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Trying To Shine To Blind The Voodoo Dolls

Trying to shine to blind the voodoo dolls
sticking sharp pins of insight dipped in stinging nettles
into my eyes like burning thorns that won't wash out
even when the blue rose of the sky
puts her face in her hands and cries her heart out.
Made my Icarian ascent to the sun
like a kamikaze pilot in reverse trying to be positive
about the self-destructive aspirations
under my thawing wings, now
I'm trying to keep my balance on my spinal cord
stretched like a highwire suspension bridge
across an abyss that keeps expanding my insignificance
as I juggle planets with my feet I keep dropping
like my head in a guillotine made for mercy.

I want to say this is the dung-heap, this is the dogshit,
these are the maggots that thrive in the corruption of it
like toxicara worms that get in your eyes
and under your fingernails, and burrow
like small black holes through your heart
and let all the light out of your life like a slow leak
somewhere in the pipeline of the universe
that's fracking me inflammably like a watershed
and I'm trying so hard to snow all over it
with the highest ideals of understanding and compassion,
every mystically specific flake sidereally designed
to ameliorate the repulsive and obscene
by cloaking it in white like an albino hypocrite.

For light years I used to believe if you
threw flower seeds in it, you could work it
like starmud blooded by a battlefield of torn corpses
into a bumper crop of zinnias and sublimely poignant stargrass.
Marvellous transformations of an outhouse
into the lunar beauty of the nocturnal Taj Mahal
making the black mirror, like the lost sheep, more beautiful
in a universe where love and light and life so often seem
mere mutations of the darkness.

Didn't really want to make an ideology of a wild guess,
that would only add to the mess of cultish concepts,
and not really born to sow stardust
into the ploughed wound of a worm,
nevertheless, I drew a gold sword
out of a philosopher's stone
and plunged it through the base metal of my heart
to suffer all those little deaths in life
and those liberating space twisting
indelible excruciations of cosmic transformation
that wrought this discipline of disobedience
I practise like an art into the absurd freedom
of the crazy wisdom that's needed to make
a start somewhere, somehow, however small
by adding my crystal skull to the shining
like the sacred syllable of a dropp of water
off the tongue of a silver leaf in the moonlight
that listens to it fall like a cross
between a good word and a tear on deaf ears below.

So I throw flower seeds on it in passing, the way
I throw all my loose change into a guitar case
trying to sing for a living against the impossible odds
of a dungheap laid like the corrupt cornerstone of things,
the ship of state expurgating in public like a sick whale
spinning the Parisian potential for the screening myths
of expensive, narcotic fragrances of rot on the Perfume Trail.
Say it isn't so, Joe, but there you go, it is.
The terrorist oilwells are planting i.e.d.s
of inflammable water in the faucets of everyone's kitchen,
so we can all burn to death
drowning in our showers in the morning
trying to chill things out
with corporate hellfire and brimstone
and legions of demon lawyers that give lying a bad name.

Been trying not to get so down I get
knocked off my axis like Neptune
ducking down below the celestial equator
and be dragged down into my own depths
by the snapping turtle of the world
that's founded upon it like a totem on a gantry.
Barring the occasional eclipse to keep
the calendars tuned to the prophecies of doom
ranged against the small beginnings of the new moon
that might squeak through the third eye of the needle
just like mammals did at the end of the late Triassic
as the insignificant consequence of a cosmic event
that upgraded scales to feathers and fur to skin
as wolves turned into whales. Creative destruction
evident in extinction and evolution the same.

I try to keep my spirits up like a lead kite
by approaching it all as if it were
delightfully and horrifically absurd spontaneously
but an unmeaningly free and creative medium nevertheless,
and even if it isn't etc., the most intriguing of delusions
it's taken me light years to adapt to
without sitting in perpetual judgement
on the immensity of the darkness
that intensifies the nebularity of my enlightenment
with starclusters of insights that flower
like a mirage of fireworks in my dazzled mind.

Even if it's no more than a flash of light out of the void
richocheting off the facet of a grain of sand,
or a firefly trying to stand up to the lightning,
or slim volume of igneous poems
wedged like a matchbook between tomes
like anthers of fire with phosphorus pollen
that will spread like wildflowers when it finally blooms
like foxfire in the ashes of an old growth forest.
Even to stand like a lighthouse on the moon,
having lost its sense of purpose, and yet,
still keep the fire in the tower burning as if
there might be a storm the way things change
and there could be a shipwreck, some nights
are so strange they're like waves or cats
that leave things like dead moles and snakes
on the threshold of the far shore of your door out of here,
I've tried to keep on shining like a candle
trying to stay awake at a black starless mass
trying to make things dark enough to make an appearance,
and even when I haven't managed it,
and all my shepherd moons are scattered like black sheep
by the snarling wolf of my mystically liberating nature,
suddenly showing up like the skull and crossbones
among the angel fleets grazing on the waves,
I've elevated waterlilies of constellations
that sat below the salt in the lowest place of all
to the zenith of my dreams like starmaps in transit
I've kept alight in a nightwatchman's eyes for years
as he makes the rounds of the zodiac
like a candle still burning in the lanterns of his tears.

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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If Only I Could Remember Things For Awhile

If only I could remember things for awhile
as they were before they changed. Savour them.
Let the flavour of the jewel
that's been ripening in my voice
wash through my mouth
like the mystic blaze of a star sapphire
and every word I say be a firefly of insight
that can shed some light on dark matter.

Would that my tears fell fruitfully enough
to feed the world, that one dropp of my blood
after years of preparing the potion, were enough
to immunize a whole planet from affliction.
And what marvels would my eyes not delight
in showing anyone, if they could astonish the blind
like an orbiting telescope that's just had
its cataracts removed
like the reflection of the moon peeled
like an albino eclipse off the black mirror of the lake
only to discover that all this time they groped through the dark
like star-nosed moles, it was their own face that got in the way
of what was shining. If only my hands
knew how to build like the birds
and my bones were strong crossbeams and rafters,
what palaces of light and water and air
would my heart not offer to the homeless
like the growth rings of a maple tree
that threw them the keys like winged samara
and said, move in, its yours. It's built on bedrock
not the quicksand cornerstone of a slum lord.

For the lonely sitting with their cats and their elbows
in half-opened windows, observing
the pigeons and the stars for memorable events,
I would break this long fast of my solitude
like black Slavic peasant bread with strangers
who sat above the salt at the table
as my honoured guests, and ask them, eye to eye,
heart to heart, all ears, as if I were a radio telescope
listening like Seti, if they've heard any news back yet
from Bellatrix or Rigel, and which
of Jupiter's shepherd moons is hiding
a secret affair with life that everyone's dying to know.

