En.Citatepedia^®.ro

Not Again, Tonight, These Fin de Siecle Blues

Not again, tonight, these fin de siecle blues
that subsume all my blossoming overviews
into the mystic specificity of concrete things
I stub my heart against as if I'd just had
a head on collision with the moon. Impact.
Emotional meteor showers, the Virginids, perhaps,
I'm being stoned by my own congenital radiants
as if I were being driven out of somewhere
like an extinct species. Bad memories, lifeboats
that didn't make it back to shore, things I've tried
to mythologize like a shipwreck in coral on the moon.
Subtle childhood fears that run my tongue along
the shadows of their blades, when I was scared and young,
and the words would come out like drops of blood
sliding down the length of the stargrass I grazed upon
alone as now in my high wide starfields.
The same ones that are seeking me out tonight
like a rogue planet that's never quite known
where it's belonged, or with whom, if anyone
or where at all. Looking for an exit sign
in the infinite labyrinth of the nightmare
that's walked me like a shadow through all these years.

Most of the past, a waste of good innocence,
and the people and things I loved about it
I cherish more now than I did back then,
usually wounded irreparably in a way
I would have suffered for them if I could have
in order to have my love of them hurt me less,
given I always thought I was more worthy of the pain,
because more deserving of what they endured
than they were. Maledictions of draconian experience.
Miracle of miracles, I transcended everything so savagely,
it's hard to forgive myself now for ever being a child,
but I try. I put my arms around people when they cry
even frivolously, and offer them a few blue ribbons of wisdom
in exchange for their butter-fingered nooses
and the occasional smile at the antics of a sacred clown
who left his tears painted on a dressing room mirror
as if it had been raining for years without anyone
but himself, a circus of one on tour, getting wet.

I've fallen through more cracks in the earth
than most earthquake zones, whenever the continental plates
of my tectonic skull put their hands together in despair
but couldn't manage prayer as I jumped in on horseback
to save someone's cornerstone, like Rome, whether
I was delusional or not. A few people lit candles in remembrance,
but just as often as the fireflies light their lamps
they blow them out to return to the darkness
as the closest thing to home. I'm inured to the intemperance
of selfishness as well as gratitude. People approach me
with their secret charade, and I cancel myself out
like a circus parade I'm sure is never going to come,
a kid kicked to the curb who's been waiting too long,
and we're both a little estranged by our mutual equilibrium.

Wild parsnip in the drainage ditch boils the flesh and leaves
permanent scars. And when I don't see them as arsonists
and flammable gypsies, I see the poppies as
the blood-soaked rags of solar flares that have staunched
and cauterized the bleeding awhile. Hot knives
applied to the heart's excruciations like a brutal code of mercy
to distract me from the agony of my indifference
to the end of an era of unacknowledged supremacy
as the occult master of mirages on the nightshifts
of intensive care, the terminal ward, desolation row,
a fencing master of scalpels who knew more ways
of cutting the heart out of himself and offering it up
to someone who needed it more for the moment,
thinking they had a better use for it than I ever did.
A poultice of water applied like an oasis to a desert's forehead
until even a corpse could rise up out of the glass-blowing heat
like the inexhaustible amphora of an Aquarian among the stars.

One of the dark jewels of my childhood
in the ashes of a dragon that left me its eyes
by eclipsing mine so I could see
where the black holes were ahead of time
and warn the well-meaning lighthouses that clung to the coast
not to trust their starmaps to get their bearings
or ask for directions from the mentors of the lost and the blind,
but to turn the wheel of life and death loose in a storm
of demonically dispassionate clarities intense enough
to weld diamonds by staring through them
with the ironic compassion of an empty lifeboat
lowered from the deck of an enlightened shipwreck
on the lunar bottom of the Sea of Tranquility
I can weave like a flying carpet of real water
out of the wavelengths of high frequency mirages
like a homoeopathic wolf shaman in shepherd's clothing.

poem by Patrick White
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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Red Shift Soon Into The Dark, But Not Tonight

Red shift soon into the dark, but not tonight
out of these longer wavelengths of insight
into the ongoing mystery of everything I'm aware of
and what I'm not in the lifelines on the palms of my blossoms
and in the roots of these abandoned orchards of stars.
Unattainable the things of the earth that were given for free,
I long for dark abundance, bright vacancy.
Beauty meets me everywhere eye to eye
on my own terms, and we speak in metaphors
that occur all around us like fireflies and wild irises.

O evanescent river of night, unpartitioned waterclock,
keep time with my heart even as you unravel the past
like a ribbon of blood I've brought to you as a gift.
Keep it supple and fluid and let the light on your waters
mingle in the sweetness of its fruit. Let no cruel day
embitter the wine of the efoliate nerves
of the wild grapes greening their tendrils
like the treble clefs of a living music
that can only be heard with the eyes when you listen.

Off road awhile, let me wander as you do
through these labyrinths of circuitous blossoming
and lose myself in people and things and wonder
at the black and white wisdom of being here
to marvel at all, and give the stars a reason to search.
Keep my wits close to my senses and my instincts
like holy books written on the wind like the smoke
of distant fires I will sit around again
listening to stories told in the tongues
of the polyglot flames. May I always
cherish the pain of separation as my most
sincere teacher, the one who beat me the hardest
for the foolishness of trying to come up for air
while I was still in the womb. May compassion
always come on the winged heels of insight
the way pears come of their leaves
or the heart grows in the hands of its thieves.

Hard, the longing to know. Harder to know you don't.
Hard to be the dunce in the corner of your own illumination.
The persecuted voodoo doll of a witch hunt.
The shabby philosopher with a heart of gold
who took the long way round to the back of the abyss.
Or an eclipse with its thumb out trying
to hitch hike down the Milky Way like a punk rocker.
And those who live to see death in their children's eyes,
as the ferocity of their frozen tears breaks
into little plinths and roseate splinters of shattered sky.
Hard to see people uncrazed by their own creativity
like a wet book of matches frowning at solar flares,
sceptics doubting the crazy wisdom of their own stars.
To see friends who were the pillars of the wharves
you said hello and good-bye on, pull away one last time
like empty lifeboats with nothing left to save.

And the lovers who know each other like junkies
on the same drug, love potions using the same alibi
to excuse the mystic delirium of being caught
by their third eye, exalting in their passion
for whispering old-fashioned things into each other's ears
on the thresholds of enlightened taboos. Imagine
going through withdrawal from your own imagination
burning little black holes through the windows
until they look like starmaps that forgot the way back home.
And the hasty bones that were buried en masse
like yarrow sticks in an incriminating Book of Changes.
Poverty, atrocity, war, disease, and these we ignore,
and these we praise for trivializing our attention span.
Hard to be human and embody all this in your heart.

But don't stop. Keep flowing. Making your own path up
on the fly as you go, knowing it's going to get harder yet.
Let me live it like a dream I'm always waking up from
with no regret. Let me cherish the terrors
for the dark jewels they sowed like dragon's teeth
in their wake, and celebrate the fools of my doubtful virtues
like a poet in autumn dancing with the last of the flowers
as if they still had the voices they had in the spring.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Tempering The Carbonized Steel Of My Heart

Tempering the carbonized steel of my heart
in a drainage ditch hissing like a snake pit
to make it impervious to the pins the colour-blind lepidopterists
keep sticking in it as if it were a voodoo doll
for the projections they keep putting on it
like death masks of their own making.

