En.Citatepedia^®.ro

Trying To Express

Trying to express a more immediate intimacy
with the life of the mind
without attributing a form to madness
might just be another way
of looking for comic relief
from the actual facts
of the tragic folly that confronts us
like a world that won't tolerate any mask
you want to put on it for long
to lie about the atrocity of your irrelevance
and pretend you don't know
what you're looking at.
I dream I suffer the same
corpuscular purpose as a paramecium.
I wake up from these desert mirages
and it's true.
OK it's true.
Next.
Because nothing in life is an endgame.
And despite the full stop like an empty cup
at the end of a thought
with the lifespan of a punctuation mark
my cup runneth over like the new moon
and everything is drunk on the lunacy of its light.
It's not the content of life that matters
as much as the way space bends
to accommodate it.
It's not the wine
it's the emptiness of the cup
that shapes the forms of our knowing
so that they can be grasped
by our eyes and hands
as separate things in the world.
Mind is a poet a potter a painter a parent a prophet
that will not be bound by its own works
or the laws of the defenceless who expound them.
Look out into space
and the furthest you will ever see
is a face in the mirror that's older than matter.
Space is a vehicle of transformation
that doesn't go anywhere
because anywhere it goes
its wheels are centered
in the still points of themselves
as we are to our navels.
And all lifelines
straight or otherwise
are emanations of its radiance.
Order and logic and reason
are the dry wishbones of the fearful
looking for predictability in a world
that can't be contained
by a unified field theory
or an elaborated straitjacket
on the fashion ramps of science.
Physics says one size fits all
but by the time the spiders
are finished weaving it
the sleeves are always too short
to keep up with a universe
that's growing at the speed of light
and I'd rather walk naked
in the skin of my own clarity
than be clothed
in someone else's hand-me-downs.
I'm not out hunting birds and butterflies
with a dreamcatcher.
I'm not looking for peace and healing
by abstaining from myself
like a promise I broke to my ancestors.
Everyone was born a lifeboat
in an abysmal sea of awareness
or they wouldn't be here to know it.
So who needs to be saved?
Or is there some kind of holy war going on
between the lifeboats and the waves?
And where does Jerusalem go
to free itself of infidels
when it goes on crusade?
All waves are waterbells
that never stop tolling
and the mindstream
they're raised upon
is in everyone
the sum of what's holy about life.
Learn to transcend your certainties
if you want to get over your doubts.
Don't hoard the effects of your efforts
in the name of a good cause
that's so blinded by its own light
that it can't see
that there's as much randomness in the wonder
as there is in the horror.
That what's most terrifying about life
is that it's free
of anything you can say or feel or think about it.
That every part in every moment
is not the sum
but the consummation of the whole
that roots and flowers in everyone
as if it were a secret
that bloomed for them alone.
To know the names of things
like the names of stars and flowers
is to look at them from the outside.
Who called you Eve?
Who called you Adam?
If you know your name
you're already in exile.
But it was not us
who were driven out of the garden.
Knowledge drives the garden out of us.
It turns our eyes around
so we can't see Eden from the inside
where our beginnings are always now
and we are no more dispossessed
of our innocence
than the passion expressed by a flower
in a loveletter to the light
can be disenchanted
of the insight that inspired it.
What's truly tragic about life when it seems so
is not that it's evil
but that it's innocent
and its innocence is older than compassion.
The moon sheds its phases.
The flower its petals.
They're always coming and going
from the same abyss they're heading into.
The emptiness engenders this abundance
out of its own potential for growth
and even death is not culpable.
This is space.
That is space.
But the two
can no more be separated
than a wave can be from water.
You don't need a unified field theory
to understand unity.
You don't need to hold a mirror up
to your face
to see your own reflection
when you can see yourself in everything.
What does space look like to space?
Mind to mind?
Light to light?
The dreamer to the dream?
What could God possibly say to herself
that she didn't already know?
There's nothing hidden.
There's nothing secret.
There's nothing that escapes detection.
There's no simulacrum for the void
that elaborates everyone's likeness.
There's no dead metaphor in the word
waiting to be resurrected.
The absolutes may be in denial
about the way things seem
but even when their eyes
burn through glass like stars
lost in their own immensities
they can't impress the darkness
with a theory of cosmic shadows.
They don't need to look
any further into space
than the ends of their noses
to see the constellations
casting them
across the universe
like the shadows of the stars
that aren't there anymore
trying to throw a light on black matter
by noting its absence.
Gravitational eyes devoid of light.
Black holes without keys
in the doors of perception.
Dry wishing wells on the moon
that have never plumbed the depths
of their bottomless longing
to hear something irrevocably truer
than the echoes of their own voices
coming back to them
like crows and doves to an ark.
By the time you know it
any event is over.
By the time you see the dawn
the sun has already set.
In the seed of every insight
you can read your own gravestone.
You can see there's as much death in it
as there is life.
You can feel the spring coming on
as if you were already buried
under the savage tiger-lilies.
And you can ask
until you're as blue in the face as a hyacinth
what it all meant
after you're dead
out in the incredible open
that's closed to the living
just past the end of their fingertips.
Or if it ever meant anything at all.
You can see and be it this way.
You can go on a long journey
to a prison or a shrine or a hospital
and return home
with no more insight
than you had when you left.
And still wonder if it was all worth it.
Because no experience of life
is truer than another
reality is not separated
from our awareness of it
nor subject to reform.
There is no norm
that isn't a prevailing illusion by consensus.
But the desert isn't looking for water
and only the one-eyed fools
mistake their eye-patchs
for an eclipse of the moon
and their own mirages
for a new way of thinking
when it's thinking's best virtue not to have one.
People and things are ok as they are
but they don't realize it.
They keep trying to live up
to their own reflections.
They keep trying to sweep
the stars and the deserts
off their front stairs
looking for a stairway to heaven
where the dust of the world
can't find a place to rest.
But time is a pulse of the heart
not the heavy pendulum
of a grandfather clock
and as Pablo Neruda once wisely said
the poetry is under your fingernails
and I would less wisely add
as is heaven.
No one's on the wrong path
once they open both their eyes
to what's underfoot
whether you're walking
on water stars or fireflies
or riding dolphins.
Whether your road
is a shoelace or smoke
or the lifeline of an umbilical cord
measured in wavelengths and lightyears
or your journey's still
an astronaut in the womb.
Mirrors holding mirrors up
to judgement for their spots.
Narcissus doesn't like what he's looking at.
So what?
The roads don't suddenly
turn back on themselves
because they lack floors
and a place of their own.
Heaven uses the same return address as hell.
But when death comes knocking in Aleppo
and you're out walking your own mile
in your own shoes
to nowhere in particular
free of arrivals and departures
no one's ever home
and every threshold you cross
is not hindered by an exit or an entrance.
Some walk.
Some run.
Some swim.
Some fly.
Some crawl.
Some ride.
Some dance.
And some sit still by the window
growing younger by the moment
the longer they look into the distance.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Out Here Alone

Out here alone so late at night
with all these spectacular stars
burning through the clean glass
of the freezing winter air
I can almost hear them thinking
behind the myths of the cover stories
they've told for years
dark truths about life and light
it would be madness in a man to understand.

Don't try to stuff the impersonal secret
of the universe
into your sentimental heart.
How could you ever fit its likeness
into a locket
and finger it lovingly as your own?

Out here alone so late
even if you have come
like a thief in the night
to steal from the light
when nobody's home
there are no cracks no facets no gaps
no backdoors, unlocked windows
or emergency exits,
no stairwells or entrances
in these jewels of insight
that can feel your eyes falling upon them
like rain running down a mirror
that shuts you out
like someone in the bathroom crying
for reasons that are light-years beyond you.