It's heart-breaking that we can't all bring our tears to bear
into one cloud weeping over a drought like a dry creekbed
where we're all hibernating in our own starmud
like toads and frogs waiting for flashfloods of the next rain
to underwhelm us like gravestones in a makeshift cemetery.
What would the world be like if we could
walk up a long country road at night far from ourselves
and not have to ask the roadkill for directions in life?
As if we were sure enough where we were going
to risk being followed by the lost like a starcluster of fireflies
within the compass of everyone's bearings, not
out there somewhere like the ghost of a spaced-out lighthouse
but like the porchlight of nearby farm on a summer night
that draws living things out of the dark like the full moon to it,
even if it just be gnats in the air, bats, or Luna moths,
what a seance of life we could be to each other
as if we left the screen door unlatched
for any lunatic of the light on the road this late at night
who might wander in like the seeds of new themes on the wind
to enrich the bright vacancy of our dark abundance
with a starmap to where our buried treasure lies hidden
like diamonds in the ore of the hearthstones of our hearts.

If I could take the whole of my darkness
and enchant its snakepits into the wavelengths
of the light I would have emanate out of me
like the rainbow body of a Tibetan rinpoche
entrusted with the wisdom of the Himalayas
to seek a low place among the stars like a sea
that all things flow down into like the shining images
we retain of ourselves like the reverberations
of experienced luminaries echoing
like seasoned birds to each other
in the valleys and black holes of tears and death below.

Sacred syllables of immortal butterflies
in the orchards of morning and moonrise.
I would shine down upon the abyss of the lovers
like a water star from the bottom up
of all the burning bridges they have yet to cross
like Aldebaran at zenith, or Cygnus at nadir,
to get them to the other side
of what binds them to each other
like water and air, light, earth and fire,
and each moment of my life, every step
I risked anew, I would become the way
that's never taken itself before this deep into the mystery
of what it means to be alive and everywhere
be endangered by the beauty of our own awareness.

Instead of breathing for the dead as long as I can
underwater on the moon, I would invite them
to make a new birthmark in new medium
that calls them back from the night like light
from the scattered ashes of the empty urn of a star
coming together again in a gravitational womb
of their own remains, where everyone achieves
the all consuming illumination of their endless afterlives
by opening the koan of a single flower
in the light of their darkest hour of perennial insight.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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If Only I Could Remember You As You Were

If only I could remember you as you were
for a few, brief radiant moments as indelible
as light in space and not as time would have it
the way things have changed. To see you
lingering in the doorway on a winter night,
the snow lying lightly on your hair like the Pleiades
over your shoulder descending below the treeline
as if it knew more about saying good-bye than you did,
and o how I loved you for it. If only I could
remember that lonely ghost of a mirage
that hovered over the watershed of your tears
and looked at me like the first lifeboat
you'd seen in a thousand years respond
to your s.o.s. in a hourglass. If only I could remember
the fragrance of the summer rain on your skin
as if it had mistaken you for one of the flowers
and how I used to like wiping your tears away
with my opposable thumb like plum blossoms from your cheeks.

Eternity coming to the surface of time
like old corduroy roads and bones in a makeshift graveyard.
Not likely I'll ever see you again in this life
but if only I could remember you before circumstance
underwhelmed itself and killed the ambiance
of our last dance by turning all the lights on at once.
But there you go, no help for it. The nightbird
transits the moon and the eternal sky as is said in Zen
doesn't inhibit the flight of the white clouds.
And this moment, too, though it's endured
a thousand deaths to come to this afterlife,
always saying good-bye to some aspect of you
that symbolizes the evanescence of love and life
in metaphors that buff the open wound
like scar tissue on the moon, like fireflies
welding living insights into the dead brain coral
of this encyclopedic coma life
can sometimes seem without you, even after
all these ensuing misadventures it would take a fire
and half a dozen bottles of wine to tell you about
if only I could remember you as you once were
like the lamb that laid down with the lion without fear.

For light years, images of you have flashed out of the abyss
as sharp and quick and vital as moonlight
wielding a sabre, or a bird quickened by a purpose
out of the unknown into the unknown
and I recognize them as blossoms that have blown
far from the tree that was lovelier
than the whole orchard to me, though angels
attended upon it like scripture from its roots to its leaves,
you were the locust tree with your demonic thorns
I wanted to tear my heart on like a rag of blood
on the galactic razorwire that encircled your heart
like a storm of dark matter with unlimited potential
for creative destruction that got the light out of the way
long enough for us to see what glowed behind it.
If only I could remember you as you were
when we both made eye-contact with each other
like exo-planets in the void, and understood spontaneously
it wasn't going to take much of a wavelength
for either of us to understand this immediately
as if we could read each other's shadows like Mayan calendars.

Water hemlock, wild parsnip, sometimes
the memories scald like volcanic dew on bare skin,
but seldom have I ever regretted
that I lived through you for awhile,
when the stars raged in my heart like a madman
obsessed by the crazy wisdom of a woman
who had the wingspan of a bow on a bent event horizon
but knew enough about compassion
to push the burning arrow of my fascination with her
all the way through like a blood sacrifice to love and life
and the mystery that moved in the darkness up ahead
like the fork in the road that separated us,
like a wishbone that had granted all it had to give.

How tenderly painful the brevity of what
we actually relive again as if some moments in life
are illuminated by a different light than that
we read by in bed late into the night
looking for translucency in the windows of insight
that keep on opening their eyes in this recurrent dream
like the black waterlilies of new moons coming into bloom.

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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As Much As I Love The Stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Someone Lingers In Your Absence Like An Icon

Someone lingers in your absence like an icon, a gate
to an open field where the white horse
that stood in the tall grass, grazing on its solitude
like a phase of the moon come to earth
is gone. A bird, a purple martin with so much
distance and disappearance in it wings
and the open vastness of the skies it was absorbed by
I can barely hear you singing from here
over the raving of an unkempt wind on a crazy night
when the ghosts are rioting in their graves
like old leaves without attachments at the feet of the new
and gravity receives the grave goods of the tree
as do I these strange epiphanies of you
that haunt me retroactively like apple-bloom.

And the depth of the emptiness that informs
the substance of my imaginings, devastates me
like an eclipse slowly swallowing my heart
like a black cataract of snake skin I keep
trying to shake like a cosmic egg without much luck.

