My Eyes
My eyes have turned into clouds on the moon
too proud to cry
and my tongue is a leaf on the wind
and this may be my last voice, everything said
in a single word not god enough to begin me again,
but I’m grateful for the ride back into town,
and there’s only one river left
that hasn’t poured the peasant
out of my patrician poverty,
these refugee lines of evacuated stars
that just made it out with their lives
and a couple of planets they wouldn’t let go of.
And I’m down to the last firefly in my grave,
a sea-witch a desert away from the coast
who’s keeping an eye on my pulse
and my amateur heart is doing cosmetic surgery
with volunteer razorblades on my mind
to undo the Red Cross facelift
they flew in to give my emergency passport
the last time I asked the mirror
to close the door on her way out
as she threw me the keys to her eyes
and said anytime you need
another oasis in an hourglass,
but she never really did understand
the true nature of my calling
but I gave her a gift certificate to rent-an-idol
for the shrine of her telephone anyway
and thanked her for the designer powerline.
Right number. Wrong answer.
And now the lotus-mouth of the nonreturnable silence
that blooms in the shadow of my name
comes to tell me the love-letters
I had to get off my chest like an avalanche
the last time I did a guest-spot on terminal row
have caught on like a shabby religion
in the mikes of the junkie prophets
realigning their echoes in the valley below
to all the compasses I’ve had to swallow
over the years to mean
when I say I’m lost, I’m lost
and not be seated like a celebrity direction.
And I hope, still dangerous enough to hope,
lingering in the doorway of a homeless waterstar,
a rootless tree, that it is my fault,
solely and wholly my fault
that I’ve never mailed the moon’s reflection
caught in the act
to the dark side of the mystery,
dropping a dime on the truth as payback
for all the furious answers I’ve listened to
trying to tell me I could do a lot better for myself
like air-raid sirens in the sack,
that I’m not enough of a user
to know what’s good for me,
that I should be the kind of loser
that claims his life’s a never-ending prize
then lames the victory with lies.
And maybe I should have listened;
and maybe it would have done me some good,
but who would have been there
when God dropped in to bury her dead,
and say she was sorry
for the kind of afterlife she’s led,
and all the things she would have meant if she could;
who would have been there
to put the crown back on her head
and who would have been there to listen
to the way her voice bled like cherry wood,
and who would have understood?
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Related quotes
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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The Creation of the Moon
The man cut his throat and left his head there.
The others went to get it.
When they got there they put the head in a sack.
Farther on the head fell out onto the ground.
They put the head back in the sack.
Farther on the head fell out again.
Around the first sack they put a second one that
was thicker.
But the head fell out just the same.
It should be explained that they were taking the head
to show to the others.
They did not put the head back in the sack.
They left it in the middle of the road.
They went away.
They crossed the river.
But the head followed them.
They climbed up a tree full of fruit
to see whether it would go past.
The head stopped at the foot of the tree
and asked them for some fruit.
So the men shook the tree.
The head went to get the fruit.
Then it asked for some more.
So the men shook the tree
so that the fruit fell into the water.
The head said it couldn't get the fruit from there.
So the men threw the fruit a long way
to make the head go a long way to get it so they could go.
While the head was getting the fruit
the men got down from the tree and went on.
The head came back and looked at the tree
and didn't see anybody
so went on rolling down the road.
The men had stopped to wait
to see whether the head would follow them.
They saw the head come rolling.
They ran.
They got to their hut they told the others that the head
was rolling after them and to shut the door.
All the huts were closed tight.
When it got there the head commanded them to open the doors.
The owners would not open them because they were afraid.
So the head started to think what it would turn into.
If it turned into water they would drink it.
If it turned into earth they would walk on it.
If it turned into a house they would live in it.
If it turned into a steer they would kill it and eat it.
If it turned into a cow they would milk it.
If it turned into a bean they would cook it.
If it turned into the sun
When men were cold it would heat them.
If it turned into rain the grass would grow and the
animals would crop it.
So it thought, and it said, "I will turn into the moon."
It called, "Open the doors, I want to get my things."
They would not open them.
The head cried. It called out, "At least give me
my two balls of twine."
They threw out the two balls of twine through a hole.
It took them and threw them into the sky.
It asked them to throw it a little stick too
to roll the thread around so it could climb up.
Then it said, "I can climb, I am going to the sky."
It started to climb.
The men opened the doors right away.
The head went on climbing.
The men shouted, "You going to the sky, head?"
It didn't answer.
As soon as it got to the Sun
it turned into the Moon.
Toward evening the Moon was white, it was beautiful.
And the men were surprised
to see that the head had turned into the Moon.
The Rising Sun
Do you just drift away
shattered with a empty emotion
from feeling's of the past
promise's that wouldn't stay
now they are all gone
you got no place left to go
So you take a ride
away from the rising sun
leaving everything behind
searching for things out there
that you couldn't find
did the good time's last
out there on the run
Lost inside the mirror of illusion
of everything forgotten and abused
was it a safe place for you to hide
away from the pain and confusion
beaten down and used
did it ever escape your mind
She just stared out the window
and said I've said again and again
time after time
no, the pain never escaped my mind
as fast as I could drive
as far as I could hide
I looked beside me
and confusion was riding by my side
So I turned around
my back to the calling moon
and I drove back toward the sun
but here in the dark I wasn't sure
where everything had gone
and as easy as I drifted away
in the winds of yesterday
against the wind
it was harder that way
But I fought on to travel the miles
back to where we once stood
feeling crazy that I was hoping
you would still be standing at the crossroads
where that canyon between where things
changed to not so good
as I crested that mountain
of going back
I feared that I have lost the way
nothing looked the same
And then spreading across the horizon
melting over the Eastern sky
the sun began to rise
and there you were
no confusion, no illusion
there you were
this time with the rising sun
Spiritwind/Violet Blue-2010
poem by Spiritwind Wood
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Did The Kind Of Good A Storm Does
I did the kind of good a storm does.
I may have broken some tree limbs
and downed some powerlines along the way
but I cleared the air of its festering
and from top to bottom
we got down to the roots of things
like lightning and rain
like real radicals
free-basing the ideological ions
addicted to their brains
like razorblades.
O ya
I remember now
we were going to save the world from itself.
I gave up trying
when I realized
that if we did that
there would be no one left
to save the world from us.
Trying to justify yourself in retrospect
is like trying to exonerate a big hairdo
you wore back in the early seventies.
It can't be done
except as a kind of dangerous chess
you play with yourself
and cheat.
It's fun to play
with the lethal intensities
and swaggering immensities of yesterday
as if all those great sublimities that moved us
like fixed stars
had come down to earth
like the ashs of fireflies
in a snakepit of thought
poured out of tiny urns
the size of a human heart.
When I've got nothing else to do
and the moon bores me late at night with its looking
I run my tongue along the edge of your words
like old knives
I've kept like a collection of my favourite smiles
to see if they still know how to draw blood
and what that might still mean to my heart.
Maybe I should have fallen on them like swords
as you wanted me to
instead of reading them
like a delinquent boy
in front of a no trespassing sign.
