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The Angel In The Way I'm Wrestling With

The angel in the way I'm wrestling with
won't box. I don't get a choice of weapons.
My hip dislocated by a greater intensity than I am,
I'll walk away the stronger man,
a sacred king with a limp, Richard the Second,
or Vulcan, or Byron swimming the Hellespont.
Down on a sunny day, snarly in the sunshine,
too disheartened to get with the picture and bloom.
Nothing against the vases of sappy daffodils
in green vases on open windowsills,
but I feel like tracking starmud into the living room.
Heavy green diamond steel-toed work boots
with their laces undone, their tongues hanging out,
clotted with earth, so the nuns of the narcissi
don't forget they've got dark, dirty roots
and bulbs like prophetic skulls
that have been buried in the garden a long time
who predicted all this would happen in due course.
Everyone clear-eyed as a haiku in a mirror.
Wholly out of season, my heart feels
like the heavy bell of a requiem for all those
who worked themselves to death for so long
like sweating horses hauling this death cart
of a planet around to change its point of view
like the bent axle of a prayer wheel
inclined toward the sun. On this blue-eyed day
and in the morning before dawn, euphoric commotion
of birdsong in celebration of the return of the light,
but I think of how much darkness, the cast off ore,
extinct forests, Jurassic coalbins,
had to clarify themselves
for the sake of a single diamond of equinoctial insight.
The apple trees are wearing their appearances
on their sleeves, and the willows
are adding blonde streaks to their hair
after their long widowhood of veils.
God I wish I didn't have to be a poet sometimes
warped into revealing things from the inside out
like a canary in a coalmine on a sunny day.
I try to imagine how sweet it would feel
just to be in the world like a lackadaisical dandelion
blooming like an average G type sun
in the fresh painterly green of the grass
with a couple of ants for planets.
What a miner I'd make. Always
looking for a motherlode of ore in a gold mine.
Reading between the lines of the spring constellations
to admire the brilliance of the darker messenger,
the deeper clarity of a more pellucid view of the world
as it appears on the nightshift
in the black mirrors of the blind chandeliers
I've been romancing at a dance of celestial spheres
by tracking my footprints all over the ballroom floor
for those who dance iambically with a limp like me to follow.
And my only alibi for looking at things on the dark side.
You can't plumb the depths, or judge the age
of a black hole in light years. And it's totally lost upon me
how you can truly claim to see anything, even spring
if you're not a two-eyed telescope, one eye on day,
one eye on the darkness, and both open simultaneously
like the sun and the moon at opposite ends of the sky,
and the earth in between like the third eye
of a spiritual refugee with an extra lens for backup
in case I should feel as I do today
like a star-nosed mole with tunnel vision
trying to shine above ground with the tulips.
Even as observatories all over the northern hemisphere
are opening their eyes to the light
just to let a little fresh air in
like house plants on open tenement windowsills
sinking their roots deeper into the darkness,
like back lightning into a mystic watershed
to keep from going blind
in the blazing of the blossom overhead.

poem by Patrick White
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I Have Become My Own Season

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Dark Circles

Never have I seen anything so clear and promising
As the landscape rolling before my eyes at this moment
Now I see that there is a force I must stop resisting
The readiness to rebuild is becoming more potent
The ashes of what used to be play in the dry wind
And I see a beautiful vision that looks so kind

Dark circles made of ash dance in the air around me
I begin to dance in the beautiful storm and I smile
Why is it that I laugh when there is no light to see?
Why do I dance when I will soon face a testing trial?
There is something exciting and humbling in darkness
From this darkness I will soon find a new grand happiness

In my heart I am feeling the new life. I feel paralyzing
In my mind I am prepared to rebuild. Nothing now stops me
I can feel that soon I will be on top and I’ll be blazing
I can feel that soon I will be revered and I’ll be free
So, why not dance with the swirls of ash so black and dry?
I would rather dance now then continue to hopelessly cry

Dark circles cover me from head to toe!
Dark circles decorate the dead landscape!
Dark circles are flying so high, like my hero!
Dark circles lead me to a grand escape!
Dark circles wrap around me and we fly!
Dark circles! A dance I always wanted to try!

All the ashes mold and form into black angels in the air
They reach out and take my hands and we run
Dark circles cover my eyes and dance through my hair
Dark figures lead me through the darkness to the sun
And in the end of the darkness I see a shining light!
It’s a mirror; it reflects me, a shining light so bright

Dark circles dance around me in celebration of a new birth
They fly high and fall down to create a wind so strong
My face is covered with colors from the burned earth
I do not look like a man. I look like a creature of wrong
I smile and I realize that this is my new territory
Dark circles form a new black castle free of any tragedy!

Dark ashes line the air and the skies!
Dark circles swirl through the land!
Dark circles vibrate with my joyful cries!
Dark circles run along my porcelain hand!
Dark circles shine new light into my life!
Dark circles bring new beauty to my eye…

poem by German Alcala
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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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Things Might Be Drifting Away

Things might be drifting away
like an empty lifeboat
with nothing left to save
but the memory of moonlight
on the rush of a wave of the heart
that rose and fell
like a bell of insight on the night watch
that said all's well all's well for the night.
And so it was for a while.

Time might seem
that it's overstaying its welcome
and you've become the estranged guest
of a bad dream
in your own bed
in the thirteenth house of the zodiac
where the dispossessed
shack up with the misbegotten
and the ghosts of everything you've forgotten
don't give you any rest
until all that you've cursed
out of anger and need
has been immensely forgiven and blessed.
And perhaps it appears
you've been the rogue star
of a sign in long exile
far away from now
and that might account
for your misplaced trust in mirrors
and your lack of confidence in star maps.

Happiness just happens
like good luck and grace
and the creative inspiration
to rejoice in your time and place here
as if the purpose of your voice
were always to praise
even on the darkest of days
when the only thing
that shone in your eyes
weren't the stars you kept
locked away in your tears
like the face paint of clowns
or the crown jewels of the Pleiades
but a bitter farce of black holes
in the veils of the mirage
that eclipsed your enlightenment
with a starless night
it's impossible to get beyond.
And so it may well be
for those who've been
as far gone for as long you have.

But even the blind are shining
though they can't see it
and the deaf are still singing
though they can't hear it
and the dead are still living
though they can't feel it.
And those who have given up seeking
still find what they were looking for
like a loveletter with a return address
and an open door that recognizes them
like the prodigal threshold
of a homeless human
about to cross one more
like the last step of a long journey
that lost its way back in all directions
like the radiance of a star in space and time
that never took its eye off the past.

We cherish the flowers of summer that bloom last
more poignantly than those of the spring
because we feel our own hour of farewell
in the progress of their passing.
The sadness of an earthly excellence
fulfilled and surpassed
we see in the shedding of the aster's petals
and in the lowering of the wild rose's eyelids
and in the lengthening of the black walnut's shadows
that move like cool water
across the dry grass of a late afternoon
signs of the same night approaching us.
And we know it will be dusk soon.

