En.Citatepedia^®.ro

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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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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If Only I Could Remember You As You Were

If only I could remember you as you were
for a few, brief radiant moments as indelible
as light in space and not as time would have it
the way things have changed. To see you
lingering in the doorway on a winter night,
the snow lying lightly on your hair like the Pleiades
over your shoulder descending below the treeline
as if it knew more about saying good-bye than you did,
and o how I loved you for it. If only I could
remember that lonely ghost of a mirage
that hovered over the watershed of your tears
and looked at me like the first lifeboat
you'd seen in a thousand years respond
to your s.o.s. in a hourglass. If only I could remember
the fragrance of the summer rain on your skin
as if it had mistaken you for one of the flowers
and how I used to like wiping your tears away
with my opposable thumb like plum blossoms from your cheeks.

Eternity coming to the surface of time
like old corduroy roads and bones in a makeshift graveyard.
Not likely I'll ever see you again in this life
but if only I could remember you before circumstance
underwhelmed itself and killed the ambiance
of our last dance by turning all the lights on at once.
But there you go, no help for it. The nightbird
transits the moon and the eternal sky as is said in Zen
doesn't inhibit the flight of the white clouds.
And this moment, too, though it's endured
a thousand deaths to come to this afterlife,
always saying good-bye to some aspect of you
that symbolizes the evanescence of love and life
in metaphors that buff the open wound
like scar tissue on the moon, like fireflies
welding living insights into the dead brain coral
of this encyclopedic coma life
can sometimes seem without you, even after
all these ensuing misadventures it would take a fire
and half a dozen bottles of wine to tell you about
if only I could remember you as you once were
like the lamb that laid down with the lion without fear.

For light years, images of you have flashed out of the abyss
as sharp and quick and vital as moonlight
wielding a sabre, or a bird quickened by a purpose
out of the unknown into the unknown
and I recognize them as blossoms that have blown
far from the tree that was lovelier
than the whole orchard to me, though angels
attended upon it like scripture from its roots to its leaves,
you were the locust tree with your demonic thorns
I wanted to tear my heart on like a rag of blood
on the galactic razorwire that encircled your heart
like a storm of dark matter with unlimited potential
for creative destruction that got the light out of the way
long enough for us to see what glowed behind it.
If only I could remember you as you were
when we both made eye-contact with each other
like exo-planets in the void, and understood spontaneously
it wasn't going to take much of a wavelength
for either of us to understand this immediately
as if we could read each other's shadows like Mayan calendars.

Water hemlock, wild parsnip, sometimes
the memories scald like volcanic dew on bare skin,
but seldom have I ever regretted
that I lived through you for awhile,
when the stars raged in my heart like a madman
obsessed by the crazy wisdom of a woman
who had the wingspan of a bow on a bent event horizon
but knew enough about compassion
to push the burning arrow of my fascination with her
all the way through like a blood sacrifice to love and life
and the mystery that moved in the darkness up ahead
like the fork in the road that separated us,
like a wishbone that had granted all it had to give.

How tenderly painful the brevity of what
we actually relive again as if some moments in life
are illuminated by a different light than that
we read by in bed late into the night
looking for translucency in the windows of insight
that keep on opening their eyes in this recurrent dream
like the black waterlilies of new moons coming into bloom.

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Want to Be Brilliant, Want To Shine Like A Black Star

Want to be brilliant, want to shine like a black star.
Trying to bend space with my mind. Trying to stop time
with my heart. Counting moments like beads on a rosary
of skulls, or shepherd moons on an abacus of gravity.
Though I know they're not all strung out like that.
Asteroids on a wavelength of light, or a spinal cord.
Or maybe I'm just trying to bead a guitar string
with a great black hole, or is it a lunar pearl,
in the center of a lyrical abyss? Workaday world
in a small town, who spends their time like this?
Not fortunate enough to have been born a carpenter,
I'm a mystically surrealistic, poetic astrophyicist
trying to come up with a new grammar for the stars
so all they have to do to express their shining,
is say, Metaphor, and as it is in the abyss, so it is everywhere.

Because I miss you like the main clause of my relativity.
The focal point of all my wavelengths. You're the radiant
and I'm the Martian meteor shower that's dying
to bring the gift of life to the Antarctic like the Leonids
did in the first place as I look at my face in the mirror
and think it's time for a change of species. Sometimes
it's crucial to sustain a few pathetic fallacies about yourself
so when you're under the moonweather of an estranged planet
and a black star breaks through the clouds like the anti-matter
of a waterlily, so do you. Funny how the flowers close their eyes
because none of them wants to miss the eclipse.
One of them said we're all looking through a glass darkly
but I don't see any soot on their petals,
and none of the telescopes are wearing shades.

I like to keep things clear in the light of the void.
I've come along way from the coal mines of space
to shine through your diamond so you can feel
a different kind of translucency that's eleven parts cheap thrill
in all the dimensions I can see you in, and one,
not even you, has discovered yet, that's the orphan of an exile
singing to himself to people the dark in a desert of stars
like a gnostic gospel in the mouth of a cave
to keep the evil jinn and bad spirits away
from the watersheds of my wishing wells
where the angels gather to mingle with the demons like water
they've just turned into wine. As for the other eighty-nine
realms of seeing and being what you see, they're shrines
I've devoted to you, swearing in blood and devotion
on the sidereal plinth of my sword, as I dedicate
all my prophetic skulls from the dark side of the moon
where the crows are wiser about lunar things than the doves,
to the enhancement of your radiance, your love and your art,
by deepening the dark, with a full heart, with things to harvest
that will make the abyss seem like a silo of stars you can break like bread.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Lament Of The Last Train Whistle

The lament of the last train whistle
has disappeared into the distance
mournfully looking for its lost child.
October night in the woods
around an old fire pit of prophetic skulls
blowing ghosts of smoke in my face
that bring me to tears, a neolithic calendar
of all the old and new moons that have passed.
So many, so much, that used to matter
doesn't anymore. Dream figures
that shed their skins like the longer wavelengths
of watersnakes in an infra-red mindscape
of serpent fire dying like the sun
that can tell the hour by the taste of its ashes.
I throw more well-dried thresholds on the fire
like branches that used to be green with the tears
of sweeter departures and arrivals over the years.

All the light's jumped from orbitals
of the tree rings that sag like bags
under the eyes knotted like islands
in the heartwood of their xylem and phloem.
Here where the river parts like long hair
on the skull of a stone, I sit like a demon
in a sacred place, clarified, alert, and alone
as any nocturnal animal in the woods.
The chalkdust of my bones trying
to connect the stars to their constellations
snagged in the trees like the rags of spiderwebs
on the blackboard of a starmap as wide as the sky
and deep as the subconscious of the Burgess Shale.

It's not a betrayal to let go of your faith
when you had none in the first place
and you don't need a parachute on the edge of space
to plunge from paradise, or a weather balloon
of a bad Christian poet to shepherd Dante
like a moon out of hell. Be yourself,
especially when nobody's watching
except that same drone in the sky
that occasionally flashes a flake of silver off
its stone cold third eye to flint your awareness
that it's still there in the cosmic background
like a witness to your dreams and schemes
for a luxuriously appointed life of enlightenment.

