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Stupid, Stupid World Full Of Lies

Stupid, stupid world full of lies, self-deceit, greed,
conspiratorial stinging nettles, leeching bills, vampiric,
cutting off the flow of things like tiger-mussels,
hillbilly hippies beating up their girlfriends on crack,
all these egotistic puff ball mushrooms with labial gills
mythically inflated by one night's good rain
into albino planets, people who have more keys to heaven
than they have locks on hell, abandoned school bells
that go on talking to themselves like wandering scholars
light years after the children grew old at their perennial recess
and the moths and the mice and the mildew
keep putting out books epilogues after everyone's
forgotten how to read the signs of their own decay.

Between the horns of the moon that's been thrown
like a goat skull into the wishing well of my heart,
roadie spiders string my harp for me like false eyelashes
in the green room, and the nerves of the mirrors
are shattered into the frayed deltas of the ropes of hope
endangered elephants are trying to climb up to heaven on.
The thin-skinned blissed-out gardenias of Maharajji
are wilting under the eyeshadow of their Mary K cosmetics
as their rainbows grow vicious as vegan dogs
in a spiritual junkyard of razorwire and foodchains
that have overextended their supply lines like the umbilical cords
of kites and puppets and angels on the strings of arachnids.
Too pure for me. I'd be afraid of getting myself on their floors.
Tracking starmud in from the mindstream I've been floating down
from one neuron to the next, one town to another,
like the new moon of an origami swan in a scenic calendar
of apocalyptic moments in the life of a hand grenade
people keep pulling on like the handle of an empty fridge.

Count me among the Andalusian vandals of the delinquent dragons
who keep writing obscene truths in lampblack and terza rima
on the walls where the flamethrowers post their prophecies.
I was born to burnish gold. I was born to dry the eyes
of weeping diamonds. I was born to wire the rainbow bridges
with satchel charges of fireflies and lightning for demolition
so everybody can learn to swim through stone
like glaciers to the other side of their polarized cataracts.
And whenever I look at a house of worship built on quicksand
I've got to laugh like an avalanche of meteors
at the self-serving lustrations of their pretentious extinctions
as the world blazes all around them like a halo of inflammable hairspray.
I've got holy wars of my own to go to that won't be disarmed
by the soft swords of their beeswax candles surrendering
to such a little flame of life at the tip of a limp wick
that trembles with every breath it takes like a feather in a furnace.

I see the mad dogs like arsonists with hydrophobia
frothing at the mouth for war, citing ancient conflagrations
from the burnt out scriptures of their sacred matchbooks
raving at the supernovas that ignore them like ingrown solar flares
that couldn't stand up to a drought, let alone a forest fire.
What good is inspiration if it hasn't got a detonator?
Or enlightenment if all it does is ignite a funeral pyre,
cremate a desire to live like a peer of the dynastic galaxies
you were born among with the silver spoon of a universe in your mouth
whether you use it to cook crack, take your medicine
like a human suffers an excruciating transformation,
or let the hummingbirds sip from it like syringes
flagging snakestongues of blood in celestial sugar water?

And all the warrior poets buffed like medicine bags
of talcum powder, and all the healers selling
batches of bad heroin like dealers to the high school kids
who used to steal their mother's oxycontin from the medicine chest
so they could rail the yellow brick road like roadkill.
All the vates, seers and shamans consulting
prophetic pundits and polls as the critics
repeal the fate of the artist before she's born,
cuckoos taking over the nests of better birds,
parasitic guests taking over the house of the host
as the journalists turn from objective observers
to political spiders weaving the webs they spin as the news
and the audience, breaking mutually consenting protocol
gets up on stage with Hamlet and turns a play into a talkshow
for the fifteen minutes of pop-tart celebrity left on their i-phones.

Originality that used to emanate from the roots up
like the light coming out of a dark universe
now seated like an air traffic controller in an orchard
like the wind assigning runways and instructions
on where to take off and land to a riot of blossoms
with pre-conceived flightpaths and well-known destinations.
Creative writing professors in the literary mills
grinding the grist for whole new generations
of mimetically enculturated oxen
to keep the wheels turning of a lucrative careers bank
that used to be the calling of the insanely inspired
too busy working in the visionary mines of their genius
looking for jewels of insight to waste their potential
on getting a job regurgitating words for baby pelicans,
masticating poetry into spiritual pulp fiction
or sipping them from other men's mouths as if
spit were the nectar of the muse they've never met.

The real dragons, their spines lined with sundials,
really don't care how many chapbooks you've published in a year
nor how many times per capita you've mentioned butterflies
just to ensure your fan club you're still sensitive to beauty
or where you're reading next like a matchbook
burning in the valley of Tuwa or whether your chimney-spark
expiring under the stars is an inferno of unignited creosote
caked in your throat like a callous of black matter
or the ore of the braille alphabet blocks you throw
like snake eyes in dice playing your randomness off
against the lottery of your autobiography copied and pasted
like a colony of red army ants putting your books together
like a folio of butterfly wings perfectly bound for the ant heap.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Writing Graffiti On The Blue Walls Of Heaven

Writing graffiti on the blue walls of heaven
to bring them back down to earth.
Seven come eleven in reverse
I'm rolling my skull like snake-eyes
against the odds of finding my afterbirth
buried on the dark side of the moon.
Cygnus transits zenith and I've
desanctified a small cross
I retrieved like a corpse from the river,
a mere splinter of a skeleton, poor thing,
to remind myself where I
begin and end like a crosswalk over
one Rubicon after another.
But great bridges
from little crosswalks grow
like rainbows at midnight
and you never know
when the wind's going to blow on your luck
like a butterfly cupped in your hands
and you're going to bump into
the Egyptian sky goddess Nut
doing Yoga on a medicine ball
and things are going to change.
Things are going to get real strange.
I'm going to knock all the stars
out of the night sky like crown jewels
so they can stand eyebrow to eyebrow
with the eye-sockets of my skull
and see what I see from the inside,
and rearrange them all into
renewable constellations of fireflies
that never wear the same myth twice.
Who hangs their dirty laundry out
on the clothes rack of the zodiac
to dry in the sun
like poppies poems and blood
for the neighbours to see
as plain as their bias
on the sheets of the night before?
I'm not going to kiss and tell.
I'm a gentleman from hell.
You can ask Nut.
You can ask Isis.
You can ask the Irish beauty
at the Bank of Montreal,
I approach love like a crisis
without a glossary of headlines.
I burn but I keep it underground
like a root-fire among the cedars
or a furnace full of stars
in the basement of a school
for prophetic janitors that want to learn
how to sweep their ashes
up off the floor after them
like martyrs to a good cause.
And I don't know what ails me
when I'm hexed most of the time,
angst, ennui, boredom
but there's a long distance look
in the third eye of my cellphone
and the crumbs of a leftover dream
in buttons of braille on the menu.
But on the dark side of the moon
there are no wishing wells
for the dark caprice of a cynic
to drink from on his own
like vinegar or hippocrene
from enlightened lunar skulls.
It's not wise to trust your misfortune
to any moon, new or full,
that's forgotten how to blush
when she remembers
she's not just a banshee
at a broken window
in an abandoned house
but a fertility goddess as well.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Creed For The Desperate

Don't let your bones be softened by fear.
By the time you hear it the lightning has already struck.
Don't listen for the echoes of things you haven't said.
And stop breaking your fortune-cookie skull open
like an old prophetic head
that claims it's been to the dark side
without being dead.
Don't let disaster define you.
You're not the bouquet
of a second class vinegar
hovering over a first class wine.
No crisis ever comes with its own identity
until you give it yours.
Move calmly over your own waters
like clouds in the eye of a puddle.
Walk as if you were already
following your own funeral
and lost your way to the grave.
People make much of being
but seeing is enough
to save you sometimes
from your own obscurity.
And when was there ever any security
in security
as if this flame were safer than that?
How long has the universe risked being you?
Take a chance on your own magic
and pull your life like a tiger
out of your own hat
to eat the rabbit you've become.
Then there's nothing to run from.
Become the sword
and you won't cut yourself.
Become the fire
and you won't burn.
Become life again
and you won't pass away
breath after breath after breath
wishing you could stay
in the negative space
of a comfortable death
that eulogizes your lies.
There are full moons
that don't weigh
like pennies on your eyes
to keep you from seeing too much.
And there are things of the earth
that have followed you into exile
like a new birth of things you can touch
that are wholly yours in passing
like music from a keyboard
or a fire in church.
And you may be down
to your last black beatitude
and righteously uphold the sanctity
of your will not to listen
to anything but the clinking of your own chains
and the mournful whistle
of your distant dying derailed thought-trains
giving up the ghost
but you're just sucking on the tit
of a perverse purity
and you're milking it
like the bitter truth
for all it's worth.
And it's not worth much.
And you may have flattened
all the mountains
and filled all the valleys
of your flatlining event horizons
but there's still life going on
in the crooked back alleys
of secret dimensions
you don't know about
stuck in the house all day
like a child afraid to go out.
You look at a tree.
You see a crutch.
You look at the moon.
You see a scar.
You look at a star
and you're lost for good wherever you are.
And it's not really a dysfunction of your imagination
that you can look at the Taj Mahal
and see a one-room hovel with slumlords
jacking up the rent.
It's good to look both ways
at any spiritual crossing.
But you see a stick in the water
and you think the water's bent.
And to shrink anything as the Tao says
you must first expand it.
But I think the Tao meant the universe
not a used condom on the death's-head
of a stillborn resurrection.
But you'd have to fall
further than you have
to understand it.
You'd have to fall
from your present plight on the world mountain
all the way down until you came to a space
where there were no more opposites in the abyss
and nothing in order
nothing amiss
nothing is meant
to scare you into being
and nothing is trying to hold you back.
What's your lover's mouth
if not a wound
you can kiss into healing?
You can see it that way.
Or you can harden the bruised fruit
with brittle tears
and flint knap chandeliers
to fall from star-crossed mirrors
like rain from broken glass
that hasn't fired up a single root in years
to dream of flowers.
The mind's an artist.
The painting's yours.
A self portrait in the image of God
whom no one's ever seen.
I see a black star in the bottom of a tulip
shining up at me
like the direction it took
to get to the other side.
You see a poisonous spider
like the leftover lees
of a flowerless wine
in the eye of a toxic goblet.
And you might raise it to your lips
like a lunar eclipse
but you never drink up.
And even when you do
it's a bad guest in the house of life
that drinks from his own skull
like the grail of a grape on the vine
with one eye open
as if he trusted the wine
but not the cup.
You're not the cure
that failed the ailing kingdom.
And you're not the miracle
that got up and walked away
to spread the word like a bird at sea
that had just discovered a tree to perch in
you might have sinned as a crow
but now that you've been saved
you're a carrier pigeon.
You can sit here all day if you want
like a buddha on his tatami mat
thinking bituminously
about burning enlightened diamonds
back into eyeless coal.
You can squat like a tree in rings of fat
smashing small thoughts
like eggs on the rocks
trying to read your fate
in their misfortune
like a chromosome
you hold in common
with all those who hate
having been born.
You can heap your afterbirth with scorn.
You can turn your eyes
into a pair of gravitational lenses
like dark matter
and wince at the stars
like cinders of light
that contradict your seeing.
And you wouldn't be wrong
because you can see it that way too.
The same eye by which I see God
is the eye by which She sees me.
Two creative geniuses in one studio
painting each other in the nude.
And she shows you hers
and you show her yours
as she enflames your solitude
by not putting her name on it
though it's a perfect likeness of you.
Your face warped into
a convoluted starless space
like the opening gala
of a staged extinction.
And your soul shrouded in lampblack
like a candle
that soils its own light
by putting on a deathmask of night
like a snakeoil salesman
selling skin to ghosts.
And there where your eyes used to be
two black holes
surrounded by random haloes of light
like lipstick on the mouths of star-nosed moles.
And look at that scar of red she's used
to catch your ambiguous smile.
That's the kind of genius
that leaves the asylum gate open for awhile
for everyone to get into your style
of imploding your eyes
like black dwarfs
with abstract depressionist astigmatism
as if gravity couldn't dig a grave deep enough
or matter make a stone heavy enough
to put on your chest to keep you from rising again
or the gold of the moon in your mouth
ever prove true enough to pay the ferryman
to get you to the other side of nowhere
as if he knew somehow
you huffed life like a paint thinner
trying to escape the race a winner
by never crossing a starting line
that wasn't already
a dark horse lamed by life behind you.
And he couldn't be bothered with anyone
who would fix their own death
and lay a bet against everyone
their pain could outrun their compassion
and in the second heat
their bitterness the truth.
But if you want a way out
like an emergency door
I'll let you in on a little secret.
Life doesn't grow into death
and death isn't waiting
to take your next breath.
And there's an eye of liberation
in the darkest hurricane roses of despair
that frees the light like life enough to care
that all it falls upon alike
should see its own face everywhere
through a crack of black lightning
in the white mirror
where everything that appears
evaporates like a ghost off a lake
or cataracts from the eyes
of the orthodox
who couldn't see straight enough
to thread their keys through their locks
like mystic heretics
to have known
the deepest wounds give birth
to the sweetest spears
that life has ever thrown
like light on a roadless night
or insight like a bird through the sky
that enters the sunset
like a planet following the sun
through the seven coloured doors
of the seven blind seers
who disappear in a vision of one clarity
with many more eyes
than there are lightning bolts and fireflies
whose age can be measured in light-years.
If a fraction of nothing is nothing.
Then a fraction of eternity
isn't a brevity less than the eternal
and every fraction of anything is all.
There now that's not too hard to follow.
The white face of the moon
veils the dark other you never see
because it's all been timed to turn away.
The moon and its month are one day.
Things might be empty
but they're not hollow.
And you're free to go or stay.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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No Gravegoods In My Solitude

