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The Fire Hydrants Look At The Chandeliers Of The Black Cherries

The fire hydrants look at the chandeliers of black cherries
like Leonid meteor showers they're never going to put out,
a pawn shop of new moons, a rack of tabled cue-balls.
A difference in the quality of heart, if not kind.
The stolid earthbound. The more translucently cavalier.
Hearts that function. Hearts that look for somewhere to dance
against the gathering storm clouds like fireflies under the stars
while it's still clear enough for everyone to shine.
The galaxies whirling around their black holes
in three four waltz time knowing behind
all that beauty and grace, like a death mask of dark matter,
lies a chaos of rapture, a state of unknowing
that nonetheless knows, a crazy wisdom,
a lucid ignorance in the eye of a draconian eclipse.

Who needs a crystal skull, or a rattle of the spirit filled
with the sacred seed syllables of a dream grammar
that undermines and derails the logic of syntax
like underground rivers of lunar clay moving
under them in the night, not out of radical spite,
or delusionally estranged from a nature
that is neither true nor false, nor any desire
to see the work train topple into the lake as I saw
happen several times in the muskeg when I
was romantically labouring and teaching on an extra gang
lining and tamping our way through the wilderness
from anywhere to here we thought there was a purpose
as useful as a shovel in quicksand. As I said
who needs a crystal skull when you've already
got two eyes in your head and a mind behind them
to create endless paradigms and occult cosmologies
of the world as you see it, create it, and it becomes you?

Nights I weep mercury like a broken-hearted thermometer
taking the measure of my own entropy. Nights I weep
blood and water, cruel roses and compassionate rain
for love affairs I've never found the exit or the entrance to
though everything was self-contained and understandable,
but for the pain, but for the pain, expanding like space,
there was never a unit of measure or monad for that
when it's wavelengths were millions of angstroms off
the scale of the Doppler Shift that would let me know,
in relative frames of reference, whether a heart
was moving toward me or apart. The birthmark
of a meteor with extinction on its mind, or a windfall
of black cherries like balloons in mourning released
like laughing gas at a black mass for poets and pariahs.
Tonight is agony without extasis. I may be
a high wire act crossing the void on my own spinal cord,
who knows how to land on his feet like the stars,
but balance is not peace, and tomorrow I'll be jumping
through hoops of fire like a tiger of a comet in a circus
of endangered life forms when the lightning
cracks the whip like a ringmaster with a boomslang in his hands.
And the night after that I'll be carving Mayan calendars
out of the petrified bones of my flesh and blood,
fossils in the Burgess Shale, to count the eras off
since I've last seen either of my children, feeling
like Stonehenge without a spring or autumn equinox.
A sun dial of the apocalypse, why has there never
been anyone here to explain this endless silence to me?
Why do the lies go on seeking God to justify themselves
and the truth refuses to speak for itself?

Hey, but I'm made of sterner stuff than that.
An adamantine alloy of necessity and imagination,
I've evolved a spiritual immunity to a whole range
of emotional insecticides crop dusting the wild harvest
of my jungle heart with napalm and agent orange,
as much by mutation as through transcendence
when I'm not morphing without roots in a salted wasteland
that's forgotten the taste of bread and the fragrance of flowers
and everybody's afraid of eating the polluted fruits of the earth.

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Coming Out Of A Blue Funk

Coming out of a blue funk, this seal,
under a sky thickening like sheet ice all day
has found an airhole it can breathe through for awhile.
Been wondering about my life. What
it's been doing to me for the last fifty years
for the sake of poetry, for the sake
of pursuing an earthly excellence
though it hardly matters why anymore.
I used to have an answer on the tip of my tongue
when I was young and thought more
with my mouth than my heart. Less so now.
Time, death, suffering, love and the devil,
certain intense realms of creative bliss
attuned to the dark harmonies of hidden roots
that flow back like the delta of a river
to the watershed of a single dropp of water
that got it in its head to do something big with its life
and turn something trivial into the sublime.
Did not the sun and the moon, the whole of the sky,
fit it like skin? And that was just the outside.
It would take more than light years to measure
the wingspan of the abysmal spaces within.
Even time would run out of itself
before it got to the end of anything.

My life in art has been like keeping a fire alight outside
in a rainstorm of tears. To see clearly
through windows that thawed in the heat
of looking through them with the compassionate ferocity
of a crystal skull poured out of a terraforming meteor impact
like a prophetic lump of coal, a diamond in the rough,
that refused to burn in the furnace to prove it had the right stuff
to shine like a star, no one could follow, on its way to somewhere else.
Not a sign post. Just a sign. Your eyes
once you see it, are never going to be the same again.
You won't look at a starcluster like the Pleiades
as if you were waiting for the traffic lights to change.
You'll take your three and a half pounds of brainy starmud,
like a meteoritic kissing stone, a falling star,
and run it through a diamond tipped bandsaw
and discover the jewel of life that's been glowing
in the core of the ore since time immemorial
like a dna molecule wasted on space
that transforms the medium and the messenger
into a voice, free of content, that's the whole of the message.

I walked out to this dark, deserted place, redolent
with the duff and detritus of life, the flotsam and jetsam,
where the half life of the rate of decay of my insights
into your heart, eludes being used as an atomic clock
to determine the agelessness of either of us.
I came out to look at the stars but I've been startled
by the photonic discharges of your bioluminescent fireflies
ever since I started looking up like a starmap to make sure things
were where they were supposed to be. One moment
you get in my eyes like the sandstorm of a mandalic power painting,
a masterpiece of the wind, and the next,
I can feel the intransigence of your vulnerability
dyeing your hair like a comet to attract the attention
of the sun at midnight looking for asylum from a black hole
where it's third eye used to be.

You're a mermaid on the rocks of Andromeda singing to a telescope
to look up to see how far its got to sink in an ocean of stars
before it hits bottom like a shipwrecked moonrise
gone pearl diving for habitable planets
that can say I love you and mean it like an atmosphere
it's not going to lose again. Only in the Braille
of the scars on your heart so far, but I can read your pain
like the glyphs of an Aztec temple
I'm still clearing from the jungle of my indirections,
that recorded in imported stone how many times
it's been torn out to please the gods with a kidnapped sacrifice
worthy of the priestcraft in the sacred abattoirs
of modern drug cartels when you're too susceptible
to feeling too much, the same as me, when I'm thinking mythically
about what I've endured to be acceptable in my own eyes
that might shine across these aloof distances like a star into yours
that lights you up from the inside like an intimate familiar
whispering into your ear like a dream grammar of sacred syllables
that have liberated themselves from the syntax of the stars
just to speak subliminally in the same sign language as you
like the chaos of fireflies I see in the black mirror of my mindstream
bending space like the surface of a lake at night
where you can hear the echo of a loon ululating
like the wavelength of a mysterious love song
among these dark hills shapeshifting in the moonlight
toward you like a mirage of picture-music
emerging as something real in this wilderness of transformation
like a new constellation of fireflies I want to overhear with your heart.

