Related quotes: On into the next dimension...

On Into The Next Dimension

On into the next dimension
like a measure of thought
sitting full lotus
on a flying carpet of feeling
that's on the same wavelength as the stars.
I've been an intimate of windows long enough.
I trust them.
But they don't shine.
They're confined to the news
of what's going on beyond them
that's brought to them live
by skies they flip through
like old Time magazines in a doctor's office.
Their eyes are long on views
but shy on visions.
Cataracts in the eye.
Flowers in the sky.
If you look through them long enough
you'll kill all the wildflowers
in your field of vision
and your third eye
will start grinding lenses for a living
like Spinoza
for a spiritual telescope with myopia.
Clarity will start writing messages in your breath
you're meant to take to heart
as you watch the universe shrinking
like expiry dates on the hot gusts of stars
evaporating like ghosts
from the cold glassy stares
of windowpanes
that have been crying in secret for years
because they're not taken as seriously as mirrors.
It takes a rock of a will
and the passion of an angry delinquent
to break free of them
but once they're broken
like the link of a koan
that liberated you from your own thought-chains
you can still see the whole in every piece
of the primordial atom
that precipitated the Big Bang
but it doesn't get in the way of what's beyond it.
You stop lifting fingerprints
as evidence that you exist
and start lifting veils
begin shedding skins
stop asking sacred clowns
if they can still recognize you
under all the facepaint
you use to express your emotions.
You let your masks blossom and blow away
like Ezra Pound's images
of faces on a wet black bough of the subway.
You empty your streets
like a dangerous part of New York
and step out of the doorway
where you've been waiting for yourself
to return home.
You exchange the key to the lock
for a fork you can fly from a kite
like a lightning rod in an electrical storm
that sends the snake pit of serpent fire
that moved like a glacier in a dream of thawing
racing up your spine
like a dragon of life
urgent as spring rain
that sheds its scales
like waves and ripples of water
but wakes up feathered in flames.
And this time it's the sun that drowns
for flying too close to Icarus
like the event horizon of a black hole
that smears its dimensions
like peanut butter
around the rim of a subliminal halo.
Free of the past
whatever you see
confirms your secret intuition
that the world hasn't happened yet.
That everything you see
in the ubiquitous solitude
of your unwitnessed sentience
is merely prelude
to a greater event
that transcends
the inconceivability
of what's self-evident about the present.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Related quotes

Event Of My Death

Event of my Death
As I Iay in the dawn of the hours waiting for my body to rest
I wonder what I will do in the event of my death….
In the event of my death most just think heaven or hell
No not me it doesn’t stop there…
In the event of my death my spirit will leave my body
My spirit will truly start living
In the event of my death I case my location,
Thinking about what led up to this…
In the event of my death I will visit all my loved ones…
My first visit will be to my king..
I will watch over him making him feel secure..
In the event of my death I will make my presence known
I will make them feel me in the heart and their surroundings…
In the event of my death I will travel…
I will hover over all the pyramids in Egypt,
I will explore all the places I’ve never been..
In the event of my death I will talk with my creator..
I will know all the answers…
Most of all In the Event of my death I will meet with my brother..
My brother and I will be together again…
In the Event of My death I will realize I’m really not dead..
In the Event of My death I will know that my spirit lives on..
I will know what living is all about…
In the Event of My death I will be immortal
I will be goddess a In the Event of My death...
I will be what I was born to be....
I will be free
I will be free of insecurities, free of poverty,
free of calamity, free of a broken heart,
Free of depression, free of negativity,
Free of racism, free of prejudice
I will be free In the Event of my Death
I will be all the things I was born to be...
I will be powerful, I will be beautiful, and I will be limitless
I will be a Goddess in the Event of my death...
Now what will you be....
Author: Templar Thomas

poem by Templar Thomas
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Morning After Everything