As if I were bleeding out like a rose after
the green thorns have hardened into fangs
that are killing and curing me at the same time.
Some nights I just want to join my emptiness to yours
and be done with it, no more of this, no more.

No more of watching the beauty of the world
burn out into a dark radiance that makes me
want to gouge my eyes out so I can see it without wincing.
Without feeling so wounded by the abundance of the rose
that blooms and disappears like the auroral apparitions
of a widow in veils of spider webs and black lightning,
thinking it might be you under there somewhere I can't go
without losing you again. Check-mate. Pain.
And it isn't anything either of us can do anything about.

It just goes down that way. The absence of your shining,
small nonrenewable gestures of your heart and hands
vividly recalled like modest butterfly volumes of poetry
blowing down an abandoned street at night in the rain, you
sewing a patch on my heart with the delicacy of a needle
mending a flying carpet grounded like a wavelength of light.

As I am now that you've become that rip in my heart
all the stars are pouring out of like a puncture wound
I let go right through me like needles and gamma rays
piercing the heart of a voodoo doll of dark matter
that makes me feel like wooden puppet of light
carved out of one of these black walnut trees.

Endure. Participate. See. Wonder.
Praise. Celebrate. Mourn. Do the next best thing.
And when you're hurting your worst, sing.
And even when I'm soldiering my way through stone
like a flying fish in the wrong medium,
or walking alone with the Alone through the woods,
just to meet you where you ask me to when you call
and I come like a burning bridge down to the river,
wondering if I might have lived here once in another lifetime,
I do say these things to myself like medicinal chants
and preventative medicine, healing totems with benign effect
hung in the medicine bag slung around my neck.
Sweet grass and a pinch of sacred earth, just in case
I forget how to dance on my own grave
with grace and flare and style and an enigmatic smile
that really means it if it really means anything at all.

Or not succumb to this ice-age of a bell
my tongue is stuck to like a child's to a wire fence,
or this black diamond nightbird
that cuts my darkness to the quick
because it's got nothing to sing about
that can answer the call of the living for someone
on a foggy hill to come to the rescue of the empty lifeboat
drifting like the corpse of a dead swan downriver,
except the dead air of this strange place
where space is indelibly bruised by the passing
of the beauty it once contained like stars in a Mason jar.

Like a candle in the lantern of a skull
I've carried before me like a nightwatchman
on the edge of a dangerous precipice for lightyears
until I lost my footing and fell in one night,
as I once did into love, and learned to see in the dark
I was growing wings where I had none before
and looking up from the bottom of an empty wishing well
noticed the dead still blooming like stars
in the white shadows of the sun at midnight.

And out of the corners of my eyes
when what I can't see what need to know about being alive
comes looking for me like the sacred syllable
on the lips of a pearl diver on the moon in total eclipse
like a kiss out of nowhere, comes like the singing bird
to the dead branch in my heart
that's having trouble remembering how to blossom
after a long winter, as if you'd summoned me to the trees
like a purple passage in the Book of the Dead,
to teach me how to take the pain
and through the alchemy of the grief
that flows through my heartwood like light and rain
turn it into life again, as if every leaf
were a new loveletter from the dead
I've been saving for years like expurgated starmaps
illustrated by exiled constellations in Braille
to a spiritual lost and found at my fingertips
where they know who you are, and they've seen you
like a soft moonrise glowing through the willows
down by the river that weeps like a black mirror
for the stars and waterbirds in passing
that appear and disappear each in its time
and you wait for me like the longing of the dead
to make some kind of sign, however simple and austere,
the withered star of a wild rose without a flower,
that let's me know you're near, you're here
rooted in me on earth where we've both come
to renew our shining from the bottom up to the blossom.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Feel Like There's A Beast

Feel like there's a beast in the darkness
eating my eyes.
I'm a moon-bull
at a crossroads of solar swords
down on it knees
hemorrhaging like a poppy.
And there are constellations
I've never heard before
playing the harp of my horns
with pensive fingertips.
How strange this rag of life
soaked in tears and blood is.
Everything dies like a snowflake on a furnace,
a rock on an autumn mountain,
no two the same.
There are nights, there are
vigils of darkness
when the mirror can no longer bear
the weight of this feather of fire,
this vision of life
that estranges the spirit
of those who love it most
like a funeral bell
that once drank to the folly of love.
I am a snakepit of lightning
knotted in a glacier of ice
and every emotion
is the undertow of the tide in a sea of eyes
on the cold skull of the moon,
every thought, a stone lifeboat
inundated by the waves
it's convinced it's saving from drowning.
Once I was the dupe
of my own ideals,
now I am the master of none.
This far into the abyss
you forget the name of the god
you died in the name of;
you have squandered your certainty
on greater and greater risks,
the enciphered lotteries of mythic necessity,
only to discover,
though you traversed eras like deserts
that made a skull of your faith,
the donkeys have eaten all the mangers,
and there is as much radiance in the eye
of the dead serpent on the road
as there is the eyelash of a star.
A tear is not a fountain of seeing,
nor a dropp of blood, a rose.
How rare the sword in its silence
among all these chatty scissors at war
trying to cut along the dotted lines
of their border highways
crammed with refugees
they once called lovers,
the horizon slashed
and bleeding like a letter.
I want to calculate the half-life of pain;
the pillar of ore it calls home;
the elemental devolution of its atomic evictions
into the leaden passion of a base metal.
I want to know what I've turned into.
I want to know what's making the stars
throw down their spears of light at my feet
though my heart's out in the open
like a voodoo doll
waiting for a donor transplant.
I want to see myself
opening a door in the mirror
to someone with absolute eyes
irrevocable as yesterday's rain.
Let the star know
the flower it engenders;
let the rose
taste its own honey.
Blind in a dream; blind,
what light roots in the darkness
that I should want to
throw off this robe of blood like a sky
to slip through the eye of the needle
that binds the seams of this world
like a bird
with the single thread of a life in its beak,
washed out of God's eye
like a firefly snuffed
in a torrential downpour of stars?
Why am I
always one heart too many
over the threshold of the truth
I had to leave home to discover?
Am I a hoax in tears
or a tear away from a gate and a rafter?
Let the wave know the sea
that packs its caravan on the moon,
let the silence of the waking abyss
write indelible preludes
with a last kiss
that goes on forever
like the white autumn wind
in a turmoil of seeds
that demonically exceed
the life they're after,
flower by flower,
death by death
like the pulse of a bell
setting the doves free
in the towers of farewell.
It's the eloquence of a tree
to say what life is
when the full moon ripens
in its leafless branches
and the heart beats
like a windfall of silver apples,
though I have tried,
but love is a bridge
on a finger of water
that not even the moon
can slip off like a ring
when the wind rises
like a gaping fish
to swallow the chimes and eyehooks
of its matriculate ripples.
And with each breath of the night
I took and returned,
I have aspired to succeed
at every failure I was ever inspired by.
I raised every sail,
crossed every wave,
every eyelid, every petal
of the sea of life
in the heart of the rose
only to dropp the first crescent of the moon
like an anchor
in the furnace of a dream.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Stranger In The Leaving

Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
Is it not always so
when people separate?
Lovers who knew each other intimately for years
close their gates to each other
and say each others' name
as if they weren't philosopher's stones anymore.
And the base metal outweighs the gold that comes of it.
Alone with the alone
in the abyss of the absolutes
what was vivid and vital
turns numb as glass
and what was mystically specific about the other
is no longer a shrine that holds the secret name of God.
Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
You leave with some of my memes
as I leave with some of yours
and we are both no doubt slightly changed for good
by the reciprocity of the encounter
like hydrogen and oxygen make water.
Though now it's all tears frozen on the moon.
Good-bye my lovely
I shall miss your eyes and your skin
and the thrill of your dangerous heart.
I will miss your wounded mouth
I tried to heal with messianic kisses
that never walked on anything but the earth.
And there's no blame
you couldn't fit my lunar month
into your solar calendar.
We had everything in common except time
and our faults were as compatible as our virtues.
I will miss the rumours of alien life in the wavelengths of your hair.
I shall miss losing myself like a firefly
in the wishing wells of your eyes
even if now my own seem more
like impact craters in the prophetic skull of the moon
when I consider what's leaving like an atmosphere from this mindscape.
And I shall always remember
that your heart was as generous as your breasts
and whenever we made love
how the earthly was the envy of the spiritual fact.
You didn't want anyone to know you were gentle.
Not even me.
But I could see through that mask
eyebrow to eyebrow with you
as if we both were intent on showing the same face to the earth
like the crescent fangs of a Georgia moon that said
don't step on me
because we were afraid.
More than enough to have you in the nude
I wasn't a glutton for your nakedness
that demanded you take your illusions off
to prove you loved me.
It would have been an irreverence
beyond the aspirations of heresy
to witness you renewing your virginity
like the new moon bathing in a sea of shadows.
I never tried to pry the petals of the flowers open
before they were ready to bloom.
I was never the ant
that told the peony what to do.
I never tried to look under the closed eyelids of the rose
to see what it was dreaming.
Though I'm not into voodoo
I never desecrated
the bird shrines
of your involuntary taboos.
But now I look in your eyes
and see that yesterday
is less vivid than tomorrow
though neither of them has happened yet.
The new moon is all potential
The full moon all used up.
There are effigies of potential
standing like scarecrows
in late autumn cornfields
and paragons of actuality
who love to star in constellations
that make them out to be the hero.
I try to stay
and I end up going.
I try to go
and the earth moves underfoot.
The root feels the death of its flower
as the autumn stars turn into frost
and burn its petals like old loveletters
to the immensities that didn't have time to read them.
The harmonies of life
are distinguished from the harmonies of death
by a single breath
taken in
and turned out
into the vast expanses of where it came from in the first place.
And the spirit that isn't shy of its own lucidity
knows that everything it illuminates
whether by day or by night
has the lifespan of light
and light is the brainchild of the darkness.
So even when the lights go out
like people and candles
and us
the shadows go on blooming
and even when the stars
are a gust of ghosts at our heels
the dust is rich
with the memory of all the roads
that once got lost in us
trying to find their way back home
like blood and fire and spirit
as if their final destination
were always the place they started from.
And if in the lightyears ahead
you should ever wonder if I remember you
be deeply assured
I shall remember you
as if every footstep I took
were a threshold of this homelessness
I am brave enough to cross without you.
And I shall thank you for this courage
inspired by the muse of your absence
and the feel of my blood Doppler-shift toward
long meditative wavelengths of red
that stream from the intensity
of the wounded white-hot blue of a renewed beginning.
You can't teach a bird to fly in a cage
or snakes to bite other people.
But when I first met you
it was as if the serpent-fire at the base of my spinal cord
that was running to keep its thoughts aloft like kites
suddenly had wings
and all my dirt-bag myths
that crawled on the earth among the lowest
were elevated into constellations
that burned like dragons among the chandeliers.
And when the muses of life well up in me like water
as they will
and ask me back
for all the tears they've shed on the sorrow
of the way things had to be
between you and me
for them and us
to happen the way we did
I will show them the eternal flame
of the nightwaterlily
blooming in the clear fire
of its lonely lucidity
not even the rain
the dragon brings
can aspire to put out.
I will show them the sun.
I will show them the moon.
And I'll say
you see?
That's us forever.
That swan in the heart of a phoenix.
And they will be well-pleased with the beauty of the lies
I use to shadow the truth with compassionate alibis
for why the flowers fall.
Sometimes it's the bird that swims through stone
and the snake that flys
in a profusion of fire and water
shadow and form
darkness and light
intensity and death
madness and wisdom.
Sometimes you meet someone
and you realize
this fallible flesh just as it is
is the deepest longing of the spirit fulfilled
like light in a perishable garden.
That there are no flaming swords
in the hands of the angels
at the wounded gates of our exile
trying to keep anything in or out.
Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
The knowledge we have of each other
might want to keep things the same
but like all living things
in this garden of creation
the only way to sustain our innocence
is change.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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These Days, This Late At Night

These days, this late at night, I'm usually a lone wolf sage
high above the timberline in a sanctuary of solitude
that occasionally breaks the silence
with the elegaic echo of the anquished shriek of a hawk
wheeling in the abyss like the stars overhead
feeling as if its flightfeathers just caught fire
and for a few brief moments no longer
than the wingspan of a wavelength
it was shining like them and there were jewels
like a woman's eyes cracking the rock
of a heart that's been more of an asteroid
than habitable planet with a few ancestral skulls of its own
for moons and a creative atmosphere where the clouds
can move mountains to tears with the beauty
of what can bloom spontaneously out of nothing
like wildflowers strewn all over the starfields
as if they were expecting someone to come
of the things we really feel are worth crying for.

