Sitting In The Dark
Sitting in the dark
being who I am by acclamation.
The solitude half memory, half exorcism.
No one else ran for the position
so I've settled on trying to live up empathetically
to this person that's tried for so long to be me.
The sound of the occasional car on Highway 7
six blocks away
puts its hand over its mouth.
Everything's a secret at this time of the night.
And it occurs to me
I've always been a stranger to myself.
The enigma in the doorway across the street.
My windows. My keys. My locks.
But always looking up at my own place
as if someone else lived there instead of me.
A man with no return address on his homelessness.
As if I were always catching a glimpse of myself
going around the next corner
and I'm the tail I'm trying to lose.
Or giving the occasional mirror
caught totally off guard
cold chills in passing
like a ghost with unknown enterprises of its own.
My freedom enclosed
within the sum of its limits
I live in an elsewhere zone
where the mystery of what I'm doing here
goes to extremes
like a tent city outside
the vacancy of an unoccupied metropolis
of anti-social landlords
to prove I have a right
to the portable threshold of my homelessness.
I'm beached like a birch bark canoe
that isn't going anywhere
on the shoals of my stream of consciousness
trying to figure out who's doing the saying
and who's doing the listening.
Though most people think
one is the spitting image of the other's reflection
verbal expression is not thought
and you can't hear it before you say it.
Even too late for the drunks to be out
I like the way the half-hearted moonlight
interprets my face through its fingertips
as if I were having my portrait done in braille.
What could that look like
when you've connected all the dots
if not an eclipse or a new moon?
Take your pick.
And I may be somewhat out of touch
with how dark things have become
but I know this much
this much at least I know.
Worse than despair
is learning how not to care.
I mean what have you got left
when all's been said and done and gone
if not for a few old reflexive delusions
in a holy war of tribal mirages
that have made a habit of your heart
just as drugs become the cosmology of junkies.
It's no more absurd
to be left standing like an echo in a doorway
long after the house has been torn down
than it is to paint realistic watercolours in the rain
en plein air.
I thought I had a message once
worthy of descending doves.
I could feel the wind under the dragon's wings
open like the firedoor to a furnace full of prophets.
And the words were mine true enough
until I realized how much life like art
is totally plagiarized from the medium it creates in
and how imperative it was
to be reborn from your mother-tongue
like a whole new language of evolving memes
if you want to be taken at your word
even in hell as in heaven
you know how to speak for yourself
without resorting to paracletes
even when you're persuasively certain
no one can understand you.
Every word might contain a dead metaphor
but when mine aren't demonically possessed
and speaking in tongues
they're buzzing around the azaleas
like hummingbirds and bees
sipping black kool-aid in Jonestown.
I start out writing like a new moon
but by the time it's done with me
I'm a total eclipse in an ink pot,
indelibly.
That's why I'm sitting here in the dark
trying not to adulterate the light
with cosmic thoughts of all night streetlamps
in an empty parking lot
where everyone overpays a price
for their little square of time and space.
I've got a digital alarm clock
with three and a half numbers that glow in the dark
like an informant trying to warn me
before it's way too late for all of us
to adjust my time-zone and dial it back.
To when?
To when it was a better world?
To when I was a better man?
To the last chance I had to become one?
poem by Patrick White
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Related quotes
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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Someone's Cut The Tongues Out Of The Bells Tonight
Someone's cut the tongues out of the bells tonight.
Even the silence isn't singing to itself.
The windows are generously tolerant of intruders
but I'm locked into the splendour of my isolation
empathizing with things I don't love.
Full moon. Fruit moon. Moon of berries and grain.
I thought I'd be happier at this time in my life,
but I'm threshing a harvest of shadows
for having sowed all my wild oats on the moon.
I'm intrigued by the fragrance of occult raptures on the air.
Dark intensities that can only end in immolation.
Black roses that only bloom in fire. Mystic disobedience
that lifts the flesh and blood taboos off
whatever comes to it naturally
as a late night 24-7 convenience store
or the fire that started in the kitchen of the Chinese restaurant
three doors down from my apartment yesterday.
Late night moods. The mind dogpaddling in its immensities.
Heritage town standing down from its fieldstones.
No drunks on the street, and all those angry voices
I didn't recognize, gone home to sleep off their disappointment.
I sit like an air traffic comptroller mindwatching
behind these panes of glass as Arcturus goes down
over the tar paper rooftops I poetically associate
with clouds, stars, seagulls and hand-held mirrors of rain
after a thunderstorm has shattered its reflection in them
like a love affair that wasn't going anywhere.
Doing time on earth, but of little consequence.
The bank across the street makes me feel depreciated.
Ask me this moment what legacy I've left
for the half century I've laboured creatively here
and I'd probably answer indignantly, a garage sale,
then reassure you by saying, for a good cause,
and mostly mean it, and partially wish I didn't.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A glimpse
a glimpse
the half opened door
some would say
a half closed door
it all depends on the
state of mind you are in
well half closed for pessismist
and half opened for optimist
half opened or half closed door
so long as it is open
and not close
a good exercise for the mind
of a story teller, novelist, a film maker
a glimpse at the half closed door
the mind is thrown open
like the kick you would give
a half opened door
so that you and pet cat could
glide through easily
the stories that start coming out
from a glimpse at the half opened door
agatha's murdered corpse lying behind
a stalker, a ghost in the corridor of the mind
from the glimpse of the half closed door
a million possibilities, ideas pouring forth
half closed door, half opened door
whichever way you may say
it is an opened door
a million stories, ideas, possibilities
knock at the door of my mind
a glimpse of the half closed, half opened door
my half closed half opened eyes
open themselves to my ever curious mind
boundless as the universe
inspired by
A Glimpse
A GLIMPSE, through an interstice caught,
Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room, around the stove,
late of a winter night-And I unremark'd seated in a corner;
Of a youth who loves me, and whom I love, silently approaching, and
seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand;
A long while, amid the noises of coming and going-of drinking and
oath and smutty jest,
There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little,
perhaps not a word.