We'll look up at the blue moon in late October
and whether the silos are full or empty
wonder if every harvest
wears the same death mask we do
with the smile of a scythe on its face
or if the goddess of the grain
bears true witness to
the perennial innocence of death
in the way she enhances
the white spectre of the first frost
to shock the garden down to its roots
with the same koan she uses
to enlighten the dew on the stargrass.

And you might dread the coming excruciations
of the scarecrow immolated on the pyre
of its own substance
like the short straw of flesh
that once sustained it
lost in a draw with death.
And come to scorn your heart like an urn
filled with ashes in the aftermath
of the same fire that once filled it
so full of desire to bloom
it could no more contain itself
than a seed can keep a secret from the spring.

You could see it that way.
And who among those clinging
like a blue atmosphere
to this homeless grain of dust
in the vastness of these sidereal immensities
within and without
that animate us like starmud
to join in this dance of life and death
like a legacy of shining
that can't be washed out of our eyes
though tears have fallen for lightyears
on the root fires of what we've loved and lost.
Who among these
could say you were wrong?

Because no river's flowing
the wrong way to the sea
in this reunion of arrivals and departures
at the stations of our afterlives
on this wheel of birth and death.
We're all going to make it back
to where we came from
one way or another.
Some like rain.
Some like ice.
Some like snow.
Some like the lingering ghost
of morning mist on the lake
that's gone before noon
and some like water on the moon.
The flowing of the river
summoned by the sea
to the source of its coming and going
is the calling of life everywhere
to transcend itself
by passing into the unknown
like the available dimension of a future
that's no further beyond us
than the past is
in the light of distant stars.

The sword doesn't wound itself.
Fire doesn't burn itself.
Water doesn't drown in itself.
And life doesn't bleed out of itself
like the dream of a fortune-telling poppy
or a water clock that's run itself to ground.

The eye isn't the seeing.
The ear isn't the hearing.
The tongue isn't the tasting.
The skin isn't the touching.
The voice isn't the saying.
The brain isn't the thinking.
The heart isn't the feeling
anymore than life
is the carrying in
and death is the bearing out.
The darkness isn't a lack of light
and the light isn't the absence of night.
Death is unborn.
Life is unperishing.
Formless in a world of forms.
Two wavelengths of the same awareness.

You say you can see night gathering
under the door you're afraid to answer
long before anyone knocks
and though you dream by your own light
you don't know who's casting the shadows.
Is sorrow any younger in the heart of a child
than it is in the memory of an old man?
Joy any less vivid in the eyes of an old woman
attending to the flowers in her garden
than it is in a girl having tea with her dolls?
Is this day not as new to the widow
as it is to the newly-wed?
Experience is the capstone and dunce-cap
of the sum of destructions
that made us who we are today.
And in life it's the brilliance of our failures
that throws more light on the dark matter
of the issue before us
than all the star power
of the blazing successes
that blind us to our own shining.

You step out of a backlit doorway
into the dark
and slowly the darkness grows
the eyes you need to see the stars.
And maybe death is like that.
Nothing to look at but black
until we blow the candle out
that's been misleading us all the way.
Maybe that's why the jaws of skulls
are always caught gaping at something
that's more than they can say.
But look at the expressions on their faces.
Maybe their eyes
are too overwhelmed by what they're seeing
to want to get in the way.
You could see it like that.
You could see it through the eyes of the rain.
You can taste it on the tongue of a candle flame.
You can read it from right to left
in the Kufic script of the wind.
You can hear it in what the stars are whispering
through the keyholes in the pyramids.
You can feel it all around you
like bubbles of skin and air.
Like empty rooms with atmosphere.
As many ways and roads and rivers as there are
that flow into it down the world mountain
back to the sea
back to the same undifferentiated watershed
of these myriads of mystic specificity
and who could number them all
as many as the stars
or all the grains of sand
of all the deserts and beaches on earth
as many as the dead of every kind who've come and gone
all that blood mind passion dream and imagination
all those tears all that despair lucidity and apprehension
love and familial affection
all that waste and hatred and emotional sewage
dissolved wholly back into the sea
like a watercolour left out in the rain
like a name written on water
by a poet who died young
in a foreign language far away from home
just as birth arrays the universe before us
and says make of it what you can
so death approaches no less a peer of life
than we are in our relationship with all things
and offers us
the same great creative opportunity life does.
Green bough.
Dead branch.
Sunset.
Moon rise.
The hidden night bird alights
on either alike
and folding its wings
like gates and books
and the eyelids of those who dream
at the beginning and end
of a long dark radiant journey,
sings.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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It's Stranger To Conceive Of Me