Tired of hauling corpses like dead weight up the mountain
on a fragile lifeline where they hang
like mummified spider trophies on a thread of fate
swaying precariously in the wind while I drive
my heart like a piton into rock to secure a footing.
Why is compassion reserved for the weak
who just want to fall backwards into the abyss
taking the strong with them who endure
greater agonies in climbing than they do in falling off?
Enough is enough. Time to cut bait
and throw the little fish back into the depths
like minnows of the moon bottom-feeding on shadows
though they aspire like the vernal equinox
to a constellation of their own where everybody
can see them shining like the Circlet of the Western Fish in Pisces.

Sick of lighting other people's fires and blowing on the flames
until their star is blazing, and then having them turn around
and throw acid in my eyes that burns like white phosphorus
through metal, even under water. All my life
I've pulled one shipwreck after another into my lifeboat
only to watch them punch holes in it to sink us all
behind my back as I was trying to swim through stone.
Why is that? Why do people cut off the hands of those
who were trying to help them like Che Guevara in Bolivia,
and kiss the asses of all those who are sitting on their faces,
who squat enthroned on the garbage can lids they're living in?

I don't make cages of gratitude for the doves and the crows
I've opened the door for so they can sing for themselves
when they get out of the egg and see how vast the sky is.
And I'm not a warden of aviaries trying to brain wash the parrots
into saying the same things I do to myself
when there's no one else to talk to in the dark.
I'm not passing out little executioner's hoods
to trained falcons perched on my arm like cuckoo clocks
timed to go off like i.e.ds at midnight at the stroke of doom.

Shakespeare might have been happy enough to teach the alphabet
to grammar school boys for seven unknown years,
but that doesn't mean he wouldn't have been happier
writing a comedy of errors of his own. I'm not
drawing any analogies here to my own state of affairs,
but if you ask and I say yes. I will. And I do as if
it were just as important to me to see you learn to address
your own potential as it is crucial I apply myself to mine,
why should anyone try to make me the dupe of my own ideals
just as a little black dwarf of a punk who thought himself
the legend of his own matchbook did yesterday on Gore Street
when he asked me politely, hey mister can you spare a cigarette
and not wanting him to go through nicotine withdrawal
because I remember what it's like, I gave him a handful,
one to smoke now, and the rest to tuck behind his ears,
and the next thing I hear as he returns to his buddies is
hey, did you see how I hustled that old man over there?
Two days of intense heat at the end of May,
the next time he leans on my generosity, that black fly's toast.

Just because the lion lies down with the lamb, and the lamb
gets an attitude that abuses the parity of all sentient beings
doesn't mean the lion's forgotten it's got fangs and claws
and knows how to use them, or that the golden fleece
can presume upon the dragon that guards it with its own teeth.
And if I were a sheep in the company of flame-throwers
I'd worry about getting my wooly parts singed if only
in the name of strategic self-interest if I weren't capable
of anything else higher than the grass I'm grazing on.

I've been a sacred clown ghost dancing with Sitting Bull
just before Custer's last stand, and I've been demonically possessed
by the best consiglieres hell has to offer, powerful familiars
with surgical minds as sharp as scalpels, black holes in space
the galaxies plunge into without hesitation as if they were jumping
from paradise into a mystery older than light, and I've made
my way out again with my own prophetic skull in my hands,
howling at the moon for the agony of this death in life experience
that might have broken me and my harp like a wishbone
that didn't have anything to sing about anymore,
but the deep cover singularities that exist in the darkness
of everyone's heart, whether they're looking for God particles or not,
and never been so twisted by any space I've ever been in
as to practise emotional espionage against my own feelings
or turn back on myself like a solar flare that festers
in its own light like an incestuous ingrown hair.

When Blake wrote that the tigers of wrath are wiser
than the horses of instruction, do you think he said it
with his tongue in his cheek? Or jumping through hoops of fire
in a flea circus with stagefright on tour through the boonies?
If someone offers you a clear, cold drink of water for free
from his own wellspring in a desert sweating mirages,
and you spit it in his face like acid rain on the flowers
after its' been polluted in your own mouth, what do you think
your chances are of not dying of thirst beside a fresh water lake
when all you had to do was roll over and drink the whole thing
in a single gulp, instead of pissing into the swimming pool
we're all trying to stay afloat in, as if you were an oilslick
sticking like an eclipse to the waterlilies in the last oasis
you're ever going to get another chance to frack
before the desert hangs you out to dry on your own bone rack
like a fish fry still trying to fly through the smog
of your own smokehouse like a ghost long after
you've been cooked on the pyre of your own matchbook?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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When I Get To The Root Of What I Really Want

When I get to the root of what I really want
it all comes down to the nothing that I've got.
If a mirror were to publish me the way I really look,
I'd look like a rootless tree, scattering all its leaves
and dropping its fruit like tears that got too heavy to bear.
I look at a beautiful woman now as if she were art,
a Caravaggio in a gallery, as my eyes are
just as happy to see, as my hands once were to touch.
Noli me tangere. Because I don't love anyone,
not even myself. Love is a double-edged sword
that can't dance solo, and my longing's been
a wandering troubadour for so long now, I can
mark the eras of my life by the number of windows
I've stood under singing to the waxing moon as it opens up.

I've always been a foolish dream weaver
trying to make a waterbed out of a snakepit for two
knowing how long it takes for the flying carpets to wear through.
I'm Pictish enough to live with a blue body
covered in lunar tattoos, or play the sacred clown
so I can use my absurdity as an alibi for the loss of my innocence,
and everybody's innocent at the beginning of love,
as if the moon were renewing her virginity in you.
I've lived with a lioness, two witches, an apostate madonna,
a beast mistress, one demon with juno, a couple of butterflies
that landed on the tip of the split dragon's tongue
divining for water in hell a moment or two
before their flightpaths got so erratic I couldn't keep up
and not wanting to fly wingman anymore,
tilted my wings good-bye, and banked back
into the depths and the heights of my reptilian solitude.

If things aren't perfect after you get over the shock of moonrise
believe me, the night you stop blaming
the flaws in your telescope
or the cinders in your own eyes
and realize how much dark ore it takes
for a nugget of gold to cast it
like a mountain of shadows behind it,
you'd make a much better astronomer than you are now.
You'd be able to relate to the asteroids
as easily as you do the radiant rings and shepherd moons
with their alluring promise of a mysterious life
just under the eyelids of their ice-caps,
as you peer through the cracks in their cataracts.

My heart's been savaged by firestorms of stars
sweeping across deserts of volcanic ash and pumice
by thousands of delusions arming themselves like mirages
to wound the very water they depended for their lives upon
because they didn't think there were enough bubbles in the hourglass.
You wake up one morning and find the skull of the moon
polluting your wishing well, it's time to pack up
and take your lute on the road again like uprooted rain.
Try for a graceful exit but if it's a little more brutal
than your entrance, do the best you can one abyss at a time
so that when you're on your death bed reviewing all this,
you won't have to wince too hard
at all your futile attempts to remain indefensibly human.

poem by Patrick White
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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The Night In The Wounded Mirror

The night in the wounded mirror
is only a childhood away from my face
and there's always a shattered window
between me and my starless shining,
and a dead bird upturned on the sill
as if the sky, too, had its quota of roadkill.

Looking back from all these
lightyears and constellations away,
on the black day I was born under an eclipse
like a flower clenched into a fist,
an eye without an iris darker than a shark's,
I suspect there was a lot more suffering back then
than I was able to live my way through,
estranged in the corner of a kitchen
that was a feeding frenzy of knives.

I still can't leave one out on the counter
without fearing it's just another punctuation mark,
the claw of a comma in a long sentence of blood.
At best, it's the silver scar of the moon
that slashed me open like a well-honed loveletter
that wasn't meant for me.