These days, this time of night, I delight
in looking for the most beautiful nocturnal metaphors
I can compare to you inside and out and beyond both
like a spirit of female serpent fire that haunts me
into paying tribute to her like a muse
who's beginning to possess me like the sea does
when the moon swims out to practise witchcraft
on a lonely island retreat that sings to itself at night.
Even from here, I can hear the song being carried
across the light years like the dove of a deep lament
she keeps like the wind in a locket the size
of the noose around her neck, and the flying carpet
under her feet all that's between her
and firewalking on stars like a burning kite
someone let go of like the umbilical cord
of a lifeboat that had come unmoored in a lunar storm.

Maybe I'm just fossil hunting on the moon
I've been howling at all these years
over the bone pits of dark wisdom I've dug up
on the far side of a black mirror
that doesn't insult your seeing with a night light.
But I swear sometimes when I think of you,
what lies like an archives in the riverbeds
of the sedimentary starmud you put back down
like a book you've read eras of time before,
and look out the window like a door
where you don't have to leave your body
on the threshold like shoes at the edge of the sea
when you walk into your own depths up over your head
to see if your eyes can still swim
with the dolphins and the stars and the flying fish
you left in your wake like a locust plague of urgent telegrams.

I know we're still more strangers to each other
than intimates, that there maybe watersheds
we have in common, and maybe it's still too early
for the fountains to come into blossom yet
as the last stars of the season become
the chandeliers of the morning stars of the next
like dusky candles going out in the blue light of the dawn.
And maybe there are ladders of fire to paradise
trembling like crutches on the edge of a shaky precipice
trying to climb higher than its cloud cover
to break into light like the Pleiades
just above the moon and Jupiter on a good seeing night,
but these days, this late at night, I've been inhaling
a lyrical lantern of oxygen and breathing out stars
like the circumpolar constellation of a healing dragon
pole-dancing with the caduceus of the celestial axis of the earth.

I'm laired with the unmarrowed riddles of bones of my own
I'm trying to read like the yarrow sticks
of a bird skeleton with rose-arbour wings
to see if the light I sense approaching out of the dark
is a mirage of fireflies disguised as a lightning bolt
or the soul mate of a rogue planet
that wants to ghost dance around the third eye
of a first magnitude star that doesn't have any idea
of what I'm doing up here, nor how far
a whisper of light away can seem
to a man fully awake these days, this late at night,
writing in the shadows cast by the candelabra
of a homeless zodiac off the beaten path
like the first draft a waking dream
sleepwalking beside me like the dakini
of a star struck maniac lifting the veils
of the inconceivable like the paint rags
of the night vision shining in the eyes behind them
that even in the dark make everything seem
so incredibly counter-intuitive and lucidly beautiful
I'd be truly out of my mind, like a crystal cranium
that's lost touch with its own translucency
if I didn't find it wholly believable
down to the last mystic detail my enlightened lunacy
howling like a wolf seer at the rising of a new moon
out of a valley where I can hear the distant barking
of the seeing-eye dog that follows Orion around
like a traffic light for the blind compared
to the way you light me up like the Pleiades
whenever I'm trying to get a parallactic fix
on your radiance dancing like a cult of fireflies
on the event horizons of my prophetic skull.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Weary Of The World Tonight

Weary of the world tonight. Can't stand the lies.
Some drunk loud-mouth out on the street
wants all the girls to know he's there,
My noise is bigger than your noise.
Someone playing a guitar badly in a doorway.
A homeless cat cries, lets out a howl
of torment as if its sinews were being keyed
as tight as guitar strings about to snap.
Out of the window that hasn't said anything yet:
you touch that cat again, slugger,
and I'll be right down with an axe
to give you a gender change. He looks up
startled. But all bullies are cowards
trying to deny it to themselves
while wearing their sister's underpants.

The cat makes a quick getaway
through a dark heritage alleyway.

Supercharged like a fire hydrant full of blood
throbbing through my temples, and demons
I haven't seen in years smiling darkly in the mirrors
my shadow always regretted like left-handed virtues
that got the job done. Demonic compassion,
colder than intelligence, with a deep
poetic sense of of infernal irony
whereas a muse ago in this specious present
I was longing for a small hobby farm
on the dark side of the moon, now
I'm a dragon eating waterlilies down
by the banks of my mindstream
quietly letting go of itself
like an unmoored lifeboat full of emptiness
drifting no where in particular I want to be
except here where I can shed my humanity for awhile
among the living and the dead
who don't care what I am and am not
as long as I'm not a threat to them.

Darkness, my solace, moon, my longing,
Star, warmer than any fire I've ever
sat around to exorcise my ghosts,
you, who've danced like my third eye
with the other two still chained to their irises,
the poetic lucidity that mentored me
in the ways of light and taught me
the creative rapture of the fish
that still swam like flashs of insight
to the surface of my oceanic tears,
I don't know how many light years
either of us have yet to shine or cry over,
but tonight, come down from your unindictable heights
and sit with me like the intimate stranger of a candle
in my eyes, in my soul, in my blood,
be the small flame that trembles in my breath for awhile,
be the sole illumination of my spirit for awhile,
ease my bodymind with the elixir of your radiance
emanating from the inside, and let me
be born again of that fire that burns within me,
purge my starmud of these urns and bones and black dwarfs
that weigh me down like disappointed bells
and feisty mastodons in the tarpits of my heart
that sink deeper the more they struggle to get out.

And I don't even care if you're the last firefly
to transcend my cosmic solitude like a wavelength
of the transmorphic singularity at the beginning of time
that woke the valley up with the roar of a dragon
in that elemental morning of mad genius
that's be the dawn of every moment ever since
in this chiliocosm of energies and forms
flashing out of the mystery of the questions we ask
about the inconceivability of being here to ask them.

No purpose. No meaning. Except the one
we all live vaguely as ourselves like a nebularity
out of which we might precipitate stars
of a different order of shining beyond what we can see.
Sit with me awhile as if we both had the same nature.
And you can look at the world and me through my eyes
and I'll look at you through yours as if I were seeing you
from the inside out, and there were ashes in my heartwood
even before I began to burn, as in yours,
there were the urns of heavy elements even
before they were born of their own afterlife.

