En.Citatepedia^®.ro

Narcissus Lost His Face In The Mirror He Stored His Image In

Narcissus lost his face in the mirror he stored his image in
while Lady Nightshade was saying grace over the wrong coffin
rats from the shipwreck were rowing ashore
in the last lifeboat with a trapdoor in it for an emergency exit.
The holy men who couldn't speak our language
without trying to fix it with an accent of their own
were recruiting for an army on the moon
to start a new crusade against futuristic infidels
who didn't share the same direction of prayer
as the wavelengths that reached the ears of the extraterrestrials
with high ideals encoded in a scripture of esoteric starmaps
that spoke like oracles stoned on volcanic gas
so when you asked how things were going,
they always answered, perhaps, in an ambiguous tone of voice.

I was sitting in the window of a burning house
trying to write poems that smelled like smoke to the Holy Ghost,
when you showed up like a stranger's doorway
out of my solitude like the bell of a three alarm death knell
with the smile that lingered like junkmail on the threshold
of a black hole that said jump right in, there's light
on the other side of sin if you go through this
like a death in life experience in love with cosmic bliss.
Who could forget that day you came like a muse
up the leaf strewn stairs of an abandoned orphanage
looking for a heart you could inspire with the ruse
of the poetic refuse you left in the wake of your pilgrimage
like the desolation of your absence from the earthbound
that languished in the eclipse of your innocence
like a spiritual lost and found trying to make sense of itself
like a horse with a broken leg on a zodiacal merry-go-round.

I felt the fangs of your crescent moons pierce my flesh
like a staple gun under a rosebush in league
with an alliance of thorns that liked to see a poet bleed
as if the great mystery of love were nothing
but a conspiratorial intrigue of sword dancers on drugs
though I did everything I could to prove to you I was wrong
about the moonrise, you weren't strong enough to be right for once
without starting a pogrom that interrogated
the light in my eyes for all those dark winter months
I never confessed, I never cried out as if ice were my only alibi.
I sat in the corner like a left-handed guitar with a dunce cap on
and wrote out lyrics that sang like the stars with a lisp
on your celestial blackboard until I felt like Sisyphus
a note shy of pushing my heart like a moon rock over the top.

It was the immanental sixties on a grailquest
for the objective correlative of a universal paradigm
it could fight under as the sign of a revolutionary new design of chaos
that made love not war to the thunder of home-made sonic booms
in a battle of bands with saturation bombing riffs and rimshots
that urged us to surrender to the enemy as if
they were dragonflies and quarter-notes of music
in a riot of helicopters dropping tear gas over Watts.
Even the madness wasn't enough to mollify the sadness
of what we lost when everyone turned the lightshows out
in the concert halls and went back to the their atavistic law schools
to get a grip on the necks of the things they had let go of for a lark.
And the last time I saw you, before things went totally dark,
you were trying to set fire to my voice-box
like a lightning rod with bad wiring shorting out
like a bass amp on the stage of your burnt out farewell
to the audience that made a gracious bow to your frantic id
and headed for the exit like an arsonist long before you did.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Gently Took The Strawberry Heart

I gently took the strawberry heart
of the bird with the broken neck
and buried it in a shrine of leaves and grass.
And in a low voice, whispered a blessing.

Under the window of an illusion
like a song you can only hear once
and it's good for a lifetime of listening,
I buried you with your wings together in prayer.

And I prayed to know what to pray for.
I prayed to know what to ask that could ease
the burden of the earth on a nightbird's journey
flying solo deeper into the dark

than even the stars or these eyeless words can go.
And I know death returns even the worst of us
to our innocence again, though our bones
come crashing down like childhood kites around us.

And the flight feathers of the aerial acrobatics
of our love lyrics run out of ink
when there's no one in the dark
to sing for anymore, no stars

to chart where you've gone,
no sign from the heavens you're not alone,
no ghost of smoke from a distant fire
I can summon to a seance of lingering desire

that would console you in the flesh again
like a candle in your solitude reaching out
to the pain of a stranger in the shadows
to make your wound cry out in bliss

as you once did from a greener bough
than this dead branch I sing from now
when we thought blossoms were the answer
to everything we didn't understand at the time

that could befall us like fledglings in the spring
who didn't know what autumn would bring
like an ice-storm in its wake
to things that break against the sky

like the cold-hearted lie of a window
that wasn't open and didn't go on forever.
And though I ask the weather for news of you,
if the wind might have heard

a word or two in passing, all
the silence does is deepen your absence
and teach me not to cling to things
like birds and flowers on the wing.

But if grief is all I can know of you now
I'll console myself with sorrow.
I'll hold onto it like the string of a kite
soaring among the constellations.

I won't let go. I'll play the line out
like a flying fish I caught in Pisces
and hauling it into a lifeboat with a net
I'll take the hook of the moon out of your mouth

and throw you back into the depths like a muse
swimming among the stars like a siren
that keeps calling me to the rocks
like an astronaut to these mountains on the moon

I keep hurling through this earthly view
of a window from the inside out
that breaks just like the shell of a cosmic egg
unfolding a loveletter with a wingspan of light

that penetrates this dark forever
like the third eye of a needle in a haystack
of begging bowls I won't abandon like the nests
of nightbirds with flightplans

that feather our falling into the abyss
of the unbelievable with starmaps
and the beacons of homing metaphors
that make our disappearance inconceivable.

I'll live like the return address on an envelope
with a mouthful of silence for a voice
and wait for you to answer me again
like a songbird at the spring equinox

through a broken window in a house of pain.
And though it hurts worse when the candles go out
I'll refuse to turn my heart away
from your reflection in everything I see.

Everything I hear and do and say.
Everything that was as true as a night sky about you.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Lady Nightshade's Suicide Wasn't Vain Enough

Lady Nightshade’s suicide wasn’t vain enough.
She insisted on dying for the world.
She finally stepped through the black door.
She took all that splendour of mind and flesh
and instead of going supernova to make a statement
let it shrink down into
the single snowflake of a white dwarf
in a spring thaw.
She died as unobtrusively as a wild flower perishes.
Lady Nightshade died like a whisper in a hurricane of razorblades
a candle flame
a toy in the corner
that knows when it’s time to let the child go.
She knew her greatest claim to fame
was perpetual silence.
There are some eyes so clear and radiant
the light’s too shy to enter.
There are some mirrors
that have to turn their backs on you
to show you what you’re looking at.
Lady Nightshade died like a black mass at the eclipse of a water lily
and then blew out the flames
on a skeletal replica
of the extinct candelabra
she made of her fossil remains.
It was hard to keep up with the half-life of some of her lies
but she could tell time radioactively
like numbers on a watch that glow in the dark
while the rest of us had to rely on a water clock.
She could see things coming
from the asteroid’s point of view
and when you heard her speak
of what she thought it was you should seek
among all those invisible things
we make visible through our lives
even if you only had a rag of blood
snagged on a thorn of what’s left of a heart in your body
she made a deep and lasting impact.
You looked at her
and you knew the time of night
and the weather.
In her nuclear winter
you were either a species of delusion
that went extinct
or you changed the way she did
and she was a legend among chameleons.
She was a rainbow’s worst nightmare.
With her
you weren’t deep enough into anything
until you’d dug your own grave.
She could hold your spirit up to your face
like a mirror one moment
and in the next
tear it off like a bandage on a deep wound
as if she were unmasking a new scar on the dark side of the moon.
She could make you smile like a face-painted clown
who just had his smile widened
from cheek to cheek
by a scalpel.
She was the daughter of intensity
but god help the snake
who tried to ride the dragon
by hanging on with its fangs
as if those were any kind of match
for her crescents and claws.
She could weld a forked tongue
back into a spear head
and bury it like the Clovis point of a viper
deep in the deserts of Arizona
where it would take twelve thousand years
for someone to find it
like a flint knapped skull with lockjaw.
With her it was ok to be the universe
as long as she were its physical laws
and they were at all times and everywhere
applicable and true.
And god what a body.
You took one look at her
and you knew already
you’d been sexually bruised.
She was living proof
that on the Day of Creation
when God made woman
he had a muse
and the rest of us were plagiarized
from an overdue Texas textbook
that denied evolution
was creatively collaborative and true.
The immutable faithful still profaning existence
where everything is the genome of the many
and all are the chosen few.
But Lady Nightshade was more amused by
than convinced of her own beauty.
She was too intelligent
not to use it as an index
of male cupidity
twisting their inflated multiverse
like birthday balloons in hyperspace
into her favourite kind of lapdog
as Leonard Cohen sang in the background
no man ever got a woman back
by begging on his knees.
She was the kind of hunger
that could teach a rude man to say please
and a wiser one
who’s been seasoned by the sea
under full sail
like an orchard in a storm
thank-you.
She could roll men’s skulls like dice
that always came up snake-eyes
because she could see how clearly
they were estranged from their own reflections
like telescopes that can see everything but themselves
bring the far near
shorten the mile
be the last day of the thirteenth month
in a leaping light year
that stays one step ahead of itself
like a thief of the moon
coming in through the back door
of someone else’s homelessness.
She loved to give performance poetry readings
where she’d scream at the featured guests
molesting the microphone with their monogamous poems
like the accused at the accuser
like an oracular snake pit from the audience
or a banshee at the window
Do you know how many muses
you blind sleepwalkers
have turned into social workers?
And in the barefoot silence that ensued
no one dropped the other shoe
and you just knew
those on stage
felt like the cutting edge of a new ice age
that would be the crib-death of inspiration
and thousands of baby mammoths
that would be clutched by dozy glaciers
like stuffed teddy-bears for security and warmth
for the next twenty-five thousand years
of black ice a mile high
trying to transcend itself
like a recurring nightmare.
Lady Nightshade wasn’t the kind of revolutionary
that showed her face to the world
like a mask turned inside out.
She never let her certainty get in the way of her doubt.
I remember watching her one night
after we’d made love
look out from the fourteenth floor
of the Hotel des Gouverneurs
at St. Denys Boulevard
lit up like a Nazca landing strip
in the middle of the starscape
that bloomed like Montreal.
She was naked.
She was vulnerable.
But I could see a bridge in the far distance
on her right shoulder
like a threshold that was all
exit and entrance
at the extreme ends of things
always at right angles to the direction of the flow.
It arched over the river
like the Egyptian sky goddess Nut
her body night-blue with white stars
that lined the bridge like streetlamps
as fragile and delicate in the aerial atmospherics
as the eyelashes of nocturnal humming birds.
And I saw right then and there
how vastly she longed for her ghost
to ready her for death
like a lover from another lifetime
when suffering wasn’t
the only natural renewable resource
you could rely on to make a living.
A wounded hawk never asks for pity
and she didn’t ask for mine.
She was the key
that left everything open
and for awhile
we were inseparably alone
because I was the lock
that couldn’t keep anything in.
She jumped from her bridge
into the lifeboat of a coffin
and left a farewell on the mirror
written by a bleeding snail of scarlet lipstick.
I don’t know what star she was following
but back here on earth
there’s a black hole that eats its own shadow
and chandeliers of firelies
that keep putting themselves out in their tears.
Lady Nightshade never cheated her solitude
by buffing it with love.
Lady Nightshade played solitaire
with a Tarot pack of mirrors.
She saw what turned up.
Lady Nightshade followed the Queen of Cups to the block.
She said a few words
that ransomed her life with a candle.
She blew it out.
She swanned like a summer constellation
on the smoke of a distant fire.
She drowned her silver sword in the star stream
like a barrette she took out of her hair
to let it blow away like the fragrance
of something beautiful hidden somewhere
like a secret that was meant to be kept.
Lady Nightshade bloomed like a bruise.
A blue rose.
A new moon.
Dark.
Unknown.
And cherished.
And when she perished
only strangers could have guessed why I wept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Living On The Cutting Edge Of The Lunar Waste