However deep and sincere your tears are
they're still only dry wells
in that vast ocean of awareness,
black snowflakes
on the roaring furnace of the abyss
and if you reach out with affection
hoping to make things better
by embracing it all
you're still only tendering a kiss
to the gaping jaws of your own lipless skull.

There's a silence older than space
in the bottomless heart of things
that makes intelligence seem
the unlikeliest of exaggerations
a human could ever mean
holding his mind up like a lamp to the stars
as if he could find his own way back by his own light
without the dream that themes his mindstream with creation.

But as foolish and futile as it is to surmise
or try to get a leg up on the wise
I don't think the darkness
is the negative space
around the troubled face that appeared
after all the dots were connected
like rising constellations
in a child's colouring book.

And I don't think there are gods
squatting like frogs
on the lotus of the world
making us up as they go along
like wheels and roads
to the grunts and groans
of an axial mating song
anyone could mistake for a joke.

And I don't think the stars
believe the things we say about them
or even remotely feel the mystic dread
of what it is to be a human
looking up at their shining
out of deeper darknesses within
where no direction can be given to the lost like eyes
that would never find their own way home again
were it not for the stars and fireflies that mislead us
from one illumination to the next
by giving the finger to the braille of the text
that would school a gust of stardust into us
like God gave life to Adam
and Eve gave life to God
long before there were any laws to blind them
like Satanic lightning bolts
uprooting their eyes like rain from the clouds
to put those fires out.

I look up at the stars
with the eyes of an exile
through the diaspora of my breath
and I want to think them all to death
like the people and things I've left behind me
when it was time to go my own way
anywhere into the darkness inside me
to see if I could shine a light upon myself
that didn't blind me to the fact
neither in the beginning
nor in the end
was I there to witness the act
that made a certainty as good as a doubt
to the great indifference
that wasn't trying to find me
like a needle of light in the heart of a haystack.

I look up at the stars
like a scarecrow in winter
trying to put its pants on
one leg after another
like a man
with nothing but time to burn
scattering his ashes among the stars
urn after urn
skull after skull
of the heretics and mystics
that were martyred by his scar-crossed heart
in the name of nothing real.

I don't know what they feel
but I look up at the stars
like a black rose
of blood and starmud
in the last death throes
of self-immolation
and see in my own image
what I've always had
in common with creation.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Things Might Be Drifting Away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Stand Where The Listening Begins

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Some People Go Looking For Happiness

Some people go looking for happiness.
Some prefer power or beauty wealth and fame.
Some crave intensity.
Some seek peace.
Some search for food and shelter.
Some want to die with a good name.
Everybody takes their lead from the way they came.
And everyone says they're looking for love
though no one knows what it looks like.
They try to fit their thoughts to their words
like skin they can touch
that doesn't scar like the moon
or shed like a petal too delicate for the senses
but most just end up trying
to mummify the mindstream
by laying thousands of years of starmaps
down on troubled waters
like autumn leaves
that don't know where they're going.
Eventually everything's swept away
in the undertow of a dark ocean
that only smells sweet from a distance.
And longing shifts like infra-red into the blackness.
And bones on the moon are the only signs
that life once perished here.
Orphic skulls whose jaws dropped
like gates before their own gaping prophecies.
Time flows like a non-existent future into us
and it fills us with a hunger
for everything we've lost
or feel somehow was always missing.
One of the cardinal features of the emptiness
we are conceived again and again out of
is there's nothing behind its face
you can fix like an identity to space.
For fourteen billion years
the universe has been nothing
but one long beginning without end
making everything up as it goes along
out of nothing
like a man whistling down a long road
far from home
late at night
to let anything that might be listening in the darkness
know he's there
so nothing can take him by surprise.
And every step he takes
he steps across a threshold like a star
just coming into being
whose light goes off in all directions
looking for blind water it can turn into eyes.
Bosons hadrons leptons neutrinos wimps and quarks
the deeper you look into the matter
the more you realize
out to the furthest galaxy and beyond
seeing is being
and being is all fireflies.
And every one of them
is true north of nowhere.
Some people follow their own beginnings
like laws into the future
hoping to become someone else
that doesn't recognize them anymore
for who they were.
The peduncle's lost in the ensuing phylum.
Their future's rich
but their past is always poor.
The planet doesn't spin on its axis for them.
It's hinged like a door
that only opens one way
though it's a two-faced god
that begins them like last year.
But the leaves of autumn
aren't the laundered money of spring
because if our fulfilment
weren't already behind us
we wouldn't be here
trying to true the last to the first
of an unfinished multiverse
like the best to the worst
as if red were the past of blue.
Stop thinking birth is the past of death
or spring is the future of winter
as if they weren't the same breath
and one breath of life weren't enough
to keep the fireflies glowing in your ashes for eternity
and everywhere you look
you will flower like a vine
that divines its way to the wine
by ripening the grapes of gratitude.
You will understand
for all that you have grasped
and brought to fruition
your most exalted aspiration
is a heap of dead branches in the spring
burning like leaves of fire
still reaching out for the sun
and you will hear the mind-mirror whisper to itself
like the wind on far off waters
Narcissus is drowning in his own reflection
like the flashback of a life he left unlived
but everything is immersed in me
like a mind
like a sea in a fish that ran aground
on the uncharted landfalls of its own teaching.
And the wine will flower in your mouth like a grail
that's given up preaching
and finally found its own voice
like a bird returning to a tree at nightfall
to call out in its solitude
to the stars as they appear
we are here we are here we are here
where we belong
at peace with everything we're missing
everything we long for
everything we are and are becoming
that overtakes us like music from within
transforming the silence into song
the water into wine
small beings into a big space
looking into the passing face
of everything's that's mortal about us
with our eyes fixed upon the divine
not to see it in any one place
but with the presence of mind
to be wholly and impurely not that not this
without anywhere a trace of ultimacy
in this world that we take for a sign
we are here we are here we are here
and things are as they are
not as they must be.
Nothing got here legally.
What's the expanding universe
if not a refugee in its own country
somehow exiled from itself for reasons
only it can express?
Citizen Universe
show me your papers
your paintings your poems
show me how you dance on your own
show me how you put your children to sleep
show me how you bar an F chord
show me what you weep for
what you delight in
what you esteem
what you despise
what you ignore
what darkness of yours
feeds that inferno of stars above you
burning its constellations like passports
that aren't going anywhere
show me the black mirror
that says you don't belong here
like some misplaced night of the full moon
not marked on any calendar
show me the law of being human
that says this little piggy has one
and this little piggy has none
show me where it's written
the guest shall turn strangers away
from his host's generosity
like a dog at the door
that bares its teeth at the table
show me the home-made honey
of your wisdom
show me the dead lamps
of the apocalyptic fireflies
that designed your chaotic cosmology
by plagiarizing the light
to prove the stars
don't reserve
a space in the universe
for any insight of yours.
Nothing got here legally.
No one followed a coyote or a law
to cross the border
into this insurgency of being
no one checked the colour of your eyes
or profiled the light
to see if they were fit for seeing.
You don't need a constitution
to verify your liberty.
Well before you were born
you were free and ever shall be
to belong here as we all do
to pursue what makes us
sad mad bad or happy
the way we all got here
the way we all get through
the way we're all alone here together
with one another as we are with you
as we are with her and him and me
as we are with everything
as we are with ourselves
when we don't know who we're becoming
when we don't know the stranger on the bridge
watching the water flow
that's waiting to greet us on the other side
in the only way the unblighted heart of reality
we're all looking for
like blood on a grail-quest for our humanity
accepts the darkness that seeks us out
like a miraculous elixir of insight
so the kingdom won't fail
so the garden doesn't ask us
for a green card to know and grow
in the only way we truly belong here
in the only way we know how to be
so the lifeboat we're all in
like the same boundless mind
is always as full
as it is empty
so no one gets left out at sea
like a wave that couldn't be saved
and no one gets in
who doesn't know how to swim
the way we all got here
and continue to be
all these thresholds of the sea
that steps across us
even as we move like waves
breaking discipline with our own continuum
creatively.
Just to be here.
Just to crawl up on the shore of a new medium
like a refugee planting flowers
we brought from home
hoping we'll still be here
to watch them bloom.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You Never Became A Memory