for Luke Cochrane

Saturday morning rain in Perth
and things seem as intimately far off and strange
as the new maps of water running down the windowpane.
No birds on the black boughs of the November trees
and black mirrors in the empty funeral home parking lot
and on the other side of me
the stalwart bloodbrick of a wet church
that looks better in the nicotine lingerie
and dusky seaspray
of a single yellow floodlight at night
that can't get it up to be a lighthouse.
It would be a lie to say that I'm not in love
and happily alone, but I most wistfully am,
as I excuse myself for being me
and put myself off like the small death of another way
I could have taken to get back home, but didn't.
November's an orphanage after the last kid has left
and I'm sure there's an ancient chthonic wisdom
under the duff and detritus
of all these slick, leechy leaves
that the earth has applied to herself like a poultice
to draw the violets and worms out in spring,
but right now my mouth is not a wound
with anything deep to say
about things too deep to be said
and there are memories of women and friends in my head
sleeping like keys in the bottom of a drawer
that I have saved for when the day comes
to open the flowers and doors
that I've forgotten,
all the soft sorrows that rime the radiance
of the halo around a black hole
haunted by these ghosts of light.
I am absorbed like tears in a tenderness of grey
and there's more healing than thorn
in the cool aloe of the air
moist with a seance of emotions
that gust lightly around me
as if yesterday were merely a fragrance
hovering over an eye of wine
like the dust and smoke of today
that bottles its purity like water.
Sometimes love passes like a glacier over you
and there are runes and scars and striations on your skin
and lakes and craters and eyes the sky fills in
and the sun comes out like an exorcist
and you feel like you've been baptized in ice
or tucked into the crevice of a wailing wall
like a baby mammoth, or an unanswered prayer
and you try not to care
that you're a freak of your own evolution
trying to clone yourself out of the museum into a zoo
and that all these people are staring at you
like a missing link between the parentheses of your tusks
that have unhinged you from the gate of time
you once swung on like your next breath,
and if you were asked about the extremes of mercy
you would say, without hesitation, death.
Sometimes it's that hard to accept
that nothing that happens here, including death
is ever over, and that the absence of something or someone
doesn't mean they've ceased to exist
like footprints that lead down to a river.
Because we all live the same beginningless beginning
that is the once and forever of this universe
even if it should call itself home occasionally like an eye,
we go on living and dying each other alone
like an extinct species always asking the time
when the moonlight burns like lime in a grave
and then, once more, absurdly never the same
riots of flying fish leap from every dropp of rain
that remembers the passion of the wave
offering itself in the life of every moment
like a jewel thawing, or an icecap over the eye
or the opening of a brittle window
to be scoped out by the nightwind
that longs like a thief for the sea
to gather him up like one of its belongings.
But you can't pour the universe out of the universe
where the whole is sustained by every part
anymore than you can empty the human heart
that is renewed by its own exhaustion like a tide.
Time is always prelude
and death has never known when
to take down its sail like a tree in the fall.
And because things are never the same twice
and the road back is not the road taken
the world and everyone in it
just as they are, have always been here.
Things don't come and go
like migrating geese ascending southward out of a field,
or things fallen returning to their leaves
because there's nowhere to come from
nowhere to go to
that isn't now and here
as intimately far as it is impersonally near.
Ask almost anyone who they are
and they'll look down a well in a mirage
to haul up their reflection on a wheel
and insist it's real
when they ladle their face to their lips
like the moon on dark water.
Or they'll tell you a story around an unending fire
where the shadows are always truer than the flames
and the most illuminating themes burn like stars without names.
Mind is space and there is
nowhere inside or outside of anything
that is closer or futher than anything else
because everything is mind as far as you can be.
So I can stand here in my lengthening shadow
like a long departure
turning into the wind like a sail or a sundial
as if I were the last of my species of eclipse
and life were merely the long, hard discipline
of unmastering the art
of saying hello to the living
and good-bye to the dead,
or turning the telescope around
and saying good-bye to the living,
hello to the dead as I please,
but I'd rather shed myself
like all these falling maps to anywhere
that once arrived like the fleets of the leaves like me
on the shores of this rootless tree
that doesn't let go of things for its own survival
but lives in itself like a stranger come
to the opening gate of an endless arrival.
I let the birds come and go, the apples fall,
the stars build their webs in my crown,
and grow like a holy road I take as my own,
like geese passing overhead at night,
or the small birds that come to me like voices
a moment here then gone
who taught me that it's always dawn
because there's no end of the beginningless beginning
and it may be a green bough
or a dead branch
you hop up and down on like the hidden notes
of something you're singing
on the rungs of these crazy snakes and ladders
that long like flesh and bone in the night
for things they can't see anymore in the light,
or fish dying of thirst in a fathomless pond
or a fire putting itself out in its own eye
or someone dying and someone else asking why
and the whole of creation left alone at home
feeling it doesn't belong under its own sky
like this Saturday morning rain in Perth
the day after your death
that falls like a loveletter too late upon the earth
or the harvest moon of a delinquent heart
above an untimely skeleton
that can't decide whether it's a tuning fork
or a witching wand
looking for answers like water
under every stone on the moon,
the way we cry for people we think are gone,
but green bough, dead branch, Luke, same song.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Art Of Life