Living on the cutting edge of the lunar waste
I made of my last moonrise. A truce
with underwhelming circumstances for awhile,
no apparent pitfalls on a Saturday night in Perth,
too cold for snakes, and the leaves playing their cards
close to earth and the air a knife at your throat,
I can remember when I tried harder to exist,
and it's still a holy war every day just to subsist
and not let it scar your spirit into being cauterized
like a bad tattoo of the moon you had effaced,
but tonight I seek the ease of a solitude older than humans
down in the wetlands of the Tay River just off
Sunset Boulevard before you cross the first bridge.

Waist high in the broken antennae of the brittle grass
yellow as the fossils in a graveyard
of green praying mantes, decultified romantics,
I pad the skull of rock I usually sit on like a prophetic throne
with the old manuscripts of fallen maple leaves,
recalling lines from poems like lyrical snippets of chromosomes
I'd written many years ago to adapt my heart
to the changes it had to go through to recast
the cannon it was into the life of a shapeshifting bell
with the pulse of a nightbird lamenting the dead
instead of a twenty-one gun salute like a firing squad
aimed at the stars. Death is the saddest loss of discipline
the spirit will ever be called upon to master in order to survive.

It was sitting here one night, staring into the eye socket
bored into the albino nugget of a crow's skull,
the boney harps of its wings torn off their hinges
like gates that weren't strong enough to keep something out,
as the black flight feathers of a long eclipse slowly passed
across my eyes, that I realized, dead or alive,
existence is an interactive creative medium that doesn't care
whether you live it like a seance or an exorcism
and there are untold ages of the shining left
even in the oldest ashes of a star strewn on the path
of these long nocturnal firewalks through the mind
and that hello and farewell were the two wings
of the same waterbird, beating in unison
that empowered it to fly like a phoenix of imagination
out of an aviary of urns of its past lives
that might not sing for awhile but never lose their voice.

Cultivate the kind of spirit that can sing to you in the silence
when you're down, about the beauty of just being here
to live it, though you don't want to hear it,
you want to drown in your sorrow like a bell
but somehow the sound of life cuts through you
like a lunar blade with a growing edge
through wounded water and you can't help but wonder
what your ghost would give just to be here again
if only one more time, to resonate with the pain
like a back up singer to the universe,
who knows all the loneliest lyrics by heart
like a waterbird out on the river late at night.

If only to hit one perfect note of sadness, one tine
of separation and suffering like a phantom waterlily
adding its shining to the light like the art
of knowing how to paint starmaps on your tears
indelibly on water for light years to come
to let people know you were once here,
you listened as they will by the side
of this river of life to the same songs, hurt and alone,
as they must if they want to step out of the chorus
and sing solo through their tears in their own voice
before they're gone to a hundred billion stars
that are listening to the same echo
being whispered in their ears like the fires of life
carried away by the desire to live on
like the empty lifeboat of a song full of moonlight
drifting down river to an ocean of awareness
where the gateways of the crow are refeathered
like the exit and entrance of an eclipse of wings
still keeping time to the picture-music that shines
like a new moonrise in the voice of a mindstream that sings
its way through the woods at night alone like a wild grape vine
sustaining the tears of its spiritual high notes until they turn
into the euphoric lunacy of a poetic wine aged in an earthly urn.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Something Deeper Than Stars

Something deeper than tears to weep for you.
I weep blood. I weep the silence
on the backstairs with the screen door
that bangs like the sound of one hand clapping
all through the night at the slightest gust of wind
as if a constellation were trying
to strike up a insightful conversation
with a wet match, the sceptre of a spent blossom.
I need a moon deeper than water to drown in.
I need to dance the pain away
in a sword dance of serpents
that know how to carry a tune
like a well fledged arrow, a beautiful toxin,
straight to the heart of the mysterious apple
that's sitting on top of my head like a prophetic skull.
No flower can say. Not any number of song sparrows
returning to the budding tree in spring,
no green leaf of an innocent tongue,
not even this dry leaf of mine in autumn
writing lyrics on the wind no one can read,
not even among ghosts, can find a voice
that isn't already the dead language
of an absence that can't be adorned
by a seance of words.
I light no candles. I summon no gods.
No pretence of knowing where you've gone.
No black hole that's as empty as
your ring on the table, no halo
that ever fell as far from heaven.
Good-bye's too optimistic and farewell's
the rudder of a grave on the rocks.
And if I were to raise the paper sail
of another poem like the waxing phase
of the funereal moonboat
that carried you away,
I'd make it black. I'd raise it
like the shroud of a black magician
that can make things disappear,
like an eclipse at half mast
and patch it with the skull and crossbones
of a different phase of the moon on the dark side.
I wouldn't return your personal belongings
back to the morning like starlings and doves.
But there aren't enough sacred syllables
swimming like moonlit fish
in the watershed of the silence
to open this fountainmouth of grief
like an aviary of flightless birds.
Nor would I risk having you remember me,
and turn around like a false start,
supposing you can still recall anything at all,
like a light you left on in the hall
the night you left home for good.
You were magic while you were here to work it.
You were the black nun of an enlightened cult of one.
You were the black mass of the sun at midnight
and the blood sister of the moon
that nicked your finger
on both her crescent thorns at once
so one was the cure to the other's wound
like the eyes of a cat, the fangs of a snake.
Given how close to the moon you were
it didn't come as a surprise
when you started writing me loveletters
inscribed in bone as if you'd just invented
a whole new language out of your claws
to make love to a poet in the nude when the moon
didn't lay its silver sword down between us
to keep us a threshold apart from our fingertips.
And it wasn't long before the elixir began to work
and I lost count of the number
of consensual metaphors I had for your lips,
similitudes for the night skies
that surrounded your eyes in a delirium of stars
that revelled in the crazy wisdom
of their mystically inspired atmospheres.
As just as beautiful as they were,
so were they irresistibly dangerous.
How many light years now
have I poured this memory of them
like a love potion over my roots
and waited for you to bloom in my bloodstream
like stars and blossoms streaming
through the heartwood of an ageing tree
that has as many dead branches on it as it does leaves,
and like an orchard anticipating moonrise,
knew you weren't coming anymore,
and the night bird had no one to sing for?
But, hey, I'm still a better seance
than I am an exorcism and if you can hear me
calling the faithful to prayer
in all directions at once like a paper airplane
the boy in me has sent out to search for you
like a loveletter in a hurricane of razor wire,
dripping with clusters of blood
the size of hemorrhaging grapes,
fireflies caught in a spider-web
of starless constellations that aren't a sign
of anything except I miss you worst at night.
If you could sense the tremor
in even the slightest wavelength of light
I'm trying to shine on the darkness to find you,
I'd write you a holy book of sacred silence
inspired by the shadows in my blood
that overtake me like strangers from behind
with an urgent message not to return home
to what isn't there anymore.
I'd sit out here all night by myself
beside the black waters of this night creek
unravelling like a ribbon in mourning,
that's been talking to itself
as it walks in its sleep on the water,
and I would beseech the stars with my eyes
to let me know if they've seen you,
and in my heart I would entreat them
with the solo of a wounded wolf
raising its head up in a wild prayer
to catch a trace of you on the chilly night air,
to give me a starmap to when and where
I can see you face to face again
and touch your eyelids in your sleep
like crocuses coming up through the snow.
Like moonrise in the apple blow of the storm
that scattered us to winds like all these poems
I've tried to write for you ever since
as if you were still somewhere nearby
like another pair of eyes
in my pain and my solitude
watching from the woods
the stars, the water, the moon,
under the stones in the river
that mark your grave and name
above the flowing of this endless epitaph
of leaves and blossoms and poems
as if you alone could still read them,
like the comings and goings,
of waterbirds on the moon,
the first draft of words on the wind,
maple leaves and keys on the mindstream,
and still understand what I was trying to mean.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sitting In The Dark