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
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Compassion Is The Sweetness That Enters

Compassion is the sweetness that enters
the wounded apple of knowledge after
you've taken your first bite out of it.
It's not an antidote to the facts of life and death.
And you should know by now if you've suffered at all,
and it's impossible not to from the moment you open your eyes,
the night is not a reward, nor the lantern of the light
that goes before you on a graveyard shift of the stars.
Compassion is the oldest instinct of the heart
and first muse of the mind that can taste only
the blowing blossoms and bitter green apples of the spring,
gripe brain, before it ripens like a sunset in your blood.

That's why the heart knows more about it than the head.
And I expect, on that basis, no one is more capable
of loving us who must doubt that we're worthy of love
to live up to the truth of it than the dead who can open
the tiny koans of the seeds at the core of things
like the lockets of fortune-cookies that break
like twisted cosmic eggs in a rush to spread their wings
like waterbirds who write the lyrics of their songs on the fly.

Words for the eye. Words for the ear. Words
for the voice of the wind like black walnut trees
and kites in a storm. And if you really know how to listen,
I mean if you can hear the wavelength of a black snake
swimming across your blood like a mantra
of terrifying, beautiful wisdom that keeps its secrets
to itself, or hear the unfathomable oceans in the black rose
whose petals and eyelids are always smashing
like white eyelashes in a squall of sunbeams
against the breakwater of a white dawn that passes
like an albino eclipse in a moonlit leper colony
of extinct black rhinos. If you even remotely
hear what I mean when I speak like this sleepwalking
through a dream grammar like a prophetic skull in a trance,
words that dance like light on the mindstream
rejoicing in the clarity of the voice that expresses
the hidden message encoded in the genes of the fireflies.

You have mouths. Speak for yourselves.
Some like lighthouses along the banks of life.
Some like thieves with searchlights for eyes on a bomber's night
when everyone is underground and the bummers are out
plundering the evacuated houses of the zodiac.
Might be the ravings of a star struck maniac talking to himself
to make sure nobody else is listening. Might be
the surrealistic lament of a Dadaist night bird
singing out loud in its sleep for things it doesn't know
it longs for, or maybe a lunatic is waxing prophetic
in a labyrinth of his own echoes trying to sound his way out
of the mountains without end he's being trying to befriend
like a cloud or an eagle silvered a moment
like the ore of a dream in the corner of the eye
of a moonrise coming on like a hurricane
with a black pearl in its teeth. The eclipse of a sacred lie
compassion concedes to an alibi without a myth of origin.

Compassion is the child of imagination that identifies
with its simulacra of suffering by applying the heart
like a bloodbank to the wounded eidolons of eyeless images
that didn't know how to bleed, or breathe, or cry or see
until compassion tempered their impression of themselves
as paradigms of rationality, by shedding real tears
in an ice age of lenses that kept their illusory distance
from the stars that came out after the rain, wet and shining,
laughter radiating through our tears, because life isn't a dry fire.
It's the hand on the rudder of a lifeboat
that keeps you from drowning from the day you were born
in the undertow of the tides of the new moon
until the night of the full when you haul everyone aboard
who's been swimming through glaciers of tears
like baby mammoths for the last twenty-five thousand years
afraid of extinction if they ever stopped to catch their breath.

Compassion is accepting everyone's death as a portion of your own.
Everyone's life as your third eye, a vital organ of your own body.
Compassion is an undisciplined action of the heart.
Compassion arises like a moonrise of inspiration
in the eyes of the older sister of the muses
who walks too much alone as if she'd devoted her solitude
to the suffering of a wounded stranger she met along the way
when she let her hair down like willows of rain
to cool the scorched earth and slake the roots of pain
until they bloomed like foxfire in the shadow of her passing.

Most poets sit around the lesser fires of their art
trying to divine the smoke of what's burning in their hearts
like autumn leaves they've heaped into books
that smoulder in tears more often than they break into flames.
But if compassion turns her eyes toward you
like a star in the darkness beyond your blazing
the Milky Way runs like a bloodstream through your veins
and you see in terrifying clarity the great mystic details
in the deep watersheds of picture music efoliating
like wildflowers and galaxies, grails, fountains,
lunar herbs, and starfish raised up off the ground
to take their place among the shining, radiant with life,
in the low valleys and high fields of an imagination that heals.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Anyone Can Say What They Feel

Anyone can say what they feel
but how few can sing what they dream.
You put your heart into any art
and people will follow you like a bloodstream.
In self defence against the omnipotence
of being interdependently originated,
you can substantiate your absence
to prove you're not living in the same world
we all do, but where's that going to get you in the end?
You can true your delusions anyway you want
but that's not going to clear you for the truth.
The destroyed see deeper than those who survived.
That man puts a straitjacket on
everytime he says he's arrived.

Just because it's absurd doesn't mean
it isn't believable. Me sitting here
writing this to a caste of albino stars
I haven't reconfigured into a constellation yet
because my imagination keeps shape-shifting me
like a gust of fireflies into myriad myths of origin
since I realized, cosmically speaking, one size
doesn't fit all like a house of transformation
in an Etruscan zodiac. Or a prayer wheel.
Or the ecliptic of a mystic head band
still bound to the skull of a Druid who died young.

Fifty years, a poet, but I don't expect
this is as mad as it's going to get.
I've been deepening my ignorance aesthetically
for light years, but when I cry for things I regret
my tears are still wet, and my mindstream suggests
there was no other way of flowing at the time.
I hang on the hook of the moon prophetically
until the pain grows profound
and ten scribes in a tower write it all down.
I am blessed. I am cursed. I am hunted and ignored.

I love disingenuously to keep from being bored.
And when there's nothing else for the fire to feed on
I offer it my body, my soul, my solitude
and the rare acquiescence of a tumultuous mind
like the third eye of a hurricane with a corneal implant.
I don't keep the impersonality of what I feel about life
in a little drawer with a skull on a keychain
I use to master the coffin doors of the slumlords
that won't open of their own accord
like rosebuds in a rusty locket that's come unhinged.

I don't pour the ocean into a teacup anymore
as much as I used to and there's a little more wisdom
in my love lyrics I haven't completely
taken to heart yet, but I'm trying. I stand
an intimate distance away from the things I cherish.
I'm dying as we all are, but it doesn' t feel
as if I'm going to perish. My emotions are ageless
and inspiration's only the whisper of a star away
and though my dark energy keeps expanding the starfields
further apart, so I have to walk further
to find a wild flower I can identify with,
the dark's beginning to shine like a black candle
with my spinal cord dipped in serpent fire
like a total eclipse of dragon's blood as its wick.

I rave like the vision of a sacred clown who's become
the misfit of his own crazy wisdom, heretically so,
to live up to the standards of my own disobedience,
a saintly truant in the labyrinths of spiritual malfeasance.
A shepherd of wolves, I don't drive the stars
up into the high fields like a small herd of scapegoats
like a hard rock on a mountain keeping
its fossils to itself like apocalyptic alibis
for the silence in the voice of the void that unwords me.

No truth ever mattered a damn to me
if it defeated people who were just trying
to get on with not knowing what to do with their lives.
No beauty ever took my breath away for long
that wasn't emotionally siderealized
or hadn't drowned like a sorceress on an island
in the oceans of the black rose of a new moon.
I prefer to look at the blessings of life
through a broken window more than
the polished mirror of a purified mind
blinded by its own blazing to the diamonds
that pour like stars from the eyes of weeping meteors
that have initiated the extinction
of too many, too much, without rancour
for the fragility of the afterlives in the ashes
that emerged from the inside out
into the available dimensions of a random future.