Walt Whitman
poem by John Tiong Chunghoo
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Standing In The Doorway
Im walkin through the summer nights
The jukebox playing low
Yesterday everything was goin too fast
Today its movin too slow
I got no place left to turn
I got nothin left to burn
Dont know if I saw you if I would kiss you or kill you
It probably wouldnt matter to you anyhow
You left me standing in the doorway cryin
I got nothin to go back to now.
The light in this place is so bad
Makin me sick in the head
All the laughter is just makin me sad
The stars have turned cherry red
Im strummin on my gay guitar
Smokin a cheap cigar
The ghost of our old love has not gone away
Dont look it like it will anytime soon
You left me standin in the doorway cryin
Under the midnight moon.
Maybe theyll get me and maybe they wont
But not tonight and it wont be here
There are things I could say, but I dont
I know the mercy of God must be near
I been ridin a midnight train
Got ice water in my veins
I would be crazy if I took you back
It would go up against every rule
You left me standin in the doorway cryin
Sufferin like a fool.
When the last rays of daylight go down
Buddy youre old no more
I can hear the church bells ringin in the yard
I wonder who theyre ringin for
I know I cant win
But my heart just wont give in
Last night I danced with a stranger
But she just reminded me you were the one
You left me standin in the doorway cryin
In the dark land of the sun.
I eat when Im hungry drink when Im dry
And live my life on the square
And even if the flesh falls off of my face
I know someone will be there to care
It always means so much
Even the softest touch
I see nothing to be gained by any explanation
Theres no words that need to be said
You left me standin in the doorway cryin
Blues wrapped around my head.
song performed by by Bob Dylan
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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In You
In you I come to the end of roads,
and an alphabet of burning wings
falls from an indigo sky
like meteors trying to write
the unsayable in a slash of light,
in a language of luminous scars
the night beatifies with mystic knowledge
that wants to name you
so deeply in thresholds and stars
the charged silence
is giving birth to an indelible mouth,
a doorway of blood,
an ancient grammar of fire
the wind puts on like a robe
to scry the darkness for a voice
that could fill the goblets
of the moon's dead seas
with the wine of a radiant wound,
so much within me
already the tongue of a bell
that can taste you like blackberries.
The whole of you
in every single dropp of your eyes,
you are the black swan
of the eclipse that rares its reflection in water,
the dark orchid in the shadow of the dragon
that sways like a bell in the night,
even your absence a shape of cherishing,
a harvest of shadows beyond the light
of the lamp that burns for you.
Within the deepest abyss of myself
where the heart stands alone
like a single black pillar
in the twilight wasteland of the world,
a mysterious temple to the ultimacy
of having been here once
to suffer the passage of form and time,
everything a gesture of space
that thaws back into itself,
I have written your name
in the hourglass of my blood
like a whisper of secret ink
that once voiced the light to be
and shook the stars like wheat
out of its blind abundance
and will be remembered forever
as the first intimacy of the sea,
and there is the rumour
of a dream in the air,
the fragrance of an approach,
that out of an ocean of light
the tide will embody a woman
like the shore of an island
littered with fingertips and kisses
enmeshed like galaxies and starfish
in the exhalation of her veils
and our lips will meet like archers,
and our bodies will sing like arrows
sunk like orchards through the heart
and long after the last flame of life is shed,
the night will silence the birds
in the groves where we bled like poppies
to open the gates of the mystery
like keys and rain, or the rosary of black pearls
that chants its prayers to the night
like the slow alarm of autumn geese
in the eyes of a human face.
I try to say what can't be said,
pouring my spirit
into the wineskin of every word,
but my heart is a larger apple
than the bough of my voice can bear,
and the silence
that would erect temples everywhere like flowers
spun from the auroral silks of my soul
and perfume the air with the pollen of sacred fireflies,
every emotion a priest with a shaven head
to honour the moon
climbing the stairwell within me
of a million horizons at once
in every breathless step,
falls away behind me like the wake of a sinking ship
that lowers me into my coffin like a lifeboat
or a message in a bottle
that pleads like wine with the emptiness
for an alphabet that isn't in arrears to time
to say you to the night
in a lightning breath of life beyond
these elemental likenesses I carve
from a quarry of stars.
And I know I ask for immortal children
from a human womb,
and wide as my powers are
to exceed the sky with homing birds,
to adorn the dead branch with windows
that dazzle the roots of dawn,
I am the ashes of a black star in daylight,
a stone man with a chain for a tongue
when I try to swim like Atlantis
through the depths of your shining within
and the last word, the last life
to flash across my mind as I drown
again and again like a pulse
in the embrace of your beauty
is always the world as it is
before anything was said.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Narcissus Lost His Face In The Mirror He Stored His Image In
Narcissus lost his face in the mirror he stored his image in
while Lady Nightshade was saying grace over the wrong coffin
rats from the shipwreck were rowing ashore
in the last lifeboat with a trapdoor in it for an emergency exit.
The holy men who couldn't speak our language
without trying to fix it with an accent of their own
were recruiting for an army on the moon
to start a new crusade against futuristic infidels
who didn't share the same direction of prayer
as the wavelengths that reached the ears of the extraterrestrials
with high ideals encoded in a scripture of esoteric starmaps
that spoke like oracles stoned on volcanic gas
so when you asked how things were going,
they always answered, perhaps, in an ambiguous tone of voice.
I was sitting in the window of a burning house
trying to write poems that smelled like smoke to the Holy Ghost,
when you showed up like a stranger's doorway
out of my solitude like the bell of a three alarm death knell
with the smile that lingered like junkmail on the threshold
of a black hole that said jump right in, there's light
on the other side of sin if you go through this
like a death in life experience in love with cosmic bliss.
Who could forget that day you came like a muse
up the leaf strewn stairs of an abandoned orphanage
looking for a heart you could inspire with the ruse
of the poetic refuse you left in the wake of your pilgrimage
like the desolation of your absence from the earthbound
that languished in the eclipse of your innocence
like a spiritual lost and found trying to make sense of itself
like a horse with a broken leg on a zodiacal merry-go-round.