Be yourself. The direct copulative imperative
that has supplanted the light as the first word
out of the mouth of creation. Be yourself.
And then let there be light by the side of a good fire
to let you see who that is as acutely
as you can see in the dark who that is not.

The migration of the Canada geese might seem
a broken rosary of new moons calling out
the names of God to you, and one unknown,
or silhouetted against the moon they might
suggest the afterbirth attached to a cut umbilical cord
and your heart might feel reborn somewhere
in the autumn of your life, a child of the fire,
a flower in the full bloom of its solitude
dancing with its own mercurial apparition
on the waters of life in the mindstream
always out of season enough to lag behind
so it can tell the time by the widening gaps in its passage
as it's waiting for the night to catch up to its own shining
like a thief of fire unchained from the rock
that broke the glass window of its transfixed seeing
with a meteor in the hands of an enlightened delinquent.

Or you might read the falling leaves as occult lifelines
on a Tarot deck of overlapping lifespans
like the scales of a dragon playing solitaire
beside the small inferno of a signal fire to the stars,
to let them know you're coming faster
than the time it takes for a thought to make it
all the way to death and back to birth again
as if you were pinging your emotions
like stray wavelengths from the oceans of your awareness
off the horns of the moon the way
you used to skip rocks out over the sea as a boy
to see how long they would keep on going
like a waterclock of stone before they sank
like the flying fish of the hard, cold facts of life back into
the numinous depths of your collective unknowing
where the stars aren't fixed to anything that isn't
flowing along with them like the wind on the mindstream
or a small fire catching its breath in the silence and the solitude
of so much radiance, before it's on its way again for good.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If Only I Could Remember Things For Awhile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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There's A Black Lotus In My Heart

There's a black lotus in my heart, black hole
of enlightenment, black waterstar, sacred eclipse.
Nothing worth attaining that isn't unattainable.
And all the gates are upside down and backwards.
Albino starmaps with black dots shining
on the other side of the mirror, zodiacs
of black matter looping back on themselves
like solar auroras of the sun that rises at midnight.
I don't know what all this means. I may have gone
too far into exile and actually managed to get
to the dark side of the moon. Or I'm a warehouse
of shadows at noon that have lost track of the time
like blind sundials that feel they're being followed.

The light illuminates, but I bloom nocturnally.
I've got the burn marks of stars all over my skin.
I work on the nightshift at the foundry of a constellation
busy pouring itself out like iron and oxygen, blood and air,
forged out the afterlives of hydrogen I've gathered over the years.
A fire-womb engendering one you fill with water.
Fire the midwife of its own daughter. I'm envious
of creative immolations I know I'll never attain.
Though my left brain is in full communication with the right
and I'm a full moon of the bright vacancy, dark abundance
of both sides, and the harvest is ripe, I'm always
a star ahead of my light, so I don't end up
like a dead school furnace in the basement
writing my memoirs like a manuscript of ashes in an urn.

Deconstruct me wholly down to my last atom
and I promise you, if that's all I've got to work with
like one stem cell to another at the beginning
of a matrix of causes and conditions into which
we'll be placed by a Hox gene assessing the chi
of which direction our eyes should face, and how many
degrees of separation there should be between our ears,
I promise you, I'll still burn with the fireflies
and the supernovas like a blind prophet
who saw two wavelengths copulating like snakes
and has been tied at this stake of of a spine,
an oracular heretic of both sexes in synchrony
like the hybrid of a phoenix and a waterbird
burning in visionary serpent fire ever since
for the sake of a muse that always comes
in the nick of time like rain on the moon to my rescue.

When it's night in the diamond of my third eye
is the light not more mystically enhanced by the darkness,
more mystically specific than the white wash of the sun?
The moon is the mitochondrian that tempers
the toxicity of the light so the nucleus of the solar system
can blaze with alien oxygen meteorically across the night.
The black mirror, brighter than the white,
shows you your reflection on the inside
where you're arrayed like a faceless world
that's given up trying to second guess
who's the unerring witness under the lifemask
of the surreal cosmology that doesn't recognize
it's not a self, at first glance, and that all physics
is the psychology of ridding yourself of the delusion
you can, even if you're riding a flying carpet
out into this desert of stars to sweep the constellations away
like mirages that have been throwing bad meat
down your holy wells like sacred crocodiles.

Ignite even so much as a matchbook at this distance
or turn on a flashlight to see what's in the dark
as if you were looking for your mind with your mind on the light
even though it's as abundantly clear as your eyes it's night out,
and the billions of stars in the next closest galaxy,
Messier 31, at eleven o'clock above the middle star
in Andromeda on the rocks, and two million light years
of enlightenment will gently recede back into the cosmic hiss
and disappear from your field of view subliminally
knowing, because the timing's yours, you're a daylily
covering your insight with the petals of your own hands
because you don't know how to open them sidereally yet
from the outside in, where your darkness shines
and the night you turn your face away from
like the bright side of the moon blinds you
by a reflected glory to the radiance of the origins
of your own vision, deep within, where it all begins
emanating stars of the darkness of your own eyes.

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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Out Here Alone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning wisdom is learning space.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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This Is An Old Sorrow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Faceless This Time Of Night

Faceless this time of night, my skin evaporates like dry ice
into a deepening sense of containment
by a dark space with distant cities of light
trying to colonize the Pythagorean fireflies of Cretona,
or the shimmering mirage of Port Angeles
dancing like a seance at the foot of the mountains
across a hundred miles of the Georgia Strait at night,
the immensity of the freedom that dwarfs the stars
with the sheer magnitude of the labour before them.

The fragility of a spinal cord traversing the abyss
of a one-stringed box guitar made of cardboard
when you were a kid, the mere filament
of an anachronistic light bulb with the lifespan
of the wick of an apostate candle at a black mass,
disappointed it wasn't born a flower,
but a weed more at home among the stars
that uprooted it from its intimacy with the earth
like a kindred spirit of light
that must wander through its own solitude
like music at night from an open window
in the life of the mind to reach out to them
like a tendril of smoke from the embering nugget
of the heart nesting in a private crown of fire
that abdicated its empire of ashes for a single note
of the night bird's longing to sing back up
like a bell for a sad universe that's always on the road.

I hear crying in the distance, the dark lament of the hills.
The night creek weeping unseen through hidden valleys.
I can taste the deaths and sorrows, the broken promises
of the rain, drifting like the fragrance of a waterlily
like a star reflected on the undivined watershed of its tears
saturating the air. Matter a condensation of the light,
I can feel life moving through this body, this flesh,
this scrap of starmud, a rush of water, a gust of stars,
a purple passage of blood, a breath of fire and wind,
and the earth, not solid, but real, animating all my limbs,
my vital organs like the ripening fruit of a rootless tree
as if time wept like a bell in me as well, and its tears,
heavy with the weight of too many separations,
yet wise in the ways of the sky, sweetened the fall to come.

poem by Patrick White
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Even When The Road Is Missing

Even when the road is missing
like the absence of God, or a woman I love,
I praise that emptiness for the freedom it accords me
to create a way of my own like a river of stars
and for the universe it's left me
like a travelling companion I couldn't improve upon.