Time might observe the protocols of its waterclocks
for some who still drink from wishing wells
and hourglasses that are always pouring another
for the road, but in the intimacy of my solitude
time acts extemperaneously upon my heart
like a stranger who could always feel his way past
what he didn't know about what could hurt him
if he ever stopped long enough anywhere to find out.
I'm grateful to the abyss for the black hole
in the centre of my life that can't be fulfilled
galaxy after galaxy at a feast of light that keeps
my appetite for the moonrise of the mystery
intrigued and hungry. My mind was never an experiment
nor my heart the rube of experience.
I didn't map the rain to know where to go.
I let the mountain be my goat-footed guide to the top
and when it came time to come down,
I won my wings falling toward paradise
with more joy in taking the plunge
than I relished in the angelic aviary of my arrival
where nobody jumps unless they've got a parachute on.

Buff the risk with a safety net or you'll candle
like a daylily all the way down into an early grave
people used to say to me when I was a young precipice
ferociously faithful to exploring the nether depths of myself
like a comet jumping the orbitals of a dark halo
to shed a little light like a petal of the sun
on why I'd rather perish in the night like a firestorm
on a purple passage of the wind, than blossom
like the wildflower of a savage mystic
in the genetically engineered garden of a false dawn.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Light Doesn't Talk To The Flowers Anymore

The light doesn't talk to the flowers anymore
the way it used to. I can feel a lot of shadows touching my face
as if it were written in braille. Acid in the rain.
Tears of dry ice in the housewell. Weathervanes
knocking at the door to get out of the storms
they used to revel in, and the storms themselves,
no kamikazes riding a divine wind against the Mongols,
at best, a mango-flavoured tempest in a Japanese teapot.
And even Zen can't put an edge on the full moon
to cut through everything like a harvest being threshed.

No songs from the birds that used to wake me up in the morning,
only these spiders weaving their smokey laryngeal webs
like a voice that got stuck in the throat of a chimney
when it forgot, when you sing from the heart,
you don't need a medium or a seance. Not even an art
that's interested in what you're saying unless
you're obeying a grammar of headstones that don't know
what you're talking about until it's not worth
bringing up anymore in anybody's language
whether the metaphors are living or not. Words in a bonebox.
Locks and bars on our eyes. Dumb-bells stuck through our tongues
like someone was doing voodoo on the leaves
or the baton of a drum major in a parade
that's never going to come, afraid to leave home on its own.

Since I was a boy in the late Cretaceous,
I've always wondered about the timing
of the asteroids and comets and why
they had such an impact upon the dinosaurs.
But I hear they were already on their way to extinction
because of the earth's own volcanic activity,
and, at worst, the asteroid just accelerated
the flywheel of birth and death a bit.
Bad spin on an antiquated myth of origin.
Better luck next time, but right now the mammals
have evolved so far beyond that they're destroying themselves
in a long, slow nuclear winter of attrition
that's putting a pillow over everybody's face
like the cloud cover of a screening myth with an air force
that buffers the light with our own ashes
and much prefers smouldering to ignition.

What did Berryman say in a letter to Wang Wei,
centuries after the fact, just before he jumped from a bridge
into an ice-covered river with the Pulitzer Prize in his hands? -
O to talk to you in a freedom from ten thousand things.
Be dust myself pretty soon. Not now. Or words to that effect.
But just the same, it's hard to get into the skull
of the man anymore without the flame of a candle or a dragon
to see where you're going in case you nudge an atom the wrong way
and bring on another astronomical catastrophe inadvertently.
Minefield covered in snow like a pioneer cemetery
buried on the hilltop of an avalanche with a view of the valley below.
Dangerous, too, to move among the stars freely
like a rogue planet without a starmap, causing perturbations
in the orbits of the shepherd moons on an exploratory flyby
to see if there's any kind of intelligent life you can identify with.

The nights are getting darker. The stars are moving further apart.
Sooner or later everything tends toward empty space
until there isn't even any room left in it for itself.
And nothing ever dawns upon you there but endless entropy
and time comes to a sudden halt where spaces runs out
and the bones of the fossilized stars are left like empty chairs
in a dark auditorium with bad acoustics.

I'll write it on the wind now, while I have the chance.
I'll write it like a fire in smoke at a ghost dance.
I'll write it in blood and tears and rivers and stars.
I'll write it in scars and wounds as deep as roses.
I'll write it on the skins of the snakes that I've shed
like serpent fire running up the lunar thread of my spinal cord
like a lightning rod tattooing the clouds of unknowing
with the insights of fireflies into the mysterious darkness of life,
who know that one glimpse is enough of a Big Bang
to satisfy even the blind who go looking for their eyes
with their eyes like a windfall in a thunderstorm of picture-music
though they're still hanging on to the same old lifeline
like an umbilical cord between the backdoor and the barn
in blizzard of stars and butterflies. I'll write it in light.

I'll write it on the eyelids of eclipses and occultations alike.
I'll write it on the foreheads of the mute rocks
in runic striations of glaciers retreating north in tears,
I'll write it on my bones before I'm buried under the hearthstones
with a big rock on my chest like an asteroid
rolled over a cave to make sure I'll never rise again
like Jesus and Muhammad said I would if I was good,
or Ali Baba and the forty thieves muttering their shibboleths
on the thresholds of an artificial paradise, in case I wasn't.

Now is the light. Now is the loving and the living.
Now is the hour for the hidden nightbirds to raise their voices
in the sacred groves of the moon to celebrate
the brevity of their own longing for the unattainable
blossoming on the dead branch of their aspiration.

There's only so much time, and then, in a moment or two, forever.
The heart sings awhile like a red-winged black bird on a green bough.
And then the eyeless silence of the stars
who have looked down upon nothing for 14.3 billion lightyears
and watched the fireflies dancing to the music
of their own tiny hearts, lockets of light, of insight,
that open like seeds and eyes sown into the abyss
to let all winged things, and even star-nosed moles can fly,
out of the cages of their earthbound solitude like dragons
taken down like occult books from their hardwood shelves,
with the wingspan of constellations singing in the night to themselves.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Ironic Smile Of A Sword That's Tasted Blood

The ironic smile of a sword that's tasted blood.
Bless the slayer who wounds me. I've been
hemorrhaging roses ever since. And bless
the tormentors of the heretical truth, voice coaches all
who taught me to sing in the fire to no one
without feeling the pain. Bless the executioner
for dropping the double-bladed axe of the moon
on the nape of my neck. I transcended thought,
tore all the wire-mesh down from
the home-made aviaries of my voice
and released all my cages from the grasp of my doves
in a slum of rapture that pitied the landlords
who had none. I bless the manipulator who taught me
how to love the joys of spontaneous chaos without contrast
and the psychosexual sadist with the intimate private life
of an X-rated hardware store who sold me a sabre saw
that allowed me to cut my umbilical cord to the puppet masters
and fly without strings like a burning box-kite among the birds.