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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My Lonely Island Music

My lonely island music,
already I see in your eyes, devastation in the dead zone,
skulls littering the field, autumns wandering away
weeping like windows that mistook themselves for the sky
and murdered a bird. Mystic September, vamp of this vision,
how could the moon not leap from my tongue
in praise of the world that shines through you
bathing alone in the dawn of every moment, utterly
alive, your beauty the page of a unwritten scripture
poised in the ink at the nib of every blade of grass to say
beyond the saying
what can’t be said. How unbearably sad
in this defeated hour that so few know the truth
that walks ahead of them like their own footprints
returning to the door they left by, already lost,
their houses, foundation stones of quicksand. Get it right in the seed,
get it right in the root of the eye, let the wind
take the ashes, sweep the shadows from the stairs,
and all the moons of yesterday are caravans of blossoms on the water.
Get it wrong and you’re a widow plundering corpses
for wedding rings and pocket-watches, black rain
on the open eyes of the dead. Devoid of transcendence
in the mirroring awareness, on a diet of fire,
you’ll end up combing your hair with a ladder.
Can you hear this bell of green before it rings, can you see
the painting in your blood before the brush is lifted
like a maggot of consciousness to the rose?
If you can, then check your shadow at the threshold
and walk naked into the far fields of your seeing, your feet
on the ground, your head in the stars; if you can’t,
you’re deepening your ignorance by ignoring your depths,
your light passes over itself like an eclipse or the hand
of a black magician, conjuring. Peril in the seeing.
A mask of frost over the surgical face of the heart. Understand
deeply and with authority that this dream cannot be understood,
taste this dream for yourself and look once
into the brilliant darkness that lies beyond wisdom and forsaking
and acknowledge in a crown of water
you are queen of that, your own teacherless realms.
Can’t you feel the roots of the black orchid of this space
wounding the soil with the stars of another night-sky
already opening above and below you? Rightly and brightly,
you are that opening, the sum of all the awareness of the whole of your life
expressed in the unborn no-point of a star of perception in space,
blue knowledge beyond the scope of the death-sighted.
Why study your own legends like snapped twigs on the trail
and send yourself in a straitjacket to school
when you already know by heart
the book of the breath you must live? Open your fist. Where
did it go? What’s in your hand? Do you understand? Our lives
are the shadows of birds sown like seed across the skies,
fish-maps printed on water, compasses looking for directions
that don’t exist. We are brief and we are vital, pilgrims
on a bridge of ancient zeroes, angels under every stone,
gypsies at home. Hold your life up like a match to a mirror in a dark room
to see whose face it is
then blow yourself out like an orchard
before blazing becomes a kind of blindness.
Put the world to your lips like a finger
in the black clarity of the silence. Do you see, do you see
the white songbird of the moon enter the throat of the well
to flaunt its plumage privately in an empty theater,
the roar of the ghosts of the infinite aeons for applause,
the sound of one hand clapping? Anciently, you were so
and now you are so
and tomorrow after tomorrow you shall be so, hidden
right under your own nose, calling yourself like a girl to her friend
when the game is over to come out of hiding. Most people
never understand more than a keyhole and a whisper of themselves,
trembling behind the dangerous doors of their own names
when they’re called to come out and play
with a universe that begins in every moment,
a fire-fly in a canning jar. They graze on the fodder of illusions,
domesticated by their own cupboards and cowardice,
peopling the wilderness beyond their artificial paradise
with demons that threaten to behead them in a palace coup
for the genuine liberation of an empty throne.
The blossom doesn’t know its own beginning,
nor the snowflake, its end. Can you find your true face
in this mirror of echoes,
the one you wore before the birth of silence?
I shall come looking for you like the wind
and I shall find you among trees and flowers
and among the grasses of the fields
and in the living light that breathes over the harvest
and in the water-mind of the stream that flexes the reeds
and playfully graces the ripe honey of the sun
with a sweetness unknown to the business of bees. No inside, no outside,
everywhere I step is the arrival and the walking of my blood
the whole of the way to you from whom I cannot be separated,
slipped like a letter under a door that opens, a mouth in space,
to paint the moon on an eye of scarlet water. One leaf falling,
the whole history of the world
in the way I love you by letting go; in the way
when you are closest, your heart, the thunder
of subtle intimacies in a lost well,
I drown in the vastness like a bird in the reflection of the sky,
happy refugees all along the side-roads of my nerves,
my mind, a fool of the moon, all parade and passage.
Do you understand? Not different, not the same,
we are rain on a window, faces beyond
the blindness of mirrors that use our eyes to see.
In every feather, in every leaf, in every flight of the word
ten thousand dawns, all of the earth,
this emptiness within emptiness singing to itself in the void.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sometimes Think

Sometimes think I'm always
a life too late
to catch up to my own
walking away weary of waiting for me.
Or I'm a star too far ahead of my own shining
and that's why it's always dark.
I know the agony
in the stones of an abandoned bridge
that shoulders the world for nothing,
upholds nothing but its own mass
and waits for things to pass.
And even when I fall into the river
to flow along with my own mindstream
without consulting the leaves like maps
I still can't get the moon off my back.
Look at all these orchards
littered along my banks
from the tent of a single blossom.
And there are nights
when I can smell snake on the wind
as if everything were about to happen again
and I still haven't milked the fangs of the moon
for an antidote to the pain
or put out the third eye
of the irrational surveillance camera
that oversees the sorrows of the insane
when it's full.
I like my perfections whole enough
to include what is not
and if I am immoderately empty
it's so I can make space for the world
like the blood-sea of the rose
that flows out of nothing
into tides that shed their waves
like the eyelids, brides and petals
of a human heart.
My breath is silver.
My breath is gold
I've mined from the mystic mountain
that got in my way
whenever I tried to cross
the valley threshold.
I had to evaporate to rise to the top;
I had to get myself together like a cloud
to transform my own delusions
into a glimpse of the other side
that didn't take a scapegoat for a guide.
Now space is my only familiar
and the being behind the face
of who I was a moment ago
is just another snake in the furnace
of this star that sheds my skin like fire.
Streams of insight
that are not predicated like mirages
on deserts of thought
trying to spin themselves
into mirrors and silks of glass
like a new religion
sweeping the world like sand
advance the gardens
of the water-givers underground
who teach the flowers how to bloom
and drown like stars
in the infinite opening of their eyes.
And I've mauled the nets of the constellations
like a man in the morning
walking through a high field
radiant with spiderwebs
and if there's anything
left hanging in the wardrobe
that used to house my masks and cloaks
they're veils I've torn from the light
to better see into my darkness.
I'm still looking
but nothing has appeared yet
and no sleight of mind
that's ever mastered me
has ever taught me how
to realize the inconceivable
except in the proportions of a human
whose mere existence is utterly unbelievable
whenever I turn the light around
and discover the dispersing stars
I have followed so long and far
into the unborn darkness where I begin
shining within.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Seeds Of Fire In A Nightsky

Seeds of fire in a nightsky root like flowers
in the ashes of my eyes I scattered on the wind
like the dust of stars I followed even into oblivion
to remain faithful to the life of the light
whatever transformations within me grew
into the starless darkness of the unknown heart
I've carried in my chest for years like the empty shrine
of a dead lantern to the last firefly to go out.