Desert Rose
Why do you live alone
If you are sad
I'll make you leave this life
Are you white, blue or bloody red
All I can see is drowning in cold grey sand
The winds of time
You knock me to the ground
I'm dying of thirst
I wanna run away
I don't know how to set me free to live
My mind cries out feeling pain
I've been roaming to find myself
How long have I been feeling endless hurt
Falling down, rain flows into my heart
In the pain I'm waiting for you
Can't go back
No place to go back to
Life is lost, Flowers fall
If it's all dreams
Now wake me up
If it's all real
Just kill me
I'm making the wall inside my heart
I don't wanna let my emotions get out
It scares me to look at the world
Don't want to find myself lost in your eyes
I tried to drown my past in grey
I never wanna feel more pain
Ran away from you without saying any words
What I don't wanna lose is love
Through my eyes
Time goes by like tears
My emotion's losing the color of life
Kill my heart
Release all my pain
I'm shouting out loud
Insanity takes hold over me
Turning away from the wall
Nothing I can see
The scream deep inside
reflecting another person in my heart
He calls me from within
"All existence you see before you
must be wiped out :
Dream, Reality, Memories,
and Yourself"
I begin to lose control of myself
My lust is so blind, destroys my mind
Nobody can stop my turning to madness
No matter how you try to hold me in your heart
Why do you wanna raise these walls
I don't know the meaning of hatred
My brain gets blown away hearing words of lies
I only want to hold your love
Stab the dolls filled with hate
Wash yourself with their blood
Drive into the raging current of time
Swing your murderous weapon into the belly
"the earth"
Shout and start creating confusion
Shed your blood for pleasure
And what ? for love ?
What am I supposed to do ?
I believe in the madness called "Now"
Past and future prison my heart
Time is blind
But I wanna trace my love
on the wall of time, over pain in my heart
Art of life
Insane blade stabbing dreams
Try to break all truth now
But I can't heal this broken heart in pain
Cannot start to live, Cannot end my life
Keep on crying
Close my eyes
Time breathes I can hear
All love and sadness
melt in my heart
Dry my tears
Wipe my bloody face
I wanna feel me living my life
outside my walls
You can't draw a picture of yesterday, so
You're painting your heart with your blood
You can't say "No"
Only turning the wheel of time
with a rope around your neck
You build a wall of morality and take a breath
from between the bricks
You make up imaginary enemies and are chased by them
You're trying to commit suicide
You're satisfied with your prologue
Now you're painting your first chapter black
You are putting the scraps of life together
and trying to make an asylum for yourself
You're hitting a bell at the edge of the stage
and
You are trying to kill me
I believe in the madness called "Now"
Time goes flowing, breaking my heart
Wanna live
Can't let my heart kill myself
Still I haven't found what I'm looking for
Art of life
I try to stop myself
But my heart goes to destroy the truth
Tell me why
I want the meaning of my life
Do I try to live, Do I try to love
in my dream
I'm breaking the wall inside my heart
I just wanna let my emotions get out
Nobody can stop
I'm running to freedom
No matter how you try to hold me in your world
Like a doll carried by the flow of time
I sacrificed the present moment for the future
I was in chains of memory half-blinded
Losing my heart, walking in the sea of dreams
Close my eyes
Rose breathes I can hear
All love and sadness melt in my heart
Dry my tears
Wipe my bloody face
I wanna feel me living my life
outside my mind
Dreams can make me mad
I can't leave my dream
I can't stop myself
Don't know what I am
What lies are truth ?
What truths are lies ?
I believe in the madness called "Now"
Time goes flowing, breaking my heart
Wanna to live
Can't let my heart kill myself
Still I haven't found what I'm looking for
Art of life
I try to stop myself
But my heart goes to destroy the truth
Tell me why
I want the meaning of my life
Do I try to live, Do I try to love
Art of life
An Eternal Bleeding heart
You never wanna breathe your last
Wanna live
Can't let my heart kill myself
Still I'm feeling for
A Rose is breathing love
in my life

song performed by by X JAPAN
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Art Of Life

song performed by by X JAPAN
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I Have Become My Own Season

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Up On Heartbreak Hill At Night

Up on Heartbreak Hill at night
with a 2.4 inch,60 mm, refracting telescope,
a cat, and a journal of poems,
deciphering those immensities of sky
as if every star were the sacred syllable
of an inconceivable intelligence that explained
everything in light, and the light were singing.

Earth noises in the broom bushes and Douglas firs.
The air rife with the spirits of those
who had their necks broken here by a prison noose,
and had more of a right to be here than I did
who felt like an intrusive guest in their house
even though the darkness was common ground.

Eventually they learned to ignore me
as just another adolescent longing for eternal responses
to the expiry date on life and love,
and not one of them without a silent understanding
of what a star could mean through the bars
on the windows of their prison cells.

Up here on the hill I was a temple above
the imperial rhetoric of toppled garbage cans
expurgating on the fate of fallen empires
that took themselves way too personally in restrospect
than they did at the time, as if the wound,
even the children had to amend like a religion,
grew deeper and more volatile with age.
Up here, just the executed ghosts of perversity and rage.

The whisper of something beautiful
no one could smear, soil, smudge,
out of touch, though I caressed
the skin of the stars as if it were as smooth
as the lenses and mirrors I used
to watch the fragile radiance of how they danced
so intimately across the apertures
of my field of vision trembling before
their scintillation the way I used to make
some spiders vibrate in the morning
like sewing machines or the clappers on fire alarms
by simply touching their webs
as if all the strings on a Spanish guitar
were trip wires in a terrorist museum.

Light as the only liquid in a desert
for many dangerous miles around,
the stars were cool jewels of water to me.
I could almost taste them like the tartness
of wild blackberries on my lips, lemons,
the deadly nightshades of experimental girlfriends
testing out cartridges of new lipstick
the first time we kissed in the shadows
of the new moon behind the abandoned warehouse.