And I still don't know how to approach
the child I was, the child I still am
time-travelling through himself like a glacier
as if he could put a stop to evolution
or survive his extinction
by keeping to himself like ice.

I look upon his solitude and silence,
the unaccusing indictment of his face,
like a cold, brass plaque
commemorating the unidentifiable victims
of an atrocity that can't be understood.

He's still seven and I'm looping through sixty
like the spine of a calendar
shedding me like autumn,
a picture of turning leaves on every page,
until there's no way of telling what age we are
in this season out of time,
and I want to love him, I want
to say things that could heal us both like water
before I take him with me into my grave,
but I don't truly know how,
and there are secret vows of violation
that are taken without a mouth
and assassins of intimacy in the shadows
and children sleeping in snakepits
who make up their own bedtime stories
and dream of things that can't be told to anyone
who hasn't been devoured in their ancient infancy
by the furious innocence of the sea.

Dark-hearted jewel
of a child in the night,
older than light
who has made more of me
than I can make of him,
when I weep for what he knows
and will not say, what am I,
what are these words
in the inky shacks of the trees
but the lengthening shadow
of the darkness that pours out of him like blood,
or duct-tape like moonlight
over the mouth of a scream?

And if I come back now
like the legend I have made of his sorrow
to gather him up in my arms
like a harvest under a full moon,
and if I sit with him all night
without saying anything
here on this skull of a rock
until each of us is the memory of the other,
could it make anything better,
would it take the thorn of the moon
out of the eye of the dragon
that sheds its skin like childhood skies,
not knowing where things end, things begin?

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Stranger In The Leaving

Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
Is it not always so
when people separate?
Lovers who knew each other intimately for years
close their gates to each other
and say each others' name
as if they weren't philosopher's stones anymore.
And the base metal outweighs the gold that comes of it.
Alone with the alone
in the abyss of the absolutes
what was vivid and vital
turns numb as glass
and what was mystically specific about the other
is no longer a shrine that holds the secret name of God.
Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
You leave with some of my memes
as I leave with some of yours
and we are both no doubt slightly changed for good
by the reciprocity of the encounter
like hydrogen and oxygen make water.
Though now it's all tears frozen on the moon.
Good-bye my lovely
I shall miss your eyes and your skin
and the thrill of your dangerous heart.
I will miss your wounded mouth
I tried to heal with messianic kisses
that never walked on anything but the earth.
And there's no blame
you couldn't fit my lunar month
into your solar calendar.
We had everything in common except time
and our faults were as compatible as our virtues.
I will miss the rumours of alien life in the wavelengths of your hair.
I shall miss losing myself like a firefly
in the wishing wells of your eyes
even if now my own seem more
like impact craters in the prophetic skull of the moon
when I consider what's leaving like an atmosphere from this mindscape.
And I shall always remember
that your heart was as generous as your breasts
and whenever we made love
how the earthly was the envy of the spiritual fact.
You didn't want anyone to know you were gentle.
Not even me.
But I could see through that mask
eyebrow to eyebrow with you
as if we both were intent on showing the same face to the earth
like the crescent fangs of a Georgia moon that said
don't step on me
because we were afraid.
More than enough to have you in the nude
I wasn't a glutton for your nakedness
that demanded you take your illusions off
to prove you loved me.
It would have been an irreverence
beyond the aspirations of heresy
to witness you renewing your virginity
like the new moon bathing in a sea of shadows.
I never tried to pry the petals of the flowers open
before they were ready to bloom.
I was never the ant
that told the peony what to do.
I never tried to look under the closed eyelids of the rose
to see what it was dreaming.
Though I'm not into voodoo
I never desecrated
the bird shrines
of your involuntary taboos.
But now I look in your eyes
and see that yesterday
is less vivid than tomorrow
though neither of them has happened yet.
The new moon is all potential
The full moon all used up.
There are effigies of potential
standing like scarecrows
in late autumn cornfields
and paragons of actuality
who love to star in constellations
that make them out to be the hero.
I try to stay
and I end up going.
I try to go
and the earth moves underfoot.
The root feels the death of its flower
as the autumn stars turn into frost
and burn its petals like old loveletters
to the immensities that didn't have time to read them.
The harmonies of life
are distinguished from the harmonies of death
by a single breath
taken in
and turned out
into the vast expanses of where it came from in the first place.
And the spirit that isn't shy of its own lucidity
knows that everything it illuminates
whether by day or by night
has the lifespan of light
and light is the brainchild of the darkness.
So even when the lights go out
like people and candles
and us
the shadows go on blooming
and even when the stars
are a gust of ghosts at our heels
the dust is rich
with the memory of all the roads
that once got lost in us
trying to find their way back home
like blood and fire and spirit
as if their final destination
were always the place they started from.
And if in the lightyears ahead
you should ever wonder if I remember you
be deeply assured
I shall remember you
as if every footstep I took
were a threshold of this homelessness
I am brave enough to cross without you.
And I shall thank you for this courage
inspired by the muse of your absence
and the feel of my blood Doppler-shift toward
long meditative wavelengths of red
that stream from the intensity
of the wounded white-hot blue of a renewed beginning.
You can't teach a bird to fly in a cage
or snakes to bite other people.
But when I first met you
it was as if the serpent-fire at the base of my spinal cord
that was running to keep its thoughts aloft like kites
suddenly had wings
and all my dirt-bag myths
that crawled on the earth among the lowest
were elevated into constellations
that burned like dragons among the chandeliers.
And when the muses of life well up in me like water
as they will
and ask me back
for all the tears they've shed on the sorrow
of the way things had to be
between you and me
for them and us
to happen the way we did
I will show them the eternal flame
of the nightwaterlily
blooming in the clear fire
of its lonely lucidity
not even the rain
the dragon brings
can aspire to put out.
I will show them the sun.
I will show them the moon.
And I'll say
you see?
That's us forever.
That swan in the heart of a phoenix.
And they will be well-pleased with the beauty of the lies
I use to shadow the truth with compassionate alibis
for why the flowers fall.
Sometimes it's the bird that swims through stone
and the snake that flys
in a profusion of fire and water
shadow and form
darkness and light
intensity and death
madness and wisdom.
Sometimes you meet someone
and you realize
this fallible flesh just as it is
is the deepest longing of the spirit fulfilled
like light in a perishable garden.
That there are no flaming swords
in the hands of the angels
at the wounded gates of our exile
trying to keep anything in or out.
Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
The knowledge we have of each other
might want to keep things the same
but like all living things
in this garden of creation
the only way to sustain our innocence
is change.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Murder Me Again With Your Voice

Murder me again with your voice,
the moon, your maculate heart, the weapon of your choice.
I am space, light, water, air, stars beyond your reach.
Meteor showers have been looking for my species for years
And still I thrive like glass eyes with real tears,
in the shadows of your amorous extinctions.

You can snuff a thousand votive candles out.
You can desecrate the shrine where I bury my feelings
like the small bodies of gentle birds
beside the ashes of the dragons that burnt out
like solar flares returning to the source.
You stab at the wind. You can try to ruin the sun
with a pettiness that isn't worthy of the moon
that sends no night bird out to look for you
though my longing says you've been missing for years.

Nothing against you, nothing especially for,
though I thought I saw for a moment Bailey's Beads
peeking through the lunar valleys of your last eclipse.
And there was a time I'd trade two of my fingers
just to have a taste of your lips again as they were
when the apple orchard covered your nakedness
in the blossoms of the first drafts
that couldn't improve on you by revising anything.
Come the first time right, or better not come at all
and they fell, each more perfect than the last.
Now it's like French-kissing a voodoo doll
with pins through its lips that makes everything you say
the martyr of a brutal kind of unspoken curse.

