En.Citatepedia^®.ro

Watching The Sky Turn Blue

for Steve Forster

Watching the sky turn blue
in the last hours of the night.
Up like the stars dreaming myself awake.
Insomniac watchman making the rounds
of my own private zodiac
on the graveyard shift
looking for signs of an afterlife
that’s in spiritual alignment with the pyramids.
Tabla rasa.
A clean slate.
A new day.
The world a new creation every morning.
Empty streets empty stores empty sidewalks.
The vertebrae of bridges sheathing the Tay River
like a spinal cord that’s stopped
sending messages to the brain
like wavelets and rain
to put the serpent fire out
that’s rooted at the base of my spine.
And the windows that couldn’t get over
the loss of the moon
aren’t talking to those
anticipating the sun rise
like the trickle of water music
arising from the willows of Stewart Park
slowly leaking out of the silence
like a crescendo of birds that come out
one by one like the stars
until you’re washed away
in the undertow of it all
like the words of this poem
riding the mindstream like a paper boat
all the bumpy way down to my heart.
The leaf and starmap of a lost art.
The dew on the cool blue green grass
has taken the spit shine off my boots
and turned their anthracite
into a flat Mars black nineteen-fifties Ford.
I can see the glass tears of a streetlight
that’s been crying all night like a candle
in front of the broken mirror
that’s been seen with another lover
slowly turning like a mood ring
into the sapphire blue of a new birthstone
with the occasional star in it.
A runaway Milky Way of lapis lazuli
pops into my head like Indian jewellery
in the showcase marinas of Dragon Moon.
Dolphins and flying fish
are leaping off the prow
in the fathomless depths
of the subconscious mind
floating ghosts
from my shipwreck
like the nautical find of the century
up to the surface
to mark where I went down.
Maybe the Perth Courier will carry the news
in black slug lines of mourning
indelible as the darkness I feel
whenever I walk past the office door
and remember when my buddy
was Clark Kent editor by day
and Big Steve Forester and the Mudcats by night
singing Kansas City rhythm and blues
to night owls and feral cats
prowling and howling
into the wee hours of the morning.
And his death may have passed
like yesterday’s obituary
into local history
but there will always be
some events in the lives of poets and reporters
that will always be breaking news to the heart.
He’d come to my place
at seven in the morning
and we’d sit at the kitchen table
like seven year old boys
dealing with death and cancer
trying to find an accurate answer
among all these rumours of an afterlife
about what it was going to be like
to wake up one day
any day now
without eyelashes ears
fingers toes a nose and skin
and your eye for picture-music
the braille stops of a bird bone flute for the blind
buried beside you
as if you were an Archaic Indian
who died young
five thousand years ago
by the Straits of Belle Isle
knowing timing’s just as important as content.
We corroborated each other’s testimony
on the wild side of things
and whenever I’m down
by the Perth Soap Factory
lavishing its thick floral scent on the night air
I look up at his old apartment window
that the new tenants look through now
and though he and I would both agree
that it blows the public cool
of a private clown
to be so sentimentally foolish
even when no one else is around
I say God bless you Steve
wherever you are now.
And I think I can almost hear you
rocking out with the celestial spheres
like a blues harp among the angels
and I like the new underground sound
that’s taking heaven by storm
though it brings me to tears
that water the root fires
of this whiff of wildflowers
working on the nightshift
to think of you gone.
Gone gone gone
altogether gone beyond
like the riff of a base run
on a guitar-shaped universe
under the travelogue of play-dates
and places you gigged
stuck to the lid of your coffin
like the leaves and constellations
of an autumn that always comes too soon.
God bless you man.
I sing it out
like a one man band
with soul and heart
under your window
like a wolf pack
howling at the moon
for the loss of one of their own.
God bless that big awkward heart of yours
and the lonely boy you told me about
playing by himself
in the abandoned World War Two airfields of France.
I’ve tried to get closer to him over the years
as I always did when he was near
by impressing him with
the smoothness of my take-offs
and the fireworks of my emergency landings.