Back in those days
my heart was a rock
and my mind
was a broken windowpane.
But I'm not one of those people
who long for the past
as if you could step into the same river twice.
Everyone forgets
memory
Mnemosyne
is the mother of the muses.
Everyday the past
comes up with a new song
that surpasses the last like the future.
The ghost of tomorrow returns to its grave at dawn.
The past is just as spontaneously inspired
as the present
and makes it up as it goes along
thinking this is what it must be like
to live on and on and on
with your cosmic elbows
leaning on earthly windowsills
wondering what it might be like to die
and come back
reincarnated as a horizon
or a threshold.
But I don't go back to the past
for the view
like a tourist passing through
his old neighbourhood
to see where he was born and died.
I don't want a brass plague
for a birth certificate
and a postcard
from the edge of nowhere
for a passport
that lies about my record
for telling
what I mistake for the truth
to anyone who'll listen.
I don't want to fake my way into reality
the way they do in Zen.
I don't want to begin again
like tomorrow's has-been.
I'm not trying to convert the faithless
to my disbelief
like a tree preaching to a leaf
like a cross to a crucifixion.
I'm not trying to pump my latest work of fiction
up into a universally inflatable religion
you can take on camping trips to the holy land.
I'm not sure
I'm even really trying to understand
the way things were way back then
when we didn't need to.
Just something to do
when I'm watching the moon
float downstream
like the prophetic skull of Orpheus
all the way from Thrace to Mytilene in Lesbos.
If I look at it long enough
even through a dirty window
I can see a footloose waterlily
preening its feathers
like the swan of a loveletter
late in the autumn
to someone
who will pick it up out of the water
and wonder who it's from
for the rest of their life
like I do
remembering you
as you are to me
now that all these lunar calendars
have shed their blossoms and leaves
and stand naked as the tree of knowledge
adding zeros to everything
like tree-rings in the heartwood
of my personal history.
I've never made a cliche
out of any muse of mine
whether she took me to bed or not.
If she infused me with inspiration
I didn't abuse her
with a parting shot
like the afterthought
of an ignoble mind
or a paper phoenix
that couldn't take the heat
when things got sweet and hot.
I come back
like an old wind to a funeral pyre
that blazed its way up to the stars
to see if anything
was left unburnt or unanswered
in the ashes of the scorched earth.
I rock the cradle awhile
like a manger in hell
that once gave birth
to a childless messiah.
I transcend my own innocence
and fall toward paradise
without asking to be forgiven.
Love hangs stars above us all
that take the fall
for the way our scars
demonize our open wounds for living.
I drink from my skull
to your memory
and then I drink to you
whoever you are now.
In a desert on the moon
in a sea of shadows
I drink in the darkness alone
like an open window
to let the birds out
as if they were the only words
I had left to say
about the passing years
to hide my crazy tears
like an atheist on a grailquest
who knows that life
is a mirage
of burning muse water
that tastes like broken mirrors.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Nevermind
The war was lost
The treaty signed
I was not caught
I crossed the line
I was not caught
Though many tried
I live among you
Well disguised
I had to leave
My life behind
I dug some graves
You’ll never find
The story’s told
With facts and lies
I had a name
But never mind
Never mind
Never mind
The war was lost
The treaty signed
There’s truth that lives
And truth that dies
I don’t know which
So never mind
Your victory
Was so complete
That some among you
Thought to keep
A record of
Our little lives
The clothes we wore
Our spoons our knives
The games of luck
Our soldiers played
The stones we cut
The songs we made
Our law of peace
Which understands
A husband leads
A wife commands
And all of this
Expressions of
The Sweet Indifference
Some call Love
The High Indifference
Some call Fate
But we had Names
More intimate
Names so deep and
Names so true
They’re blood to me
They’re dust to you
There is no need
That this survive
There’s truth that lives
And truth that dies
Never mind
Never mind
I live the life
I left behind
There’s truth that lives...
I could not kill
The way you kill
I could not hate
I tried I failed
You turned me in
At least you tried
You side with them
Whom you despise
This was your heart
This swarm of flies
This was once your mouth
This bowl of lies
You serve them well
I’m not surprised
You’re of their kin
You’re of their kind
Never mind
Never mind
The story’s told
With facts and lies
You own the world
So never mind
Never mind
Never mind
I live the life
I left behind
I live it full
I live it wide
Through layers of time
You can’t divide
My woman’s here
My children too
Their graves are safe
From ghosts like you
In places deep
With roots entwined
I live the life I left behind
song performed by by Leonard Cohen, music by Patrick Leonard, lyrics by Leonard Cohen (2016)
Submitted by Dan Costinaş
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Making Peace With My Father
You could be dead by now.
How would I know?
Last time I saw you
was fifty-five years ago.
My first day of school.
Your last with us.
You’re the little man now, Paddy,
you said
then got on a greyhound bus
in front of Tang’s Pagoda
as I watched the door close
on that fuselage without wings
as if the whale had just swallowed Jonah whole.
The last time I noticed we had the same eyes.
The end of your reign of terror.
As I remember you fifty-five years later
you were brutal, violent, cruel,
a con-man and a drunk.
You hurt people then laughed at their pain.
You were the lethal meltdown of a radioactive brain
that made the grass glow at night
from thousands of miles away
and poisoned the rain.
I went to jail with my mother to bail you out
more often than I was pushed into going to church.
And when you got out
you were always as angry as a killer bee
in the soggy autumn orchard of your hangover.
Life for you as it is for any coward
was one long complaint you took out on us.
My first seven years
I watched as many ambulances
take my shattered mother away for months
as many cop cars washing up on our doorstep
with all those messages in a bottle
that had your name on them
like a federal warrant for your arrest
as I recall the clinking horse-drawn milkwagons
with their coloured cardboard bottle caps
or the tinkling neighbourhood ice-cream trucks.
Remembering you now at this late date
is like fingering the fossils of a Tyrannosaurus Rex
and feeling the faint resonance
of your ferocity even yet
through my fingertips
like a warm-blooded mammal
in the menacing shadow of a reptilian law
whose last judgment was always a jugular in a jaw.
If you’re dead,
if you’re truly dead,
did you die alone?
Did anyone grieve?
Did you change over the years
and become a good man
as righteous as the stroke of midnight
and atone for anything
before you boarded the next bus for the abyss?
Was your last flashback of life
the sunami you drowned in
after your psychological fault lines
flintknapped an earthquake
that brought the whole planet down on us
everytime you barged through the door
back from the bar
and turned a home into an avalanche?
Did you remember your children?
Did you remember me?
Did you ever wonder
how I turned out without you?
Who knows?
Maybe I’m way too late for your funeral
and this wreath of blood and thorns I bring
to lay on your grave
like the bitter irony you fathered in me
is not a fitting obsequy for either of us
because maybe, possibly, improbably
as you aged like an acid
time defanged your thunder
like a white cottonmouth
and the moon took back its crescents
and the lightning began to make crutches of the trees
it used to split like cedar shakes
with double-bladed bolts of light
that scorched so much more
than they ever illuminated in the darkness they returned to.