Sitting in the dark
being who I am by acclamation.
The solitude half memory, half exorcism.
No one else ran for the position
so I've settled on trying to live up empathetically
to this person that's tried for so long to be me.
The sound of the occasional car on Highway 7
six blocks away
puts its hand over its mouth.
Everything's a secret at this time of the night.
And it occurs to me
I've always been a stranger to myself.
The enigma in the doorway across the street.
My windows. My keys. My locks.
But always looking up at my own place
as if someone else lived there instead of me.
A man with no return address on his homelessness.
As if I were always catching a glimpse of myself
going around the next corner
and I'm the tail I'm trying to lose.
Or giving the occasional mirror
caught totally off guard
cold chills in passing
like a ghost with unknown enterprises of its own.
My freedom enclosed
within the sum of its limits
I live in an elsewhere zone
where the mystery of what I'm doing here
goes to extremes
like a tent city outside
the vacancy of an unoccupied metropolis
of anti-social landlords
to prove I have a right
to the portable threshold of my homelessness.
I'm beached like a birch bark canoe
that isn't going anywhere
on the shoals of my stream of consciousness
trying to figure out who's doing the saying
and who's doing the listening.
Though most people think
one is the spitting image of the other's reflection
verbal expression is not thought
and you can't hear it before you say it.
Even too late for the drunks to be out
I like the way the half-hearted moonlight
interprets my face through its fingertips
as if I were having my portrait done in braille.
What could that look like
when you've connected all the dots
if not an eclipse or a new moon?
Take your pick.
And I may be somewhat out of touch
with how dark things have become
but I know this much
this much at least I know.
Worse than despair
is learning how not to care.
I mean what have you got left
when all's been said and done and gone
if not for a few old reflexive delusions
in a holy war of tribal mirages
that have made a habit of your heart
just as drugs become the cosmology of junkies.
It's no more absurd
to be left standing like an echo in a doorway
long after the house has been torn down
than it is to paint realistic watercolours in the rain
en plein air.
I thought I had a message once
worthy of descending doves.
I could feel the wind under the dragon's wings
open like the firedoor to a furnace full of prophets.
And the words were mine true enough
until I realized how much life like art
is totally plagiarized from the medium it creates in
and how imperative it was
to be reborn from your mother-tongue
like a whole new language of evolving memes
if you want to be taken at your word
even in hell as in heaven
you know how to speak for yourself
without resorting to paracletes
even when you're persuasively certain
no one can understand you.
Every word might contain a dead metaphor
but when mine aren't demonically possessed
and speaking in tongues
they're buzzing around the azaleas
like hummingbirds and bees
sipping black kool-aid in Jonestown.
I start out writing like a new moon
but by the time it's done with me
I'm a total eclipse in an ink pot,
indelibly.
That's why I'm sitting here in the dark
trying not to adulterate the light
with cosmic thoughts of all night streetlamps
in an empty parking lot
where everyone overpays a price
for their little square of time and space.
I've got a digital alarm clock
with three and a half numbers that glow in the dark
like an informant trying to warn me
before it's way too late for all of us
to adjust my time-zone and dial it back.
To when?
To when it was a better world?
To when I was a better man?
To the last chance I had to become one?

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Hearts Healing

I called your name
you weren't there
I waited for you
You passed me by
I asked you to dance
You asked someone else
I loved you
You didn't love me
I said hello
You said good-bye
You broke my heart
I couldn't fix it
I wanted revenge
You lauged at me
I cried
You loved someone else
No one heard my cries
My heart was aching
You moved on
I didn't
You were happy
I was sad
I had no one
You had someone
I got lost
lost
lost
In the dark was I
alone alone alone....
my heart still aching
the memoires of us still waking
help help help
no one heard
alone alone alone
forever forever forever
it seemed
the pain was intolerable
I was going insane
my heart was still broken and pain
then then then
I saw
a bright light
i heard a calming voice
calling me....
it was someone who loved me
more than you,
I felt a strong
loving embrace
It was an angel you see
He loved me very much
He told me to go on
That I wasn't alone
I was healed
I felt happy again
and I knew I was loved
and I would never have to wait for love again.....

poem by Bella Ravenstar
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Took My Death Mask Off For You

I took my deathmask off for you
to show you the naked absence
behind the past of everything I've ever been.
Real, you said, and meant something squalid.
And I autographed your holy book
with green ink the same colour as your eyes
with a fountain pen that didn't
step into the same poem twice.
Let's be real, you said, but you meant solid,
so we pushed your single bed
over by a window full of stars
and pulled the blind down on enlightenment,
cataracts in the eye, flowers in the sky,
and made love to the picture-music of a candle,
jealous of my gold-nibbed fountain pen
trying to prove it had a voice of its own
and could bleed as easily I could over nothing.
And I remember how you liked to sing to me
with that old cat-scratched guitar
you kept in the corner like an emergency lifeboat.
And I'd listen like a lighthouse
just to bug the candle
for being so competitive
any gust of stars could blow it away in jest.
And I heard the music of shy spiders
spinning the lyrics of their silken sorrows
on the looms of their guitars like webs.
And you could tell by the way I looked at you,
I wanted you to take off your veils and dreamcatchers,
that serpentine boa of apricot orchards
feathered between your breasts, get naked again
and go swimming with me
like two dolphins on the moon
in your deepest, darkest watersheds
where you weep black pearls
like the broken rosaries of past eclipses
that portended the end of the world
for all those one-eyed lovers as they knew it
who tried to patch the wounded rose
with one of her own petals like a bicycle tire
and blew it big time on the downslope to nowhere.
And if I was autumn
with my whole future behind me
then you were spring
with your past up ahead.
Though we both knew
time was just a rumour
some snakeoil salesman
was trying to spread
like a cure-all for everything.
And there were times when we bumped hearts
like two soft rocks of coal playing with fire
I swear I saw meteroritic nano-diamonds in the sparks
anyone of which could have been the beginning
of a new religion I could have given my soul to
if I wasn't already the prophetic heretic of one of my own.
And you'd end up burning me at the stake of your guitar
for breathing life back into the dead words
that expire like caged birds
in the chimneys and lockets,
of your spiritual metaphors,
new lamps for old, new wine
for the old wine-skins of the new moon.
I never wanted to see Mary Magdalene
stoned among the asteroids
like a sacred whore defamed
by everyone else's vices
because she dances unashamedly
naked as a snake in the temple of Isis.
Besides, why make confession like graffiti
written on the concrete underside
of realistic overpasses and burning bridges
as an urgent sign of the times
even in these urban shrines of futility
where we speak in forked tongues when we pray
for things we don't even know if we want,
in pictographic hieroglyphics
for illiterates with dangerous spraybombs
that shake their tails like rattlesnakes
that don't want to be tread on when they're empty.
And for those who've mastered
the writing on the wall
as if it were their mother tongue,
the ambiguous eloquence
of these blessings and curses,
this Delphic ambivalence of Pythian oracles
split down the middle of what they meant
like the witching wand of a fire serpent
or a tuning fork looking for the G-spot
on the lunar body of a shapely guitar
trembling like a spider in an hourglass
everytime the world gets turned upside down
like moonset in the morning of a mirage.
Why crack another perfectly good mirror
just to hatch another eclipse
out of a cosmic egg
when it's just as easy
to teach people to see in the dark.
And, besides, you being the singer you were,
I didn't think a nightbird needed a voice coach
and I'm nothing, if not a man of my word
though I know it sounds
too sophisticated to the foolish,
and to those who know
way more than I care to, absurd.
But I don't trust any kind of wisdom
that takes its craziness for granted
and starts putting bars on the windows
to keep itself out of the asylum.
This is this. And this is that too.
And whether I'm looking
deeply into stars or fireflies
from either end of the telescope
at a feast of light, or the crumbs
of a dream in the corners of the eyes
of the last famine of seven lean kind,
alone with myself in the night
beauty is always an ocean of bliss
tinctured with a mild antidote of sadness
so this doesn't overwhelm that
in a delerium of epiphenomenal madness.
I don't know if you'd call it spiritual or not
but when it comes to divining the undefinable,
I know that similes share a lot more of themselves
with a world that doesn't cut itself any slack
than metaphors that insist on exacting
false identities from refugees along the road
with whom they have nothing in common
but exile and the longing
of a candle in the window
who doesn't know who it's waiting for
to write someone's name again in fire
like a fountainpen talking to birds
in a dialect of being that's older than words.
And the Sufis say you begin to take on
the characteristics of anyone
you've been around more than forty days.
And we made it a bit further than that.
You so much like the nightsea
of starless rain in me by the time we parted
and me the unpredictable spiritual weather
in the third eye of your emotional hurricane
looking for landfall with ravens and doves
in an exchange of transcontinental loveletters
with black and white feathers.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Moon In The Mirror