Make it worse, if that's all you've got left to feel.
Get it out. Oxyrhyncus Jesus says that'll save you.
I'm an old ghost. Do you really think
you're my first exorcism? Boo. I'm gone
just like the mist off a morning lake,
just like a gust of stars in the lens of a telescope
that can bring you close, or set you at a distance
just like that piece of tinfoil you wrap
like skin around your heart as if you were saving
some kind of vegetable in the cold shining
you think of as the Pleiades on a binge of light.

Screech, shriek, rave, rake your fingernails
down a blackboard like an ice age in a rage,
like a glacial striations cut into shale
and ambush the mammoth, the sabre-tooth, the dire wolf
of twelve thousand years ago when you stole
the water out of their mouths and returned nothing but dust
like you take the words from mine now
that you've uprooted the garden of your own.

Carve on me like a bone if you must, break my skull
like Pangaea into a synarthritic jigsaw puzzle of continents
and I'll do nothing but diversify my species.
I'll turn the scars in my starmud into calendars and alphabets
and wait for the next golden age like honeysuckle
tangled in a cedar fence after a storm
that strikes at itself like sheet lightning,
after your apocalypse has finished venting itself.

You're a white peony, not a wounded rose with thorns,
though you both shed the moon in common
to get down to the withered jester's cap of the star
hiding like a spider under your eyelids.
You kill me and you kill me deeper into life
not because it's me you hate, but what I refuse
to hate about you as a coward who turns her back
at the sight her own blood on her razors and wrists
and runs like a river system on a starmap
toward the emergency exits of the red giants
even as they're imploding under their own exhaustion
who promise to suckle you on the dream milk
of the poppies who opiate you into believing
you're twice as deceiving as death in Aleppo,
racially profiling the stars in infra red for the Gestapo.

What a silly girl you are, to expect a firing squad
to show up for your rescue, every time you click
your ruby slippers like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz
and tiny eyes emerge from the gigantic size
of the blackholes in your deathmasks like gnats
swept up like stars in your stillborn tornadoes on the moon.
It takes more than a snakepit to make someone an oracle.
However you enrobe it in incense and drugs
and mollify your fear in an exchange of syringes.
More fangs on a hydra-headed Medusa than there are
crescents of the moon lactating with antidotes
as if to say the cure is in the heart of the disease.

Let all those boyfriends you stole like corpses
from a graveyard, believing you were the artistic genius
who was mistress of their vital organs, rise from the dead
as if they'd finally learned to stand up to you
and making a move on your surgical flesh
say, hey, now, mistress, come lie down with us
and see, for yourself, what a heady lover death can be
when you don't take your cliches so seriously
you've rewired your waterlilies to the stars
until they all sting like superclusters of jellyfish
tasing you with the acid rain of your own tears
like rootfires of desire blossoming underground
without a flower to speak of or break through anywhere
you could point to and say, there, I grew that out of love
as if I weren't even trying all that hard
to stand here alone, alive, and beautiful as I am
not as an alibi for dying, but as an act of life
as indelible in its absence it is when it's here.

So go your own way with blood on your hands
and blessings on your head as you wish.
And take a last parting shot at the stars
if you want the last word
as you stand like a likeness of yourself
like a commission you've always had done
by every doorway you've ever stood in like an easel,
and step into a smaller realm than the one you're leaving
as if your eyes were too small for my windows
when you hurled yourself against them
like a housefly against a mirage in an hourglass
being emptied and filled at the same time.

And, yes, I will cry for you with deep regret
I couldn't die for you any better than I did,
and you couldn't live for me
just for the cheap thrill of it.
And then I'll wipe my tears on my sleeve
where my heart used to be
and make my comic entrance into the next world
laughing like a sacred clown at the sublimity
in the enlightened madness of it all
as you back up like a tragic exit into yours,
troubled by the punch-lines in your nightmares
you never got.

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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This Is An Old Sorrow

This is an old sorrow, almost beautiful in the way
it underwhelms me from above, a sky caving in
like a circus tent under the weight of the rain,
a ghost of fruit that could not bear the weight of its tears.
This is a random sadness that's got me as its only friend
when it thaws like a mirror
looking back over its shoulder
at its glacial past, ex-lovers, friends, certain pets,
and eyes that were glass weeping
in the intense mystic heat of a blast furnace full of stars
for how little they understood at the time, things pass
like Canada geese migrating across the moon
like a river you can't step into twice.
Though it doesn't make any sense to say so.
This is an ancient sorrow. And though one direction
is as good as many, I'm still following
the herds of the grazing stars as far north as I can.

O we shall sit down on the good earth half lotus sometime
and cry together for the wound of being alive.
The rose has teeth. And celebrate the scars
in the herb garden as if they were crescent moons.
Or the eyes of a powerful wraith of sadness
saturating the atmosphere with the pathos
of a lament that's been sublimely burning
through its heart for lightyears
like some deep emptiness it knows can never be filled.

As if God would never be enough for herself
and the whole of the universe were
one long maternity of endless creation
that is manifested in its entirety in each one of us
the way the moon's reflected in a dropp of blood
hanging from the thorn of a rose
with the last of two beautiful sunsets for eyes
like the sheen of auroral silk glancing off the scales
of a black watersnake at nightfall when the swallows go in
and the bats come out on the nightshift
like the winged heels of some demonic messenger
with minions that squeal in a frequency too high to hear.

But however you send it, by sound or by silence,
by light or by night, be assured the message you send
however time and space bend things
is the message that's received, like a bee by a flower
or a star by the eye that transcribes it creatively
into hieroglyphic metaphors of picture-music
following a dream grammar of starmud
with a bird stuck in its voice like a phoenix in the Arctic.

Time washes the dust of the road off
by shedding the moonlight like a snake's skin
and skinny-dipping in the fathomless lakes of eternity
it finds along the way like eyes along the mindstream
full of stars and fireflies and what blooms in the soil of its sorrows
beside the stairs at the back doors of all those tomorrows
that left the way they came without saying good-bye.

Volcanic lunar oceans that are only as deep
as the dark tears I have left within me
when I dip the leaking cup of my heart
like the goblet of an impact crater
into a watershed of compassion that looks like the holy grail
and share it with my fellow mirages in this desert of stars
as if they were all as thirsty as I am and everyone
deep down inside somewhere within them
like the green star you can find at the core of an apple,
had a fountain within them like a moon dial or a wine glass
they smashed on the high notes of the nightbirds
just to express their joy as a kind of defiance
in the face of their lots in life, though, in fact
nothing is longer or shorter than anything else in eternity
just as there's only so much time and then there is forever.
And it's the black magic in the roots of a demon
that blossoms like Venus in the west
or New England asters up around Westport in the fall.

And though there's something beautiful in this sadness
that eludes me like a Braille starmap
I can't quite put my finger on to see what's shining
like Aldebaran through the tree line of a bride in a widow's veils,
as I listen to a whisper of flesh
pleading in the darkness not to be excluded
from the presence of time, or left behind by the spirit
like a false clue of cast off rags on a hawthorn bush
to say where it's gone forever and ever and ever
as if whatever the spirit and the flesh had
going on between them never mattered,
whenever the clarity cuts through
the thin-skinned mirror like this
as if it were trying to slash my eyes open
like an insight into what's beyond the obvious,
immediately out of a wounded mouth
I am healed by the balm in a voice of compassion
that rises sweetly like the new moon from the womb
of a scarred guitar that didn't know it had such music in it.