It's stranger to conceive of me as I am
than to imagine that I'm someone else.
There's more largesse in the early spring air.
You can tell by the tears that well up in their eyes
the glacial stars are beginning to thaw splinter by splinter
withdrawing their claws from the corpse of the snow
like thorns from the Lion's paw overhead.
I can hear water in the creek tuning up
for the dance to come as soon as
the first violins of the crocuses get here,
the trout lily, the purple passage of the wild violet
under a leaf it took like a page from the book of autumn,
trout lily, hepatica, wood sorrel, grape hyacinth.
I like it here because it doesn't matter who I am.
Things are alert and vivid with life because
they're not threatened by the possession of it.
And time is a lot more honest
here where it lets its hair down
than it is back in town
where it's always now, now, now,
and the streetlights, blinded by their own blazing
turn their backs on the stars
like the distant fires of native peoples
who preferred to dance to see
where they were going at night
than watch their step
like the next best real estate deal.
Even without intention, every time
I try to shape space with my mouth
and say this is who I am, this is me
whatever similitude I use I always feel
I'm exhuming a dead metaphor
from the coffin of a word
that's been taken out of the context of the world
and put on display in a dream museum.
It's as if I can relate the history of smoke
but not the flame that lived it.
As if one of these half-submerged skulls of rock
that have been trying
to pave their way across the creek
for as long as I've been crossing here
were to try and understand the mindstream
that's been ploughing around them for lightyears,
not realizing what they're rooted in like cornerstones,
are islands on the moon, mere shadows of water,
mirages on the tongue of those who have
never tasted it like their own blood
to know whether it was hot or cold,
blue or red, sweet or sour, real or not.
The earth can sleep a little longer yet
under this tapestry of snow while
the dreamweaver at the loom of the moon
is unravelling the threads of a thousand loose night creeks
the sea will gather up again into an oceanic consciousness
of the flying carpet of wavelengths and life themes
we're riding on well out of reach of ourselves
like waterlilies in winter when it's coldest,
and snowflakes on a furnace when it's hot.
It's as fun to say it as it is to play with hula hoops.
The ecliptic intersects the celestial equator
at the equinoctial colure and it's spring
in the northern hemisphere. Canada geese
thread their way like rosaries of snake skulls
through the stars in the eyes of northern lakes
peeping through the cataracts of ice and clouds
breaking up like mirrors that can only
hold this pose of starmud for so long
before it's time to change studios again
to keep up with the light
that's trying to capture your likeness
like the whole of the sky on the skin
of a dropp of the water of life
that reflects like a mirror
but sees through appearances
into the deeper darkness
like a gravitational lens of pure insight,
the lamp in the hand of the light that leads it
like a blind lighthouse to the perilous reefs
of morning on the moon among the corals.
Was I born to wonder what, who I am
or not, as is more highly probable?
Is the persistence of the question, the way
it makes you suddenly look up
from a seemingly unrelated matter
at the moon in the black walnut trees
or a bird in passing that commands your attention
without in the least meaning to
until everything but it feels like the intrusion.
Is the question on the agenda of the answer
or does it have a life of its own,
a journey that doesn't end in a key?
I look at all these twisted forms of life,
not cast out, but abandoned, these
deadly gray limbs of swamp wood
silking their legs in the moonlight,
these mauled pines that look more like weather
than evergreens, the sparse, despirited crimson
of the ground willow paintbrushes
that have lost their handles in the snow
waiting like a newly primed canvas
for the first rose petal of blood
to fall from Virgo as a sign of consummation.
Things, forms, things of the world,
things of the bodymind that shapes them
out of starmud, out of the outer receptacles
of the five senses on each hand,
that conceives of a bee like a hollyhock
calling it into being like the fragrance
of something that was said, but wasn't
meant to be heard by anyone else.
Animate and inanimate alike
a grammar of things, ritual magic
and we're the diction,
we're the verbs and nouns of the spell
that keeps us creating the world in tongues
so even as strangers we end up speaking
the same language as stones and stars and birds.
Maybe the question is just an answer
that's travelled back in time from the future
to ask the prophetic skulls of its own ancestors
if any of them had foreseen what was to come?
Or the question is all and the answer is negligible?
Or left speechless, you achieve wisdom?
Or left unanswered, you awaken
your own creative freedom
like a world you didn't know
you had it in you to make any way you want
in case this one doesn't fit, you don't have to bear it.
Absurd as it seems to seed your dreams
and expect to harvest them when you wake up,
and yet I've seen it happening all around me
every day of my life, objects, symbols, stars,
insights casting shadows of themselves
into the darkness as far as the light
they've been given to go by,
sowing the available dimensions of the future
with a world that isn't so much said into being,
but arrayed lucidly before us
like eyes full of mystery that don't reveal a thing.
I sit on this rock and I watch the night creek
until I can't tell which one of us is flowing
and it occurs to me that maybe the question itself
is the crucial essential of my existential dilemma
and the answer's only the temporary afterlife
of who I'm becoming now. Not as I appear;
not as the psychic life of a heart-broken mirror,
not as the mirage of a snowblind seer
who approachs the desert on my threshold with a broom
as if I were trying to keep house in an hourglass.
I don't sweep the stars off my stairs.
I don't follow a trail of breadcrumbs
in the corners of the eyes of last night's dream
as if someone had been here before me.
I don't pass myself off like counterfeit leaves in the spring.
Honesty isn't a fact. And clarity isn't a starmap.
And love's only another religious con
if it isn't wholly unconditional and inclusive.
I'm not looking for asylum in the abyss
like some petty alternative to living this
without knowing what this is or I am
or at least trying to get my ignorance
as close as humanly possible to it as I can
whether it's aware of me, these stars, this
broken thatch of wild rice, wheat, and cattails, or not.
Then I will celebrate the creativity of its absence
with reverence and compassion for all
that it's left in its wake like a sleepwalker
shaping this mindscape like a retreating glacier.
All that abide here with me tonight
like the gateless gate of an open mind
wondering if there's anything left to catch up to
that embodies the dignity of the beginning
in the dead of winter, as apparently it does in the spring.
Or if we're all words in a language
we're just learning to speak on our own
that can point to anything, say anything
except themselves to themselves
whenever the question comes up
about whether they mean anything at all
when they're not leaning on the world to exist
as we all do, trying to make sense of it
in this dumb-founded dialogue of wonder.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Angel of Darkness

Angel of Darkness
My loving life
You pulled me up
Instead of pulling me down
My Angel of Darkness

Angel of Darkness
With brown shaggy hair
And dark blue Blazing eyes
My heart it soars
With my Angel of Darkness

Angel of Darkness
Jet black wings
That spread across the sky
In flight that never ends
With my Angel of Darkness

Angel of Darkness
Give me a kiss
And make it a dark sensation
And I will follow your command
And never fight with you
My Angel of Darkness

Angel of Darkness
Take my body because it’s yours
It sub comes to yours
In my breathless wake
My Angel of Darkness

Angel of Darkness
I will fight and stand
Not against you
Just against my last breath
We are creature of the night
And I will be with you and stay with you
My Angel of Darkness

poem by Tin Mouse
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You Never Became A Memory

You never became a memory.
You remain as you are in my life.
A living compassionate presence.
I have forgotten more of me
than I ever could of you.
Whenever I want to see beyond the light
I see through your eyes
everything you wanted to show me
that was not petty or tragic or cruel.
I was a profound fool
but you taught me how
to add my darkness to the night
to enhance the shining.
And even now
when things aren't flowering well
I still reach out for you by deepening my roots.
As if I could touch your face again
like a muse of water
lost in her own reflection.
As if I could ignite the same fires again
that blossomed on the dead branch
of the witching wand
that inspired the stars
who thought they had seen everything
to marvel at their own perfection in you.
Inspiratrix of the blue waterstars
that burned like chandeliers
among the constellations of the lilies
pluming themselves like swans
in the feathers of the moon,
how I long to be eclipsed and enlightened again
like a chameleon reflecting the mood of your beauty
as I did before these windows came
like glass-eyed calendars between us
to prove that time isn't space. It's pain.
And change is an absolute
that doesn't like its relatives.
My angel misses you.
My demon misses you
so badly at times
I can't look into the abyss for long
without impeaching my mind
for its awareness of an emptiness
that aches like an existential absurdity
to be put out of its misery
for being born blind deaf and dumb
about whose wind on the waters is rocking
the cradles and crucibles of creation.
The Medusa holds her tits out
like snakepits and grails
and I never know which one to drink from
or if the poison and the antidote
are just the opposite fangs of the moon
as it grows through its waxing and waning
as if a physician found a way
of healing herself
by sloughing her wounds like skin.
The mindstream weaves its way at night
like a garden snake
through myriad blades of grass
like the shuttle of a loom
that doesn't know what theme of life
unspools in the flowing.
And my eyes miss you like light.
I'm a lighthouse on the shore of a dead sea
trying to walk on water like the moon
as the waves chip away at me
like shale flakes off the cold stone
that edges slowly through my heart like a thorn.
And it may make a king of me
to draw the sword out of the stone
but that doesn't close the wound
of having first to fall upon it
to vacate my throne with honour.
If life is the truth
then lying is the only way
to describe death to a god
who doesn't understand it.
What's a church without gravestones?
Aspiration without an expiry date?
And so many different kinds of death
not enough generations of humans
have been born yet to know them all.
Death tries to trivialize the relative
as if the things I miss most about you
had never been.
But your mindwaters are mingled with mine inextricably
like the shoreless starstreams of space
panning for planets in our flowing
we might live on
and have our being and our breath
unblighted by loss. Separation. Death.
And there is no more of the sadness
I used to see in your eyes
as if they were my own
that I still see everywhere in the eyes of all living things
when I know as you would have had me know
as clearly as you did
that even though the neverness
of implacable circumstances and lost last chances
may have separated us like the threads of the rope
you used to climb up to heaven before me
like one who took the short-cut
and one who took the long way home through these starfields
taking his painful time
like the unfulfilled hope of a child
he's not alone when he opens his eyes
like a dream within a dream
that looks but can't find him,
you can polish the missing into a mirror
and wait like a fox by a black hole for things to appear
that will never be the same again
or you can open your tears like windows
and let out the birds of pain
that I have kept as close to me
as the whisper of your voice
in this cold, dark chimney
telling me to let you go as I do now
to rejoice on the dead branch and the green bough
like the flower and flame
of what became of us.
We cannot be the song or the singer
for very long
as our voices dim like candles in the darkness
that have given it all away.
And as you used to say
as if it would always be today without you
and all we have given is all we could keep of each other
like water returned to the river
we raised to our lips to taste
the sad, last drops
of these eyeless elixirs of the moon
that linger like vapours
in the empty goblets of the morning glory,
and I need to believe you more than I do
in this neverness of now
that has come before me without a beyond
or a word from all that has irrevocably gone.
Yes. But the singing. That goes on.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Lighting It Up And Blowing It Out