I felt the fangs of your crescent moons pierce my flesh
like a staple gun under a rosebush in league
with an alliance of thorns that liked to see a poet bleed
as if the great mystery of love were nothing
but a conspiratorial intrigue of sword dancers on drugs
though I did everything I could to prove to you I was wrong
about the moonrise, you weren't strong enough to be right for once
without starting a pogrom that interrogated
the light in my eyes for all those dark winter months
I never confessed, I never cried out as if ice were my only alibi.
I sat in the corner like a left-handed guitar with a dunce cap on
and wrote out lyrics that sang like the stars with a lisp
on your celestial blackboard until I felt like Sisyphus
a note shy of pushing my heart like a moon rock over the top.
It was the immanental sixties on a grailquest
for the objective correlative of a universal paradigm
it could fight under as the sign of a revolutionary new design of chaos
that made love not war to the thunder of home-made sonic booms
in a battle of bands with saturation bombing riffs and rimshots
that urged us to surrender to the enemy as if
they were dragonflies and quarter-notes of music
in a riot of helicopters dropping tear gas over Watts.
Even the madness wasn't enough to mollify the sadness
of what we lost when everyone turned the lightshows out
in the concert halls and went back to the their atavistic law schools
to get a grip on the necks of the things they had let go of for a lark.
And the last time I saw you, before things went totally dark,
you were trying to set fire to my voice-box
like a lightning rod with bad wiring shorting out
like a bass amp on the stage of your burnt out farewell
to the audience that made a gracious bow to your frantic id
and headed for the exit like an arsonist long before you did.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You Can't Embrace Me With Your Moderate Love
You can't embrace me with your moderate love
as if two arms were one too many to give someone a hug,
or one eye were enough to look at the stars in your lover's eyes,
and make up constellations you've never seen before.
I've never fallen in love with anyone who ever
made my whole body feel like it was a ghost amputee
who had never gotten over the memory of having one.
You can't read Braille without fingertips.
And it's either brave and suicidally noble, or something
drastically real about me but I've always preferred
the dark, dangerous muse, to the sunny cheerleader
who cut the bananas into my cereal just for the potassium.
No moon. No music. No slumming in heaven
when we take every other nightshift off from hell
and then walk out on the job permanently like a Tarot deck
to see how it feels to be a shipwreck on the bottom of a prophecy
that foretold, one day, swimmers and drowners alike
would be in it way up over their heads. And that's
when I learned to count on my heart
like an overturned lifeboat to keep things afloat
for me and anyone I love who went into exile beside me.
Got to be ancient starmaps in her eyes
like the return address of extraterrestials
who promised to come back one day
and make crop circles in the hay together.
And fireflies for back up in the long dark halls
of what we were reading when the stars went out
and we opened up to each other about our secret research
into the comparative mythology of each other's psyche.
Even at high noon I want to look out of the corner of my eye
and see in the depths of her silence, stars
hiding out in the shadows on the bottom of her wishing wells
and know that she's ok at either end of the telescope.
And I'll show her the sun shining at midnight
and the moon among the corals, and come up like a pearl diver
with new metaphors to show her how I can still see her radiance
like a lunar eclipse in a mystic moon rise just behind
the guile of her veils and the eyelashes of her tree line.
And there shall be no shadow upon the earth
that she casts behind her that shall remain starless.
And it must be well understood from the very start
that you can't put the wing of an eagle on one side of the heart
and that of a sparrow on the other, even less so, a dragon,
and expect it to fly very good or straight to the mark.
And no broken arrows of the promises
we make to each other at a rain dance for the waters of life.
And no sipping from the river when there's a chance
to swallow it all in a single gulp and satisfy all wells at once
without getting the waterbirds stuck in our throats
like the high notes of sacred syllables above the reach
of the black swans that live in our chimneys for free.
By all means, I want to see the light
but coming out of the dark like a nightbird
with a message that wasn't meant for anyone else.
She can be swarmed by faeries, she can
live on a menu of mushrooms and toadstools,
all the soft gilled things without hooks in them she wants
I don't care, as long as she includes
a banshee or two scratching at her wings like windows
to be let in to the inner sanctum of her devotion
like a black candle at a white mass for wounded voodoo dolls.
And if she wants me to jump through her wilderness fires
to satisfy her occult desires in a coven of one
that's ok too as long as she's enough of a firemaster
to know when I've been done well. Not medium rare.
And I won't have things fifty-fifty, a hundred and fifty percent
and a hundred and fifty percent, or die in the attempt,
because anything less than that is nothing at all.
Love when it comes to the hour of gates, becomes
the best of the other in the leaving, as your lover
absorbs in the turn-counterturn-stand of the perennial dance
things about you she loved at first glance, jewels and virtues,
and all the wildflowers a suffering soul puts out with generosity
that were meant for her eyes only, even you
couldn't see in yourself at the time because even
among the most enlightened of us, the deepest insight
into ourselves as embodiments of thoughtless reality
is always blind. And if you couldn't find what you wanted
together, you always find it under your pillow
once the other who left it like a parting gift is gone.
Don't want anyone after we've broken up
who doesn't know how to honour the memory of what we tried
to be to each other before we outgrew what we meant
when we vowed to console our loss of happiness
with peace and a gentle release of the moon
like a blossom from a dead branch in the middle of winter.
She can come to me flawed, she can come to me wounded.
She can come to me like an apostate sunflower
who wandered off the beaten path to follow the moon.
Selfless as we all are behind our delusions of probity
who remains to be a judge of character except
the most doubtful and disdainfully vain among us?
Let the death masks argue it out among themselves
who is real and who is not, who's been true and who forgot,
as for me and my house, I'd rather be loved than right.