No gravegoods in my solitude, no trinkets
from any spiritual world inside or outside this one.
The totem belongs to the dream that's buried with it
as the flower's engendered by the root it's taken from.
Mind is matter. Matter is mind. And it isn't as if
one is blind to the other because one shore
isn't parted from the other by the flowing
of the mindstream in between. Try to separate
the reflection of the moon from water in a dream state.
The moon is a characteristic of water as the water
is a feature of the moon. If you want to mediate
until you turn the vertebrae of your spine into a bridge
to get to the other side of a life you're already standing on,
that's ok as long as it's burning. Otherwise it's just going
to obstruct your path when you're shooting the rapids
of the Milky Way like your own spring run off
trying to saddle a rush of stars with a rudderless liferaft
and oars for spurs. Better to be a waterbird
with wings of your own, but what a thrill
to ride the snake until you can fly like a dragon
among the stars like Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider,
in the handle of the Big Dipper like a warrior Bedouin
testing his eyes on the dune of a tribal hourglass to see
if he can tell what hour it is by the dance of a distant binary.

It's getting late. Nightwatch at the well. The town
unpeopled by sleep. A choir of train whistles
practising their inquisitive requiems at every crossing
like Canada geese migrating south when the autumn stars arise.
More lonely than mournful, I can taste the shadows
in the honey of life as readily as the light. I can smell
the fragrance of time like the first snowflakes
in a lover's hair, trying to turn her into a constellation
to sweeten the night air. And even in the ashes
of the starmaps the shining sets afire
and scatters like a library in the urn of the heart
on a wind that carries away the passions of this art
of exhuming more life out of a shallow grave than went into it,
I can still burn in the dark like the ore
of undisciplined diamonds. I can still squander my light
on the eyelids of the fallen flowers like a final kiss farewell.

Time wastes a death on me. Years ago the wind arose
and blew that candle out in the open window
of an abandoned house and ever since I've been
drifting like a ghost of smoke in a diaspora of stars.
I bequeath to the rose, the blood of my wounds.
To the thorns of the moon, my scars. To the night
I leave my eyes. To the wind, my breath. My voice
to the nightbird whose longing put my lyrics
to the picture-music that's haunted me all my life
like the song of someone who loved me once
before I was born and began to forget. But my heart
that I could judge the worth of like a bell bound to the earth,
or a feather of fire in hell, in the palm of my hand,
I give that to everyone like the windfall of a tree in a storm.

Black walnuts and wild apples. Solar systems
of peaches and pears in the leftover orchards
of organic gardens bearing the fruit of a habitable planet
at the autumn equinox of the New England asters
and modest suns of the Jerusalem artichokes
for the birds and the squirrels and the bears.
You can't keep what you won't give away
and it's no good to you in a grave when it comes time
to throw yourself overboard to stay afloat
and weather the squalls on your own sea of awareness
like an empty moonboat drifting through the fog
calling out to anyone who'll listen on the coast
of a new universe that discovers you like Atlantis
to a ghost of the old world looking for a passage
back to the more familiar labyrinth of home.

Liberation is freedom through creative form, not from it.
Liberation is life. And life is all entrance, no exit.
And you weren't asked at the door for any i.d.
And no one's going to stop you from lowering the fire escape
to get away from yourself. And if you were to ask
the mirrors of your own awareness, they'd stop staring at you
as if they'd never seen a new world savage before.
Everyone's going to leave an empty chair at the table
sooner or later. Like the skull cup of the moon
you've got to pour your prophetic lees out upon the earth
if you want to give your abundance another chance.

You can make lanterns out of fireflies in canning jars
or you can abandon them to the spiders
in the corners of your eyes like dreamcatchers and kites,
but if you want to shine of your own accord,
albino fish in the darkest depths with stars in their eyes,
you've got to see the sun flowering at midnight,
you've got to greet Venus in the Pleiades at dawn.
You've got to unsilver the mirror like a stripper
until you disappear like a bird in the house of life
through an open window like a crack in a cosmic egg
to feel the vastness of the sky that transcends
the limit of your wings. Despite the eye-witness
in the mirror, where time is always in arrears to eternity,
you've got to give it all up like your shining reflection
if you want to stay here for your own protection.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Life's A Genius

Life's a genius.
Not a mediocrity
looking for reasons to live in the morning.
Life's not a plan.
It's a spirit that doesn't need one
whether things go right or wrong.
Life is light and water.
It delights in going everywhere at once.
Mediocrities have genius
but they don't know how
to play with it like a child.
Their eyes peek
through knotholes in the fence
but they sacrifice their longing
on the conventional altars of common-sense
and never throw the ball back over the hills
like the moon coming up
or the sun going down
without worrying about
breaking the neighbours'windows.
Life throws whole mountains around
and turns the cornerstones into quicksand
and goes down with Atlantis
only to come up again like Moby Dick
spewing stars out of its blowhole.
Mediocrity has its feet planted firmly on the ground.
It never goes anywhere it hasn't gone before.
It's the kind of fire
that sleeps with an extinquisher
in case things get too hot to put out.
Mediocrity shares.
But life's the kind of genius
that gives like an apple-tree
that fully expresses itself
through infinitely more
than four seasons
no two alike
without caring if it's of any benefit to anyone.
Mediocrity's stunned by the blossoms.
Genius tastes the fruit.
Life's the kind of fire
that doesn't have a root
you can pull up and take home with you
to add to your garden
like a new word to your vocabulary.
Mediocrity spells it out.
But genius is the dream grammar
of a spiritual alphabet
that isn't used to taking orders.
It doesn't have twenty-six words for inspiration
like potted geraniums all in a row
and only one for freedom
it weeds out like morning glory
and dandelions
whose vagrancy threatens
to overwhelm the rest
with a longing
for the happier memories of their homelessness.
Mediocrity's a highway lined with roadkill.
Genius is a river
that goes around
not through the hill
and though there are fleets of waterlilies all along its banks
that gather like the Spanish Armada every year
to burn the infidel irises on the far shore
back into the true church
they never set sail.
They stay anchored to the coast
like loveletters from buddhas upstream
rooted in the flowing.
Mediocrity writes a great poem.
Genius lets the poem write itself.
Mediocrity signs its own vanity.
like a work done well.
But genius doesn't have
anything to sell
that ever belonged to anyone
in the first place.
Life is the generosity of space
that blows stars in your face
and gives you the eyes to see them.
Mediocrity confines the muses to a hareem
to compel their obedience.
Mediocrity is a great sea without any tides.
Genius sleeps with women
it never thinks of as brides
because it can feel their power
like a waterbird feels the waves
breathing like the sea beneath it
wild and profound
cannibal creators
oceans in the black rose
dripping like the blood
of enlightened virgins
from Kali the Crone Destroyer's mouth
eating her own like the moon
as if she were life itself.
Mediocrity never includes
enough destruction in its creations
to be credible.
It goes along with the swans
like afterlives in the moonlight
but not the snapping turtles
that drag them down into the mud
like constellations brought back to earth like kites.
Mediocrity defangs the moon.
Genius flows down
its first and last crescents like blood
knowing one fang kills you
and the other heals you for good.
Mediocrity is hemmed in
by thresholds it never crosses.
It never colours outside the lines
into the negative space
of the forbidden white beyond.
It's never gone gone gone forever gone beyond.
It's a star with a lazy eye in an expanding universe.
It never reads the writing on the wall
between the lines
like fossils.
It's afraid of the dark.
It fills whole galleries
with works like arks
with two of every kind
that are signed like truces
it made with its imagination
as if the imagination
ever kept its word
to anyone who was afraid of it.
Mediocrity keeps an eye on itself
like a documentary.
It comes to the right door
but it never gains entry.
It's lost in the labyrinth
of its own fingerprints.
It leaves too much evidence
at the scene of the crime
and turns over on genius
at the dropp of a dime
for getting away with everything
like the mastermind behind it all.
Mediocrity sings like a canary in a coal-mine.
Genius howls at the moon
among the mountains
high above the timberline
where she takes
her first and last crescents off
like handcuffs off an escaped convict.
Mediocrity lives
as if it's always
making up an alibi
for something it never did.
It's easier to lie about a sin of omission
than it is to tell the truth
as if you weren't signing
a celebrity confession.
Genius lives out in the open
where everything's well hid
like a mason jar full of fireflies
without a lid.
Mediocrity hugs the shore
like a lighthouse
that's afraid of everything
it can't shine a light on.
Mediocrity shows you its scars.
Genius shows you the wound.
Mediocrity's amazed
that the universe
got as far as it did on its own.
Genius walks the rest of the way alone
and doesn't care if the path it's on
reads like an exit or an entrance.
Mediocrity looks for acceptance.
Genius throws the audience out the window
like an old typewriter with keys missing
and all its loved ones
smiling in the front row
as if they were in on the know
and sits down by itself at the piano
and lets the silence play
whatever it wants
all night long.
Mediocrity makes a big splash
like an inert gas
in a flickering neon sign
advertising one night stands
in a cheap roadside motel.
Genius shapes space like black matter
that stays hidden
on the far side of gravity
behind the leaves
that grow on its boughs like galaxies
that wait like nests in the treetops
for the shamans babies and birds
to fill their bright vacancy
with the dark abundance
of a language older than words.
There are lyrical swords
that have mastered the art
of writing their eloquent history
in scars that pre-date cuneiform.
That's one muse.
And when the dark mother
who gave birth
to the ten thousand things
whispered the mystery of the universe
into her own ear
she said it in stars.
That's another.
And when you listen to the moon
as she summons her own
like lost echoes and mad shadows
to the fullness welling up inside her
she sheds her eyelids like loveletters
she's read over and over again
out loud to the lunatics
like cracks in a dry creekbed
or a prophetic skull
waiting for rain.
She's beauty pain and death
all rolled up into one
black rose of inspiration
she hands out
to those of us she loves
like an eclipse
without an explanation.
Mediocrity doesn't understand this.
Three lucidities in one black mirror
before the arising of signs
and all it's looking for
is its likeness
in the meaning of everything.
Humans may have been created
in the image of God
but the world's not created
in the image of humans.
It's a lot crazier than that.
Mediocrity makes a habit of significance
to justify its eyes
to the nightwatchman in the mirrors.
Genius pulls the hat out of the rabbit
and the magician disappears.