It's impossible to see a star as it is
until it's become part of your love life
or, at least, until you can learn to flirt with the light
like a firefly at the window
of this thirteenth house of solitude
where the homeless gather like an avalanche
of the misplaced cornerstones of condemned temples
that like the stars, are always updating their past
about things that shine, but don't last.
If the medium is the message, and it is and it isn't,
then seeing must be a kind of love as well.
I saw the stars through the eyes of the stars.
I felt the weight of the billions of years
there wasn't even a one-eyed sea to look back at them
for intimate insights into its own impersonality.

Hard stars in the winter, soft stars in the summer.
Stars can see further into the darkness of the human heart
when it's cold out for everyone and clarity
stops breathing on the mirror like evanescent nebulae
sensitizing the light to the chromatic aberrations
of the disappearing veils and crushed rainbows
synchronously aligned with my poetry at the time.

I could feel the passage of the stars
like migrating Canada geese in the autumn
the shamans read like rosaries in retrograde orbits,
an abacus of wandering planets, and one,
whose name was unknown
rooted in the ground of itself like a strange silence
that had whispered the world into its own ear
like the dark secret of light upon light
as everyone looked up like mirrors
with tears in their eyes as big as lenses
trying to overhear what was clearly not hidden
through the keyhole of a telescope up on Heartbreak Hill
when seeking wasn't a way of avoiding what was revealed.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Every Morning Of The Moment, A New Creation

Every morning of the moment, a new creation,
the distillation of the dreams of the night before
when the moon was as fertile as the dew we were born from.
I start out each day with a new face. By nightfall
it's just another phase of the same old ageless deathmask,
heavier than a bell that's been talking through my mouth
for more light years than I've got tears to measure in mirrors.
That's usually when I start thinking like a potato about stars.
Blood sugars in my mindstream ripening me like a vision
I'll only ever get to see backstage like a forlorn clown
trying to hang on to his faith in laughter.

You can pursue happiness, but it will only
run from you like the light, or you can cover your eyes
and try to avoid it for fear of losing it like the last time,
but when you turn around, it's right behind you,
flirting with your shadow. Better to let it come and go
of its own accord, like a waterbird in a moonrise
reflected on a lake. Then when you speak of things
you increasingly know less about the more
you're intimate with them, your voice isn't
a bird net trying to cage words on the fly
but an aviary as open as the sky when
Cygnus and Aquila are up, and the Lyre's
a larynx for the asking. And you're free
to sing your heart out as if no one were listening
but you and the trees and the stars you hit like high-notes.

Or shriek like a rabbit seized by the coydogs
if you run out of lucky feet and that's what comes up
like snake eyes. Lap the experience out of the bone
until there's nothing left to eat but your appetite itself
and among the myriad flavours of life you've exhausted
that will taste the sweetest of all to that emptiness
that harvests the world like a blue moon that's never full.
Is the moon not the equal of its waxing and waning alike?
Is it trying to enlighten its dark side?
When the candle goes out, does the light have any trouble
handling it? Fear returns to what it knows the best.
It hugs the shore like a tidal pool beside the sea,
a dead starfish or two it can get its arms around
like a worm's-eye view of the galaxy, and the shell
of a red sunset in the morning on the carapace
of a crab that left its hovel for a house in
a more upwardly mobile zodiac. Sometimes
it comes down to that. Quantum level gravity.
A gravitational eye with myopia that bends the light
like a stick in the water, a mirage of sand in an hourglass
that's afraid of being swept out to sea
with nothing to hold onto but the lifeboat
of a shucked clam Venus just stepped out of onto land
to have sex in a new medium like an artist
who's just switched from water colours to oils.

You've got to accept the down times as all part
of the same wavelength you've been riding
like a snake scaled in white caps of light
that break on shore in a turmoil of kelp.
The cosmos doesn't need to be put in order
and chaos doesn't need any help. Listen to your sorrows.
Summon them to a seance of yourself
and apologize to their ghosts for not having the voice
to let them speak through you about
learning to swim with the stars further out of your depths
than you've ever been before. First you drown
in the fathomless immensities of even the smallest detail,
and then you bubble back up to the surface
of a multiverse with an oceanic awareness
of what's been hiding under every eyelid of a wave
like a overturned lifeboat that's waking up
to the fact that everything floats like the moon
in the reflection of its own mindstream.
And whatever sail you spot coming up over
your event horizon, whatever constellation
or black hole you take for a sign of salvation
or salvage, it first had to sink
before it could rise to the rescue.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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On The Wings Of An Eagle

Oh, my home is in the mountains, I am free, I am free.
I am one with wind and eagles, I am free. Given wings to sail in gracefulness, the sky, the sky.
Given a voice to sing in breathlessness, I find that I can fly, fly away.
I've been a long time on the highway, I've been a long time on the run.
And it gets to be like chaos when I'm so long away from home.
And sometimes it's just to much to bare and I hide behind my eyes.
I can picture friendly faces and I can dream of friendly skies.
And I guess that I'm a lucky one for the truth of what I know.
For my heart had not denied me and I have somewhere to go.
I shall never be a prisoner of steel and glass and stone.
If I leave, I will return again to my Rocky Mountain home.
Oh, my home is in the mountains, I am free, I am free.
I am one with wind and eagles, I am free. Given wings to sail in gracefulness, the sky, the sky.
Given a voice to sing in breathlessness, I find that I can fly, fly away.
In the hands of my father, in the light of the sunshine. On the wings of an eagle, I'm flying again.
I'm flying again, I'm flying again, I'm flying again, I'm flying again.