Be that moment within me when time breaks into light
and even the shadows, like sunspots, shine
in their own right, and nothing is disturbed,
not even the silence that is intensified when the fish jump
or a dog is barking hills away at what approaches
out of the dark, and the waterbirds in their onceness
might seem to fly away, but have been here from the start.
Fill my life with the unimaginable splendour
of all those nights you've looked down upon the earth
and witnessed the horror and the wildflowers
in the same breath on a cold windowpane in winter
etching the light like an artist with an eye for life
or the praying mantis of a small telescope in the summer
its legs spread like a doe about to drink from her own reflection
or one half of a collapsed bridge to the other side
of everywhere at once. I don't ask for bliss or enlightenment.
Just show me how you make the shadows luminous again.
Even on a starless night, how to mourn like the eyeless rain
even as it renews the leaves and roots of the constellations
of the wild asters with their violet plinths and yellow suns
burning fiercely as a distant relation of your myriad myths of origin.

Do that for me and I'll show you how to intensify
the darkness into a diamond chrysalis of transformation
like a deeper mystic bliss in life, enhanced by the ores of pain,
as your light is by the night, or the flying stickshifts
of the dragonflies put the waterlilies in park for the night
as if they'd just got out of a car by the side of an unknown road,
not to find out where they are, but just
to gape up at the stars in the midst of decay
and let the wonder of it all heal me as it always has
by showing me how to make a cradle out of a grave
or the long, slow art of a human out of a wounded heart.

poem by Patrick White
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A Little Thought In A Big Space

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
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
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Does The Eye Of The Rain

Does the eye of the rain know it's a tear?
Does that ray of light know
that even at night
it's a revolutionary among flowers?
Between the giver and the given
between a human and his god
between a human and her void
the gift of a gift of a gift.
And the gifts aren't hidden
even when you cover your eyes.
I saw a baglady the other day
who hadn't given it all away yet
who was positively beatific
in an atmosphere
that only she could breathe
but the shining under her rags
told me she lived on light.
She was a waterlily in a swamp.
And I wondered if she knew it.
What I don't know I intuit
so even if she did
how could that add
one dropp of bliss
to an abyss that was already full?
Experience makes a gift of a school.
The blossom grants the apple its absence.
The wind is Johnny Appleseed.
Or the mad old farmer at the end of his life
that was seen hanging on to the tail
of a black bull
in the backwoods of Westport
sowing the groves with grain.
So the birches had bread
he gave away his brain.
So the dead know
we haven't departed
we leave them our pain
in the company of flowers.
Things don't have origins.
They have givers.
Even in math
giving is an axiomatic fact.
Does the sumac know it's a phoenix in the fall?
The lifework of a universe
in every eyelash
in every bud on the locust tree
in every branch of coral on the moon.
If the all were not whole in the least of us
all things would cease to exist.
Life wouldn't be possible
if it ever short-changed itself,
watered a gram,
diluted the whiskey
thinned our blood like a mosquito.
Life would be an also-ran
that didn't quite make it to the moon.
Does the stone
that forged it out of fire and iron
know it's giving Excalibur
back to the water?
Or the magician his wand?
The diviner his witching rod?
The poet his computer?
Giving isn't a moral vow
you make to the universe.
It's the way we survive.
Say one word truly in any language
and you've endowed the gift of speech
on inanimate things that were mute
about all the things they had to tell you
in your own voice.
This is not mysticism.
This is not science.
This is not the Uncertainty Principle
of some random atomic spiritual life.
I'm not drinking my reflection
from the wellspring of a mirror.
It's as clear as a chandelier.
You can't keep
what you won't give away.
And it isn't the giver.
It isn't the given.
It's the giving that's crucial.
The Buddha gave Ananda a rose.
I don't know what kind of flower it was for sure
but let's suppose.
It isn't the rose that's famous
it's the giving that has come down to us
through the years
thorns and all
heart to heart
hand to hand
human to human
rose petals on the mindstream.
The enlightened dreams
of an unattainable man.
If you're cosmic ice,
absolute Kelvin,
dispassionate as entropy,
profound as blue glass
to an ancient Roman
you're still not sublime
until you learn to give it all away.
Empty the urns of the fireflies
like the ghosts of earthbound insights
and scatter their ashes on the wind
and they'll tell you how
to light the night up
and play like water
that doesn't know how to live any other way.
Giving took water for a body
as soon as it saw how beautiful
the wild iris and blue narcissus were.
Wisdom is water.
Compassion is water.
And there's no end of the modes of it.
Water is the light's favourite mirror.
And the most fun.
And what are we
if not clouds
if not wombs
cut off from the sea like kites,
if not sacks of water,
fruit that leaks like a crucified pear
hoping if we've got to be poured out of ourselves
like pitchers
it's over a garden.
Chandeliers of rain when we cry,
even the windows have learned
to weep along with us,
glaciers and glass,
slow inexorable tears
that like to linger on the past
as if their futures weren't the past
just gone on ahead of them
to greet them when they come.
Like a garden in the fall
that gives what it's got left to the birds,
However you think
you've emptied the cup of the moon,
such is the generosity of water
there's always one last
unfathomable watershed of a dropp left
to give back to the water-giver.
And when you do
pour it away from you
like Dogen Zenji
or someone who has drunk their fill
in a single gulp of the bowl of their skull
as a sign of respect for the river.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Not Quite Dawn

Not quite dawn, night seeping out of the blue,
troubled sleep, no stars, and you, a week gone,
the whole universe applying its laws to your absence
which is the silence everything returns to like water.
I have never touched you, so my fingertips
can still play you into existence on a keyboard,
though the loss of your voice is a dead bird,
and I am a loose thread of blood in a labyrinth
of motherboards and micro-chips like me
who can’t find a way out of themselves without
turning away like a planet from its own stars.
How quickly the light comes, and the darkness
bleeds away like a love-letter under the door.
No eyes. No hands. No skin. No hair. I am
not even the ashes of a cleft witching wand
that went looking for water and caught fire instead,
and we have shared only the light of the mind
that paints a world with the shadows of a ghost,
and might only be the last habit of an amputee to leave,
a mere mime of the way our eyes make us see.
And yet the heart hurts as if you once were flesh,
and I am awake as if another bed denied me my own,
and I am angry and sad, scared and alone as if
the universe were shy one comet, one bead,
one firefly among billions who shone for me
and that light was brighter somehow than a galaxy.
The day grows a new skin over your absence,
and I am as out of place, out of time, as a streetlamp
still shining down on its feet in the morning.
And there could be a thousand and one reasons
you don’t write back, why the black crow caws,
the sky is a concrete rose, the blood of the poppy
runs along the gypsy blade of its undulant smile.
From the heights, I can see a small, blue egg
smashed on the rocks below, a gesture of ruin;
from the depths, the remnants of a shattered star,
and all I can do is stare into the relentless images,
a word without a mouth, like the new moon
shucked from my tongue like a black pearl.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Woke Up Saying Your Name