And it says in moonlit windows and nightbirds
that make all the dreaming children wake up and listen
to the intimate strangers that speak as gently as fireflies
to the vast nightskies of their own imaginations,
that the world that casts these shadows on your wall
like a crow preening its feathers, or a bell
that's lost its faith in knowing, and plunges like an apple
into its next afterlife, are merely the holy petals
and sacred syllables taken like pages from the Book of Life
left out like an orchard in a nightwind for every one to read
like a story each of us writes for ourselves
to help us drift gently off into sleep again
to find out how it all ends in a dream that goes on forever
like the fragrance of lilac in an old woman's memories
or the marrow of the apple bloom
that clings like the moon to our bones
or stars to the flypaper stairwells of our chromosomes.

No other way to explain the shining of this sadness deep within
as if my very blood mourned the passing of the things
that have drowned and disappeared into it over the years
like honey-bees in the lees at the bottom of a black tulip
full of rainwater, and by that I know
this is a sadness common to all
that's worthy of the stars in its windows,
and the dreams in the mirrors that paint our faces
like quick watercolour life studies of rainbows in tears.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Your Face Among Many, A Blossom

Your face among many, a blossom.
Let it go. Let it go. Let it go.
The sun can't understand why it can't
open the buds of the parking meters.
Some people worry they don't have talent.
Given a name, who isn't a masterpiece?
A perfect self-portrait of what they're becoming?
Talent, the worst superstition of all.
That lullaby you sing to your voodoo doll
at bedtime, to let her know she's special
when, in fact, she's blind. Talent.
That estranged mix of an eclipse and an oilslick
that isn't sure of its standing in life.
Sensible shoes wishing they had wings on their heels.
The redundant navigator of mountain streams
that would have found their own way to the river
all by themselves. You ask if I think you have talent.
To me that's like a flower asking
if I think it will ever come to bloom,
a star wondering if it's shining or not,
a sea uncertain of its own waves and weather.
And I say, your eyes do, your ears do, your mouth has,
these birch-trees, those starlings, that tree, those rocks,
these rags of last year's flowers do, but not you.
On the day of creation when God exhausted herself
using up the leftovers of her inspiration
so as not to let anything go to waste, she pinched the noses
of a few sacred clowns and instead of
breathing life into their lungs, she opened their throats
and poured a special esoteric elixir of talent,
the mother of all oceanic love potions
that ever played favourites with a select few
among everyone she'd ever given birth to,
out of her mouth into theirs, such that like her
all they had to do, they were so talented,
was give the word. Say be. And it was.
Because the moment you ask if you have something,
you've already lost it. Like space or time or mind,
talent isn't possessed. It's made manifest spontaneously.
Do you see the ruby throated hummingbirds
in a last duel with the thorns
of the locust trees in blossom,
one drawing blood, the other, first honey?
Behind every river making its way to the sea
stands the cornerstone of a mountain
buried under an avalanche
it brought down upon itself
like the winter solstice
between the dolmens of Stonehenge,
just as every dropp of water is a lost key,
the Rosetta stone of a nameless grave in the rain
that can still speak fluently
the mother-tongue of the dead language
that buried oviparous metaphors
like oxymoronic dragons in cosmic eggs,
a coincidence of contradictory birds and snakes
the highs and the lows, made whole again.
Asking me if you've got talent is like
a nebula light years across asking me if it's got stars.
Do the candles wish they were fireflies?
Do you write with your eyes or your ears?
And if you're asking me if you've got
the bit, the spit, the spurs, the stirrups
to ride a wild, white-winged horse in a rodeo
without being thrown off, I'd say
the most seasoned saddle of all
is to ride bareback along the Milky Way in summer
and see for yourself if you can make it as far
as Altair in Aquila or the Deneb in the Swan.
And then realize, if you can't, the real star
of the show all along was the rodeo clown
who rescues the riders when they're down and out
by living dangerously on the horns of a dilemma
he had to make his own to spare the hero
from any further injury that might come
from taking anything too seriously.
And don't canter as if you had talent
you can put your trust in like a reliable lie.
Risk everything on one leap of the fence.
Assume you're a genius and fly.
You sweep the stars under your prayer rug
and then come and ask me if you're a good housekeeper.
You want to know if your third eye is glass
or real crystal, something from the depression era,
and I turn it circumspectly in the light
and focus it on the sun and the moon
and few oddball stars nearby,
and I can see where you've being crying a lot
and missed a spot that makes things perfectly clear.
Talent might polish the mirror of the Hubble Telescope
to get rid of the smear of the Andromeda Galaxy,
to rub a hundred billion stars out
for the sake of appearances, but genius
sees through every dropp of rain that falls
like an eye of its own through a broken windowpane
it's just thrown the moon through like a lunatic
at the reflection of its own face
on the waterless pond of its own seeing
to make waves just to see itself as it is
warped like space and time
by the crazy wisdom of the circus mirrors
that are always in tears of laughter.
And this by the merest of inclinations
to have a good chuckle at the expense
of the straight-faced paradigms
trying to get a fix on their shining as if
they were measuring the nearest distance
the fireflies approach earth at apogee by parallax.
Talent may well be the architectural blueprint
of the underlying infrastructure of the chrysalis,
but it's the worm that crawls
into whatever house of transformation,
whatever zodiac squatting on the outskirts
of whatever shantytown gerry-mandered out of scraps,
salvage, cast offs, discarded parts of mechanical experience
looking for a new purpose in life,
and flies out the other end with mandalas
not starmaps on its wings.
Talent takes note of the traffic signs
long before it's walked the road.
Until you realize through the eyes in your blood
with a passion that won't go back the way it came,
like the fish hook of the moon
torn out of the fleshy part of your heart the wrong way,
or revoke the names of the things you've given birth to
crossbreeding with a fertile imagination
when things get dark and narrow
in a black hole where the shadows of sacred fires
dance to the picture-music of hallowed cave paintings,
until you realize how meaningless and futile
the most significant things in life are
you'll never know the playful intensity
of being so wholly absorbed into your own creation
there's no afterbirth of inspiration to cast off
like a shadow of the mind upon the light.
If you're still looking for your own face
behind the veils you lift
like the mirages of mediocrity
in the breathless splendour
of the restless mirrors of reality
where you drink from your own reflection
like the false idol of an image
you've kissed the feet of before.
Be assured. If you're still down on your knees
before this simulacrum of seeing
you're just peeking through the keyhole
of a little door into a bigger world
that isn't sleepwalking through the same dream you are.
If you've got talent. And why not?
When everything else including you does,
except when you're a fish out of water
dying of thirst beside a fresh water lake
asking the stars if you can swim as well as they do.
If so. Why do you keep it to yourself
like some secret contagious disease
you haven't had time to spread around yet?
If you've got talent, don't judge
the quality of the wine by asking someone
to appraise the worth of the jewels
that open like the eyes of rubies and rhinestones,
like fierce Venutian diamonds in the twilight
of empty, golden goblets mortally wounded
by the going down of the sun
striking its colours like pennants of surrender.
But if you've ever known the delirious oblivion
of the protean genius or juno of a child
then your cup runneth over like the moon at full.
You drink from the cups
of the wild gypsy poppies
with the crazy lunar slips of the tongue
they keep whispering like the sacred syllable
of a cataba worm at the bottom of a bottle
like an unforgiving message for help in your ear.
And it's perfectly clear
from the either/or lens of your orbiting telescope
the stars aren't waiting for an answer
to all their big first magnitude questions,
but if you were to say anything, say it
like the ghost of a breath from the past,
a shadow in passing
that makes the candle flames tremble
at a seance of sensitive souls and murky mediums
in a delirium of stars giving rise
to a dancer in a dream riding her own thermals
in the cooling of an August afternoon like a red-tailed hawk
winging it on the fly for the euphoric high of it,
for the pure joy and solitude
in the miscreant freedom of it
from the wounded wild rose in her heart
like blood and wine and the miracle of mirages
in a bottled hourglass of quicksand.
Down to the lees of moonset
in your own bottomless skull
where you can read the black tea leaves for yourself
like the spinal vertebrae of books on a library shelf
to see if you're ever going to make it into print or not
like a fossil in the Burgess Shale
of a lonely species of heart and mind
that was one of a kind from beginning to end.
Of course, you're talented. Show me a star
or a stagestruck flower in the green room that isn't.
But talent isn't just another antidotal snake serum
you pour like iodine onto to the burn
of a lightning strike you can't mend any other way.
And genius, what can anybody say?
You won't find it out trying to stake a claim
to the insights it's been panning for
like nuggets of harvest gold
from the blue ore of the new moon's dark potential.
from the mindstreams that have been turning over
the reflections of the green mountains
they've been walking beside all day
like stones in the flow of an ongoing conversation
that might have something hidden under them
like stars that size of misfit diamonds
that ring the craters of the meteor impacts
that don't enlighten anything
that's bigger than your eyes
could ever dream of seeing.
And what new species of intensely creative visual life
might have come of them in the aftermath
by adapting that poem you're holding in your hand
like the neck of a dying swan song
to a whole new biosphere of picture-music
where merely to breathe the stars in and out
even at these lower altitudes
in these valleys of the fireflies
the storm passed over out of consideration
for their blood ties to the lightning,
were to sign your name in the first edition
of a cosmic guest book with the wingspan
of an immensely talented constellation
working on the first draft of a brilliant myth of origin
that says as it will be at the end,
so it was in the beginning
and is now in the coming of nightfall to a stranger.