The gate shut, the door closed, the window locked,
I slip a key to a poem under the welcome mat
and say my house is your house anytime you call
and then go get drunk with the moon down by the lake.

And after awhile we're laughing at ourselves,
rolling in the leaves like the groundswell
of two happy vagrants with homeless hearts
making off with our lives for free as if
we'd just pulled off some cosmic B and E.
without leaving any sign of culpability behind,
except for the joy of our felicitous crime.

And when my moonboat's in port for repairs
like bedsheets in a backyard fleet of laundry on the line,
I don't mind being land locked for awhile.
I just take a walk along the shore of the lake
and gather moonlit feathers
from the scales of the waves
that have evolved from raptors into swans,
and binding them together
like Daedalus did for Icarus,
take a joy ride into the sun at midnight
not really caring too much about whether
I'm at zenith or nadir as long
as I'm transiting something akin to a threshold.

The sun can hold Venus on a short leash,
and me on the chain of my spine
like a barnyard dog barking at wolves
trying to tempt it deeper into the night
but the last crescent of the moon
will cut right through them both
like the umbilical cords of a new life
where we can both roam free
like rogue planets from star to star.

Empty-handed and full-hearted I come by day
to a low place looking for fire
from the daylilies with a bucket and an urn,
because I'm so tired of what I've had to do
to stay alive for the past fifty years as a serf of poetry
to keep it a calling, instead of a career,
and suffer the consequences of not attending to it
as a business that makes a profit off the stars,
but by night I'm a starling of creosote in a chimney
singing my heart out as if I wanted to eat it
because it has all the virtues of a noble enemy
and there's no poetry or protein in the junkfood of fame,
though I think that might be a trifle ingenuous.

Impoverished Druid, you lean on a crutch for a tree,
as a flying buttress to your sacred folly,
and running out of time to avoid
a head-on collision with eternity
all your devotions the ghosts of yesterday,
you kick the stool from out under your feet
and garotte yourself from the bough of an oak,
like the berry of a single moon of mistletoe
and the last crescent of a golden sickle just out of reach
of the harvest season of the King of the Waxing Year.

Poor heart, what a battered shoe
of a vital organ you've become, a bone box
for the sacred skeletons of hummingbirds and elephants,
a Burgess Shale for the creative fossils and footprints
we both had to evolve through to come to this
inconceivable moment without a time scale
to measure how far it is from then to now
like the last leap of faith of the waterclock of life
into the abyss without a bucket for a safety net
or any deep assurance of even having a bottom anymore
to fall out of the ongoing over the edge of a precipice
as if even the rivers of Eden sometimes
had to seek release from it all and fall
even without a parachute to candle
like an exclamation mark all the way down,
a descent into hell creatively much to be preferred
than stagnating in paradise with nothing but apples to eat.

But still you know you won't do it, given
the number of times now I've come running
with a chair and a rope to let you down
out of the window of a burning building
not knowing whether we were committing suicide
or I was running to your rescue as I always have.

Your daring has always said feathers and falling
has always taken wing like Pegasus before,
and what a wild strange radiant white water ride it's been
across the high unbounded starfields of the shining
with Vega and Deneb goading us on
ever further like spurs of Spanish silver
just you and me, my blood brother, together
in the vastness of a mutual solitude.

My God, when I think of the flights we've taken.
When I think of the things we've seen,
and the orchards of sorrow that found more bliss
in the fruit than they did in the blossom.
And what did we ever write about all those stars
that didn't declare how impossibly illiterate we are
compared to the lyrics of light and time and wonder
they've been singing all these lightyears
since I first opened my eyes to why I'm conceivably here,
though here can be anywhere by now like a bird
that loses its bearing under the stars everytime
it tries to get a fix on where it's going like a photon
jumping orbitals like tree rings in a flash of insight.
When you're light, when you're foolhardily alive
you don't need to pay heed to where you're going
because there isn't a single stage, place, or phase
that isn't the destination of what you're shining up at.

And I never thought the day would ever come
when sadness would sweeten into wisdom enough
to take pity on the mirrors like the eyes under our lifemasks
when we went down to the river to drink
our own reflections like faces from the lifeboat of our hands,
like a rain of mercy far out at sea far from the sight of land,
when we first began to understand how clarity like unity
can be broken down into little pieces of sand
that reflect the whole universe as readily
in their mystic particularity
as the stars and the sun and the moon do
when they lay their swords and feathers
and flying carpets like wavelengths of light
down in tribute to our third eye weeping its way to the sea.

And you were surprised, admit it, weren't you,
to find so many white horses like you running ashore,
mustangs from the waves, to check out the new guy's wings.
And me standing there like an avalanche of winged heels
wondering why I didn't make as big a splash
and if all we walked away with was a detailed starmap
who could say the journey really wasn't worth it?
Let the shore-huggers do what they want with it
to find their way around in the dark like fireflies.
Leave it to them. We were ever explorers
from the beginningless beginning to the endless end,
and we'll rise up again on a gust of stars
caught up like a dust-devil at the crossroads of earth
and ascend on a thermal of the sun, the stairwell
of a star-studded chromosome that could
take a coil of flypaper and turn it into a poem.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Never Alone With A Candle

Never alone with a candle
a firefly in a valley,
a star above the hill,
is your seeing less beautiful
than that stranger in the mirror
who takes you by surprise?

Can you hear your eyes
your eyes your eyes your eyes
falling like rain
on the plectra of the flowers?
Is that a coffin or a harpsichord?
Scarlatti playing the columbine
or the midnight requiem
of a dolorous pine longing
for a nightbird that never comes?

I can sense you count yourself
a dandelion among delphiniums,
a brown star without solar flare,
a moon with a complexion of coral,
and even from here I can hear
that happy bell you wear
like your heart on your sleeve
to let people know you’re coming,
and either fake it or leave.
Fashionable mirages of make-believe.
Black roses of mascara
with comets for eyebrows,
their noses stuck up in the air
like the wrong end of a telescope.

Born this crude ore of a man
what can I know of a woman’s feelings
moving around inside of me at night
like underground rivers of gold?
But, sweetness, if I were to guess,
there are stones much more lustrous,
more polished, more shapely
than even the linghams and yonis,
unenlightened cosmic eggs
with nothing inside to reveal,
no stars, no jewels, no chandeliers
of sad insights into dark mirrors
of what’s inconceivably real
and what’s merely the fossil
of an extinct species of fish
trying to swim through brimstone.

