Walking Straight Through The Cobwebs
Walking straight through the cobwebs of old emotions,
trying to get these straitjackets off me, these
brown starclusters that stick but never seem to shine.
Don't care if I'm in or out of my mind, enough's enough
and comes a time to take a bath in your own grave
to wash all these ghosts off like the smoke of old fires
that returned to their urns like shepherd moons a long time ago.
And I still can't tell if that's a rose petal or an eyelid of blood
under the fingernail of the crescent moon
when she scratched the eyes out of her prophetic skull.
Tired of asking for clarity and being answered in labyrinths.
The more I see the more alone I feel. I've been
disciplined by catastrophe long enough to know
how to build bridges of fire across the mindstream
without extinguishing my reflection like a torch
in my own awareness. Suspension bridges
woven of spinal cords like the suicide nets
around the Peace Tower. Dream catchers, yes,
but who can stop the nightmares from falling to their deaths?
The scars grow old as the tongue leather of leeches.
Time for them to dropp off like deathmasks on a pilgrimage
that just couldn't keep up with the unholy pace of my blood.
Tired of waltzing with bear traps in a plastic marijuana patch.
Weary of arranging flowers so they're not embarassed by the stars
that are wearing the same thing this year,
as they always do in the fall, when it's not their wardrobe,
but our eyes that are renewed by their shining.
Not a crusade in advance of hope, not the retreat
of apostate despair, nor yet a sideways move
to get out of the way of anything I labour
under the delusion for convenience
I was meant to experience without being consulted.
It isn't the stump that has to fear the lightning.
Asleep or awake, it's all the same vision to a sorcerer
casting spells on the moon like oxymoronic dream grammars
that don't come with parachutes or safety nets
to catch the flying fish when they swan dive back into the abyss.
What's a thought? What's an emotion?
Why do the butterflies sting worse than killer bees?
Why do the scalpels of thought only dance with amputees?
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If You Were To Give Me Your Hands
If you were to give me your hands, break your prayer
and offer each wing up to me, broken halves of the heart,
I would make one burning dove out of them
that would carry a ribbon of flame in its beak,
a comet in the night, a vision of life and love,
a message to God she couldn't ignore, a wild flower
that emerged out of the ashes of her abyss
like a star waking up from a bad dream
in the skies over the darkening hills of Perth.
If you were to give me your eyes for a moment
like the lily pads of two eclipses, I'd put my lips
to each of your eyelids like the kissing stone of the Kaaba,
and erase all memory of its igneous fall to earth,
and when you opened them at moonrise,
where I touched you, there'd be two waterstars
shining as if they'd just fallen from the Pleiades
among the waterlilies and crazy raptures of the nightbirds.
Spare me a tear, and I'll return it to you like an elixir
that will dye your grief like the palette of an autumn tree
that's been painting for years, a sidereal Prussian blue,
with a touch of alizarin crimson, to burn
like the subliminal passion of a dragon in the background.
And when the fish return to their sacred pools on pilgrimage
like water sylphs, even when your mindstream
breaks like a rosary into billions of separate beads
flowing over the precipice of your eyelashes into the void,
you'll be the bird that amazes the sun and moon
reflected in each of them as they are in your eyes
as you wheel like the phoenix of a double helix
with the Swan and the Eagle across a summer
of clear night skies casting the nets of their constellations
far and wide, like a spell that gathers them up like shepherd moons.
If you were to give me your breasts, your lips,
your arms, your legs, I'd come like spring to a landscape,
clouds and rain to the moon, a hummingbird
to the goblet of your body, water to a wishing well
full of stars and fireflies, even at noon,
that's just realized all she ever had to do was ask.
I'd make your flesh feel like the shores
of some vast sea of unexplored sensual awareness
and walk them like a beachcomber in a red tide
of radiant starfish pumping light into your blood.
I would not ask for your soul or your spirit,
knowing the eternal sky does not inhibit the flight
of the wild waterbirds startled off the lake,
and even the wind can't hold them for long
like leaves and kites, when autumn says it's time to move on.
But if you were to give me their chains,
I'd retool them into royal cartouches,
ellipsoid orbits, halos, and shield-shaped lozenges,
to distinguish your name, like a waterclock
in an hourglass of desert queens firewalking across the sky
by the Milky Way, as if you were on pageant
sailing up the Thames or the Nile in a barge of moonlight.
And should, never perish the thought, you see fit
to offer me your heart, not as a fortune-cookie
with a happy ending, but like the complementary colour
of the world's biggest emerald, or the red berry
to a crown of prickly holly leaves, never
would any of my thorns ever draw even so much
as a dropp of blood from you to gray the greening
of this lyrical innocence that sings in the urns of autumn
as if Eurydice raised Orpheus out of the grave for a change,
or wild geese carrying the souls of the dead south
out of a threshed cornfield under the first frost of the stars,
or awoke the Sleepers in the Cave, to a new age
that believes if you can't dream it with your third eye closed
it isn't real. It doesn't sail. It isn't champagne that's breaking
like a bottled wave against the bow of a moonboat
that's been in drydock long enough to heal its wounds
and drift down the mindstream of the muse
like a feather of life, with a leaf for a starmap,
a message of love, with no astrolabes or compasses up its sleeve
and a fleet of poems flying high over head across
the lifeless sea of shadows below, the crane bags of Hermes
reaching your delta where the river greets the sea of bliss
breaking into bloom like a third eye from its chrysalis,
a dragon at dawn, a planet in the sunset, a dream figure
that woke reality up from a firepit of illusion
like foxfire in the scorched roots of an old growth forest
where lightning sows the seeds of illumination
like fireflies and transformative storms of stars
under the heavy eyelids of the pine-cones
that have fallen into a deep meditation on the koans
that have rooted love like an unlikely windfall
of constellations, whether your walking on stars or their ashes,
in the unsalted soil of its own galactic immolations.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Hung Up And Overdue
I'm so hung up I'm gonna go see her tonight
I'm so hung up I can't get her out of my mind
Could it be just stars in my eyes
Could it be this won't happen twice
We're overdue for a dream come true
Long time, nothing new
We're overdue for a dream come true
She said she's going to move to California on day
Said she's going out on safari to stay
She's tired of her job and the snow
We both need somewhere to go
We're overdue for a dream come true
Long time, nothing new
We're overdue for a dream come true
I'm so hung up on her now
I'm so strung out on her now
A gift from the sun to the moon
I hope something changes soon
We're overdue for a dream come true
Long time, nothing new
We're overdue for a dream come true
We're overdue for a dream come true
Long time, nothing new
We're overdue for a dream come true
song performed by by Tom Petty
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Your Time Has Come
Now one fell asleep in the street
and he never woke up
And now one died in pieces
whose been with a mouthful of ghosts
And one threatning long ago i saw him
melt in the bright of day
And one laid to rest in the field
on the stories and crawled, hey
I've been walking the sideways
I've stared straight into the sun
Still, I don't know why you're dying
Long before your time has come
Your time has come
Now one took some bullets to the chest and the field gone wrong
One got a little too depressed then he went and jumped the gun
One got shoot right in the face and he somehow
survived
But he doesn't know my name or who I am
and I'm not surprised, hey
I've been walking the sideways
I've stared straight into the sun
Still, i don't know why you're dying
Long before your time has come
Yeah I've been wandering sideways
I've stared straight into the sun
And I don't know why you're dying
Long before your time has come
Your time has come, hey
(Solo)
I've seen fifty thousand names all engraved on a stone
Most of them, met em at a grave years before i was born
All of them left brothers and sisters and mothers behind
And most of their family and friends are alive
everytime
I've been walking the sideways
I've stared straight into the sun
And i don't know why you're dying
Long before your time has come
Yeah I've been wandering sideways
I've stared straight into the sun
And I don't know why you're dying
Long before your time has come (x3)
Your time has come
song performed by by Audioslave
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The Lament Of The Last Train Whistle
The lament of the last train whistle
has disappeared into the distance
mournfully looking for its lost child.