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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If Only I Could Remember Things For Awhile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Someone To Rejoice In

Someone to rejoice in. Foolish thought.
Epiphanous absurdity. My interminable longing
for a treasure, a happiness, a companion
I'm not even sure I deserve, is agitating
oceans of emotion again,
and wants to run before the wind,
wants to raise up apple blossoms
like sails with the skull and crossbones on them
and skirt the rocky coasts of extinct volcanoes
that once served as lighthouses in the distance
when I was island-hopping
like an infidel among the angel fleets.

The dragon's howl in the dead skull.
Moments when my heart shrieks with life
like a red-tailed hawk falling upon a snake.
I am a ravenous man who wants to eat the light.
The night flows into my bloodstream
like an atlas of arteries.
As time has passed, the pain in me
has shifted wavelengths from the ultra violet
to the infra-red of a less lethal frequency.
I'm at the wide-eyed end of the hourglass,
but I can still bare my fangs
like the moon when I need to.
I can still come down off the mountain
like a hashashim and run the shadow of my knife
like an eclipse across the dreamscape of anyone
who takes too much for granted in their sleep.

So why is it after refueling and buying
a well-upholstered cheesey sandwhich in plastic skin
at the all night Kingston Esso just before you cross the 401
at one thirty in the morning, and begin to enter
the long, dark way home up the old Perth road to Westport,
did I begin to miss you
as if you had sat beside me my whole life?
And I pondered your absence like a hitch hiker
I had just picked up for the first time
and the impact of the encounter
left an indelible impression on my emptiness
as if someone had written something
so eloquent and intriguing as a ribbon of blood
letting its hair down in the water
I couldn't help but feel like a flying carpet
that was unravelling mile by mile of asphalt
like a glacier that couldn't wait to get back to you,
thawing time into rivers to speed things up?

And the night sang as I hadn't heard it in a while.
And the stars flew in through the window like fireflies.
And I rode the road like a rat snake past Devil's Lake
where we agreed to paint en plain air
when the waterlilies were in bloom
like huge starmaps laid upon the water.
Are you the tuning fork that tames the lightning?
Are you the power of silence that shames the word?
Are you the thread of blood on the sword that blesses it?

And I wanted to kiss you good night.
I wanted to embrace you like a nebula
of blue-hearted hydrogen and the dust of dead stars
just to see if I could make you shine or not,
but I thought it was too early in the year,
too premature for the Pleiades to break into light
and I might scare you with the intensity
of what was ingathering out of
the immensities of the last million light-years
of crossing these homeless thresholds
without a star to go by, alone and unconvinced
I hadn't missed the turn several lifetimes back.

Now I sit upright in my bones at my desk
like dice with their eyes fully opened like blackholes
wondering if I should chide my skeleton for cowardice
or alea iacta, risked my luck, and crossed the Rubicon
like an event horizon that's never known a compass or a guide.
And I'm looking under every leaf and stone
and heart I've ever worn upon my sleeve
like a fresh strawberry in a field of burning scarecrows
that started out as potential messiahs
but ended up being immolated as faithful heretics
true to the fire that consumed them from within.
And you, their felix culpa, their happy sin.
The one forbidden thing you must risk your life for to live.

I'm dogpaddling in space and time like a shipwreck.
I'm holding my breath like a lungful of stars
trying to stay afloat long enough
not to see my life flash before my eyes
like a lantern whose last remaining firefly's gone out
like the solar flare of an s.o.s. that bloomed to no effect,
until your lifeboat returns like the moon for survivors.

A swallow again lost in a hurricane of volcanic ashes?
A simian in a cage with a piece of coloured glass
that transfixes it with vulnerable awe and wonder?
The aura of a woman who doesn't know yet
quite how beautiful she is, lingering in the air
like the smell of wild roses when you're out
painting alone in the fields of abandoned farms
and you can feel the uncanny chill of another person
walk right through you like the moon through a summer window.

And o to worry about so many little things again
the world pivots on moment by moment
as if it were a privilege and an honour to cherish them
like signs of love in a Druidic tree alphabet
that whispered coniferous prophecies to the moon
but held a few sacred syllables back under its tongue
that were just meant for one alone to hear
like a secret message between a butterfly and a star.
Or this woman who's just summoned me
like a nightbird to the moonrise of her smile
as if I'd never flown to the end of my longing before
without finding a noose to hang myself with.

But as I do, I do again with less fear than before
and though the shadows in the valley of death
are just as intense, the warmth of a sprightly optimism
that keeps this firefly of insight alive in my heart
to want to see this all the way through
as if it were a rite of passage
that proved the comets true
or the rush of a wild northern river
with a rudder and a sail and a hull
going over a waterfall like the Milky Way,
or a moonboat panning for gold in the mountains.

The rustic pauper prince of Perth, I hadn't
realized what an undernourished bush wolf I had become
after all these years of living in the wilderness
until I understood someone had baited the trapline
with kindness I had forgotten the taste of in my exile.
And though I don't travel with a begging bowl,
by god, I'll hold my skull out to her next time
if I have to, just to taste a sheaf of light
from that harvest again, as if the dark side of the moon
had just broken its long vow of silence and darkness
and she were lingering in space like the aura
of an atmosphere I had lived too long without.