song performed by by John Denver
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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All This Stuff

All this stuff going on in my head all the time.
All my fixed constellations changing like fireflies.
All the burning ladders of my unsuccessful siege of heaven
lying down like crosswalks at the feet of the mob.
And the stars that seemed so aloof and untouchable
settling like dust on my eyes.
I want to go home but home itself is gone
and there is no one waiting for me.
I live in these nomadic tents of my breath
that the wind blows through day and night
and everything I touch
though I long for the will of a pyramid
turns into quicksand.
I observe the life within me going on,
this flux of intimate intensities
as if I were no more than the container
and sentient window of a stranger's house
looking in out of the darkness
of my uninhabitable homelessness
that has always been my last known address.
Nothing is ever what it seems
in this shell-game of themes and memes
that shuffles me around like a hard pea
gullible enough to deceive itself
it might one day turn into
the new moon of a black pearl.
But I'm chained by my vertebrae to a slaver
in a caravan of all my wild sides
being dragged like a jungle
toward these civilized coasts
that put everything asunder
that God has joined together
and brand what they sever
with the savage logos of an enforced belonging
that death is the only escape from.
My private cloud of unknowing
with the occasional black lightning bolt of insight
that sets my roots on fire
so that the whole tree becomes its own funeral pyre
and sheds me in flames.
And trying to fit me like a shoe
to the newly washed foot of God
is a vain waste of time for both of us
when you're life's got a hole in it
I keep patching with poems in the cold
or keep stopping along the way to take off
and dump out the pebble of the world
I'm walking on with a limp.
And it's as foolish for a river
to ask where its youth has gone
as it is for me to lament the passage of mine
that I sent on up ahead like water
to keep something flowing behind me.
I don't look for grey hairs in the wind
when it's as clear as grace
that time and space
don't encroach upon the stars like cataracts
and everyone we've ever been
lives on in each of us forever
like water waiting in the open mouth
of the frozen moonskull
for me to swallow and thaw
so that the blossom can flesh the dead branch again
that trembles and bends before the wishing well
that all men drink from like a bell
in this mirage of fire in a desert of stars
to taste the lightning-tongued elixirs of life
that frees the serpent from its scars
like a discarded straitjacket of skin and pain
to go witching for water in hell again.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Took My Death Mask Off For You

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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No Ray Of The Star

No ray of the star in the lead,
none following, no one vector of light,
the compass needle for all the rest.
Eye to eye, side by side,
like the spikes of an onion gone to seed,
companionship and parity,
even after billions of light years,
every one's still shining among their peers.

Even your best efforts
to make it all into one when it already is,
are in musical harmony
like dissonance in jazz
with every wavelength of heart and mind
in a great creative collaboration
with every thread on the loom of a flying carpet
as big as the universe, growing
into the vast expanse of the chaos
it's spinning itself out of like the three fates,
the daughters of night with their thread and shears
severing the lifelines of passion birth and death.

Let them. Because there's a little green thread of love
coiling around your spinal column like serpent fire
that can't be cut by scissors or tears,
a dragon of dna with rainbow chromosomes
riding the stairwells and thermals of its own flames
like a wild grape vine, or trout lilies
down by the night creek
holding up their blossoms
like masterpieces to the stars
apprenticed to their shining
like one genius to another
revealing what can be done with light
when everyone's working in the same medium.

Every star, a kiss on the eyelids
of a wildflower in a far field
that's gone back to seed for a while,
every rose and mushroom alike.

Every ray of light, a mystic spear
through the heart of a disbelieving telescope
that's just had a major revelation
not only about the true nature
of the radiance within
but the ore of the darkness
that includes it like a diamond close to its heart.

Every lucid needle in the haystack,
in the pin cushion of every star,
laying out the pattern of a constellation
like a star map with a ray of light in its teeth,
and every angel that dances thereon,
and every angel that keeps its place under a stone
as a junkie London poet once wrote,
and every demon of a black dwarf
that gave its all and everything up
until there was nothing left but a black hole
or a massive cosmic match head that's burnt out
like the ashen bud of a heretic that bloomed in fire
like the seeds under the eyelids
of the pine-cone of a Zen pagoda,
and returned the universe to the darkness it came from
like a child it discovered wandering
too far from home without a threshold of its own,
is patching the wounds of the sacred clowns
with the whole cloth of the rags they're standing in
with roses and rainbows at midnight
and big ripe tears in a windfall of pears
that keep falling to their destiny
without realizing they're plunging toward paradise
every time they lose their grip on things.