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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Galactic Darkness

Galactic darkness. Luna moths
drawn in by the zircon oases of
candles on the coffee-table
burning behind plate-glass
like the muses of consumer longing,
given how far it is to fly to the stars,
though nothing blocks the way,
their wings spread on the windows
like death masks and decals on a suitcase,
stamps on forlorn loveletters
that can labour over every sacred syllable
for effect, but still eat
the ashes of neglect for real.

But, then, again, how can you fail
if you're mad, if you can feel
in your blood, how the stars
can start fires here on earth
using the fireflies for chemical fuses?
Or the moon, her moths, for proxies?
Bless the beatific insanity of crazy wisdom
pursuing an earthly excellence
in the eye of inviolate perfection
to add its petal of light to the shedding
of the unsayable rose that ignites the soul
to the dragon of longing and devotion
that dwells within like serpent fire
waiting on the wind, that's you,
to give it wings with every breath you take.

Just because you can name all the trees
in the forest, doesn't mean
you've explored a wilderness
or suffered the dangerous ordeals
of your rite of passage through it
to uninhabitable states of mind
your adaptable presence
spontaneously humanizes
with the unlikelihood of you even
being there with your mountainous outlook
and sidereal overview about
the apparent impersonality of the universe
putting its roots down in you like fruitful tree
with a windfall of sustainable planets at your feet.

O little mystic, in midnight shades
of Prussian blue, it isn't true if you
were to look into the face of your god
your eyes would burn like an oilspill
on an ocean of of prescient wavelengths
that will turn on you like a snake
from the burning faucet of a toxic housewell.
Embrace what consumes you like fire at the stake.
In the blast furnace of the universe they peer into
like the source of the mystery that absorbs them
the astronomers have recast their eyes
into philosophically ground lenses and pyrex mirrors
silvered by a quarter ounce of their vaporous spirits
looking for clarity in a cloud of unknowing
the way the morning air cleans its stardust off with the dew.

Nothing less than everything all the time.
What does the world hold back in reserve,
or your bodymind all you need and prefer
to be as lost as a feather in the shadow of a sundial
as the nightbird you are now, afraid
of where the wind might carry you
far from the aviary of that golden cage
of a voice-box that's trained you
what to say to strangers who ask
when was the last time you went looking
for continents in a flood, or even
went down with one like Mu or Atlantis,
the kingfisher captain of the ship?

Take a cometary approach and leap
from your black halo into the sun
as if you were jumping orbitals
from a burning bridge where
the serious arsonists come
to commit suicide by flinging themselves
like fire on the water to see if,
like the reflections of the stars,
they can get over their hydrophobia,
by realizing the pilot lights of their fever
can never wholly be put out once
they start spreading like a wildfire
through the zodiac, house by house.

But you don't need a fire department
in the inflammable amethyst village
sequestered in the coffin of your spiritual life
like a seed afraid to come out of itself
like foxfire after a cosmic conflagration.
You don't need to dream your totem alone
in a fire-tower in the woods,
high among the crowns of the trees
polling fireflies and meteors by the minute,
to see if you've got what it takes
to get something started within yourself
that isn't just another demonic firecracker
you throw at the ghosts of your afterlives
like pebbles and beans, to scare them away.

Pinocchio runs to the pyre of his karma
in the sacred ashes of someone else's lifemask
though the flame at the end of his nose
is a dead giveaway he's attached too many strings
to the box kite self-immolating in the power lines
he thought he could do a quick fly over
like a transmigratory bird avoiding a snake pit
that's trying to catch its eye like a liar's holy book,
two minutes with a hook, then dead air
when the hits are shelved like golden ashes
in the urns of an elephant graveyard
where the poachers come to salvage
the tusks and crescent moons of their mnemonic relics.

Any fool can make a religion out of a salvationist alibi
by telling themselves that we were all no good
before we were born, and we all need to be recalled
like Toyota suvs for legally culpable emergency repairs
at mystically specific authorized garages
and shrines with forklifts for spiritual vehicles
to have their undercarriages inspected in the pits of hell
by gurus with Jiffy Lube all over their coveralls
greasing the wheel bearings of the celestial omnibus
to turn round and round and round
like the wheel of birth and death suspended in mid air
and going, as the crow flies, nowhere.

Don't scorn the fire in the darkness of the coal
that burns on the inside when there's nothing
but diamonds freezing at the door on the outside
or looking down in longing like the stars
at the flurries of chimney sparks rising
like intimate insights with the lifespan
of enraptured gnats at dusk, to illuminate
the fixed assumptions of the mythic shining
with impromptu constellations of their own
in a smaller darkness closer to home
that glow at night like astral plastic stars
stuck to the ceiling of a child's bedroom
made infinitely intimate and wondrous
according to the orders of her intuitive seeing
when she walks in the starfields, following
the fragrance of whatever's she's dreaming
whether the road evaporates like smoke
from a fire on a cold night in the distance,
or unfolds like a starmap of wildflowers,
a bird with a library of feathers for wings,
she embraces the vast, vacant, interstellar spaces,
the sublime, empty vastness of the tabla rasa
of her imagination, the light emerging out of the void
into the eyes of the uncarved lifemasks
of the most tender and homely of things.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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However Gratified I Am

However gratified I am, always I'm left with a hunger
for something more than I've tasted before
as if my emptiness were not perfect yet and I were
ready to let everything ride on a single throw of my skull
up against the wall just to see what falls out of its own will,
or change my species once in a while. Over-reaching
perhaps, spiritual pleonaxia, something amiss with my heart
or maybe I just don't want to be left behind, resigned
to an expanding universe I can't keep up with.

Things are as they are. It's clear. My mind's a hawk
with the blinders off. I've thawed the diamond.
Enlightenment flows through my heart like electricity.
I'm shining. I don't need a star to find my way home in the dark.
I can look upon the earth demonically.
I can see it through the eyes of the angel.
But the fireflies have taught me all they have to share.
And the lightning looks like a slacker compared
to the discipline I exact from myself just to
shock me out of the old growth forest in my heartwood
like a chainsaw, despite the nails I've hammered into it
like a crucifix without a saviour, an ark without a sail.

Though I've beamed like the full moon out over the harvest
the bounty of life never quite fills me all the way up to the brim.
I'm always a dropp shy of my longing for completion,
as if there were always a crack in the cup I drank from.
And this agony has summoned me for years
from as far back as my beginningless beginnings
like a bell that swings both ways between sex and death
and though I answer it like the s.o.s. of a lapwing
by the time I get there, it's irrevocably gone
as if it were just a ruse that were leading me on.
Deeper into life? Though what I make of it, like the stars,
I make alone? No trysts on the rainbow bridge at midnight?
No god to rejoice in these works of love within me?
No abyss to delight in the sheer absurdity of it?

A gleeman, a jester, a sacred clown, a morose fool,
a mystic, a scholar, a sailor that went down with the ship
just to stay true to the spirit of the storm within me,
an open doorway for the dead to come and go as they please,
an astronomical prodigy, an optician of mirrors and prisms,
a cowboy Zen master who rode into town on a seahorse,
a poet living on the edge of the word that thrives like weeds
around the graves in the cemeteries of the dead metaphors
I'm always digging up like a dog who buried a bone.
A gardener on the moon, an usher of history, a lover
who learned to sing like a martyr in the flames
of a gnostic heresy that gave up all its claims to knowledge,
a triviality that mentored the grand scheme of things
in the mystic specificity of not just the cosmos,
but the chaos under our noses as well, and all these avatars,
this pageant of characters I look back on now
like a children's crusade, consumed like straw dogs
in the fires of their adoration, and the smoke they left
like a script on the air, unencompassed by any direction of prayer.

A lunar mirage behind a veil of heat, a delusion of water
I raise to the lips of the man on the moon to drink slowly
from his own hands, and the mouth of the man he sees in them.
I hang on a hook through my gut in the air and speak
in tongues of pain nemetic forecasts of the New Year
as a volunteer for the mystic excruciation of agony into bliss,
without insisting that it should be so, and each time
I say next year that's going to be effortless, but it never is.
I've tried denying it to win its affirmation.
I've tried affirming it to have it issue a denial
and still it haunts my solitude like a mute siren I can' t resist.
And don't want to hear. And don't want to listen to.
This undemanding imperative to live more deeply, more darkly
than I ever have before such that all my dragons
are diminished into fireflies at a distance by comparison
trying to burn their way out of the blackholes
I enter like a rite of passage I can't do anything but trust
to the other side of why I risk so much to be here.

I can hear the wind howling through me like a wounded wolf
cauterizing its heart with stars. No mercy on the mountain,
I steel my blood cells with the carbon of old extinctions
and eat the pain, gnawing on a bone in my mouth.
Praying to my own echo for silence, cessation, release,
without taking a step backward over the edge of where I came from.
Let it come, let it come, let it come, encounter or collision the same,
exit or entrance, gate, wall, consummation or the upper limit
of it all just before it turns into a windfall of beginner's luck
and I'm the chance it takes I'm not playing dice with the universe.
That there's more to learn from a curse than a blessing.
That all this isn't just an agonizing farce of humourless shadows,
non-spatial impersonalities slowly being humanized
by life masks of scar tissue as a way of facing up to things.
That a calling isn't just a matter of putting up a plaque
to commemorate the garden life was first introduced to time in.
That humans weren't just born to be sundials of the flesh.
That suffering is a dark enlightenment that's mother of the stars
and compassion tastes of the tears of the tree it ripened on.
That ego isn't the king of thorns in a world full of balloons.

