Over And Over And Over Again
Over and over and over again
you return to me each time
made more beautiful by the pain
I embrace you with
like the aura of fireflies
in the afterlife of the lightning
that was struck by you.
Over and over and over again
I have watched the birds leave in the fall
and come back in the spring
and whether they were coming or going
especially at midnight when you couldn't see them
high overhead like the souls of the dead
I've always heard the same longing in their call
for something I've never been able to wholly comprehend
except as the way I miss you
on this journey without end
where the destination isn't always
the friend of the road
as the stars foretold it would be.
And I don't know why
I always associate pain with lucidity
like the price of shattered glass
when you hurl the moon through it
from the inside
to let the light in through the damage
and you back into my life again
like the radiant sorrow of a lonely tomorrow
that today already lives in vain
like a weathervane
trying to give the wind a direction
it's never taken before.
Over and over and over again
I have looked for your hidden mystery
in the history of gone
for some living intimacy that lives on
but I've run out of doors and gates and windows
flowers and skies I can leave open
hoping you might find your way back in somehow
from those spaces greater than skin that fit you now
like the dress you were buried in.
The random singularity of death's one demand
might shake the tree
into the soft hooves of the highest fruit
that gallop off like wild horses
spooked by their own windfall into the silence
but over and over and over again
I turn the fact that you once existed
like a jewel I once knew from the inside
into an act of insight
that over and over and over again
rocks me like the aftershock of an earthquake
as if your death weren't once but many
and I would live my way through them all
listening to the geese depart at night in the fall
wondering which one embodied your soul
like a star-bound angel in earthly feathers
and whether you noticed me as you left
over and over and over again
standing in the light by the window
a tiny dark figure down below
listening for you in the darkness
like a vase of full of ashes
wishing it had wings.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Related quotes
Time
Time can never lose the game
Will never lose
Time can never feel the pain
Will never feel
There's a wheel that turns our fortunes
There's a light to lead the way
It's holding back tomorrow
From a destiny today
I used to be so lonely
Never thought that I could find the time
Never thought that I could give it up
Ahhh
It's back to
Here today
Bet never leave
Do what you want
Here today
Don't ever leave
It's what you want
It's here today
But never leave
Do what you want
Here today
But never leave
Time, can never lose the game
Will never lose
Time, can never feel the pain
Will never feel
From a love that's going nowhere
To the heart that feels the pain
It's holding back the forces
Of a destiny distained in vain
I used to be so lonely
Never thought that I could find the time
Never thought that I could give it up
Ahhh
It's back to
Here today
But never leave
Do what you want
Here today
Don't ever leave
It's what you want
It's here today
But never leave
It's what you daze over
But never leave
Say what you will
You can't shout it up and crowd it up
and shout it on down
Look around, look around
Solo
It's what you want
It's here today
But never leave
Do what you want
Here today
Don't ever leave
It's what you want
It's here today
But never leave
Do what you want
It's here today
Don't ever leave me
When you call me up
In the evening
And we're standing there
In time
You can feel the wind,
Touch the stars
Leave our cares behind
We'll make love till the morning
song performed by by Zebra
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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These Words Turn Homeward
These words turn homeward
toward you, my dark wood,
because of all assignations of the night
you are West, you are dream and secret
you, deeper than jewels, sweeter
than the taste of stars
in the eyes of wounded black berries.
You, longing and lucidity,
singing in the last of the shadows
of the sacred trees for the unattainable
that summons me to you.
Endless, the farewell, endless
the dusk the nightbirds follow
after the swallows
have danced for the stars
in an aerial display of their own.
You, my star field, my wildflower,
whose skin is the skin of lunar waterlilies
and the tide at the tips of my fingers.
My new moon, my despair,
my solitude, my silence, my absence
which among these thousand lonely lakes
has looked upon you and seen
as I have seen in your incomprehensible eyes
how unfathomable they are to themselves
in your depths, your death,
the fullness of your abiding evanescence.
the quiet intimacies
that have just crept up on me
over these intervening years
that have done nothing
but linger in the moment
as if you would always be there
and could be found nowhere else
but now forever in this doorway
this broken window into my heart
to let go of
over and over and over again
like the rain, this stone, that leaf,
the wraith of your breath
hovering like a thin autumn mist
always at a distance over the harvested fields.
O diminished one, subtle one, free,
how is it you can inspire me still
though your ashes were given back to the stars
like a message for their eyes only
so many years ago that time itself
has upgraded all my starmaps
and made you alone, far one, bright one,
this lonely holy road that’s walking me home
as if my final destination, like yours, like you
were everywhere in whatever direction I turn
to ask the next star, where you’ve gone,
has it seen you, has it heard
was it too soon, was it too early
is it too late, too perilous, too absurd
for the morning to return you
like a singing bird to a green bough
to the dead branch that lost the moon
like its only blossom
on the rootless tree
that it took you from
when it took you from me?
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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And Though It's Dark And Cold Now
And though it’s dark and cold now
in this ice palace of broken windows
that don’t know whether to bite their lips
or cut their wrists like a suicide
that took it one step too far
like an eclipse that went into exile
I remember the swell and release
of your breasts in moonlight,
rising and falling like a lunar tide.
I remember coiling my finger around
the soft chestnut tendrils of your hair
as if I were dialling a long distance call
to someone I knew light years from here
who was living her dream
like the black sheep of a shepherd moon
she was giving her life up to.
You were an atmosphere on the nightshift
on the intensive care unit of a hospital
applying a cool poultice of moonlight
to the volcanic burns
of more terminal passions
than I ever aroused in you.
Or thought I ever could.
Though time stopped
dead in its tracks like a coma
whenever I was around you
and everything the good doctors
found incurably bad about me
suddenly went into remission,
I knew I was merely
a minor miracle in your life.
Intermission. Time out. One day
every four years to tune up the calendar
A blue moon in late October
after the harvest’s in
and the small birds
are gleaning the rags of a garden.
Canada geese in the cornfields
shredding the last documents
of an abandoned embassy heading south.
We were Indian summer
together for awhile both knowing
the frost would come soon enough
and one morning I would wake up
and look through the window
on your side of the bed
and say, hey, look, it’s snowing
and you wouldn’t be there.
And when the time came, you weren’t.
And I spent the next six years of my life
numb with understanding
in the snake pit of a Zen morphine drip
blessing the beauty of the knife
and the wound you left me with
like a thorn of light under the eyelids
of a new moon in full eclipse.
An eyepatch over the third eye
of an enlightened planet
that felt just like any other
starless night on earth without you.
And though I hurt like a lamp
that couldn’t see you
even when the sun shone at midnight
I knew enough about attachment even then
not to hold up hope
like a cage to the wind.
I never laid a trap line
along the path you took to leave.
I let the silence and the solitude
I returned to like a night bird
to a white-out deep in the woods
efface your footprints in the snow.