O, and the long erosive sorrows of an afterlife
with nothing to hope for anymore, what gifts
have they not arrayed before me like wine to a grape,
enlightenment sweetening my heart
with the fluid fruits of compassion?
Namaste, my old teachers, namaste.
I sing it from a low-hanging bough
like the new moon in the heart of a nightbird
and when I went like a wolf to dig up
where I was interred, to give myself
a decent sky burial, I discovered
a motherlode of constellations had replaced
the dusky, sad marrow of my bones
that lay all around like the clappers of bells
that had their tongues cut out by the silence.

Praise be to the assassins on top of the world mountain
and the Old Man who wheels and deals
in sex and drugs like a false prophet who casts
a shadow upon the earth like a tarpit
where the trophies of extinction sink into time
and the abattoirs are redesigned as museums of the mind.
I decultified myself like a contract killer
and rehabilitated my existence by letting a full moon
kiss your eclipse on the lips like the birthmark of a man
who's about to die at the hands of an apprentice
he raised like an orphan as one of his own.
Ever since you died, the flowers don't mind coming to my wake.
I shall always sing lyrics of acid rain over your grave
that sting the heart like a child choir of scorpions.

And I want to honour the pettiness of all the maggots
and leeches and tapeworms and high-minded parasites,
who pitched their love like tents in the place of excrement
as Yeats remarked, and spoke like monostomes
out of the same mouth they ate and eliminated with
for teaching me that karmic retribution is instantaneous
and reincarnation isn't a single event of birth
but a kind of regressively transformative justice
that can swarm one lifespan with many afterlives
like a law of diminishing returns. And that a lion
can learn as much from its unlikeness to these
as it can from all its shining solar affinities.
And humans are known not only by their friends,
but the qualities or lack thereof of their enemies.
Which is why wolfpacks don't hunt flies.

Out of the effluvium of the swamp I was born into
I broke into poems like nocturnal waterlilies
and even as the eyeless night darkened around me
my fireflies of insight deepened their radiance
into first magnitude stars. And all the lunar deaf-mutes
of my scars opened their mouths for the first time
in a long time, and my blood begin to sing
to the picture-music of songbirds returning
to a sacred grove of first violins branching out
to watch the bud of the moon blossom like a whole note
at the tips of their horse-hair pernambuco sticks.
Praise be to the krill that nemetically created the blue whale.

I've learned to fractalize the singularities of black holes
into radiant galaxies lavishing themselves
on billions of life forms upon as many worlds.
Out of a single atom being told it won't amount to much
by the encroachment of the abyss, I have
elaborated myself out of a dangerous contradiction
into a creative heretic disciplined by the unconditioned
without making an orthodoxy of a lack of tradition
like a great barrier reef of dead polyps mouthing
sacred syllables to the lunar seas they're buried in like cement.
My eyes have been guided by the shadows of sundials
toward the light. Born with nothing
but the love of a mother who taught me
even a breadcrumb can be as generous
as loaves and fishes on a compassionate hillside,
I have been squandering the riches of my poverty
like a scarecrow on the hungry ghosts of the unfulfilled
like an inexhaustible silo ever since,
growing sunflowers for the blue jays in winter
corn for the raccoons that come with their kits in the night,
and whatever they like for the white-tailed deer
who enter the garden I've laid out for them,
shy as moonlight, with no intention
of ever harvesting anything but the wind
that sowed it in the first place with the teeth
of a dragon with starmud in its heart and mind
that brought the rain to temper and heal
the starfields of grain that had felt
the forge and blade of an igneous heart
that knew the dark abundance that would come
from the bright vacancy of the crazy wisdom
that evolved out of adverse nothing
the sublime absurdity of its efflorescent art
of breathing in coal dust like the black lung of a mine
and exhaling diamonds as expansive as a palace of water
to house the homeless radiance of the stars
in the largesse of a mind you could only enter
like a wound through the heart you could feel
in the pain of everything else like steel through your own.

Born like a star or a dragon in a cold furnace of your own ashes,
when you come across a muse chained in a dungeon of ore,
is it not a mystic act of love and compassion to fire her up
and pour her out like gold from the crucible of a base metal
with wings like bellows to fan the flames
of your own extinction into the creative immolations
that illuminate these dragon paths out of hell
with fireflies, stars, and the deeper insights of the night
burning like enlightened serpent sages
up the spinal cords of black candles
dancing on their own funeral pyres like heretics
sacrificing themselves to their own shining
well off the beaten paths of the orthodox nightwatchmen
who make the rounds on the graveyard shift of the zodiacs?

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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As Much As I Love The Stars

As much as I love the stars, I know
the spirit must seek its lost radiance
in the midst of the filth of this world,
even when its third eye is trying
to wash it off in tears it really means.
Under the half-closed eyelid
of the pine cone pagoda in oceanic meditation
is a fire-seed waiting for immolation
like an overdue urn about to give birth.
And do you see how the moon
feathers the waves with silver,
and the breathing waters so much
like the flesh of a woman undulating
under the caress of an unaccustomed hand
shines back like fish swimming through a starmap?

As above so below. Same with inside and outside.
Astrophysics is psychology. Noumena, phenomena.
Are you looking for a unified, field theory of your mind?
Study that small sacred syllable of a black ant
with the torn wing of a butterfly
under full sail in its mandible
it's taking back to the heap
of a thriving passage tomb burial
like a high card it's going to lay on the table
without intending to call anyone's bluff.

The moon on the lake isn't timed.
Death's not too late. Life's not too early.
Not all the flowers bloom at once
in a wave of mass hysteria at a sports stadium.
Time is as generous to the dandelion
as it is to the hyacinth or the rose.

When a total eclipse of the soul
can be as illuminating to a firefly
as the enlightenment of the full moon
can be to the mad at harvest time
and the night bird sings on the same branch
out of the same longing
as the mourning dove does
on the burgeoning bough,
how far must a wave look for the grail
before it realizes it's swimming in it
and by virtue of it having never been lost or found,
like the universe you're surrounded by
dipping its other wing in the cup you drink from
like blood from your own prophetic skull
or an elixir of love from the goblet of a black tulip,
as an antidote to falling into a cult of trances,
trying to teach rattlesnakes to ghost dance for rain
when everywhere you look as far as the eye can see,
nothing but the bleached bones of their vertebrae
crumbling like aqueducts across a sea of sand
looking for the holy hourglass to green it again?

When things are like this, why send
a caravan of mirages like thought-trains
on a pilgrimage for water on the moon?
Is a course correction more innocent
than its original direction or is it
just another change of heart on the part
of a weathervane that thinks linearly
it's got its hand on the rudder of the wind?

Best thing to do in a storm
is let go of the wheel of birth and death
and either go down with the ship like a constellation,
or trust in a bubble-shaped universe you still might float
like a turbulent waterlily above the turmoil of it all,
anchored to the bottom like a key on a kite
to lure the lightning to your spinal cord
the way copulating snakes make their own caduceus,
twin wavelengths from the same inner matrix
ascending like helical thermals under a dove's wings,
so that dragons are born of cosmic eggs
that know how to heal fire with fire
that can consume itself like life
without ever getting burnt out
even when autumn's coming on
and you can begin to smell
the smoke and ashes on its breath.