Does the sea envy its waves
because its ambient eyelashes
aren’t long enough to paint
a black velvet masterpiece
signed by a cosmetic line
of flash in the pan movie stars?
Isn’t it enough the moonlight
adorns your eyelids like a lake?
I haven’t touched a woman’s breasts yet
when I didn’t feel like a sailor
lost at sea without a lifeboat
in an ocean of heaving roses.
And I’ve slept with enough women
to know beauty isn’t only skin deep.
Sometimes it’s a shipwreck on the bottom.
Sometimes it’s a blood diamond
on the black market of a cheap eclipse
that bleeds out like haemorrhaging slaves.
Sometimes it raves like Medusa
at the snakepit of a hairdo in the mirror
that turns her reluctant heroes into stone.

You weep for this? You curse your body
your lips, your nose, your legs, your thighs,
the white-out of your smile, your eyes,
your hands for not being doves,
your hair because it doesn’t flow
like long blonde tresses of honey
from a hive of killer bees,
because you don’t think
you can please Adam well enough
with the apple you hold out to tempt him?

Ask Majnun about Laila,
it’s not the goblet, it’s the wine inside,
and from what I know of night and desire,
I’ve never met a man
who wouldn’t drink from his own skull
just to taste it like a mirage in an hourglass
or a message in a bottle on the moon.
Don’t judge the potency of the elixir
by the popularity of the flower
it’s taken from like a love potion
nor the strength of the poison
by the dowdiness of the snake.

And I don’t say this waxing insincerely
like the false dawn of a consolation
for something you’re austerely missing.
You’re not a nun among flowers
about to take vows
of silence and celibacy
because you don’t know how
to attract bees to your cult of one.
You’re not a black mass
with a rose petal on your tongue
instead of the thorn of the moon.

Why do you desecrate
the vases and urns of the wildflowers
that bloom like New England asters
in the starfields of your windowless room
like the prophetic heads of the dead
because they’re not sunflowers
or waterlilies and wild irises
in full bloom along the banks
of your cresting mindstream?
Why do you pass the hours
snuffing fireflies out in your tears
like a constellation of match heads
on the sill of a broken windowpane
in a misbegotten house
of a wayward zodiac for rogue stars?

You’re not a calendar of scars
marking time with razorblades
on the bone of your wrist
like some Neanderthal
who’s just discovered time
because there’s no view of you
scenic enough to cut out and save
that isn’t nicked by crescent moons.

Have you not seen the envy
in the eyes of those first magnitude
fixed stars showcased
on a starmap, jewels under glass,
butterflies pierced through the thorax
for the garishness of their wings?
Take a look for yourself.
Do you not see
how deeply they envy
the beauty and freedom of fireflies
who’ve gotten off the grid?

It’s not just the light that’s beautiful,
it’s what it shines upon as well.
That’s how the flowers talk to the stars
in the same universal language.
Not as lesser avatars of shining
but as one beauty to another
in an alphabet of loveletters
they leave unsigned, unaddressed,
for anyone who wants
to walk in the moonlight awhile
neither in nor out of style,
as beautiful in their own skin
as the auroral silks of the northern lights
or the moon a vaudeville stripper peeping
through the boas of the clouds
when that’s all she’s wearing
like a changeable wind, a radiant sky
revealing and veiling simultaneously
the bright vacancy of one side
and the dark abundance of the other
more intriguing face
she’s turned away from.
The one you can easily see
on the other side of your own eyes
when you turn the light around
and let the mirrors labour to perfect
the artless beauty of their reflections
by imitating you like a ballet
in the feathered death mask of a swan
learning to move with the beauty and grace
of someone flowing
like a river on the moon,
a white Taj Mahal reflecting
the pale towers of a torch
that burns like stars and lilies
in the black waters of its dark opposite.

Ask any Luna moth at the window.
it’s not the shape, colour, scent
of the votive candles or fragrant lamps
you’ve devoted to your solitude
that draws them in out of the night.
It’s the intensity of the light
that summons them to you like seance.
Ghosts, poets, lovers, artists all alike.
The way things are here, not
as they seem to appear and disappear
like fireflies in a mirror
but as they are and will ever be
the translucency of stars by night
the clarity of flowers by day,
the sun shining at midnight,
the moon keeping its shadows a secret
from the occult powers of noon,
all the beautiful shapeshifters,
all the moody chameleons,
each with a face of their own
as unique and revealing as the universe.

In every dropp of water
the depth of the sky
as in every tear an eye
that can see straight through you
to the beauty within
when you’re as easy on yourself
as a starfish on the moon
a dolphin with stage fright
on the catwalk of the stars
changing wardrobes like weather,
night seas of habitable planets
wholly at home in the mindscapes
of their luminous atmospheres,
their immaculate waterskins,
as they are in the rags of those mirages
you keep drowning your radiance in.

A constellation in the desert
that’s underwhelming itself
by forgetting that fire knows
how to swim in the deep end
of shadows on the moon
like the flame of a candle or a goldfish
even you for all your tears,
your weeping willow chandeliers,
your wishing wells, your watersheds,
your shaded windows, your broken mirrors,
the torn nets of those dreamcatchers
you gouged the eyes out of
like semi-precious jewels
that didn’t measure up to diamonds.

Even you, for all you relinquish
of your native beauty to comparisons
with the costume jewellery of other eyes
than your own, try as you might
to unfeather the plumage of the moon
you could never extinguish,
you could never eclipse or blow out,
no more than you can hold a mirror
up to the dead like a portrait of smoke
and convince them beyond
the shadow of an unreasonable doubt
it’s a simulacrum of your solitude,
though it looks nothing like you
sitting alone by a candle in the nude.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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11 Star

STAR:
'FOLLOW THE SAME STAR'
The truth we see;
How small a part
Of that lovely light
Ever reaches our heart?
If you're looking for the light,
There is a star shining bright,
A dawn to this dark night,
A candle burning bright.

Long ago, a star
Sent forth its light from afar.
And now, no matter how far,
We will follow the same star.
Lost sailors used stars
To calculate their course
Whenever the wind and waves took
Them with their force.

Let truth transform you;
It will make your heart and mind new.
If you're not faithful, your heart's in denial;
Take it from me - it's worth your while.
So forget this world with all its cares,
For troubled dreams turn into nightmares.
You have to leave this world behind
If you want to keep what you find.

The stars haven't always been there,
But the love of our Lord is everywhere.
The devil appears as an angel of light;
He does his best work in the night.
One day you'll leave this world of ours,
Taking your place among the stars.
Shine bright with light, my star;
Show the world who you are.

'SHARE THE SAME STAR'
I'm looking at this star tonight,
But will my wish come true?
I can't help wondering,
If you can see the same star too?
Do you see what I see,
As we stand in its light?
Does darkness overwhelm you,
When you look up there tonight?

I am dreaming in the darkness,
About this star that shines above.
I hope that you'll find me,
Looking for true love.
I've wished upon this special star
For my whole life, it seems.
I close my eyes and make a wish
For all my hopes and dreams.