I knew I had to stay.
And I knew you had to go.
That one mile east is one mile west
like two feet going in opposite directions
down a road that doesn’t have any.
And though sometimes I look
at the moon these days
and say to myself
what a little scar it is
to cover so much
that’s dark and wounded
about the human heart,
I still haven’t changed the broken windows
I often find myself standing before
to take a long, good, hard,
dark, radiant look at life
to see if it’s still crying outside,
for a thermal-paned, fire-walled website
prophetically updating the virtual weather.
I’m still throwing stones
with loveletters attached to your absence
like the moon through the windows
of a glass palace in an ice-age
I know will thaw by itself in time
like the whirling Castle of Arianrhod,
the hot gem of Celtic heaven shining
in the afterlife of the Northern Crown
down upon these small human acts
of estranged encounters with our own kind
where we meet each other in passing
at the gate of a cosmic garden
that no one was tending at the time,
and long after the one has gone their way
and the other has gone inside.
Long after the flowers have died
that were strewn across
each others’s paths through life
like the spring on a windy night;
no matter how vulnerable it makes us
to being a prime candidate
among many with their sensible shoes on
to firewalk barefoot
on a starmap of burning thorns
into the darkness of enlightenment
to stay attached to the unattainable
the way we both were to the same stars.
Even when the morning glory
overruns the New England asters,
we leave the gates thereafter open
as if the whole heart of the dark matter
of why we love and suffer, bloom
and come to fruition
in the light of each other
as if the aurora borealis
that mystified our nights on earth
with the sheen of cool Persian silks of insight
blowing over the flesh and blood of mystic serpents
then die back into our brief lifespan
like a solar flare back into its sunspots
were still hanging
on one star
one eye
one wing
one prayer
one hinge.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Have Become My Own Season
I have become my own season
living through these renewable eras of you
that come and go
like the fragrances of passing stars
that sometimes stop by the gate
to talk about the garden blooming late.
Some flowers wait for the moon to open,
to throw their arms around space
as if they could encompass everything
in the brief embrace of their petals,
and their seeing is one eye under multiple eyelids
as they burn like jewels in the night
to keep it all shining and bright.
But I've worn out the elbows
of my insatiable longing
on the windowsills of a different insight.
Saddened by the distance, the time, the circumstances,
delinquent desires still hanging out their shingles
like green apples on a dead branch in winter,
withering like the inconsolable eyes of old men
who have died like sons
and now must die like fathers,
mine is the darker radiance
of the faint halo of light
around a black hole
that summons everything
down into it like the sea
sitting below its own salt
at a stranger's table.
You can't look into
the black mirrors in my house
with your eyes open
because they only reflect
what's on the back of your eyelids
where the only light is your own
and you are the road
and the lantern you go by
and everything you feel and think and imagine
is your own true face without skin
not the gate between outside and in.
How could I ever recognize you
in these dark spaces
if it weren't for the trees
and the stars and the moon
and the night stream that runs through me
like a lifeline on the palm of my hand
down from the mountains
in a rush of diamonds and gold
that pour out like the pent-up emotions
of a sword that's just been pulled from a stone?
And how hugely alone the night is
when you love someone as they are
and you realize without effort
that if you hold them a moment in their transience
you hold them like a star in a locket of water
that tastes like the past.
There are people
like treebound barrels of rain
and then there are people like me
who leak out of their lives
like radioactive water
that couldn't pool the pain
long enough to stop the meltdown
long enough to cool the brain,
long enough to let it kill me.
Now in the darkness
seeded with the dust of black dwarfs
trying to clench a fist of coal into diamonds
my auroras are weeping neon dew
like a cheap enlightenment
all over the watercolours of dawn.
And I'm wondering
what kind of an afterlife is this
that I might have foregone
if I were indifferent
to how my solitude deranges me
like a lost continent
wandering through its own mindscapes
like an extinguished star
that wants to make up
just for one luminous moment
a constellation of its own
that doesn't wait upon anyone's eyes
for the themes of its seeing.
And though the skies have changed
like the slides of childhood dreams
with every blink of an eyelid
whenever night approaches me
and asks to sit by my fire
and let the flames and the smoke
of our past lives
speak for the both of us
I look up to give my eyes
like two drops of water
back to their oceanic immensities
and it's always unattainably you
that is shining
like a woman in the window
of a secret house of the zodiac
far off the beaten path
that leads everywhere like a firefly.
And your stars speak to me
as if my flesh were light again
and my heart
that bumps its way through the dark
already a lamp beyond
the Lazarus of wax
that's buried in his own lucidities
like a candle I left for dead.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Gently Took The Strawberry Heart
I gently took the strawberry heart
of the bird with the broken neck
and buried it in a shrine of leaves and grass.
And in a low voice, whispered a blessing.
Under the window of an illusion
like a song you can only hear once
and it's good for a lifetime of listening,
I buried you with your wings together in prayer.
And I prayed to know what to pray for.
I prayed to know what to ask that could ease
the burden of the earth on a nightbird's journey
flying solo deeper into the dark
than even the stars or these eyeless words can go.
And I know death returns even the worst of us
to our innocence again, though our bones
come crashing down like childhood kites around us.
And the flight feathers of the aerial acrobatics
of our love lyrics run out of ink
when there's no one in the dark
to sing for anymore, no stars
to chart where you've gone,
no sign from the heavens you're not alone,
no ghost of smoke from a distant fire
I can summon to a seance of lingering desire
that would console you in the flesh again
like a candle in your solitude reaching out
to the pain of a stranger in the shadows
to make your wound cry out in bliss
as you once did from a greener bough
than this dead branch I sing from now
when we thought blossoms were the answer
to everything we didn't understand at the time
that could befall us like fledglings in the spring
who didn't know what autumn would bring
like an ice-storm in its wake
to things that break against the sky
like the cold-hearted lie of a window
that wasn't open and didn't go on forever.
And though I ask the weather for news of you,
if the wind might have heard
a word or two in passing, all
the silence does is deepen your absence
and teach me not to cling to things
like birds and flowers on the wing.
But if grief is all I can know of you now
I'll console myself with sorrow.
I'll hold onto it like the string of a kite
soaring among the constellations.
I won't let go. I'll play the line out
like a flying fish I caught in Pisces
and hauling it into a lifeboat with a net
I'll take the hook of the moon out of your mouth
and throw you back into the depths like a muse
swimming among the stars like a siren
that keeps calling me to the rocks
like an astronaut to these mountains on the moon
I keep hurling through this earthly view
of a window from the inside out
that breaks just like the shell of a cosmic egg
unfolding a loveletter with a wingspan of light
that penetrates this dark forever
like the third eye of a needle in a haystack
of begging bowls I won't abandon like the nests
of nightbirds with flightplans
that feather our falling into the abyss
of the unbelievable with starmaps
and the beacons of homing metaphors
that make our disappearance inconceivable.