Enlightenment the inspiration of the search,
the spirit returns to the candle in your hand,
to dance with the flame of life within you
on your own threshold, in your own doorway as you realize
like someone waking up from a dream
in their own bed, their head on a softer pillow
than they imagined a moonrock could be
at one sixth the gravity of earth, what
was there to aspire to that could possibly be
higher and wiser than a cloud circling a mountain
or down in the valley where the stars slum
once they get off the night shift, more compassionate
than a honey bee in the eye of a stargazer lily
smothering it in a rusty ochre dust storm of pollen
the way we prepared our dead when we lived in caves
to bloom like a hive when its spirit returns to matter
in its next incarnation as a gust of wildflowers on Mars.
Hawkweed and Indian paintbrush I would think.
And the unusual fruits and flowers that can sprout
from a windfall of intensely radiant meteor showers
flung out of the darkness by the hands of generous sowers
that were ploughing the moon for themselves
long before the ox of the mind showed up
like the blessing of a delusional dependency
that makes you think, gone to seed, you need it.
When the truth has always been mindful
and mindlessly green as the thorns and the leaves
of the locust trees in spring coming into blossom
as easily as the mindstream follows its own lead everywhere
with nothing but its own flowing for a navigator.

No gate, no lock, no pivot, no hinge, no waterclock
trying to put the fire of life out in a bucket brigade
of community-oriented arsonists, departure
never any further off the beaten path from home
than its arrival can be lead astray
by the shadow of the return journey
it casts behind it like the widening wake
of a waterbird's wings unravelling
the flying carpet of the water that wove it
like wavelengths of the hidden harmonies
that are on your side like your eyes are
when you step out of the blazing house of life
once in a while, into the expansive solitude
of your own inimitably creative darkness,
without a candle, a firefly, a lightning strike
for a guide, and look up, just look up
in any direction you wish, and don't pick any one
of the six thousand stars you can see
with the naked eye in the country,
no matter you don't know their names
or myths of origin, or much about shepherd moons,
or what an antikythera is, then run around
looking for an underground circumpolar sage
to show you on a starmap where your shining is at
like the light of the star, though you cry
in bliss and sorrow, delusion and insight,
you can't wash out of your own eye
anymore than you can Venus in the dawn
when you're sitting on a mountain under a Bodhi tree
trying to attain the unattainable empty-handed
in the same breath that's been giving it all away
for light years, inexhaustibly, like a flower-mouth
of enlightenment in everything you say or do,
the world in the creative wake of whatever medium
that's shapeshifting into you like water into fish,
darkness into star, sky into a bird on the wing
in a homesick sunset, or the shining of the source
like the lantern in your hand you needlessly labour
at keeping lit to go look for it without realizing
it's your own blazing that blinds you to the gift
of what the darkness arrays before you like candles and stars
and nocturnal waterlilies opening like a new moonrise
amazed by the occult mystery of the fire that burns
in the subliminal watersheds of your fathomless eyes.

In this boundless space, why should you be surprised
behind all the masks of God, her best disguise
when the hidden secret wished to be known
and she revealed herself, was your own face,
your eyes, your mouth, your ears, your voice alone
pouring the universe like the light of picture-music
into your own ears like the spirit of a word
that can't be enlightened until it's been heard by you.

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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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In You

In you I come to the end of roads,
and an alphabet of burning wings
falls from an indigo sky
like meteors trying to write
the unsayable in a slash of light,
in a language of luminous scars
the night beatifies with mystic knowledge
that wants to name you
so deeply in thresholds and stars
the charged silence
is giving birth to an indelible mouth,
a doorway of blood,
an ancient grammar of fire
the wind puts on like a robe
to scry the darkness for a voice
that could fill the goblets
of the moon's dead seas
with the wine of a radiant wound,
so much within me
already the tongue of a bell
that can taste you like blackberries.
The whole of you
in every single dropp of your eyes,
you are the black swan
of the eclipse that rares its reflection in water,
the dark orchid in the shadow of the dragon
that sways like a bell in the night,
even your absence a shape of cherishing,
a harvest of shadows beyond the light
of the lamp that burns for you.
Within the deepest abyss of myself
where the heart stands alone
like a single black pillar
in the twilight wasteland of the world,
a mysterious temple to the ultimacy
of having been here once
to suffer the passage of form and time,
everything a gesture of space
that thaws back into itself,
I have written your name
in the hourglass of my blood
like a whisper of secret ink
that once voiced the light to be
and shook the stars like wheat
out of its blind abundance
and will be remembered forever
as the first intimacy of the sea,
and there is the rumour
of a dream in the air,
the fragrance of an approach,
that out of an ocean of light
the tide will embody a woman
like the shore of an island
littered with fingertips and kisses
enmeshed like galaxies and starfish
in the exhalation of her veils
and our lips will meet like archers,
and our bodies will sing like arrows
sunk like orchards through the heart
and long after the last flame of life is shed,
the night will silence the birds
in the groves where we bled like poppies
to open the gates of the mystery
like keys and rain, or the rosary of black pearls
that chants its prayers to the night
like the slow alarm of autumn geese
in the eyes of a human face.
I try to say what can't be said,
pouring my spirit
into the wineskin of every word,
but my heart is a larger apple
than the bough of my voice can bear,
and the silence
that would erect temples everywhere like flowers
spun from the auroral silks of my soul
and perfume the air with the pollen of sacred fireflies,
every emotion a priest with a shaven head
to honour the moon
climbing the stairwell within me
of a million horizons at once
in every breathless step,
falls away behind me like the wake of a sinking ship
that lowers me into my coffin like a lifeboat
or a message in a bottle
that pleads like wine with the emptiness
for an alphabet that isn't in arrears to time
to say you to the night
in a lightning breath of life beyond
these elemental likenesses I carve
from a quarry of stars.
And I know I ask for immortal children
from a human womb,
and wide as my powers are
to exceed the sky with homing birds,
to adorn the dead branch with windows
that dazzle the roots of dawn,
I am the ashes of a black star in daylight,
a stone man with a chain for a tongue
when I try to swim like Atlantis
through the depths of your shining within
and the last word, the last life
to flash across my mind as I drown
again and again like a pulse
in the embrace of your beauty
is always the world as it is
before anything was said.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Something Deeper Than Stars