I'd rather have my lover's head in my lap at the end of the night,
or mine in hers. I'd rather stand beside her
and look up at the stars together as if they knew
more about us than us about them, than feel them
hemorrhaging like supernovae in both our eyes
arguing like medieval theologians painting
a picture on the third eye of the telescope
we're looking at through both lenses simultaneously
eye to eye, tooth to tooth, one false idol to the other,
squabbling over whose lop-sided view of the paradise
we planted to live in together, is most worthy of worship,
the hunter or the farmer, the hunter or the farmer,
keeping in mind women invented agriculture.
Intrigue me, berate me, teach, upgrade, or refute me,
just let me feel your hand when I suffer
as if it were the wing of a bird
I was scrying aviomantically to see
if it had healed enough to fly, to make
my homelessness a big enough sky for her
to spread her wings in and wheel
on the passionate thermals of joy
that arise within me like double helices of inspiration.
And in return, I would promise her to never think
I'd found an answer to her mystery, or a reply
to the silences that abound within her
like nightbirds that just won't answer.
And if she's not in her shrine when I come to lay
a bouquet of stars at the foot of her temple stairwells,
or off at a coven somewhere with the Horned One,
trying to get a handle on my polyphrenic diversity
that can speak to the angels as well as the demons in tongues.
Shapeshifter though I may be, I promise her
by the time she gets home she'll always recognize me
in the form that most becomes her. I've always thought
that death was shorter than life, because
death isn't lived through even for a moment and if
anything lasts forever anywhere, it's right here
where we can dance like rootless trees to the songs of the nightbirds
and listen to the squirrels in the walls in the morning
stacking black walnuts like prophetic skulls,
and reach out to the waterlilies like dragonflies
that know how to interpret them like loveletters on the sly.
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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The Unknown Star
I was born of an unknown star, of a mother who did not know herself-
From the very beginning I was a canary that could not sing and who
Would fall to the ground every time I lifted my wings to fly-
Trapped inside a cage of my own delusions,
I was alone looking upward towards that clouded sky, searching for that unknown star,
Where by chance I could find a place where I would belong-
My mother wept a wide stream of tears
Not to be consoled from the deep pain that tore at her heart-
The day I lost myself to another world, she abandoned me as agony wrenched her soul-
A phantasmal canary lying still at the bottom of my cage-
Hiding behind a rainbow looking for rays of hope,
Trying to deafen the voices only I could hear,
Searching for that unknown star,
I would dance in the rain beneath the faint light of the moon at night
Seeking for myself, that person I could not find, however
All I could find was a shadow upon the wall-
A shadow upon the wall I hardly recognized as myself,
A reflection within a pond which was that stream of my mother’s tears-
Dancing in the rain trying to become somebody,
Somebody famous or a perhaps an angel or a saint,
Trapped inside a cage of my own apparition where dense cloud cover barred me from
That unknown star where I might feel at home-
Looking about me at hillsides I might have tried to climb-all I could see was my shadow.
A shadow upon a hillside or inside, a shadow upon the wall,
A vague reflection within a pool of tears- Seemingly eyes of a ghost staring into mine,
Reading the demonic thoughts that raced inside of my mind-
Born of an unknown star, I had never found a home and
Born of an unknown star, I had never found myself-
Searching inside and outside all I could ever see was
A dark shadow of a lost person with no destiny or direction-
That canary that could not sing or fly, or perhaps a being who
Tried to come to life dancing in the rain beneath the faint moonlight- I became
A shadow dancing beneath the light of that unknown star I could not reach-
Hoping someday I would save the souls of those who despair and expectantly
Someday I would become that canary, but lifting my wings to fly and bursting into song,
Joyfully watching the sunrise as the moon would vanish
Behind disappearing dark clouds of despair.
poem by Claudia Krizay
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Moon Girl
sometimes it seems the night will last forever
sometimes it seems that darkness always falls
a dark star woke you up and with a dark star, you go to bed
you're sinking slowly into the deep
you wonder if you ever touch the ground
where you would walk through sparkling spheres,
on strangest drugs and without fears
you feel just like a little girl
and all your dreams lie frozen on the moon
you left them ther some time ago
but it ain't true that you don't need them anymore
you are so beautiful, you are so very beautiful
don't give up , kill the pain, don't start crying again
here it comes, here it comes, the golden handshake of life
you are so beautiful, you are so very beautiful
keep the faith, stop to fight
and walk out into the night
you're so strong, yes you are
reach out for your star....
even those who are afraid to live
they're dying some day
sometimes it seems that silence crawls all over
sometimes it's hell inside and hell out there
your heart is nothing but a haunted place
is that you in the mirror?
you're all alone inside a world
full of confusion and of strange alarms
and though your courage left you long ago
it doesn't mean that you don't have it anymore
song performed by by Alphaville
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Wearing The Inside Out
From morning to night I stayed out of sight
Didnt recognise what Id become
No more than alive Id barely survive
In a word...overrun
Wont hear a sound
From my mouth
Ive spent too long
On the inside out
My skin is cold
To the human touch
This bleeding hearts
Not beating much
I murmured a vow of silence and now
I dont even hear when I think aloud
Extinguished by light I turn on the night
Wear its darkness with an empty smile
Im creeping back to life
My nervous system all away
Im wearing the inside out
Look at him now
Hes paler somehow
But hes coming round
Hes starting to choke
Its been so long since he spoke
Well he can have the words right from my mouth
And with these words I can see
Clear through the clouds that covered me
Just give it time then speak my name
Now we can hear ourselves again
Im holding out
For the day
When all the clouds
Have blown away
Im with you now
Can speak your name
Now we can hear
Ourselves again
Hes curled into the corner
But still the screen is flickering
With an endless stream of garbage to
...curse the place
In a sea of random images
The self-destructing animal
Waiting for the waves to break
Hes standing on the threshold
Caught in fiery anger
And hurled into the furnace hell
...curse the place
Hes torn in all directions
And the screen is still flickering
Waiting for the flames to break
song performed by by Pink Floyd
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The Night In The Wounded Mirror
The night in the wounded mirror
is only a childhood away from my face
and there's always a shattered window
between me and my starless shining,
and a dead bird upturned on the sill
as if the sky, too, had its quota of roadkill.