I'll live like the return address on an envelope
with a mouthful of silence for a voice
and wait for you to answer me again
like a songbird at the spring equinox
through a broken window in a house of pain.
And though it hurts worse when the candles go out
I'll refuse to turn my heart away
from your reflection in everything I see.
Everything I hear and do and say.
Everything that was as true as a night sky about you.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Lighting It Up And Blowing It Out
Lighting it up and blowing it out
I try to make my way through the dark
by beginning at the end
as if the coming and the going
were the same door
or good-bye were the first thing
you would say to a friend.
I approach things like a night stream
as if my death were already achieved
and behind me.
And all the atoms of my being
dancing like frenzied gnats
in the sunset glow of a last eye-beam
are certifiably primordial
and any one of them
when they lose it in the light
could begin a world.
And what can you say more of a life
that dreams of what it is
than it's the taste of the same wine
in many different cups?
And as any fox knows
the grape is always sweetest
when you can taste it with your eyes.
Though why foxes eat grapes is anyone's guess
but life makes itself up as it goes
like music in a fish's earlobes.
It feathers its themes in fire and light
and goes up in smoke
like the ghost of a tree
looking for habitable planets among the stars.
New wounds with innocent root-room for old scars.
Chalking the cue to bank the long shot
you're trying to spin off into
the deep, dark pockets
of your game-winning afterlife.
And I don't believe in much anymore
though that hasn't stopped me from crying
like a slow window trying to keep
the stars from leaking out of me
as if there were a black hole
somewhere in my heart
waiting for an iris to make it an eye
whose seeing might be a new way of healing
what can't be healed.
Once here. Here forever.
But whether we're the eternal children of forever
or just another breath on the night air
that doesn't even know we live,
even death is just another way of killing time here.
When everywhere's the center of everything else,
the centre holds,
things don't fall apart.
They disappear.
And that's the mystic art
of knowing how to make the most out of existence
by offering no resistance
to the rocks in your own mindstream
that part the waters like the thoughts
of an exile in the promised land
who can't go back the way she came.
The river can't step into the same you twice.
And in every direction
your eyes have ever burned like stars
you can see the dark jewel of your own life
from the inside
before it breaks into light.
Sometimes I'm the lonely sign
on the only path to nowhere
and others I'm positively amniotic
with the schools of my blue lucidity
the albino dolphins of the moon leap through
without a chance of changing their colour.
A flower of prophetic blood bleaches my skull.
I swallow the snakefire of my last eclipse
like a lump of coal
I'm trying to turn into a diamond
that doesn't burn
and never sloughs its skin.
Reality isn't a religion or a science,
or the back and front of a mirror
that doesn't know whose eyes its looking through.
Religion: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Science: how many pins can dance on the head of an angel?
Totem poles on a telephone booth where no one ever picks up.
Voodoo dolls that hex the cause of their effects.
The apple bloom on the tree of knowledge
lets go of its flightless wings
and follows the wind
like the eyelids of unfeathered angels
who opened their eyes like flawless fruit
as they fell toward paradise
without a parachute of smokey virtue
or the scale of a snake for a vice.
Emergence into the open
like a hidden secret revealed
is the engine of evolution
that empowers the dark matter
of this incorporeal starmud
to arise like the high note of a bird
that's flown beyond the night in its voice
like light beyond its myth of origin.
And the peduncle is lost in the ensuing phylum
as a madman is lost in the scream
that woke up the asylum,
or a god is lost in his own creation.
And the mountains listen
to the holy voices
in the valleys of their shadows
they deepen as they arise
like the guests of an echoless calling
to greet the unknown host.
It's what the moon feels
when she fondles her locket of water
and memories pull at her heartstrings
like tides on earth
and music is the way she recalls
the sirens that used to sing
like the brides of empty lifeboats
that prayed like smashed guitars
for the night to sow the seedless sea with stars.
And in every fish that swims through fire
like the sacred response of life
to the longing in its own desire
she knows they got their wish.
Fireflies in the ashes of the phoenix tree.
And the eggs of cosmic words
like serpents in a bird's nest
learning to fly like dragons
that have just swallowed the moon.
And it's one thing to pull the sword from the stone
but it's a greater power than magic and proof
with no urge to rule
that summons the butterfly from its cocoon
by giving the fool who inches toward the truth
along the green branch toward the apple-bloom
that already tastes like the forbidden fruit
of some radical insight
the whole orchard in a pair of wings
and more than enough night and light on its palette
to start a revolution in seeing among the flowers
who still labour in the chains of their roots
to turn their earthbound lucidities into stars
who might look back for a change
with eyes that have gathered like water out of the shining
and taste the light in the honey
that kissed their eyelids into gold
long before the night was old
and it wasn't enough just to see them.
When you opened your eyes
in the burning clarity of your lone vision
before this matrix of space and time
gave birth to the world
you were free to be whatever you could see.
That's when the light first spoke to you
in the mother-tongue of your seeing
and your voice broke
like a secret name in the mirror
that didn't know who you were
and the moon on nightwater
the thief at the window
your breath like stars on the cold, night air
summoned the whole of being
in every particulate shard
and radiant plinth of the mirror
to drive your shining into the shadows
so myriad things can appear as they are.
Many eyes open. Night. An eclipse. One star.
And the darkness an anti-romantic
in love with the moon from afar.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Stand Where The Listening Begins
I stand where the listening begins
as if my voice were just another one of the echoes
and my tongue were the tip of an edgy precipice
that doesn't dare make a move
over an immeasurable abyss of eyes
that nobody belongs to.
This is a seeing that's older than the stars
that were born of it
like a mirror is born of the shining.
Like a body is born of the mind
and takes on the shape of a universe
as an expressionist gesture of classical reserve.
In the great ocean of being before it turned into everyone
our eyes weren't beaded like two drops of water
strung through our nose
like a statement we were trying to make.
They were waves.
Waves of water.
Waves of light.
Waves of thought and feeling.
They were waterbirds that came and went
without leaving.
They were meteorological events
in the emotional life of the sea
when it played alone with itself like weather.
We didn't evolve hands to prove we had a grip on things.
We didn't evolve brains to prove we were intelligent.
We're not nuggets of insight
panned from the mindstream
that runs down the world mountain
in a rush of gold.
I stand where I can hear the night
breathing like a shadow in its own darkness
and whatever I am not
is as real as whatever I am.
And my sorrows dropp away
like the black fruit of ruined bells
and my joys know a freedom
no holy war ever deserved.
Here my death answers to my life
and not the other way around.
My beginnings are not justified by my ends
and my solitude is so wholly itself
it embraces everything
as if it were space
and time were its only friend.
This is a poetic state.
A dynamic mode of creative annihilation.
This is a phoenix blooming in its own fire.
This is life.