Something deeper than tears to weep for you.
I weep blood. I weep the silence
on the backstairs with the screen door
that bangs like the sound of one hand clapping
all through the night at the slightest gust of wind
as if a constellation were trying
to strike up a insightful conversation
with a wet match, the sceptre of a spent blossom.
I need a moon deeper than water to drown in.
I need to dance the pain away
in a sword dance of serpents
that know how to carry a tune
like a well fledged arrow, a beautiful toxin,
straight to the heart of the mysterious apple
that's sitting on top of my head like a prophetic skull.
No flower can say. Not any number of song sparrows
returning to the budding tree in spring,
no green leaf of an innocent tongue,
not even this dry leaf of mine in autumn
writing lyrics on the wind no one can read,
not even among ghosts, can find a voice
that isn't already the dead language
of an absence that can't be adorned
by a seance of words.
I light no candles. I summon no gods.
No pretence of knowing where you've gone.
No black hole that's as empty as
your ring on the table, no halo
that ever fell as far from heaven.
Good-bye's too optimistic and farewell's
the rudder of a grave on the rocks.
And if I were to raise the paper sail
of another poem like the waxing phase
of the funereal moonboat
that carried you away,
I'd make it black. I'd raise it
like the shroud of a black magician
that can make things disappear,
like an eclipse at half mast
and patch it with the skull and crossbones
of a different phase of the moon on the dark side.
I wouldn't return your personal belongings
back to the morning like starlings and doves.
But there aren't enough sacred syllables
swimming like moonlit fish
in the watershed of the silence
to open this fountainmouth of grief
like an aviary of flightless birds.
Nor would I risk having you remember me,
and turn around like a false start,
supposing you can still recall anything at all,
like a light you left on in the hall
the night you left home for good.
You were magic while you were here to work it.
You were the black nun of an enlightened cult of one.
You were the black mass of the sun at midnight
and the blood sister of the moon
that nicked your finger
on both her crescent thorns at once
so one was the cure to the other's wound
like the eyes of a cat, the fangs of a snake.
Given how close to the moon you were
it didn't come as a surprise
when you started writing me loveletters
inscribed in bone as if you'd just invented
a whole new language out of your claws
to make love to a poet in the nude when the moon
didn't lay its silver sword down between us
to keep us a threshold apart from our fingertips.
And it wasn't long before the elixir began to work
and I lost count of the number
of consensual metaphors I had for your lips,
similitudes for the night skies
that surrounded your eyes in a delirium of stars
that revelled in the crazy wisdom
of their mystically inspired atmospheres.
As just as beautiful as they were,
so were they irresistibly dangerous.
How many light years now
have I poured this memory of them
like a love potion over my roots
and waited for you to bloom in my bloodstream
like stars and blossoms streaming
through the heartwood of an ageing tree
that has as many dead branches on it as it does leaves,
and like an orchard anticipating moonrise,
knew you weren't coming anymore,
and the night bird had no one to sing for?
But, hey, I'm still a better seance
than I am an exorcism and if you can hear me
calling the faithful to prayer
in all directions at once like a paper airplane
the boy in me has sent out to search for you
like a loveletter in a hurricane of razor wire,
dripping with clusters of blood
the size of hemorrhaging grapes,
fireflies caught in a spider-web
of starless constellations that aren't a sign
of anything except I miss you worst at night.
If you could sense the tremor
in even the slightest wavelength of light
I'm trying to shine on the darkness to find you,
I'd write you a holy book of sacred silence
inspired by the shadows in my blood
that overtake me like strangers from behind
with an urgent message not to return home
to what isn't there anymore.
I'd sit out here all night by myself
beside the black waters of this night creek
unravelling like a ribbon in mourning,
that's been talking to itself
as it walks in its sleep on the water,
and I would beseech the stars with my eyes
to let me know if they've seen you,
and in my heart I would entreat them
with the solo of a wounded wolf
raising its head up in a wild prayer
to catch a trace of you on the chilly night air,
to give me a starmap to when and where
I can see you face to face again
and touch your eyelids in your sleep
like crocuses coming up through the snow.
Like moonrise in the apple blow of the storm
that scattered us to winds like all these poems
I've tried to write for you ever since
as if you were still somewhere nearby
like another pair of eyes
in my pain and my solitude
watching from the woods
the stars, the water, the moon,
under the stones in the river
that mark your grave and name
above the flowing of this endless epitaph
of leaves and blossoms and poems
as if you alone could still read them,
like the comings and goings,
of waterbirds on the moon,
the first draft of words on the wind,
maple leaves and keys on the mindstream,
and still understand what I was trying to mean.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Would Speak To You In My Night Voice

I would speak to you in my night voice
if you were still here. If you were even as near
as the stars commingled in my breath,
I'd thaw my secret zodiac of crystal skulls
and let my mindstream run wild at your feet
like a flashflood waking the dry creekbed up
from its long dream of making the desert bloom
with real flowers in a mirage of metaphors.
I would ignite the pilot lights of a thousand stars
to blaze in an honour guard of mythic starmaps
waiting for you to bless their colours,
because wonder's never been known to start a war
with a world it's amazed by in every mesmerizing detail
without annihilating itself first, bursting
its own bubble in an efflorescent multiverse.

I'm a surrealistic mystic to give it a funny name,
and you've seen my hidden housewells, sacred pools
receiving the moonlight on the water like the blades
of ceremonial swords that tasted my blood first
like a rose bleeds on its own thorns, now let me
show you my watersheds, the fathomless voids
of dark abundance and bright vacancy
where my eyes swim like the Circlet Of The Western Fish
that never swim out of themselves
or the oceanic awareness they're luminously
immersed in up to their gills in the clear light
of the emptiness shining back at them like a distant mind.

Under the icy eyelids of methane seas on shepherd moons
I can feel life stirring like the muse of itself
and though it's too early in evolution to see yet
I've jumped ahead of myself like the light of the Pleiades
and gathered up a herd of wild telescopes
grazing on the stars like big-eyed, thin-legged antelopes
waiting for you to make an appearance on opening night
and watch how they'd dance and leap for you
like grasshoppers in the Bolshoi Ballet
who didn't give a damn that autumn was on its way
to throw cold water on the fire because in this universe
imagination is the physics of the place, and the ants
might busy themselves gathering butterfly wings
like the covers of slender chapbooks of poetry,
but I'm drunk on these lyrical elixirs of the mind
that I take as a sign that you are near in the night
and who has to worry about snow,
when they can live in your light on an occult planet
where myriad seasons can pass in a moment of spontaneity
and the fruits of life invariably fall toward the sky?

Are we both not rooted in the ancient fires overhead?
Nervous systems of black matter, scaffolding the mind
climbs up to paint the origin of worlds before their grand openings,
dark palettes of our third eye, skeletons of pictographic bones
beneath these scriptures of flesh we can read with our fingertips
like holy books and X rays written in the boustrophic signs
of the last time we ploughed the dark side of the moon together
and filled the siloes of the stars with galaxies
that spun like Tibetan prayerwheels, or Moroccan Sufis
or dust devils at the heels of winged messengers
conducting us like the flightfeathers of the dark arcana
we can read in each others eyes like loveletters
written in the cursive dream grammar the heart sings to itself in
when it's a lonely nightbird, and you're there like the stars.

poem by Patrick White
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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
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Dying Young In Autumn

Dying young in autumn,
the ideal death of a flower or a star
whose beauty's still as obvious
as a door that's been left ajar at night.

The fireflies are search parties
out looking for someone
who's made an escape through the woods,
or they're lamp lighting deer
out of the dark into the glare of their insights.

Train whistle in the distance
works its ghost to death
Doppler-shifting its lament
into an infra-red eclipse of existence.

And then the stars in the eyes
of the recurring storm of the trees,
flaring over-eagerly like candles and dragons
to burn for the sheer delight of it.

I make my way through a labyrinth
of foliage and moonlit shadows
to nowhere in particular
with a rocky slope glacially graded
down to what the locals say
is a fathomless lake none of their childhoods
were ever deep enough to plumb.

I lie down upon the cool poultice of the earth
and I can feel it drawing
all the fever out of me like the effluvium
of swimming the thousand polluted mindstreams
I've become osmotically enculturated to
like a dendritic form of spiritual gangrene.

The moon puts a new dressing on my wound.
I urge the pain to rest like a homing bird
on a limb that's healing like the rafter of a house
that broke under the weight of what it upheld
when a three alarm fire in the heart
sought sanctuary from an ice storm
and it was nobody's fault but my own
that I didn't let it go out like a flagging comet
with the rest of the daylilies
that died in harness like parachutes.