One day, I got my wish;
I finally met you.
You're that special someone,
Who made my dreams come true.
They say you should never tell
What you wish for, it's true,
But I want the whole world to know
That my wish was for you.

Though there are miles between us,
I know our hearts will meet.
At the point this star begins,
The two will have one beat.
Whenever we are apart,
I find that same bright star.
It makes me feel close to your heart,
No matter where you are.

'WISH ON A STAR'
As I wait here, wondering where you are,
I lie in loneliness and look up at the stars.
Soaring on through space like a shooting star,
Still searching - wondering who you are.

As far as you can see into eternity,
Each one is a wish that with you I'll be.
Stare at the sky, on a silent night;
Count the crystal sea of stars, blazing bright.

Staying by your side wherever you may go,
I have to tell you now - I just want you to know
That even as the stars keep shining in the sky,
My love for you will burn forever and never die.

There's just something beautiful about when angels pray;
A star shines brighter in the night than the light of day.
You can't lift a candle to show lost souls the way
Without feeling the warmth of that radiant ray.

'SHINE BRIGHT WITH LIGHT'
Up in heaven, the angels cry;
Another star falls from the sky.
A falling star - a fading light,
And soon it shall pass from our sight.

When the world starts falling apart,
The hope of heaven is hidden in my heart.
I'll make the world a brighter place,
Like the light of a star in space.

Someday, we'll be just like the angels are;
Like the steady light of a distant star.
Someday soon, we'll shine like them,
Radiant as the rarest, glowing gem.

Sing to the stars - sing to the sea;
Let your song echo for eternity.
Truth our hearts alone can see,
A reflection of reality.

'EACH NIGHT I PRAY'
Walking outside, I lift my eyes
To a symphony in the skies.
You are my star - you shine so bright;
When it is dark, you are my light.

Everyday, I'm so grateful
For your warm and glowing light.
Thank you for being so faithful;
You make my whole world bright.

Just like a star, you're so far away.
I think of you - each night I pray,
But I know there's no way
For you to hear the words I say.

I see you in the sky at night,
But I can't touch the star in sight.
I guess I will always be
A friend you will never see.

'WISH YOU WERE HERE'
One night I was out wandering,
Feeling lost and alone.
I looked up into the heavens,
And there a bright star shone.

I picked one to wish on
From every star above.
I closed my eyes and made a wish
To send you all my love.

So look up in the sky tonight
And find that star;
It will shine bright with light,
However near or far.

And when you see our star,
My wish will come to you;
Stars were made to wish upon;
Sometimes wishes come true.

'I SAW THE LIGHT'
I saw a bright ray today
That led me out of darkness.
A little light so far away
In an endless sea of emptiness.

It burned like a shooting star,
In the distance, so very far.
I think it’s getting clearer;
Now it's coming nearer.

A light just as bright as the sun
And almost as distant;
It wasn’t the only one;
You couldn't have missed it.

When I'm lost in the dark and I can't see,0
I just look for the light.
I have hope when it shines on me,
Everything will be bright.

'YOU ARE MY LIGHT'
I looked up at the stars last night,
Just thinking about you,
And wondering what I could do
To make our dreams come true.

Together, we’ll shine like the sun;
Two candles burn brighter than one.
We'll dance just like the stars in space,
Together forever in an endless embrace.

Wherever you go, I will follow;
And it doesn't matter how far.
Without you, my heart feels hollow;
I just want to be where you are.

You shine just like a star so bright;
I'd be lost without your light.
Hand in hand, we'll stand together;
I promise to be there forever.

'A STAR IS BORN'
Every star is destined by fate
To live and then to die.
It glows with light - it just can't wait,
Shooting across the sky.

For a moment, it is there,
Burning bright up in the air.
It falls gently onto the ground,
Without making a sound.

Like a falling star,
Glowing bright with glory,
I'm just another ending
To someone else's story.

Just a dropp of rain in the desert,
Just a grain of sand in the sea;
What have I done that won’t be forgotten?
Will anyone remember me?

'SHINE LIKE A STAR'
I look up at the sky;
It hurts so much saying goodbye.
Every time I think of you,
It makes me want to cry.

Hope is not hope if you can see;
Is there a star that shines for me?
Like a star, you showed me the way;
You led me with your light each day.

I'll say a prayer for you;
I'll make a wish and I hope it comes true.
Put your faith in what you can't see;
I wish you could be here with me.

Sometimes I wish I could be
A star to shine for all to see.
I know the light is not my own;
I could never do it alone.

'YOU ARE MY STAR'
You are my star,
So bright up above;
I can't forget it;
It's you I love.

My star will shine
So bright and true.
It's a light in the night
Made just for you.

When you are lost,
Wherever you may be,
Look for the light,
For it will set you free.

Don't hide your light,
Wherever you are;
Let it burn bright,
Just like a star.

'A SEA OF STARS'
A life is lost;
What can we say?
A bright light burns,
Then it fades away.

And at the sight,
They stop and stare
On this dark night,
But they don't care.

It came and went;
I'm not sure what it meant.
A star fell from the sky,
And I want to know why.

Just for you,
This star fell;
You have one wish,
So use it well.

poem by Daniel Cobb
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Each Window Its Moon

Each window its moon,
and a thousand lakes around here
each wearing it like a medallion.
The spirit of a woman haunts me
as the starlings head for home
and I just want to go down by the river awhile
and sit among some companionable bones
while the daylilies tender their buds
to the hot night air, and the river runs by me
without any notion of what I see in it.

No waterlilies yet, but the wild irises
are protruding out of their blue green sheaths
like cartridges of lipstick, and the clouds clear
and the stars get me thinking about her again,
and all the tender lucidities held in abeyance
I would say to her if she were here.
My heart startles me and jumps like a fish.
The fireflies play a game with me
where I have to guess what constellation
I'm in now as they ricochet off the water like a starmap.

She's beautiful and bright and dangerous
as a witch in heat, and she's been hurt so deeply
she loves the stars the way I do because
distance is a guarantee of their innocence
and she uses her pain like a weapon
on behalf of other people who suffer as she does.

Who hasn't been wounded deeply by someone they loved?
Who hasn't thought of suicide in a bus station washroom
where the mirrors won't leave you alone with yourself
long enough to think of a destination
that isn't bleak and unknown and against the way
your heart's aching to go, you go, you just go
as you throw the face you just wiped off in the trash can
and try to get on with a life that's over?

And once the scars have healed what they could
the terrifying blandness of a world that tramples
on the absence deep within you everyone ignores
by whipping your heart with advice, as the leaves
are hair braided like feathers into the tresses of the willows,
clarity, peace, and a solitude that understands you
better than anyone else can, one afternoon
in a backyard somewhere, sitting alone
in the shadow water of the maples and black walnuts
inundating the grass as the sun goes down,
when you least expect it, resonate with your awareness
of being lost, but delighting in the fact you can't be found,
without feeling your happiness is some kind of consolation prize.
The ant with the wing of a butterfly in its mandible
doesn't shine like a star cluster of floral chandeliers
they way love once did, it glows like a tiny coal of life
turning to diamond in the heart. Arcturus in Bootes.