This is the universe full of bright ideas
that come to it like stars in the darkness.
This is the white mare of the full moon in the high field
with the gates open
like wings growing out of her shoulders.
This is a space that is so spontaneously immediate
that you receive the reply
long before you've even asked the question.
It doesn't take thousands of thoughtyears
for the light to get here.
A flower blooms.
A star comes out.
It's as simple as that.
You lift one veil of the mystery like an eyelid.
Nothing has a history.
The old man remembers nothing.
The old woman forgets her name.
Once they were seabeds of meaning.
Now they're just water.
And everything is ok with that.
People go grey
and turn into clouds in the mountains
just to catch the last of the light
and give their lives some colour.
And then it's night again
and the dancing chandeliers of the stars
that are burning like legends
to make a name and a myth for themselves
fall like constellations to earth
and shatter like the rainbows of youth.
Every dawn has a taste of the sunset in it.
What's the end of anything
if not the dark side of its beginnings?
I am the fool of a freedom
that lets things be whatever they want to be
deep within the heavy fruit of a compassionate heart
that ripens in its own lucidity.
There are worms.
There are birds.
There's a green star in the apple core.
My skin is the chameleon of the sun going down.
I know how to swim through stone and water.
There are fish in my treetops
and birds in my roots
and when I drown
it's the sun in the sea
and nothing ever really goes out.
Everytime I open my mouth to sing
this is where the muse
puts a finger to her lips
to teach me what I'm talking about.
I'm a star when I write.
First I let go of the light.
And then the children point fingers at me
and say in mutual recognition
of the stories they make up on the go
there you are
just as we foretold.
It's the same way with water
when it's lost in a desert of sand and stars.
Sometimes it takes a mirage to find your way home.
Death gapes like the jawbone of a mummy
and writes like a pyramid
as if it wanted to make all things last forever.
But when life picks up the pen
around the fires of the stars
to whisper into its own ear
things that only solitude
can suggest to the night
its poems are always tents on the move.
The moon sailing paper lifeboats down a river
like waterlilies
blooming in the pale flames
of their lunar immolations
as if each were a white phoenix
rising above its own ashes and smoke
like someone dreaming of swans.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Painful Love
If I became crippeled or maimed
Would I have your love or just your pity?
Would you cherish and take care of me?
Or would you put me in a nursing home?
And go on with your life, as if I never existed
I would never want your, pity only your love
If I should ever become that way, just let me die
Your love so cruel, hardly ever a touch
In my time of need, when I love you so much
You turn away from me, as if a polite stranger
But it must be love, because I feel no danger
You don't beat me or abuse me, so it's got to be love
There is no tenderness or any understanding
Just day to day living as two polite strangers
I love you I do, my heart beats only for you
Is our love just so hopeless or is there a chance
That we can find our way back to each other again
Sleeping in the same bed so lonely and cold
If loneliness could kill I'd already be dead
Am I not worthy of your love as i once was?
You break my heart over and over again
You can't even see the pain I endure
The pain of the awful silence when we are together
Can't talk to you all alone with my pain
You say if you didn't love me, I wouldn't be here
But if I left I wouldn't be missed or looked for
My heart is dying inside, and you can't even see
So once more I love for nothing in return
Why do I try so hard to make you love me?
So i'll not leave, live without love just companionship
I'll pretend everythings ok, and love won't matter anymore
You didn't even know when I died inside
Going through the motions of acting alive
I feel such great pain over so much from the past
You can't see the many scars I carry inside
You weren't there, their buried deep in my mind
I don't blame you if you don't want to love me
I wouldn't want to love me either!
poem by Donna Nimmo
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Galaxy
words by jason mraz & d. stevie journey, jr.
music by jason mraz
Here I am I'm sitting alone again I'm staring up at the sky which at this lonely moment is my only friend suddenly as I gaze upon the night I notice the stars began to shake and dance and fall into the darkness
They exploded down. I knew what I had to do. I ran up to the top of the hill and took ahold for you
The sweetest star that fell and yes I held on to it close to the numbness in my heart
And I kissed a star. I wrapped it up inside a golden bow and I ran away just to find you.
This was your gift a star that I kissed.
The galaxy that lived inside your eyes was in need of a brand new shining light.
I wished to the dark sky up above that all I had was to be captured and willingly turned over to you.
I know you better now and at this I smile. I simply gave to you the symbol of what you are to me.
You are the star that shines and explodes with light and I love and embrace all that I can.
Take this blindness away from me and let me bask inside your golden sea.
I never ever knew such simple astronomy could ever come to me by ways of the heart.
Call me to be one of those strangely dressed wise men who follow the stars to their love
You are such a perfect star to wish upon and I love you and yes I'm hopeful
Of what this lonely night may lead me into. I'm wishing upon you now.
Free me and let me indulge in my view a most beautiful you.
A keeper of starlight..
the way I feel: I'm feeling happy finally. I've no room for sorrow and I feel lit inside.
It's something I cannot hide. Oh maybe I've never felt this way before. Not for real.
Finally I feel free.
Here I am I'm sitting alone again I'm staring up at the sky which at this lonely moment is my only friend suddenly as I gaze upon the night I notice the stars began to shake and dance looks like they wanna fight
No way they were dancing. They were romancing.
Falling in love all over.
song performed by by Jason Mraz
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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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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OH, Angel in Heaven Above
Oh, Angel Eyes One Day I heard an Angel's voice & I Said To The Angel I see Your Big Beautiful Eyes in The Haven's Above, OH, Angel in Heaven Above,
OH! Wont you Come Down here & Talk to me..I long to Hear your Soft Sweet Voice Sing to me, When you just Talk to me..When the Heaven above Had opened up & your wings stretched out so proud & wide with Your feathers unfolding, like a gentle
tide, Soring throw the midnight sky so Gracefully, Just like an Swan Swimming in a pond. & then
an Angel Appeared, Oh to my eyes My dearest Angels the most beautiful site, I have ever seen that has
just came from Heaven Above, Standing In front of me singing that never ending Sweet time Summer song So
Gracefully with your Angel's eyes, they shine so bright It, lights the darkness of a moonless
midnight sky. As you Talk to me with those Sweet worlds of Fraze in my Ear, Oh so sexy, soft &
sweet, Oh How I love it......I had such Fun hearing it. But now That I am down & out For Awhile.
Can you Repair my Broken Heart so I Can take control of my life again. That you Have Broke, For
Which You Don't Seem To Talk to Me any More Or is it like a beat that my heart is Missing.