Or if so. A rose is a mere rhetorical device of the blood
and there's nothing beautiful about a puncture wound
to a mythically-inflated universe waiting for a heart transplant.
That art's just the phoney climax of an unbearable impotence
that breeds cunning and guile as an antidote to spontaneity
and it's an indictable offence to bear true witness
to the untenable relationship between the fiction of beauty
and the delirium of meaning that follows in its wake
like gulls behind a river barge of surgically removed body parts
being dumped out at sea like bad meat down a neighbour's well.
Anomie. Ennui. Menses and memes of homogenous angst. Normalcy
of reflexive desecration. Solipsistic nihilism. Home-grown anarchy.
Gnats in the dusk. Frenzied star clusters. Saddles without horses
lined up seriatim along the fence like the pelvises of extinct animals
waiting to get asked to the dance by a water ballet of wheelchairs.
Schools of thought slyly amended by X-box.
Heavily armed poets buying bad ammunition for their books
and the clarity of a life that was never there to return to
going through violent paroxysms of withdrawal in de tox.

Locusts dying in the starfields they swarmed like civilization.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?
I'm out here in the weeds, ploughing the moon back under.
Let the seeds fall where they will on any night of the calendar.
Intense heat. Unusual sprouts. I'm not a hunter, not a farmer.
No ploughshares beaten into swords, no swords into bells.
I don't read meanings into what I sow like dragons' teeth,
open gates to let things in and out or through.
I was an exile in progress the day before I was born
to be returned to my solitude like a waterclock
of siloes and urns on the moon scattering my ashes
among the stars that bloom to be consumed by their hunger,
as it is becoming increasingly clear to me I do
like a salmon leaping upstream against the flow of time,
to spoonfeed the abyss an elixir of remedial eyes.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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O Igneous Rose

O igneous rose, are you the furnace or the urn of the butterfly?
Or should I ask the vatic wind which pyre is mine?
Will I be be food for the stars again, will I mulch
the dark matter of the roots with my remains
or will my ashes retain some semblance of the light
like the ghost feeling in the heart of a spiritual amputee
or linger among archetypes like fossils in the Burgess Shale
that haven't reached their full potential yet?

Not Hell, not Heaven, not Hades, Sheol, Tartarus
Dis, Avernus, Jana, Jahannum, Nirvana, Samsara,
or the great abyss where nothing is even in the slightest,
and presence, and absence, and time aren't even
anachronisms of their past lives. I'm not going
anywhere when I die, because death is not discontinuous
from life in the known universe, though one's a lifeboat
and the other's what you need it for to stay afloat.

Wherever your mind walks in unison with your heart
deep in emotional thought without too much attention
to where you're going, you break trail like a river
and the stars start flowing into your alluvial fields
and the green mountains you left walk with you
all the way into the pyramids like the source of the Nile,
not tombs of death, but tombs of life pointing like starmaps
to the indelibility of your afterlife in Orion
as the scion of a great house of mystic hunters.

I'll be here. Just behind your eyelids. Like a dream
I'm having until things come true again for the sake
of distinguishing my extinction from one bone to the next
like yarrow sticks throwing away their crutches
like the hands of a clock to read the Book of Changes
to see what's bubbling up like the multiverse from the bottom
and every eye of air, each a complete science unto itself
or an occult art, where it's been fully realized
chaos is the root of all imagination
even when it's writing Horatian odes and haikus.
Chaos is as smooth as Hermes writing his own flightplan
with his heels, and where he arrives, is as much of a message
as the word he holds in his mouth
like coin for the ferryman in his moonboat
at the end of the long wharves that are the last to see us off
to the other side of everywhere. O come now

surely you didn't think life was going to let you off
its prophetic hook that easily before it got
its last crescent snagged like a koan in the mouth
of the golden fish that thrives in the dead seas of the moon
that reels it in for questioning, only to throw it back?
Everybody satisfied with the answers for awhile
until the questions get bored with hanging around
like mere coathangers, and bite off more of you
than they can chew again. No more than a windowpane

can hold the whole of the sky the way any dropp of rain can,
can you without washing the dye out of your tears like an iris
that encircles the blackholes like rainbows around a wishing well
where what you see is what you wished for from the beginning
because chaos conforms to any vision of reality and delusion
that conceives of it as a feature of the conditioning mind
that shapes it like a simulacrum of the inconceivable.
So the same well that the stars and fireflies look into
holds a mirror up to them like a reflecting telescope.
And all it takes is a quarter gram of vaporized aluminum
to silver the whole universe with a prism and a dropp of dew
trembling in the web of a spider mount like a psychic butterfly.

Chaos and cosmos. Igorance and enlightenment. Reality
in contradistinction to delusion. Life and death yoked
like two oxen to the oxymorons of the helical star wheels
that dance like Sufis at the naves of their retrograde crossroads
to weird what direction to go in like witching sticks
in the mouths of the dragons that undo the locks
on the gates of the rain with skeletal keys of lightning.
I shall be here. Where the light and the water
illuminate the blossoms and quench the roots of things
at the intersection of time and the timeless where
there's no more need of religion than there is crosswalks
or moonboats and ferrymen to the other side of the river
that know what season it is by the colour of your sails.

I've always flown under the skull and crossbones
like a sea wolf that didn't evolve back into a whale
howling in the mountains on the moon in a savage agony
of the longing to live yourself to death as intensely as you can.
The sublimity of laughter that makes the clown profoundly sacred.
That beatifies the candles like eyes in the unapproachable darkness.
That takes one world after another in hand
like a party balloon and lets the clowns and magicians
twist it into the shapes of worlds within worlds
where the ground of being is always and only
the liberated exercise of their creative imaginations.
And every world we pass through the sum of all
we've imagined it to be, and a little bit more
just to keep the mystery from being perfectly contained
in the three and a half pounds of starmud we call a brain
and root our shining in it like flowers gone to seed.

Make a muse of the wind, or a church out of a rock, the same,
or pitch a tent or a pyramid on the dunes of the shifting stars,
or in a nunnery of desert mermaids who gave up singing to take vows
make your obeisance to the unknown with laughter, grace, and style.
Best show in town, and the ticket was free, and who
so ungrateful they could leave the table that fed them, fouled?
Holiness isn't a threshold where you take your body off
at the door and separate your mind from the Braille of the flesh
you need fingertips to read just as you need eyes in your blood
to see a lover's heart from the inside out. True holiness
is not holy. It's not fool proof. It's not stake-prone.
It doesn't pour honey all over your head in the morning
just to feather you with doves and expect you to glow
like secret diamonds in the dross of the ore. Listen.

You can hear the light walking across the grass.
The snakes are teaching their occult wavelengths
to the shadows of the trees leafing in the moonrise like veils.
There are mad poets all through these pathless hills
waiting for inspiration like a singing coach
to raise havoc among the high notes of the bush wolves
that leave you guessing what they're really mourning for
that's actually missing. Grains of sand,
we grow like pearls and stars and expanding universes
beyond the limits of what constrained us yesterday.
The seed splits its cotyledons like Solomon's baby
and scarlet runners burn like heretics at the stake
in an auto de fe of enlightened immolation
of serpent fire running up the spine to get to the stars
as a circumpolar constellation with small flammable flowers
before the last watch of the night blows them out at dawn.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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When The Spirit Moves

When the spirit moves it's the summation
of everything I am without definition,
the averaging out of all my existential crucials,
the dark matter of the moment
expressing the perennial insight
not as signs in the light, but light itself.

I don't know what it is or it is not,
maybe just an enculturated meme of antiquated emotion,
or a way of hallowing the next breath I take.
I could be cynical and say it's fake.
But then I'd have to eat my own ashes
with a long spoon, and what would I do
for an encore? Boring if the truth
doesn't leave you gaping in wonder at something.

I've seen the wind at night in full moonlight
silvering the hot gold of the wheat
as if it were cooling a sensitive burn on human skin.
I've seen the fireflies in the valley
illuminate the cloud of unknowing
after a summer thunderstorm
like a chaos of lighthouses on shore
signalling to an empty lifeboat.
I've been engulfed by the fearful immensities
in the heart of a woman when her dark energies
start to accelerate space up to the speed of light
and even the most quotidian moments,
lipstick on a rumpled kleenex on the kitchen table
beside the abandoned mirror that couldn't
get a handle on things, blood on the bedsheet,
the cooling red of a farewell rose, all,
supercharged with chameleonic frequencies
of eternity forever the silence of time and the void
when you're mystically terrified by the passage
of beauty and passion into the carrying forth
of a waterclock just back from the wellsprings of it all.

Who knows where the time goes and everything with it?
I suspect it follows me home like a feral cat
that wants me to adopt it so it can bring me in
out of the cold. I used to think that spirit
was a smudge of a ghost, a gesture of air,
an aurora borealis in a twilight zone
where the sun shines at midnight and the snow blooms.
I used to try to touch the intangible with my imagination.
The void arrays the things of the world.
Can the mind do any less as a serious creator?
That's when I discovered the fingertips of the very hand
I reached out with was the spirit reading Braille
because I was blind to what the dark constellations
in the black mirror were trying to tell me
engaging the spirit as a scribe and interpreter
one moment, then blowing it in my face, the next
like a squall of stars in a vertiginous gust of wind.
Snuffed out like a matchbook just when I thought
I had things flaring away like sunlight at a rave.

The spirit that witnesses is not a cartographer
with a surveying team on the dark side of an Orphic skull
to assess if all its softer continental plates
had synarthritically reassembled themselves
like Humpty Dumpty back into a cosmic egg.
The lamp might be shattered but that doesn't mean
the light's broken. The spirit never really mends.
It just keeps on shining in a wounded space
until it doesn't feel the swords of the assassins of water
arming their shadows for a firefight with a dragon
that brings the rain like a medic to a battlefield
where the slain forgive their slayers for healing the moon.

The heart governs in silence. But the spirit moves
like a processional stillness through the mind
that shakes the diamonds out of the cuffs of your crazy wisdom
like dew from the mandalic cobwebs of the morning
and turns the lint in your empty pockets out
to show you you were richer than you thought
before you left home to seek your treasure elsewhere.
You cherish the jewels at the expense of your eyes.
One star tweaks your devotion more than the rest.
And they all go out at the same time. The spirit
doesn't refuse the mind anything that allures it.
The full moon doesn't obstruct the flight of the blue herons.

The spirit isn't the voice coach or dream grammar
of what gets written about your life long after
you're too far, too long, the moment you're gone, to read it.
The spirit is like sentient space. It doesn't come
with an entrance or an exit. The axis of the earth
might be the tent pole of a circus going up in a starfield,
and all the constellations swinging on a trapeze
in a travelling freak show of ring masters
and snake oil salesmen pitching their wares
on a blazing midway meant to befuddle the senses
into buying a peek at the grotesque and ugly
so you can secretly gloat at the shapeliness
of your own reality depending upon the comparison
for your sense of ascendency, your shaky rung
on the ladder out of the snakepit it's got a foothold in
like a black hole cornerstone in an avalanche of galactic quicksand.