October night in the woods
around an old fire pit of prophetic skulls
blowing ghosts of smoke in my face
that bring me to tears, a neolithic calendar
of all the old and new moons that have passed.
So many, so much, that used to matter
doesn't anymore. Dream figures
that shed their skins like the longer wavelengths
of watersnakes in an infra-red mindscape
of serpent fire dying like the sun
that can tell the hour by the taste of its ashes.
I throw more well-dried thresholds on the fire
like branches that used to be green with the tears
of sweeter departures and arrivals over the years.
All the light's jumped from orbitals
of the tree rings that sag like bags
under the eyes knotted like islands
in the heartwood of their xylem and phloem.
Here where the river parts like long hair
on the skull of a stone, I sit like a demon
in a sacred place, clarified, alert, and alone
as any nocturnal animal in the woods.
The chalkdust of my bones trying
to connect the stars to their constellations
snagged in the trees like the rags of spiderwebs
on the blackboard of a starmap as wide as the sky
and deep as the subconscious of the Burgess Shale.
It's not a betrayal to let go of your faith
when you had none in the first place
and you don't need a parachute on the edge of space
to plunge from paradise, or a weather balloon
of a bad Christian poet to shepherd Dante
like a moon out of hell. Be yourself,
especially when nobody's watching
except that same drone in the sky
that occasionally flashes a flake of silver off
its stone cold third eye to flint your awareness
that it's still there in the cosmic background
like a witness to your dreams and schemes
for a luxuriously appointed life of enlightenment.
Be yourself. The direct copulative imperative
that has supplanted the light as the first word
out of the mouth of creation. Be yourself.
And then let there be light by the side of a good fire
to let you see who that is as acutely
as you can see in the dark who that is not.
The migration of the Canada geese might seem
a broken rosary of new moons calling out
the names of God to you, and one unknown,
or silhouetted against the moon they might
suggest the afterbirth attached to a cut umbilical cord
and your heart might feel reborn somewhere
in the autumn of your life, a child of the fire,
a flower in the full bloom of its solitude
dancing with its own mercurial apparition
on the waters of life in the mindstream
always out of season enough to lag behind
so it can tell the time by the widening gaps in its passage
as it's waiting for the night to catch up to its own shining
like a thief of fire unchained from the rock
that broke the glass window of its transfixed seeing
with a meteor in the hands of an enlightened delinquent.
Or you might read the falling leaves as occult lifelines
on a Tarot deck of overlapping lifespans
like the scales of a dragon playing solitaire
beside the small inferno of a signal fire to the stars,
to let them know you're coming faster
than the time it takes for a thought to make it
all the way to death and back to birth again
as if you were pinging your emotions
like stray wavelengths from the oceans of your awareness
off the horns of the moon the way
you used to skip rocks out over the sea as a boy
to see how long they would keep on going
like a waterclock of stone before they sank
like the flying fish of the hard, cold facts of life back into
the numinous depths of your collective unknowing
where the stars aren't fixed to anything that isn't
flowing along with them like the wind on the mindstream
or a small fire catching its breath in the silence and the solitude
of so much radiance, before it's on its way again for good.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Hung Up & Overdue
Im so hung up Im gonna go see her tonight
Im so hung up I cant get her out of my mind
Could it be just stars in my eyes
Could it be this wont happen twice
Were overdue for a dream come true
Long time, nothing new
Were overdue for a dream come true
She said shes going to move to california on day
Said shes going out on safari to stay
Shes tired of her job and the snow
We both need somewhere to go
Were overdue for a dream come true
Long time, nothing new
Were overdue for a dream come true
Im so hung up on her now
Im so strung out on her now
A gift from the sun to the moon
I hope something changes soon
Were overdue for a dream come true
Long time, nothing new
Were overdue for a dream come true
Were overdue for a dream come true
Long time, nothing new
Were overdue for a dream come true
song performed by by Tom Petty
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Journey
I’m on some kind of journey
but I don’t know where it’s going;
I’m growing wings and shedding them,
and I’m true to every thought in my head.
I’ve got a heart, worn down at heels,
a used voodoo doll quilled like a native,
a meteorically battered planet
that wobbles between a kiss and a fist
in the way it keeps running itself around.
I spend too much time alone.
There are no obstructions in any direction;
and barefoot, I’m walking on stars and poppies,
talking to myself like a candle,
weaving my way among the shadows
like a fish through the supple harps
of the silver river reeds. I see
that I’m taking a bath in my own grave
to wash the soiled skies of the painted world
off my eyes, to behold
the brief career of the leaf of life
and how the light gusts out from the windows
like curtains and bird-nets. Life is short
and the new temple never gets further built
than a hole and a single cornerstone, the rest
left to the business of the earth,
all that beauty and magnificence,
unravelled among the mud weavers.
I was inoculated against death
by a splinter of the moon;
by how little time there is for love,
for the root to get drunk
on the fruits of enlightenment and compassion,
by how little I will ever know
of the road to the doorway I stepped through
to stand in awe before the moonspill
on the raven blue waters,
and to look so deeply into the eyes of a woman
who has just conceded an island in her passage,
and the fragrance of unheard music
that I am a pillar of wonder
before the unsayable
as she lets dropp her shadows and feathers of light,
and the blood-god assumes
his flowering crown of fire
to enhance the splendours of his courtly intensities.