Oh Angel Friend of Mine....... Can you restore Every thing That's Broken Does It matter If It's
black or white, Down & out for Awhile or Up & Running like A humming Bird............. But then
again I could be wrong. The words, they linger on the tip of my tongue Oh Angel My Dear.What have
I done wrong? In the heart My Darling Angel Friend.. A feather, A Feather Flowing in the Wind is
my Heart, Oh Please Cough that Feather for me my Darling Angel For Silence is Loulder Then THUNDER
& Talk to me Again....For It Been a Long Time For Thow Has Talked To Me........Oh Angel, Oh Angel
Where For Are Thow Angel...For Thow Has Gone Away & left Me In The Dark, Oh Angel Eyes, But, It's Not
That I am Sacred Of The Dark It's Because I Can't Sleep With a Light On..Or Is It Just That You've
Closed Your Angel Eyes For Awhile, Oh Angel friend Of Mine.So If That Is The Case Then Well you
Open Your Angel Eyes My Princess Darling To Me & Speak To Me With That Sexy, Soft & Sweet Voice That
You Sing To Me, When You Just Talk To Me. Oh Angel from Heaven Above......... Oh, I Long To Hear
Your Soft Sweet Sexy Voice Sing To Me Again Someday.... Because Your Voice Was Filled With
Sweet Melody, So Worm, Soft & Sexy To My Ear. Is It Really Good By For Ever My Princess Darling
To Me.......& For The Thunder Roll Again, Just As The Whisper From An Angel In Pain For Why Shall
Any Angel Be In Pain, Oh Angel, Oh Angel Wont You Opened Up Your Wings & Stetch Them Out, So
Proud And Wide With Your Feathers Unfolding, Like A Gentle Tide & Fly To Me & Tell Me What's
Wrong So May Help You Over Come This Pain In Your Heart & Be Free Again From The Pain That is
With In The, For I Have Looked To The Heavens To Find The, But Thow is No Where To Be Found, Oh
Heaven's Above Where For Art Thow Angel That Used To Talk So Sweetly In they Ear, But Now Has Gone
Away It Seems At Least For now, If Not For Ever, I Look In The Mirror & I Seen A Trace Of The One
That I Miss And Her Beautiful Face Be Bind Me But When I Looked Around There Was An Empty Feeling
Of The Love That I Once Made Is Now Gone Away..... Your Sweet Voice Warms Up My Soul & My Heart
Skips A Beat I Will Never Stop Looking For Her, You've Changed All Our Lives Every One That You
Meet OH Angel Eyes. Your Memory Will Last Forever, Forever And A Day, OH Angel In Heaven Above..
I live Without Her For So Long & now I Wont A Change.......I Live Every Day Now Just To Hear your
Sweet Soft Sexey Voice Sing To Me When You Just Talk To Me....But For Now I am Waiting On That
Sign I have Been Looking For All My Life...........1994
poem by Ronald Summerville
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Go Down, Death
Weep not, weep not,
She is not dead;
She's resting in the bosom of Jesus.
Heart-broken husband--weep no more;
Grief-stricken son--weep no more;
Left-lonesome daughter --weep no more;
She only just gone home.
Day before yesterday morning,
God was looking down from his great, high heaven,
Looking down on all his children,
And his eye fell of Sister Caroline,
Tossing on her bed of pain.
And God's big heart was touched with pity,
With the everlasting pity.
And God sat back on his throne,
And he commanded that tall, bright angel standing at his right hand:
Call me Death!
And that tall, bright angel cried in a voice
That broke like a clap of thunder:
Call Death!--Call Death!
And the echo sounded down the streets of heaven
Till it reached away back to that shadowy place,
Where Death waits with his pale, white horses.
And Death heard the summons,
And he leaped on his fastest horse,
Pale as a sheet in the moonlight.
Up the golden street Death galloped,
And the hooves of his horses struck fire from the gold,
But they didn't make no sound.
Up Death rode to the Great White Throne,
And waited for God's command.
And God said: Go down, Death, go down,
Go down to Savannah, Georgia,
Down in Yamacraw,
And find Sister Caroline.
She's borne the burden and heat of the day,
She's labored long in my vineyard,
And she's tired--
She's weary--
Do down, Death, and bring her to me.
And Death didn't say a word,
But he loosed the reins on his pale, white horse,
And he clamped the spurs to his bloodless sides,
And out and down he rode,
Through heaven's pearly gates,
Past suns and moons and stars;
on Death rode,
Leaving the lightning's flash behind;
Straight down he came.
While we were watching round her bed,
She turned her eyes and looked away,
She saw what we couldn't see;
She saw Old Death.She saw Old Death
Coming like a falling star.
But Death didn't frighten Sister Caroline;
He looked to her like a welcome friend.
And she whispered to us: I'm going home,
And she smiled and closed her eyes.
And Death took her up like a baby,
And she lay in his icy arms,
But she didn't feel no chill.
And death began to ride again--
Up beyond the evening star,
Into the glittering light of glory,
On to the Great White Throne.
And there he laid Sister Caroline
On the loving breast of Jesus.
And Jesus took his own hand and wiped away her tears,
And he smoothed the furrows from her face,
And the angels sang a little song,
And Jesus rocked her in his arms,
And kept a-saying: Take your rest,
Take your rest.
Weep not--weep not,
She is not dead;
She's resting in the bosom of Jesus.
poem by James Weldon Johnson
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I Wish
I wish I could leave this place.
Leave the pain and disgrace.
I wish I knew what I did that was so wrong.
Its been like this for so long.
I wish I could run away.
To find a place full of goodness and lay.
Lay there and smile at the sun.
Wondering what I have done.
I wish to know why they hate me.
Making me so lonely.
I hate the pain that you gave to me.
Its hurting me you see.
I wish I was dead.
To just lay down in my death bed.
To leave a place of pain and sorrow.
To go of a place with the morrow.
I wish I could just leave.
Just let me go please.
I need to go.
When I'll be back, I don't know
poem by Alice Spakrs
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Sometimes The Clarity Comes Too Late
Sometimes the clarity comes too late
to realize there was never
any need for forgiveness
and nothing to expiate
about the way we made our gracious farewells
into works of art
that would go on hurting forever.
We had a genius back then
for making death seem more beautiful than it is
because we lived on the edge of things
and not their surfaces
and o if we'd only felt all those things
that made us weep at the end
dying in doorways that were more cruel
than any threshold we had to cross to stand there.
If only we could have felt those immensities of good-bye
from the very beginning
what reason would we have had to cry like candles
when the wine turned back into water
and the roses wiped their lipstick off on their leaves?
One goes out.
One goes in.
Because severance
no less than the dance
takes two to make a difference
and as the years go by
the silver flakes off the memory of the mirror
and you can see clear through to the other side
experience is just another log
you throw on the stars
to keep yourself warm on a cold October night
by a small fire out in the open
where it's easier to sublimate
the intensities of fate
by opening the cages you keep them in
and burning your loveletters
like the flightfeathers of half-forgotten songs
to spread their wings in the flames
and give them the freedom to rise higher
than the nest of ashes they were born in.
