En.Citatepedia^®.ro

Scouring The Patina Of Time Off With Stars

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
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Am I Your Angel

Am I your angel of darkness?
That has been reborn again,
Into the dark,
Where my life begins,
And where love just barley begins all over again,

Am I your angel of the light?
One that is just re-beginning,
Their life in your arms,
One that is fresh and pure,
Am I your angel of the light?

Am I the darkness or the light?
One that needs the light,
Or one that needs the dark,
Am I the dark or the light?

Being in the light,
Might be better,
But living in the light to long,
Will make me go under,

Being in the darkness,
Is where I always am,
But being consumed,
Will just make me fly again,

Or could I just be your angel?
One that is mixed with both,
The dark and the light,
Maybe it would just be better,

Am I your angel?
Just flying the night sky's,
And always bringing light,
The question is,
Am I your angel?

poem by Tin Mouse
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Nightbird On A Winter Branch

Nightbird on a winter branch.
Dark blossom of the new moon,
Last kiss on the eyelids of the dead
As the snow falls like apple bloom.

I see you’ve left the door ajar:
The backdoor of an eclipse
To let the first crescent of the light out.
The sacred syllable of the mistfits

Lost in the silence and the solitude
You raise like heretical mystics into songs
That only you alone can sing
So that each in their homelessness belongs

To the false dawn of the same secret
They weep over like empty lockets
That stole the moon from their windows
As they burned at the stake, rockets

Martyred in the fire of the holy books
That inspire them deeper into exile
This late at night far from anywhere
Distance is measured by the mile

And not the wingspan of the light-years
It’s taken me to write this.
Like a bird that flew out of the darkness,
That left no trace of the witness

As it blew a kiss of sudden insight.
A word in passing from the dead
About who’s behind the death mask
Of the snow that’s covering my head

Like the polar ice cap of a planet
With the prophetic wisdom of a skull.
Life in the birthmark of the new.
Death in the harvest of the moon at full.

Emptiness devoid of all light.
The first sign of renewal in the urn
Of a nightbird on a winter branch.
Diamonds of ice and insight that burn

Like coal in the eyes of a snow man
With the passion of a phoenix born
A star in the cold furnace of the sky.
Where every passage is a rite of return

That hides its brightest jewels
blossoming like enlightenment on the wing
In the dark ore of a nightbird
When a deathmask opens its mouth to sing.

poem by Patrick White
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Elemento De Noctis

Element of the Night, Darkness. My way and my path of life.

I've been ranting continuously ever since I found out that the Dark is actually light in a different form. So I made my 'E' poem Elemento de Noctis:

Darkness was created with the land
The dark one stretched out his old gloomy hand
Yet not a soul is willing to go
In darkness you reap, in darkness you sow

Darkness is one of the light
It shines its energy out day and night
Yet nobody trusts its presence
Due to human fear towards its essence

The dark is never evil
From the beginning it is good
Yet from the beginning it is misunderstood
As both light and dark are mutual

The dark cannot exist without light
Just as day could not end without night
The path of life that nobody has taken
The path of life that I have awaken

poem by Jaya Razo
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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
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I Have Become My Own Season

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

poem by Patrick White
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Stars In The Night

Look, look at the stars
How brilliant they are
How can they be shining now?
When hope is so far
Look, look how they shine
These cruelest of stars
What fire inspires them,
What faith is it fires them?
Darkness grows,the world turns cold
And still, there glows the light
Heaven knows what hope they hold tonight
Look,look how they shine
These stars in the night
The darker the night becomes
The brighter their light becomes
Chill winds wail
The tempest blues
and clouds asail the sky
Through the veil,
The stars refuse to die
In this world of darkest night
Where hope is hurled away
There they are
And still, there's light
Oh,so far, but will they
There they lift our hearts
As we lift our eyes
Are we fools to see
The harmony that fills the sky
Look,there's the light
Stars In The Night
The Stars In The Night

song performed by by Barry Manilow
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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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
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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
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Dark Light