And this is a seeing without the eyes of the stranger
I no longer recognize as who I thought I was
when I could read the constellations like the Linear B
of the lost civilization that was elaborated out of me
to perish in the mountainous silence of what was abandoned
when I burned my starmaps and entered chaos
like the blackhole of the singularity
that could rejuvenate me out of nothing like a grail
I was seeking at the bottom of the deepest grave
I ever descended into, a spider at the end of its silk,
or a caterpillar like the distant rumour of a butterfly
on a tranformational pilgrimage to an unknown shrine
that crawled with it all the way back to the beginning
of the radical innocence of an radiant world,
before time overran it with arrivals and departures
as if it never meant anything in the first place
to aspire to the light in the hope of a deeper intimacy with life.

And in this darkness, there is no letting go,
or hanging on to what cannot be grasped by understanding
until you realize that understanding only ever finds itself
and the vastness of what's expanding before it
into the unknown, is not a journey with a destination
or a threshold that can be crossed into illumination
like a voice meditating in the silence of its mother-tongue.
I was looking for the light by the light
I was given to go by when the wind blew it out
like a candle I no longer needed
to make my way deeper into this homeless darkness
that does not cast a shadow of time on enlightened extinction.

How can you divine what isn't missing within yourself?
The seeker dies by the side of the road
like a cry for help in the dangerous distance
pleading to be rescued by its own echo, and it comes
but not in a language of its own, not
as the event of anything that could have been anticipated,
not as something you can bring back with you
like the taste of water to the lips of a delirious mirage
to prove there's a reality beyond delusion
where everyone drinks from the same well
the muses of wisdom summon them to without a mouth.

As unsentimental as an overnight frost on the garden,
the larkspur rimed by billions of cold stars,
as if my seeing condensed out of the air
and every insight were a sign of farewell to the mystery
that urged me to risk everything like a tribute
to the divinity of nothing that had seized upon my heart
like a sacred clown faithful to the folly of experience.
Like the footprints of space and time that stretched behind him
for lightyears like the forced smile and phony tear
of the painted lifemask that convinced him he was not dead
to the ordeals of the journey he was leading nowhere
but to where he was every moment of the way
trusting in the crazy wisdom of the laughter
that regaled him every step of the way
like the cornerstone of the absurdity
that kept looking for new hills of prophetic skulls
to roll over like dice in a bone-box.
To wander like a rogue planet on an aberrant wavelength
of dark matter that doesn't express itself like moonlight
talking to itself like the open-mouthed seed syllables
of the waterlilies at night on the Fall river
writing love poems back to the stars that inspired them.

You want to overhear what the universe
is whispering to itself like a madman in his sleep
in the unbreachable silence of a fathomless dream
of random atoms engendering the forms of awareness
like a grammar of chaos out of its own unattainability
trying to make some sense of what it's saying,
an asylum of paradigms that undermines it own existence
in the arraying of a conditioned universe?
You have to learn to learn to hear it in a language
no one has ever spoken before you, as if
you'd never heard your own voice before
from somewhere deep within you saying
let it be as the stars broke into light
like the distant echo of an unknown wonder
that perceives the source of its own extinction
in the birth of everything, in the slightest conception
of the inconceivable rooting in its own ashes on the wind.

We all listen to the eloquence of things we don't understand
like a secret we're forbidden to tell anyone,
that keeps giving us away death after death,
birth after birth to our imperceptible selves.
Imagination seeds the mind of our uninhibited potential
to flower into worlds where the fruit comes before the blossom
as the harvest precedes the seed, or the darkness
wakes the nightbird up to its longing for love and light
and all our deaths are already achieved behind us
long before anyone was born to suffer them.
And yet we suffer them like a truce with the absurdity of the act
that establishes peace like a third-eye
in the middle of a hurricane that gives meaning
to the dark abundance of our extinction gathering into light
by sacrificing our emptiness like gods to our own creations
over and over and over again, as we surrender to ourselves
like candles returning themselves like fire
to the the light that inspired them
like water to the river it was taken from.

The distance of the journey of life is a wingspan
that cannot be estimated in shadows.
And though you master all the meanings in the world
and learn to love their subtleties like the taste
of mystic wine, or enlightened tea,
you're still the guest that's never met its host face to face
because everything you say is always behind you
like the light of a star whose immediate life
is always ahead of it hidden in the darkness like a jewel
that has yet to know the light of a direct encounter.
If you want to see deeply into the shining
you have to grow your own eyes to accommodate
the perennial insight into the restive vision at hand.
And you must learn to live without knowing
what it is you've come to understand
about the ashes of the dragons in the afterlives of the stars.

Don't let the scars intimidate the innocence of your wounds
as if you could never be hurt again by what
you cherished the most in your search to find yourself
in the absence of anything you could be attached to.
Look at the fireflies emerging from the valley fog
of a passing storm like a shapeshifting constellation
dancing at its own wake like a blissed-out drunk at a funeral.
You can taste the whole history of life
like a wandering myth of origin in every sip of water
flavoured with the reflection of things that changed along the way.
Don't mourn the transformations that enabled you to stay awhile
like snow on the mountaintops, dew on the tongues
of the new leaves of the apple-tree that emerge
like the sacred syllables of lovepoems
to the unknown windfalls of the mystery they facilitate
out of the urgency of their own becoming.

Here, where we speak for awhile, in the diction of things
arranged in the mystic grammars and paradigms
of our own likeness reflected like starmaps
to the shining that ripened our eyes from within
as if the whole world were turned inside out
and you had to descend into yourself to see the stars
like an arrangement of chaos expressed in metaphors,
the liars speak clearly in the language of other men's mouths
that can be easily understood, as the tongue-tied sages
blunder like an ineffable silence into the deepening mystery
of the creative eloquence of the unsayable things
that life speaks through them like the facts of a dream
that trues their wisdom to the disparate harmonies
of the illuminated chaos deep within the heart of life
that keeps contradicting itself like a pulse among the dead.

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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Amazing As The Stars In The Darkness My Eyes

Amazing as the stars in the darkness, my eyes,
though I've never seen them directly, only
as a reflection I take at its word they're blue.
And when I look a little deeper, there's
no part of me that isn't eventually invisible.
Everything's like that, the seer and the seen,
so wholly absorbed in each other,
there's no sign of either of them, just the seeing,
the heart and its feeling, the mind and its thought,
the flower and the eye, crocus, turk's cap, tiger lily, lilac
all one spontaneous happening without distinction,
one infinitely collaborative creative event flashing
out of the dark resources of the plenum-void
to give it a name for the sake of rendering experience
communicable through a delirium of form.

If you've ever walked by a mirror and the mirror's disappeared,
mercury into mercury, water into water, fire into fire,
a mother into her child, an unsuccessful lover into his longing,
that's something like it. You're everything
and in that everything you're nothing, you're selfless
to the point of not even knowing what that means anymore
except it's of no significance whatsoever. There's just
this star flashing out of a night it's surrounded by,
just these dark hills where the dead buried themselves
as they did their children, as they had lived, secretly
under the leaves that covered their gravestones,
lichens, moss, growing hundreds of wild columbine
on a modest rock of ages with the sensibilities of a butterfly.

If you stand by a gate that doesn't latch by itself anymore,
and the garden's been left to its own inner resources,
because no one lives there any longer, as, perhaps, even you once did,
o in a dream, how long ago was that? And watch the moon rise,
as if the healer and the wound were remembering
an old love affair that's gone well beyond the inseparable
because there never was a time, a prelude to seeing,
they were ever apart. You'll understand passing
as a perpetually new approach to things, you'll see birth in why
the flowers fall, and death, in why they rise again.
The simultaneity of the life and death of all things.
How present you are in the midst of your longing.
How clear in the absence of everything you're missing.