Moon in the mirror,
Wont you stay a while tonight?
All things of beauty
Are too soon out of sight.
I know its a selfish plea;
You must light the hearts of more than me.
Theres a girl at her window;
Now shes trying to catch your eye.
But oh, pretty stranger,
You must keep on passing by.
Moon in the mirror, I dont know you;
Just a reflection of kisses
And whispers and indigo skies.
Moon in the mirror, look below you.
Moons looking back and theyre loving
And longing and telling no lies.
Moon in the mirror,
I will ask you one more time,
Not for a reason and not for a rhyme,
But please tell me if you can,
Have you seen a moonlit man?
Hes so very like you,
You could see him from afar.
Perhaps hes a misplaced moonbeam
Or a banished star.
Moon in the mirror, hes so like you.
Light up the room for an hour;
A smile or the beat of my heart.
Oh, how my heart tried to fight him,
Fight against mirrors of moonlight
Or lovelight. you lost from the start,
From the start

song performed by by Joni Mitchell
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Slowly Over The Years

Slowly over the years
like a queen cobra that didn't like
the music she was dancing to,
the right song but the wrong flute,
life has made a big impression on me
by showing me what it can do
to the magnanimous equanimity
of all those who went looking for the Buddha
to explain what they'd just done to themselves
in the late sixties by straightening out their wavelengths
like the curls in their long bucolated hair,
or the creases under the eyes in the mirror
that weren't there yesterday
or the day before whenever I last cried.
I used to tattoo starmaps like blackholes
on the bad moon rising of my skull
like the eye sockets on one roll of the dice.
I put an emergency exit sign over one ear
and over the other. Enter here.
Like the back and front covers of a hardbound book.
Emotional butterflies caught in the passions of a forest-fire
like broadsheets in a revolution,
spiritual gazelles like slim first volumes of poetry
martyred in the eternal flames
of the solar corona with the mystical sun dog
they mistook for their third eye
before it evaporated into thin air
like the last two drops of bloodshed on the savannah.
It rained vipers. It rained manna.
Authority struck my crystal skull
with an iron billy club
it carried around like an organ transplant
in case of urgent insurgencies
and where you can see all these little frayed threads
of the deltas and rivers and roads I've been down
like a pilgrim asking everyone I met along the way
whose holy war this was and had they seen
a dreamcatcher fractured by nervous, white lightning
walking in its sleep on the moon somewhere
uprooting the wildflowers of the stars in her eyes
to replant them like corneas in the gardens of the blind.
Right here. Where that shard of a star is missing
like the capitol of an unknown country
is where I broke out of the cosmic egg
and made a getaway like an arrow
in the opposite direction of the divine.
Not every journey ends in a shrine.
Right here is where I stepped out of the night woods
like starlight through my eyelashes
into the clearing of a vast inconceivably open space
as if I had just woken up and were rubbing
the crumbs of a dream like fireflies,
like stray asteroids with chips on their shoulders
looking to pick a fight with the planet
I was living on at the time,
and nuggets of fool's gold
out of the corners of my iron pyrite eyes.
And I had a vision that crept up on me
like the shadow of the watcher in a dream
who's always keeping an eye upon you
from the trees on the far side of the mindstream
And I'll always remember this.
The orchids of bliss
were blooming in the shadow of an outhouse.
And I understood how love
that thrives on longing and emptiness
could die of starvation as soon as it was full.
And why enlightenment, the moon, love, and poetry
that come so blithely of their own accord
are so attached to letting go of everything
they ever set out to seek like someone
they were blind to who could see
but could not speak.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Don't Care If You Remember Me Or Not

I don't care if you remember me or not.
I'm not going anywhere. I'll still be here.
But I'm going to disappear soon enough
and you can have the mirror all to yourself.
I can't imagine dying alone is any deeper
than this solitude I've been living on my own.
Take that chisel of a tongue and chip
my cartouche off that gravestone I'm not under yet
as if you just discovered a new talent
for pecking away at death as if you were married to it.

I'm out of here. This is my grand exit. Like Keats
I make it with an awkward bow, the way the deer do
when they come down to the river to drink.
I don't make it in anger. I'm not judging a mirage
because it doesn't slake my thirst for real water.
I'm not bitter, vicious, or proud. I see myself
in you, especially when you're crying without
a knife in your hand you wield like a paper cut
of the last crescent of the moon. It makes me sad
that we live more separately than we ever will in death.
I can remember when you first took my breath away,
and now, if you want to give it back, that's ok,
that's ok, too, as my brother would say, listening
like an amputee to the one-handed applause of the Buddha.

There are gaps, there are voids and abysses,
there are neuronic synapses, godheads, bardo states
and black holes we all have to bridge sooner or later.
Love's one of them. Death's another. And life's
a country road with so many potholes it's shell-shocked.
You can efface my name from your memorial wall
but I'm sure I'll turn you into poetry somewhere
along the way. I'm thawing into tears
like an Arctic ice cap faster than I should
but I'll hold you in my cold, cold heart forever
like a dolmen without snow nobody knows the name of.

More wonderful things get said in the doorways
of farewell through the veils of our motiveless tears
than you're ever going to hear on the thresholds of hello
when everyone mythically inflates their uncontested lies
in the name of love. It's not much of a triumph
to ride in a golden chariot of the sun through a slum.
It's a little vehicle, and come the first serious eclipse,
you're on black ice on a highway late at night on your own,
however many corpses you've sand-bagged in the rear
to give it some weight. Kitty litter and ashes
for traction are better than rose-petals and thorns
strewn along your path. You get a better grip on things
as you're turning your wheels into the direction of your spin
or somersaulting over your handle bars like a cow
that jumped over the moon. As for me. The moonrise
raises a spoonful of ashes to my lips and I try
to take my medicine like a solitary nightbird
sipping from the fountain of a dark muse
like a lunar fish in the watershed of a total eclipse.

I'll never wish you ill. And I'll try really hard
never to dispel your delusions of me as someone
you might have been able to love. Sorry about the discrepancy.
Mirages on a sundial. Lighthouses on the moon.
Sharks and shipwrecks. Shouldn't our dreams and delusions,
our secret nightmares, be accorded the same
ontological dignity as any other God particle
in the transmorphic context of reality? They move
the world as much as mass or gravity and they're
as counterintuitively absolute and constant
as the speed of light. Everyone's trying to write
their own unified field theory to explain everything
all at once to themselves, as if they were whispering
seas of rising awareness into their own ear.

I've lived too long under this cloak of the mystery
I bear as best I can like a mantle of starmud
in the name of a thousand poets who bore it
in their turn to suffer the solitude of their revelry
like the calyx of a black hole in the center of a galaxy
consuming two hundred billion stars in a single gulp
to stay drunk enough for light years to learn
to breathe in the light before they're willing to let it go.
To kiss the bud of the wildflower into the open
and step back into the light like a shadow at noon
and watch it grow without you. Noblesse oblige.
And I don't mean it cynically. The wolf howls.
The dog barks. The road leads like a trail of blood
to a dark grove of trees where everything heals by itself
and death is a retroactive edition of a posthumous future
that lies up ahead like road kill. Like it or not.