As if the whole of the little earth I knew then,
my mother, me, my brother, my sisters
sported the wounds you gashed
on everyone’s heart and a skull
like chopping blocks
under your bloodied blunted war-ax.
For longer than autumn’s been keeping time now
with rosaries of geese in passage
like the secret names
of God on the run
for bouncing rubber cheques,
I have carried you around inside of me
like a chromosome in a coffin.
It’s a kind of genetic locket
I sometimes open
to remember you by
when I’m mythologizing my scars
like blackholes among the stars
or the empty eyesockets
on the wailing walls of the dice
you loaded like the prophetic skulls of a bad choice.
And I still don’t know if I’ve come
like an eviction notice
to this dismal place
to condemn you
or exorcise your ghost
I have despised you for so long within me
like the sloughed skin of a snakey oilslick,
the black blood of a haemorrhaging eclipse
that covers everything like an executioner’s hood,
the birds, the sun, the sea,
every tarnished cell of me
in a darkness that won’t wash off.
Or maybe I’ve just shown up again
like Empedocles on Aetna
to jump into the collapsed caldera of your grave
like the last flower.
Ambiguous homage with seven kinds of meaning
to a spent volcano
buried in itself
that once knew how to preserve the dead
in all the twisted shapes of prolonged agony
that has characterized the living ever since.
Every day of my life
I have wanted to give you back your name
like a white cross on a black plague door
that isn’t me anymore
and never was.
Or maybe I should
jump down into your grave and say
Hey, Dad, isn’t this sad for you and me
this is the way we take leave of each other for good
like chainsaws snarling through the heartwood of the family tree?
Isn’t it just so incomparably sad
that a son being honest as a deathbed
with his father as he dies
over and over again in his imagination
as I do now here beside you
should lean over and whisper into his father’s ear
with a heavy heart that regrets it was ever born to mean it
Hey, Dad, I want you to know
when it’s my time to go
and I get to the other side
of all that was
and can be abandoned
time will heal everything
you did and didn’t do
and all these severed bloodlines
reach their final watershed,
all the weak threads
of what was unbound
like rain in the river
fall into the flowing
and be made whole as strong rope again,
and the eye that offended be plucked out
and an old fist be opened up like the new palm
of a better afterlife than the one we had here,
and reunited families everywhere
break bread together in love and laughter
and every father be a strong rafter
and every mother be a lamp in a tent
and a cool night wind
as intimate and near
as stars in a desert,
and every son
say farewell to his father
as I do now here beside you
on this re-useable illusion of a death bed
where I am trying so hard to listen
to the voices in my heart
instead of the wise-guys in my head:
Father, farewell.
You gave me these empty eyes.
My mother filled them with compassion.
May peace marrow your troubled bones at last
and God soften the stone
upon which you lay your head.
What has passed has passed
like a storm out over open water.
You were my father at noon.
I was your son at midnight.
You withdrew like a shadow
that dreaded the light.
May God grant you a deeper insight
into these lives
we pass along to one another
like candles in the doorway of a dark night
and the courage to see
when they’re blown out
and death comes to sever even this little thread
of earthbound lucidity
that exists like blood between you and me
why even if these eyes of yours you gave me
were washed up like the survivors of a shipwreck
on the eyelids of the same shores
we started out from together,
asked whose son I might be
and who among all the generations
of the unborn and unperishing gathered there
was the road that fathered my journey,
I would answer
my life was a river with only one bank
that flowed from a sea of shadows on the moon.
I would embrace my mother in tears
if I saw her standing there
for all the long, hard, humiliating years
she always sat on the edge of the bed
the last thing at night
before we fell asleep under her eyes
and quietly lowered herself down
like a ladder into a snakepit
so we could climb out
without getting bit by the same viper
that had struck her like black lightning
in the heel in an orchard in spring.
About you I wouldn’t say anything.
I’d swallow my voice like a sword.
I wouldn’t sacrifice a word
on the altar of the silence
that waited like a god
to hear himself named.
I’d shake my head.
I wouldn’t look for you among the dead.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Not The Kind
When I'm away from you
I think about the things you do
And every single day
I hope that love will stay this way
When I'm alone I just worry about you
It shouldn't matter if I'm with or without you
Everybody wants to have a boy like you
And there's not a single guy who doesn't look at you
You're so fine
You're so kind
Can't believe
That you're mine
Heaven sent me love like you
Well I'm not the kind of girl who will play around
Well I'm not the kind of guy who will let you down
So you're not that kind of guy
So you're not that kind of girl
We're good when we're together
But it's hard when we're apart
I'm not the jealous kind
But you've been playing with my mind
In every single way
I think about you every day
When I'm alone I just worry about you
You say you love me boy so why should I doubt you
Listen to your heart
There's no mistaking
Listen to your heart
You'll find the truth
Listen to your heart
When life is breaking
Every single answer
Is right there inside of you
Well I'm not that kind of girl
Well I'm not that kind of guy
So you're not that kind of guy
So you're not that kind of girl
song performed by by Hear'Say from Popstars
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Shoulda' Listened
Ohhh... yeah
I should have stopped, looked and listened before I proceeded
But caution I threw to the wind
Manyve been placed in my life to help lead me and guide me
But I didnt want to talk to them
So I ignored their advice and I tried to disguise pain from you and all the things you did
The wrong road was chosen my heart has been broken
Cause I didnt want to hear them
Shoulda said what I didnt say
Shoulda went right but I went left that day
Shoulda prayed but instead I strayed
Shoulda gone a different way
Shoulda listened to my mother
When she said that you were no good for me
Shoulda listened to my pastors
When they told me turn around and leave you be
Shoulda listened to my sisters
When they said that I was too blind to see
But I see the light somehow
And I vow to listen now
I had the chance to advance and it seemed like the best
Opportunity that I could get
I didnt bother to see if my people agreed
Maybe I knew what they would say and yet
I didnt control it I kept going for it
When I shoulda known it wasnt in Gods plan
Had to let go, had I listened before
I wouldve said no from the door
Shoulda said what I didnt say
Shoulda went right but I went left that day
Shoulda stayed but instead I strayed
Shoulda gone a different way
Shoulda listened to my mother
When she said that you were no good for me
Shoulda listened to my pastors
When they told me turn around and leave you be
Shoulda listened to my sisters
When they said that I was too blind to see
But I see the light somehow
And I vow to listen now
Shoulda listened to my mother
When she said that you were no good for me
Shoulda listened to my pastors
When they told me turn around and leave you be
Shoulda listened to my sisters
When they said that I was too blind to see
But I see the light somehow
And I vow to listen now
Shoulda listened I know I shoulda listened
But I know that I vow to listen now
Shoulda listened I know I shoulda listened
But you dont have to tell me twice I'm going to listen now
Shoulda listened if only I had listened
But Ive learned my lesson now
Im gonna listen now
Shoulda listened cause I just cant be missing
All the things God has for me
Repeat till end
song performed by by Out Of Eden
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Broken Chances
My Love,
I don't know how you're going to get this,
But it is my last word on this Earth.
Just what ever you do sit alone and read this.