I've spent much of my life preparing gardens for planting.
Shaking out roots, rocking fields. Wondering
whose house of life the bones I dig up once belonged to,
cornerstones and rafters in arrears
to the temples they once upheld to themselves.
And come nightfall, my work finished for the day,
I've paused and looked to see if I could identify
through the trees, the whole of a constellation
from a single star. As if gazing in wonder at it
in the mutual solitude and hugeness
of the unknown immmensities that surround us both,
and bind us to a weary body and a still heart
leaning on a shovel in a garden, as if the silence
could look up or down, either way, were made sacred
by the poignancy of a momentary insight
that penetrated both our hearts as if time and space
were mere bubbles of awareness in a dream.
And in a differentiated union of not-two,
I saw myself shining through the eyes of a star
as it laboured over what flowers it intended to grow.

Without a thought or a feeling I could call my own
I was a desert of stars without a mirage
to keep up appearances. I was a single point of light
with infinite distances in it, and even the word, one,
had gaps in it I learned to jump like a star.
And I saw with the certainty of water, that
when one was a wave, the other was an ocean
and separation was simply the blindfold we put on
at midnight in front of an imaginary firing squad,
as if our whole life depended upon it, to watch
the stars shoot flowers at the sun like blanks
I seeded the garden with like constellations
breaking ground through the tree tops like Vega in Lyra.
Astro-flowers. The Pleiades approaching
the larkspur like bees. Honey in a new hive.

Light years of perceptions in a garden of starmud
encompassing strangers only an insight away from home.
It's an immensely intimate universe. Go out.
Get down on your knees in the soil. Plant flowers.
And when you go in look at your hands, at the stars
shining under your fingernails as a sign
of some honest cosmic work well done.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You Were The Intimacy

You were the intimacy
of the things I loved
that were so impossibly far away
I could never reach out and touch them
except by touching you.
In the long silence of these past thirty-seven years
I have never been able to look at people again
the way I used to see them before I met you.
There's a fear in the way I love them
that I learned
from living your absence.
A deep black wounded space within
that has sadly outgrown the stars
like October outlives its fireflies.
And every threshold I've crossed ever since
has turned into a long road
with a precipice at the end of my spinal cord
swaying like the first night I met you
on the Capilano Suspension Bridge
and you said
the only way
to overcome your fear of falling
is to have the courage to jump.
And I laughed and said
staring into the gorge
and the thin silver water down below
what's to fear
if you know how to fall toward paradise?
And you knew right away
I was your kind of challenge.
And I knew you wanted
to sword-dance with razorblades
you laid out like the Tarot
later back at your place
as if you wanted to convince yourself
you were still silly enough to believe in tomorrow.
The candle beside the cards on the floor
didn't turn out to be
enough of a lighthouse
to warn us of the approaching storm.
We were sincere in the darkness
for a little while
astounded by the expert innocence
of our mindless flesh.
You shone like the sun at midnight
and I came undone like Icarus
to prove I was falling
without regrets
like a spent star
into the singularity
of a whole new universe
where everything that didn't happen in this one
came uncannily true in the next
for both of us
as if we were at last worthy
in each others' arms
of our own happiness.
When happiness is brave
it's bliss.
And when it's afraid
there's nothing sadder
than a gift that was never opened.
Joy is a warrior that risked hoping
there was nothing left dying for.
Sorrow comes up with a million reasons.
The only way of life
is not making a way of life.
Nor making
not making a way of life
a way.
One day you just get off the road
and start taking the long way home through the starfields.
You stop looking in the mirror
to see if you still have eyes.
For years after your death
no matter what I looked at
I always saw the same thing.
The black clarity
of your existential absence
staring me in the face
without turning me into stone
because that would have been mercy.
Try how I might
I could never quite
shut the lid on your coffin
or accept
that you were buried in me for good
or that my blood burned
like the infernal red
of an emergency exit
to show me the way out
of heaven and hell
by falling on them both
like a two-edged sword
that killed me deeper into life
than your death ever did.
Either life's unfair
or I'm not man enough
to live up to your suicide
but I remember how I used to love
feeling the weight
of the nightstream of your hair
as it poured through my hand
like a landscape that could feel
for the first time in a long time
water running in the dry creekbeds of its lifelines.
Things woke up.
And I saw the flowers
among the thorns
that had been guarding them
like the secret names of God
you had to know
to get past the burning angels
through the gates
of your sad return to Eden alone.
The eloquence of your flesh
when you walked on the earth
as if your heart danced to your blood
like an old song we both knew
now a broken harp of bone,
a wounded guitar,
someone laid down for good.
A prophetic skull
without a future
anyone can foretell.
The full moon going down
like a spare penny
into a dry wishing well.
Me looking at the dark hills
like the contours of your corpse laid out
under a collapsed tent
as they wheeled you into the ambulance
to spend your first vast impossibly long night in the morgue
among the dead
who don't catch their breath
or break their bodies like bread
alone in the stillness
that can't distinguish one death from another.
However I wept for you
all the hard bitter baffled tears
all the sweet radiant wellsprings
that washed the dust like stars
off the wings of the birds
that had laboured to carry the souls of the dead
far to the west
when I remembered
how blessed I really was
that things had been
so beautifully dangerous for awhile.
And all the dark fathomless watersheds of lucidity
I drowned in like a eye in a grail
looking for butterflies in a suicide note.
All the black pearls
the diamond skulls
the eclipsed chalices
all the precious jewels of my grieving
that death hoarded underground
nothing in the end
but nameless water
frozen between the cracks
of a gravestone as old as the moon.
I remember how I loved your ice-blue eyes
and how they burned with an Arctic clarity
you had to dress warmly for
if you didn't want to suffer from frost-bite
but there's more nightshade in them now
than chicory
when I look into them like tundral flowers
and the light turns hurtful and eerie
when I recall how the melting snow
washed itself clean of itself
all those years ago
when we didn't know
what all this meant.
It's of little relevance
that we once loved each other
the way we did
and once you've exhausted
the meaning of signs
like galaxies expanding
ever more deeply into space
less significance.
What does it look like from Mars?
Your death was a koan
not a fortune-cookie
and the koan broke me
like a man it couldn't understand
rationally.
There is no scar for you.
You will always be
this open wound inside of me.
When I look at the stars
I can't dissociate beauty from absurdity.
I cherish their clarity
as something that can't be
contaminated by my eyes
when they're nothing
but two black holes in space
a snake-bite of the light
in the middle of my face
like a colon without the following:
the kind of faith
that makes what little is left
so incommensurably greater than what's been lost.
I can see the blue morning glory in the garden
as if moonlight had turned to skin
just to feel what it's like to flower
but I can't forget the frost
that fell like your death over all of it
when I went so numb
space turned into glass
and time pulled the blind down on the window.
I closed my eyes like a mirror
content to let the stars make sense
of their own reflections.
I gave up on directions
and burned my starmaps
and followed who I was
without caring what I became.
Absolutes of ice
spread like cataracts
over the relativities of the river
that went on flowing
as if nothing had changed
and my life was still a dream without eyelids.
A ghost would be easier to deal with
than the fact
that you don't exist anymore
except as bare bones
denuded of the world
like yarrow sticks
thrown before the Book of Changes.
But then I expect
you'd exorcise yourself
at a suggestion of the night
that the stars would be so much brighter
if you only blew out the candleflame.
You'd do it just to see
if things got better.
You'd leave me in the dark again
staring at the stars
like white ink
on a black loveletter
you left unsigned
as you disappeared into death
like your last breath on a cold windowpane.
I've long since forgiven you my solitude.
I've long since forgiven you
the severity of the wisdom
that hardened my eyes
like diamonds in the darkness
that could cut through anything
except my attachment to you.
I have forgiven you
for the way I have grown through suffering
to realize
how much I owe your death
and the terrible eyeless abyss that followed it
like an enlightened insight
into the impersonal nature of compassion.
I have forgiven you
the way I am spontaneously compelled
to love a world that is so estranged from me
I feel like water on the moon
trying to imagine what it must be like
to fall like rain on the intimate earth
with a reasonable expectation
of coming up flowers
that weren't destined
to be laid on your grave.
I've gone grey gathering them up
and bringing them to you
like bouquets of paints and brushes
that are ready at hand
should you ever wish
to pick them up again
and show me what the world looks like
without a body for a picture-frame
as you play the part of the upstart genius
who lived the black farce of creative pain
like the agony of the wick
burning at the stake like a heretic
between the flesh of the wax
and the spiritual aspirations of the candleflame
thrusting spears into space at the stars
as if the only way you could ever know God
if you ever met up
was by the scars.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Gray Rain