Sooner or later every persistent absurdity is interred
in an aura of grace, as if we gave the dead
the benefit of the doubt we begrudge the living.
That said. Still hard to kiss the stinging nettles
like hooded cobras on the head spitting in your eyes
like the Taliban just as you're learning to read
the writing on the wall. So the blind prophets
learn to love the dark. So the candle that's burning
to shed some light on the night and the stars
goes out in a gust of breath like a secret chandlier
on the dark side of death. And what are we left with
that might remotely stick it out with us
in search of a treasure chest that isn't
just another bone box of sacred relics? I used to think
scars from the stars that enlightened us
like Medusas of white phosphorus that bit
like high frequency wavelengths in a snake pit
the moon was agitating like ripples and scales
on the skin of a mirror we thought we'd shed
relationships ago. But now my youth has outgrown me
I go well out of my way to err on the side of compassion
more than I ever longed to know the truth
of what we're all doing here together
trying to stay true to the circuitous path we're on
by getting lost in each other's eyes and arms.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Cursed (story)

I am Bill.I live with my brother, my dad, mom and my lil sis.There's always this thing that bothers my mind..it's because i believe that my mom and sis already died.It was almost a yearago yet not that old to be forgotten.our house was burnt for unknown reason.They we're found dead on the room i was staying.Burned, yet there's still mystery upon their death.

I can barely remember that i see mere smoke and huge fire.i was just 7 yet my mind works as if i was not.After the tragic happenings the ocean made noise and i saw a huge wave comming towards our direction.Crowds of neigbors, the police, the rescuers and even i, my lil bro and dad run away.

our house was swallowed by that huge wave.After that i don't know what else happened.I hear my dad yell and my lil bro crying.I see blurry lights and hear the sirens.I was asleep! am i? i see the lights striking in my eyelids yet i can not see any image.i hear the sound of waves smashing unto rocks then i'm

shocked to reality i'm just sitting on the deck before the emergency room in the city hospital.I was wonderin' what i'm doin' there but 'twas just a couple'o seconds when i saw my lil bro and dad walked out the emergency room, smiling and waved on me.My dad shouted com'mon bill let's go home.okey, well my dad's calling me.Gotta go!

i really don't know what happened but as we go back to where our house was build it was still there standing steady and strong.I looked around i saw our neighbor's house burnt.and i said' oh, bla bla i really don't know what's happening! ' and asked dad 'dad i thought it was our house burned? '

and as i always hear from him dad answered in a huge voice 'what? are you out of your mind? '

then i heared a soft voice saying 'John, let him rest.Maybe he's hallucinating.he's from kelly's house beside the shore.we all knew it's almost impossible for him to survive that huge fire.'

my pores closed, my spines shivered..and my heart pumped fast...

i shouted' who's that'? ... MOM?

and the voice answered 'yes dear.'

my dad then said' LEt's took him to the doctor, maybe the accident affected his mind too.'

'but DAD! ! , Mom and tricia died already! '

he answered: 'That's not funny bill! if yu're thinking this is the right time to crack pranks.well ITS NOT! ! ..Go to your room! ! '

'but DAD? '!

'NO buts, go to your room.NOW! '

okey, it seems like i really am hallucinating..maybe i came over kelly's house and caused fire and cause of the pressure and i was so scared that i would be charged for the accident i run out of my consciousness..yeah..maybe that's what happened..

'I really feel like i was dreaming, so i quinched my face and punched my head..yet i did not wake up..

so i told myself to relax 'oookeey... bill, , , re-lax! this is true..just believe...just believe! ' and i almost lost my consciousness again when i hear someone say just believe..

i turn at my back and lil sis was there at my back, , , i said' hey tricia, what are you doin' here..how'd you come in? ? ' she answered' i don't know, i just got here...but mom want you to believe...'

i answered ' what the...just go! crazy little brat! '

so she scampered out of my room...

Sigh! for all that happened this day..i want to forget it all and sleep.so i slept.

it wasn't that long till I

woked up with a voice

'Bill come down.it's dinner..i cooked your favorite dish..! '

oh its mom..

i answered

'Comming mom! ! '

and it really was true..everything is true..so i decided to forget it all..

everything turn back to normal until now.. yet i was still believing behind my thoughts that they were dead..

There will be a storm that'll enter the state tonight.The TV forecaster said it carries strong winds and heavy rains.The city government said that lights will be out at eight to prevent accidents caused by electrical damages.

Our city is not a capital.it's located at the far eastern part of the state, near the shores of open oceans.

It's 7: 03 in the evening and i guess the storm hit the state earlier than the forecast..

my dad went downtown to buy some food and my lil bro really cried so hard to go with him so he let him..

i hear the car breaks and the wheels screeching..so i looked upon the window...

why'd they brought almost all their stuffs? are they goin' out of town or running away from us?

i saw my lil bro crying at the backdoor of the car... so i shouted

'daaaaaaaaaad! where are you goin! , daaaaaaaaaad'

'daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad'

but it seems like he don't hear me..

maybe cause of the heavy rain..

but why are they leaving me?

suddenly the lights turned off...?

my heart is beating loudly...

and i am starting to faint...

then the light's back..

i saw my lil sis run unto the kitchen, , ,

i told her 'hey ttrish where's dad goin? , , , where's mom? '

but she did not answered...so i followed her until i..i...iii can't see her..where'd she go?

i hear a lil girl crying at the room so...i turned back and planned to peek at the room.. i saw my little sis crying at something i can not clearly see..

so i said ' trish? ', , then she stopped crying..

'what are you doing..? '

she stay silent..

and BOOM! i hear a thunder..

a lightning striked..

so i look around and found out that the antenna was strucked...

as i look back at my sis

she was gone?

then i hear footsteps at my back...

'MOM>? Trsih? ? '

then i saw my mom very far from me...at the other side of the house..it was dark.. the lights were blinking..

and a candle was lighted above the reff.

i'd gone closer and closer yet the closer i go..the more the image i'd seen fades...

'Mom? '

BOOM! ! ! ! another lightning with thunder strucked!

my mom was there again standing...

and then they've said with a very frightening voice..the one i've rarely heard at the CR or anywhere when i'm alone...

'you killed me! '

'you killed me! '

'you killed me! '

'you killed me! '

then the lights got totally busted...

i scampered away...

i'd run out the house...

the doors, the windows and everything is swinging in and out like there was a strong wind pushing them...

i rode my bicycle and cycled fast until i reached downtown...

i saw dad's car..

it was parked in front of a huge mansion..

i got in..

i'm just a little bit intrigue cause..this mansion is quite big yet no guards and no other people noticed my entrance? ..

i got through the gates..and then unto the doors..the water is dropping fast from me totally wet and cold.

i saw dad and lil bro eating..

my bro was very happy..he was laughing..

my dad was smiling while he was eating...

and said ' hey lil boy d'you like our new home..huh? .. I'm sory 'bout what happened to our old house earlier..i myself can't take to remember that tragedy...our house was burnt to dust..and nothing or no one among them survived..now little boy..it's just me and you... only us.

i came close, hoping he would notice me..

so i shouted 'dad i'm here! ! '

yet he did not noticed..

i tried several times yet it was not effective.

so i came even closer..pick up the fork and throw it away...kicked the vase and step on it..i punched the wall.. and i see my blood drifting from my hands..all i can feel is only at my right hand...the other one seems to lose it's sense..

I am starting to cry...'daaaaad, pls.'

he suddenly looked at my direction...he stood up /...

my tears were like sipped up again..and the smile in my face turned exaggerated..

but his face was not okey! he looked like he was electrified!

yet i noticed..he was not looking at me..!

his vision was just passing through..

then i saw my sis on the door she was wet with both rain water and blood..

my dad saw her..and cried..

his eyes were almost out..he's abviosly frightened..

and said

'trish! i'm sorry, i'm really sorry di not have enough time to save you..i'm sorry i let you down...' (continued weeping)

then sis cried and said..'you left me alone! you left us! you don't care for us! ! DIE! ! ! '...

dad whispered: 'NO, no, no! i care...i care...i..i.. just..i just dont know what to do...! ! '

my sis said 'DAD, here's bill.! he didn't really died cause of the fire! i killed him! '

I can't believe what i've just heared!

I'M DEAD! ! ? ? ?

'yes! yes! you are my dear! '

my mom's voice answered yet i see a burned corpse standing next to me., .

'She killed you...hahahahaha'

i answered: but..but.bbbut?

i'm with trish earlier...

' we died in the house..earlier'

i said 'huh? earlier? '

'bill? son? ...you're really there! the fire accident happened early just this dawn..' DAd said

but...but..b.b.ut?

how'd?

(i saw my sis embraced by my dad..)

DAD explained me the whole thing... 'At the moment of dying cause of tragic happenings...everything flashes back and the moment will slow down you will feel like things were happening at a long period of time while it really was the other way around....... AAAAAAAAAARHG! ! ..Ruuunnn my boy..save yourself! '

oh no! what have you done trisha!

'wahahahah! ' the corpse laughed..

'don't worry...she'll just help me finish them! wahahahahah'

then again i looked back at my sister and i saw a demon child with red eyes and bloody mouth...

it bit dad and crunch his flesh into peices...

the demon child jumped over the table and intentionally broke the lamp and spill the gas..the table started the fire and burned the entire mansion...

and i.i.ii.. saw my dad ..he was already corpse...breathing on the hole on his neck.. with burned body..and blood bathed...

i tried to scamper back but i can not move....

they were all holding me back..saying 'you belong here! , you belong here with us...we're now complete...and atlast we'll be happy....wahahahahaha'....

but i did not go with them..