History isn't the muse
the immeasurable mystery is
and if you don't learn to let things go
you'll never know
how to live lyrically alone in the wild
unbounded by your solitude
by the side of a river whose flowers are dying.
The green bough hisses and blisters in the fire
but the cracks in the heartwood
burn far into the night
and give off way more heat in the autumn
than the pre-emptive lightning strikes of spring.
It's a rite of passage as old as migrating geese
mournfully bearing souls south
whose bones have turned to dust
to take all my prophetic skulls like moon rocks
out of the house of the dead
and arranging them into the ring of a firepit
stand in the middle like the eternal flame
of an unrepentant heretic
to rekindle the dance
even among the skeletal shadows
of a persecuted romance.
Even in sorrow.
Even in the silence
of the great distances
that add their aerial perspective to time.
Not to call ghosts back to a seance
as if they could tell me anymore about death
than I've already lived through
but every year at the second full moon in October
after the harvest is in
and the scarecrow has come down off his cross
and left it to the ravens of nevermore as a church
I lay a blue violin on a funeral pyre.
I stretch my heart out like a skin on a drum.
Dressed in the plumage of solar flares
I enter a trance of firebirds
that have long since disappeared back into the sun
and like Icarus in eclipse
or the last grasshopper
who didn't take the advice of the ants
to drag the leaves and wings of things
piecemeal into a shelter
to prepare for deeper separations yet to come.
I take my chances by the hand out here in the open
and I dance.
I dance with heresy.
I dance with the angels and the demons
that were martyred in the name
of what is unforgiveable about my human nature
and yet more sacred than the rain I dance for
to put the war I dance for out.
I dance with whole asylums of noetic visionaries
who went insane
trying to explain me to myself
like the origins of life on another planet.
And I dance again to the music of the women I've loved
whether in pain or bliss
whether I was hung by the tail
like a plague rat over the abyss
of my cannibalized emotions
like a famished snakepit
or I fell sidereally under the spell
of the fragrance of summer stars in their hair
I dance not as if it were all worth it in the end
but something inestimable to celebrate
that gives the chartered undertakers pause
about what they do for a living
when they see how a poet can dance
to the picture-music of the crazy wisdom
that sings the dead up out of the earth to their feet
without looking down from the mountaintops
or back at the valleys behind
to take the measure of their heart
to see if it's empty or full.
I let the new moon
feel the old moon's arms around it again
like the bright vacancy and dark abundance
of what's joyfully absurd and playful about life
whether it's doing a sword dance with words
or dancing in blue heron feathers
like a shaman among waterbirds
longing for enlightenment
like a tantric star map
to break the jinx of their prayer-wheels.
Or dancing to bullets like a greenhorn
in the main street of nineteenth century Dodge
or like me out here in the country dark
alone with six thousand visible stars
eleven miles outside of Westport
spreading my wings under the sign
of the Eagle and the Swan going down in the west
to add my phoenix to the feathers of the burning sumac
and grabbing the lightning lance of the thunderbirds
like a serpent from their talons
hold it up to the stars to the east and the west
like the wavelength of a crazy insight
into the dark word of the living light
that makes me dance my way
out of time
out of place
out of my mind
without leaving anyone or anything behind.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Gone Is The Light
Every day I wake in my lonely bed
How I wish that I was dead
No more left to be said
A great burden I carry on my head
All I do is question why
No longer pointing my head to the sky
No more wind is in my sail
Nothing more I can fail
I have lost my only friend
In love I fall never again
It is sad but yet so true
Nothing left for me to do
Into the night I'll fade away
For me there's just no more day
All is left is the night
Gone tomorrow the sun light
Darkness surrounds everywhere
Gray are my skies since she's not here
Turned his back no longer I sleep
For my soul no one will keep
As winter’s chill cometh the dawn
Lost all my senses since she’s gone
The darkness cry’s out my name
Hard I find to live down the shame
No longer can I conceal my sorrow
Why must there be a tomorrow
No more comes a brighter day
It just won’t seem to go away
This is a first for me to be alone
I've never been on my own
Gone are the days of my happiness
All is left is pure sadness
No one left to kiss and caress
No longer do I have someone to impress
The darkness I now embrace
For I have fallen on my face
No more to rise it’s the end
For I’ve lost my best friend
That voice I no longer hear
For she’s no longer here
poem by Wilfred Mellers
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The Blonde Shock
The blonde shock of wild sea grass from New Brunswick.
At first I thought it was your hair.
And tiny beads of iridescent peacock seeds
as small as the myriad hopes of a poppy
she'll come again
that fell out of the envelope
into my coffee
as a muse of patchouli oil
inspired the air like an Egyptian temple
tending to the rites of Isis
when the moon's in the nymph phase
of her ancient seduction.
And a drawing of a rainbow phoenix
in the form of a flower
and a money-order for five hundred dollars
to paint violet horns
on the black inverted star
with its plinths open like legs
giving birth to helical vines and snakes.
A symbolic tattoo
that means you
that will hang like a flag from your spine
down your back
as a sign of whose country it is
should anyone ever get lost.
You're right.
You can't draw butterflies.
But your darkness intrigues.
Your light is true to its star.
Space bends around you like water.
And there's not a chained tree
in the whole of your wilderness.
The gates of your rivers are open and free
as the salmon who jump them
conjured out of the sea
by the siren who sings to them
like a journey of things to come
at the end of the long way home.
Love breathes life into death
and even on the fly
love is the prime circumstance of now.
And I feel the gold of your harvest in every seed.
And there's no scarecrow with a sword
trying to defeat the ploughshare
it was born from
like the moon as it moves
like a white horse
through a wounded valley
looking for its lost rider
somewhere out there like the wind.
I've been blinded by squalls of stars before
the sphinx blew in my face
and I have felt my eyes
evaporate in the blazing
of certain fireflies
who could read the braille of my face
like elegant fingertips of light
deciphering the writing on the wall.
And I've lived through it all like space
whether I was a celestial snakepit of passion
with a mouse for a heart
or I was blowing kisses
like the petals of bruised flowers
into the grave of an enlightened starfish
passing by in a deathcart.
And sometimes the geni gets his wish
by rubbing the lamp on the inside
and asking the night to need him
like water needs a fish
like fire needs a tree
like air needs a bird
like earth an unpoached elephant.
I'm not a species bent on martyrdom
to any cause lesser than the love
I aspire to
and I won't burn my eyes
on insincere candles at a black mass
or the votive fires of delusional crucifixions
that yearn without conviction
for a better infancy in their afterlife.
Things have been tough
but I still go to bed at night
with the door wide open
as hope to folly
to catch a thief
that might put the moon back
she stole from my window
like the coin from my mouth
I had hoped would pay for my passage.
And I've been given up
like the sea gives up its dead
like the ghosts of old cliches
to the voice of a new medium
and I've discovered
that love isn't the forensic history
of a mystery that can be cracked by the truth.