Gray rain
but the trees
are teaching the stars how to break into leaves.
Good rain on the good earth.
Autumn's a long passage.
Spring is full of thresholds.
Rainbow bridges in the distance
over urgent streams.
Everything's in a rush to become something.
I thought I knew once
who I was supposed to be
but more and more it eludes me
like a future that's already behind me.
I leave it to the world
to finish what I began
and include myself in the mystery
and try to carry on like a man
who looks at a star he won't follow
through the branches of the burgeoning trees
as the history of who I am
now that I'm not anymore.
The less I am the more there is to be.
And one eye doesn't get in the way of the other as much.
There is just this as it is
and what am I beholding
if I'm not looking upon myself as I am
in common with everything
that's changing all around me
like a mind that can't contain itself
in any fixed mode of being
anymore than the eye
can decide what it's seeing.
Everything is burning with life in the rain
and change is the dangerous bliss
we feel when we cease to exist.
The trees might have fingerprints
graven into their bark
and you might accord them
an identity in the dark
and approve of their names
and let them pass as if you knew who they were
but that doesn't make them
any less of a stranger than you are
or the clouds carry passports.
Praise be to the abundance of oblivion
and the cornucopias of blackholes
in the hearts of the galaxies
that keep wounding themselves into life
by falling on their own swords
like a knife that heals.
By day the light gives.
But at night
it steals.
And the mirror lives
and pours water over the eyes of the blind
and suddenly the stars can see again.
And the grape hyacinth is drunk on blue wine.
And I'm walking on water on the moon
even as the moon walks on my tears
without knowing which ones
flowed from the bells of my sorrows
and which overwhelmed me
like birds in the fountains of joy.
First I am a man.
And then I am a boy.
Spring takes itself for granted.
And autumn comes on with regrets.
But they both know
this is as good as it gets
and nothing's missing
in the mind's lost and found.
It's just the way things get around
when you throw the world back in the water
like a life of your own
you gave up years ago
to be who you are now.
Praise be to the stars
that stop by the gate this late
to chat about gardens
and how to keep
the roots of the roses alive
when the ground hardens.
Even if you're a demon in steep descent
or an angel rising from hell
life has the power of a flower
and the genius of a universe
to turn falling into a calling
like planets and Canada geese.
You can walk out alone
into a wide open field at night like I do
and stand there under the stars
that have been staring at you since childhood
like someone they should keep an eye on
and say: This is me. This is who I am as I am
to the whole twinkling lot of them in self-defence
to uphold the savage dignity of the difference.
You can stand there in the vastness
of that one definitive thought
that goes on forever like a silence older than birds
and feel the sweet release of upending joy
trying to master its new freedom
when space morphs into a mouth for a moment
and says softly
o so softly
in a voice that's been singed by compassion:
No.
You're not.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I look Into People's Faces

I look into people's faces
and I see the same wound
under many different scars.

I look into their hearts
like a stranger at night
through a passing window
and I see how suffering through
the agonies of life
has ripened some
with sweetness and compassion
and others are already
rotten before they fall.

I look into people's eyes
and some are vast starlit skies
and some are the iota subscripts
of scholarly fireflies
that footnote the constellations
at the bottom of the page
with details off the beaten path
of their MLA mainstream cosmic thesis.

And some are like moons
with parenthetical crescents
with nothing in between
both sides of their smile
that isn't a cynical aside
about the lost innocence
of a phase they've already gone through.

And some stare back like eclipses
that have pulled the blinds down
over their eyes
like sunglasses disguised
by a witness protection program
but you just know
they're oilslicks
on the Sea of Shadows
as they were in the womb
and in the Gulf of Mexico
the black blood
of an incorporated miscarriage
that hemorrhaged like the pot of gold
at the end of the oleaginous rainbow.

I look into people's souls
and I see how afraid
they must be of life
to hide out in the open
like an ocean
that hasn't kept faith
with its own depths
and tries to pretend it's
as airy and light as the sky.

The birds are flying through the roots.
The fish are swimming in the treetops.

I see judas-goats chained
to the stakes of their ego-Is
like sacrificial tiger bait
devoted to their cunning.

I see the anti-muses
that shadow Mt. Helicon
like black holes
in the death valleys
of human imagination.
And I wonder how they ever got here.

What bend in space
led them to this twisted place
like a forsaken road
they keep taking
like a wormhole through time
into the womb
of a stillborn universe
where the moonlight
burns their embryos
on pyres of lime
beside the dry creekbeds
of nameless rivers going nowhere?

Along their flowerless banks
I see the rib-cages of dead snakes
that went witching for water
with tongues and tines
of Kundalini lightning
that ran up their spines
like time through a waterclock
and the hulls of empty lifeboats
that died in the desert
at the bottom of the mirage
they drowned in
hoping to find themselves
among those who survived
by learning to swim through sand
like fish in an hourglass aquarium.

I'd rather walk on stars
reflected in the shattered mirrors
of my last self-image
than repay
the generosity of my solitude
with mass ingratitude.

I listen to people's voices
and they all seem like the same echo
with many different mouths.

I've tried to respect
the mystic specificity
of the thousands of fierce individuals
I've met over the years
but the more I've learned
about myself and others
the more I see the same mind
in many different skulls.
The same genius of inspired water
that poured an ocean
of sentient awareness
into everyone of our cells.

Union differentiates.
Separation binds.
I look into people's faces
however young or old they are
and I see infinite spaces
moonlighting as time
on the nightshift of the stars.

I see horror and compassion.
I see butterflies sipping
the nectar of diamonds
like honey in the promised land
and maggots born in excrement
thriving on offal
like the janitors of the dead
because everything grows best
in the soil it was born into
like karma in the fortune-cookies
of wombs and eggs and cocoons.

I look into people's eyes
like sad stars
through the generous end
of the telescope
that brings the far near
like impact craters
and I see how some people
cling to the memory of themselves
like underground seas
in frozen lockets
of water on the moon.

I look into people's secret shrines
they build like birds
in the eye of the storm
looking for salvation.
And I can hear
the echo of their prayers
bouncing back off hydrogen clouds
like a nineteen twenties radio show
thousands of lightyears away
as if they just said them yesterday
and the universe as usual
threw the words back in their face
like the cosmic background hiss
of snowflakes on a furnace
going out like stars.

I've seen the innocence of fireflies
making halos
and the blood-rose weaving thorns
around the massive blackholes of death
as if they were merely
a pinprick in a voodoo doll
that got into white magic by mistake.

I've looked into
the nuclear blaze of madness
like an A bomb with shades on
and seen the flash and shadow
of embryo silhouettes
spit out like cave paintings
on the firewalls of the fusion wombs
that give birth to the heavier elements
it takes to survive.