Spirit is flame, muse, familiar, sybil and friend.
No more than butterflies need to be liberated from their cocoons,
or dragonflies from their chrysales, the gerry-mandered huts
of their koans and fortune-cookies, does the spirit
need to be liberated from its earthly transformations. Who
can liberate the wave from water. Who can liberate
space from space? Just because the blossoms blow away
doesn't mean they're trying to flee the apple tree.
Let the spirit dance to its own picture-music.
Let the spirit play like the sea with its own weather.
In a bifurcated world that revels in reflecting its opposite
to get a rise out of consciousness, need one eye
be the disciple of the other? Speak quickly
or you'll regret you forgot the answer
and start looking for intercessors to do it for you.

Dark watershed and radiant wellsprings of the muses
hauling up buckets of stars to bathe in like a moonrise,
your spirit a fountain, what need for it to drink spit
out of other people's mouths, or masticate
the sacred syllables of someone else's rapture at being alive
but its own? Whether you're at a foodbank
or sipping nectar from the birdhouses of the gods,
even the angels can't chew your spiritual food for you
and have it do you any good. Say, ah,
when you look at the world with infantile appetites
like gaping new moons trying to add to their collection
of silver spoons. Let the thief run off with them
like a crow with an eye for shiny things. The sooner
you get rid of the tinfoil, the sooner the shining
will get real for once and everything you rejoice in,
everything you feel and think and grieve for,
your commonsensical ignorance of the goat paths
up the mountain, and the avalanche of asteroids
you bring down on yourself as if your valley were a grave
the mountain dug for itself, to the enlightened lunatic
of your crazy wisdom raving in laughter with the wolves
at the rising moon, everything thereafter will taste of stars
in the eyes of the ageless friend you've made
of your own presence sweetening the air of a late October night.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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All The Good Reasons That Get In The Way Of Writing

All the good reasons that get in the way of writing,
baby needs new shoes, and you're conscientious and diligent,
will kill you faster than the bad ones
that brought you to the edge of your mindstream in the first place
to dip your skull like the cup of the moon
in the wellsprings of your own imagination
instead of always sipping spit from other men's mouths.

I'm not saying don't do what you must do
to be a decent human being, or as close as you can get,
but when you're creatively underwhelmed
by the rising Rockies of Circumstance
losing their footing like an avalanche of cornerstones
coming down on you like a barrage of asteroids,
you better find a mountain gear deep within yourself
to power you out of the way of your own collapsing mindscape.

Don't come to a reasonable truce with the ashen exigencies
of the underwhelming reality love married you to,
or pontificate like a hollow urn on the tragic absence
of even so much as an echo of yourself to make a comeback
or tell me you squandered it all like apple bloom
when everything I've read of what you haven't written
smells like smoke from a distant pyre on the wind.

Remember the fire. Even if you have to burn underground
through the occult roots of the cedars, or bury yourself
powdered in red ochre under the hearthstones
of your prophetic forebears erasing your picture-music
from the cave walls like graffiti under a bridge
between this world as it never is when you look too closely,
and the one that's working on you like spiritual water on limestone.
Remember the fire. Remember the discipline
of disobedience that tempted you to steal it in the first place
like a Spartan boy with a hot fox, as it
eats you from the outside in without you saying a word
lest you get caught ratting your deepest secret out in agony.
Or regenerative Prometheus chained to a rock like a salamander
born in the fire of his own afterbirth. Know this.
Lightning doesn't strike the roosters of fire
that crow like weathervanes pinned
like a medal from an old campaign to the axis of the wind
as if the dawn were some kind of triumph over the night.

Cradle that fire in your hands like a bird that's fallen to earth,
or a lamp of holy oil in a niche of unanswered longings,
a candle in a hurricane of boarded up windows,
the light of your own mind, casting shadows of time
like a sundial with a wilder imagination
than its usefulness might at first glance suggest.

Nor will it do to catch a falling star and put it in your pocket,
or pour gold down your throat like the Parthians did Crassus
and expect to shine like a lighthouse in a diamond mine
with the voice of an oracular canary in a cage.
You've got to live inexhaustibly
what you're going to write about first
if you want to burn down the Library of Alexandria
in a gamma ray burst of creative annihilation
because you can only master as much life
as you've surrendered to like a heretic at the stake
or a pine cone germinating the seeds of enlightenment
like a zen hermit in a forest fire. Don't take
all the beautiful green swords flaming like wild irises
whose beauty you fall upon like an honourable death
and abuse them like the palings of a gate or a fence around paradise.

Even if you've only got a firefly of talent
left in the caldera of an extinct volcano,
a spark in the firepit of a burnt out dragon,
a smouldering ember from last night's fire in the stove
on a cold morning when the windows are blazing with ice,
you must be crazy and wise enough oxymoronically
to be the benign tyrant of your own Golden Age
like Pericles of Athens, with a politically incorrect
lover for a muse you look upon like the Parthenon
as if she were a phase of the moon. Even if
you love the swaying silver of the wind
over the heavy-grained harvest breaking water
like a bell under a redundant blue moon,
don't shrink from threshing it if you want to
share it like bread with people as hungry as you are
to eat the heart of the king of the waxing year,
like Wodin made a sacrifice of himself to himself,
or life thrives on itself like a soccer team
that crashed landed on a mountaintop,
or the cosmic eggs of turtles feeds a manger of seagulls,
and the grass eats the grazer, and the grazer eats the grass.
Or if you're too sensitive to compassionately take life
in order to give it, sharpen the edge of your golden sickle
on the whetstone of the moon, and express your mercy
as Muhammad suggested, with a quick kill
you can hold love responsible for like a spiritual alibi
if you've got genius enough to heal it like a inspired liar.

You have to be part salmon. A battering ram
swimming upstream against the flow of circumstance
like the gate of a water castle you're besieging
to lay your blunted sword down in tribute
among the sacred pools of life that gave it to you
at the beginning of your song, like fire from their eyes
to wage a holy war of one on their behalf
you're doomed to lose like a conflict that progresses
from one defeat to the next against ever stronger adversaries,
angels in the way, shaitans obstructing the path for your own good,
who realize, too late, with every encounter,
you're growing stronger than the best reasons
could have anticipated strategically.

Be a good apple tree, lyrically seasoned and epically strong
as Lao Tzu and the Druid aptly described you
like the sacred syllable in the heartwood of the letter Q,
and express yourself completely without intending
the betterment of anything, though all do,
from wasps and birds to bears and humans
with the beauty of your blossoms, the wisdom of your leaves,
and the generosity of the sacrifice that laid you out
like a windfall of dice enshrining the eyes that can see
like seeds in the sibylline books of the apple
the risk they'll need to take tomorrow like a fire swallower
of the sun and the moon to keep their planets shining
from the inside out in the Goldilocks zone
of a light that's been sweetened immanentally
by a dangerously habitable life holding up
a lantern in the dark that disappointment, defeat and struggle
could no more put out than a volunteer fire brigade of waterclocks
for the best of reasons could put out the stars in an arsonist's heart.

Set the world afire like a flame that writes on the wind,
poppies flaring uncontrollably across your field of vision.
Burn like a two-eyed passion for everything
you can see and be on the earth that consumes you
in the equinoctial fires of your vernal immolations,
not a magnifying glass that intensifies the sun into
the capricious focus of an idle boy on a cruel afternoon
shepherding ants like prophetic semi-colons into a furnace.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You May. You May Not Come. Maybe Tonight. Or Not

You may. You may not come. Maybe tonight. Or not.
When it's not cooking cosmic eggs, boiling heretics
in the hot oil of bubbling cauldrons, the hourglass
is sandpainting sidereal mandalas with stars
to empower the wind to blow them away,
bones of grey chalk watergilding my flesh in ash.

What did I say? What did I say that was so unorthodox
all the bells of your body were left speechless
at the sight of so many grails trashed like empties
from a car window like a litter of roadkill
along the side of the highway? Did I transit
the zenith of the burning bridge of your last loveletter,
or should I have jumped, or fell, or cannonballed in
to make a bigger splash in the blood vats of your heart?
Maybe a meteor to render your old lovers extinct?

I watch the cold windows until they begin to percolate
in an unexpected thaw of disciplined sorrows.
It's getting late. Your absence, a glacial waterclock
followed by a lot of patronymic colons about who
begat what upon whom. I don't want to meet your father.
I'd kill him on the spot. I don't want to prove
to your mother I'm going to be good to you
in ways that she was not as she soaks
the blood from the carpet like gouts
of insincere candlewax. The price you pay
for three meals a day and a creative finishing school
where you can afford the kind of problems
the poor don't make enough to imitate.

They worry about where the next meal
is coming from. You were born knowing
how far out the soup spoon was supposed
to be aligned from the begging bowl
like a shepherd moon in orbit around Neptune.
And me? I eat out of my skull on the run
whenever I'm writing poetry to the moon
in one long howl of anguished wanting.

Were the diamonds too hard? Wasn't I
bituminous enough when I entered the dark
to show you how I could shine out of
my own inner resources like two hundred million
urns of light gathered from the firepits of the stars
by the crows that keep pecking out my eyes
like jackhammers looking for the motherlode?
And when I watched you slicing the throats
of your long-necked swans like ballet dancers
and black daffodils on an angle to preserve them longer
as cut flowers on the coffee table, didn't I
make a Zen comment on the way you'd arranged them?

I've been scarred by love like a clay tablet in cuneiform
in the library of Ashurbanipal. The crow
has scratched at my flesh to show me where to bury
my dismembered body parts to guarantee
a higher yield over the ensuing light years.
The cat claw of the moon has caught my eye
more than once. Fireflies in a bird net,
I've cauterized my optic nerves on the constellations
of my own signage to keep my brain from seeing
what my heart was afraid to reveal to itself.
I was a blind prophet being led away by a child.

I could witness on the dark side of my seeing
the bird eating arachnids with two red stars for eyes
weaving their wavelengths into low frequency webs
like the bass strings of a slack guitar
to catch the fire of the morning dew in a false dawn
like Cherokee water spiders with hairy down
and scarlet stripes casting magical spells
like the geoglyph on the Nazca pampas
with Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka
in the hourglass waist of Orion trying to squeeze
its abdomen into a whalebone corset
before the Arabs changed its sex
into the belt of a less subtle Hunter
with a trophy line of scalps for wampum.

One of them mine. My eyes transfixed
by the paradigm of an eclipse being peeled back
like a black eyelid of time, or raven tresses
from the skull of the moon. I've known
the innocence of the crow when its feathers
were albino white before its failure turned sinister
as a starless night. A penury of insight
pearl diving for diamonds in a tarpit of love
that swore the new moon would last forever
like apple bloom and silver on the inside of the ore.