I want you to be at the lake where you gave me my first kiss,
I want you to sit by the tree that held us, and read this.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You were my love, my only one person who always made me smile,
You held my hand through so many things, so many firsts.
You were my light you were my smile
And you told me the three deadly words,
The words that always kill, but first make you smile.
I have sewed my mouth shut, so you will never see me smile.
I would melt at the sound of your voice,
I would just sit and listen just to know you were really there,
I would call when you weren't home, just to hear your voice.
My wish every day was to hear you say 'I love you',
To hear your voice.
I have glued my ears so I don't have to listen to your lies.
I remember the feeling of your hands running through my hair,
You'd weave your fingers through it to comfort me,
Sometimes I would act sad just to feel your fingers in my hair,
I would silently smile and melt in your arms.
I remember your fingers running through my blond hair.
I have cut my hair so I can never remember that feeling.
U can see you standing looking at me with your sparkling eyes,
I always see you,
I can never see past those deep eyes,
I can see you smile at me, see your hands reach for mine.
I can still see your eyes.
I have cut my eyes out so I can never again fall into your deceiving eyes.
You made my heart race with butterflies, with hope.
I gave you my heart to keep, you said you'd never break it,
You gave me the one thing i needed ti keep going; hope.
And I fell for the traps, I gave you EVERYTHING.
I ave you all the hope I held in my heart, my soul.
I have stabbed my heart, just so you can't shatter what's already broken.
You became my life, you became my love, my everything.
No matter what happened I still loved you,
And no matter what I tried to give you everything,
And you made me loose so much that I'm left with nothing,
And with my dying breath I give you what was all I had left, my everything.
I take my life to show you what love really means, that it's not the lie you told.
I may not be able to smile when you hold me,
I may not be able to hear your words even if their truth,
I may not be able to remember you soothing touch, or your warmth,
I mat not be able to see your eyes, or your reaching hands,
I may not be able to press my beating heart against your skin,
I may not be able to give you a second chance, for like my heart it is broken,
But After the pain and lies, I believe in what I felt for you,
And hope maybe someday you'll believe the same, and find beauty from pain
Even with nothing left to give you but my word, I breath my last breath for you.
I lay in silence to let you live, to give to you a broken second chance,
For I will always love you,
Be............
by: Bethany Maxwell =)
poem by Bethany Maxwell
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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O No Witness To Me
O no witness to me you can't go,
though I long for it, you don't follow,
my shadow stops leaving itself behind as a sign.
I have been ungrammatized by the madness of scientific magic,
a waterclock of life boats I kept bailing out of
until I threw the baby out with the bathwater, mushy as soap.
I tore down the shrines of chaos as an act of irreverent devotion
and the dead thanked me for stealing what they couldn't give away.
Divine solace without earthly consolation,
I wanted to be crucified diagonally as a random act
of symbolic defiance, but I was buried
under an avalanche of skulls on the moon
and all these voices in my head that swear they're prophetic
keep baffling me with alternative universes
that have no interest in cultivating me as a way of life.
But you my heart, dark star, dying insurgent of my solitude,
homeless door into the open, your eyes more beautiful
than reflecting telescopes on a cold mountain
far from the city, I am a casualty of space, what hands
do I have to hold you with? Time has ripped out my tongue
like an autumn leaf, and the clouds gather, sweetness,
the clouds, hushed like a book-signing at a mortuary.
Whatever value I had once as a man has turned
against the mirror of miracles, the chthonic excellence
of elegizing the teen age suicides and untactical drunks
that curled up in a coma on the train tracks
as the inevitable came into view with a warning whistle.
I poured libations of poetry to beseech the poppy gods below
among their immortal bees, to explain something to them
gentle and soothing, cool honey on a burn. Delusional
but compassionate in a useless kind of way. A gesture
of ineptitude that swept me away in tears for how much
has yet be lost in the abyss of human affairs
that doesn't even taste of us after all these years.
At the window of wonder, if you don't throw
the moon through it, you're going to dropp like a fly.
No more questions to pin down like the head of a snake
to keep it from turning on you like the lethal insight
of a gamma ray burst into the nature of nothingness
across the great divide of the razorwire
that twinkles like stars that are deaf and dumb
to the wishes we make upon them. I wish I may,
I wish I might be seen by you as the missing wing
of your cosmic symmetry, and you, the dark matter of mine.
Could we fly? Could we shine? Could we go mad together
under your bedroom window in a connubium of moonlight
and even the insincere candles from the dollar store seem sublime?
This far out at sea, would you be my island galaxy,
would you let me be washed up on your coasts
among the drowned, my whole life flashing before your eyes
as I reached out for you ingenuously as the tide
leaves things at your door like nomadic starfish
and my fingers, almost touching your face,
as I have so many times imagined
an enlightened savage might your talismanic sorrows,
feathers of joy and sacred dirt in a sexual medicine bag?
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I'm Not The Girl, You Think I Am
why is everything you say,
turn out to be not true?
i'm not the girl who will turn her back,
i like to think of myself as the girl,
who fights back,
i'm sick of getting taken advantage of,
but in a way,
that was kind of my fault,
i allowed it to be okay,
just like i allowed myself to give up on life,
weak moment, it felt so right,
i wanted this to end,
but, than i wouldn't win,
the chance to be treated fair,
when i did everything you asked of me,
2 weeks later, there was more to do,
do you think i would give up?
thoughts come to mind,
but, i remember where it gotten me,
coming back at you stronger than ever,
because this is my life to control,
not yours to be prisoner,
i may cry when everything becomes too much,
but, it gives me the power,
to never give up my fight,
i'm going to take what i deserve,
because i've been through enough,
once we done, i want nothing to do with you,
you did me no good,
except see that all people can't be trusted,
along the way, i found who my true friends were,
that the best present i can ever ask for,
i guess things do happen for a reason,
and that god hate ugly people,
when your time comes,
he will have a payback for you,
but, for right now,
i just have to be patient.