What I have lost in the river
I will find in the river
and what I have taken from the sky
I will give back to the sky,
and there shall come a day
when the eclipse will be the brighter mirror,
and the darkness that overtakes me now
will be a gate of stars to a water palace
where the dragonflies and waterlilies
are the sceptres and crowns of a human divinity
that will endure like a whisper of radiance,
a more haunting taste of light,
the rumour of a black rose
that outshines the angels
that coax the lanterns out of the night.
I will evaporate like the flaring of fireflies
on the windy shore of a trembling lake,
like the blue hat plume of smoke
from a gallant winter chimney
into the vastness of my own mind
like a waterbird without a trace into a sweeter, wilder solitude.
And these words will come and go
like the tides of the ocean I was,
like the providential leaves
of unfurling fortune-cookies,
like an avalanche of gold
washed down from the mountain upstream.
I write them in flowing diamond,
I write them in auroras of blood,
in dawns bluer than the iris of a peacock’s eye,
in fire and water and the mystic inks of the night
in the fleeting, indelible dream
of doors and hands and moons,
in warm breath on a cold window,
in a halo of comets
smeared into light by the sun,
in the sidereal wines that bled from bitter wounds,
I have said what it was mine to say
on a page of the wind
that whistled through me like life
greening the sands of the hourglass
with visions that ripened the bell of blood in my heart
to fall like wisdom from its tower
toward a fallible paradise
that won’t leave me as I am for long.
And I will jump again
into this cauldron of joys and sorrows
to string my spinal cord
over the abyss of the guitar-shaped universe,
walking upright
to plead with my own answers
to thaw like a mirror
estranged from the world it reflects
in the self-effacing flames
of the passionate gardens that dance on the wicks.
The awakening seed
echoes these flowers of fire
in the valley of a voice in the furnace
that lies down in the cool grass
by a stream of idle stars
and arrays its vagrant heart
like a breeze of blood in the dust
to the refugees in the shadows.
They move like eyelids
through all the phases of the moon
from an unspooled well of darkness
to the slash of a razor of light
to the threshing of the full harvest
in the siloes of the nightwind
enthroned like a breath of life
in the midst of its own dispersal.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sometimes Think
Sometimes think I'm always
a life too late
to catch up to my own
walking away weary of waiting for me.
Or I'm a star too far ahead of my own shining
and that's why it's always dark.
I know the agony
in the stones of an abandoned bridge
that shoulders the world for nothing,
upholds nothing but its own mass
and waits for things to pass.
And even when I fall into the river
to flow along with my own mindstream
without consulting the leaves like maps
I still can't get the moon off my back.
Look at all these orchards
littered along my banks
from the tent of a single blossom.
And there are nights
when I can smell snake on the wind
as if everything were about to happen again
and I still haven't milked the fangs of the moon
for an antidote to the pain
or put out the third eye
of the irrational surveillance camera
that oversees the sorrows of the insane
when it's full.
I like my perfections whole enough
to include what is not
and if I am immoderately empty
it's so I can make space for the world
like the blood-sea of the rose
that flows out of nothing
into tides that shed their waves
like the eyelids, brides and petals
of a human heart.
My breath is silver.
My breath is gold
I've mined from the mystic mountain
that got in my way
whenever I tried to cross
the valley threshold.
I had to evaporate to rise to the top;
I had to get myself together like a cloud
to transform my own delusions
into a glimpse of the other side
that didn't take a scapegoat for a guide.
Now space is my only familiar
and the being behind the face
of who I was a moment ago
is just another snake in the furnace
of this star that sheds my skin like fire.
Streams of insight
that are not predicated like mirages
on deserts of thought
trying to spin themselves
into mirrors and silks of glass
like a new religion
sweeping the world like sand
advance the gardens
of the water-givers underground
who teach the flowers how to bloom
and drown like stars
in the infinite opening of their eyes.
And I've mauled the nets of the constellations
like a man in the morning
walking through a high field
radiant with spiderwebs
and if there's anything
left hanging in the wardrobe
that used to house my masks and cloaks
they're veils I've torn from the light
to better see into my darkness.
I'm still looking
but nothing has appeared yet
and no sleight of mind
that's ever mastered me
has ever taught me how
to realize the inconceivable
except in the proportions of a human
whose mere existence is utterly unbelievable
whenever I turn the light around
and discover the dispersing stars
I have followed so long and far
into the unborn darkness where I begin
shining within.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Rose Petal Pool
ROSE PETAL POOL
August 1983
Sounds of laughing waters in my thought,
Over the hard flat stones so cool.
A vein of life in my stillness.
Found by the rose-petal pool.
A ripple, not nearly a hope;
Merely a whispering breeze.
A breath of air in my smoke filled room.
To brighten my chamber of dreams.
Rose petal pool, it’s a joy to live.
Enfold my thoughts, as I bathe in yours.
Rose petal pool, it’s a joy to give.
Give reflection to mine, as I give to yours.
Give vision to though!
Give thought to seeing!
Give substance to dreams!
Give essence to being!
I could never ask a lifetime, just the moments and the days.
Give me a while, to build you a smile or two.
A cup of your time, to pour out a rhyme for you.
To build you a dream would be fine, Salind!
Foundations of love, poured in time, Salind!
With pillars of memories shared.
And fears and emotions we’ve bared.
And these things may come, we may find,
But for now, just one day at a time.
August 1983
I had a few dates with a girl named Rosalind. She had a fresh way of looking at things, and we shared some deep conversations. We borrowed Kevin’s canoe and went canoeing at Clairville. My problem was, I was still looking, and I think that causes some kind of pheromonal thing with me. She said she was looking for a forever kind of relationship, but we both knew this was not going to be long term. It served as a good checkpoint along the way though, as we both had the opportunity to examine our motives, our past, and our goals
poem by Albert Ralph
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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Trying To Interpret The Silence Like Glyphs In A Jungle Ruin
Trying to interpret the silence like glyphs in a jungle ruin.
Afraid of what they might say if I cut the vines away
like a Medusa's head of spinal cords connected to my brain,
or this octopus of major blood vessels plugged into my heart.
My dna is the long molecule of a Zen cowboy,
with the Mongolian genes of a shaman practising
hunting magic that ensnares what he loves
in the nets of constellations that do no harm
to the wavelengths of the prey. You've got
to keep on dying every day if you want
to be born again in the dream tree of a shaman.