Lighting it up and blowing it out
I try to make my way through the dark
by beginning at the end
as if the coming and the going
were the same door
or good-bye were the first thing
you would say to a friend.
I approach things like a night stream
as if my death were already achieved
and behind me.
And all the atoms of my being
dancing like frenzied gnats
in the sunset glow of a last eye-beam
are certifiably primordial
and any one of them
when they lose it in the light
could begin a world.
And what can you say more of a life
that dreams of what it is
than it's the taste of the same wine
in many different cups?
And as any fox knows
the grape is always sweetest
when you can taste it with your eyes.
Though why foxes eat grapes is anyone's guess
but life makes itself up as it goes
like music in a fish's earlobes.
It feathers its themes in fire and light
and goes up in smoke
like the ghost of a tree
looking for habitable planets among the stars.
New wounds with innocent root-room for old scars.
Chalking the cue to bank the long shot
you're trying to spin off into
the deep, dark pockets
of your game-winning afterlife.
And I don't believe in much anymore
though that hasn't stopped me from crying
like a slow window trying to keep
the stars from leaking out of me
as if there were a black hole
somewhere in my heart
waiting for an iris to make it an eye
whose seeing might be a new way of healing
what can't be healed.
Once here. Here forever.
But whether we're the eternal children of forever
or just another breath on the night air
that doesn't even know we live,
even death is just another way of killing time here.
When everywhere's the center of everything else,
the centre holds,
things don't fall apart.
They disappear.
And that's the mystic art
of knowing how to make the most out of existence
by offering no resistance
to the rocks in your own mindstream
that part the waters like the thoughts
of an exile in the promised land
who can't go back the way she came.
The river can't step into the same you twice.
And in every direction
your eyes have ever burned like stars
you can see the dark jewel of your own life
from the inside
before it breaks into light.
Sometimes I'm the lonely sign
on the only path to nowhere
and others I'm positively amniotic
with the schools of my blue lucidity
the albino dolphins of the moon leap through
without a chance of changing their colour.
A flower of prophetic blood bleaches my skull.
I swallow the snakefire of my last eclipse
like a lump of coal
I'm trying to turn into a diamond
that doesn't burn
and never sloughs its skin.
Reality isn't a religion or a science,
or the back and front of a mirror
that doesn't know whose eyes its looking through.
Religion: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Science: how many pins can dance on the head of an angel?
Totem poles on a telephone booth where no one ever picks up.
Voodoo dolls that hex the cause of their effects.
The apple bloom on the tree of knowledge
lets go of its flightless wings
and follows the wind
like the eyelids of unfeathered angels
who opened their eyes like flawless fruit
as they fell toward paradise
without a parachute of smokey virtue
or the scale of a snake for a vice.
Emergence into the open
like a hidden secret revealed
is the engine of evolution
that empowers the dark matter
of this incorporeal starmud
to arise like the high note of a bird
that's flown beyond the night in its voice
like light beyond its myth of origin.
And the peduncle is lost in the ensuing phylum
as a madman is lost in the scream
that woke up the asylum,
or a god is lost in his own creation.
And the mountains listen
to the holy voices
in the valleys of their shadows
they deepen as they arise
like the guests of an echoless calling
to greet the unknown host.
It's what the moon feels
when she fondles her locket of water
and memories pull at her heartstrings
like tides on earth
and music is the way she recalls
the sirens that used to sing
like the brides of empty lifeboats
that prayed like smashed guitars
for the night to sow the seedless sea with stars.
And in every fish that swims through fire
like the sacred response of life
to the longing in its own desire
she knows they got their wish.
Fireflies in the ashes of the phoenix tree.
And the eggs of cosmic words
like serpents in a bird's nest
learning to fly like dragons
that have just swallowed the moon.
And it's one thing to pull the sword from the stone
but it's a greater power than magic and proof
with no urge to rule
that summons the butterfly from its cocoon
by giving the fool who inches toward the truth
along the green branch toward the apple-bloom
that already tastes like the forbidden fruit
of some radical insight
the whole orchard in a pair of wings
and more than enough night and light on its palette
to start a revolution in seeing among the flowers
who still labour in the chains of their roots
to turn their earthbound lucidities into stars
who might look back for a change
with eyes that have gathered like water out of the shining
and taste the light in the honey
that kissed their eyelids into gold
long before the night was old
and it wasn't enough just to see them.
When you opened your eyes
in the burning clarity of your lone vision
before this matrix of space and time
gave birth to the world
you were free to be whatever you could see.
That's when the light first spoke to you
in the mother-tongue of your seeing
and your voice broke
like a secret name in the mirror
that didn't know who you were
and the moon on nightwater
the thief at the window
your breath like stars on the cold, night air
summoned the whole of being
in every particulate shard
and radiant plinth of the mirror
to drive your shining into the shadows
so myriad things can appear as they are.
Many eyes open. Night. An eclipse. One star.
And the darkness an anti-romantic
in love with the moon from afar.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If You Had Any Compassion For Yourself

If you had any compassion for yourself,
others wouldn't have to suffer for you
and the world wouldn't show you
such a sad, woeful, wounded face.
You wouldn't see the withering leaves
and petals of the rose in autumn
as merely the scar tissue of its thorns.
In winter, mend your severance.
In spring, attend to your joys.
Like fishing nets and snow fences.
Like delphiniums in a garden bed
that's beginning to bloom like a starmap.

And you know that stranger inside
that's always witnessing everything we do
like a perfectly clear mirror, even in dreams?
Take another look, you might be surprised
at whose face you see at a meeting of eyes.

It's important not to pass judgement on yourself
for fear of condemning the world.
Show me a mirage that isn't a friend to water
or a wishing-well that resents a rainbow
for the pot of gold at the end, though
no one ever knows which end at the time.