Brutal exigencies acceptable to an incomprehensible radiance,
the commotion that has stirred the prophetic cauldron
for light years now has almost always been terminally creative
and I've always known the absurdity I'm dying in the name of
has been accelerated by dark energy into the expansiveness
of a sublimated kind of love that evaporates
like the ghosts of a diamond of dry ice into the night.
Sometimes it feels as if I've been working nightshift
on the looms of the spiders weaving curtains
to hang over the mouth of a screaming window
that never got over breaking up with the moon.

No longer apprenticed to a mage of crazy wisdom
I could take it from here on my own like this river
if I had to. I could flow like a diamond all the way to the sea.
I could get drunk down here with Li Po's shadow
and drown in my own reflection, trying to embrace the moon.
And it would be all right, all right. I could live with that.
Like a red shift in the way I paint, and sure proof
I'm not wasting my life writing poems inspired by the abyss.
I could live like the black stone of a meteorite
that was never meant to be kissed, and it would be all right,
I could always tell myself when I needed a delusion
to rationalize why I've come so far the way I have,
I was a nickel-iron tektite with new paradigms of life
in my core that were contaminating life
with the antidotal memes of a creative future
that doesn't replicate like logos into the brittle corals of life
we're all being keel-hauled over like the hull of the moon.

I could tell myself all that but there would be one black pearl
like a new moon missing from the rosary of the truth
like the unknown name of someone inconceivably absent
as I sit here waiting for her to step out of the birch groves
like a white-tailed doe. Because I've become too foolish
to make a fool of myself, too hermetically balanced
to damn my own salvation for the sake of a greater bliss?

I've always thought it was a lunar privilege to love someone
and if they loved you back with anymore light
than a reflected glory with a few stars in it
to spice up the flavour of the imported candles,
you lived in the aura of a human divinity
like a paradise without any gates and you could
write poems on the wings of the butterflies
they passed on to the wild flowers that inspired them.
You could forgive the thorns of the locust tree full of bees
for not wanting to die like martyrs to their own blessings.
Or the begging bowls of necessity that came to realize
that life was something they couldn't afford
not to be attached to. And maybe I've been
looking at the stars too long for things
they don't know themselves, but it all made
incandescent human sense to counterpoint
all that lonely fury in the cold distance,
that can be dwarfed by the loneliness of people,
to ingather all the supernovas of my expanding afterlives
and use them to kindle the shining of someone I loved.

And I was willing to tap into the heat of hell itself if need be
so she could bathe naked among the stars
blowing bubbles like the multiverse into the abyss
that always smelled like cucumbers and apricots
as greater than a goddess, she shampooed her hair
and clipped the dead ends of the willows like a woman
highlighted by the medicinal signs of her intelligence.

A discipline, an art, a devotion, a grace of human nature
in the service of a body, a mind, and a spirit
that wasn't unacquainted with demons,
I lived like a warrior on the cutting edge
of growing thresholds in perilous doorways
as the sages of my dragon blood stood watch over her
as she dreamed, and wherever she touched me
my scales turned into the feathers of fabulous fire birds
and I was the happy heretic who burned in sin
at the stakes of desire without any apprehension
of punishment or isolation in an urn of ashes.

Immolations of the spirit in a sexual narcosis
of gratified dreams. Sex as the bread of the soul,
butter on a cat's feet, salt on the tail of the bird,
the lyric of the mob, the muse of the poet's ode,
champagne and mud, the mythic inflation of love,
the dark root of the white blossom in the moonrise.
The jewel in the lotus like the third eye of a dropp of dew
shining translucently in a flash flood of light
from stars that bloom like the flowers of solitude.
Time for the angels to sleep with the daughters
of men again. Time for the demons to dance
with the fireflies like the shadows of candles
in a shrine to what's holy about the devoutly insane.

The hour come round to break this windowpane
like a pact between me and the stars and return
this journey of enlightenment back to the place
it started from like a mountain in the valley of a woman.
Let my eyes thaw. And her passion be the firewalk
of a weathervane that's never sure which way
the wind's playing for keeps from one day to the next.
Breach the clarity of the abyss with the bliss
of a commotion that surpasses the void bound
intimacies of a peace that's about to return to transcendence.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Lightning Hits The Horns Of The Morning Snail

Lightning hits the horns of the morning snail
like the tines of a tuning fork
and the larkspur sees in the ashes of the holy one,
a tiny urn, no bigger than a cigar butt,
a deep connection to the stars
at the root of its ultramarine towers,
the ugly and despised become luminously beautiful
by what they've been touched by. Same
with candles, night, the human spirit, a poem
and the stars and planets
that ride the film of our eyes across the sky
or slide across the poppies of blood that bloom
on the other side of our eyelids in the sunshine
like blue sunspots and serpentine rainbows
on the deft wings of the houseflies aspiring
to penetrate the heights and mysteries of being
as if they approached God like an ineffable windowpane,
and the black mirrors of the oil slicks
that eclipse our faith in our transformative power
to change things. Two petals of violet cosmos,
two eyelids of a new way of looking at things,
swaying ethereally in the wind
as if they were keeping time
to a faint music they can hear
way back somewhere in their mind's eye, fall
and stick themselves to the back of a snail
inching its way along a garden path in metric
through a crosswalk of rococo shadows,
and who would have believed
something so low and slow could fly
if they hadn't seen it with their own eyes?

Show me anything your eyes have ever been deprived of,
however ugly, however visually tantalizing,
inside our out, even if you can count more than the usual three,
and I'll show you someone who hasn't learned
how to be grateful for the generosity
of the black hole they're living in
like one of the darlings of light.
Clarity isn't just a matter
of straightening out the wavelengths in your line of sight
and then looking upon everything you see
as if it were flatlining in parallel event horizons
everywhere you looked for signs of life
and came upon death, and mistook it for peace.
It isn't just a matter of contemplating sundials
in erratically disciplined Zen gardens
until you come to understand how to use the shadows
on behalf of your own spiritual insight
as readily as you've mastered your weapons of light.
No one's ever been purified by a holy war.
Not even the warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope.
You can exhaust a whole new generation of third eyes
trying to make it all one out of a lot of little separate pieces
that reflect the whole in every part
of your shattered chandeliers and mirrors,
that long pilgrimage, that fire walk of shining splinters
that dazzle you into believing it's skip to my lou my darling
all the way down a Milky Way of stars
from here like a fingerling of light
to there like a wild salmon of oceanic enlightenment.
Beauty isn't an essence you can extract from the ore
of who you are as a human like an existential alchemist
trying to distill the stars from the medium they're shining in
as if you were pulling a sword from a philosopher's stone.
All the shining spiritual metals, copper, silver, mercury, gold,
unless they're alloyed with the darker elements of earth,
are too soft for combat. Merlin relies
on the iron forge in his own blood to work his magic.
He knows a holy war is just an exorcism
on crusade against a seance. A calling
of the dead to the dead. Not the work
of the living spirit that resides
in the human divinity of everyone of us
like a birthright of shining
that's as indefensible and unassailable
as time and space. Clarity doesn't try to part the heavens
like a mansion into single rooms for every afterlife
that goes into exile looking for an excellence within itself
that knows how to keep a promise to the earth.
Knowing how to fall is half the art of rising.
Learning how to get up off
your knees, your prayer rugs, tatami mats
and all those flying carpets
that don't fly straight in any direction
with compassion for the human being you are
as you see yourself looking at you
through everyone else's eyes,
and hear creation being said within you
like the fleeting meanings of life
that shadow the life of meaning
as fast as it's being spoken
in the mother-tongue of everyone
who can look upon a morning snail
and hear how a grubby little buddha
of a sticky sacred syllable
that crosses your path in the morning
is saying you into existence twenty four seven
the way everything else is each other
in the wholly imaginable beauty
of a creative language that isn't
a tongue-tied stranger to anyone.