You were the first unimperial Englishman
that ever convinced me
he could wear cowboy boots convincingly.
And that you knew what it was like
to be down and out with George Orwell
in west Vancouver
sleeping among violent drunks
that kept waking up
just to spit into your wishing well.
I know you spent your whole life wondering
whether you were or not
and wandered off the horse trails
of the bronze riding academy often enough
just to prove you were
to me and to yourself
but you were real.
Outlaw blues man
with a lot of good habits
you were addicted to like your upbringing.
I’ve ridden with a lot of bad dudes
and seen a few hung along the way
like identity thieves caught red-handed
branding their names
on other people’s logos
but none of them knew how
to head off a stampede
in a lightning storm
like you could with a mike
and an edgy audience in front of you
as if you’d just pulled a gun in a bank
like Robin Hood.
I don’t know if it does any good
to lay food and tobacco and beer
bread and a baggie
of Lanark County homegrown
with colas the size of treetops
frosted with the galactic radiance of stars
with crystal healing powers
and wine-tipped Old Port cigarillos
at the eastern doors
of the burial huts of the dead
approaching the autumnal equinox
as the Ojibwa at this time of the year
believe it does.
Or if our souls go east or south
in the bodies of migrating Canada geese
when the moon takes them off
like lockets and rosaries around her neck
as the Ojibwa Pythagoras the Persians
and the Christians
who caught on to the thought
all said they did.
Or if the Great Spirit
has a wingspan that includes us all or not.
Hard to imagine nature
comes pre-prepared with a womb
but not a tomb
that’s big enough for all of us.
And maybe there’s no more distinction
to be made between the exit and the entrance
than there is to be made between
a sacred grove and a parking lot
and in the clear light of the void
we’re all bound to see for ourselves
you don’t notice the difference
between the living and the dead
the way I do
looking up at your window
as if the oldies and goldies
of the rhythm and blues
had turned into the base metal
of an alchemical universe in reverse.
And maybe everyone ends up here
sooner or later
beside a soap factory
below somebody’s window
trying to throw
a philosopher’s stone through it
like a grain of sand
through the blank stare of an hourglass
whose timing is as bad as eternity’s
always half a note off the tempo
like a white boy playing jazz
with one foot on shore
and the other in a lifeboat.
And maybe you’ve got to
syncopate the backbeat
to stay on your feet dancing
long after the music’s over
and the lights have been turned off
like stars and streetlamps in the dawn.
I don’t know Bud.
I’ve just lived on
doing what I’ve always done.
And I hear they put that painting
I did of you dressed up
like one of the Blues Brothers
bending the music
like a mike stand
up against your coffin
and I was happy to hear that.
And there have been two elegies
I’ve written for you since
that have tried to say farewell
in a way that could convince my heart
but they both failed like a funeral
and it looks like
given I’m standing here tonight
watching the sky turn blue in your window
that it’s going to take more than your death
to make me say good-bye
at the end of the gig
when they’re breaking down the music
like roadies disassembling a Rubik’s cube
or typesetters yesterday’s news.
So I’ll just keep saying thank-you
over and over again
for being a friend of mine
until you hear me
wailing like a wounded blues harp in pain
and not just another banshee
scratching at your window
like a cat that wants to come in
and make a demo
with fading stars in the studio.
I’ll watch the sky turn blue
over the Old Brown Shoe factory
that’s given over to body builders
and tomorrow’s ballerinas now
and intrigued like the bees
by the smell of soap
I’ll jack into the sun like a power-amp
and you’ll grab the mike
like the bud of daffodil
or a streetlamp around the neck
and we won’t play
Should Old Acquaintance be forgot
on the deck of the Titanic
as it’s going down
like the moon and the stars
but as I heard you once sing
Kansas City on stage
in Stewart Park.
The amplified echo of your voice
long after dark
all over town.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

The Blues Line

Hear blues arrived from Southern starlight,
like musical blackbirds in flight.
Originally with negro spiritual flow,
underlined with the hard blues glow.