Be kind to your delusive paradigms of life,
as you would an old skin you shed like the moon
when your serpent-fire could no longer contain itself
and broke out of its sacred chrysalis like a dragonfly
that had made itself a house of life out of matchsticks
and went up in flames like a snake with wings.

If you could see your life for what it is,
a teaching device for mentoring your own enlightenment
you might read the books of all the sages
rooted and flowering in you like the wisdom of a seed,
or the star in the ore of a panspermic universe
that was planted in you like the garden you've been from birth.

You might think that the wildflowers
are looking up at the stars to understand themselves
but, in truth, they're looking up at their roots
like rain reveres the lightning that engenders it.

You don't need to convince the wind of your freedom,
you've just got to ride it out to the end,
a friend to yourself, a worthy companion,
the intimate familiar of a cloud with a clear blue sky
or a subliminal lover of the darkness
love mushrooms up in like a moonrise.

If you knew how to nurture yourself
by breaking bread with the spirit of life within you
there wouldn't be millions of children
all over the world who will go hungry tonight.
They'd be licking the spoon with stealthy laughter
like cookie-batter out of the begging bowl of your heart.

Enlightenment isn't going to add one ray of light
or a single star to the night you're already shining in,
and whatever wavelength you're on, regardless
of the mystic polarities your potential flows between,
like dark matter and light, whether the journey you're on
is orange or infrared or the blue white violet of the Pleiades,
absorption or emission spectrum alike, no wave
of thought or mind, light, heart or water
is discontinuous with the oceanic consciousness
they rise upon, so why turn back to the source
like a solar flare to ask for directions from a starmap
that sent you out like a bubble in the multiverse to look for land.
You know, if you were more of an explorer
without a preconceived destination, more
of a space probe leaving the solar system periodically,
the rest of us wouldn't feel so lost or out of place at your table.

And even if you've made a vehicle
of the wheel of birth and death
and think you have a firm grasp on things
with your arm out the window in the driver's seat,
enjoying the passing view with the wind in your hair
without clinging to anything along the way
it still might be a good idea to learn how
to come down off your throne like a pauper
and change a flat tire now and again.

Your life is not an untimely interruption of eternity.
The eternal sky does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds,
and it even bends down sometimes toward the earth
to pick up Venus like a lost earring in the sunset.
It's your point of view that turns your back on yourself
like the retrograde motion of Mars, not
the planet itself playing rope tricks with your spinal cord.

Why go looking for your mind
like a lighthouse with a flashlight,
a flame for the source of the fire
or a star for the constellation it belongs to,
or the homeless for a home when everyone's
the foundation stone of their own habitation
wherever they are at the moment.

If you chase the wind, it will be you
that loses its breath like the atmosphere of the moon.
And when you run out of air, breathe light, breathe space,
and don't try to fix an expanding universe
to your nostrils like a bicycle pump
to get you back on the road again.
Or you'll find you're swimming out of your depths
to run to the rescue of an empty lifeboat
that's already unloaded its contents ashore.

If you don't want to go blind as a starless night
it's prescient to eclipse your blazing from time to time,
turn the lights down low, snuff the candle,
and learn to see in the dark there's just as much reflected
in the depths of the dark abundance
of a black mirror, though it takes time to focus,
than there is in the expansiveness
of the bright vacancy of the white
that takes things in at a glance.
The seed of a every glimpse of insight contains
the whole of the vision in advance,
and at the core of the apple of the issue
is a green star with dark auburn eyes
on the nightshift of the maternity wards of spring.

And o come on now, how long can you hang on
to being this box kite on a string
watching another phoenix ride your thermals
like inspiration on the wing, without feeling
like the premature ghost of yourself at the onset of spring,
all smoke, and no fire, your flightfeathers smouldering
like a pyre of wet maple leaves who haven't got the courage
to break into flames and flap their wings and rise above it all.
Better to be a weather balloon losing altitude like Icarus
or even a candling parachute taking the fall for all of us,
as daring said feathers and falling took flight,
than not risk falling through the black holes of life to paradise?

And what if I were to tell you're they're just the pupils
the light enters through like your eyes into your imagination
to be transformed from a visual into a vision,
the visible form into the invisible shining of the spirit
that raises everything in the known and unknown multiverse,
and the trees and the stars, the rocks and the clouds
are all counting on you to do this for them,
because this is what you're here for,
if you've ever wondered,
to raise them up to eye-level
with a human who knows the names of things
like parents know the names of their own children
running toward them down the street. It's how
we were meant to meet and greet the universe.

So if once, just once, for my sake, your sake, the sake
of the forsaken with their elbows on the windows of the world tonight
watching it all go by like stars on the firewalks beneath their noses,
that are not embedded in cement like a mausoleum
of movie-stars that refused to become fossils
before their shining was spent,
you took a chance, and that's all it would take,
one step forward with no return address,
to risk falling down at the dance,
and seven times down, eight times up,
such is life, get up on your own two good feet again
and discover you've got wings and spurs on your heels
the rest of us wouldn't feel so lame
when we came over to your place
like a riot of erratic fireflies to celebrate
the lightning moves of the rain that's dancing on our graves
where the dead lie down like the corpses of candles
knowing they'll be reincarnated
as wildflowers and Luna moths
because nothing that's ever given its life up
to this business of shining on everything alike
from a first magnitude star, to the night light in the hall
that shoos the ghosts away from their portraits on the wall
so the whole world can bloom in the tears of your eyes,
the fire in your heart, and in the human divinity
of the spirit of your imagination, can ever be put out
because every shadow of doubt
leads back the light that cast it
in love and sorrow, time and space
like the life and death mask of your own face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Scouring The Patina Of Time Off With Stars

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Grey Rain Riffs On The Windows

The grey rain riffs on the windows
as if it's been listening to too much rap.
Fragrance of gasoline blooming in the gutters.
People all look like daffodils in baseball caps.
Wish I wanted something enough to buy it again,
and it's been a while since I've been with a woman
who wanted anything for me. I'm inside here
dethorning the intensity of the black rose
imploding under its own mass as its core
condenses in a withered star like a heart
whose light's run out. The fire in my blood
took it all one nightshift further than red
and now I can see in the dark like a black hole.

Nightvisions in broad daylight. I can see the stars
shining through the smudged pearl of the sun
trying to glow its way through the clouds.
I can see the skulls of insurrectionist dreams
deep underground in the cults of my cells
trying to assess the direction of the bomb blast
to insure the maximum damage. Not all roads
are trying to make friends with people
who walk them like cowpaths littered with road kill.
It's better to be lost as the lesser of two evils
when clarity scorches the heart radioactively.
Dissociation, Deconstruction, Disintegration,
I've evolved like a language into a grammar
of oxymorons just to keep my thoughts and feelings
together in a syntactical world of unpunctuated scalpels.
Alloys of a stronger metal are not estranged
like copper and tin from the cutting edge of the sword
by the colour of their skin or religion in the Bronze Age.