Look at any grain of dirt on whatever path you're on
and light it up with the shining
from the oil lamps of your own eyes
and you'll see how easy it is to enlighten
what's under your feet like the billions of stars
that spontaneously followed suit like wildflowers
once you got the first one lit and realized
in whatever direction you search and seek
the spirit isn't looking for the right road of thorns
to cut its feet on, or lacerate its knees on a holy stairwell.

Put a pair of cosmic wings on a morning snail
and the whole earth turns into a landing strip
of green boughs in blossom, even
when the fireflies take over the nightshift
like microcosmic demonic nightwatchmen.
Go ask the bees if you don't believe me.
They can read the petals of the secret starmaps
that bloom like love notes and shared recipes
for honey that tastes like a solar flare
transformed by the transactions of a spiritual atmosphere
that pearls this grain of nacreous earth
as surely as the air that breathes us does,
into auroral arrays of beauty and compassion.

If you can't love the veils, how are you ever
going to learn to love the face behind them
that smiles back at you in a likeness of yourself,
all eyes, and stars, flowers and nocturnal metaphors
for what you're looking at?
A morning snail with two petals of cosmos for wings,
with flashy grains of dirt on its back, each
a world within a world in its own right,
rising chromatically over their event horizons
as a sign of a significance of their own
as poignant as the silicates and stars they're reborn from,
delivering the mail at its own pace
as if its wings were two loveletters
addressed to itself by the wind personally
each sealed with a kiss
like two complementary eyes
you must look into deeply if you want to see
how the hourglass flowers in your gazing
like larkspur and shapeshifting desert stars.
If you don't want to live your whole life
like a scar looking for a wound you can believe in.

Even a morning snail, if you've got the eyes for it,
can make a trail of the silver veil it leaves in its wake
like a smeared mirror on the path to enlightenment.
If you only love the light at moonrise,
and despise what's fallen into the dirt
like so many windfalls of
demons, stars, snails, angels, apples and humans before it,
your life is not adjusted to the time-zone you're living in
and your heart keeps missing a beat
you go endlessly wandering over the earth to look for
through the gardens on the moon
and the starfields above
when everywhere and always
it's been right under your feet all the time
like a snail path shining like the Milky Way
on the garden walkway through
the blue and white stars of the larkspur
like lightning in the morning
that flashes from your own eyes.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Loneliest, Most Protean Modes Of Madness

The loneliest, most protean modes of madness
rage in my cells like nightmares in isolation
watching the fireflies dance through the bars
as a secret gesture from unknown, sympathetic stars
in a collusion of constellations to keep up with the times
and shuck off their old myths of origin
like the straight jackets of a fixed place,
debate whether the light-bending darkness is chaos or freedom
or the old heirarchies of seraphic emanations of insight
still trickle down like oracular snakes on burning ladders.

Now if I wanted this to mean something
I'd look for a precedent for the shadows that dart like birds
across the tunnel vision of my line of sight
and I'd drink from the same fountain where the leaves
lap their water like books full of experience
and I'd borrow light years from other men's eyes
to verify my seeing may be new, but it's sound.
I don't have any use for knowledge
and that's why it trusts me and let's its hair down
as if there were nothing of any significance to impart
to the diamond-hearted translucency of an engaging madman
whose enlightenment sweats the details
in a fever of crazy wisdom that plays with his mind
like a child on the moon fascinated by the solitude of its intensity.

But you who can hear me in your blood without asking
will recognize me by the accent of light in my voice
and know that I don't walk in the footprints of grammars
that wore down this trail like a carpet that wouldn't fly away
until they got as far as they could vocally could
then turned home for good, as if that were the end of the tail
that began and ended like alpha in the mouth of omega.
But time sweeps eternity away like a waterclock in a deluge,
like chalk on a blackboard, a ferocity of jewels out of the eyes
of bitter ores that couldn't see anything shining in the dark
by their own light like a fish out of the reach of the sun,
that became a lantern unto itself, a revelation
on its own wavelength that illuminated the depths
of a darkness deeper than light years are far
and there's no way to divine a sign in the immaculate darkness
for a teacher or a star. Here where the ladders don't reach
and there are no reflections of a higher clarity
all senses are intensified into one medium of perception
that doesn't individuate the morphology of knowledge forms
your mind holds up like a black mirror to a chaos
of hidden harmonies that depend inexhaustibly upon you
to add your voice to a new species of seeing,
like a mutant gene that's never been heard from before.

Even in a cage, my humanity is what's measureless
about all things if you enter them deep enough to understand
you can't drown in the mirage of your own emptiness
or badger the stars to break their vow of silence
without giving yourself away like a secret
everybody's been keeping to themselves like tears
under their breath, in the wells of their heart,
in the dessicated watersheds of their art
with nowhere to fall but up into the nights within them.
The unattainable aspirations of a madman grasping at fireflies
like the cornerstones of a new palace of stars
that dance like chandeliers in the rain
to the timing of their musical visions in the night.

Among the journeymen who labour for lasting results
I do with great discipline exactly nothing,
masterfully done. And the picture-music is undeniably
perishable. I burn colours in the sun on a pyre of hawkweed
like the works of a dead chameleon evaporating
like a rainbow body that isn't making promises to anyone
you'll ever hear from it again, though mantras
echo through the mountains like the shrieking palettes
of wild birds revoking the ease of the nocturnal silence
with more vivid mixes of the hues in the eyes of crazy wisdom.
I make great leaps of disbelief into the abyss
off the ledge of a lover's precipice into the emptiness
and my heels flower into wings and it feels
as if I'm departing at last like a hermit down a mountain
with a contemporary vision of my own empty immensity.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Old Sorrow, I've Forgotten Your Name

Old sorrow, I've forgotten your name,
you've been with me so long, pouring
the iron in my blood into the heavy bell of a heart
that's climbed back up this sad tree of my spine
so many times out of the afterlives of my windfall,
these sad planets collapsing in on themselves
under the decaying weight and water of their own tears
from the inside out, and gone to seed
like a small fleet of lifeboats in this floating world,
trying to make it up out of these watersheds
to run the vertical deltas of this autumn orchard
whose roots I keep falling upon like a radical place to begin
climbing back up toward the stars again,
until one night I'll raise my sail
like the moonrise of a blossom on the Milky Way
and be gone like a ghost ship in the fog of a nautical legend.