Moving across mason dixie line,
discovering Chicago rhythm and rhyme.
Where going electric was the thing,
man did you hear the sounds ring.

The howling wolf amongst others,
Muddy Waters, BB-King were brothers.
Creating chess musical legends anew,
whose fiery blues sound rang true.

Across the Atlantic ocean way,
the Chicago blues found a new day.
A new British scene was born,
another blues voice found form.

Blues stars like the great John Mayall,
created a new sound to set sail.
The Yardbirds and The Cream,
set fire to the blues guitar dream.

Blues music lets us feel,
allowed us to often heal.
Gives rise to higher emotion,
lets us share some sweet devotion.

2012 has blues musicians anew,
sons and daughters take musical cue.
Play those twelve bar song blues,
man have you heard the news.

The blues sound remains forever,
blues cats will forsake never.
As long as sunlight shall shine,
rhythm song beat shall rhyme.

poem by Wayne Falconer
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

I Gently Took The Strawberry Heart

I gently took the strawberry heart
of the bird with the broken neck
and buried it in a shrine of leaves and grass.
And in a low voice, whispered a blessing.

Under the window of an illusion
like a song you can only hear once
and it's good for a lifetime of listening,
I buried you with your wings together in prayer.

And I prayed to know what to pray for.
I prayed to know what to ask that could ease
the burden of the earth on a nightbird's journey
flying solo deeper into the dark

than even the stars or these eyeless words can go.
And I know death returns even the worst of us
to our innocence again, though our bones
come crashing down like childhood kites around us.

And the flight feathers of the aerial acrobatics
of our love lyrics run out of ink
when there's no one in the dark
to sing for anymore, no stars

to chart where you've gone,
no sign from the heavens you're not alone,
no ghost of smoke from a distant fire
I can summon to a seance of lingering desire

that would console you in the flesh again
like a candle in your solitude reaching out
to the pain of a stranger in the shadows
to make your wound cry out in bliss

as you once did from a greener bough
than this dead branch I sing from now
when we thought blossoms were the answer
to everything we didn't understand at the time

that could befall us like fledglings in the spring
who didn't know what autumn would bring
like an ice-storm in its wake
to things that break against the sky

like the cold-hearted lie of a window
that wasn't open and didn't go on forever.
And though I ask the weather for news of you,
if the wind might have heard

a word or two in passing, all
the silence does is deepen your absence
and teach me not to cling to things
like birds and flowers on the wing.

But if grief is all I can know of you now
I'll console myself with sorrow.
I'll hold onto it like the string of a kite
soaring among the constellations.

I won't let go. I'll play the line out
like a flying fish I caught in Pisces
and hauling it into a lifeboat with a net
I'll take the hook of the moon out of your mouth

and throw you back into the depths like a muse
swimming among the stars like a siren
that keeps calling me to the rocks
like an astronaut to these mountains on the moon

I keep hurling through this earthly view
of a window from the inside out
that breaks just like the shell of a cosmic egg
unfolding a loveletter with a wingspan of light

that penetrates this dark forever
like the third eye of a needle in a haystack
of begging bowls I won't abandon like the nests
of nightbirds with flightplans

that feather our falling into the abyss
of the unbelievable with starmaps
and the beacons of homing metaphors
that make our disappearance inconceivable.

I'll live like the return address on an envelope
with a mouthful of silence for a voice
and wait for you to answer me again
like a songbird at the spring equinox

through a broken window in a house of pain.
And though it hurts worse when the candles go out
I'll refuse to turn my heart away
from your reflection in everything I see.