But sometimes the Artesian springs we plant
in the starmud of our hearts come up like black holes
and flowers of oil and what's left of the shining
is the tinfoil of a trickster shaman substituting
his hunting magic to gratify the eyes of fools
that revel in their amorous delusions and spurn
the astringencies of enlightenment that burn
like circumpolar suns at midnight illuminating
nothing but the skins we shed to let the snake
out the box like Draco, without getting bit
by the picture-music of our own motives
trying to charm the serpent fire with backbone flutes
jamming with the downed powerlines
of our badly tuned spinal cords riffing
with the cosmic spiders writing the lyrics
of our myth of origins like electrical dreamcatchers
with toxic pincers like the tuning forks of splintered stars.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Eyes In The Shadows, In Blood, In Space

Eyes in the shadows, in blood, in space, incubating the light
that has yet to be born, wild asters in the deflowered fields of death,
and the return of the living out of the eyeless abyss, delinquent,
and a redness in the air of this September night,
saturating it like a deep wound it holds under its breath,
a black rose, a fossilized thorn that no longer grows old,
memories fixed like crucified bats to the sticky brown stars
of the fanatical burdock trying to wear me like a starmap
as if every day of my life has felt like the approach of autumn
watching the constellations turn like the pages of a calendar,
a waterclock of new moons flowing like dark matter,
sundials at midnight encircling me like shark fins
slashing the water like sabres with surgical precision
and their eyes, oblivion, a focus of shadows, perennial night
after a supernova of dismemberment, dehumanizing horrors
in a hydrodynamic abattoir. Spirits of old root fires
smelling of pine and cedar at large in the dark like hunting magic.

And the clouds a wolf pack of shapeshifters among the stars,
the exhilaration of spiritual wariness out in the woods alone at night
where it's unwise to trust anything too beautiful at first sight,
and a sudden flash of inspired self-destructive courage
to do just that in protest of the abuse of beauty as a Venus fly trap.
But it's not hard to tell a real muse from a false one
because a real muse never wastes her passion on the sane,
and if there isn't an occult side to a poet who works his madness
like a medium in the dark he had to sacrifice his eyes to see
beyond the visuals of the retinas and the cameras
with lizard eyelids that blink like guillotines, into
these visionary realms where galaxies are shed
like the feathers of migrating swans, gravity's gone,
and if you want to go up, you've got to go up without a parachute on.
Mystic physics. The illogic of the heart delighting
in the absurdity of itself just because it can and you can hear
a sword master of black Zen singing his heart out in a brothel:
A good heretic never disciplines his disobedience.

The brutal moon offers me the cup of my own skull
and says drink, and I know it's death to hesitate
because you lose control of everything in the moment
if you do, so I drink it like an elixir of dark tears
from the eye of the shark in eclipse, and I peer
into the black mirror of a midnight lake to see
if I'm still alive or dead, and the mirror breaks
like the unleavened bread of a gnostic gospel in my hands,
wholly enraptured by a spell I wasn't ready to wake up from,
and I can feel the lustrous radiance of a light
so inconceivably darker than the one I go by
like a shadow of that, the ferocity of the clarity
immolates my heart with a terrible joy
in a prophetic furnace of hot diamonds
that howl like the insights of a firestorm of dragons in extasis
breaking out of their cosmic shells like stars out of the void
shining out of the dark heart of things within
like eyes seasoned by compassion
for the low hanging bells and fruits of the earth
trying to express the infinite solitude between birth and death
where we walk alone together forever with everyone
and everything, like pilgrims sleepwalking
in the unattainable dream that animates us all
to keep on divining the inspired limitations of the impossible.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Born Without A Silver Spoon

I was born without a silver spoon.
On a raining day in the month of june.
We lived in a face me and face you,
it was a crowded neighbourhood.

Born without a silver spoon.
To have a three square meal
is like wishing for the moon.
Many times we bed the night,
cold night without food.

Without a silver spoon.
My father struggled me through school.
Primary, secondary and university
education i made it through.

A silver spoon.
My wish which must come true.
For i dream of it everday.
Think about those moves i'll make.
Praying to God for steps to take.

Though i was born without
silver spoon.
Yet if heaven be true,
my family's pain will not be vain.
I was born without a silver spoon
shall be erased.
To my generations it shall be a tale.
And only a silver spoon shall remain.

poem by Enebeli Ifyprada
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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There's Nothing Cozy About Real Beauty

There’s nothing cozy about real beauty.
That’s why it scares you to death
when you’re around it. You sense
that it disdains to kill you
simply because it knows it can
but that only makes you beg for the knife
even more, even deeper, until
you’ve suffered more death
than you ever knew there was to suffer.
It’s the same with the truth. The truth
isn’t the act of a well-meaning
coffee-table sentiment,
a hundred dollar book
of recycled paper
to help save the Caribou,
an a chequered impressionist table-cloth
with compositionally balanced butter-knives
that have never tasted blood in their lives.
If you can’t hear the shriek
of the red-tailed hawk as it plunges
toward a mating pair of killdeer
executing an aerial ballet in May
that would make you cry it’s so beautiful,
you can’t hear the hummingbirds
at the holly hocks either
even if you know sign language.
And no more than the truth, poetry
isn’t a mirror you hold up to nature
with preconceived notions of what
you want to see reflected there.
In hunting season around here
the truth can bleed Bambi upside down
from the bough of a willow
that let’s its golden tresses down
all the way to the ground
until its tips are dyed in blood.
The truth can tear the heart of a wolf out
and eat it raw in front
of a classroom of schoolchildren
while it’s still beating.
Go ask any child army.
Go ask any street kid in Ottawa
or any bushwhacked adolescent in Lanark.
You asked me to read your poems
without holding anything back from you
and I have and I won’t.
You keep a tidy house
on the right side of the tracks
of a zodiac with astro-turf lawns.
And I see all your candles
have been dipped in scented wax
and write right-handed
with glowing nibs on the reverent air
and there’s a stick of sandalwood incense
protruding from a buddha’s belly-button
that makes me wonder
whether he’s committing hiri kiri
or lowering his lance at a joust
to let a lady tie a ribbon to it
as you have most of these poems
to designate them your champions.
You’ve bomb-proofed your church so well
with so many lesser lights
in cages and black outs there’s no chance
you’ll ever be struck by a bolt of inspiration.
The lightning doesn’t send messages
like sweetgrass in the beaks of doves.
You sip from the muses like bottled water
from the tears of crystal skulls.
But you haven’t yet learned how
to swallow their watersheds on the moon
or drink blood from the skull of your own
in a single gulp for fear
they’ve been contaminated by fracking.
Flying fish in a sea of shadows
that’s always at full tide
but you never reveal
the constellations of dead starfish
that reek to high heaven
like the stink of enlightenment on the bottom
when the tide bleeds out
like a white-tailed doe.
Happy lifeboats moored safely in port
as if there were nothing to risk or rescue
but a new paint job
as a storm front moves in
like a curtain call of judgmental grey.
All your feral cats have been fixed
and the darkness has no claws or fangs,
and that wilderness that used to howl
in an agony of sex and longing
under your windowsill of potted herbs
all unnerving night long
now purrs impotently in your lap.
You strew your path with rose-petals
but when have you ever walked barefoot
on toxic thorns or the plinths and eyelashes
of the splintered chandeliers of the stars?
You cut the polar ice-caps off
the extremes of a hard-boiled planet
and only eat the temperate zones
you can scoop out with a silver spoon
like the front left parietal lobe
of Humpty Dumpty’s sunny brain.
Blackholes do more to enhance
the radiance of stars and fireflies,
ignite the fire of dragons
on the other side of a wormhole hourglass
into the next coincidence
of a harmoniously contradictory world
than all those sunbeams
you try to keep on
like night lights in a morgue
because you’re afraid to sleep with the dead
and they don’t want to wake up without you.
And I’m not saying
you need to go out and mess up,
trample on your own garden,
turn Taurus loose
in the china shop of the Pleiades.
No one can go out and think their way
into an experience they haven’t had yet.
They merely experience their own thought.
Just another poetry book
having sex with itself
in the hopes of winning an award
to make it feel fulfilled enough
it can take what’s real for granted.
But even Rimbaud who
dissociated his sensibilities rationally
and then killed a man with a stone
on a construction site in Cyprus
discovered how dangerous it is
to broach the spontaneous deliberately.
As for me, I’ve learned
to delight in the despair
of my own crazy wisdom.
As for you, you might start
by turning the light and around
and looking into the darkness within you
not as a smudge on the reputation of your lilies
but as a chunk of coal
that didn’t let your diamonds down.
A suggestion I suggest you ignore
if you’ve understood anything I’ve said
about the nature of poetry
that makes any petty sense at all to you.
And the next time you
you run into your own clarity
like Galileo trying to show you
through his telescope
there are sunspots in your field of view
like bruises on a banana
and the moon is pock-marked
by one too many facelifts,
don’t try to paint the lens
as if you were airbrushing
the imperfections out of your own eyes
just realize how important it is
to open them from the inside out.
And as for those little black ants,
that keep inciting a riot of words
you’ve got no crowd control over
you keep setting honey-traps for,
to keep them from running all over
the planetary orb
of your moonlit peony in bud
like a chaos of minutes
looking for a fixed place
on a spherical waterclock
as if they were all
running out on time simultaneously.
Trust me, or don’t, they’ll let you know
when the sun shines at midnight
and your hour’s come round to bloom.
Meteors cry like diamonds
for the species they make a big impact upon.
And volcanoes eventually
weep their way into islands
that will be seeded by birds and castaways.
The eye of the rose
looks into the secret heart of the worm
and sees the wings of tearful loveletters
being born like butterflies in the rain.
And then the sun appears
and dries them out
like laundry on the line.
Or the negative of an eclipse
hung up in a dark room
like a flypaper map of the stars
in an alternative universe
on the other side of your eyes
that hasn’t come up with a name,
a fixed place, or a myth of origins for you yet
until you’ve passed
like the tiny planet of a firefly
through the gravitational eyes
of a constellation of black holes
without going out
like a flashlight you keep shining
nervously into the dark doorway
of a dragon’s mouth when you write
to see what was making the noise
like the universal cosmic hiss
of a flamethrower in a snakepit
of oracular wavelengths
that keeps you from going
downstairs to find out.
As a Zen master once said.
The stone is lustrous
but there’s nothing inside.
The ore is different
but from it comes gold.
And as any poet knows
who’s ever been inspired
you polish gold in fire.
You don’t write white noise
to block the darkness out
as if you were afraid
of things that go bump in the night.
Don’t fall like a snowflake on a furnace
then try to sip your tears like spit
from its prophetic mouth when you melt.
Be a star, be a Chinese lantern,
be a fire-kite of burning insight.
Light upon light means
the darkness shines as well
on the inside as it does without
whether you see it or not.
The moonrise of an emotion
follows the sunset of a thought.
Two tides of the same ocean,
the highs and the lows
the crest and the trough
of the same wavelength we’re all on.
And the mountain you’re trying to climb
is only as high and white
as the valley is deep and dark.
Not two is the furthest thing
you can say in a universe that isn’t a lie.
There’s a lot of shadowless noon
in your impeccable poetry
but where’s the starless midnight
on the other side of of your eyes?
Don’t orphan your first born
to legitimize your poems
like a forged birth certificate
you hope everyone will recognize
as your rightful place
in a table of contents
with the good taste of a menu.
A suggestion I suggest you ignore
if you’ve understood,
deeply understood
anything I’ve said
about the nature of poetry
that makes any petty sense at all to you.
And I don’t say this to be kind or cruel.
You know how
to harvest the full moon
like a sparrow
the gleanings of the light,
twelve grain whole wheat bread,
but you don’t know how to sow stars
on the dark side of an eclipse
that will sprout and bloom,
a phoenix feathered in wild fire
that will catch on and spread
like life itself
like the syntaretic spark
of the timeless with the fruitless dead.
Out of the dark abundance
of watersheds and roots,
the phoenix energy of your cells,
the bright vacancy of the full moon,
a blossom on a dead branch,
the new moon of a crow in autumn
on a green bough of night birds
that are never at a loss for words
when the truth and the beauty
of the light coming out of the darkness
leaves them as speechless
as a starmap of fireflies
where the constellations have no names,
going up in flames.