Copyright © 2009
7-22-09
poem by Mona Martinez
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Should Know Better
I keep blaming you for what happen
Is all my fault
I keep pushing you away
I hurt you baby
I’m so heartless
I don’t know what was I thinking
I should know better
You were being so kind
All I did is hurt you making you jealous
I didn’t care how you feel
I was dumb for breaking your heart
I hope one day you will forgive me
I keep going back to you and get hurt
I get you don’t want me
I should not get angry
It’s not your fault, it's mine
Stop saying sorry because
You didn't do anything wrong
It was me who make your heart
Breaking into million pieces like broke glass
In the first place
There other fish in sea
I cry once in awhile
I should know better
I need to let you go and set you free
Whatever happens between us was past
I should stop try getting in contact with you
It going make it harder to love other guys
Now it time to go different direction
I should just act like I never met you
I need to make changes or else
This is best for both of us
I hope you can understand
Time to close door on you and
Open doors for someone else
You didn’t care and look back
I should know better
poem by Christina Phan
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Unknown Girl
You never held your breath you said
You never promised that you would
and winter rolled down from the pole
I watched the flakes fall through the blind
a blur of white all over town,
a frieze of time all over now
and took to reading history
and took to reading history
I thought I understood
but I was flying blindly
through the mountains of the heart
vain cathedrals of the mind
with the innocent and wild
all the hordes of shackled free
all the hordes of shackled free
Our eyes were bright with certainties
but life was crowded out with doubt
I set off with my plans and dreams
and aimed to gain great distances
but left them lying under siege
by liars, dwarves, forgetfulness
and turned my back on poverty
and turned my back on poverty
I thought I understood
but I was flying blindly
through the fountains of the heart
Sweet deceptions of the mind
with the warriors of lies
and the vultures of the soul
and the vultures of the soul
And you were watching from the wings
believing all those lies would fall
until they all were saved by saints
who never gave a damn for truth
or dreams of making good from ill
and now the leaves of life drift down
in league with some false harmony
in league with some false harmony
I thought I understood
but I was flying blindly
'cross the deserts of the heart
round the spirals of the mind
by the lure of noble cause
from the cross to Wounded knee
from the cross to Wounded knee
Now I've no nobler axe to grind
than building walls against the tide
with not a moment left to spare
for spending wisely all we have
between the rainbow and the rain
between your eyes and sudden wings
the ending of all mystery
the ending of all mystery
I thought I understood
but I was flying blindly
with the phantoms of the heart
sweet concoctions of the mind
from Jerusalem to here
on the run from broken gods
on the run from broken gods
And now the ploughs have broken through
with hounds, to clear the streets of dreams
and from the other side of town
your breathing fogs the window pane
and fades as hushed as snow on snow
to leave me searching through the sky
for ties to bind the crumbling cliff
For ties to bind the crumbling cliff
I thought I understood
but I was stumbling blindly
through the caverns of the heart
and the mazes of the mind
by the patterns in the flakes
in the wind that blows the sand
in the wind that blows the sand
(song)
Lighting It Up And Blowing It Out
Lighting it up and blowing it out
I try to make my way through the dark
by beginning at the end
as if the coming and the going
were the same door
or good-bye were the first thing
you would say to a friend.
I approach things like a night stream
as if my death were already achieved
and behind me.
And all the atoms of my being
dancing like frenzied gnats
in the sunset glow of a last eye-beam
are certifiably primordial
and any one of them
when they lose it in the light
could begin a world.
And what can you say more of a life
that dreams of what it is
than it's the taste of the same wine
in many different cups?
And as any fox knows
the grape is always sweetest
when you can taste it with your eyes.
Though why foxes eat grapes is anyone's guess
but life makes itself up as it goes
like music in a fish's earlobes.
It feathers its themes in fire and light
and goes up in smoke
like the ghost of a tree
looking for habitable planets among the stars.
New wounds with innocent root-room for old scars.
Chalking the cue to bank the long shot
you're trying to spin off into
the deep, dark pockets
of your game-winning afterlife.
And I don't believe in much anymore
though that hasn't stopped me from crying
like a slow window trying to keep
the stars from leaking out of me
as if there were a black hole
somewhere in my heart
waiting for an iris to make it an eye
whose seeing might be a new way of healing
what can't be healed.
Once here. Here forever.
But whether we're the eternal children of forever
or just another breath on the night air
that doesn't even know we live,
even death is just another way of killing time here.
When everywhere's the center of everything else,
the centre holds,
things don't fall apart.
They disappear.
And that's the mystic art
of knowing how to make the most out of existence
by offering no resistance
to the rocks in your own mindstream
that part the waters like the thoughts
of an exile in the promised land
who can't go back the way she came.
The river can't step into the same you twice.
And in every direction
your eyes have ever burned like stars
you can see the dark jewel of your own life
from the inside
before it breaks into light.
Sometimes I'm the lonely sign
on the only path to nowhere
and others I'm positively amniotic
with the schools of my blue lucidity
the albino dolphins of the moon leap through
without a chance of changing their colour.
A flower of prophetic blood bleaches my skull.
I swallow the snakefire of my last eclipse
like a lump of coal
I'm trying to turn into a diamond
that doesn't burn
and never sloughs its skin.
Reality isn't a religion or a science,
or the back and front of a mirror
that doesn't know whose eyes its looking through.
Religion: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Science: how many pins can dance on the head of an angel?
Totem poles on a telephone booth where no one ever picks up.
Voodoo dolls that hex the cause of their effects.
The apple bloom on the tree of knowledge
lets go of its flightless wings
and follows the wind
like the eyelids of unfeathered angels
who opened their eyes like flawless fruit
as they fell toward paradise
without a parachute of smokey virtue
or the scale of a snake for a vice.
Emergence into the open
like a hidden secret revealed
is the engine of evolution
that empowers the dark matter
of this incorporeal starmud
to arise like the high note of a bird
that's flown beyond the night in its voice
like light beyond its myth of origin.
And the peduncle is lost in the ensuing phylum
as a madman is lost in the scream
that woke up the asylum,
or a god is lost in his own creation.
And the mountains listen
to the holy voices
in the valleys of their shadows
they deepen as they arise
like the guests of an echoless calling
to greet the unknown host.
It's what the moon feels
when she fondles her locket of water
and memories pull at her heartstrings
like tides on earth
and music is the way she recalls
the sirens that used to sing
like the brides of empty lifeboats
that prayed like smashed guitars
for the night to sow the seedless sea with stars.
And in every fish that swims through fire
like the sacred response of life
to the longing in its own desire
she knows they got their wish.
Fireflies in the ashes of the phoenix tree.
And the eggs of cosmic words
like serpents in a bird's nest
learning to fly like dragons
that have just swallowed the moon.
And it's one thing to pull the sword from the stone
but it's a greater power than magic and proof
with no urge to rule
that summons the butterfly from its cocoon
by giving the fool who inches toward the truth
along the green branch toward the apple-bloom
that already tastes like the forbidden fruit
of some radical insight
the whole orchard in a pair of wings
and more than enough night and light on its palette
to start a revolution in seeing among the flowers
who still labour in the chains of their roots
to turn their earthbound lucidities into stars
who might look back for a change
with eyes that have gathered like water out of the shining
and taste the light in the honey
that kissed their eyelids into gold
long before the night was old
and it wasn't enough just to see them.
When you opened your eyes
in the burning clarity of your lone vision
before this matrix of space and time
gave birth to the world
you were free to be whatever you could see.
That's when the light first spoke to you
in the mother-tongue of your seeing
and your voice broke
like a secret name in the mirror
that didn't know who you were
and the moon on nightwater
the thief at the window
your breath like stars on the cold, night air
summoned the whole of being
in every particulate shard
and radiant plinth of the mirror
to drive your shining into the shadows
so myriad things can appear as they are.
Many eyes open. Night. An eclipse. One star.
And the darkness an anti-romantic
in love with the moon from afar.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You Are Crazy
You are crazy and beautiful
and wounded and wild
and the youngest daughter
of a coven of poetic sea-witches,
and dangerous as the moon in your changes,
the fragrance of night
hovering over the blue star-honey
of your seductive hive of candles,
the skulls you drink from naked,
anointing the fire
with libations of blood and wine,
dancing to the passionate lament
of ancient serpents
unfolding their wings
like eras in the lives of stars,
constellations that have come and gone like leaves,
seasons that are only distant whispers
in the hourglass of the hills,
voices that have outlived the ears to hear them.