Old sorrow, I know you like the smoke of a thousand fires
I've danced around alone like the only child
of a midnight sun that abandoned me on the threshold
of a black hole I orbit like the rain in a broken mirror.
Who did you bury that we weep for, what
did you aspire to that you were too earthbound to reach,
what love of yours was so betrayed when it had
its eyes pecked out by the song birds
you never sing anymore when the bees
are in the locust trees, and the ants are opening
the peonies like loveletters from the Pleiades,
except there's a wound in your voice the lyrics
are bleeding out of like a thorn in the eye of a hurricane rose?

Old sorrow, are you the tears deep down in things,
the lachrymae rerum that fill the wishing wells
with oceans of disappointment like the run-off
of our hopes and dreams descending the world mountain
after we'd talked to God like bathyspheres
trying to get to the bottom of our tears
like glass bubbles in our crystal skulls,
our third eyes frozen like the lenses of a telescope
fixed on a star above a shipwreck in Arctic ice,
looking for a northwest passage out of ourselves
toward a mythic Cathay beyond our continental shelves?
And what did God have to say that you kept to yourself
when you came back down from your tete a tete,
and returned your commandments like a library book
that was way overdue in Alexandria?

Old sorrow, I can sense in you how many seasons
have scarred you like a calendar of crescent moons
as you hang like the pine cone of one dolorous note
of the silence you sustain like a blues guitar

ripening in the corner of the room where the spiders
are writing music you'll never play like the wind
in the hair of the willows down by the Tay River
when the black walnuts are floating by
like the scorched planets of sunless solar systems.

Old sorrow, I know you like a heavy boot cloyed in the starmud
of all these roads we've walked together to get
nowhere in particular but wherever we are now
in this graveyard of shadows
that talk to the stars who have none
about how to wash our names and faces off
like deathmasks that are tired of trying to light up the darkness
like a candle at a black mass at high noon
with an eclipse high overhead the flowers won't look at
for fear of burning their eyes. Compendious companion,
you bend my boughs toward the earth
with the low hanging fruit of a giving nature
seasoning your inconsolable wisdom with compassion.

Immoveable buddha, are you the ancient echo
of the birth pang of life, the groan of sentience
being torn up by the roots out of the indwelling forms
of things you used to take shelter in like lenses and mirrors
you could blow into bubbles of the mind
like the multiverse through a keyhole into the abyss of hyperspace?
Old sorrow, were you rounded like a shepherd moon
in the undertow of time, your teeth blunted
like the molars of the asteroids eating stoney wheat
growing wild in the starfields of the neolithic grasslands?
Sometimes I can feel you possessing my heart and body and mind
like the corpse of an ancient ancestor, my spirit
like a prophetic skull on the dark side of the moon
lamenting the loss of its atmosphere like one of its eyes.
Other nights, I look upon you like the ruins
of a palace of water that once greened this desert of stars
like a Persian gardener that ruled an empire of flowers.

Venerable exile, do you despair of ever
finding your way home again through your lion gate
or have you encamped like so many other nations
to weep like Zion beside the rivers of Babylon?
Is your diamond corona occluded by the protocols of coal
that sully your face like the memory of darker days ahead?
I shall call you, friend, given how long
we've known each other like shadows of the valley spirit
blinded by the sundials of the unaging mountains of the moon.
I shall open my heart like a fire to you
and we can share the silence together for hours at a time
on long winter nights when the wind is howling outside
and there's no need to speak of things
that neither of us understand about why
the fountains with the deepest watersheds
are always sadder than the last of the flowers
in a late autumn rain, or the willows along the Tay.
Slowest of rivers, you can sit saturnine and soporific,
red shifting into the longer wavelengths
of the oldest of your dreams, if you still dream yet,
and I'll work on a poem in the shipyards of the mindstream
that will displace its weight in tears, and hopefully,
though you probably know better, keep us both afloat
like a paper boat shooting the rapids of a waterclock
that's been running a little late like the two of us for light years.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Enlightenment Isn't Lumpy

Enlightenment isn't lumpy
even if sometimes you've got your heart
stuck in your throat
like a bird in a chimney
warming up like a phoenix
to go the way of the sumac leaves
and the ghosts of smoke
on the pyres of the sky burials
of the Canada geese.
Just because November
can't feel its pulse
and the garden snakes are nesting
like a sloppy knot of wavelengths
deep in the cold heartwood
of a rootless tree that can feel
the brutal chill of serpent fire
running up its spine like a lightning rod
doesn't mean enlightenment's a placebo
you have to keep away from the kids.
It's real enough to be unattainable
without disrespecting the integrity
of the picture plane.
It hides out in the open
where no one ever thinks to look.
The simpler it gets
the bigger the book you need to write
in order to conclude ambiguously
you do and you don't not understand it.
Say not two
and all is well.
And mean it deeper than you can say it
so that pain doesn't adulterate the child
that's trying to transcend it
by hanging on to the lifelines
of his fire-proof constellations
like the kites of distant stars burning in the wind.
Enlightenment doesn't care
if you've lost your integrity.
Your absence of self-respect
for someone who isn't there
is a rare opportunity
to uphold the dignity
of stars and rivers and trees.
Enlightenment's just the blossom.
It's not the fruit
of what there is yet to be.
The smell of autumn
in a windfall of apples
cradled like small planets in your arms.
Enlightenment isn't salvation from pain.
It's an invitation to forsake yourself
in the name of nothing you can explain.
The blossom let's go to make room for the fruit.
The perfumes of the spring give way
to the aromas of decay.
But they're both sweet
because there's nothing about either of them
that's everlasting.
It may be an old root.
But it blossoms in the spring.
It may be a dead branch
but the nightbird stops to sing.
And the full moon shines
like a skull full of signs
above its dark abundance.
Enlightenment isn't out of the reach of anyone
because it's got infinitely long arms
and puts the stars at your fingertips
and says play what you want
as long as it's something
we all can dance to
on our way to the grave
like fireflies in the wake of a thunderstorm.
Enlightenment doesn't take life too seriously
even when it makes a tantrum
of its elemental innocence
and goes supernova.
Deep in the nuclear core of its heart
it's creatively playful on a cosmic scale.
The darkest inspiration
of its genius for making
an art of its existence
is life.
Simple and beautiful
as the laughter of children
collecting sea shells on the moon.
Even when you're severely lost
enlightenment doesn't hand you a flashlight
and say go look for your mind
like the holy grail in a sacred wood.
It deepens your solitude.
It blows the candle out
until you emerge like a star
from the profusion of your own darkness
and stand in the doorway
of your own shining
amazed by what you can see
when enlightenment isn't blinding.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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