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Long For Words

I long for words that don’t exist;
I long for a light
that my eyes have never flowered in before,
but hope is a gravedigger
singing in a pit
and I removed those bones long ago
to accommodate the newly dead.
Now I conduct night-classes under a bridge
for working constellations.
And I don’t really know what I’d say
if the silence were ever
to shape the urn of my voice
into an uncontainable emptiness again;
so that every dropp of dew
on every blade of grass,
while the moon rose
through the broad-leaved basswood grove
were wrapped like a sky
in the skin of my eyes.
What can be understood
is already slurred by signs,
and the best way to hide
is to go looking for yourself.
Forgetting for the moment
that ignorant doors
are not looking for enlightened keys,
maybe I would still try to express
that first dark kiss
of the original fountain-mouth
that stepped out of the tide of an eclipse
like an island or a woman
who wore the shore of her own shapeshifting body
to walk like a watershed into consciousness.
But the light cloaks as well as reveals
and eventually the eyes
evaporate into their visions,
and the hearts of the seers
hang like drops of blood
above the cold and empty cauldron of the universe.
Time and suffering
will enlighten the profound folly
of your most sacred delusion
and in a black lightning flash
before the arising of signs
you’ll know whose signature the wind is.
How many tomorrows ago,
furious and young,
did I make a ladder
out of violated thresholds
to climb up to the window of a burning lighthouse
and rescue myself like a child
from this moment now?
Follow someone else’s road
and you walk your own wake.
Make your own
and you are everywhere
the immoveable seed
the world flowers for.
When your silence turned grey,
and your jewels
no longer hosted the light
in their darkening palaces,
and your echoes rewrote the original play
for three actors with the same voice,
and all your one-legged bridges
stood on a single bank,
longing to straddle heaven,
and you let your heart wither
until it was only a medicine bag
full of sacred dirt,
and what you once knew
without a witness,
you now forced yourself to believe in
like a sinner you thought you were
pressed into jury duty against herself
because eventually all the lies come true
and sin is just another form
of back porch enlightenment
to obviate your entrance
into the greater delusion of virtue.
Do you remember what it was like
to see clearly
before you poured
all this snakefire and moonsilt into the well?
Now you’re trying
to wash a mudslide off
in a dropp of dew,
straining to cast the shadow of a mountain
behind every grain of dust.
And you’re afraid
to be afraid that all
your goofy revelations of personal apocalypse
are cliches of other people’s wisdom
on the back of a matchbook,
that you’ve passed
through the gates of midnight thousands of times
only to find
you’re still veiled like a nun
by the light of your own passage.
The answer shows up
and you start looking for the question.
You wear your nakedness on the outside
to disguise your masks
and what kind of a lover can you be now
that you’re too shy
to undress in front of yourself?
How many skeletons
have you tried like keys
on the doors of your emptiness,
trying to get out of yourself,
only to realize
the abyss between your legs
has no inside or outside,
that the void never checks its mail
for love-letters,
that all your scars and bruises
rolled up into a ball
still don’t make a moon
with a sea and an atmosphere?
You never liked me
because I wouldn’t lie to you,
and though I ached for the oblivion
in the black fire of your lust,
and waited for you to rise from the lake
to claim my burning body,
and loved you like the death I was meant for,
I never could teach you
to swim through ashes with dragons,
or convince you you weren’t blind
when the mirrors turned their backs
to prove by the light of a brighter darkness
your eyes were your own.
You shot past me
like a near-sighted asteroid
thrown like the first stone
at a planet grown stubborn with life
the cold, igneous ore of your porous heart
could not sponsor on its own.
You took what you thought was aim
and squeezed one off
the trigger of the moon
as the hammer fell on the anvil of your body
and you recoiled like a serpent with intent.
You missed
and have gone on as you are forever,
stunned by the concussion that proved
beyond the shadow of a misfire
you’re bad ammo,
a leaky white phosphorus grenade
advancing rapidly toward the front lines
of a war with yourself
already well lost
when you came out of the tent
of your high command like a worm
with the battle plan of your next breath
and the junkie poppies
that blow like kisses between your crosses
row on row
o.d.’d en masse like a blood transfusion
rather than remember
anything about you.
Some people just make more of an impact
than others I guess.
But I haven’t completely forgotten you.
You were the pygmy empress
in the shadows of the single matchstick pillar
of your own self-renown,
trying to plough the moon with a sword
that couldn’t tell the difference
between a crater and a crown.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Living On A Planet That Kills More People Than It Heals

Living on a planet that kills more people than it heals.
And the most dangerous of predators, our own ideals
turning on us like ingrown hairs, solar flares the wind
blew in our faces without any of the veils or auroral graces
that used to adorn our amazement at what our eyes
in creative collaboration with victimized ions, could do
with the last breath of an expiring sun god to make it
mystically beautiful and awe-inspiring. Just
to be a witness to it was enough to keep your mouth
shut for the next ten thousand years, the silence
before the sublimity of being in the presence
as convincing to the farmer as it was to the astronomer.

As civilization progresses into an improved savagery
and people grow more bovine in their living rooms
as the one-eyed liar at the nadir of the third eye
entrances them into believing they're still
grazing in the starfields of genetically modified astroturf
they were raised on, slowly, from a moon cow's point of view
it's beginning to dawn on people that civilization
is nothing but the history of war since Sargon of Agade
first turned the plunder of cattle and women
into the military imperialism of the few against the many
by staying like a parasitic cosmic egg laid
on the pineal gland of a host caterpillar so civilization,
mimetic word, a cattle prod, an axe, and an abattoir,
is coming to be seen for the death trap that it is.
Muddy Waters, there's anotha mule kickin in yo stall.

I grew up in an impoverished neighbourhood
where the garbage cans were full of people
but I swear, and I've seen a lot I wish I hadn't,
I've never seen so much rot, corruption, and ignorance,
lacking even elementary street smarts, as I do
in the portulent politicians and their fanatically kempt hags
that make you feel so sorry for their hairdressers,
and the tailors that have to fit them like a hidden agenda
of hate and greed, oozing through the seams
of their shapeshifting, deformed-fitting suits.

Makes you want to stick the old peace sign of the sixties
down your throat and throw up. Or pack up
a small tent, like a refugee or an emigrant
and get in line with the rest of the waterlilies
who've finally given up on trying to turn
the festering swamp into something redeemably beautiful
and would rather be homelessly lost among the stars,
floating down the Milky Way with wild black swans,
than sit like the eggcup of a crown on the skull
of a false prophecy missing more than one link in its evolution.
And if you think not to be appalled by the stink of the world
is a kind of experienced wisdom, a seasoned outlook,
then I might suggest that you've aged like offal
complicit in the contagion of worms in the grass
where the children play on the swings. And your last best hope
is that your eyes have retained some of the original innocence
of the fool that you used to be,
before the Medusa turned them to stone
and the colour flaked off like the irises of violated covenants.

Radical in the sixties, I was into self-creative destruction,
tallowing sand candles out of napalm and beeswax
that went off like fifty calibre lipstick shells in your face.
I occupied. I dropped out. I blew my own mind
more than once just to make sure the bridge was burning
by the time I got to the other side of my own mindstream
and no one was following me like another blistering ideal
that got thrown like acid in the maculate face of the full moon.
It was easier to believe in everything back then
than to make peace with myself even now,
though I know it's just one illusion dead set against another
and I'm sitting naked in the Himalayas alone at night
trying to hatch a new cosmic egg for myself
or at least a new cosmology for this glass third eye
I've ground like a lens or the mirror of a reflecting telescope
with gritty carborundum down to within an angstrom of perfection
just to be on the same wavelength as quicksilver and diamonds
when it comes to seeing things that don't easily disappear.
Now I can see the stars dancing clearly from the inside out.

I'm looking for an abandoned observatory on the top
of the world mountain standing on the shaky cornerstone
of a snapping turtle, and I'm not being driven out this time,
exiled among exiles, like some scapegoat beaten
like an objective correlative for what is most ugly in humans
that don't sacrifice themselves for their own sins.
I've been leaving of my own accord for the last thirty light years
of this wilderness experience for the wind knows where.
And I still care. And I still help the waywards of life
that blow across my path like losing lottery tickets
and one winged butterflies trying to fly
like the unbound page of a book with half a wingspan.
I still fight with words and actions that have been blooded
like Damascene swords in the sacred forges of my infernality.
I've gone on exploring the elusive dark energy
of my expansiveness long after the universe went out
and sight stopped being a kind of love as lucid
as the imagination on a good seeing night for the sky bound.

But as my compassion has grown deeper, more holistic
and mystically specific simultaneously so has the sadness
of feeling so many suffer the indistinguishable pain
of simply being alive to endure the agony
of cauterizing their cosmic wounds with the very stars
they wished upon a heart break ago when the waterclock
broke like an ice-age dam and the baby mammoth
was washed away like starmud in a glacial flood
of Pleistocene tears. And life seems so randomly perilous
in the way it maims and kills the body and the mind,
it seems even the wise and the sublime die as surrealistically
as the sarcastic mentors of trash and trivia
trying to distract our attention away from our dilemma
with cheap thrills and punchlines about the meaning of nothing
so we can't feel the house burning down around us
until we're reminiscing in our urns,
as if we were still haunted by eyes in the dark
like some lingering significance to our demise.

Lachrymae rerum. Sometimes I think the mute rocks
don't just speak, they weep like stars
for the things they've seen like the headstones
of prophetic skulls in a cemetery of ancestral asteroids.
An abandoned observatory, yes, the jewel in the lotus,
and a large garden where I can grow my own constellations
like esoteric zodiacs of asters and sunflowers
and a lover I can bed down with like an equinox
when our celestial equators intersect our ecliptics
at the equinoctial colures of our cosmic G-spots
and we can implode like supernovas in each other's presence
just for the pure joy of immolating ourselves in bliss
to renew the tenderness of the fireflies who know
there are no limits to how far we can take this.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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There Is One Voice

And there is one voice among many,
one I remember as mine
among so many drops of rain, so many stars,
so many leaves, flames, feathers, flowers,
and the teen-age girl in so many corners of her darkness
skeining her pencil webs across the page
to catch something, a butterfly hunting spiders
that won't understand her,
and the lovers that have sifted downstream
from the radiant watersheds of their mountain plateaus
like silt over the laryngal deltas of my saying,
black pollen of extinguished stars
I carry around in the medicine bag of my afterlife
like mystic winds to keep the sails up
like the eyelids of a blind rose.