And we are no more contained
than is the wind, the white cloud
in our approach to lucidity,
and we have been wave and shore
many times for each other already,
and I have heard how
the night flute of your solitude
suffers like an island,
and the wizards have worked
an extra contemplative shift
to make you the gift of a gate
when my love of you
alloys my will
to the light of the urgency.
There is a wholeness to your being such that
even when the night shatters like a mirror,
all of you is reflected in every piece,
and your eye at the keyhole
unfolds me like a starchart
trying to locate a deep sky object
burning ferociously in wavelengths of black.
I am enrobed in your mystery like a waterfall
and you swim, a silver fish,
through the roots of my mind like the moon,
and the shadow of every thought
is a likeness of you
that I’ve conjured out of space like an aurora,
a feather of smoke
to limn your features mystically
in apricot-violet fires that flower like paint
and I take you away with me sometimes
where I can savour you alone like a mountain
where the silence prowls like a cougar
and you keep the wilderness to yourself
and your presence is enough of a fountain
to turn my heart into a mouth
entranced into speaking in the tongues
of the hidden grammars of blood
that pi the spirit with golden ratios
and passionate incommensurables.
You are a star caught
in the curtains of my seeing
and we are only eyelids away
from finding a flower
worthy of the sight
as you seed the darkness with light,
and I carve your face,
your transformative beauty,
out of a block of eyeless uranium
that glows invisibly like an emotion
that only blooms in exile,
a genius among elements
that gives herself away
like an orchard in a storm,
a serpent in the labyrinth,
the blessing of a weapon.
How could I know you in any other words;
how could I win the trust of your riddles
and climb the stairs of your neglected shrines
to the reluctant priestess
chanting in the shadows
of her own eclipsed altars
for a sacrifice that would answer
the impiety of a lifetime?
If I don’t touch you there,
if you don’t feel my breath upon the nape of your neck
like the wind on a lake,
if your blood
doesn’t turn into a red light district
without emergency exits
at the thought of being caressed
on the other side of your skin,
on the other side of the tapestry,
how could the hidden clarity
ripen into the crazy wisdom
of the bird that was born of a jewel
and you exceed yourself like wings?
You are all flavours of the fire
that bewitches the tongue of the snake
to divine the air for grails of water
with a branch of conscious lightning
that wants to taste you through its fingertips
like a note in a tuning fork
that will open the dark gate of your radiance
like the key to a secret release.
And I know how often
love is a dream in a graveyard
where only the rootless flowers say
what they can about severance
and the abyss of the heart that falls from its crown,
and the urgent vacancy of a throne
that governs lying down
beat like grief against the cageless door of a cold stove;
I have wept on stone,
trying to make a lie come true,
a mirage turn solid,
a ray of light linger in my bloodstream
like a locket dropped from a bridge,
I have been the timely extinction
of mystic alarms
that woke me early to grief
and what the thief left of my afterlife,
and I have been the razorblade,
the knife that bled to death,
that cut itself out like the tongue of a wound
rather than inflict a law upon love
that would tin the waterlilies
with savage indignation.
I have made one infinity of two zeroes,
and handcuffed myself
to the top of a tree
to throw the pack of chainsaws
that chased me up it like a scared messiah
off the scent of blood
that rippled through the heartwood,
and climbed down
like a quiet last judgment
when nobody was around
and stood in the doorway of my grave
like a letter delivered to the wrong address,
and cursed myself
for all the things I couldn’t save.
I have tried to knit honey
from the smoke of the fire
that spread like pollen over the fields,
but it was always tainted
by the taste of a black saint
retreating into a starless night
like the shadow of a bird
that had nothing to sing to the dawn.
And I withdrew from life
like the cult of virulent addiction
and lived like a ghost in detox
parsing planets like flaws on a rosary
and idling among the late night shadows on the walls
like a stone fish among the reeds.
And my name
was a word in a foreign language
I didn’t understand
until you said it like a wind of light
that had wandered like a road through time
to breathe me again
and pick my body up like a lost glove
lying by the lifelines in the wineskin valleys of your hand.
Until you were you
among the veils and interpretations,
black swan enthroned in a sky of fire,
the ghost of a bell
in the rain mirror
that arrayed your face like a whisper of islands,
I had never looked into my own eyes
as if they belonged to someone else.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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As You Look Deep Into The Mirror
the mirror is the echo of the sound you make
inside yourself,
the voice that you utter when nobody watches you
when all of them left to their homes
and you are left alone
talking to yourself, the voice comes out
from your heart
speaking your name, your dreams
you hear the voice that you cannot see
calling you
and so you stand before the mirror
and try once more
to see the face of that voice
fair and square
it tells you who you really are
softer inside
hard on the outside
the exoskeleton that you have been making
breaks down
like flakes of mud drying
the warmth in your eyes is still there
the affection you want to give
the love you want to spread
they are all there
in your eyes
but you cannot help it
seeing something ugly
you have not spoken
the voice hides in the silence
walled by your teeth
your tongue swollen
this discomfort of not saying
anything as everyone you love
leaves the door still opening
to the cold outside
the wind hunting for some stars
poem by Ric S. Bastasa
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Long For Words
I long for words that don’t exist;
I long for a light
that my eyes have never flowered in before,
but hope is a gravedigger
singing in a pit
and I removed those bones long ago
to accommodate the newly dead.
Now I conduct night-classes under a bridge
for working constellations.
And I don’t really know what I’d say
if the silence were ever
to shape the urn of my voice
into an uncontainable emptiness again;
so that every dropp of dew
on every blade of grass,
while the moon rose
through the broad-leaved basswood grove
were wrapped like a sky
in the skin of my eyes.
What can be understood
is already slurred by signs,
and the best way to hide
is to go looking for yourself.
Forgetting for the moment
that ignorant doors
are not looking for enlightened keys,
maybe I would still try to express
that first dark kiss
of the original fountain-mouth
that stepped out of the tide of an eclipse
like an island or a woman
who wore the shore of her own shapeshifting body
to walk like a watershed into consciousness.
But the light cloaks as well as reveals
and eventually the eyes
evaporate into their visions,
and the hearts of the seers
hang like drops of blood
above the cold and empty cauldron of the universe.
Time and suffering
will enlighten the profound folly
of your most sacred delusion
and in a black lightning flash
before the arising of signs
you’ll know whose signature the wind is.
How many tomorrows ago,
furious and young,
did I make a ladder
out of violated thresholds
to climb up to the window of a burning lighthouse
and rescue myself like a child
from this moment now?
Follow someone else’s road
and you walk your own wake.
Make your own
and you are everywhere
the immoveable seed
the world flowers for.
When your silence turned grey,
and your jewels
no longer hosted the light
in their darkening palaces,
and your echoes rewrote the original play
for three actors with the same voice,
and all your one-legged bridges
stood on a single bank,
longing to straddle heaven,
and you let your heart wither
until it was only a medicine bag
full of sacred dirt,
and what you once knew
without a witness,
you now forced yourself to believe in
like a sinner you thought you were
pressed into jury duty against herself
because eventually all the lies come true
and sin is just another form
of back porch enlightenment
to obviate your entrance
into the greater delusion of virtue.