Looking back from all these
lightyears and constellations away,
on the black day I was born under an eclipse
like a flower clenched into a fist,
an eye without an iris darker than a shark's,
I suspect there was a lot more suffering back then
than I was able to live my way through,
estranged in the corner of a kitchen
that was a feeding frenzy of knives.
I still can't leave one out on the counter
without fearing it's just another punctuation mark,
the claw of a comma in a long sentence of blood.
At best, it's the silver scar of the moon
that slashed me open like a well-honed loveletter
that wasn't meant for me.
And I still don't know how to approach
the child I was, the child I still am
time-travelling through himself like a glacier
as if he could put a stop to evolution
or survive his extinction
by keeping to himself like ice.
I look upon his solitude and silence,
the unaccusing indictment of his face,
like a cold, brass plaque
commemorating the unidentifiable victims
of an atrocity that can't be understood.
He's still seven and I'm looping through sixty
like the spine of a calendar
shedding me like autumn,
a picture of turning leaves on every page,
until there's no way of telling what age we are
in this season out of time,
and I want to love him, I want
to say things that could heal us both like water
before I take him with me into my grave,
but I don't truly know how,
and there are secret vows of violation
that are taken without a mouth
and assassins of intimacy in the shadows
and children sleeping in snakepits
who make up their own bedtime stories
and dream of things that can't be told to anyone
who hasn't been devoured in their ancient infancy
by the furious innocence of the sea.
Dark-hearted jewel
of a child in the night,
older than light
who has made more of me
than I can make of him,
when I weep for what he knows
and will not say, what am I,
what are these words
in the inky shacks of the trees
but the lengthening shadow
of the darkness that pours out of him like blood,
or duct-tape like moonlight
over the mouth of a scream?
And if I come back now
like the legend I have made of his sorrow
to gather him up in my arms
like a harvest under a full moon,
and if I sit with him all night
without saying anything
here on this skull of a rock
until each of us is the memory of the other,
could it make anything better,
would it take the thorn of the moon
out of the eye of the dragon
that sheds its skin like childhood skies,
not knowing where things end, things begin?
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Dark Of Night
IN THE DARK OF NIGHT , YOU REACH OUT TO ME , AS I TAKE YOUR HAND, YOU DRAW ME CLOSER AND TOGETHER WE STAND.THE LOOK IN YOUR EYES, THE TOUCH OF YOUR KISS, OUR HEARTS BEAT IN RYTHEM WHEN YOU HOLD ME LIKE THIS, THE TOUCH OF YOUR FINGERS AS THEY SEARCH AND EXPLORE, LEAVES ME BREATHLESS AND WEAK AND YEARNING FOR MORE, THE FEEL OF YOUR BODY PRESSED TIGHT AGAINST MINE, WE ARE LOST IN EACH OTHER, AS THE DARK OF NIGHT TURNS BACK TIME.I REACH OUT TO YOU TO DRAW YOU NEAR, ONLY TO WAKE TO FIND YOU ARE NOT HERE, .IM HOLDING YOUR PILLOW, AND HOLDING IT TIGHT, AS MY CRIES OF SORROW PIERCES THE QUITE, I CALL OUT YOUR NAME IN THE DARK OF NIGHT, I ASK FOR ONLY, ONE LAST CHANCE TO TOUCH YOUR FACE, TO HOLD YOU CLOSE ONE MORE TIME IN THE DARK OF NIGHT. .THE ONLY ANSWER THAT I HEAR, IS THE SHATERING SOUND OF A BREAKING HEART, AND THE ROARING SOUND OF THE SEA OF TEARS , AS I BEGIN FALLING APART., MY FINGERS KEEP SEARCHING THE EMPTY SPACE , WISHING FOR ONE LAST CHANCE TO REACH OUT AND CARESS YOUR FACE.THEY ONLY FIND YOU ARE NOT THERE, THE COLD ROUGH SHEET AWAITS THEM THERE, AS THEY KEEP SEARCHING IN THE DARK NIGHT AIR.
poem by Judy Compton
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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Stranger In My Own House
(a capella: she said: boy, your luck is running out...she make me feel like a stranger...in my own house)
I come stumbling in at a quarter to three
To the sound of my own dog growlin at me
Im scared to move or turn on a light
Youve got me creepin around in the dark
Like a thief in the night
Ive got no excuse, I should have known
Ive got no place to live
I never feel at home
I walk into the kitchen to see whats there
Im tired and Im hungry but the cupboards bare
Ive been working all day and all night too
I cant believe this is all I have to come back to
I guess Ill take a look upstairs, in the danger zone
I wonder what Im doing here
When I never feel at home
Im a stranger in my own house
Ive got the keys to the door
But Im still locked out
Im a stranger in my own house
Ill huff and Ill puff and Ill blow this house down
Cant be a stranger in my own house
I see the do not disturb sign on my bedroom door
What is this sheet and pillow laying on the floor
I wore out my welcome
I hear you loud and clear
Its time to get a few things straight around here
Ive got no excuse, I should have known
Ive got a place to live but I never feel at home
Im just a stranger in my own house
Ive got the keys to the door
But Im still locked out
Stranger in my own house
Ill huff and Ill puff and Ill blow this house down
Cant be a stranger in my own house
Ive got no excuse, I should have known
With a woman like you Im better off alone
Im a stranger in my own house
Ive got the keys to the door
But Im still locked out
Im just a stranger in my own house
Oh, honey Im home
Im just a stranger in my own house
Im just a stranger in my own house
You got a lion on your hands girl, not a mouse!
Im just a stranger in my own house
Im just a stranger in my own house
Well, somebodys got to go...
Stranger
Stranger
song performed by by Foreigner
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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First Yellow Leaves On The Black Walnut Trees
First yellow leaves on the black walnut trees.
The original digits on the wristwatch of the sun.
Waterproof to any depth you want to drown in.
The trees are homesick.
You can tell by the way they’re giving up.
Comes the season of the dead in harvest time.