I've kept it alive for lightyears
like a book of the occult in an industrial library.
I've cupped its light in my hands
like an ancestral offering
to the enlightenment of my peers
and though the clouds have raved
and the wind turned vicious
it still burns in me like a dragon in an aviary,
a canary in a mine, a muse in a lantern,
a genie in an old lamp, a female demon
that only blooms in fire like a black waterlily
with nothing to fear from the new moon.
Or the fireflies trying to find it on a star map.

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
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Faceless This Time Of Night

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
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I Flesh Your Spirit Out In Starmud

I flesh your spirit out in starmud. No creator.
No created. Between the leaf and the sky
I mix the colour of your eyes on the palette
of a rainbow that let's the darkness
sit at the same fire it does. Because the spirit is free.
I hang crescent moons from your earlobes.
I release the sacred deltas of small night creeks
into your veins, and talk to deserts on the moon
about the manes of sidereal lions for your hair.
I search the darkening hills at night for a black rose
with eyelids as cool as mushrooms, and lips,
that are more the wings of auguries, birds and bows
disappearing into the distance to imagine you
than they are the words and arrows
of a flightless heart dipped in stars that don't ignite.

I'm a blind man in a room, painting eyes,
trying to grow flowers out of last year's fragrances,
interpret every syllable and sacred pixel
of your red ochre glyphs of lipstick
I used to bury myself in when I lived in caves with bears
and rubbed the stuff all over my face
like blood and corn flowers under the hearthstone.
Now I'm a dragon rising from my urn of ashes
like a volcano of serpent-fire out of the chrysalis
of my crystal skull, looking for signs, hints, clues,
any whisper of linear B as to who you are
in the shadows of the sundials of the mountains
you go walking with at night with your dogs.

And the stars you must see in the clear-eyed desert
when the temperature drops and all you've got
to keep you warm from the inside out is not
you in my arms, but this small dropp of blood
in our chests, this cosmic thermometer of a heart
on the night ward of a perilous greenhouse.
And I went to a cactus with thorns like a voodoo doll
with oracular powers to ask about the shape
of the body I should root you in like an hourglass in sand
and she said to me, a rootless peach tree on the moon.
And ever since, I've touched your skin
with eyes at the end of my fingertips
like a new world gnostic gospel for the blind
that can see you in the flesh, naked, sublime
like a desert island it would be worth drowning for
just to be washed up on the curvature of your dunes
like a starfish when the mind comes back to its senses
like the first sign of life on the moon in a long time.

You emerge like wild irises of hydrogen out of
this cloud of unknowing, this cocoon of nebularity
like one star among many in an almost perfect vacuum.
I can see you. I can almost taste you. I can feel
your last lover trying to squeeze into the chrysalis
of the infinite straitjacket of your last exorcism
as if he'd finally run out of dawns as alibis
for why he didn't want to leave just yet. Who
hasn't stood in the doorway of Orion
sinking down in the west? For some
the threshold's the longest part of the journey
and they make a nadir of everything at zenith
by letting their horizons down like a crosswalk
waiting for a change of colour blind traffic lights
that don't know, for all that Stop. Go. Maybe so.,
anymore about passage than the road does
or a starmap that always certain of where it's going
but never has a reason why it should
jump the gun like a star and get ahead of its light
like a car on a long dark dusty country road at night,
one headlight out, trying not to hit a doe
in the glare of the sun at midnight
on its way out of town, whether that's up, down,
or omnidirectionally radiant as the Pleiades in tears.

Drift and mingle, merge, enhance,
dance, glance, shadow and glow,
still more ghost around you than I am a mirror,
I know what it means to be summoned to a seance
and not know what to wear. What lifemask to put on
like a Mason jar full of fireflies trying to decide
what constellation has the fewest short circuits in it
and is the least likely to lead anyone astray
when the lights go on and off like a fickle tranformer
or a Cepheid variable that was just born that way.

And here, now, your ears and your hands, your arms
and bones of your own that don't owe a thing
to anyone else's bird cage after the bird has flown.
And now I think I've got the eyes just right
but it's the heart calling its rivers back to it
like the sea I can't quite find the likeness of
even when I appeal to the most ancient galaxies
in the Hubble mirror for a similitude of love
that might serve as the understudy of a metaphor
in an expanding universe that keeps exceeding
the boundary stones of the stars at zenith
and even the chipped cup of the moon full
and a skull that used to juggle mirrors
like shattered insights into reality for those
so spiritually inclined at harvest time to listen
to the blue moonrise peering through the cedars
like an effulgent pearl of wisdom shedding her skin
like a mystic in rapture on the dark side she keeps to herself.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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As If Beyond Death

As if beyond death today,
as if I lay already under the eyelid of the moon,
the echo of my heart
pumping shadows
through my perfectly preserved corpse
in a silence that's never known the wind,
a fallen wharf without arrivals or departures,
and sad enough not to care why,
blood on the dolphin in the black tide
that pours me out of the horseshoe of the bay
like a road from its boot,
wipes me like the pollen and dust of dark matter
off the windowsills of the constellations,
my unknown mass crucial
to the cosmic contractions
that might give birth to the world again,
and I'm here alone in the high field
drowning in the twilight with the wildflowers
and the sky a last exhalation of the blue-green luster
that flirts with the mystic violet
on a homing crow's head
as the shadows assemble the wings
of a total eclipse
and a new dragon is born of the pain
that shrieks like lightning in the mouth of the abyss,
a torn animal
peeled out of its own skin like an eye
to add its darkness to the furnace of the black rose
that roars in the night
to blood the hungry mirror
with the thorns and talons of clarity,
to feed the wound of its existence
its existence.
And when I walk to the end of myself
through the golden rod and waist-high asters,
the seed of the stars that sleep with the daughters of men,
some of the flowers close up like fists and kisses
and others grasp themselves like a key
to a door that the whole universe can walk through,
and there are strange birds
flying from the eyes
in the rising skull of the moon
that sing like the pyres of cremated guitars
that died like trees in their solitude
and even the gates are weeping like wild dogs.
And there's a wind, intelligent, dark
the ghost of an ancient serpent
horned without ears,
an ocean of mind that exceeds itself like a wave
that howls like a secret it can't tell itself,
like a root blind to its own flowers,
that wants to lead my voice away in chains,
that wants my tongue to try
like a leaf in the updraft of a fire storm
to scream its agony out in the night
so that even the furthest star shudders
with the horror of its final liberation
like an arrow through the throat of a caged hawk.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Background Sadness. Cosmic Hiss

Background sadness. Cosmic hiss. Cool blitz of the rain.
Too late to do the fossils of the flowers any good. Grim air.
Morose silver-grey homogenous sky. Curds of colour.
Though the trees that have hung on to their leaves
like poets afraid to publish their works on the wind,
hoarding them like flakes of dried blood from previous passions,
remind me of the Library of Alexandria going up in rusty flames.
The drainage ditches are full, and the chandeliers
of the New England star clusters aren't shining anymore.