This is the way you avoid taking possession of your transcendence.
This is the way you break out of a cosmic egg
like a dragon without making an aviary of your solitude.
So many voices all at once in my head,
trying to say something in the living languages of the dead
about annihilation in a time urgent with the mystery of need.
When space isn't expanding the potential of its own medium
into the available dimensions of a future
that's already behind us by the time it gets here
like a delinquent s.o.s. from a star we were hoping
had got a fix on us like the maidenhead of a lifeboat,
it breeds. It proliferates like punctuation. It bonds
disparate elements into oxymoronic metaphors
that leave you as elated as a vertiginous Sufi at a crossroads
knowing that ultimate union doesn't have to be
about one or the other of infinite ways to make it through life,
you can shine like a star emerging from its own ancestral ashes
and take them all at once. Or as Dogen Zenji
said to himself one night when the moon was clear:
The place is here. The path leads everywhere.
I emerge from my own flame like a genie of fire
without smoke, and burn invisibly in my own art
like a crucible of the heart. Hermes Trismegistus,
the Thrice-Blessed, in a biochemical retort
bubbling over like the multiverse getting out of the bathtub
without leaving a ring around the womb of hyperspace.
I've washed so many lives off like the moon
it's a wonder I'm not a virgin again, but the return journey
of the second innocence is better than the first
because it's been sweetly seasoned by a universe
looping in reverse through all the stations
and excruciating transformations of my life
that don't have the same sting in their glands
when they first struck out at me like mystic acetylene
and scaled flashes of insight into the psyche of lightning.
I'm a big boy. The acquiescent khan of millions,
the Golden Horde who would rather make love than war any day
of the Great Tectonic Year, trying to read the fault-lines
in my own skull, volcanic fissures between continental plates
and the surrealistic empires crowding my stargates.
I can take the pain. I was born for it. Raised in it.
Even if I'm deciphering my own gravestone,
brushing away the stardust like a patina of mirages
with my eyelashes for a broom, my tongue for a dustpan,
ripping away the roots like the nervous systems
of the things that cling to it like the cornerstone of a ghost.
Been alone so long in the company of stars,
raising this hourglass of time to the beauty of their eyes,
even quicksand can look like the oasis of a distant galaxy to me.
And this skull of a headstone, crumbling like bread for the birds,
not a ruin, but just another phase of the moon I'm living through.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Never Alone With A Candle
Never alone with a candle
a firefly in a valley,
a star above the hill,
is your seeing less beautiful
than that stranger in the mirror
who takes you by surprise?
Can you hear your eyes
your eyes your eyes your eyes
falling like rain
on the plectra of the flowers?
Is that a coffin or a harpsichord?
Scarlatti playing the columbine
or the midnight requiem
of a dolorous pine longing
for a nightbird that never comes?
I can sense you count yourself
a dandelion among delphiniums,
a brown star without solar flare,
a moon with a complexion of coral,
and even from here I can hear
that happy bell you wear
like your heart on your sleeve
to let people know you’re coming,
and either fake it or leave.
Fashionable mirages of make-believe.
Black roses of mascara
with comets for eyebrows,
their noses stuck up in the air
like the wrong end of a telescope.
Born this crude ore of a man
what can I know of a woman’s feelings
moving around inside of me at night
like underground rivers of gold?
But, sweetness, if I were to guess,
there are stones much more lustrous,
more polished, more shapely
than even the linghams and yonis,
unenlightened cosmic eggs
with nothing inside to reveal,
no stars, no jewels, no chandeliers
of sad insights into dark mirrors
of what’s inconceivably real
and what’s merely the fossil
of an extinct species of fish
trying to swim through brimstone.
Does the sea envy its waves
because its ambient eyelashes
aren’t long enough to paint
a black velvet masterpiece
signed by a cosmetic line
of flash in the pan movie stars?
Isn’t it enough the moonlight
adorns your eyelids like a lake?
I haven’t touched a woman’s breasts yet
when I didn’t feel like a sailor
lost at sea without a lifeboat
in an ocean of heaving roses.
And I’ve slept with enough women
to know beauty isn’t only skin deep.
Sometimes it’s a shipwreck on the bottom.
Sometimes it’s a blood diamond
on the black market of a cheap eclipse
that bleeds out like haemorrhaging slaves.
Sometimes it raves like Medusa
at the snakepit of a hairdo in the mirror
that turns her reluctant heroes into stone.
You weep for this? You curse your body
your lips, your nose, your legs, your thighs,
the white-out of your smile, your eyes,
your hands for not being doves,
your hair because it doesn’t flow
like long blonde tresses of honey
from a hive of killer bees,
because you don’t think
you can please Adam well enough
with the apple you hold out to tempt him?
Ask Majnun about Laila,
it’s not the goblet, it’s the wine inside,
and from what I know of night and desire,
I’ve never met a man
who wouldn’t drink from his own skull
just to taste it like a mirage in an hourglass
or a message in a bottle on the moon.
Don’t judge the potency of the elixir
by the popularity of the flower
it’s taken from like a love potion
nor the strength of the poison
by the dowdiness of the snake.
And I don’t say this waxing insincerely
like the false dawn of a consolation
for something you’re austerely missing.
You’re not a nun among flowers
about to take vows
of silence and celibacy
because you don’t know how
to attract bees to your cult of one.
You’re not a black mass
with a rose petal on your tongue
instead of the thorn of the moon.
Why do you desecrate
the vases and urns of the wildflowers
that bloom like New England asters
in the starfields of your windowless room
like the prophetic heads of the dead
because they’re not sunflowers
or waterlilies and wild irises
in full bloom along the banks
of your cresting mindstream?
Why do you pass the hours
snuffing fireflies out in your tears
like a constellation of match heads
on the sill of a broken windowpane
in a misbegotten house
of a wayward zodiac for rogue stars?
You’re not a calendar of scars
marking time with razorblades
on the bone of your wrist
like some Neanderthal
who’s just discovered time
because there’s no view of you
scenic enough to cut out and save
that isn’t nicked by crescent moons.
Have you not seen the envy
in the eyes of those first magnitude
fixed stars showcased
on a starmap, jewels under glass,
butterflies pierced through the thorax
for the garishness of their wings?
Take a look for yourself.
Do you not see
how deeply they envy
the beauty and freedom of fireflies
who’ve gotten off the grid?
It’s not just the light that’s beautiful,
it’s what it shines upon as well.