As if a dakini, an elixir of light, had appeared
like the planet Venus in the dusk again
and I could feel an updraft of stars
wheeling under my wings
like a winding stairwell of serpent fire
threading through all nine open chakras
and eleven dimensions of a sky wide third eye
in an easy rapture of something unearthly, ascending
to sterling altitudes of blissful vertigo
that whirl me in a wind of fire at the crossroads
of everywhere and here
like the ashes of a mad Sufi
ghost dancing on his funeral pyre for rain
as the first few drops wash his fate from his forehead
like the sheet music of an old song
perched like aging birds on a downed powerline
returning its energy like lightning to the earth
she walks upon in the flowing raiment of fireflies
and the hydrogen negligees of the blue star clusters
embroidered with the harvest gold of the sun
seasoning the grain with the bright vacancy
and dark abundance of the light
still warm in the lunar locket of her heart
as if she'd just put a loaf of bread
out on the windowsill to cool for a moment or two.

And how can I, this famine in an hourglass
beside this silo of the plenum void full of manna
resist whatever befalls me in this desert of stars
whether it be vipers or wheat fields
along the way to the unpromised land of milk and honey,
barefoot on thorns, or walking on soft petals
like the dunes and waves of the ocean in the rose?

Flammable poet, sacred clown of the holy mirage,
mad monk alone in your hermitage, dragon seed
of island pirates wearing the night like an eye-patch
to navigate the stars like a canning jar of fireflies
burning on the inside of their eyelids like starmaps
to the cherished singularities I buried
at the bottom of the fathomless blackholes
firing up the galaxies all over again like the wellsprings
of a muse renewing her wings like starfish and birds
in the fountainmouth of the mountain at a loss for words.
Or as the poet said, what's madness
but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?

And did you not say, I heard you as if my life
depended on it, you were attracted to crazy people,
and did I not ask, if crazy wisdom were close enough,
and you replied, yes, and my heart freefell
a thousand feet without a parachute
when space bent like a longbow into flight.
And I shuddered like a witching wand in ecstasy
over the watershed that swelled under me
when I divined what that could mean to a sailor
lost at sea on the moon as far from shore
as any lunatic has ever been out of his asylum
his heart his mind his body soul and spirit
without dying like a message for the sake of the medium
it was delivered in like longing in the song of a nightbird.
Love in the sound of a word.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Out Here Alone

Out here alone so late at night
with all these spectacular stars
burning through the clean glass
of the freezing winter air
I can almost hear them thinking
behind the myths of the cover stories
they've told for years
dark truths about life and light
it would be madness in a man to understand.

Don't try to stuff the impersonal secret
of the universe
into your sentimental heart.
How could you ever fit its likeness
into a locket
and finger it lovingly as your own?

Out here alone so late
even if you have come
like a thief in the night
to steal from the light
when nobody's home
there are no cracks no facets no gaps
no backdoors, unlocked windows
or emergency exits,
no stairwells or entrances
in these jewels of insight
that can feel your eyes falling upon them
like rain running down a mirror
that shuts you out
like someone in the bathroom crying
for reasons that are light-years beyond you.

However deep and sincere your tears are
they're still only dry wells
in that vast ocean of awareness,
black snowflakes
on the roaring furnace of the abyss
and if you reach out with affection
hoping to make things better
by embracing it all
you're still only tendering a kiss
to the gaping jaws of your own lipless skull.

There's a silence older than space
in the bottomless heart of things
that makes intelligence seem
the unlikeliest of exaggerations
a human could ever mean
holding his mind up like a lamp to the stars
as if he could find his own way back by his own light
without the dream that themes his mindstream with creation.

But as foolish and futile as it is to surmise
or try to get a leg up on the wise
I don't think the darkness
is the negative space
around the troubled face that appeared
after all the dots were connected
like rising constellations
in a child's colouring book.

And I don't think there are gods
squatting like frogs
on the lotus of the world
making us up as they go along
like wheels and roads
to the grunts and groans
of an axial mating song
anyone could mistake for a joke.

And I don't think the stars
believe the things we say about them
or even remotely feel the mystic dread
of what it is to be a human
looking up at their shining
out of deeper darknesses within
where no direction can be given to the lost like eyes
that would never find their own way home again
were it not for the stars and fireflies that mislead us
from one illumination to the next
by giving the finger to the braille of the text
that would school a gust of stardust into us
like God gave life to Adam
and Eve gave life to God
long before there were any laws to blind them
like Satanic lightning bolts
uprooting their eyes like rain from the clouds
to put those fires out.

I look up at the stars
with the eyes of an exile
through the diaspora of my breath
and I want to think them all to death
like the people and things I've left behind me
when it was time to go my own way
anywhere into the darkness inside me
to see if I could shine a light upon myself
that didn't blind me to the fact
neither in the beginning
nor in the end
was I there to witness the act
that made a certainty as good as a doubt
to the great indifference
that wasn't trying to find me
like a needle of light in the heart of a haystack.

I look up at the stars
like a scarecrow in winter
trying to put its pants on
one leg after another
like a man
with nothing but time to burn
scattering his ashes among the stars
urn after urn
skull after skull
of the heretics and mystics
that were martyred by his scar-crossed heart
in the name of nothing real.

I don't know what they feel
but I look up at the stars
like a black rose
of blood and starmud
in the last death throes
of self-immolation
and see in my own image
what I've always had
in common with creation.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Your Eyes For Awhile

Your eyes for awhile
were the only eyes
I could see through
to catch a glimpse of god;
were windows into my own soul
that I could look through from the outside
without throwing the moon
through my reflection like a stone
in the hand of an angry boy.
And it was always as true
as the way your heart grew
that you could love strangers
easier than I do even now
after all these years of learning how
to talk to mirrors in their own language.
And you were not one woman
but all women forever
when I saw you once
bending down like the dusk
to touch the last of the flowers
as if you would never see them again.
As serene as the evening
there was no labour in your beauty
and I swear when I saw you that night
I felt as if I were the whole world watching
time put a finger to its lips
and pour its fountain
into the flow of your body
as if it were the sum of all passage.
And though I was your friend in all things
every evening since
the candle went out
in the lantern of a lost tomorrow
I have walked out into abandoned fields alone
and asked the saddest questions
of the most distant stars
knowing there is not enough light sometimes
even in the eyes of God
to be a companion of our sorrows.
And the questions grow longer
as the darkness deepens
the echo of my longing
in a well as dry as my skull
and closes its gates like scars.
And then those nights come
like a life or a day
or even just this moment
when I stop asking
why human suffering
is always indescribably true
and joyful as an irreproachable buffoon
sword-dancing alone with the moon
who writes me dangerous loveletters
as if she were the Lady of the Lake
receiving me back
like a funeral ship
into this mysterium of you,
I can almost believe that you know
even though the night mocks the crow
that pines for mercy
and turns its lightless face toward you
as if it could still feel
the warmth of the sun at midnight
in your eyes again
like the afterlife of light
playing with fireflies in the abyss
now that the summer constellations have gone down;
that somehow you must know
like a guitar
on the far side of a room
where someone is singing
as if they had their ear
to the womb
of your irrevocable absence
that binds me to you with every breath
I take for two
as if I had learned to live on death
to keep you alive in me
where you still flow through the seasons
on the nightstreams of my blood
like blossoms and leaves and stars
and the moon leaves no scars on the water;
must know. Or a demon’s a kinder face
to bestow on the darkness
than a black hole without eyes,
though it’s taken many, long, painful years
for the night to share the light with its jewels again
and as many schools as there are fools to fill them
that even just one
of those slightly compassionate smiles
you would send across the room
to cool the furnace of my heart
with the lightness of one snowflake,
one feather
gracing a change in the weather,
knew more about love
as a raindropp knows the sea
than all of us
who have been washed up
on this cold, lonely shore together
thinking we may have been saved
for something more
than this tidal longing
to brave the sea again
and even if doomed to drown
as I have learned
from this shale of pain
that has carbon-dated the eras
of my missing you
like a life that didn’t
flash before my eyes
as I went down for good with everything,
to thank-you, o, yes,
with nothing but love and light in my heart
and your face in the eye of my solitude
as I stand before the sea in gratitude
to thank-you
as you well knew one day I could
for the generosity of the wound
that has run like my life
down these eyes
these windows
this page
these empty mirrors
of autumn rain
that have wept for years without you
just to see you again
for one moment more
than the time I have left
to know that I never will.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I look Into People's Faces

I look into people's faces
and I see the same wound
under many different scars.