I am now living along the cyberworld to guide my brother's life...yet i lost him! i am now searching for him...are you my brother? i am still waiting for the ryt time to come..

i choosed to stay here with you! i'm very thankful someone was interested to read my life...but i promise...the last person to read this will see me in the first full moon of this month...

i will kill you!

please come with me....

be my brother...

poem by Ellirie Aviles
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sometimes The Intimacy Of The Silence

Sometimes the intimacy of the silence
can grow so profoundly intense
it seems impersonal. Or the heat of life
burn like the dry ice of the holy ghost
as you shudder with spiritual chills in the cold.
And when you see things whole in and of themselves
it's always as if you were looking through a broken window.
Truly fulfilled, you realize everything you're missing.
The more you explore the mystery of what you're doing
just walking around on the earth, aware
of your awareness, the more of a stranger
you seem to yourself, decultified of your identity.

The birches are glowing in skin tight moonlight
and there are sixties hash burns in their white leotards
and the leaves are falling and the river's flowing
and the Canada geese are sowing themselves
in the wake of the plough of the moon
like black and white sunflowers seeds further south again
and my heart is saturated with autumn's sad sugars
like a mournful apple at the pathos of their passage
as if time had abandoned everything and all
the solitary soul can do is harvest the loss like a human
with a romantic sense of irony as we dance
on the graves of the dead to celebrate
the bright vacancy, dark abundance of our starmud
occluding and enlightening our solitude
until you're enthralled to conclude, the darker the night,
the brighter the light. And appearances are only deceptive
to those who haven't broken on through to
the other side of the mirroring awareness yet like a hymen
over a virgin black hole that's all iris with no pupil
so all it can ever see are moondogs of exclusion
that begin to look like haloes after awhile.

I'll write an epithalamion on my wedding night with death,
but while I'm alive I like to toy with euphoric elegies
that weep like old rivers in the discrete depths
of their watersheds. I spend hours by myself
watching the spiders of time stringing contellations
like bird nets between the sacred upper branches
of the aspens to catch fish on the fly the way I
wait for insights to start riffing on the blues guitar
in the corner jamming with the silence of itself
like a poignant wildflower blooming unfashionably late.

If you stare intensely enough into the emptiness,
if your focus is searing enough to burn holes in space,
seemingly self-contained things will emerge like particles
you can elaborate in time and space like the fractals
of worlds within worlds engendered by your own seeing.
But turn the light down, turn your eyes away, dissipate
your concentration, everything reverts to the wavelengths
of the flying carpets unwoven on the waning loom of the moon.

Things done. Things undone. Does the water remember
the growth rings of its ripples, does the snake cling
to the loss of its skin, or fire reminisce in its ashes?
Or scars in autumn long for the springtime of their wounds?
Nights like this sensation haunts me like the ghost
of an amputated heart I dedicated to poetry to add my pulse
to a dying art like the blood of a noble enemy who knew
without saying, the only way to keep the calling alive
was to practice an excruciating discipline of heretical infidelity.

And that's why I'm out here alone in the woods,
still trying to think my way out of the bone box of my decline
by taking my mind off things by letting go
of the paradigms and symbols that kept me afloat
like the lifeboats and wandering starmaps
of the habitable planets of the past bobbing
like the prophetic skulls of black walnuts back down
the mindstream to Mitylene in Lesbos
where Orpheus still dreams of singing himself
back up from the detritus of his cosmic dismemberments
like Vega in the lyrical grip of a dreamcatcher
casting spells like a widow's veils on the water
to snare the stars like a fisherman who drowned on the moon.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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This Late In The Day

This late in the day, could I love you, could you
love me? If I made a black rose of my blood,
redshifting into the dark, and gave it to you,
not knowing what to expect, would you counter-intuit
the wounded watershed of the poetic imagery?
Younger I was a lot more dangerous than I am now,
though I wasn't trying to be. Dragons raged in me
in infernal crusades of the bad against the worst
as I stood at the flaming gates of the vulnerable
and said to their worst nightmares you shall not pass.
I used my horns and scales to empower the innocent,
trying to turn a curse into a virtue, the atrocities
of the left-handed legacy of my condemned childhood
into something even a stranger might be proud of.

In Zen it's said that nobody likes a real dragon
and even among those I came to the rescue of
like a Viking long boat with runes like scars
chiselled into stone, and well-seasoned swords
that backed up my word down to the very least detail,
even among the exiles who felt compelled to love me,
even among those who didn't want to be seen
as hypocrites of their fashionable memes if they didn't,
I could see people backing away from me
like an expanding universe running on dark energy
and that was ok, I was raised to bite the bullet
whenever my heart was liberated by amputation.
Free of me, I am unencumbered by concern.
I can solo in the night skies I return to without fear
of estranging the stars with my intensities.

Now there's more mage than king in my immensities,
and time, sorrow and death have blunted my edge
like broken glass rounded in the turmoil of the tides
and Merlin has returned Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake,
I feel more like a rodeo clown in a barrel
with a funny hat, a painted tear, and a flower on my head,
a floppy poppy in red, trying to turn the crescents
of the moon bull on me like a Mayan calendar
to keep from goring the fallen who were mounted
above me like heroes that took a fall. A dragon
sheds its deathmasks like petals of the moon.

So if I presented myself to you as I am
could you learn to love an enlightened buffoon
with the injured nobility of a distinguished demon
guarding a small boy's notion of doing
some good in the asylum of the raving world,
intrigued with the urgency of innocence
to redeem itself like a mutant gene in the fuse
of an occult chromosome that's always
about to go off like a bomb buried
in the Milky Way of a fanatical supernova?
Was a time I'd hang the heads of my enemies
like Al Ghoul from my earlobes if they dared
to threaten anything I loved that couldn't defend itself.
Was a time I'd start a fight at my own funeral
just to stand up for someone when I couldn't.
Now I'm hemorrhaging like amaranthus
on an infernal summer day and my heart
is a coal bin of all the things I used to be
and there's more tears in the diamonds than blood.

I don't dip my pen in the trough of the world,
and I don't shepherd wolves to graze on the mountain.
Even when space turns to glass, and water leaks out
of the reactor like a constrictor from an aquarium
I endure the inverted question marks
of the hooks I hang on in a deep freeze
as if just to endure were to spite in spades
the cruelty of conditions taking their natural course.
Seven come eleven, but I can look at things
through the snake eyes of frost bitten dice
and not end up piping on a stone flute.
I was born standing in the doorway of an exit
that glowed red at night like a miscarriage of the light
but still the road sign of a back way out of hell.

So if I wrote you a poem you couldn't understand
would you exalt in your power to unman me
or would you feel the tenderness of the beast
behind the eclipse of the black lion that wears
the corona of the sun for a mane, a sunspot for a face?
Would you trust that the darkness is full of eyes
and some are hunting you, and some are shy
in your presence like wolves that have been shot at
because they're wild and as cunning as life?
Would you bait the meat with poison in a leg hold trap
or would you defang me into affability
and teach me to lower my voice when the moon was full?
Would we lie in the same bed with a sword between us?

I could befriend your fireflies. I could mitigate your thorns.
I could get behind whatever you dream
like dark matter behind a light filled universe
and when you were sad, let the rain play my scales
like a harpischord or a guitar with a black hole
in the middle of it I would descend into
like an Orphic underworld to sing you back to life.
I would lift all my taboos for you and give you
an exemption in the night to approach me as you wish
and even if your hand weren't brave enough to ask
I would fill it full of jewels with magic properties
that tempt the thieves of light to risk the labyrinths
of the inviolable graves on the dark side of the moon.
I would beatify you like a grail in a secret society
of warrior saints that haven't had a drink in years.

And if your chandeliers ever had a nervous breakdown
in a lightning storm, I would dig up the bulbs
of the crystal skulls I buried in your garden for next year
and let you talk to them yourself about your fears
of what's to come, and how to heal the shattered
with the dark clarity of compassionate crazy wisdom
drifting on the oceans of your tears
like a hydra-headed lifeboat empty but for you.
I would plunder spiritual islands in the wake
of extinct volcanoes to bring you
the rarest herbs of insight prophecy could afford
to see you dancing again like a constellation
rising over my event horizon with no fear of the abyss.

I could do this, I would be this, and will and more
and mean it if you'd let me. I could be the quicksilver
water of life and you could be the white sulphur
substance of the great work, its spirit and activity.
Or the other way around, if you like, given I was born
on a Wednesday with wings on my heels and head.
I could be the dragon trickster, infernal and divine
the hermaphroditic hidden secret
buried in the earth, creature of fire and air,
and you could be the salt, the anima mundi,
the philosopher's stone, the light of the soul,
the wisdom that gives life and energy their forms,
mistress of the planets and the stars, the divine energy
that moves all things around to bring things about.