Love comes at me in the darkness of these depths
like a crossroads of light from all directions at once
by which I know the radiance that's found me
is not just another flashlight that's still looking.
And there are Sufis whirling like weathervanes
in blue woollen robes, and enlightened Zen masters
gently picking the fleas out of their chest hairs
and thanking the thieves for leaving the moon in the window,
and demonic demons with the insight of black diamonds
all telling me you lose control if you hesitate in the moment,
or stand up, sit down, walk, or run, but whatever you do
don't wobble. And I plunge into the galaxy with both feet
hoping to make a big splash in the red tide of the stars
and I either drown in the light, or I end up
blowing hyperbolic bubbles into a bulky multiverse.

I haven't turned my senses into lenses,
starmaps, and spectrographs, but I'm not blind
to what's living under my eyelids in a chaos
of crazy-wisdom playing picture-music
in a band of clowns, just to get a good laugh
out the oracles that are prone to never
take their own advice so seriously
they couldn't change their minds.
You can't refit a round suggestion
into a square meaning, and it' cruel to try.
I have long wavelengths of thought
that burn like iodine and salt in sea kelp
but I don't whip the eyes of the tide
just to get things flowing like tears my way.
I don't throw acid in the faces
of tomorrow's beauty queens learning to read
the writing on the wall as just the wall's way
of threatening you into letting it protect you.
I don't boil kids in their mother's milk
and I don't practise the kind of spiritual judo
that uses a person's best ideals against them.

Especially as I get older, I would rather be
obliterated by wonder and gratitude
that I got to be all this without any effort of my own
than have my awe underwhelmed
by petty renditions of the black farce
that welds some people's eyes shut like
an eclipse stronger than the original bond.
But there again, if you're happy being a scar, mend.
What could it mean to the stars
if you can't see them during the day?
And I've said it before, and I'll say it again
to those of you who have taken a more radiant path,
blazing is a kind of blindness too
that keeps you from seeing the diamond in the coal.

Yesterday oxygen was alien ore as toxic
as the love apples of superstitious tomatoes
two hundred years ago it was death to eat.
And it's poignant to remember that any ground
you plant your flag in like a flower without a root,
like a placard without a rally, is
a charged particle field that reverses spin
synchronistically like a revolution
in an hourglass relationship with what it overthrew.
Consciousness is necessarily bifurcated by its blossoms
into two points of view, but deeper down
in the bloodstream of its darkest roots
it doesn't make a distinction between an I and a You.
Subject and object aren't separated
by a skin of water empty as the mirage
of a bubble within and lustrous as the stone
that broke the window without. This world
isn't happening to you from the outside
and you're not making it up within like a lie
you can tell your children about being alive.

No one's wholly wise who still possesses a mind.
No one's totally ignorant if they give
a red cane to a blind traffic light to see it coming.
I don't trim the wicks of my comets
as if they were candles at a black mass.
I can breathe fire like Draco at the North Pole,
but when I'm not axially aligned with the earth
I can look into the eyes of my fiercest dragons
and see at the bottom of a telescopic well
millions of fireflies lost in a labyrinth of mirrors
looking for an insight into the nature of life
that would true all the others like crystal eyes
caught in the eleven dimensional net
of enlightened lies where time and the timeless intersect
and synderetic sparks ricochet like spiritual eagles
off the slopes of mountainous eras of grace.

poem by Patrick White
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I'm A Savage Mystic With Chamelonic Passions

I'm a savage mystic with chameleonic passions.
Serpent fire with meteoritic nano-diamonds for eyes.
The black slash of the wounded crescent of the new moon
bleeding to death like a thorn among the willows
who grieve for me like Arab women under their veils.
I'm a house of ill-repute on the outskirts of the zodiac
and under my eaves and eyelashes I can hear
the storm cloud pigeons cooing like shepherd moons.
I'm dark ore with a star in it, a star
giving birth to dark ore where I mine the eclipses
that pour out of me like igneous swords and snakes
I temper in the dead seas of my mystic watersheds
hissing in the cool bliss of a cosmic riverbed
waiting for the next flashflood of insight
just to hear the frogs singing again among the wild irises
who come with blades of their own as sharp as mine.

And this could be the slipppery slope to solipsism,
subjective idealism, rabid Narcissusism,
Vishnabandu's eighth century Mind-only
non-conception of inconceivable enlightenment
being everything all at once the moment being
ceases to exist chasing its own tail around the mulberry bush,
I'm never all that sure myself, but for the moment,
I'm swimming through stars like flying fish,
I'm drying the painted tear on the face of a clown.
I'm trying to put a smile on my deathmask.
I'm listening to Mayan calendars and crystal skulls
in the gloomy backrooms of human sacrifice
weeping like chandeliers of prophetic lightning
shattering my peace of mind like black mirrors of insight
thrown down at my feet like the ten commandments
brought up from the valley of death like imported brides
to marry those brought down from the mountain.

And all I can say, is, aw, come on now, give me a break,
I can remember when you guys used to feed
your Pythian pythons sweetcakes after every oracle.
What have you got them on now, Qualuds?
And even if the world does end
when the sun rises in the west at midnight
and no birds sing in the eucalyptus trees of Israel
where bull-dozed Arab villages used to stand,
and the shepherds of the black camel
build tall buildings in the desert in the Kuwaiti desert
where the black camel is obviously oil,
and the last man in the world is Chinese
and grovels in the dust at his sister's feet,
and the Nazca lines turn out to be a starmap
to the place where extraterrestrials used to stage
the discus throw for flying saucers
when they put on the Olympics once every four light years;
right now while I have a rare chance to,
I'd rather sword dance with enlightened fireflies
to the hillbilly fiddles of the summer crickets
against your gathering storm on the hillside
on the thresholds of life and insight
than goose-step to your martial requiem
on the event horizon of a black hole.
And who knows, if you go a little deeper
into the dark with all three of your eyes open
you might find a dragon like me
full of serpent fire with the alpha and omega
of crescent moons for fangs and claws,
one of which kills you, and the other cures,
spiritual antidotes to toxic cosmic glands,
this remedy in the heart of the disease,
this herb of the moon on the tongue of a snake,
this Eden I've flown into off course today,
not a cinder, but a nightbird in the eye
of the hurricane rose of Armageddon,
where the nations meet on the plains of Jazreel
to dance themselves to death in a moshpit
at a rave of wavelengths out to save the world.

poem by Patrick White
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I Stand Where The Listening Begins