But the water's not mad
just because the moon's a lunatic.
The mirror might seem
just as angry as you are
but it doesn't feel a thing.

Learning wisdom is learning space.

It doesn't eat flowers
and the weeds don't sting.
It takes everything it embraces to heart
and nothing's left out
from the very beginning.
Like the whole of the moon and the sky
in every eye of water
that's ever looked into me
and seen that everyone
is the heart of a mystery
whose lucidity
is their only true identity.

It's our seeing
that makes the flowers open
and the stars shine.
It's our hearing that gives
the wind something
meaningful to say
and the grass something
to whisper about.
Whatever you touch
walks in your skin from thereon.
Whatever you taste
be it roses and nettles
or sulphur and wine
or the sour-sweet radiance
of the stars on your tongue
you're the flavour of the day
in everything.

It's your nose
that gives the burning leaves
in the urns of autumn
the spectral fragrance
of chrysanthemums
that are barely holding on.

And it's your mind.
Your heart.
Your blood.
Your body.
Your imagination.
Your intuition.
Your wisdom.
Your ignorance.
Your darkness.
Your light.
Your spirit
enlightened or deluded
whatever you think or feel
is abundantly missing
or dream you're waking up to
that makes the world real
in every mystically specific detail
of who you are.

Who else?
I look into myself
as far as the stars
at the edge of my seeing
fourteen point five billion lightyears away
and I can see how much time and space
how many species of life
generation after generation
have been born to give birth and die.

All the roses swept
from the stairs
of our hopeless tomorrows
because they were a tribute to love
meant for someone else.

All the spontaneous joys
that cast their long random shadows
like occasional fireflies of insight
across the lunar mindscape
of this afterlife of sorrows
where every church is the gravestone
of an unsuspecting god.

I look into my own seeing
like light upon light
in the vast expanse
of an unknowable night
and I'm cosmically astonished
by how many worlds within worlds
eyes within eyes
minds within minds
lives within lives it takes
to make a single habitable human being
meaning everyone of us sacred fools
fit as a genius
for the crazy wisdom
of a creative life
in a self-inspired universe.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Things I Would Say To My Daughter If She Were Here

for Jody

The important thing
is to stay ahead of the pain
like a debt you'll pay tomorrow with your life
they're calling for today.
Tips for survival:
Luck has nothing to do with intelligence.
Stupid will get you killed faster than evil.
The most dangerous assassins
conceal themselves under the eyelids
of those who say they love you best.
And as any bruised heart knows
there's more power in an open palm
than there is in a fist
and the best way to get someone
to taste their own effluvia
is not to point to it.
A lot of opinions
is the frenzy of gnats in the sunset.
Silence walks like a tiger on soft paws.
Take a hint from the moon
who only bares her crescents twice a month
to show what's she's got up her sleeve
at the beginning and the end.
Keep your claws retracted
like laws you haven't enacted yet.
And never pass judgment on a friend.
A free mind is a godsend
but don't measure your liberty in chains.
And if you feel the need
to attach yourself to someone
attach yourself to them
like the full moon to water when it rains.
Think with your heart.
Feel with your brains.
And don't expect the Red Sea to part
into a thousand miraculous pirate-swept sea-lanes
just to let you get away because you're special.
You turn a legend into a farce
the minute you start to believe in it.
You can't make a commercial for one
of the light that falls on everything alike
so don't abuse your shining
like a fire eclipsed by its own soot.
Greenwood blows the most smoke
and gives the least heat.
Stay a jump ahead of yourself like a real star.
People might point to you and say your name
and write your story into the Pleiades
thinking they're only a finger's length away
from where you are
but cherish your darkness
like a secret you keep to yourself.
And remember when you transit zenith
everything you see in the sentient mirror
isn't having an illicit affair with your eyes.
You should receive your life in every moment
like a constant surprise
if you want to stop aging,
if you want to grow up like the wise
who are always the first born of time
to inherit eternity
like a bloodline without a beginning
that leads to everyone as if they all bore
the creative likeness
of your closest ancestor
like Castor and Pollux in Gemini
like the history of your breath
in every gust of wind
that sows the dust
of countless generations
in the features of your face
as if everyone's story were told by the same voice
in the same spontaneous tone
of all things passing away into fruition.
Don't track a hovel of impoverished thought
into a palace of thoughtless intuition
and expect to be invited back.
Thirty chiefs of autumn
sit around every fireleaf
that's ever fallen
telling stories about things that last
no one believes anymore.
All the reasons for yesterday
turn into today's folklore
and if you're trying to look into the future
from anywhere other than now
trying to separate the light from the darkness
like gold from its ore,
trying to anticipate the harvest before it's sown,
you're only prying the petals of flowers open
before they're ready to bloom.
You're just peeking under the eyelids
of the embryo of a new moon
as if you could crawl into the womb with it
to see what's it's dreaming
before it comes to light
as if you could get an angle on life
to take the shot
without sinking the table
or load the dice in your favour
with the third eyes of prophetic snakes.
Insolent with disobedience
you turn yourself into a slave,
but bound by duty
the great sea of awareness
is mastered by the sloppy salute
of any green recruit
passing in review like a wave.
The stars don't need to convince anybody
they're stars
and the flowers aren't trying to be beautiful.
Live as if your death were already achieved
and lost in the shadows behind you.
Life flowers in the valleys of death
and if our beginnings weren't
our ends are equal
and there's an eternity of a chance
more than not
there's a sequel
but live your afterlife now like water.
You can't pour the universe out of the universe
anymore than your mindstream
can flow out of the sea of awareness
like blood from an irreparable wound
or a theme of unrequited love out of its music.
In what space you don't already occupy
can you bury the corpse of all things
as if you could fit your boundless mind into anything
as if you could dig a blackhole deep enough
to bury God
as if there were ever anywhere to go in the first place
that wasn't already in your face?
The delusions of a coward cast longer shadows
than the things they're the images of.
There are dragons that know more about love
than the doves we send out looking for land
and who among sphinxes knows more than the sand
they come to in time like wisdom?
The mysteries are the mysteries.
They're not looking for answers.
The meaning of life
is the life of meaning
as waves are the life of the sea
or even in late autumn
leaves are the life of the tree.
Let go of things as they do.
Blossom bear fruit and fall.
It's not such a long way down to your roots.
Not long at all.
No further than the boots you're walking in.
And if someone should ask you your name
say it like a constellation
that doesn't shine its light on fame
though everyone sees it rising in the west,
not an inert all night marquee
with letters missing
that burned out like candles
that gazed too long
at their tiny tongue-tied celebrity
as if they were on a visionquest.
Sophocles said never to have been born is best
but he was just trying
to get the world off his chest through denial.
He was a bad guest with tragic manners at a great feast
who had forgotten
because he was born Greek
that life's negation is its oldest affirmation
and what is lost in life is lost solely to those who seek.
Gratitude is the truest measure of wealth.
Squander yourself lavishly like an orchard in spring
knowing generosity is the spontaneous sign
of a spiritual being in good health
that doesn't need money to prove she's rich.
Let life adorn you in its robes and ashes
as if they were just so many cloaks of the moon
slipping from your shoulders
like petals in the starfields of space.
And don't heed the blind fool
who calls for chandeliers
when she's already got tears in her eyes
she's been dancing to for years.
And remember this for the rest of your life
long after my tongue is a leaf
and my eyes are clouds on the wind:
once long before you were born
I asked how I could best return my life to the water
as clean as the reflection of the waterbird
that had just left it
and when the stars of Cancer
granted me you as my daughter
since then I've never needed to look
any further than their light in your eyes
for the answer.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Have Become My Own Season

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Isn't It Obvious

Isn't it obvious by now
matter is the language
of the spirit
that expresses itself
as flowers and trees
and you and me
just as we are.