That’s how the flowers talk to the stars
in the same universal language.
Not as lesser avatars of shining
but as one beauty to another
in an alphabet of loveletters
they leave unsigned, unaddressed,
for anyone who wants
to walk in the moonlight awhile
neither in nor out of style,
as beautiful in their own skin
as the auroral silks of the northern lights
or the moon a vaudeville stripper peeping
through the boas of the clouds
when that’s all she’s wearing
like a changeable wind, a radiant sky
revealing and veiling simultaneously
the bright vacancy of one side
and the dark abundance of the other
more intriguing face
she’s turned away from.
The one you can easily see
on the other side of your own eyes
when you turn the light around
and let the mirrors labour to perfect
the artless beauty of their reflections
by imitating you like a ballet
in the feathered death mask of a swan
learning to move with the beauty and grace
of someone flowing
like a river on the moon,
a white Taj Mahal reflecting
the pale towers of a torch
that burns like stars and lilies
in the black waters of its dark opposite.
Ask any Luna moth at the window.
it’s not the shape, colour, scent
of the votive candles or fragrant lamps
you’ve devoted to your solitude
that draws them in out of the night.
It’s the intensity of the light
that summons them to you like seance.
Ghosts, poets, lovers, artists all alike.
The way things are here, not
as they seem to appear and disappear
like fireflies in a mirror
but as they are and will ever be
the translucency of stars by night
the clarity of flowers by day,
the sun shining at midnight,
the moon keeping its shadows a secret
from the occult powers of noon,
all the beautiful shapeshifters,
all the moody chameleons,
each with a face of their own
as unique and revealing as the universe.
In every dropp of water
the depth of the sky
as in every tear an eye
that can see straight through you
to the beauty within
when you’re as easy on yourself
as a starfish on the moon
a dolphin with stage fright
on the catwalk of the stars
changing wardrobes like weather,
night seas of habitable planets
wholly at home in the mindscapes
of their luminous atmospheres,
their immaculate waterskins,
as they are in the rags of those mirages
you keep drowning your radiance in.
A constellation in the desert
that’s underwhelming itself
by forgetting that fire knows
how to swim in the deep end
of shadows on the moon
like the flame of a candle or a goldfish
even you for all your tears,
your weeping willow chandeliers,
your wishing wells, your watersheds,
your shaded windows, your broken mirrors,
the torn nets of those dreamcatchers
you gouged the eyes out of
like semi-precious jewels
that didn’t measure up to diamonds.
Even you, for all you relinquish
of your native beauty to comparisons
with the costume jewellery of other eyes
than your own, try as you might
to unfeather the plumage of the moon
you could never extinguish,
you could never eclipse or blow out,
no more than you can hold a mirror
up to the dead like a portrait of smoke
and convince them beyond
the shadow of an unreasonable doubt
it’s a simulacrum of your solitude,
though it looks nothing like you
sitting alone by a candle in the nude.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Dutch lullaby
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe,--
Sailed on a river of misty light
Into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going, and what do you wish?"
The old moon asked the three.
"We have come to fish for the herring-fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we,"
Said Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
The old moon laughed and sung a song,
As they rocked in the wooden shoe;
And the wind that sped them all night long
Ruffled the waves of dew;
The little stars were the herring-fish
That lived in the beautiful sea.
"Now cast your nets wherever you wish,
But never afeard are we!"
So cried the stars to the fishermen three,
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
All night long their nets they threw
For the fish in the twinkling foam,
Then down from the sky came the wooden shoe,
Bringing the fishermen home;
'T was all so pretty a sail, it seemed
As if it could not be;
And some folk thought 't was a dream they'd dreamed
Of sailing that beautiful sea;
But I shall name you the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,
And Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
Is a wee one's trundle-bed;
So shut your eyes while Mother sings
Of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
As you rock on the misty sea
Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three,--
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
poem by Eugene Field
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No Gravegoods In My Solitude
No gravegoods in my solitude, no trinkets
from any spiritual world inside or outside this one.
The totem belongs to the dream that's buried with it
as the flower's engendered by the root it's taken from.
Mind is matter. Matter is mind. And it isn't as if
one is blind to the other because one shore
isn't parted from the other by the flowing
of the mindstream in between. Try to separate
the reflection of the moon from water in a dream state.
The moon is a characteristic of water as the water
is a feature of the moon. If you want to mediate
until you turn the vertebrae of your spine into a bridge
to get to the other side of a life you're already standing on,
that's ok as long as it's burning. Otherwise it's just going
to obstruct your path when you're shooting the rapids
of the Milky Way like your own spring run off
trying to saddle a rush of stars with a rudderless liferaft
and oars for spurs. Better to be a waterbird
with wings of your own, but what a thrill
to ride the snake until you can fly like a dragon
among the stars like Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider,
in the handle of the Big Dipper like a warrior Bedouin
testing his eyes on the dune of a tribal hourglass to see
if he can tell what hour it is by the dance of a distant binary.
It's getting late. Nightwatch at the well. The town
unpeopled by sleep. A choir of train whistles
practising their inquisitive requiems at every crossing
like Canada geese migrating south when the autumn stars arise.
More lonely than mournful, I can taste the shadows
in the honey of life as readily as the light. I can smell
the fragrance of time like the first snowflakes
in a lover's hair, trying to turn her into a constellation
to sweeten the night air. And even in the ashes
of the starmaps the shining sets afire
and scatters like a library in the urn of the heart
on a wind that carries away the passions of this art
of exhuming more life out of a shallow grave than went into it,
I can still burn in the dark like the ore
of undisciplined diamonds. I can still squander my light
on the eyelids of the fallen flowers like a final kiss farewell.
Time wastes a death on me. Years ago the wind arose
and blew that candle out in the open window
of an abandoned house and ever since I've been
drifting like a ghost of smoke in a diaspora of stars.
I bequeath to the rose, the blood of my wounds.
To the thorns of the moon, my scars. To the night
I leave my eyes. To the wind, my breath. My voice
to the nightbird whose longing put my lyrics
to the picture-music that's haunted me all my life
like the song of someone who loved me once
before I was born and began to forget. But my heart
that I could judge the worth of like a bell bound to the earth,
or a feather of fire in hell, in the palm of my hand,
I give that to everyone like the windfall of a tree in a storm.
Black walnuts and wild apples. Solar systems
of peaches and pears in the leftover orchards
of organic gardens bearing the fruit of a habitable planet
at the autumn equinox of the New England asters
and modest suns of the Jerusalem artichokes
for the birds and the squirrels and the bears.