I woke up saying your name
but in the course of the day forgot.
I should have forgiven you sooner
but my tongue was a noose and a knot.
I should have let you fool my eyes
but not my heart. No Grecian urn
but just the same
I loved the shapely vase of your body
and the fact that my ashes weren’t buried in it.
But those bouquets of angry snakes
you kept trying to arrange
into a Zen garden in Kyoto
or a hair do in Mycenean Greece
kept me looking for an antidote for years
to all those estranged wavelengths
of a gamma ray burst
I stood like a nuclear meltdown in the way of,
though I poured my blood out like heavy water
to get you to stop and cool down.
What it is is what it is only
if you don’t factor in what it’s not.
Otherwise, in the bigger picture,
what it is is just as much what it’s not.
And who can assess
what didn’t go down between us?
I’m sitting on a cold rock down by the Tay River
freezing my proverbials off
because I like being alone with the stars
at three in the morning
because they don’t ask for an explanation
about why I’m up so late
so many light years from home.
And they don’t ask me to translate my scars,
the dead word into the living,
back into wounds
they couldn’t relate to anyway.
And I don’t need to tell them
if you’re going to open yourself up to someone,
if you’re going to bloom, if
you’re going to shine
a rose, a star,
you’re bound to taste your own thorns
or the splinters of broken chandeliers
on your tongue, or a dog
with porcupine quills in its mouth,
howling at the dark side of the moon
as the greater of two faith healers.
Though neither the stars nor I
are into comparative mortality.
And as I approach death and love aimlessly
looking at the stars timelessly alone
I don’t bemoan my brevity anymore
and they don’t flash their eternity in my face.
There’s just stars and eyes for awhile
and both of us agree
death and eternity are none of our business.
There’s just this little bit of heat and light
that flares like a matchbook for a minute
and then goes out
like a holybook, a firefly,
a poem or a flower
burning in its own ashes, smothered
in its own smoke like a pillow
over a dream in a skull
that effaced itself like stars
packed into a snowman that thaws
according to cosmic laws
not meant for our eyes only.
And God, the Zeitgeist,
the Universal Id knows,
how we’ve both tried
to enlighten these lumps of coal,
these sorry excuses for eyes
into diamonds that flow
with love and compassion.
How we have laboured like Sisyphus
to haul what’s deep underground,
the dark ore within us,
up into mountains of light
only to watch it run down again
rivers and rain
into the great night seas beyond
like a heart-mind continuum.
A leaf and a starmap on a lifestream.
We have advanced into our retrogression
like everything else in the universe,
big heavy methane planets
with shepherd moons
that cast their shadows
like beauty spots on Saturn,
and our axes toppled like Neptune’s.

poem by Patrick White
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To See The Glee In Your Eyes At Eighty