I stand where the listening begins
as if my voice were just another one of the echoes
and my tongue were the tip of an edgy precipice
that doesn't dare make a move
over an immeasurable abyss of eyes
that nobody belongs to.
This is a seeing that's older than the stars
that were born of it
like a mirror is born of the shining.
Like a body is born of the mind
and takes on the shape of a universe
as an expressionist gesture of classical reserve.
In the great ocean of being before it turned into everyone
our eyes weren't beaded like two drops of water
strung through our nose
like a statement we were trying to make.
They were waves.
Waves of water.
Waves of light.
Waves of thought and feeling.
They were waterbirds that came and went
without leaving.
They were meteorological events
in the emotional life of the sea
when it played alone with itself like weather.
We didn't evolve hands to prove we had a grip on things.
We didn't evolve brains to prove we were intelligent.
We're not nuggets of insight
panned from the mindstream
that runs down the world mountain
in a rush of gold.
I stand where I can hear the night
breathing like a shadow in its own darkness
and whatever I am not
is as real as whatever I am.
And my sorrows dropp away
like the black fruit of ruined bells
and my joys know a freedom
no holy war ever deserved.
Here my death answers to my life
and not the other way around.
My beginnings are not justified by my ends
and my solitude is so wholly itself
it embraces everything
as if it were space
and time were its only friend.
This is a poetic state.
A dynamic mode of creative annihilation.
This is a phoenix blooming in its own fire.
This is life.
This is the universe full of bright ideas
that come to it like stars in the darkness.
This is the white mare of the full moon in the high field
with the gates open
like wings growing out of her shoulders.
This is a space that is so spontaneously immediate
that you receive the reply
long before you've even asked the question.
It doesn't take thousands of thoughtyears
for the light to get here.
A flower blooms.
A star comes out.
It's as simple as that.
You lift one veil of the mystery like an eyelid.
Nothing has a history.
The old man remembers nothing.
The old woman forgets her name.
Once they were seabeds of meaning.
Now they're just water.
And everything is ok with that.
People go grey
and turn into clouds in the mountains
just to catch the last of the light
and give their lives some colour.
And then it's night again
and the dancing chandeliers of the stars
that are burning like legends
to make a name and a myth for themselves
fall like constellations to earth
and shatter like the rainbows of youth.
Every dawn has a taste of the sunset in it.
What's the end of anything
if not the dark side of its beginnings?
I am the fool of a freedom
that lets things be whatever they want to be
deep within the heavy fruit of a compassionate heart
that ripens in its own lucidity.
There are worms.
There are birds.
There's a green star in the apple core.
My skin is the chameleon of the sun going down.
I know how to swim through stone and water.
There are fish in my treetops
and birds in my roots
and when I drown
it's the sun in the sea
and nothing ever really goes out.
Everytime I open my mouth to sing
this is where the muse
puts a finger to her lips
to teach me what I'm talking about.
I'm a star when I write.
First I let go of the light.
And then the children point fingers at me
and say in mutual recognition
of the stories they make up on the go
there you are
just as we foretold.
It's the same way with water
when it's lost in a desert of sand and stars.
Sometimes it takes a mirage to find your way home.
Death gapes like the jawbone of a mummy
and writes like a pyramid
as if it wanted to make all things last forever.
But when life picks up the pen
around the fires of the stars
to whisper into its own ear
things that only solitude
can suggest to the night
its poems are always tents on the move.
The moon sailing paper lifeboats down a river
like waterlilies
blooming in the pale flames
of their lunar immolations
as if each were a white phoenix
rising above its own ashes and smoke
like someone dreaming of swans.

poem by Patrick White
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My Side

Black emptiness is where I travel
Casting shadow where ever I go
Someone must play this part
There must be balance to make this world work
There needs to be darkness
May I bring despair, hate, and jealousy
into the lives of others
I despise myself
I despise the thought of being alone on the hated side
I am revolted even though I didn't choose this life
But as I said there needs to be a balance
And she is on the other side

There's always a ray of light in the darkness
She is that light I wish to have stabbed in me
She is my light, the guide of my love
I can feel her deep in my heart
But the darkness covers her in my eyes
Though she is always with me
Because as she casts light there must always be a shadow

I sit near a blackened pool on the opposite side of the world
and I look at the closest reflection I have of you
The moon shines on as I'm wishing you were here
I look into the pool and think of the time we have spent
Those brief few moments when light met dark

'This is a love to fight for'
That's what I said the last time we met
You shook your head and said
'In the end we'll both lose'
Time fades fast
I must convince her here and now
'Look at me' I said in her ear
She looks and her eyes twinkle
'If at anything my dream came true
I brush back her hair
'I got to meet a girl like you'
Gentle lips meet
Sometimes a kiss is all you need to do

That day was the last time I saw her
As time hit the right mark we were forced to pull away
Me into darkness
She into light
I grab her hand and try not to let go
But I was being pulled back
I yell so she could hear
'I'll come back to you I promise'
She nods
'I know you will'
And we break
I am swallowed in the darkness again
Alone and again on the other side of the world
I will wait again for the next day
When light and the dark can meet once more

Written: February 16,2010

poem by Ryan Collins
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It Isn't As Far As You Might Think

It isn't as far as you might think
from this spiritual lost and found
coiled like a labyrinth of cul de sacs
or a snake of time spiralling down
the seven degenerative metals of man
through the rib gates in the belly of a dragon
that's flamed out like a red-tailed hawk riding
the last of its cooling thermals down with the sun,
not as far as you might think, according to the moss
that grows all over your north side
from this circuitous blossoming into knots
in the hardwood of a rootless tree
to the threshold of where your heart belongs.

Dig yourself out of that old National Geographic
like an explorer that never got to go
and unfold that free starmap someone included
like a flag of protocol awarded a dead celestial sailor
and start connecting the dots like ports of call
in the eyes on the dice of a long shot against the odds
that nobody believed could be made until you took it.
Where was it ever suggested that the return journey
would be any less dangerous than the first time
you left yourself like a stranger in the doorway
of this house of life, waving farewell in the rain
as you carefully put the chain back on the gate behind you?

The object of the grailquest isn't so much
a matter of finding it as it is learning how
to lose yourself wisely in the search. You can
orient your mindscape to the direction of your shining
like a circumpolar constellation, but to sip
from the Little Dipper isn't going to green
that dead branch of a divining rod in your hand.
The journey isn't lost upon you because
you're out there on the road alone
with nothing but departures behind you
and the only arrival on your horizon
more of the unknown without a return address.

What if the stars you take your bearings from
set out to find the source of their shining
and turned their light back on themselves
like solar flares to see where they were going? Do you think
you could see them from here on this hillside,
to assign them names and myths of origin
they whisper to your eyes at night like fairytales
and lullabies to help you get to sleep
when you lay your head down like moonset
on the cold stone of the world by the roadside?

The moment you go looking for yourself
do you leave the part that's beating the bushes for you at home?
Have you ever checked out who's in the search party?
Go ask the diamond sages. They aren't the masters
of an enlightenment no one can attain. They sit
like stars in the throne rooms of dark matter,
lords of the darkness, confusion and chaos
that have mastered them spontaneously like ore
to the indirections of an undisciplined way of shining
so the dark mirror you wander in looking
for a lifemask you can recognize as a face of your own,
is brighter than the white one of insight
you've had so much trouble adjusting your eyes to
like a telescope to the weather of a habitable planet.

No ray of the light you're looking for
ever started out with a sense of direction.
No star, no beacon, no lantern, no insight,
no firefly, lightning bolt or lighthouse
ever plotted a straight path through the abyss
that wasn't omnidirectionally bent
by the gravitational eyes of space it passed
on its journey to nowhere in particular
though it bumped into a few planets and wildflowers
along the way it was exactly meaningless to take.