In my unified field theory,
whether you call it fana, nirvana, tauhid,
the godhead, the plenum void, the blaze,
the rapture, dropping off body and mind
once the Japanese plum blossoms
have turned into fruit and realized
no sweetness in the apple bloom
no ripeness in the apple, God,
Brahma on his lotus, Muhammad on Buraq,
Jesus on the cross, Moses on the mountain,
or you've just had a serious falling out with your lover,
in a world so boundlessly unified
we have to resort to stars for boundary stones
like illusory barriers between too much and too little,
where the sweet water meets the salt;
in my intimately impersonal skew
of the crazy wisdom of what's happening here,
the most accurate thing
you can whisper like a poem
into your neighbour's or lover's ear,
is not two, not two, not two, like the vital pulse
of a musical cult of oxymorons
at a gathering of opposites in the wilderness,
everything clings to one another inseparably
like the primordial atom to its table of contents,
like a fish to water, a bird to air,
a star to the darkness, the heart and the mind
to every thought and emotion
of the space-time continuum it works in,
or insight into the mystery that inspires it
to go looking for more grails
than there are ailing kingdoms
to hold them up to their lips
like rain on ripe blackberries
or the full moons of magic mushrooms
because every dropp of rain's a grail in itself.

For every star, an imaginary number
of lifemasks like metaphors
as many as there are flowers
and children of the earth to wear them
as if dressing up for life were the embodiment
of how awareness made its first appearance
like a hidden secret that wished to be known
through an infinite number
of ongoing myriad things all at once forever.

Ergo: we're all in the same lifeboat together
looking for one and the same threshold
in our homelessness like rogue planets
dancing around one another as if each
were in reach of the sun of the other,
sister, brother, and lover, mother and father,
bonded by the light and life
we've all been looking for long before
we were born to shine upon one another like this
as if there were no difference
between the crests and valleys
of one wave and another,
our fullness and our emptiness
on the great night sea of the abyss
that is always as pregnant with us
as it is with the membranous wombs of the multiverse
whenever we kiss in deep hyperspace
and a whole new world gets off on us.

In this realm everyone receives one another
like a gift they weren't expecting
and are never sure they deserve,
down to the last atom of the drunk in the doorway,
the exile in the embassy yard
looking for sanctuary in his own country
by asking you to let him in
like the angel of immigrants in disguise,
like a teen age girl on the sidewalk,
crying like a star-crossed chandelier of rain
shattered like a crystal slipper at her feet
into the plinths and shards of a constellation
you can only see on the dark side of the mirror
like the secret reflection of who she is
inside the locket she hangs around her heart
like the moondog of an innocent suicide
no one would have ever guessed she had in her
like a conversation that never took place, face to face,
heart to heart, when timing was as important as content.

If you hold up a mirror to your own lifemask,
a puddle where the starmud's settled down
like the cornerstone of the moon in a tent
that's comes to flower in the backyard
of a house of the zodiac, you can see in your own face
the faces of everyone who's ever been, or is, and will be,
you will see in the single eye of a seed
how many Japanese plum blossoms had to be
scattered down the street like a Milky Way of the ancestors
you're descended from, to implant their vision
of light and love and life in you. And how
transience learned from the wind
how to let go and give it all away
like the passage of birds and the winged samara
of maples across the full moon, all the fruits
and flowers, stars and seeds of a generous autumn
shaken like the apple orchards of the Hesperides into your lap.

And to begrudge one atom
of this inexhaustible plenty to anyone
is to starve to death in your own garden
is to deny your own children bread
you didn't break with them like a harvest of light
so their darkness wouldn't hunger
for stars the rest of their lives.
Is to live in the shining
and grow possessive of shadows.
Is to break off a love affair with the waters of life.
Is to never feel your eyes ripen from
something green and bitter
into a mirage of wine in the desert
that drinks time spiced with stars
from an hourglass of a blissful delirium
where even the vipers have learned to dance in the sand
among the bones of skeletal keyboards.

Anyway, you get the point, and once
you've got the point, you've got the wavelength by the tail
and you're centered everywhere in a boundless universe
and the circle is as complete as a dropp of rain,
or the growth rings of a tree
making ripples in the heartwood of spring
to give the birds and the stars and the trees
something to sing about they weren't expecting.
That no sum of zeroes ever added up to nothing
as if something were missing from the very start
like blackholes that don't write their names
on the galaxies they make out of their emptiness.
Out of nothing, one, and in that one
that includes everybody you can see
how the zeroes got carried away by the billions
into an infinite elaboration of their radiant vision
of a universe of overlapping circles making waves
and all it takes is one insight
into the creativity of compassion
that steals the breath of the stars away in amazement
that one ray of light from the least expected quarter
when you least expect it is more than enough
to touch your heart with a feather of love
fallen from a passing nightbird above
that has been calling to you all night in the darkness
to see how enlightened everything is as it is
when you open up the black holes
in the wild irises of your eyes to it.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Stop