You can't keep what you won't give away
and it's no good to you in a grave when it comes time
to throw yourself overboard to stay afloat
and weather the squalls on your own sea of awareness
like an empty moonboat drifting through the fog
calling out to anyone who'll listen on the coast
of a new universe that discovers you like Atlantis
to a ghost of the old world looking for a passage
back to the more familiar labyrinth of home.
Liberation is freedom through creative form, not from it.
Liberation is life. And life is all entrance, no exit.
And you weren't asked at the door for any i.d.
And no one's going to stop you from lowering the fire escape
to get away from yourself. And if you were to ask
the mirrors of your own awareness, they'd stop staring at you
as if they'd never seen a new world savage before.
Everyone's going to leave an empty chair at the table
sooner or later. Like the skull cup of the moon
you've got to pour your prophetic lees out upon the earth
if you want to give your abundance another chance.
You can make lanterns out of fireflies in canning jars
or you can abandon them to the spiders
in the corners of your eyes like dreamcatchers and kites,
but if you want to shine of your own accord,
albino fish in the darkest depths with stars in their eyes,
you've got to see the sun flowering at midnight,
you've got to greet Venus in the Pleiades at dawn.
You've got to unsilver the mirror like a stripper
until you disappear like a bird in the house of life
through an open window like a crack in a cosmic egg
to feel the vastness of the sky that transcends
the limit of your wings. Despite the eye-witness
in the mirror, where time is always in arrears to eternity,
you've got to give it all up like your shining reflection
if you want to stay here for your own protection.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Could Bring You A Shattered Windowpane
I could bring you a shattered windowpane,
I could bring you a musical whip that's been trained
to read the stops of your flute
and how your fingers move like windproof spiders.
I could bring you the red brick of dried blood
that was left of my heart when I threw it through the window,
and it broke into a thousand chips of rose petals
that shed like flakes of dried paint off the eyelids
of a revolution that hasn't woken up yet
to finish what it started in a recurring dream
of mystic junkies flagging their fits
until Faustus sees Christ's blood
streaming across the firmament like mother's milk.
Should I ever come to know you well enough
to let you drink from my hidden starwell in my field of view,
I could raise your spirits up like a candelabra
to be whatever constellation you wanted
among all these myriad stars dying to be given a focus.
And if at first you didn't know where you were, I'd be your locus
until you got your sea legs on the moon,
and learned to walk on fire without getting burned.
You could be the punk mermaid who beguiled
the seasoned sailor of my oceanic awareness
you were still flinging your nets far and wide over
like spatial tides of ionized wavelengths
keeping time with the stars in a Babel of voices
that stratified the lyrics of the seven visible celestial spheres
that could be seen with the naked eye
like the black grammar of the multiverse
trying to keep the light in some kind of context.
And if I drowned to compliment your singing.
You could write a biography of bubbles
about my life and times in the depths with you
and I'd be happy to sign it in the cursive spring
of the year's first seance to prove
every word I've said to you is a cult of the true,
even before I began to write secret loveletters to you
in the nebulae and clouds of unknowing in the stars
that precipitated out of my breath on a glacial windowpane
of an ice age that couldn't thaw fast enough
for me to open my eyes and see you shining
in ten thousand lakes all at the same time
like the orbits of a prophetic skull at vernal equinox.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe,--
Sailed on a river of crystal light
Into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going, and what do you wish?"
The old moon asked the three.
"We have come to fish for the herring-fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we,"
Said Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
The old moon laughed and sang a song,
As they rocked in the wooden shoe;
And the wind that sped them all night long
Ruffled the waves of dew;
The little stars were the herring-fish
That lived in the beautiful sea.
"Now cast your nets wherever you wish,--
Never afraid are we!"
So cried the stars to the fishermen three,
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
All night long their nets they threw
To the stars in the twinkling foam,--
Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
Bringing the fishermen home:
'Twas all so pretty a sail, it seemed
As if it could not be;
And some folk thought 'twas a dream they'd dreamed
Of sailing that beautiful sea;
But I shall name you the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,
And Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
Is a wee one's trundle-bed;
So shut your eyes while Mother sings
Of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
As you rock in the misty sea
Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three:--
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
poem by Eugene Field
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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My Back Aching Like The Sky Goddess Nut Doing Yoga
My back aching like the sky goddess Nut doing yoga
over a sidereal painting that's burning like a bridge.
I've been many kinds of fool before, some just silly, some profound
but this is the work of a sacred clown hemorrhaging in the heavens
like the supernova of a pot of gold at the end of a ragged rainbow
still shining through the remnants of a colourful wardrobe.
I've been accelerating into space driven by a muse
of dark energy with an expansive heart. Time stops
as I exceed the speed of light across a threshold of starclusters
flowering in my wake like New England asters
with cadmium yellow suns with auras of orange coronas
glowing in their eyes. The apartment is silent
except for the trickling of the water pump in the aquarium
and a dance arrangement of goldfish that are swimming
in synchronicity with my thoughts and feelings
as if the heart of a human can speak through many voices
like the wind through the harps of the trees,
like the angels that descend among the daughters of men
when they're feathered in their beds at night like black swans,
or stars rooted in their own decay like waterlilies
that just don't know when to quit making beauty
out of the muddy deltas of their creative bloodlines.
She's firewalking in her sleep by now I hope, watching
a documentary of how the universe works in another city.
I'm flipping through the pages of the rooftops of Perth
outside my window like a weirdly bound heritage history book,
trying not to get any paint from my fingers on the view of the stars overhead.
Arcturus in Bootes still flying its kite in the west.
I need some rest. I've been bleeding like a cut rose
on the blades of the moon all day, and I feel threshed,
a cylinder of hay left out in the open starfields
for the black horse she told me to put in my last painting
to show something grazing under the full moon
like an eclipse that just discovered it had life on it
lyrically at peace with the siloes of light in the distance.
Even when love is cosmically oriented, God
how it loves to focus on the mystic details of everything
right down to the eyelashes of the ruby throated hummingbirds
hovering in a Pleiades of first magnitude larkspur.
Sometimes I feel like the fossil of a dreamcatcher
in the Burgess Shale, but right now, my third eye's wholly open
and I'm casting silver nets I've woven out of
my axons, blood vessels, nerve ganglia,
lunar fuses of serpent fire coiled around my spinal cord
like a helical riff of a bass run on a burning guitar
I'm holding like a metaphor for the body of a woman in my arms.
When I told you I was a sacred clown. I didn't invent it.
I meant it. I feel it. I can dance for ghosts at a seance.
