes
of the treeline like dust at the broom of the treeline.
Cold-blooded, shedding an old sky, half in,
half out, I dream like a snake thickening
in its own coils as the autumn turns soporific
of weaving a flying carpet of the roads I've walked
the whole length of myself alone at night
only to discover that it was me that was flowing
and every step I took burnt like a new beginning
as if I were firewalking a graveyard shift of stars.

If you want to open the third eye of the needle
in the haystack of your mind, set fire to it.
What's left shining in the ashes is a ticket out of here.
The serpent's gone down the black hole
after a rabbit like Lepus at the heels of Orion,
like a gamma ray burst of annihilative clarity
and come out the other side of midnight in an hourglass
drying its wings like a dragon from the chrysalis
of an urn with the intensity of a furnace.
The world crowds out the truth of its own existence.
I'm pierced by the wounded insights of a butterfly
into the crazy wisdom of a flightpath without a starmap
that knows anything about where I'm going
or in retrospect, been. I've spent a whole lifetime
trying to mean what I see when I get myself out of the way
like an eclipse of fireflies. I experience the world
like an abyss with eyes looking into its own ferocious solitude.

I know by the whirlwind I'm reaping, it's harvest time.
The whole earth's a silo and a grave. Wheat seeds
in a pyramid waiting to sprout like time locks
on their afterlife when the planets align with the sun
at midnight to wake them up from the absurdities
of what they were dreaming. How strange it all is.
How vague the assurances of our sacred doubts.
I try to keep faith with my absolute uncertainty
like the third wing of a bird hovering between two extremes
and though I'm full of dark energy, strive
not to be the antithesis of everything else
like the enlargement of space in an expanding universe,
where the stars are moving further apart everytime I look.

Formless, does the mind speak to itself in a grammar of things
like dark matter providing a vocabulary for itself
to say the world into existence like a gesture of light
to keep the heart from reading its fate in between the lines
of an overwrought nervous system rooted like axons
in a garden of starmud perishing like a potted plant in a skull?
Sometimes I think I've gone mad, the pain
gets so unbearable in this tragic mime of exile,
when I realize how utterly inane everything is
as the transients walk through the gates of their homelessness
like a stranger on a return journey to a place
that's irrevocably changed like a future that happened
in the wake of an absence that was always behind
whatever he was looking for when he left.

Are we just here to cross our own thresholds of being
like mystic deaths to deepen the solitude of our seeing
as if the seeing itself were the optical illusion of the light
that follows us like a guide lost in the shadows
of who we thought we were yesterday
like the past of a star with an extinct future
always catching up to us with news of the moment now?
Knowledge as the fossil of a future event
we're always trying to predict. Hairy stars
like toupees on the pates of our bald telescopes.
It's only when you hold your mind up to the dark
to look for the source of the light, that you realize
how lost you are and how many time-zones
can be cast simultaneously by the single shadow
of a waterclock running through the woods
like the mindstream of the Milky Way
we keep weaning ourselves from
like vulnerable gods hiding out in uterine caves
with umbilical cords as long as the Road of Ghosts.

I try to see the whole in my own dismemberment
like Kirlian light. A moment of union
in eras of separation, myriads gathered into one
that can't help transcending itself like a fountain.
Some look for the grail. Some for the watershed.
And some ask the living in the language of the dead
what it means, if anything, to be alive in the fall.
As a bush wolf calls out like the only witness
of its homely longing like a summons
on a hill in the distance that's heard it all before
and knows the ensuing silence is probably
the most comprehensively compassionate answer.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Night's A Black Hole Of A Begging Bowl

The night's a black hole of a begging bowl
that doesn't know what to ask for anymore.
Shall I throw the new moon of another beginning in
like good coin of the realm, in passing,
or bite the bullet of a counterfeit eclipse
in the silver silo of the dark abundance
I'm trying to trigger into stars again
like apocalyptic insights going off in my brain?
The heavens roll like an old thirty-eight
I raise to my temple for old times' sake.
But the gate I used to close behind me
in the high starfields to keep nothing in
is hanging on like a lapwing by one rusty hinge
to the wing and the prayer it's dragging on the ground.

It's getting a little late for suicide. The timing's
overtaken the importance of the content.
And this close to the end, it would be a shame
not to see yourself out like friend in the doorway
saying farewell to yourself as you say in return
I'm glad you came to the stranger whose threshold
you crossed like a star in transit at zenith.
My pulse is still hammering swords of light out
on the anvil of my heart for me to fall upon,
but lately I've been bending them like horseshoes
to put them out of use and return them in tribute
to the water sylphs in the sacred pools of my mindstream.

Inspiration ages into crazy wisdom that still
doesn't take its own advice but never fails to sing
in a voice worthy of a wolf or hermit thrush at moonrise.
I've been firewalking my way through this
long, dark, strange, radiant dream since I first
opened my eyes and the stars began to shine
but I've never lived the same thing twice.
Though the morning star falls like Lucifer
in the false dawn of enlightenment, the abyss
cannot be bridged by anyone's trajectories
however high we ascend, how ever deep we plunge,
until we're burning like maple leaves and shooting stars
in the second innocence of our return journey back to earth.

Fletched arrowheads of the sky, even the birds
falling short of the unattainable miss the mark
and return to the green boughs of their beginnings
just like the flight of these words in the sunset
as the night overwhelms us all unspeakably
with the proto-nostratic of the stars
like a mother-tongue of light that leaves nothing unsaid
in the autumn darkness fragrant with the decaying dream grammars
of the dead slipping their shadows like secret messages
under the door of the book we're writing between us,
the beginningless prelude of the endless epilogue
of the memoir of the love life we had with Venus in Virgo
when the new moon was in the claws of sensuous Scorpio.
Big, red-hearted, archaic Antares
threshing the green wheat of Spica
as if the harvest had been achieved before the seed was planted.

Just because we die doesn't mean that life
is finished with us like the draft of a manuscript
we threw into the bonfires of the maple trees
to inspire our ashes to rise out of the open urns of our firepits
like the feathers of a dragon enflamed by the wind
so our spirits could ride their own legends a breath
higher and closer to the stars every time we open our wings
to re-read the lyrics it took a lifetime to write in scars
like thorns in defence of the mystery of the black rose
we were happy to bleed for as if our blood had no other use
than the ink in the pens of these leafless woods
dreaming of new foliage in the spring returning
like the plumage of eagles to the lonely flight feathers
of their skeletal quills. Fossil constellations
in the darkness that whisper between the lines
of the alpha and omega of the life themes that once ran
like purple passages of the mindstream
that can still shed light on our afterlives in a book of shale
long before we had eyes to read what we were writing
like loveletters to ourselves on intimate terms
with the inconceivable solitude of this distant future
we're all living now in celebration of yesterdays yet to come.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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