Look out, cause theres something wrong
And you dont know what it is
Watch out, or its sodom and gommorah
The malevolent order
Right now, before its much too late
Before its much too late
A dark light---a darkness never ending
A dark light---the devil gets his due
A dark night---is everywhere descending
A dark light---is coming for you
Now look up, well the skies are black
And theyre getting darker all the time
Watch out, for the things that you believe in
Youre gonna be attacked,
And you wont know what it is
Wise up, you better watch your step
You better watch your step
A dark light---a darkness never ending
A dark light---of perversion and hate
A dark night---is everywhere descending
A dark light---theres no time to wait
Look out, for the death of love
There will be no more love
Watch out, its yourself that you are fooling
Who do you think youre fooling
Shout it out, its a terrible thing
Such a terrible thing
A dark light---a darkness never ending
A dark light---the sun is turning cool
A dark night---is everywhere descending
A dark light---is shining at you
Dark light, dark light
Is shining at you, dark light

song performed by by Kiss
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Sun-Woman

Let the sun show
over the hills, I love it so
Life is the sun,
the sun is life
let life rise, brightly, slowly, funly
let life never set.

But it does.

light turns to night, the
darkness comes
my eyes close slowly
sun, please don’t go.
please don’t go.

but wait-in the light of the setting sun
I see some hope
a slender shape
walks over the hills in the distance
the sun halls to a stop, seems
to look at the figure
seems to stare, decide if it’s worthy
then the sun starts flying,
back up into the sky.
the figure keeps walking, closer,
closer.
the sun keeps moving, as fast as light itself,
into the middle of the sky above me.

the shape is hope, hope itself
she is light, and for me, the only
way to avoid darkness.

She is not far now, I see her face.
she says, “Are you all right? ”
“Don’t worry, ” I tell her, “the sun is not
my enemy anymore. He is my ally.”
She smiles at my healing face, and then I say,
“You were my hope, you are my hope. You
are my only hope of avoiding the darkness.”
“And you are the same to me, my love, ”
She says.

I jump up and I take her hands,
and I sing, “My love, my hope,
when you go the darkness comes,
but as long as you come back
light will shed on my weary face.
I owe my life to you, Sun-Woman.
I owe my life to you, my love.
I owe my life to you.
I owe my life to you.”

poem by Llew N. Rmail
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A Little Thought In A Big Space

A little thought in a big space, I'm falling
through my own immensities here at my desk,
one of my Icarian propensities for plunging into things.
My voice intimidated by the violence of the silence within.
I'm on the dark side of my eyes.
No one's ever been here before.
No window, no wall, no door,
I'm on the threshold of my homelessness again.
I'm looking at stars, but I feel like rain.
I'm talking to ghosts that I don't remember.
Might be the wrong medium, but it's the right seance.
I don't even know what I'm doing here myself
but it seems I'm free to go or stay as I wish.
I'm wearing my shadow like a candling parachute
that didn't step back from the edge in time.
No point in pretending you're an airborne dandelion
when you feel like a rock with a message
someone just threw like the moon through a mirror
disguised as a sky the night birds keep flying into blind.

No one asks your name here on this pyre of a sky burial
if your birth certificate says you were born in fire.
Desire anything you like. It was all written in smoke
before you came. And these words that are saying me here
have been out of the aviary of the lantern for light years.
Who knows where the light goes or what if falls upon?
Trying to shine in a dark time without taking anything away
from the lunar eclipses that aren't in need of enlightenment.
Don't know if I'm a solar flare, a firefly, a matchbook,
or a lightning bolt that keeps stressing my starmud out
by sneaking up on it from behind and overdoing things a bit.