So many skies have enthroned themselves within me over the years,
so many waves and planets and legends of darkness
and the shipwrecks and shores of the weather,
and the storms and the birds, and the shriek of the lightning,
so many dawns and sunsets
and the strutting peacocks in the twilight,
and the sumptuous nights with their illicit luminosities,
so many banners of burning straw
as I look for the one needle of light
that was the gate and the eye and the mouth and the voice
of what most closely resembled me for awhile,
before I learned how to slough my skin
and the hauntings of the black poppies who long to be clear began,
and what was one threshold for a poet in solitude
turned into a palatial labyrinth of doors
that swung on their hinges in space like birds and tongues and bells
all the homeless whose last address will be a gravestone,
all the hapless, broken wretches
who keep trying again like losing bottle-caps,
and the women who came to the mike
to sing like an ambulance,
and the atrocities, the murders, the obscenity, the weeping,
that grabbed at my throat like severed hands
to scream of the horrors and sorrows
in the bloody braille and crippled signage of slaughtered flowers.

There was a boy. He was sixteen. And a prelude
that grained him out of a black cloud
that swirled around his feet like a snakepit
and pearled him into an eclipse
that time held up to the moon like a crow,
like a telescope silvered by the eyes of the night,
a black mirror that parted the veils of the obvious
like a woman's legs
and went looking like a silo of infinite space
that echoed like a famine
into what he was the name of.

And he discovered he was nothing but the shadow of the world,
deaf mailmen, reluctant debutantes, car thieves
with the souls of hunted deer,
hookers whose blood glowed like neon
to fill the pleading mouths of a nest of empty wallets,
and the arrogant, the boring, the vicious,
the scholastic tidal pools who conjectured
about the existence of the great sea of being
that overwhelmed them day and night,
and the arsonists who walked in the rain of their distant exile
playing with their hearts like matches,
and the bruised violets who hide their eyes
under the sodden leaf of an autumn journal
that reads like the last ocean on the moon,
and the treacherous, the bitter, the liars
whose quivers of feathered asps
broke like arrows against the stone lions of the truth,
and the assassins who waited
like the thorn of a sundial to blood their shadows
in the eyeless witnesses of the crimes of noon
and the reformers who wanted to cover the earth in leather,
put shoes on the world
and wore out like flying carpets,
and those who were born to salt the field
and those who were born to sow,
and the rootless wildflowers
that gathered on the corners of concrete cities
like fire on the wind
only to be threshed by the blades of the moon,
cut down by the scarlet scythes of harvest squad cars.

And he has lingered among the opals and sapphires
and on the stairwells of water
that coiled like rivers and women
through the hovels of fire and ash
that consumed him like the memories of a phoenix
that had gone out like a pilot light,
and drunk the stars and eaten the radioactive meat
out of his own skull
like an enlightened begging bowl,
and come undone like a bell of wine in space
like a drunk shapeshifter, a staggering compass
on the high wire of his spinal cord
when his locks were moved by one of the keys of the mystery
that attuned him to the voice of his freedom
in a vast, starless abyss
that wiped the universe off the mirror
like the last breath of the light
to prove he was irrevocably dead.

And through all of this he has been a podium, a stage,
the gaping ellipse of the clear light of the void
auditioning another dream for the talent show,
an advance scout in the night
following rumours of stardom
across the appellant deserts of the moon
like thought chains of migrating geese
trying to remember their lines
like the secret names of God
on the rosaries of their long farewells,
and the only way to be anything
when he turned the light inward
was to agree that everyone had the answer but him,
that even the darkness that dyed
the clarity of his waters with night
to detonate the fireflies like blasting caps
wasn't a robe of his own
but the nocturnal paint rag of the sky
that has been making him sit for his portrait like space
for the last forty-seven years
of writing shadows on the road like poems.

And I haven't stopped crying for him since.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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And There Is One Voice

And there is one voice among many,
one I remember as mine
among so many drops of rain, so many stars,
so many leaves, flames, feathers, flowers,
and the teen-age girl in so many corners of the darkness
skeining her pencil webs across the page
to catch something, a butterfly hunting spiders
that won’t understand her,
and the lovers that have sifted downstream
from the radiant watersheds of their mountain plateaus
like silt over the laryngal deltas of my saying,
black pollen of extinguished stars
I carry around in the medicine bag of my afterlife
like mystic winds to keep the sails up
like the eyelids of a blind rose.
So many skies have enthroned themselves within me over the years,
so many waves and planets and legends of darkness
and the shipwrecks and shores of the weather,
and the storms and the birds, and the shriek of the lightning,
so many dawns and sunsets
and the strutting peacocks in the twilight,
and the sumptuous nights with their illicit luminosities,
so many banners of burning straw
as I look for the one needle of light
that was the gate and the eye and the mouth and the voice
of what most closely resembled me for awhile,
before I learned how to slough my skin
and the hauntings of the black poppies who long to be clear began,
and what was one threshold for a poet in solitude
turned into a palatial labyrinth of doors
that swung on their hinges in space like birds and tongues and bells
all the homeless whose last address will be a gravestone,
all the hapless, broken wretches
who keep trying again like losing bottle-caps,
and the women who came to the mike
to sing like an ambulance,
and the atrocities, the murders, the obscenity, the weeping,
that grabbed at my throat like severed hands
to scream of the horrors and sorrows
in the bloody braille and crippled signage of slaughtered flowers.
There was a boy. He was sixteen. And a prelude
that grained him out of a black cloud
that swirled around his feet like a snakepit
and pearled him into an eclipse
that time held up to the moon like a crow,
like a telescope silvered by the eyes of the night,
a black mirror that parted the veils of the obvious
like a woman’s legs
and went looking like a silo of infinite space
that echoed like a famine
into what he was the name of.
And he discovered he was nothing but the shadow of the world,
deaf mailmen, reluctant debutantes, car thieves
with the souls of hunted deer,
hookers whose blood glowed like neon
to fill the pleading mouths of a nest of empty wallets,
and the arrogant, the boring, the vicious,
the scholastic tidal pools who conjectured
about the existence of the great sea of being
that overwhelmed them day and night,
and the arsonists who walked in the rain of their distant exile
playing with their hearts like matches,
and the bruised violets who hide their eyes
under the sodden leaf of an autumn journal
that reads like the last ocean on the moon,
and the treacherous, the bitter, the liars
whose quivers of feathered asps
broke like arrows against the stone lions of the truth,
and the assassins who waited
like the thorn of a sundial to blood their shadows
in the eyeless witnesses of the crimes of noon
and the reformers who wanted to cover the earth in leather,
put shoes on the world
and wore out like flying carpets,
and those who were born to salt the field
and those who were born to sow,
and the rootless wildflowers
that gathered on the corners of concrete cities
like fire on the wind
only to be threshed by the blades of the moon,
cut down by the scarlet scythes of harvest squad cars.
And he has lingered among the opals and sapphires
and on the stairwells of water
that coiled like rivers and women
through the hovels of fire and ash
that consumed him like the memories of a phoenix
that had gone out like a pilot light,
and drunk the stars and eaten the radioactive meat
out of his own skull
like an enlightened begging bowl,
and come undone like a bell of wine in space
like a drunk shapeshifter, a staggering compass
on the high wire of his spinal cord
when his locks were moved by one of the keys of the mystery
that attuned him to the voice of his freedom
in a vast, starless abyss
that wiped the universe off the mirror
like the last breath of the light
to prove he was irrevocably dead.
And through all of this he has been a podium, a stage,
the gaping ellipse of the clear light of the void
auditioning another dream for the talent show,
an advance scout in the night
following rumours of stardom
across the appellant deserts of the moon
like thought chains of migrating geese
trying to remember their lines
like the secret names of God
on the rosaries of their long farewells,
and the only way to be anything
when he turned the light inward
was to agree that everyone had the answer but him,
that even the darkness that dyed
the clarity of his waters with night
to detonate the fireflies like blasting caps
wasn’t a robe of his own
but the nocturnal paint rag of of the sky
that has been making him sit for his portrait like space
for the last forty-seven years
of writing shadows on the road like poems
that haven’t stopped crying for him ever since.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Just Want To Stay Inside

Just want to stay inside. Don't want to see anybody.
Don't want to be anybody. Just want to forget for awhile
that I exist. I'm sick of being besieged behind my eyelids
by a hundred thousand ghosts all gibbering at me
because they were reincarnated as blackflies
that want to be treated with the same poetic protocol as swans.
Flake off and find another furnace to thaw on
and take all these weeping mirrors with you
that can't look at the stars without smearing them.
I'm sick of splashing through them barefoot.
Go puddle on somebody's else's floor. I've gone
as deep as I'm going to go with you. Don't want to mean
anything to anyone anymore. Maybe
there's someone out there you can tie
your umbilical cord to like a leash on a pet submarine.

Just want to get clean. Take a meteor shower
like the Arabs do when they can't find any water in the desert
to wash their faces for prayer. Tayyamum.
Who knows? Maybe I can grind my eyes into lenses
like Spinoza in his attic for myopic glaciers
that don't believe in global warming though the proof
is running down their cheeks in tragic laughter.
Want to be crowded out, effaced, erased like the leftover seraph
of a letter in chalk dust on your blackboard
that dropped out of your alphabet like a Mayan glyph
running in the blood of another futile sacrifice
to avoid the next astronomical catastrophe
they brought down on themselves from the ground up.

Feel bad about this. Mean. And casually ungenerous.
My heart was a wild rose a moment ago, now
it's a withered green star with the bulbous body
of a black widow spider at the bottom of a teacup
that's about as Zen as venom, leaking out of itself.
biliously weary of prognosticating the future for people
numb as pharmacies in their outlook on life.
Don't want to reach out to anyone. Don't want
anyone reaching out for me when I'm not the one
who's drowning. Just want to be an empty lifeboat
drifting down my own mindstream as composed
as a leaf torn by the wind from a tree like a censored page
of the Book of Life. Don't want to be there at dawn
like another excited bird breaking into song
when the sun comes up like the Taliban
and splashes acid in my eyes because I can read
the signs of our demise in three dead languages
and one that's on its deathbed mouthing the sacred syllables
of its last words fouling the air with lies about the disease
that it's dying of like everyone else listening to a guru
like a poultice to draw the infection out and break the fever
of the nightmare they're sweating in. I don't need a holy man,
selling snakeoil like an antidote to the dragons of serpent fire
running through my veins when I've got
home remedies of my own I can administer to myself
like the breast milk of the Medusa that can keep me
from turning to stone with a tincture of the lunar serum
I can drink from my skull cup, bottoms up, in a single gulp.

Spare me your alibis. The interrogation's over. Forego
the duplicity of your two way mirrors and all your mea culpas
enraptured by the felicity of your own happy sins or not.
All the lanterns of the truth in the hands of the nightwatchmen
are nothing but fireflies covered in soot. Chimney sparks
flying out of a black hole of creosote to tar and feather the stars.
I'm out of here like the heigh ho Silver of yesteryear.
You might hear me howling late at night
like the last of the hunted wolf shamans on the wind
high above the timberline where the air is lucid and thin.
You might be a snakecharmer but I can still shed you like skin.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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