Do you remember what it was like
to see clearly
before you poured
all this snakefire and moonsilt into the well?
Now you’re trying
to wash a mudslide off
in a dropp of dew,
straining to cast the shadow of a mountain
behind every grain of dust.
And you’re afraid
to be afraid that all
your goofy revelations of personal apocalypse
are cliches of other people’s wisdom
on the back of a matchbook,
that you’ve passed
through the gates of midnight thousands of times
only to find
you’re still veiled like a nun
by the light of your own passage.
The answer shows up
and you start looking for the question.
You wear your nakedness on the outside
to disguise your masks
and what kind of a lover can you be now
that you’re too shy
to undress in front of yourself?
How many skeletons
have you tried like keys
on the doors of your emptiness,
trying to get out of yourself,
only to realize
the abyss between your legs
has no inside or outside,
that the void never checks its mail
for love-letters,
that all your scars and bruises
rolled up into a ball
still don’t make a moon
with a sea and an atmosphere?
You never liked me
because I wouldn’t lie to you,
and though I ached for the oblivion
in the black fire of your lust,
and waited for you to rise from the lake
to claim my burning body,
and loved you like the death I was meant for,
I never could teach you
to swim through ashes with dragons,
or convince you you weren’t blind
when the mirrors turned their backs
to prove by the light of a brighter darkness
your eyes were your own.
You shot past me
like a near-sighted asteroid
thrown like the first stone
at a planet grown stubborn with life
the cold, igneous ore of your porous heart
could not sponsor on its own.
You took what you thought was aim
and squeezed one off
the trigger of the moon
as the hammer fell on the anvil of your body
and you recoiled like a serpent with intent.
You missed
and have gone on as you are forever,
stunned by the concussion that proved
beyond the shadow of a misfire
you’re bad ammo,
a leaky white phosphorus grenade
advancing rapidly toward the front lines
of a war with yourself
already well lost
when you came out of the tent
of your high command like a worm
with the battle plan of your next breath
and the junkie poppies
that blow like kisses between your crosses
row on row
o.d.’d en masse like a blood transfusion
rather than remember
anything about you.
Some people just make more of an impact
than others I guess.
But I haven’t completely forgotten you.
You were the pygmy empress
in the shadows of the single matchstick pillar
of your own self-renown,
trying to plough the moon with a sword
that couldn’t tell the difference
between a crater and a crown.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Creed For The Desperate
Don't let your bones be softened by fear.
By the time you hear it the lightning has already struck.
Don't listen for the echoes of things you haven't said.
And stop breaking your fortune-cookie skull open
like an old prophetic head
that claims it's been to the dark side
without being dead.
Don't let disaster define you.
You're not the bouquet
of a second class vinegar
hovering over a first class wine.
No crisis ever comes with its own identity
until you give it yours.
Move calmly over your own waters
like clouds in the eye of a puddle.
Walk as if you were already
following your own funeral
and lost your way to the grave.
People make much of being
but seeing is enough
to save you sometimes
from your own obscurity.
And when was there ever any security
in security
as if this flame were safer than that?
How long has the universe risked being you?
Take a chance on your own magic
and pull your life like a tiger
out of your own hat
to eat the rabbit you've become.
Then there's nothing to run from.
Become the sword
and you won't cut yourself.
Become the fire
and you won't burn.
Become life again
and you won't pass away
breath after breath after breath
wishing you could stay
in the negative space
of a comfortable death
that eulogizes your lies.
There are full moons
that don't weigh
like pennies on your eyes
to keep you from seeing too much.
And there are things of the earth
that have followed you into exile
like a new birth of things you can touch
that are wholly yours in passing
like music from a keyboard
or a fire in church.
And you may be down
to your last black beatitude
and righteously uphold the sanctity
of your will not to listen
to anything but the clinking of your own chains
and the mournful whistle
of your distant dying derailed thought-trains
giving up the ghost
but you're just sucking on the tit
of a perverse purity
and you're milking it
like the bitter truth
for all it's worth.
And it's not worth much.
And you may have flattened
all the mountains
and filled all the valleys
of your flatlining event horizons
but there's still life going on
in the crooked back alleys
of secret dimensions
you don't know about
stuck in the house all day
like a child afraid to go out.
You look at a tree.
You see a crutch.
You look at the moon.
You see a scar.
You look at a star
and you're lost for good wherever you are.
And it's not really a dysfunction of your imagination
that you can look at the Taj Mahal
and see a one-room hovel with slumlords
jacking up the rent.
It's good to look both ways
at any spiritual crossing.
But you see a stick in the water
and you think the water's bent.
And to shrink anything as the Tao says
you must first expand it.
But I think the Tao meant the universe
not a used condom on the death's-head
of a stillborn resurrection.
But you'd have to fall
further than you have
to understand it.
You'd have to fall
from your present plight on the world mountain
all the way down until you came to a space
where there were no more opposites in the abyss
and nothing in order
nothing amiss
nothing is meant
to scare you into being
and nothing is trying to hold you back.
What's your lover's mouth
if not a wound
you can kiss into healing?
You can see it that way.
Or you can harden the bruised fruit
with brittle tears
and flint knap chandeliers
to fall from star-crossed mirrors
like rain from broken glass
that hasn't fired up a single root in years
to dream of flowers.
The mind's an artist.
The painting's yours.
A self portrait in the image of God
whom no one's ever seen.
I see a black star in the bottom of a tulip
shining up at me
like the direction it took
to get to the other side.
You see a poisonous spider
like the leftover lees
of a flowerless wine
in the eye of a toxic goblet.
And you might raise it to your lips
like a lunar eclipse
but you never drink up.
And even when you do
it's a bad guest in the house of life
that drinks from his own skull
like the grail of a grape on the vine
with one eye open
as if he trusted the wine
but not the cup.
You're not the cure
that failed the ailing kingdom.
And you're not the miracle
that got up and walked away
to spread the word like a bird at sea
that had just discovered a tree to perch in
you might have sinned as a crow
but now that you've been saved
you're a carrier pigeon.
You can sit here all day if you want
like a buddha on his tatami mat
thinking bituminously
about burning enlightened diamonds
back into eyeless coal.
You can squat like a tree in rings of fat
smashing small thoughts
like eggs on the rocks
trying to read your fate
in their misfortune
like a chromosome
you hold in common
with all those who hate
having been born.
You can heap your afterbirth with scorn.
You can turn your eyes
into a pair of gravitational lenses
like dark matter
and wince at the stars
like cinders of light
that contradict your seeing.
And you wouldn't be wrong
because you can see it that way too.
The same eye by which I see God
is the eye by which She sees me.
Two creative geniuses in one studio
painting each other in the nude.
And she shows you hers
and you show her yours
as she enflames your solitude
by not putting her name on it
though it's a perfect likeness of you.
Your face warped into
a convoluted starless space
like the opening gala
of a staged extinction.