It's apocalyptic lightyears beyond both
like a prophecy
uttered in the secrecy of your solitude
that can only be overheard
with your eyes.
And there is no age in it
no youth that leaves the stage
a wiser happier skeleton
no shrines to spring
no pyres of autumn.
It isn't the beginning or end of anything
that wanders in a world of forms
like a road with all the answers
to questions it never stops to ask.
Love isn't a lost cause
looking for someone to take a risk.
And it isn't the silence
it isn't the singing
it isn't the longing
to be pulled out like the lucky straw
in a random draw among exiles
to decide who should go first.
It isn't a thumb in a plum pie.
It isn't the kiss that lifted the curse.
Or a lifeboat on the moon
that overturns like a blessing
that only makes matters worse.
And it would be unforgivably spacious of me
though I have loved long and intensely
to say what love is
when it wings its own immensity
like a nightbird of blood
that sheds its hood
to fly among the stars
like a fire feathering its own solitude.
But if I were to say anything
I would say
love might be a mighty sword
drawn from a dark ore
tempered in secret waters on the moon
enfolded like time in space
like a worldly loveletter
in a cosmic envelope
with a return address by the sea
that keeps faith with its prey
by giving its word to life
it's not the expedience of the slayer
or the obedience of the slain
not the exaltation of joy in death
or the mystic terror there is in birth
that calls the lightning down
to make the weathervane crow at midnight:
I have tasted the light on my tongue
like the tine of a new direction.
A dragon sheds it skin
like the ashes of a spent fire.
And the serpents of desire
dance to the flutes
of a lyrical resurrection
like words that take
their meaning from us
when love's the native language,
the grammar, the muse, the voice, the silence
the playfully profound way the picture-music
hides like a Rosetta stone
that doesn't want to be found
like a key to the meaning of everything
when we're what it's trying to say.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Hurt Ego....
some windows really are kept open
even at midnight
the moon in its fullness has always been
that welcome visitor
that sense of mystery long gone
opening a window has always been considered
a healthy option
and people who pass the street look at you
standing by the window
in openness
you trust that openness being arms that know the value of embrace
can be redeeming
in fact some children who play in the yard
have a way of looking at you as their idol
they clap their hands and dance for you
it happens almost all days of the year
the open window appears like a warm smile on the face of sorrow
not everyone likes it though
there is a crazy old man and he picks a stone and throws it against
your glass window
your window cracks and your smile become a word
with double meaning
what damage must have the old man caused?
you should know, you have too
wisdom still lies with the old
their discipline is still in the stone
that leave a scar
on the shattered glass
the ego, this self.
poem by Ric S. Bastasa
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Since I Was A Child
Since I was a child, this longing in my heart
for something I can't even name, but keeps
drawing me into it like a unfulfilled abyss,
unattainably alluring, but the space
saturated with pain as if time itself were grieving
like the white noise of the cosmic background,
or the love of a created thing for this that has come
would always be left unanswered and unrequited.
Times I've thought the emptiness, because
nature abhors a vacuum, was life's way
of enticing me into the available dimensions of the future,
a furtherance of me as a means of achieving its own ends.
I could blunder my way toward it as the labour of my life
in pursuit of an earthly excellence radiant with stars,
sublime as a root, with the dynamic equilibrium of a tree
that had weathered many storms in the name
of a beautiful absurdity that adorned the heart
with the tenderness of fireflies without losing
any of the impact of a life-changing meteor shower.
Maybe I'm just chasing ghosts of the unborn
who should have been and my longing's
a kind of mourning that confuses the past
with what's missing when it's really the future
that's suffered a miscarriage, and the way
a woman's body grieves like a planet
for a shepherd moon that's lost, I sense
the devastation of the coming years and my heart
aches with compassion for what is yet to be lived through
and all I can do is retain a future memory
of the bloody rose I can see in the bedsheets
of a spiritual hemorrhage we'll wake up beside
one morning like a shattered window
into the souls and hearts and minds we denied
any possibility of life to because
we hoarded our potential for love so lethally.
Life keeps its balance by constantly adapting
to its growing awareness of what it's made of itself
as do we making it up as we go along approximating
the probable concourse of affairs spontaneously.
You might say consciousness, the light that each
has been given to go by, is what evolution
looks like on the inside, urgent with creation.
The gathering. The mingling. The dissipation.
All the eddies and currents of thought and emotion
writing on the mindstream sometimes in Kufic script,
sometimes Irish kells, or maybe just heavy-hearted bells
that like to write their own songs and sing them
to no one but themselves, as if the mystery
of their sadness were sweeter kept than told.
I came like a stranger to the burnt gate
of my unsurvivable longing, and it was open
as if it had been waiting for me, and I walked barefoot
in the ashes of the flowers that were being emptied
like the urns of many past lives on the wind,
until I came to one that bloomed like a waterlily of fire,
a blossom of enlightenment, a sun that shone at midnight,
and for awhile, as still happens from time to time,
I walked in my own profusion like a garden again
so alone with a blue moon in Pisces only
the most courageous of lovers could enter my solitude
like the fruits of the earth, like a windfall of stars,
like a gust of fireflies out to make constellations of us all
that evolve, as circumstances change, into intimate zodiacs
that keep us all fire walking on our mindstream
like maple leaves in an autumn that just won't go out
like inspiration and life and longing, the mystery
in the beautiful eyes of the muses of crazy wisdom.
poem by Patrick White
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Making Peace With My Father
You could be dead by now.
How would I know?
Last time I saw you
was fifty-five years ago.
My first day of school.
Your last with us.
You’re the little man now, Paddy,
you said
then got on a greyhound bus
in front of Tang’s Pagoda
as I watched the door close
on that fuselage without wings
as if the whale had just swallowed Jonah whole.
The last time I noticed we had the same eyes.
The end of your reign of terror.
As I remember you fifty-five years later
you were brutal, violent, cruel,
a con-man and a drunk.
You hurt people then laughed at their pain.
You were the lethal meltdown of a radioactive brain
that made the grass glow at night
from thousands of miles away
and poisoned the rain.
I went to jail with my mother to bail you out
more often than I was pushed into going to church.
And when you got out
you were always as angry as a killer bee
in the soggy autumn orchard of your hangover.
Life for you as it is for any coward
was one long complaint you took out on us.
My first seven years
I watched as many ambulances
take my shattered mother away for months
as many cop cars washing up on our doorstep
with all those messages in a bottle
that had your name on them
like a federal warrant for your arrest
as I recall the clinking horse-drawn milkwagons
with their coloured cardboard bottle caps
or the tinkling neighbourhood ice-cream trucks.
Remembering you now at this late date
is like fingering the fossils of a Tyrannosaurus Rex
and feeling the faint resonance
of your ferocity even yet
through my fingertips
like a warm-blooded mammal
in the menacing shadow of a reptilian law
whose last judgment was always a jugular in a jaw.