I can dance for rain and war. I can paint my face blue
with moonlight and wode, and dance for peace, dance for fire,
dance for someone like you to step out of the darkness
as if someone had shaped a jewel out of the northern lights
and I was looking at it from the inside out through your eyes
on a a night of the new moon that isn't on any calendars
that are going to hang doom over my my voodoo heart
because there's never been a curse from the mouth of a Druid or Mayan
that could stand up to the courage that it takes
to receive a blessing without worrying what mistakes
inspiration might make when your muse is as flawless
as imagination obedient to the laws of her own myth of origin
and your art elucidates the crazy wisdom of your folly
like a discipline that isn't for the petty or sane at heart.
The stargates just don't open for those who are still in their right mind.
Just as the maple key to your entry, isn't about
what you leave out like a sin of omission that's culpably blind,
but what you leave innocently behind you
like mountain streams, and morning snails,
and the long uncombed comatose trails of sleepwalking comets
plunging from their dark haloes like Icarus
into a sun that only shines at midnight
like a candle on a windowsill calling out
like a poet for a new medium that's lightyears beyond words
to the first of the autumn stars purring like a cat in her dreams
when she hears the holy nightbird just before the dawn
knowing Regulus and Spica and all the stars of my art
won't pale in the lotus of the heart like real jewels in the eyes
of a sacred clown whenever he looks for her
shining in the ascendent of Leo long after
the Lyre, and the Swan, and the Eagle have all gone down
and all these poems I write on the wings of Luna moths,
enraptured by the sphinx of her radiance, are irrevocably skybound.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Old Sorrow, I've Forgotten Your Name
Old sorrow, I've forgotten your name,
you've been with me so long, pouring
the iron in my blood into the heavy bell of a heart
that's climbed back up this sad tree of my spine
so many times out of the afterlives of my windfall,
these sad planets collapsing in on themselves
under the decaying weight and water of their own tears
from the inside out, and gone to seed
like a small fleet of lifeboats in this floating world,
trying to make it up out of these watersheds
to run the vertical deltas of this autumn orchard
whose roots I keep falling upon like a radical place to begin
climbing back up toward the stars again,
until one night I'll raise my sail
like the moonrise of a blossom on the Milky Way
and be gone like a ghost ship in the fog of a nautical legend.
Old sorrow, I know you like the smoke of a thousand fires
I've danced around alone like the only child
of a midnight sun that abandoned me on the threshold
of a black hole I orbit like the rain in a broken mirror.
Who did you bury that we weep for, what
did you aspire to that you were too earthbound to reach,
what love of yours was so betrayed when it had
its eyes pecked out by the song birds
you never sing anymore when the bees
are in the locust trees, and the ants are opening
the peonies like loveletters from the Pleiades,
except there's a wound in your voice the lyrics
are bleeding out of like a thorn in the eye of a hurricane rose?
Old sorrow, are you the tears deep down in things,
the lachrymae rerum that fill the wishing wells
with oceans of disappointment like the run-off
of our hopes and dreams descending the world mountain
after we'd talked to God like bathyspheres
trying to get to the bottom of our tears
like glass bubbles in our crystal skulls,
our third eyes frozen like the lenses of a telescope
fixed on a star above a shipwreck in Arctic ice,
looking for a northwest passage out of ourselves
toward a mythic Cathay beyond our continental shelves?
And what did God have to say that you kept to yourself
when you came back down from your tete a tete,
and returned your commandments like a library book
that was way overdue in Alexandria?
Old sorrow, I can sense in you how many seasons
have scarred you like a calendar of crescent moons
as you hang like the pine cone of one dolorous note
of the silence you sustain like a blues guitar
ripening in the corner of the room where the spiders
are writing music you'll never play like the wind
in the hair of the willows down by the Tay River
when the black walnuts are floating by
like the scorched planets of sunless solar systems.
Old sorrow, I know you like a heavy boot cloyed in the starmud
of all these roads we've walked together to get
nowhere in particular but wherever we are now
in this graveyard of shadows
that talk to the stars who have none
about how to wash our names and faces off
like deathmasks that are tired of trying to light up the darkness
like a candle at a black mass at high noon
with an eclipse high overhead the flowers won't look at
for fear of burning their eyes. Compendious companion,
you bend my boughs toward the earth
with the low hanging fruit of a giving nature
seasoning your inconsolable wisdom with compassion.
Immoveable buddha, are you the ancient echo
of the birth pang of life, the groan of sentience
being torn up by the roots out of the indwelling forms
of things you used to take shelter in like lenses and mirrors
you could blow into bubbles of the mind
like the multiverse through a keyhole into the abyss of hyperspace?
Old sorrow, were you rounded like a shepherd moon
in the undertow of time, your teeth blunted
like the molars of the asteroids eating stoney wheat
growing wild in the starfields of the neolithic grasslands?
Sometimes I can feel you possessing my heart and body and mind
like the corpse of an ancient ancestor, my spirit
like a prophetic skull on the dark side of the moon
lamenting the loss of its atmosphere like one of its eyes.
Other nights, I look upon you like the ruins
of a palace of water that once greened this desert of stars
like a Persian gardener that ruled an empire of flowers.
Venerable exile, do you despair of ever
finding your way home again through your lion gate
or have you encamped like so many other nations
to weep like Zion beside the rivers of Babylon?
Is your diamond corona occluded by the protocols of coal
that sully your face like the memory of darker days ahead?
I shall call you, friend, given how long
we've known each other like shadows of the valley spirit
blinded by the sundials of the unaging mountains of the moon.
I shall open my heart like a fire to you
and we can share the silence together for hours at a time
on long winter nights when the wind is howling outside
and there's no need to speak of things
that neither of us understand about why
the fountains with the deepest watersheds
are always sadder than the last of the flowers
in a late autumn rain, or the willows along the Tay.