And your soul shrouded in lampblack
like a candle
that soils its own light
by putting on a deathmask of night
like a snakeoil salesman
selling skin to ghosts.
And there where your eyes used to be
two black holes
surrounded by random haloes of light
like lipstick on the mouths of star-nosed moles.
And look at that scar of red she's used
to catch your ambiguous smile.
That's the kind of genius
that leaves the asylum gate open for awhile
for everyone to get into your style
of imploding your eyes
like black dwarfs
with abstract depressionist astigmatism
as if gravity couldn't dig a grave deep enough
or matter make a stone heavy enough
to put on your chest to keep you from rising again
or the gold of the moon in your mouth
ever prove true enough to pay the ferryman
to get you to the other side of nowhere
as if he knew somehow
you huffed life like a paint thinner
trying to escape the race a winner
by never crossing a starting line
that wasn't already
a dark horse lamed by life behind you.
And he couldn't be bothered with anyone
who would fix their own death
and lay a bet against everyone
their pain could outrun their compassion
and in the second heat
their bitterness the truth.
But if you want a way out
like an emergency door
I'll let you in on a little secret.
Life doesn't grow into death
and death isn't waiting
to take your next breath.
And there's an eye of liberation
in the darkest hurricane roses of despair
that frees the light like life enough to care
that all it falls upon alike
should see its own face everywhere
through a crack of black lightning
in the white mirror
where everything that appears
evaporates like a ghost off a lake
or cataracts from the eyes
of the orthodox
who couldn't see straight enough
to thread their keys through their locks
like mystic heretics
to have known
the deepest wounds give birth
to the sweetest spears
that life has ever thrown
like light on a roadless night
or insight like a bird through the sky
that enters the sunset
like a planet following the sun
through the seven coloured doors
of the seven blind seers
who disappear in a vision of one clarity
with many more eyes
than there are lightning bolts and fireflies
whose age can be measured in light-years.
If a fraction of nothing is nothing.
Then a fraction of eternity
isn't a brevity less than the eternal
and every fraction of anything is all.
There now that's not too hard to follow.
The white face of the moon
veils the dark other you never see
because it's all been timed to turn away.
The moon and its month are one day.
Things might be empty
but they're not hollow.
And you're free to go or stay.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Face In The Mirror
Time passes by
And the years fade into the distance
I look into the mirror and see a young boy
Full of hope and potential
A few moments later I stare again at my reflection
And I see a young teenager
Enthusiastic and full of life
Tasting love for the first time
Preparing to step into adulthood
Ready to take on the responsibilities that adulthood brings
I stare again at the mirror
My past lives reflected back at me
I see a young adult
Taking his first steps in the world
Learning how to interact and build a future
Hoping to find a partner to share his life with
Again I look into the mirror
This time the adult is older
Just turned thirty
The stress lines are starting to appear
Hope has faded to cynicism
The relationships have all ended badly
A breakdown is just around the corner
As I look into the mirror
I see a sad young man on a mental ward
Trying to come to terms with the pressures of life
The figure looks lost and forlorn
Will he put the pieces back together again?
Another glance at the mirror
This time the figure is nearly forty
There is a distant look in his eyes
Dreaming of what might have been
There is an attitude of acceptance and resignation
Life is a hard battle and sometimes you lose
Just living out the remaining years
Another glance at the mirror
This time the figure appears much older
The adult is now an old man of sixty-five
There is a look of fear in his eyes
His family have passed on and he is all alone
Only distant relatives remain and they were never close
The fear is of what lies ahead
Pain and suffering and death
As I look again in the mirror
I see a grave and a gravestone
Only two or three people at the funeral service
A sad end to a life
And as he gasped his last breath
Fear was still close at hand
What faced him after death?
Would his soul face damnation
For wasting the gift of life?
The gates of heaven would be slammed shut in his face
soul without a home too afraid to enter into hell
A soul endlessly searching for redemption but time has run out
A never-ending period of purgatory
A tormented soul without hope of redemption
As I look into the mirror I see my true self
Tears roll down my cheeks
I have seen my fate and it frightens me
Please guide me towards the path of salvation
poem by Jojo ismail
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Thousand Years From Now
A thousand years from now
who will remember me
once I've disappeared from this windowpane,
a vapour of breath with awareness,
a nebular stain on the clarity
that will wash its hands of me
like a scar of water that has clung too long?
I'm not trying to embalm
the elegiac content of these obvious sunsets in words,
and it's hard to shake honey out of these mordant bells
that lie like duplicitous lifeboats to the gullible compasses and maps
that keep crashing like doves that don't have the wingspan
to come back with news of land
to this museum of DNA, two of every kind,
I keep scuttling like an ark on the top of every wave.
And what is a grave if not an abandoned embassy
that didn't have time to shred its dreaded secret?
And sometimes, when the emptiness and the silence
are beyond bearing,
I hold myself up like a passport at the panicked gates
that have made me an exile and a wounded threshold in my own home
and clamour like a continent
to be repatriated anywhere
that isn't a country whose borders are stretched out like refugee lines.
But it's a foolish wish.
And if there's a dragon to slay,
I realize it's only more shadows and swordplay,
and I think of the return of the rain lifted from the sea
and how the sea never feels anything is missing,
and everything is passage without arrival or departure
and how the arrow never leaves the hand of a good archer.
It's human nature to understand,
a sacred mode of disobedience
to look into the eyes of our worst fears
even if it's just to flare like a star without rescue
and scream out in light a moment against its own extinction.
But who or what or nothing is ever there to listen
as we go out like flies and stars in a toilet bowl?
And a love of laws is not the law of love
and there have been so many dragons
left out of the chrysales of their questions like answers
that the heart is not sustained by the impersonal blessing
of ubiquitous entropy in a long, lab coat
as the spirit longs for transformations
a star and a night beyond itself
that might astonish a human
with something enduringly human
like a next breath that can't be smudged by death
or something drastic in the dust that remembers us
when we were stars
that thawed through the windowpane
as if we were looking through the lenses of our own eyes
to discover everything we live is how we die
and we're always a plight and a plea away from knowing why.
Imagine, one night, looking up at the sky
and there were no death to raise the moon
like a calendar above your neck,
and everything you saw around you,
crows, kites, keys,
last year's pine cones on this year's trees,
were not denuded of their mystic specificity
in this mortal profusion of origins
that ends where it begins. Imagine,
one morning, not getting up from the dream
to pan the mindstream for the nugget of a skull
that might be gold, and the luster of the radiance
never grows old like the taste of the moon in your mouth.
Wouldn't this onceness then be eternal,
and what I'm saying now, indelible
as the space that prompts the stars to shine?
Learning wisdom is learning the universe
as if it were your own face, on the inside,
and you were its only eyes,
disappearing from view so that all that remains is you.
Birth, a breathing in; death, a breathing out,
before the first and after the last, this pulse and suspiration,
muses around the wellspring, witches around the cauldron,
planets fluttering like moths
at the windows of the constellations. Like the moon
I pass my hand over like an eclipse as if it were my own skull,
I have been creatively maintained from the start by my own expiration.
Are there no orchards in the hearts of old women?
Are there no graves in the eyes of a child?
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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