The dark abundance of the light
inspired by the muse of the earth
to write poetry
that touchs everyone
like water and wine
whether the apples are gathered or not.
The mystic grape finds enlightenment
in the mouth of a human
when it breaks like a koan
that tastes of something older than the truth.
It’s good to walk through an open field by yourself
as if home were just over the next hill
as the night comes on.
It’s good to feel fulfilled
without knowing much about why
as if some subtle stratagem of the sky
had worked out a truce with life for awhile
and everywhere the armies of the grass
were surrendering their shields like flowers.
It’s late August
and the cedars gather on the hillside
like old testament prophets
come down to the river
to baptize their roots in fire.
Chicory in the eyesocket
of a baby muskrat’s skull
half-buried in the earth like a small moon
that returned to its mother’s breast
several autumns ago.
If the medium is the message
then the message of life
is its timing
and the whole of its content is now.
The dead don’t walk among the living
squawking about things
they’re missing in paradise.
Ten commandments might be good advice
but there’s one bit of wisdom
that wasn’t written on a gravestone
that threatened to bury you
in the valley of the shadow of death
like an avalanche down the world mountain
for ever and ever and ever
should you ever wander off the beaten path
by as much as one black sheep away from the flock:
It’s not your door if you have to knock.
Your life’s the key to your own lock.
You can ask the flowers.
Beauty isn’t enslaved by its own powers.
Clarity sees through the brave
as easily as the cowards
as two sides of the same fear
and no river’s flowing the wrong way to the sea.
Autumn is a lonely voice
that sadly rejoices in what it must be
but what mad wonders
it hides under everyone’s breath
like marvels it keeps to itself.
The best place to hide
is out in the open
like being and seeing and thinking.
And if you smell the wind
at this time of year
you can tell that it’s been drinking
to drown its wanderlust in words
heading south with the birds
who carry the souls of the dead away
like fires that ascended to heaven
on a ladder of bones
and a spinal cord
threaded through the eye of a needle.
A snake sheds its skin and vertebrae at last
and turns its scales into wings
to become a dragon
that burns its bridges behind it
like waterbirds without directions
disappearing from their own reflections
before the first ice.
I reach the top of an old hill
and I can see what I look like
a long way off from here
as Venus breaks like a mirror
low on the horizon
through the black mascara
on the eyelashes of the backlit pines.
And there are spirits of the air
summoned by the darkness
with eyes that glow
like charcoal on the fires
of yesterday’s myth of origins
to look up at the stars
and make up some kind of a story
about what they’re doing there in the first place
like the afterlife of the mystery
of the night before time and space
as if the history of our prophetic skulls
could still foretell the future
of an advanced race of cannibals.
You are what you eat.
But the time is long past
when I could tear my heart out
and offer it up to the unappeasable gods
like the fruit of a human
who has wandered the earth
like a rootless tree
true to his own homelessness
like a fire that kept faith with a heretic
who made the ultimate sacrifice.
Who would be there to receive it?
If I wrapped it up like a foundling
and laid it on the stairs of the abyss
late at night when no one was watching
or sent it down the river
in a basket I wove from cattails
like a baby in an empty lifeboat
drifting down its bloodstream
on its way to something better
than a promised land it couldn’t enter
what life on what distant star
would bend down and pick it up
like a message in a bottle
from life stranded on an island galaxy
waiting to hear the likeness of its own echo
in the voice of the light that answered
help is on the way?
And that sword’s been long drawn
out of the barren stone of the moon
that gave it back to the waters
like the blade of an old perfection
it once fell upon
like the reflection of a man
with a noble calling
in the absence of volunteers.
I haven’t sacrificed my innocence
to that invincible agony in years.
And there’s more than one crown
I’ve thrown off a bridge
like a trinket of my powers
to self-destruct
as if I knew somehow
you can’t keep
what you won’t give away.
You can run deliberately straight as a highway
or weave spontaneously like a river
but if the first
just regard the extreme chaos
of conditioned conciousness
and if the latter
you’ll shed many lives
like skies and skin you’ve grown out of
following the long journey of yourself
all the way from your tail to your head
passing like a serpent through the grass
as if you had a secret
you keep to yourself
that were better left unsaid.
But there’s a third extreme
that just as intense as the others
which is the way I stay the course.
I put wings on a horse
that’s never known a saddle
or been bruised by the stars like spurs
and we’re up up and away
as if we’d never heard of the Medusa.
The Great Square of Pegasus
going down behind the pines
like a card up my sleeve.
I don’t want to turn anyone into stone
or blind them with my shield
as if the light knew judo
and how to use my enemy’s strengths
against it.
I don’t want to decapitate anyone
who was once the priestess
who fed sweetcakes and honey
to the oracular pythons of Delphi
and long before that
along with her two Gorgonic sisters
was the virgin wife crone phase of the moon
shedding her graces like skin.
I’ve jumped into enough snakepits
for one lifetime
to know how easy it is to get in
and how nearly impossible it is to get out.
One fang of the moon kills you.
The other heals you.
But you’re never the same after that
and there are scars that hurt worse than the wound.
But you can see things before the arising of signs
and there’s a crazy wisdom that embodies you
like a candle in the darkness
talking to itself.
And I can hear what the serpent said
quietly to Eve
just before it offered her the apple
from the forbidden tree:
Don’t lie to anyone you’re trying to believe.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Don't Care If You Remember Me Or Not
I don't care if you remember me or not.
I'm not going anywhere. I'll still be here.
But I'm going to disappear soon enough
and you can have the mirror all to yourself.
I can't imagine dying alone is any deeper
than this solitude I've been living on my own.
Take that chisel of a tongue and chip
my cartouche off that gravestone I'm not under yet
as if you just discovered a new talent
for pecking away at death as if you were married to it.
I'm out of here. This is my grand exit. Like Keats
I make it with an awkward bow, the way the deer do
when they come down to the river to drink.
I don't make it in anger. I'm not judging a mirage
because it doesn't slake my thirst for real water.