If you find yourself trying to pry the flowers open
with a crowbar or a koan, and it's nightfall, it's
time to turn your hourglass in for a waterclock
and see how the stars emerge out of nothing
as soon as you deepen the dark with a more acute sense of timing
that let's everything happen spontaneously by itself.
Even if you're the lighthouse of your dreams
that doesn't mean you're the nightwatchman
keeping his third eye on you in the shadows
like a theft of fire you can get away with
this second time around with only a warning.

If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
And if you did, whining about it in your sleep
isn't going to help and who's Spartan enough these days
to stash the fox under their tunic to keep
from being caught while it eats them alive?
If you want to be a dragon you've got to learn
to swallow people's hearts like hot coals as if they were chocolates,
without wincing. The stars don't come out
like emergency candles you've been saving
for exactly this kind of situation. And if
you really want to know the truth about illumination,
try and blow one out. Quick, now, look
and see immediately into the clear light of the void
what it's like to shine without a metaphoric reflection.

The stars here don't hide their nakedness under a cloak
of black holes and dwarfs that take it all in
but give nothing back like the second hand clothes
of serpents shedding their skin. One size fits all
like a bubble in a watershed of dark worlds
dazzled by how much a single eye can contain
whether it's hanging from the lip of a flower in the fall
or going down the drain in spring. I know
you hit it like a snowflake on a furnace
and do your damnedest not to cry. Thing is
as unique among billions as you think you are,
there's not a star in the sky that isn't a rite of passage.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Tenderly The Evening Descends Into A Dark Bliss

Tenderly the evening descends into a dark bliss
and lays its poultice like a cool leaf against my forehead
and draws the fever of the day out of the night.
I ease back on my elbows like an easel down by the river.
When I'm burnt, I make a blister
and cushion myself with water,
a more useful approach to tears.
The mosquitoes swarm like insistent circumstances
that thin my blood, but a soft wind
is blowing them away from Pearl Harbour.
The long blue grass yields as easily to a man as a deer.
I want the stars near enough to overhear what they're whispering.
Still amazing to me I can embrace all of them with a thought
as if they were my idea in the first place
and feel humbled and exalted at the same time
by the sublimity of their radiance and the strangeness of my own.
The river sustains its clarity by wandering.

Single male in the autumn of life, I've let go of so much
the only thing left to let go of is the letting go itself.
I've forgone the commotion of inducing myself into creation.
Things will fall out by themselves. Playfulness
return to surrealistic perversity
to explain the shape of the universe
and fools like me counter-intuit the crazy wisdom
of squandering their lives on voices in the distance
leading them on deeper into the subtleties of a poetic narcosis
that haunts them like the face
of a beautiful woman they once knew.
Don't we all belong to a nobility of longing, even though
we don't live up to it, and start to grasp and scratch
like dead branches screeching across
an intransigent windowpane on a stormy night
that let's us look at the fire, but doesn't let us in?
Where do you go with your serious spirit
when you've been rejected by your solitude?
Do you know the secret art of being enhanced
by the qualities of anything you're not attached to,
without killing off the desire for what you're missing?
Live with gratitude for the abyss in your heart
it's impossible to fill like a grave
that took more out of you than it put back in.

You can be adorned by your failures.
You can be humiliated by your victories.
Coming and going, your path can be strewn
with roses or thorns. You could be walking on stars.
You could be lying down beside a river at night like I am
savouring a sorrow you like the poetic taste of,
because it includes everything within it
like the skin of the dew and the moon as the source of life.
Even sweeter than a rainbow body of light
or an atmosphere with ocean to match,
this last touch of clinging before you evaporate
into the mystery of everything you're leaving behind.
No more than you can pour water out of the universe
through a black hole, can your mindstream be poured by time
into the uncomprehending darkness of the black mirror
you're looking for an image in tonight
in the eyes of all these stars shining down upon us,
knowing our starmud is just as old as their light
and we're not wandering orphans lost in their shadows.
We're firewalking on water like stars in the shapes
of self-immolating swans, two parts flammable
from the start, and one of oxygen like a toxin
we depend upon for life like an alien export we adapted to.
Same with death. Until you include it in the nucleus,
inviting your enemy in to feast behind the gates
that laboured like water to keep life in the seas,
you're vulnerable to the delusion of your own exclusion
like the face of an exile in your mirroring awareness.