I look into their hearts
like a stranger at night
through a passing window
and I see how suffering through
the agonies of life
has ripened some
with sweetness and compassion
and others are already
rotten before they fall.

I look into people's eyes
and some are vast starlit skies
and some are the iota subscripts
of scholarly fireflies
that footnote the constellations
at the bottom of the page
with details off the beaten path
of their MLA mainstream cosmic thesis.

And some are like moons
with parenthetical crescents
with nothing in between
both sides of their smile
that isn't a cynical aside
about the lost innocence
of a phase they've already gone through.

And some stare back like eclipses
that have pulled the blinds down
over their eyes
like sunglasses disguised
by a witness protection program
but you just know
they're oilslicks
on the Sea of Shadows
as they were in the womb
and in the Gulf of Mexico
the black blood
of an incorporated miscarriage
that hemorrhaged like the pot of gold
at the end of the oleaginous rainbow.

I look into people's souls
and I see how afraid
they must be of life
to hide out in the open
like an ocean
that hasn't kept faith
with its own depths
and tries to pretend it's
as airy and light as the sky.

The birds are flying through the roots.
The fish are swimming in the treetops.

I see judas-goats chained
to the stakes of their ego-Is
like sacrificial tiger bait
devoted to their cunning.

I see the anti-muses
that shadow Mt. Helicon
like black holes
in the death valleys
of human imagination.
And I wonder how they ever got here.

What bend in space
led them to this twisted place
like a forsaken road
they keep taking
like a wormhole through time
into the womb
of a stillborn universe
where the moonlight
burns their embryos
on pyres of lime
beside the dry creekbeds
of nameless rivers going nowhere?

Along their flowerless banks
I see the rib-cages of dead snakes
that went witching for water
with tongues and tines
of Kundalini lightning
that ran up their spines
like time through a waterclock
and the hulls of empty lifeboats
that died in the desert
at the bottom of the mirage
they drowned in
hoping to find themselves
among those who survived
by learning to swim through sand
like fish in an hourglass aquarium.

I'd rather walk on stars
reflected in the shattered mirrors
of my last self-image
than repay
the generosity of my solitude
with mass ingratitude.

I listen to people's voices
and they all seem like the same echo
with many different mouths.

I've tried to respect
the mystic specificity
of the thousands of fierce individuals
I've met over the years
but the more I've learned
about myself and others
the more I see the same mind
in many different skulls.
The same genius of inspired water
that poured an ocean
of sentient awareness
into everyone of our cells.

Union differentiates.
Separation binds.
I look into people's faces
however young or old they are
and I see infinite spaces
moonlighting as time
on the nightshift of the stars.

I see horror and compassion.
I see butterflies sipping
the nectar of diamonds
like honey in the promised land
and maggots born in excrement
thriving on offal
like the janitors of the dead
because everything grows best
in the soil it was born into
like karma in the fortune-cookies
of wombs and eggs and cocoons.

I look into people's eyes
like sad stars
through the generous end
of the telescope
that brings the far near
like impact craters
and I see how some people
cling to the memory of themselves
like underground seas
in frozen lockets
of water on the moon.

I look into people's secret shrines
they build like birds
in the eye of the storm
looking for salvation.
And I can hear
the echo of their prayers
bouncing back off hydrogen clouds
like a nineteen twenties radio show
thousands of lightyears away
as if they just said them yesterday
and the universe as usual
threw the words back in their face
like the cosmic background hiss
of snowflakes on a furnace
going out like stars.

I've seen the innocence of fireflies
making halos
and the blood-rose weaving thorns
around the massive blackholes of death
as if they were merely
a pinprick in a voodoo doll
that got into white magic by mistake.

I've looked into
the nuclear blaze of madness
like an A bomb with shades on
and seen the flash and shadow
of embryo silhouettes
spit out like cave paintings
on the firewalls of the fusion wombs
that give birth to the heavier elements
it takes to survive.

But the water's not mad
just because the moon's a lunatic.
The mirror might seem
just as angry as you are
but it doesn't feel a thing.

Learning wisdom is learning space.

It doesn't eat flowers
and the weeds don't sting.
It takes everything it embraces to heart
and nothing's left out
from the very beginning.
Like the whole of the moon and the sky
in every eye of water
that's ever looked into me
and seen that everyone
is the heart of a mystery
whose lucidity
is their only true identity.

It's our seeing
that makes the flowers open
and the stars shine.
It's our hearing that gives
the wind something
meaningful to say
and the grass something
to whisper about.
Whatever you touch
walks in your skin from thereon.
Whatever you taste
be it roses and nettles
or sulphur and wine
or the sour-sweet radiance
of the stars on your tongue
you're the flavour of the day
in everything.

It's your nose
that gives the burning leaves
in the urns of autumn
the spectral fragrance
of chrysanthemums
that are barely holding on.

And it's your mind.
Your heart.
Your blood.
Your body.
Your imagination.
Your intuition.
Your wisdom.
Your ignorance.
Your darkness.
Your light.
Your spirit
enlightened or deluded
whatever you think or feel
is abundantly missing
or dream you're waking up to
that makes the world real
in every mystically specific detail
of who you are.

Who else?
I look into myself
as far as the stars
at the edge of my seeing
fourteen point five billion lightyears away
and I can see how much time and space
how many species of life
generation after generation
have been born to give birth and die.

All the roses swept
from the stairs
of our hopeless tomorrows
because they were a tribute to love
meant for someone else.

All the spontaneous joys
that cast their long random shadows
like occasional fireflies of insight
across the lunar mindscape
of this afterlife of sorrows
where every church is the gravestone
of an unsuspecting god.

I look into my own seeing
like light upon light
in the vast expanse
of an unknowable night
and I'm cosmically astonished
by how many worlds within worlds
eyes within eyes
minds within minds
lives within lives it takes
to make a single habitable human being
meaning everyone of us sacred fools
fit as a genius
for the crazy wisdom
of a creative life
in a self-inspired universe.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Heart Won't Lie (feat. Reba McEntire)

Looking back over the years
Of all the things I've always meant to say
But the words didn't come easily
So many times through empty fears
Of all the nights I tried to pick up the phone
So scared of who might be answering
You try to live your life from day to day
But seeing you across the room tonight
Just gives me away
Chorus:
Cause the heart won't lie
Sometimes life gets in the way
But there's one thing that won't change
I know I've tried
The heart won't lie
You can live your alibi
Who can see you're lost inside a foolish disguise
The heart won't lie
Long after tonight
Will you still hear my voice through the radio
Old desires make us act carelessly
Long after tonight, after the fire
After the scattered ashes fly
Through the four winds blown and gone
Will you come back to me
You try to love your life from day to day
But seeing you across the room tonight
Just gives me away
Repeat Chorus

song performed by by Vince Gill
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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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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