Slowest of rivers, you can sit saturnine and soporific,
red shifting into the longer wavelengths
of the oldest of your dreams, if you still dream yet,
and I'll work on a poem in the shipyards of the mindstream
that will displace its weight in tears, and hopefully,
though you probably know better, keep us both afloat
like a paper boat shooting the rapids of a waterclock
that's been running a little late like the two of us for light years.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Cocoons
Weary of lies and the soap operas of fruit on the verge
of their due dates, weary of men and women and breezy friends
with smiles like illegal fishing nets across a river, bored
with the multiple personalities of stale bread growing pools
of blue-green bacteria like a bad imitation of the moon, the people
who landed safely from a long way up
but drowned in their parachutes, the earth-bound
curb-worn excuses that never learned how
to park a star without getting burnt; and nowhere to go
with all of this unspooling of an old documentary
that isn't me anymore than the echo of a diamond is;
sick of approaching the vital signs of every oceanic dilemma
with the heart of a well, the mind of a winch
and the balls of a bucket, without malice
and I repeat it, without malice
because my mind is not a shoe full of interrogative scorpions
and my blood has never gone white long enough
to call itself an ice-age and there's always a clown
to warm things up with sad defeats and comic thawings
and most things are just old bottles in a barn anyway,
tired of witching the watersheds of mystic sublimities
that are always flying away like herons startled in the moonlight,
or stars with the eyes of fish, lovers
washing the doves of their hands in the blood of a rose,
jaded by the black translucencies of hell
that smell like cordite and lightning
and leave ambivalent messages on a storm-coloured mirror
lustrous as the eyes of a horse from a paid familiar
amused by the fool he courts, I write this
to no one in particular knowing it's a way out of the stone
I'm swimming through like ore, a dream key
to a cormorant fountain of elegant transformations
that haven't been born yet, faces that return from childhoods
yet to come, roads to go down that aren't roads
until I walk them, all here now in the lifespan
of a heartbeat, singing like sirens of oxygen
to seduce the wind away from paler tresses
and rattling windowpanes. Little matter
who the return journey is if it ever gets there, finds its way back,
there are fires along the way so intensely
beyond the last farms of colour
their serenity is their fury
and all this world of discernible form
in the light of that light,
a pilgrimage of shadows. And by that, do not think
there is a secret eclipse up the sleeves of flame
that rise from the candles of my adoration
because it was the world in the profundity of its playing
that lit them in the first place to celebrate
the way it hides from itself when anyone's looking
and the way it looks when anyone hides. So I hide my wave
in the water and hang my fleece in the sky
on the branch of a dangerous star tree
to test the nerve of the neophyte sailors
who come from ports like me that are
no more than a dropp in the bucket
of all there is to be. Now everyone is an effusion
of this nullity, the creative efflorescence of a cosmos
suggesting dandelions and dishevelled magnolias to the dark,
releasing black cherries and bells of deadly nightshade
to wander the forsaken labyrinths of the moon,
or shaking chandeliers of water out of the light,
worlds within worlds, fire harps in tears, and the brief urgencies
of the eyes that put them out flung out over the grass like silver seeds
in the way a dog shrugs off a lake, in the way
I've just emerged from the palace in the rock like a sullen metal
stapled to a wound in a tight-lipped corner
of a memorial shrine to unknown spiders,
and looking up at the stars rinsed out of the willow's hair
released myself from this web of torn horizons
by handing out cocoons to everyone for free.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Everything Is Not Enough
It doesnt help you if you scream and shout
That isnt what this thing is all about
And do you really want to fight to win
Youre missing out and thats another sin
Your dream of power is a sacrifice
Do you really want to pay that price
Just think about it and youll change the pace
Look in the mirror tell me who do you face
Who is that?
Its everything, everything is not enough
I want it all, thats tough, thats tough, thats tough
Another dream, another dream, another dream goes pop
This is the time, lets stop, lets stop, lets stop
Nobody loves you if you moan all day
So take it easy then youll get your way
You aint no dummy and Im sure you know
You know its better if you let it go
Youre in control if you let it go
Youre feeling better when you let it flow
You never really had to catch the moon
Youre better jumping to another tune
So lets jump
Its everything, everything is not enough
I want it all, thats tough, thats tough, thats tough
Another dream, another dream, another dream goes pop
This is the time, lets stop, lets stop, lets stop
Its everything, everything is not enough
I want it all, thats tough, thats tough, thats tough
Another dream, another dream, another dream goes pop
This is the time, lets stop, lets stop, lets stop (do, do, do it)
Ive got it all but its not enough
I keep thinking boy I feel so rough
This cant be me, Im such a happy guy
I laugh a lot but I want to cry
A cry for help is just letting go
It hurts a lot but I think I know
Its time for change I dont need the hype
Its time for change and the time is ripe
So lets go
Its everything, everything is not enough
I want it all, thats tough, thats tough, thats tough
Another dream, another dream, another dream goes pop
This is the time, lets stop, lets stop, lets stop
Its everything, everything is not enough
I want it all, thats tough, thats tough, thats tough
Another dream, another dream, another dream goes pop
This is the time, lets stop, lets stop, lets stop
Its everything, everything is not enough
I want it all, thats tough, thats tough, thats tough
Another dream, another dream, another dream goes pop
This is the time, lets stop, lets stop, lets stop...
song performed by by 10 Cc
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Flowers Adrift On The Fragrance Of Their Own Foregoing
Flowers adrift on the fragrance of their own foregoing.
In the night that takes me under its wing
to shelter me from myself, arrival and passage of spring.
Fish nibble at the wafer of the moon on the tongue of the lake.
The wind bitter as a green apple with an innocent cruel side.
Saturn at dawn, Venus at dusk, things abide in their own good time
without knowing for whose sake they shine until the mind
can't keep a secret anymore and let's the heart know
what the heart has always known. Reason is colour blind.
Everything that's hidden out in the open isn't invisibly camouflaged
to look like God at a quick glance. Flowers don't dance
with their deathmasks on. Things may have changed
since I last walked here, but they haven't aged. Autumn
not an older season than spring, spring not younger than yesterday.
Water's never heard of a virgin birth that ends in a real death.
Silence of time as it appears to the spirit in a deepening sea of awareness.
Nothing disfigured. Nothing restored. Nothing scarred.
Nothing wounded in the moonlight, pleading to be healed.
Earth pungent with the expectations of urgent ghosts.
And dust in the eyes of the stars, the cries of Canada geese
with more longing in their voices than celebration
like the wailing of a train disappearing like smoke in the distance
from a sad fire in danger of going out. Exits and entrances galore
there are as many ways out of here as there is space and time to stay.
Bush wolves on a far hill agonizing over something in the night
like blues harps of blood. And in the heartwood of every leafing tree
I can hear the first violins of a symphony tuning up to the light
as if something sublime were about to begin with the first dropp of rain
pinging like a tintinnabulum beside the kettledrum of thunder at the back.
To speak now would be to conceal what I really feel in words.
Lavish with life, I reveal my voice in a rush of waterbirds
startled off the lake like a mantra of sacred syllables
that nuance the ripples they leave in their wake
with a whole new way of phrasing the light with eyes
that see things musically as they fall away from their wings
like the meaning of things when meaning isn't necessary.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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