Don't underestimate the creative potential
of the dark genius of death to come up
with new paradigms of seeing and being
that make us feel we lived our whole lives
confined and blind in the coffin of a seed
that stored a harvest of what we've reaped in a silo.
Out of the dead ore of the moon
pours the white gold of wheat
like metal from a stone in a starfield
that yields more life than can be lost
in the living of it. Without a sword. Without a ploughshare.
Isn't it in the nature of our evanescence to move
like light and water and wind from urn to urn
of one sky burial to the next at sea and then the earth
like a water clock that runs so urgently
from full to an emptiness that has to keep expanding
like the human heart just to contain it
so when the cup's broken like a skull
you can drink the whole of the sea and the sky
in every single dropp of your mindstream
and the stars will still be climbing your roots
up to the flowers within that bloom every year
like a deepening insight at zenith into
the dark generosity of becoming something
even beyond the scope of death to imagine extinct.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Aura

The air was dark
The moon was dark
The night was dark
The cloud was dark
The heat was dark
The stars were black
The birds were black
The eyes were black
The shadows were black
The planes were black
A sound of night
The hearts of night
A chase at night
A fall at night
No help at night
The night is night
Where is my sight
I have no sight
Your light was sight
No light no sight
No one in sight
The dark in sight
Don't call my name
What's my name
They call my name
That's not my name
Who said its my name
I have no name
You took my same
It was our same
She was our same
She's now your same
Its all the same
I'm not the same
Judas and my hand
You took my hand
'I do' my hand
You kissed my hand
You broke my hand
You fell my hand
A tear in sand
A heart in sand
A body in sand
Alone in sand
A dust in sand
At home in sand.

poem by Jenim Dibie
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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And Here Comes Dark

It's dark outside
But I see the light
Then darkness
I see the light again
And here comes dark

It's dark outside
I am lonely and sad
But I see the light
You ask my name
Then darkness
You take my hand
I see the light again
We fall in love
And here comes dark

It's dark outside
I can't find you
But I see the light
You were right there
Then darkness
I have my doubts
I see the light again
You say I'm wrong
And here comes dark

It's dark outside
I reach for you
But I see the light
You don't reach for me
Then darkness
I feel alone
I see the light again
I read your face
And here comes dark

It's dark outside
I want to leave
But I see the light
You're come to me
Then darkness
I feel your grip
I see the light
You're hurting me
And here comes dark

It's dark outside
I try to scream
But I see the light
You have my throat
Then darkness
I can not breath
I see the light
For the last time
And here comes dark

poem by Yasmin Rubayo
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Shine Your Light

You've told me,
many times before,
that you prefer living,
in a world of darkness.

But tell me this,
when looking into darkness,
don't you see the smallest light,
in the distance?

Can't you see,
a little light,
that will shine through,
any darkness?

But yet you still say,
dark is better than light,
so are you saying that,
you too are a dark person?

No that can't be so,
when I think of you,
the last thing I'd think of,
would be dark.

You have so much light within,
but yet you've decided to live,
where no light can get in,
but is suffocated by dark.

You seem so strong inside,
but yet to everyone you hide,
except to me when you show me,
the real light within.

If you are full,
of such strong light,
then why do you tell everyone,
you love the darkness?

poem by Katherine Bryce
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Weary Of The World Tonight

Weary of the world tonight. Can't stand the lies.
Some drunk loud-mouth out on the street
wants all the girls to know he's there,
My noise is bigger than your noise.
Someone playing a guitar badly in a doorway.
A homeless cat cries, lets out a howl
of torment as if its sinews were being keyed
as tight as guitar strings about to snap.
Out of the window that hasn't said anything yet:
you touch that cat again, slugger,
and I'll be right down with an axe
to give you a gender change. He looks up
startled. But all bullies are cowards
trying to deny it to themselves
while wearing their sister's underpants.