No one's ever really lost. They're just
not very adept at reading their own starmaps.
They look for what shines though the eyes of a crow
remembering how white its feathers were
before it found the continent it was sent out
before the dove to look for. And Noah cursed it black
for not coming back. Lost innocence longing for light.
Long wavelengths on the night sea of awareness
looking for land like particles and cornerstones
they can found their spiritual temples upon
like aviaries for the wrens and sparrows
buffeted back by the winds they're flying against
like the ashes of disinterred aspirations in their own face.

Lost in the woods, everyone looks at the constellations
like light in the windows of a distant farmhouse.
But no one ever consults all the darkness beyond
the blazing midways of the zodiac like deer paths
off the ecliptic or wolf packs above the timberlines
of their celestial equators. Aldebaran
is sixty-five lightyears from here as we're
eight light-minutes from the nearest sun.
But how far does a human who is the measure of all things,
have to go before he or she realizes the darkness
was always the truest sense of direction for anyone
trying to shine a light on where the light has gone
without them, so they can see in the dark
how their eyes emerge out of the search for themselves
and the night whispers like a homecoming embrace
in the ear of the prodigal do you finally recognize
who I am? Even when you most deeply eclipsed
the shining of the black mirror of awareness,
blinded by the candle of your own lantern
there's never been a son or daughter of a star
that was ever lost in me since the light began.

poem by Patrick White
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Am I Your Angel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Tin Mouse
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The Demonically Enlightened See Further Into Hell

The demonically enlightened see further into hell
than the light the angel eyes see by. Who knows
a woman better than when you've lost her?
So I know the bliss of heaven as I know
the depth of the regrets of Pandemonium.
Both ends of the telescope. The vapour of the rose
and the smoke of oil fires throwing snakes
and black feathers on the pyres of the wildflowers
that shed their petals like scales. A white star
in the arms of a black hole it's dancing around binarily.
The via positiva coiled around the via negativa
like the copulative way of day and night,
helical theta waves killing and healing,
changing their spin contemporaneously
in synchronicity with the charged starfields
in every creative moment we live here to shine
a light out of the darkness of awareness
we haven't seen before. And I say,

prophetically hooded in snake skin,
this interim in the late fall, this fateful pause
in the roseate third eye of a galactic hurricane
bearing down upon us like diamond-edge blades
in a threshing field full of scarecrows
that incorporated the crop into the strawdogs
of their bodies, is the Age of Disappointment,
the bursting of the myriad balloons of the multiverse
blooded like roses hemorrhaging on their own thorns.

We grow older faster than we used to
trying to keep up with the pace of our longevity
fleeing from the light of the way things are,
one jump ahead of our youth, as if the ship
were abandoning the plague rat of time
by scuttling itself on the reefs of a foreign eternity
wearing the deathmask of the moon
that gapes down upon us all in shock
at what we've done to ourselves in the green room
like an atlas of shattered mirrors slashing out at us
in a frenzy of reflections that make things clear as blood.

Disappointment is the prelude to desecration.
And though we all hype our optimistic overviews
of the text to come, we haven't seen anything yet
like the wind that will knock us out of our words
like the empty nests of the birds that had heard enough
to stop singing before us. The terrible stillness
of the first sign of a red alert in heaven
and the great silence that overwhelms
the air raid sirens of hell. And all
the opinionated lighthouses and foghorns
that made a career out of not taking their warnings
seriously enough, snuffed out and blinded
like the mouths and eye-sockets of prophetic skulls
in the decaying orbits of an avalanche of asteroids
taking their lead from the insurgent cells of shepherd moons.
A ravening species of life that eats itself
out of house and home like a cannibalistic planet
that lives off its own, gone antibiotically insane.

But even a total eclipse doesn't cover the sun wholly
and the corona gleams through the valleys
of the lunar mountains like Bailey's Beads.
And there's even a dim halo around the rim of a black hole.
And among the condemned you can sometimes see
a begrudging kind of merit that shines out
of the slag and slurry of the excruciating transformations
of the ore that's being refined by suffering and experience,
a black jewel that radiates dark energy
even in the false dawn of an unworthy afterlife.

Just below the scar tissue of the earth's crust,
seven kilometers down in a diamond mine
blind on the coal road to the light,
thermophilic bacteria have regenerated life on the planet
after near annihilation three times.
So if any of us survive ourselves in this empire
of mineralized cells and exotic metals
out of our exuberant neurons what photons
of our bioluminescence might jump orbitals
and spread like foxfire across the scorched earth again,
casting the ashes of stars in the urns of the rose-hips
on the roots trying to cling in the cold
to some notion of spring that keeps their bloodstream
blooming in their underground hearts
like one of the more graceful arts of survival?

poem by Patrick White
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A Little Thought In A Big Space

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
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Bright Morning

Bright morning, blue, and the clouds gossiping with the treetops and the fallen ladders of the impossible horizons. I sustain six lives simultaneously in a wounded apartment that's been bleeding for years, continents of plaster out of the walls, the cartography of aging, rewriting the maps as the world drifts like a cinder across the seas of its weeping eye. The trees sway in the wind like smoke, and I sit at my desk, waiting for my hair to dry, smoking, drinking black coffee, happy to be enthroned in my solitude as my dreams pale like stars in the extremity of the light. Lost. I couldn't tell you who I was if you showed me, and the mirrors have grown bags under their eyes like the heavy pollen of time in bee-satchels, silver wombs that are still trying to get my birth right. I've become an apostate of reflections, erasing my face with a sleeve; or watching it shrink like a warm breath on a cold windowpane. Maybe the hive of a mind somewhere is turning me into honey. And I remember lovers I've had, and lovers I will never meet, and all the changes of a comet as it approaches each one to glow luminously in the darkness of the bottomless watershed that is always within me, the familiar one-eyed abyss. And there's a wing of my heart that opens and passes over them like a generous eclipse to bless them all for the time I spent in their mansions of blood and tears, for the candles that ached like joy in the mystery and led me to the eras where they wanted me to stay for the night. They left a desert by the bed and I drank it like an hourglass, true to a calling that exceeded us both. Like the wind, I left a note, extolling their beauty to the webs of the morning, hanging on the bell-ropes of the flowing diamonds that wander the labyrinths of the wet peach hair and Appalachian earlobes I dampened with my tongue. A language of one, I drank from their intimate stars and played the skeletons of their burning harps in a controlled fury of power and hunger as the earth convulsed with islands of flesh, bolts of black lightning that illuminated oblivion in a flash of annihilant ecstasy. And habitable planets were born of the encounter, two children, old enough now in their passage of nights and days to know that it's life that flows, not the river, that their wings are bridges of light and blood and breath that once offered themselves like the crutches of winter trees to the sky in a paradox of love that wanted to lay down roots and fly. What a dream it all is; what a vast and amazing hallucination of darkness within darkness, shadow writing on shadow, a confusion of gates trying to enter one another with both eyes closed, fire obsessively trying to coax the hydrant of the heart to open up before the house burns to the sky and the ground, uncertain whether it's a root or a flower, a bone or a star, a desert of light, or the whisper of a billion gestural galaxies.

poem by Patrick White
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