Matter is the mother-tongue
the alphabet
the periodic table of elements
of what can't be said about God
without resorting to signs
like water and oxygen.
The runes of the mountains.
The purple passages of the sea.
And the moon who couldn't find
anything beautiful in her bleakness
long before Samuel Beckett.

Out of an almost perfect vacuum
out of nothing
out of space
its thirteen atoms of hydrogen
per cubic centimetre
like magic beans
a longing for existence arises
spontaneously out of the abyss
as if it just remembered the name
of something that came back to it
like a lost thought
and happily blurted it out like the Big Bang.

God mind the abyss nothingness
the cosmic id
call it what you want
they're all just waves of the same sea
iridescent bubbles rising out of the depths
like independent cells with shapeshifting nuclei
or the membranous worlds in hyperspace
that start with a kiss
and end with a face in the window
staring out into the same old darkness
like a syllable of dust
in awe of the silver-tongued stars.

Mind does its best
to take a good guess
but it doesn't really matter
if you're right or wrong
because everything's
been clear and true all along.
The point is.
There's no point to this.

You just break into song
like a bird that can't help itself.
You gather everything into yourself
like a blackhole
with a creative affinity for stars
and a key turns deep inside you
and suddenly you're walking
through an infinite number of doors all at once
that have freed you from yourself
like a replicating cell.
Water looking at itself
with eyes of water.

Mind looking for mind with mind.
The snake trying to swallow its own head
as a sign from infinity
that it's going to take forever.
Illusions of light
burning like jewels
in the mirror of rain
rooted in the starmud
of the human brain
that thinks if it elaborates enough laws
it can hold the universe to account
for the cause of its behaviour.

Oceans roll off its tongue
like drops of water
from a blade of grass
and things keep on happening
like galaxies and starfish.

Be the bright vacancy
that shines out of your dark abundance
like a waterlily putting a white spin
on the death and decay of the swamp
that aspired to it
like the Buddha watching Venus in the dawn
or a magnanimous loveletter
as long as autumn
at the end of a mean affair
that sweeps it like stars and leaves
off the helical stairways to heaven forever
like the memory of mutant genes.

Be the eleven that comes of seven
and dot the dice with the starmaps
of the chance constellations
that rolled your way
like a genome
without asking for your advice.

If you were really down on your luck
you wouldn't be here to know it
so why not risk it all
like a universe in the beginning
in one throw against
the wall in a dark back alley
that's been breaking banks
and bringing the house down ever since
like an incommensurable decimal
that escaped the confines
of a whole number
that couldn't restrain it like a straitjacket?

Add yourself to things like zero
and amplify their effect
like a deep canyon foretells
the echo of things to come
that are well beyond your voice.
You don't need to choose
when there's nothing you can't refuse.
There's nothing to win or lose.

Time may well be
the adolescence of eternity
that puts cracks in its vinegar
and wrinkles its wine
but who wouldn't rather play
than work at being who they are?

Honour the wound with a scar
that's worthy of what you have suffered
to express yourself as you are
like a firefly in a palace of light
with a deep insight
into the black mirrors of dark matter
that multiply your afterlives like stars
in the eyes of the windows
in the house of life
that were broken from the inside out.

Astound your own vision
with the kind of crazy wisdom
that knows the crown of the universe
doubles as the dunce-cap of a cosmic egg
and say what you have to say
to add yourself to the conversation
like a bridge to the few bars of picture-music
that look and sound just like you
when you refused to crush
the head of the serpent under your heel
like the end of the long interminable road you were on
to salvation.

And you were amazed
when it struck you
like an elixir of life
emerging from the eclipse
of a dark venom
you didn't get up off the ground
like St. Paul who had been Saul of Tarsus.

And you weren't the Tiresias of either sex.
There was no blind catharsis.
But your heels sprouted wings
that mastered the wind like words
and the snake flew away like a dragon
with a lot in common with birds.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I See Myself Happening

I see myself happening
in the flight of a bird across the moon,
in the appearance of the leaves
and the leftover flowers
that have gone on blooming
in the corner of the yard
longer than anyone ever thought
and in the light of the star
through the branches of a tree
that's rooted in me like an emotion
that's grown beyond its rings.
For a moment the moon
holds the spring leaves up before her
like the cards of a new hand
to make sails and water of their shadows
and I am all arrivals and tides and departures,
the skeleton of a battered ark
scuttled in the mountains of the moon
after the flood receded
and everything was land
and I was the two of every kind
that disembarked like a mind
to elaborate itself through a bloodline
that wound many threads
into one strong rope
that might bind me like a spinal cord
to a place in an empty lifeboat.
We all have our protean myths of origin.
The wounded lies we use to exempt
our intimate extinctions
from the obvious suicides
who trusted death not to judge.
One voice says it's merely a witness
while another tries to interpret
the meaning of the life that's going on
without consultation
and another scoffs at them all
as if bitterness could save you from being a fool.
And tired of having my teachers
interrupt my truancy
with rational voices
that always knew better,
I suspended the school
with an unfinished loveletter
that got things off my chest
like baby crows in a nest.
No rule, no fool. And now I'm free
to taste the moon for myself
and know it tastes like scars.
And there are commotions of life in the grass
that don't violate
the incredible privacy of creation
by trying to assert what they are
to the secret that gave them birth.
What child was ever of no worth
in the scales of a grieving mother?
The moment you affirm you exist, you don't;
and denying you do won't do either.
In a single scale of the fish,
the whole ocean
and in a feather, the sky.
Sometimes reality hangs
like a tear from an eyelash
or a dropp of water from the tip of your nose,
reflecting the entirety of the world
and sometimes it's a grain of dust
that humbles the mountains.
The moment you go looking
for the meaning of things
you pry the jewel out of the ring
and all that's left is the eye-socket
of a skull full of fire ants.
No exit, no entrance,
no inside, no out,
isn't it obvious by now
there's no theshold, no door,
no far shore
no road to follow or not
no passage to anywhere
no aspiration or desire
no sage or liar
no mirage on the moon
or shadow born again
in the fires of the sun at midnight
pouring itself into forms
to ensnare you like love and war?
There's no need to air
your private or public ordeals.
Just realize your formlessness,
your lack of beginnings and ends.
Mind is space. What's to liberate?
Nothing gained, nothing lost,
nothing large or small,
nothing wounded or healed,
full or empty, bound or free,
and yet nothing is ever missing
because time and mind and space
are three echoes of you in the same empty well.
Why struggle exhaustively
like a wave that takes up arms
against the sea
or a light at odds with its lamp,
a flame that sobs in the ashes of its fire,
or a breath that holds itself aloof from the wind
stringing yourself out like beads
along the spinal thread
of your hydra-headed rosary,
trying to pry the pearl of the moon
out of every dropp of water
that falls from the tip of your tongue?
If you think your life was attained at birth
then surely you will lose it when you die,
but when you realize
that origins and ends
are both eyes
of the one seeing,
the same breath
on the threshold of now
without an eyelash in between
like the moon on water,
everything you've ever looked for
asks you
where you have been,
and what, if anything,
among the inexhaustible answers
you might possibly mean.
You'll finally realize
though you've looked everywhere
on worlds as numerous as grains of sand
and plunged through the darkness
like the only fish in an infinite, eyeless sea,
and cobbled the road
you hoped would lead you home
with the prophetic skulls
of all your past lives,
and pondered your purposeless beginning
like a funeral bell that never knew you well,
the source of the mind you look for
is as close as the lamp in your hand
and everywhere your eyes inspire the light to dare,
you see the black squirrel in the blue patch of grape hyacinth
watching you watching it
and thought-years beyond the exhibits of meaning,
you understand.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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