The cat makes a quick getaway
through a dark heritage alleyway.

Supercharged like a fire hydrant full of blood
throbbing through my temples, and demons
I haven't seen in years smiling darkly in the mirrors
my shadow always regretted like left-handed virtues
that got the job done. Demonic compassion,
colder than intelligence, with a deep
poetic sense of of infernal irony
whereas a muse ago in this specious present
I was longing for a small hobby farm
on the dark side of the moon, now
I'm a dragon eating waterlilies down
by the banks of my mindstream
quietly letting go of itself
like an unmoored lifeboat full of emptiness
drifting no where in particular I want to be
except here where I can shed my humanity for awhile
among the living and the dead
who don't care what I am and am not
as long as I'm not a threat to them.

Darkness, my solace, moon, my longing,
Star, warmer than any fire I've ever
sat around to exorcise my ghosts,
you, who've danced like my third eye
with the other two still chained to their irises,
the poetic lucidity that mentored me
in the ways of light and taught me
the creative rapture of the fish
that still swam like flashs of insight
to the surface of my oceanic tears,
I don't know how many light years
either of us have yet to shine or cry over,
but tonight, come down from your unindictable heights
and sit with me like the intimate stranger of a candle
in my eyes, in my soul, in my blood,
be the small flame that trembles in my breath for awhile,
be the sole illumination of my spirit for awhile,
ease my bodymind with the elixir of your radiance
emanating from the inside, and let me
be born again of that fire that burns within me,
purge my starmud of these urns and bones and black dwarfs
that weigh me down like disappointed bells
and feisty mastodons in the tarpits of my heart
that sink deeper the more they struggle to get out.

And I don't even care if you're the last firefly
to transcend my cosmic solitude like a wavelength
of the transmorphic singularity at the beginning of time
that woke the valley up with the roar of a dragon
in that elemental morning of mad genius
that's be the dawn of every moment ever since
in this chiliocosm of energies and forms
flashing out of the mystery of the questions we ask
about the inconceivability of being here to ask them.

No purpose. No meaning. Except the one
we all live vaguely as ourselves like a nebularity
out of which we might precipitate stars
of a different order of shining beyond what we can see.
Sit with me awhile as if we both had the same nature.
And you can look at the world and me through my eyes
and I'll look at you through yours as if I were seeing you
from the inside out, and there were ashes in my heartwood
even before I began to burn, as in yours,
there were the urns of heavy elements even
before they were born of their own afterlife.

Be that moment within me when time breaks into light
and even the shadows, like sunspots, shine
in their own right, and nothing is disturbed,
not even the silence that is intensified when the fish jump
or a dog is barking hills away at what approaches
out of the dark, and the waterbirds in their onceness
might seem to fly away, but have been here from the start.
Fill my life with the unimaginable splendour
of all those nights you've looked down upon the earth
and witnessed the horror and the wildflowers
in the same breath on a cold windowpane in winter
etching the light like an artist with an eye for life
or the praying mantis of a small telescope in the summer
its legs spread like a doe about to drink from her own reflection
or one half of a collapsed bridge to the other side
of everywhere at once. I don't ask for bliss or enlightenment.
Just show me how you make the shadows luminous again.
Even on a starless night, how to mourn like the eyeless rain
even as it renews the leaves and roots of the constellations
of the wild asters with their violet plinths and yellow suns
burning fiercely as a distant relation of your myriad myths of origin.