To see the glee in your eyes at eighty
as if you were about to achieve something as big
as you did at three.
And you, there, shy one, freaky adolescent
day after day in the same corner of the restaurant
like a bruised mermaid
riding the clock out like a sea turtle
until it’s time to go home again and face the music;
you who drive your pen so deeply
into the fleshy paper
of your black arts journal
as if you were carving up a body
or intensely wedging the tiny bird tracks
of your hieroglyphic footnotes
like some bitter aside
into the shin of that Ramsean gigantism
you’re standing in the shadow of
waiting for it to get dark enough
the fireflies might come out.
To see you light up like a rainbow at a black mass
when I ask if I can look
and you turn your book over like a leaf
and show me a breakthrough masterpiece
that’s good enough to start a school of crocuses
with no instruction from anyone.
To see you afraid to believe in your own excellence
the juno of your aristos
yet risking the possibility it might be a fact
you’re the mysterious matrix
of a genuinely creative act;
that you might feel
like you’ve got a lump of coal for a heart
and a La Brea tar pit for a mind
but when the mascara comes off
like a Gothic eclipse
you’re a new moon
and you’re starting to shine like a diamond.
To see the black dove in your eyes
liberated from the cages of disapproval
imposed on you by white crows in disguise
is to know
what human beings are doing on earth.
To see what softens the angry blue eyes
of the next generation
of gram masters of Gore Street
with their heads shaved like Auschwitz
or the Stalinesque inmates of the Thief’s World
with its rock pile laws
trying to stay true to the Rosetta Stone
of their prison tattoos
like the sacred syllables
of the mother tongue of darkness.
To see in the glee in their eyes
when their girlfriends take them back
that their hearts are not hard enough yet
to be immune to alienation
and for all the rocks that blister in spoons
the occasional angel still keeps its place
as Francis Thompson knew better than these
under the stones that love turns over
like eclipses of the moon
that weren’t indelible enough to last.
To see the glee in the eyes of a child
when it looks at an animal
and sees the same instinctive innocence
that’s just as wild as it is
and watch their minds go crazy
trying to give their tongues
a jump up on their amazement
at meeting a senient life form
that speaks the same language they do
and shares in the original parity
of the undifferentiated freedom
they still enraptures them in Dilmun
Shangri La
Queensland
and the Garden of Eden.
To see such ecstasy in their eyes
is to know how much wonder is lost
how much joy in just being here with everything else
is driven out of us
as we age our way into separation
deluded by the truth
that perfects our isolation
from the small and big furry things with startling eyes
and the Bolshoi Ballet of fins and veils
that makes my gold fish Toke a dancer
or an underwater comet
high above Atlantis
like a good omen on the eve
of some catastrophic decision
to rise again with more imagination to live
than the dead have reason not to.
To see the glee in the eyes of a friend in winter
like the bouquet of good brandy
beside a warm fire mythologizing
the first drafts of the stories
that are being told and retold
by the blind poets of an oral tradition
sipping red gold
from the snifters of inspiration
they swirl like the whirlpools of the muses
warming to their palms like the head of a glass rose
with its stem between their fingers.
To see in their eyes how good it is
to recognize we’re all linked like tree rings
to the same heartwood
through all four seasons of our lives
is to make a friend of your own human nature
by remembering even in the midst
of this blitz of blazing that blinds the world
on the frantic midways of its cheap thrills
like a heart under a roof heavy with snow
the best things in life
like fires and friends
and goblets of auburn Courvoisier
still glow without diminishment.
To see the glee in the eyes of the rain
that they can behold the whole of the sky again
and all its stars
in the single dropp of a tear
though the rain doesn’t know who it’s crying for
is to understand in a flash of insight
even though you fall
like the small flower at the tip of a blade of stargrass
like a grain of sand down the slopes
of the oxymoronic mountains in an hourglass
you contain it all within yourself
and you can’t pour the universe out of the universe
anymore than you can be driven out of paradise
or be obliterated out of existence
whether humanity immolates itself
or dark energy accelerates us
into an entropy of starless ice.
To perceive the stars and the fireflies in the eyes of the rain
is to comprehend that your mystic specificity
is so unique and broad-shouldered
that down to the slightest detail
what makes you so crucially you
is that it upholds the whole of the rest of the world
in every cell and grain of gold and dirt
like a mountain of a cornerstone
that’s as boundless and high
as its bottomless valley is deep.
To look into the eyes of the stranger
the child the friend the lover the corpse
the eye of the hurricane the enemy the Medusa
the wounded white tail buck in the barbed wire fence
the black-eyed Susans the English ox-eyed daisies
or the yellow suns in the hydrogen clouds
of the New England asters
or the white eclipse of the black holes
in the eyes of the shark as it rolls to kill
or to attune the expression
to the sensibilities of the moment
as a fourteenth century German mystic once wrote
the same eye by which I see the multiverse
are all the eyes by which the multiverse sees me.
What you see
everyone sees.
When you understand
everyone understands.
Lost causes flaws and imperfections.
The lamp the road the night the light the journey.
You can ask the fireflies.
You can ask the galaxies.
But when you’ve exhausted all your cul de sacs
it’s going to be your own seeing
without starmaps
that gives you the right directions
like true north on the inside
and then reminds you in a gentle aside
that it’s impossible to be off the path
because it’s as wide as your field of vision.
When you see for yourself
who’s watching you in this dream of life
even the blind are enlightened
and as many as the ways
and as myriad as the eyes there are
to see in and through your mind
like a jewel turning in the light
it reveals like infinite insight
from the dark source of its own radiance
we rejoice in the genius
of compassion and courage
who took a Pax gene and a moonbeam
and in a moment of omnidirectional inspiration
that included all points of view at once
made it the muse of our eyes.
When you realize
that sight is a kind of love
as I once read on a poster in the sixties
everyone realizes
when you open your eyes
like an expanding universe
even our imperfections shine
in the available dimensions of the darkness before us
and born from the very beginning of everything else
to see and be happy
eye to eye with your own vision of things
as they appear and disappear
like thorns and roses from your heart
like leptons axions and quarks
like the stem cells of your own creative potential
to enter the dark spaces of your own imageless realms
and revel like a child in the art
of making worlds within worlds
like an opening night that everyone’s invited to.
Comets bombarded the earth
and the waters of life
broke from their fire wombs
and for the children of that union
there’s never been a way
to look into the eyes of their opposite
without seeing themselves.
Whether in sorrow or joy
whether in love despair ignorance or wisdom
out of our minds
or biding our time within them
like a flower that knows when to bloom
our shadows cast on a winter night
by the approaching light of Venus
or exalted by the crazy wisdom of life
in the thriving tides of the moon
eyes in the sky
like spy satellites extraterrestrials
and Hubble telescopes
eyes in the water
eyes in the blood
eyes in the wine
eyes in the wheat the apple the pomegranate
eyes in the forbidden fruits
that make all things believable
two eyes and a third
in the word for imagination
to conceive of the inconceivable.
When you see this
through your own eyes
even the mirages the delusions the lies
confess to themselves creatively.
Don’t judge the immensity of the world within
by the grain of sand it comes in
or the density of the pyramid
by what the thieves left of its grave goods.
Imagination is a dragon fly
that can take the fallen and broken
the duff and decay
the twig the leaf the petal
and glue it into a small house of transformation
so the worm comes out breathing fire
like a burnt matchstick with wings.
Point is.
Don’t waste the creative potential
of your own imperfections.
You can find holy water in a tainted well
if you know how to look for it.
The moon dips her cup
in the waters of life
because she has none
and as she raises it to her lips
what looked like a skull
turns into a long-stemmed goblet.
Doorways of light.
Doorways of night.
We open them both alike.
White sails.
Black sails.
We part the veils of space
to see who’s wearing our face
like a mask in the guise of a universe.
Bad.
Worse.
Perfections.
Imperfections.
When you understand
everyone understands.
We weep rivers of stars
into our own hands
to drink from our own reflections
just to taste the light and the life
of the mysterious insight
that burns within us
when the sun shines at midnight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Voices Of Dead Friends, Departed Lovers

The voices of dead friends, departed lovers
aimlessly feather the night air like the fragrances
of wildflowers and burning guitars thriving in the dark.
I'm out to see the Delta Aquarids down by the river,
leaping like a man with faith in his precarious footing
from skull to skull like a chessboard of oracular rocks
keeping their heads above water like a half-hearted bridge
dog-paddling in its own collapse, trying to cross
the same mindstream they're in up to their eyes
for a better view of the sky in the clearing on the other side.

Clouds of cometary junkyards in decaying orbits.
Placental remains of unilluminated afterbirths.
I delight in watching how wasted things shine the brightest
on their way down like blossoms of paint
flaking off the windows of heaven like rose petals
revealing these thorns that gore and slash the night
like matadors and meteors with razorblades
hidden under the screening myths of their eyelids.
It's natural when opposites come together,
enjoining disparate elements into more enduring alloys,
it's the clarity that seems confusing to the untrained eye
and chaos that foreshadows transmorphic reality.

All my aspirations emanate from the same radiant
like sudden cremations in the upper atmosphere
that disintegrate and flame out upon re-entry
like Icarian candlewax at the black mass
of a waning eclipse factualizing the omens
of its own self-fulfilling prophecies of subliminal descent.
All the matches I strike like fireflies
and phosphorus flower buds against my heart
are put out by the same bloodstream
they once illuminated like wild columbine
and the hydrogen blue of the star clusters
burning like irises along this highly siderealized river.

Meteors. Two an hour. Bayonets of light
making the rounds on the nightwatch.
The tree line blows through the open window
of the wavering lake like an old curtain
about to be shed like the veil of the Queen of Heaven.
Indigo the eyes of Isis. With a white wavelength for a smile.
Here where she gathers up the severed hearts
of the light's dismemberment like body parts
she heals by leaving the waterlilies on all night in the morgue
and staring so long and immaculately
into the darkness like a lump of coal
for the third eye of a spiritual snowman
washing his hands of himself like a pilgrimage
weeping diamonds all along the way
like the excruciating tears we all shed
in the shrines of the black suns that rise at midnight
like broken mirrors from the graves of dead metaphors.

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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