This morning I'm the fragrance of smoke
in a bombed out city that's eaten all its horses.
A drenched scarecrow without a function
wandering through a field of shattered cattle corn.
More smouldering than combustible. The earth
lays a poultice on my heart like green moss
on the skulls of the rocks. And the agony of healing
sometimes hurts worse than the original wound.
Dark starmud clings to my lily-white winged heels.
And though the arrows of my words have been
fledged by the sky like ospreys among songbirds,
I'm still flaking spear heads off the obsidian
of prolific new moons. And it's hard to know
if I'm weeping like a candle that's still burning in the rain
or crying long, slow, pungently languorous tears of resin
down the trunks of the dolorous pines.

Wet raw umber leaves stick to my boots
like decals on a guitar case of one night stands
like the lament of a bird moving from tree to tree
without understanding what it's longing for.
Too many sundials past the equinox
in the season of the dead, I'm hauling
the blue stones of my emotions from distant quarries
as I walk these fallow fields like a crop circle
with notions of refounding Stonehenge here in Lanark County,
stacking pagan trilithons out of heritage Christian cemeteries
as I close the endless gates behind me, chain by chain,
so nothing gets out that isn't meant to, except me
and the fox that's stopped to eye me
from the far side of my field of view
that's been abandoned to its own recourses
for the rest of the year in and year out.

I came for a casual walk, but I find myself
wary and prowling through a carnivorous solitude
like a drenched bush wolf in the middle of too much agriculture
and I'm many long wavelengths away from home.
There's a brutal exactitude about a life that doesn't love you
because you were born with fangs, even when
you lie down with the lamb to share vulnerabilities.
Some like it high above the timberline
where everything is as sublime as nightfall
on a good seeing night and the stars are so ferociously hot
they cauterize your eyes like focused fireflies of blue acetylene
so you never have to cry again quite the way you used to,
or if you do, your tears shatter like chandeliers of dry ice
and weeping glass. And then a black walnut tree
that's been unfeathered by the wind like a snapping turtle says
the trouble with wild predators is they never
get down to the roots of things. Come the autumn
they're still wandering homelessly in the shallows of life alone.
Too sad to argue, I nod my assent, and think to myself
so do your leaves, your blossoms, your seeds, your windfalls,
the burnt planets of your scattered solar systems
strewn at my feet like black cue balls that break for us all.

I allegorize the woods to humanize my lupine mythologems.
And then there are some. Siloes of dark abundance
standing in the starfields of an emotional famine
that have been living on nothing but the crumbs
of the forgivable shining of their former dreams.
Sometimes think I'm one of them as well, among
so many fortune-tellers reading the lifelines
of the open palms of the trees. But I don't get fixed upon it
for fear the fireflies of insight I revelled in this summer
stop burning holes in my starmap that lets me see
clear through these obvious paradigms of the light
to the shapeshifting constellations of chaos on the other side
that unravel these monstrous myths of human origin
as quickly as they weave them out of nothing
so that in the end we're always the beginning of something else.

And there's a hidden compassion in all of that. Mercy
in the mobile protocols of passage that initiate us
into a deeper awareness of the pathos of our passions
emptying the urns of our hearts like the ashes
of the Canada geese flying high overhead above the clouds
that our pristine emptiness might be renewed again
by the yellow leaves we're kicking through in the rain
like sodden flames strewn across the trail
beside the mindstream I've been following like the Tay
where the fleets of sulphur butterflies
timed to the weather reports of the dying flowers
have taken down their sails like the wings of old loveletters
to walk alone with the Alone without saying
anything short-sighted or humanly intrusive along the way.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Not Again, Tonight, These Fin de Siecle Blues

Not again, tonight, these fin de siecle blues
that subsume all my blossoming overviews
into the mystic specificity of concrete things
I stub my heart against as if I'd just had
a head on collision with the moon. Impact.
Emotional meteor showers, the Virginids, perhaps,
I'm being stoned by my own congenital radiants
as if I were being driven out of somewhere
like an extinct species. Bad memories, lifeboats
that didn't make it back to shore, things I've tried
to mythologize like a shipwreck in coral on the moon.
Subtle childhood fears that run my tongue along
the shadows of their blades, when I was scared and young,
and the words would come out like drops of blood
sliding down the length of the stargrass I grazed upon
alone as now in my high wide starfields.
The same ones that are seeking me out tonight
like a rogue planet that's never quite known
where it's belonged, or with whom, if anyone
or where at all. Looking for an exit sign
in the infinite labyrinth of the nightmare
that's walked me like a shadow through all these years.

Most of the past, a waste of good innocence,
and the people and things I loved about it
I cherish more now than I did back then,
usually wounded irreparably in a way
I would have suffered for them if I could have
in order to have my love of them hurt me less,
given I always thought I was more worthy of the pain,
because more deserving of what they endured
than they were. Maledictions of draconian experience.
Miracle of miracles, I transcended everything so savagely,
it's hard to forgive myself now for ever being a child,
but I try. I put my arms around people when they cry
even frivolously, and offer them a few blue ribbons of wisdom
in exchange for their butter-fingered nooses
and the occasional smile at the antics of a sacred clown
who left his tears painted on a dressing room mirror
as if it had been raining for years without anyone
but himself, a circus of one on tour, getting wet.

I've fallen through more cracks in the earth
than most earthquake zones, whenever the continental plates
of my tectonic skull put their hands together in despair
but couldn't manage prayer as I jumped in on horseback
to save someone's cornerstone, like Rome, whether
I was delusional or not. A few people lit candles in remembrance,
but just as often as the fireflies light their lamps
they blow them out to return to the darkness
as the closest thing to home. I'm inured to the intemperance
of selfishness as well as gratitude. People approach me
with their secret charade, and I cancel myself out
like a circus parade I'm sure is never going to come,
a kid kicked to the curb who's been waiting too long,
and we're both a little estranged by our mutual equilibrium.

Wild parsnip in the drainage ditch boils the flesh and leaves
permanent scars. And when I don't see them as arsonists
and flammable gypsies, I see the poppies as
the blood-soaked rags of solar flares that have staunched
and cauterized the bleeding awhile. Hot knives
applied to the heart's excruciations like a brutal code of mercy
to distract me from the agony of my indifference
to the end of an era of unacknowledged supremacy
as the occult master of mirages on the nightshifts
of intensive care, the terminal ward, desolation row,
a fencing master of scalpels who knew more ways
of cutting the heart out of himself and offering it up
to someone who needed it more for the moment,
thinking they had a better use for it than I ever did.
A poultice of water applied like an oasis to a desert's forehead
until even a corpse could rise up out of the glass-blowing heat
like the inexhaustible amphora of an Aquarian among the stars.

One of the dark jewels of my childhood
in the ashes of a dragon that left me its eyes
by eclipsing mine so I could see
where the black holes were ahead of time
and warn the well-meaning lighthouses that clung to the coast
not to trust their starmaps to get their bearings
or ask for directions from the mentors of the lost and the blind,
but to turn the wheel of life and death loose in a storm
of demonically dispassionate clarities intense enough
to weld diamonds by staring through them
with the ironic compassion of an empty lifeboat
lowered from the deck of an enlightened shipwreck
on the lunar bottom of the Sea of Tranquility
I can weave like a flying carpet of real water
out of the wavelengths of high frequency mirages
like a homoeopathic wolf shaman in shepherd's clothing.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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