What an experiment we'd make, what an art,
what a conjunction of life and love and bodyminds
what signs we could reveal, what prophecies scry,
what freedoms take we could be burned at the stake for.
And the sand paintings we could pour through an hourglass
that would blow away like the dust of the road
and the comets that fell from their black halo
around the sun, and the lifting of waterbirds
in the pewter moonlight feathered on a lake
we could observe, and the scores of new constellations
we could form like new houses of an alternative zodiac
for the dispossessed stars of the homeless
burning their hearts out around oil drums under bridges
that span them like the Egyptian sky goddess Nut,
and the poems that would flow like spiritual transfusions
into the carnal bloodbanks of the burning rose
with a needle exchange of thorns, and the transmutations
of base metal into gold and back again, of dragonflies
gleaming like anthracite in the birth fluids of their chrysales
drying the filigreed silver of their wings in the sun,
paper clipped to the waterlilies like pencils behind their ears,
and the light years of passion and devotion
this would take to be done in unison, in chaos,
in wonder and bliss, in fingertips, eyes, skin and lips,
two alchemists in the Vas Hermeticum of a conceivable abyss.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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And Should I Recall Whose Eyes

And should I recall whose eyes made the stars most beautiful,
and set the mindstream that flowed though us aflame with fireflies
a moment there and gone and come again like light
in the keyholes of the feral cats that prowled the graveyardshift
wholly to the top of the broom-swept path up Heartbreak Hill,
where the bones of the seven hanged men lay buried
in the duff of our childhood legends, a shadow and a name,
trying love on shyly like new clothes in the shadows of the pines,
where we lay down with the dead on beds of rusty compass needles,
out of sight of the windows of the town, how could I not feel,
here alone now by the Tay, thousands of miles away,
and more years later than it takes to walk a burning bridge,
waiting for the flower moon to appear above the horizon,
the waterclock in the nightbird's song of longing?

And if I were to say what it was like to be touched by her
when she was brave with hunger and my body
all loaves and fishs in the innocence of her hands
and her breasts and lips magic mushrooms without the flies
that swarmed the garbage cans in the back-alleys below,
and though it was not wise to begin a new life
on the last night of the past we were ending together,
like a bell and a cannon that had been melted down
from the same dark ore of a life we were cut out of
like a wound in a loveletter we left unsigned for one another,
because good-bye was harder to write than just to let things go,
what words could I use that weren't already
denuded of their shining like a windfall
of black dwarfs on the windowsills of time,
and the stars that night that clung to the sky
like bubbles in the evanescence of glass
or the grass to our flesh, all washed off now
as if they were grime, the quiet patina of time
gilding the dust like rainbows on the wings of flies?

And the wind asks, and the water sylphs want to know
and the wild willows are holding their breath like a veil
and the Tay is pulling a curtain of water aside in its wake
to hear about another stranger the earth swallowed
like a sacred syllable in the mouth of a snake
that envied the waterbirds their wavelengths and wings,
and though the skeletal birch and prophetic skulls
in the riverbed plead like the end of a dream
for one more lullaby in the ghost story of the moonrise,
I show them the black pearl of my heart
lustrous as hard coal to burn again in the furnace of dawn
on the dark side of the moon in partial eclipse
as I weep like a dragon for the secrets I keep
like myths of origin in the urns of things that are gone
like the irrevocable flightfeathers of the words and waterbirds
under the lost petals of fire that bloom in the eyes of the flower moon.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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These Words Turn Homeward

These words turn homeward
toward you, my dark wood,
because of all assignations of the night
you are West, you are dream and secret
you, deeper than jewels, sweeter
than the taste of stars
in the eyes of wounded black berries.
You, longing and lucidity,
singing in the last of the shadows
of the sacred trees for the unattainable
that summons me to you.
Endless, the farewell, endless
the dusk the nightbirds follow
after the swallows
have danced for the stars
in an aerial display of their own.
You, my star field, my wildflower,
whose skin is the skin of lunar waterlilies
and the tide at the tips of my fingers.
My new moon, my despair,
my solitude, my silence, my absence
which among these thousand lonely lakes
has looked upon you and seen
as I have seen in your incomprehensible eyes
how unfathomable they are to themselves
in your depths, your death,
the fullness of your abiding evanescence.
the quiet intimacies
that have just crept up on me
over these intervening years
that have done nothing
but linger in the moment
as if you would always be there
and could be found nowhere else
but now forever in this doorway
this broken window into my heart
to let go of
over and over and over again
like the rain, this stone, that leaf,
the wraith of your breath
hovering like a thin autumn mist
always at a distance over the harvested fields.
O diminished one, subtle one, free,
how is it you can inspire me still
though your ashes were given back to the stars
like a message for their eyes only
so many years ago that time itself
has upgraded all my starmaps
and made you alone, far one, bright one,
this lonely holy road that’s walking me home
as if my final destination, like yours, like you
were everywhere in whatever direction I turn
to ask the next star, where you’ve gone,
has it seen you, has it heard
was it too soon, was it too early
is it too late, too perilous, too absurd
for the morning to return you
like a singing bird to a green bough
to the dead branch that lost the moon
like its only blossom
on the rootless tree
that it took you from
when it took you from me?

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Woke Up Saying Your Name

I woke up saying your name
but in the course of the day forgot.
I should have forgiven you sooner
but my tongue was a noose and a knot.
I should have let you fool my eyes
but not my heart. No Grecian urn
but just the same
I loved the shapely vase of your body
and the fact that my ashes weren’t buried in it.
But those bouquets of angry snakes
you kept trying to arrange
into a Zen garden in Kyoto
or a hair do in Mycenean Greece
kept me looking for an antidote for years
to all those estranged wavelengths
of a gamma ray burst
I stood like a nuclear meltdown in the way of,
though I poured my blood out like heavy water
to get you to stop and cool down.
What it is is what it is only
if you don’t factor in what it’s not.
Otherwise, in the bigger picture,
what it is is just as much what it’s not.
And who can assess
what didn’t go down between us?
I’m sitting on a cold rock down by the Tay River
freezing my proverbials off
because I like being alone with the stars
at three in the morning
because they don’t ask for an explanation
about why I’m up so late
so many light years from home.
And they don’t ask me to translate my scars,
the dead word into the living,
back into wounds
they couldn’t relate to anyway.
And I don’t need to tell them
if you’re going to open yourself up to someone,
if you’re going to bloom, if
you’re going to shine
a rose, a star,
you’re bound to taste your own thorns
or the splinters of broken chandeliers
on your tongue, or a dog
with porcupine quills in its mouth,
howling at the dark side of the moon
as the greater of two faith healers.
Though neither the stars nor I
are into comparative mortality.
And as I approach death and love aimlessly
looking at the stars timelessly alone
I don’t bemoan my brevity anymore
and they don’t flash their eternity in my face.
There’s just stars and eyes for awhile
and both of us agree
death and eternity are none of our business.
There’s just this little bit of heat and light
that flares like a matchbook for a minute
and then goes out
like a holybook, a firefly,
a poem or a flower
burning in its own ashes, smothered
in its own smoke like a pillow
over a dream in a skull
that effaced itself like stars
packed into a snowman that thaws
according to cosmic laws
not meant for our eyes only.
And God, the Zeitgeist,
the Universal Id knows,
how we’ve both tried
to enlighten these lumps of coal,
these sorry excuses for eyes
into diamonds that flow
with love and compassion.
How we have laboured like Sisyphus
to haul what’s deep underground,
the dark ore within us,
up into mountains of light
only to watch it run down again
rivers and rain
into the great night seas beyond
like a heart-mind continuum.
A leaf and a starmap on a lifestream.
We have advanced into our retrogression
like everything else in the universe,
big heavy methane planets
with shepherd moons
that cast their shadows
like beauty spots on Saturn,
and our axes toppled like Neptune’s.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Lost in Love.....

Lost in love
with the innocense of your eyes when i first saw you,

Lost in love
with your humble voice that made me crave for it even more,

Lost in love
when being friends we came to know the incompleteness in our lives,

Lost in love
with the nervousness i felt when i first expressed my love and emotions,

Lost in love
with the smell of your hairs that mesmerized me,

Lost in love
with the gulabi lips that took me to a dream world,

Lost in love
with the kissable hands that i always want to hold till eternal love,

Lost in love
with the sensuous touch of yours which made me feel heavenly,

Lost in love
with your heartbeat that made me feel very close to your heart,

Lost in love
with the ticklish tummy of yours that lightened my senses,

Lost in love
with the hug of yours which made me feel complete,

Lost in love
with the kiss of yours that lessened the gap between our souls,

Lost in love
with the pain you took to keep our relation,

Lost in love
when we were departed and alone,

Lost in love
with the undying feeling of yours that kept me awake all night,

Lost in love
when we have found our WAY BACK INTO LOVE.

poem by Villager Gulabo
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You Were The Intimacy