Gone too far
Gone too long
Messed it up completely
Till everything is wrong
Stop, start over, start again
Too many pieces
Too much to chew
How can you ever win
When youre so scared to loose
You better stop, start over, start again
Stop, start over, start again
Walk away
See what it looks like from here
If you stay you will only drown
If a mass of fear
You need to sleep
You need a break
You got to find out before its to late
Stop, start again
You better stop, start over, start again

song performed by by Chris Rea
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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These Days, This Late At Night

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Someone Else's Life

(John Bettis/Chris Farren/Danny Wells)
Lauralee had a headache, I bet you know the feeling
Bangin' your head all day long against the glass ceiling
Lauralee made her mind up, she had enough
She jumped the fence right there and then to go someplace she's never been
Chorus:
She waived the nine to five a big goodbye, she just got tired
Of living someone else's life
She heard the sky is full of stars in Buenos Aires
There gonna says she crazy
Cashing in her ira baby (v2 maxin' out her visa, baby)
She's gonna start living
It's time to start living
Someone else's life
Someone else's life
Maryanne was a waitress, started out as part-time
Six years on she's in a cocktail apron doing hardtime
Maryanne called her sister said put my stuff in storage
Yah and feed the cat, I don't know when I'm coming back
Chorus:
She waived the nine to five a big goodbye, she just got tired
Of living someone else's life
She heard the sky is full of stars in Buenos Aires
There gonna says she crazy
Maxin' out her visa, baby
She's gonna start living
It's time to start living
Someone else's life
Someone else's life
There's a whole new world
Waiting for you girl
Chorus:
She waived the nine to five a big goodbye, she just got tired
Of living someone else's life
She heard the sky is full of stars in Buenos Aires
If you're gonna say she's crazy
You better say it in Spanish baby
She's gonna start living
It's time to start living
It's time to start living
Time start living
Someone else's life
Someone else's life
Hey
Someone else's life

song performed by by Jo Dee Messina
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Since childhood the night scares you

Since childhood the night scares you
as if here in Africa dark things do sneak about
and when the stars appear you start to long

for tomorrows when the sun hangs bright in the blue sky
and it feels as if something almost touchable sneaks up on you.
Since childhood the night scares you

as if even the wind hisses at times like a deadly snake,
as if something dangerous is drinking water from the dog's bowl
and when the stars appear you start to long

do want to replace your fears with my presence,
and you want to baste in the passion of our love.
Since childhood the night scares you

and it feels as if something evil wants to catch you
when you sometimes find shelter in the bath
and when the stars appear you start to long

while I dry the tears from your rosy cheek,
and hold on to you through the night.
Since childhood the night scares you
and when the stars appear you start to long.

poem by Gert Strydom
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Over Here, You See

Over here, you see, this is where I keep
a hospice for the strawdogs and voodoo dolls
that wander in off the road like spiritual emergencies
that have had enough of being used at sacred rituals.
I made peace between my blessings and my curses,
blew the angels off the heads of the pins
they were dancing on like the axes of uninhabitable planets
stuck through my eyes, the splintered glass
of wreckless stars it took more than light years of tears
to wash from my seeing when everything looked so painful
and the angels were grinding reflecting mirrors
to give corneal transplants to the way I looked at things.
Away with the blessings. Away with the curses.
The doves and the crows, the veils and the bars,
and the way some stars burnt like meteor showers,
chimney sparks, with the radiant of a welder's arc
trying to repair the rip in the hull of my heart in drydock
whenever I scuttled it like the moon on a coral reef.

And this is the matrix of the lost and found
of all I've known and seen and couldn't find
any other context for other than the artificial paradise
of this womb in waiting everything that hasn't happened yet.
There are generations of orphans here
with toyboxes full of the enduring relics
their mothers left like endearing fossils
of a love that never came back to claim them.
Petrified butterflies among the sea life of the Burgess Shale.
I keep a place for them in my heart like a pressed flower
until they can root on their own, and bloom
like a star they can follow anywhere, and it's home.

This is the dark closet where I hang my skeletons
like a wardrobe of mannequins that have worn
my skin from time to time like the flying carpets
of world-creating cosmic membranes blowing
shapeshifting bubbles into hyperspace like alternative lives
that occasionally pop on the razorwire of their umbilical cords
like prophylactic thorns on the miscarriage of a rose
as never to have existed, as Sophocles said,
is the best part of life, bar none. Whether you're dressed
like a zodiacal king in the cochineal robes of the universe,
or wear the richer rags of a man who walks naked.

And you don't want to know what's in there,
but over here in this chamber next to where
the picture-music has a sound proof room of its own
when its rehearsing the silence of the mystery that beguiles it
like a lyric of blood in deep irreconcilable exile,
if you look through this little mica window
you can see the dragons glassblowing their tears
as delicate and fragile as the rain that falls
like chandeliers from a lunar watershed just below
the manic desiccations on the sun-baked surface
of a reflected glory that doesn't come
with dedicated flowers devoted to hummingbirds
that showed them the sweetness of life in surreal replication.

And this water palace has a thousand rooms
with great bay windows and walls that can speak
of the great events of tragedy and bliss
they've witnessed discretely in a cosmic context,
hung with heavy velvet curtains of blood
and tapestries of loose ends the moon unweaves at night
into a million separate wavelengths of enlightenment
it will gather on a loom of blood into the narrative unity
of tomorrow when the tide draws back like an arrow on a bow.