I'm not bitter, vicious, or proud. I see myself
in you, especially when you're crying without
a knife in your hand you wield like a paper cut
of the last crescent of the moon. It makes me sad
that we live more separately than we ever will in death.
I can remember when you first took my breath away,
and now, if you want to give it back, that's ok,
that's ok, too, as my brother would say, listening
like an amputee to the one-handed applause of the Buddha.
There are gaps, there are voids and abysses,
there are neuronic synapses, godheads, bardo states
and black holes we all have to bridge sooner or later.
Love's one of them. Death's another. And life's
a country road with so many potholes it's shell-shocked.
You can efface my name from your memorial wall
but I'm sure I'll turn you into poetry somewhere
along the way. I'm thawing into tears
like an Arctic ice cap faster than I should
but I'll hold you in my cold, cold heart forever
like a dolmen without snow nobody knows the name of.
More wonderful things get said in the doorways
of farewell through the veils of our motiveless tears
than you're ever going to hear on the thresholds of hello
when everyone mythically inflates their uncontested lies
in the name of love. It's not much of a triumph
to ride in a golden chariot of the sun through a slum.
It's a little vehicle, and come the first serious eclipse,
you're on black ice on a highway late at night on your own,
however many corpses you've sand-bagged in the rear
to give it some weight. Kitty litter and ashes
for traction are better than rose-petals and thorns
strewn along your path. You get a better grip on things
as you're turning your wheels into the direction of your spin
or somersaulting over your handle bars like a cow
that jumped over the moon. As for me. The moonrise
raises a spoonful of ashes to my lips and I try
to take my medicine like a solitary nightbird
sipping from the fountain of a dark muse
like a lunar fish in the watershed of a total eclipse.
I'll never wish you ill. And I'll try really hard
never to dispel your delusions of me as someone
you might have been able to love. Sorry about the discrepancy.
Mirages on a sundial. Lighthouses on the moon.
Sharks and shipwrecks. Shouldn't our dreams and delusions,
our secret nightmares, be accorded the same
ontological dignity as any other God particle
in the transmorphic context of reality? They move
the world as much as mass or gravity and they're
as counterintuitively absolute and constant
as the speed of light. Everyone's trying to write
their own unified field theory to explain everything
all at once to themselves, as if they were whispering
seas of rising awareness into their own ear.
I've lived too long under this cloak of the mystery
I bear as best I can like a mantle of starmud
in the name of a thousand poets who bore it
in their turn to suffer the solitude of their revelry
like the calyx of a black hole in the center of a galaxy
consuming two hundred billion stars in a single gulp
to stay drunk enough for light years to learn
to breathe in the light before they're willing to let it go.
To kiss the bud of the wildflower into the open
and step back into the light like a shadow at noon
and watch it grow without you. Noblesse oblige.
And I don't mean it cynically. The wolf howls.
The dog barks. The road leads like a trail of blood
to a dark grove of trees where everything heals by itself
and death is a retroactive edition of a posthumous future
that lies up ahead like road kill. Like it or not.
Sooner or later every persistent absurdity is interred
in an aura of grace, as if we gave the dead
the benefit of the doubt we begrudge the living.
That said. Still hard to kiss the stinging nettles
like hooded cobras on the head spitting in your eyes
like the Taliban just as you're learning to read
the writing on the wall. So the blind prophets
learn to love the dark. So the candle that's burning
to shed some light on the night and the stars
goes out in a gust of breath like a secret chandlier
on the dark side of death. And what are we left with
that might remotely stick it out with us
in search of a treasure chest that isn't
just another bone box of sacred relics? I used to think
scars from the stars that enlightened us
like Medusas of white phosphorus that bit
like high frequency wavelengths in a snake pit
the moon was agitating like ripples and scales
on the skin of a mirror we thought we'd shed
relationships ago. But now my youth has outgrown me
I go well out of my way to err on the side of compassion
more than I ever longed to know the truth
of what we're all doing here together
trying to stay true to the circuitous path we're on
by getting lost in each other's eyes and arms.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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An Occasional Dream
I recall how we lived
On the corner of a bed
And wed speak of the swedish room
Of hessian and wood
And wed talk with our eyes
Of the sweetness in our lives
And tomorrows of rich surprise...
Some things we could do
In our madness
We burnt one hundred days
Time takes time to pass
And I still hold some ashes to me
An occasional dream
And wed sleep, oh so close
But not really close our eyes
Tween the sheets of summer bathed in blue...
Gently weeping nights
It was long, long ago
And I still cant touch your name
For the days of fate were strong for you...
Danced you far from me
In my madness
I see your face in mine
I keep a photograph
It burns my wall with time
Time
An occasional dream
Of mine
An occasional dream
Of mine
An occasional dream
Of mine
song performed by by David Bowie
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I Gently Took The Strawberry Heart
I gently took the strawberry heart
of the bird with the broken neck
and buried it in a shrine of leaves and grass.
And in a low voice, whispered a blessing.
Under the window of an illusion
like a song you can only hear once
and it's good for a lifetime of listening,
I buried you with your wings together in prayer.
And I prayed to know what to pray for.
I prayed to know what to ask that could ease
the burden of the earth on a nightbird's journey
flying solo deeper into the dark
than even the stars or these eyeless words can go.
And I know death returns even the worst of us
to our innocence again, though our bones
come crashing down like childhood kites around us.
And the flight feathers of the aerial acrobatics
of our love lyrics run out of ink
when there's no one in the dark
to sing for anymore, no stars
to chart where you've gone,
no sign from the heavens you're not alone,
no ghost of smoke from a distant fire
I can summon to a seance of lingering desire
that would console you in the flesh again
like a candle in your solitude reaching out
to the pain of a stranger in the shadows
to make your wound cry out in bliss
as you once did from a greener bough
than this dead branch I sing from now
when we thought blossoms were the answer
to everything we didn't understand at the time
that could befall us like fledglings in the spring
who didn't know what autumn would bring
like an ice-storm in its wake
to things that break against the sky
like the cold-hearted lie of a window
that wasn't open and didn't go on forever.