Do that for me and I'll show you how to intensify
the darkness into a diamond chrysalis of transformation
like a deeper mystic bliss in life, enhanced by the ores of pain,
as your light is by the night, or the flying stickshifts
of the dragonflies put the waterlilies in park for the night
as if they'd just got out of a car by the side of an unknown road,
not to find out where they are, but just
to gape up at the stars in the midst of decay
and let the wonder of it all heal me as it always has
by showing me how to make a cradle out of a grave
or the long, slow art of a human out of a wounded heart.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Dark

Ive been waiting here
Waiting for faith
And the word to fall.
Now the darkness comes
And Ill pray for
The end of us all.
Dont let the dark into me
We killed the angels that warned us of you
Dont let the dark into me
We raised the tower of babel for you
Dont let the dark into me
We let the children build temples for you
Dont let the dark into me
Dont let the vengeance of heaven be you
So pray to me, Im the lords new disease,
Look down into the face of god.
Bow down and cry, Im the black messiah,
The one true divinity.
Kneel before my altar and drink the wine of slaughter,
Who said Id save anyone?
So bleed for me, I need hostility
To lead the faithful and the blind.
Dont let the light shine on me
I am the poison that feeds life to you
Dont let the light shine on me
I am the demon that waits inside you
Dont let the light shine on me
I am the ghost that reminds death of you
Dont let the light shine on me
I am the darkness that crawls into you

song performed by by Gary Numan
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Walk this Night

Dark clouds will move
Light rays will come
Dark night will end
Bright day will start
But walk this night

Walk seeing its stars
Seeing its bright light
Seeing its white shine
It’s the beauty of night
So seen only in night

Walk seeing its moon
Seeing its moon light
Seeing its bright shine
It’s also beauty of night
So shines only in night

So walk this night
Walk seeing its light
And awake in light
Walk seeing its beauty
And awake in beauty

So walk this night
To wake in shine
If not the next day
It will be other day
For now walk this night

So move, said my heart

poem by Kranthi Pothineni
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Struggle with Darkness

The sun set and it was being dark,
A pitch dark night had fallen,
No light was there nor any spark,
A star shone at all of sudden,
And found all his friends sleeping,
He went and tried them awake,
One of them got up from his sleeping,
And asked why he made him awake.

Asked him making the earth light,
Cause there had fallen a dark night,
But, his reply was then shown,
'What can be done, O friend! Alone?
Without the moon we are what?
Against the darkness can't be fought,
Let's go to awake our moon
The earth may it light up soon.'

They both reached the moon and found,
The moon was lying on the ground,
And appeared, she was not fine,
Cause she had drunk the evil wine,
Unfair gifts had she been given,
For shining not in dark night,
Forgot she, her duty at all of sudden,
And let the inhabitents of earth fight.

The moon ordered them to go and sleep,
'What's the use for them weep?
We'll be given gifts for this deed,
And on duty we find nothing indeed.
'Second' of both agreed with the moon,
He went and slept very soon,
'First' was worried, but nothing spake,
And he put himself at stake.

He went respectively to each stars and;
Requested them to get up and shine,
Initially they were afraid being mixed in sand,
At last they all accepted his wine,
All of them when began to shine,
Like the ornaments of the sky,
The moon felt a tasteless wine,
On herself she was shy.

Getting up, the moon begged sorry to all,
And she shone at full of her might,
Lighten up was every mount, forest and wall,
And became silver the whole sight.
This revolution if on the earth befall,
No country would be worried but delight,
Be alive, no of your leaders can thee enthrall,
But know the deference between Black and White.

25/02/07

poem by Mohammad Muzzammil
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Was The Child of The Night

I was the child of the night
Dark is my father
The moon is my mother
Star of stars was my sister

I was the child of the night

My father is a symbol of fear and helplessness
My mom is the charm
My sister is the beauty of the night

I was the child of night who afraid of the dark night

Mom, please tell to father i would not like the darkness
But my mother said, need not be afraid, my daughter, my light will always protect you from the dark night.
I always give you a glimmer of light in the darkness.
And see your sister, she was very beautiful among the dark of night.

My daughter, the darkness is tranquility.
Many people would like stay in it although it will make them are scared and helpless because
They are find peace in the darkness.

poem by Sari Mavi
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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