But there's one floorless, wall-less windowless room
ageless as eternity and bigger than the abyss
that's lit by the dendritic candelabra of fireflies and stars
coming into blossom nocturnally like an apple tree
on a cold night in spring, I especially want you to see.
This is the doorless niche of my solitude I burn in like a candle.
This is the inexplicable emptiness in my heart
that's learned to cherish the abyss with open arms,
not just as space, though learning that is wisdom,
but as living people and inanimate things, stars,
leaves, ants, wolves and windows expressing forms
to console themselves in the pervasiveness of their isolation
by taking a hidden secret and making it known
as the black waters of earth long for the moon as a companion.
And this is where I have enshrined your dark radiance
like a telescope in an observatory buzzing with stars
at the prolixity of wild flowers opening themselves up
like loveletters they received anonymously in the night.
This is the sacred grove of the silver-tongued silence
where the birds of insight ripen the fruits of their longing
like windfalls of jewels in the ores of the darkness like eyes
that have sweetened and deepened their seeing enough
to orient the Parthenon to the rising of the Pleiades
liberated like a flock of doves flying off everywhere
in the ubiquitous directions of prayer voiced by the light
of the sailing ones nursing the catasterism of the heart
risking a more enlightened suicide
by falling in love from ever greater
mythologically inspired heights in the depths
of my astronomical awareness of the shining that is you
as if you were the only mirror in the room I can look into
and see way more than the eclipse of myself
than I ever expected to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Scouring The Patina Of Time Off With Stars

Scouring the patina of time off with stars
the way I used to grind pyrex plates
with varying grades of carborundum
down into telescopic mirrors, then silver them
with a vapour of aluminum to add
to the luster of their parabolic eyes.
Been looking into the darkness so long
I'm beginning to shine on my own.
Now from moment to moment
there's as much darkness coming out of the light
as there are black holes sand-blasting
the hour-glass shape of this bubble of the multiverse
with firestorms of desert stars as I make my way
from one oasis to the next where the mirages
wander in out of the night to drink
from the reflections of their own faces
with hands cupped like the hulls of leaking lifeboats.

I don't believe a life of delusion is any less painful
than a life of enlightenment, even if
your scarecrow self is finally standing naked
under a full moon that's come to realize
that an orbit isn't the same as an enlightenment path
that can loop back on itself like a snake or a shoelace
or the retrograde motion of Mars, without
wandering off the road you were meant to walk
because that's the way you went. Give them both
sixteen ounce gloves and let reality
have it out with delusion in eternity
like two siblings of the same dark mother
trying to get some rest from the racket
after giving up on interceding
by putting some distance between them
light years out of earshot of the nightbirds
that have been longing for her return ever since.

Even the first bliss of the blossoming of illumination
grows sad if it's not wholly shared like an orchard
with everyone as the wind turns around like a fist
flowering into a more open-handed approach to life.
Enlightenment is in everyone like a wavelength
is in a particle when no one is watching.
And if today you're an angel in a coma of ice
tomorrow the diamonds will fall out of your dark halo
and slowly thaw you out as you get closer to the light
like a comet plunging into the sun like the vapour
of a bridal veil you've finally shed like a snakeskin
that had to come off like the white-out of the eclipse
you were living, to see the stars that were rooted
in the darkness within emerging out of your own starmud
like waterlilies and larkspur and the peony buds
of the remote observatories on cold mountaintops
breaking into life like planets at a suggestion from the ants.

Stations of our perishing, perhaps. Phases of the moon
topping my skull up again like the cup that she drinks from
with the crazy wisdom of the lunatic she takes for a companion.
First crescent after the crone. Death's door left ajar
to let a little of the light out for those of us
who like to walk down long country roads alone at night
brindled by shadows, runged by black flames
like ladders of prophetic fire with nothing left to lean on
but the event horizons of their own imaginations
exploring the inevitable exits and entrances
of the passage of life like a waterclock of stars
descending the dark stairwells of the night with the maple keys
to the secret cellars where they age the best wine
by letting it stare into the dark so long
it begins to shine like a blind dream with a light of its own.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A New Begin

When things is going horrible and
The way you think expect to happen
Then you need to start
A new begin
Give yourself another chance
Take one step at time
I used to be person where
I'm scared for changes,
Take a crazy risk,
A shy girl and can't stand up for herself
That's not me anymore
I have grown up and matured
I'm different Christina
I don't regret things anymore
I don't think about past and want
To reach for the goal
It brand new slate to start over and
A new begin
For you and me
I think you can do it again
Don't spend your time thinking or say what if
You are wasting your time
Just stand back up
I believe you
Don't say you are falling in
Black hole and you are trap forever
By someone you can't stop loving so much
The world is not over for you
A new begin
We should try
Don't wait too long
Take your chances
A new begin

poem by Christina Phan
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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En.Citatepedia®.ro

On Into The Next Dimension

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