If you’re dead,
if you’re truly dead,
did you die alone?
Did anyone grieve?
Did you change over the years
and become a good man
as righteous as the stroke of midnight
and atone for anything
before you boarded the next bus for the abyss?
Was your last flashback of life
the sunami you drowned in
after your psychological fault lines
flintknapped an earthquake
that brought the whole planet down on us
everytime you barged through the door
back from the bar
and turned a home into an avalanche?
Did you remember your children?
Did you remember me?
Did you ever wonder
how I turned out without you?
Who knows?
Maybe I’m way too late for your funeral
and this wreath of blood and thorns I bring
to lay on your grave
like the bitter irony you fathered in me
is not a fitting obsequy for either of us
because maybe, possibly, improbably
as you aged like an acid
time defanged your thunder
like a white cottonmouth
and the moon took back its crescents
and the lightning began to make crutches of the trees
it used to split like cedar shakes
with double-bladed bolts of light
that scorched so much more
than they ever illuminated in the darkness they returned to.
As if the whole of the little earth I knew then,
my mother, me, my brother, my sisters
sported the wounds you gashed
on everyone’s heart and a skull
like chopping blocks
under your bloodied blunted war-ax.
For longer than autumn’s been keeping time now
with rosaries of geese in passage
like the secret names
of God on the run
for bouncing rubber cheques,
I have carried you around inside of me
like a chromosome in a coffin.
It’s a kind of genetic locket
I sometimes open
to remember you by
when I’m mythologizing my scars
like blackholes among the stars
or the empty eyesockets
on the wailing walls of the dice
you loaded like the prophetic skulls of a bad choice.
And I still don’t know if I’ve come
like an eviction notice
to this dismal place
to condemn you
or exorcise your ghost
I have despised you for so long within me
like the sloughed skin of a snakey oilslick,
the black blood of a haemorrhaging eclipse
that covers everything like an executioner’s hood,
the birds, the sun, the sea,
every tarnished cell of me
in a darkness that won’t wash off.
Or maybe I’ve just shown up again
like Empedocles on Aetna
to jump into the collapsed caldera of your grave
like the last flower.
Ambiguous homage with seven kinds of meaning
to a spent volcano
buried in itself
that once knew how to preserve the dead
in all the twisted shapes of prolonged agony
that has characterized the living ever since.
Every day of my life
I have wanted to give you back your name
like a white cross on a black plague door
that isn’t me anymore
and never was.
Or maybe I should
jump down into your grave and say
Hey, Dad, isn’t this sad for you and me
this is the way we take leave of each other for good
like chainsaws snarling through the heartwood of the family tree?
Isn’t it just so incomparably sad
that a son being honest as a deathbed
with his father as he dies
over and over again in his imagination
as I do now here beside you
should lean over and whisper into his father’s ear
with a heavy heart that regrets it was ever born to mean it
Hey, Dad, I want you to know
when it’s my time to go
and I get to the other side
of all that was
and can be abandoned
time will heal everything
you did and didn’t do
and all these severed bloodlines
reach their final watershed,
all the weak threads
of what was unbound
like rain in the river
fall into the flowing
and be made whole as strong rope again,
and the eye that offended be plucked out
and an old fist be opened up like the new palm
of a better afterlife than the one we had here,
and reunited families everywhere
break bread together in love and laughter
and every father be a strong rafter
and every mother be a lamp in a tent
and a cool night wind
as intimate and near
as stars in a desert,
and every son
say farewell to his father
as I do now here beside you
on this re-useable illusion of a death bed
where I am trying so hard to listen
to the voices in my heart
instead of the wise-guys in my head:
Father, farewell.
You gave me these empty eyes.
My mother filled them with compassion.
May peace marrow your troubled bones at last
and God soften the stone
upon which you lay your head.
What has passed has passed
like a storm out over open water.
You were my father at noon.
I was your son at midnight.
You withdrew like a shadow
that dreaded the light.
May God grant you a deeper insight
into these lives
we pass along to one another
like candles in the doorway of a dark night
and the courage to see
when they’re blown out
and death comes to sever even this little thread
of earthbound lucidity
that exists like blood between you and me
why even if these eyes of yours you gave me
were washed up like the survivors of a shipwreck
on the eyelids of the same shores
we started out from together,
asked whose son I might be
and who among all the generations
of the unborn and unperishing gathered there
was the road that fathered my journey,
I would answer
my life was a river with only one bank
that flowed from a sea of shadows on the moon.
I would embrace my mother in tears
if I saw her standing there
for all the long, hard, humiliating years
she always sat on the edge of the bed
the last thing at night
before we fell asleep under her eyes
and quietly lowered herself down
like a ladder into a snakepit
so we could climb out
without getting bit by the same viper
that had struck her like black lightning
in the heel in an orchard in spring.
About you I wouldn’t say anything.
I’d swallow my voice like a sword.
I wouldn’t sacrifice a word
on the altar of the silence
that waited like a god
to hear himself named.
I’d shake my head.
I wouldn’t look for you among the dead.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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One Day at a Time
Yesterday the sky was clear and the sun
Was visible behind the barren trees-
In the early morning the snow was falling and
The path upon which I walked led me to nowhere-
In this life I have no destination, Yesterday wild geese were calling
High in the sky, I followed their lead-
I do not know what my future holds-
My family, being amongst the departed-
As snow falls lightly upon my horizon,
My future is clouded.
I live one day at a time,
Yesterday the sky was clear and today-
Overcast, clouded and dismal- although
I can still see the wild geese flying above and
I believe I saw a young deer
Lying amongst the trees, near where I am walking-
I have no destination and my future is
Darkened by clouds of uncertainty- although
Wild geese, deer and a lone cardinal-
Have become my best friends today as I walk and as I
Continue my journey-In all suddenness it hardly matters- in actuality-
That I do not know what my future holds or
That I do not know my destination in this life-
Today I own the forest, and the mystery of it all
Has given me strength to persevere-
Living one day at a time has removed the clouds as would an eraser to a chalkboard-
Enveloping inside of my mind the glory of my surroundings as
The voices inside of my mind accompany me-
I shall let the magnificence of these woodlands very well be my destiny-
I believe I see a ray of light shining through the bleakness of the sky,
Though phantasmal, it is still there to guide me for this moment-
Yesterday the sky was clear but my life was an empty cage-
Today I have become the queen of the woodlands,
I live one day at a time and as I hear the wild geese calling and
In their own way beckoning me- as a herd of deer gallop by- I realize
I shall never be alone as I hear voices speaking to me
That only I can hear-the deer, the wild geese are close by and
I see the beauty of the snow blanketing the trail as I walk-
Living one day at a time, I need not think of tomorrow
Because today has just become too beautiful-
Claudia Krizay
poem by Claudia Krizay
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