You were the intimacy
of the things I loved
that were so impossibly far away
I could never reach out and touch them
except by touching you.
In the long silence of these past thirty-seven years
I have never been able to look at people again
the way I used to see them before I met you.
There's a fear in the way I love them
that I learned
from living your absence.
A deep black wounded space within
that has sadly outgrown the stars
like October outlives its fireflies.
And every threshold I've crossed ever since
has turned into a long road
with a precipice at the end of my spinal cord
swaying like the first night I met you
on the Capilano Suspension Bridge
and you said
the only way
to overcome your fear of falling
is to have the courage to jump.
And I laughed and said
staring into the gorge
and the thin silver water down below
what's to fear
if you know how to fall toward paradise?
And you knew right away
I was your kind of challenge.
And I knew you wanted
to sword-dance with razorblades
you laid out like the Tarot
later back at your place
as if you wanted to convince yourself
you were still silly enough to believe in tomorrow.
The candle beside the cards on the floor
didn't turn out to be
enough of a lighthouse
to warn us of the approaching storm.
We were sincere in the darkness
for a little while
astounded by the expert innocence
of our mindless flesh.
You shone like the sun at midnight
and I came undone like Icarus
to prove I was falling
without regrets
like a spent star
into the singularity
of a whole new universe
where everything that didn't happen in this one
came uncannily true in the next
for both of us
as if we were at last worthy
in each others' arms
of our own happiness.
When happiness is brave
it's bliss.
And when it's afraid
there's nothing sadder
than a gift that was never opened.
Joy is a warrior that risked hoping
there was nothing left dying for.
Sorrow comes up with a million reasons.
The only way of life
is not making a way of life.
Nor making
not making a way of life
a way.
One day you just get off the road
and start taking the long way home through the starfields.
You stop looking in the mirror
to see if you still have eyes.
For years after your death
no matter what I looked at
I always saw the same thing.
The black clarity
of your existential absence
staring me in the face
without turning me into stone
because that would have been mercy.
Try how I might
I could never quite
shut the lid on your coffin
or accept
that you were buried in me for good
or that my blood burned
like the infernal red
of an emergency exit
to show me the way out
of heaven and hell
by falling on them both
like a two-edged sword
that killed me deeper into life
than your death ever did.
Either life's unfair
or I'm not man enough
to live up to your suicide
but I remember how I used to love
feeling the weight
of the nightstream of your hair
as it poured through my hand
like a landscape that could feel
for the first time in a long time
water running in the dry creekbeds of its lifelines.
Things woke up.
And I saw the flowers
among the thorns
that had been guarding them
like the secret names of God
you had to know
to get past the burning angels
through the gates
of your sad return to Eden alone.
The eloquence of your flesh
when you walked on the earth
as if your heart danced to your blood
like an old song we both knew
now a broken harp of bone,
a wounded guitar,
someone laid down for good.
A prophetic skull
without a future
anyone can foretell.
The full moon going down
like a spare penny
into a dry wishing well.
Me looking at the dark hills
like the contours of your corpse laid out
under a collapsed tent
as they wheeled you into the ambulance
to spend your first vast impossibly long night in the morgue
among the dead
who don't catch their breath
or break their bodies like bread
alone in the stillness
that can't distinguish one death from another.
However I wept for you
all the hard bitter baffled tears
all the sweet radiant wellsprings
that washed the dust like stars
off the wings of the birds
that had laboured to carry the souls of the dead
far to the west
when I remembered
how blessed I really was
that things had been
so beautifully dangerous for awhile.
And all the dark fathomless watersheds of lucidity
I drowned in like a eye in a grail
looking for butterflies in a suicide note.
All the black pearls
the diamond skulls
the eclipsed chalices
all the precious jewels of my grieving
that death hoarded underground
nothing in the end
but nameless water
frozen between the cracks
of a gravestone as old as the moon.
I remember how I loved your ice-blue eyes
and how they burned with an Arctic clarity
you had to dress warmly for
if you didn't want to suffer from frost-bite
but there's more nightshade in them now
than chicory
when I look into them like tundral flowers
and the light turns hurtful and eerie
when I recall how the melting snow
washed itself clean of itself
all those years ago
when we didn't know
what all this meant.
It's of little relevance
that we once loved each other
the way we did
and once you've exhausted
the meaning of signs
like galaxies expanding
ever more deeply into space
less significance.
What does it look like from Mars?
Your death was a koan
not a fortune-cookie
and the koan broke me
like a man it couldn't understand
rationally.
There is no scar for you.
You will always be
this open wound inside of me.
When I look at the stars
I can't dissociate beauty from absurdity.
I cherish their clarity
as something that can't be
contaminated by my eyes
when they're nothing
but two black holes in space
a snake-bite of the light
in the middle of my face
like a colon without the following:
the kind of faith
that makes what little is left
so incommensurably greater than what's been lost.
I can see the blue morning glory in the garden
as if moonlight had turned to skin
just to feel what it's like to flower
but I can't forget the frost
that fell like your death over all of it
when I went so numb
space turned into glass
and time pulled the blind down on the window.
I closed my eyes like a mirror
content to let the stars make sense
of their own reflections.
I gave up on directions
and burned my starmaps
and followed who I was
without caring what I became.
Absolutes of ice
spread like cataracts
over the relativities of the river
that went on flowing
as if nothing had changed
and my life was still a dream without eyelids.
A ghost would be easier to deal with
than the fact
that you don't exist anymore
except as bare bones
denuded of the world
like yarrow sticks
thrown before the Book of Changes.
But then I expect
you'd exorcise yourself
at a suggestion of the night
that the stars would be so much brighter
if you only blew out the candleflame.
You'd do it just to see
if things got better.
You'd leave me in the dark again
staring at the stars
like white ink
on a black loveletter
you left unsigned
as you disappeared into death
like your last breath on a cold windowpane.
I've long since forgiven you my solitude.
I've long since forgiven you
the severity of the wisdom
that hardened my eyes
like diamonds in the darkness
that could cut through anything
except my attachment to you.
I have forgiven you
for the way I have grown through suffering
to realize
how much I owe your death
and the terrible eyeless abyss that followed it
like an enlightened insight
into the impersonal nature of compassion.
I have forgiven you
the way I am spontaneously compelled
to love a world that is so estranged from me
I feel like water on the moon
trying to imagine what it must be like
to fall like rain on the intimate earth
with a reasonable expectation
of coming up flowers
that weren't destined
to be laid on your grave.
I've gone grey gathering them up
and bringing them to you
like bouquets of paints and brushes
that are ready at hand
should you ever wish
to pick them up again
and show me what the world looks like
without a body for a picture-frame
as you play the part of the upstart genius
who lived the black farce of creative pain
like the agony of the wick
burning at the stake like a heretic
between the flesh of the wax
and the spiritual aspirations of the candleflame
thrusting spears into space at the stars
as if the only way you could ever know God
if you ever met up
was by the scars.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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How Strange To Recall Childhood As An Aging Man

How strange to recall childhood as an aging man
as if nothing had changed for the last sixty years
you're watching yourself as a young boy
from a point of awareness somewhere in the air
above him like someone he couldn't have foreseen becoming,
looking back upon him with great tenderness
that I'm what I made of his future as he
tries to reverse the bike chain he caught
his pant cuff in, and I can do nothing to help him
at this remove, except love him as someone should have then
when these strange tears didn't taste so much of time.

Who could have guessed it would take all these years
to fill the absence in his heart up by becoming
the intimate familiar of the solitude of a child
who could befriend anything that was as lost and wild
and wounded as he was and yet could dream
of doing great things up late in his room at night
to prove he was at least as loveable as any achievement.
He was off to fight a holy war of one with himself
like a single infidel against the whole of Christendom
that I'm the living ruin of because sometimes it's wiser
to be defeated than it is to prevail supreme
against your own dream of being worthy of love.

Time ripples in the growth rings of a tree
echoing the song of a well-seasoned nightbird
in the heartwood of a shedding maple
that remembers all the lyrics of longing and lament
it sings to itself at times like an arrow, a burnt guitar
struck by lightning, or one of the strong rafters
that uphold the soul like the keel of a lifeboat overturned
on the great night sea of a death in life
it drowned in more than once like moonset
among the corals that tore the bottom of its hull.

And how many cold nights did it take
before the syrups began to run sweetly in spring
and the new leaves forget the history of their roots
as I tried to abandon the child that I was
by the side of a road that led him away from me
because I thought one of us had to go homeless
in order to survive the firestorms of his outraged innocence
and the unaccusing guilt of mine as I grew up
letting him down in ways that only he can imagine
as I spread from one burning building to the next
like a new religion that wasn't looking for converts?
But if you were to ask me now, I'd say it's funny
how he turned out to be the Buddha sitting at the base
of the Bodhi tree of my spine, and on a good day,
at my best, before the fall, I'm Lucifer leading
the sun up at dawn like a child guiding a blind prophet
by the hand long before the morning star appeared
like Venus to those who were seeking enlightenment
without me or themselves to witness what neither of us
had attained like the key to the mystery of a universe
that had no locks on it to begin with to shut anybody out
or keep anybody in. The man in me doesn't blame the child
for existing the way I do now trying belatedly
to embrace his rejection as a way of life
I can make up for by sharing this wounded solitude with him
like an injured animal he can see himself in
as a potential friend he could identify with
as if what had happened to me had once happened to him
and we could both approach each other with compassion.

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