And though I ask the weather for news of you,
if the wind might have heard
a word or two in passing, all
the silence does is deepen your absence
and teach me not to cling to things
like birds and flowers on the wing.
But if grief is all I can know of you now
I'll console myself with sorrow.
I'll hold onto it like the string of a kite
soaring among the constellations.
I won't let go. I'll play the line out
like a flying fish I caught in Pisces
and hauling it into a lifeboat with a net
I'll take the hook of the moon out of your mouth
and throw you back into the depths like a muse
swimming among the stars like a siren
that keeps calling me to the rocks
like an astronaut to these mountains on the moon
I keep hurling through this earthly view
of a window from the inside out
that breaks just like the shell of a cosmic egg
unfolding a loveletter with a wingspan of light
that penetrates this dark forever
like the third eye of a needle in a haystack
of begging bowls I won't abandon like the nests
of nightbirds with flightplans
that feather our falling into the abyss
of the unbelievable with starmaps
and the beacons of homing metaphors
that make our disappearance inconceivable.
I'll live like the return address on an envelope
with a mouthful of silence for a voice
and wait for you to answer me again
like a songbird at the spring equinox
through a broken window in a house of pain.
And though it hurts worse when the candles go out
I'll refuse to turn my heart away
from your reflection in everything I see.
Everything I hear and do and say.
Everything that was as true as a night sky about you.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Something Deeper Than Stars
Something deeper than tears to weep for you.
I weep blood. I weep the silence
on the backstairs with the screen door
that bangs like the sound of one hand clapping
all through the night at the slightest gust of wind
as if a constellation were trying
to strike up a insightful conversation
with a wet match, the sceptre of a spent blossom.
I need a moon deeper than water to drown in.
I need to dance the pain away
in a sword dance of serpents
that know how to carry a tune
like a well fledged arrow, a beautiful toxin,
straight to the heart of the mysterious apple
that's sitting on top of my head like a prophetic skull.
No flower can say. Not any number of song sparrows
returning to the budding tree in spring,
no green leaf of an innocent tongue,
not even this dry leaf of mine in autumn
writing lyrics on the wind no one can read,
not even among ghosts, can find a voice
that isn't already the dead language
of an absence that can't be adorned
by a seance of words.
I light no candles. I summon no gods.
No pretence of knowing where you've gone.
No black hole that's as empty as
your ring on the table, no halo
that ever fell as far from heaven.
Good-bye's too optimistic and farewell's
the rudder of a grave on the rocks.
And if I were to raise the paper sail
of another poem like the waxing phase
of the funereal moonboat
that carried you away,
I'd make it black. I'd raise it
like the shroud of a black magician
that can make things disappear,
like an eclipse at half mast
and patch it with the skull and crossbones
of a different phase of the moon on the dark side.
I wouldn't return your personal belongings
back to the morning like starlings and doves.
But there aren't enough sacred syllables
swimming like moonlit fish
in the watershed of the silence
to open this fountainmouth of grief
like an aviary of flightless birds.
Nor would I risk having you remember me,
and turn around like a false start,
supposing you can still recall anything at all,
like a light you left on in the hall
the night you left home for good.
You were magic while you were here to work it.
You were the black nun of an enlightened cult of one.
You were the black mass of the sun at midnight
and the blood sister of the moon
that nicked your finger
on both her crescent thorns at once
so one was the cure to the other's wound
like the eyes of a cat, the fangs of a snake.
Given how close to the moon you were
it didn't come as a surprise
when you started writing me loveletters
inscribed in bone as if you'd just invented
a whole new language out of your claws
to make love to a poet in the nude when the moon
didn't lay its silver sword down between us
to keep us a threshold apart from our fingertips.
And it wasn't long before the elixir began to work
and I lost count of the number
of consensual metaphors I had for your lips,
similitudes for the night skies
that surrounded your eyes in a delirium of stars
that revelled in the crazy wisdom
of their mystically inspired atmospheres.
As just as beautiful as they were,
so were they irresistibly dangerous.
How many light years now
have I poured this memory of them
like a love potion over my roots
and waited for you to bloom in my bloodstream
like stars and blossoms streaming
through the heartwood of an ageing tree
that has as many dead branches on it as it does leaves,
and like an orchard anticipating moonrise,
knew you weren't coming anymore,
and the night bird had no one to sing for?
But, hey, I'm still a better seance
than I am an exorcism and if you can hear me
calling the faithful to prayer
in all directions at once like a paper airplane
the boy in me has sent out to search for you
like a loveletter in a hurricane of razor wire,
dripping with clusters of blood
the size of hemorrhaging grapes,
fireflies caught in a spider-web
of starless constellations that aren't a sign
of anything except I miss you worst at night.
If you could sense the tremor
in even the slightest wavelength of light
I'm trying to shine on the darkness to find you,
I'd write you a holy book of sacred silence
inspired by the shadows in my blood
that overtake me like strangers from behind
with an urgent message not to return home
to what isn't there anymore.
I'd sit out here all night by myself
beside the black waters of this night creek
unravelling like a ribbon in mourning,
that's been talking to itself
as it walks in its sleep on the water,
and I would beseech the stars with my eyes
to let me know if they've seen you,
and in my heart I would entreat them
with the solo of a wounded wolf
raising its head up in a wild prayer
to catch a trace of you on the chilly night air,
to give me a starmap to when and where
I can see you face to face again
and touch your eyelids in your sleep
like crocuses coming up through the snow.
Like moonrise in the apple blow of the storm
that scattered us to winds like all these poems
I've tried to write for you ever since
as if you were still somewhere nearby
like another pair of eyes
in my pain and my solitude
watching from the woods
the stars, the water, the moon,
under the stones in the river
that mark your grave and name
above the flowing of this endless epitaph
of leaves and blossoms and poems
as if you alone could still read them,
like the comings and goings,
of waterbirds on the moon,
the first draft of words on the wind,
maple leaves and keys on the mindstream,
and still understand what I was trying to mean.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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