Everything I hear and do and say.
Everything that was as true as a night sky about you.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

The Blues

Hes gonna tell you bout his dear old mother
Burned up in a factory in springfield, mass.
Hes gonna tell you bout his baby brother
Hustlin down the city streets
And selling his ass for a dollar bag
Hes gonna tell you bout his uncle neddy
Locked up in a prison out in oregon
Hes gonna tell you bout his best friend eddie
Killed in a bar fight with a pair of marines
And a sailor
Oh
Hes got the blues, this boy
Hes got the blues
You can hear it in his music
Hes got the blues, this boy
Hes got the blues
You can hear it, you can hear it
When I was nine years old
My daddy ran away
With a woman he met on a train, oh
His little boy
Ran to the room
Where his piano
Lay in wait for him
He played and he played
He played and he played
Hes got the blues, this boy
Hes got the blues
You can hear it, you can hear it
Hes got the blues, this boy
Hes got the blues
A year ago, I met a girl
I thought wed hit a massive groove
But she dumped me
And all wed hit were the blues
Hes got the blues, this boy
Hes got the blues
You can hear it in his music
Hes got the blues, this boy
Hes really got the blues

song performed by by Randy Newman
Submitted by Lucian Velea
Vote! | Copy!

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
Vote! | Copy!

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
Vote! | Copy!

Willow-Minded Friend Of Mine

Willow-minded friend of mine
you're the star of Isis in the palm of my hand
that keeps me from drowning in a sea of glass.
How often have I been washed ashore
on the coasts of your flesh
like a naked sailor in an icestorm
of breaking chandeliers
and been taken to see the king
by a princess doing laundry?

A firefly in the distance
might be a great star up close
and your every breath
seed the whirlwind
with golden drops of rain
after the tempest has exorcised its pain
and you grow more beautiful picture by picture
like someone who wants to be redeemed
in her own eyes
for things that only she could be.

But that's not why I love you.
No siren no muse no priestess no witch
no shepherdess of exotic snakes
squirming with the future
like mystic themes around your body
no sacred whore ready to party in the temple
with Minervan night owls and Cepheid movie-stars
that don't want anybody to turn the lights on
to see what's going on in the darkness
they are to everybody,
you are to me more
than I have eyes to see
to the beginning and end of things
but I can feel the night within
flowing like dark energy through space
and tendrils of time growing like paisley lifelines
into something sweeter than the wine
the white mirror drinks from its own reflection.

Before the arising of signs
I can feel your presence moving in me
like unborn constellations playing chess with time
to see who shall be the blossom
who the root
who the leaf
and who shall prime the lightning of the vine.

Long before your veils are parted by no one
like rivers of insight
I can hear your stars
whispering things into my ear
that make whole worlds appear
rocking life in their arms like water.

Time is a mental space
with different flavours.
You taste like the wounded grace
of an eloquent truce with flowers
or as Dogen Zenji said in l238
the lucky day is when you discover it's all one day
meaning one chameleon
turning many different colours
to match the hours it spends
in front of the mirror
that keeps it guessing
who's the seer and who's the seen.
The grass turns red.
The flower turns green.

How long have I waited for you
like a tide on the moon to come in
like the spoke of a tree for a rim of stars
like a metaphor in the chrysalis of a dragonfly for wings
you could see through like a stained-glass window
divining the silence like a witching wand
in a waterless church?

And it's all just been a moment ago
that isn't at the discretion of birth and death
I learned to breathe with you on the moon
like some atmospheric fish
transformed by a new medium
into whatever you wished me to be
when I was the lifeboat
in the eye of the endless sea
that washed me out like a cinder
with the tears of a passing mindstream
as if I got in the way of my own dream
and you?

You were the mystic specificity
as you will always be
in the lunar pearl of it all
that sometimes doubles for my skull.

And isn't it funny how when the night screams
it's always an aurora
that everyone mistakes for dawn?
A snail of a comet smears the mirror and moves on
and it's as good a path as any to follow I suspect
if I had a destination in mind
that wasn't looping in retrograde like a noose.

I may be as footloose and fancy-free as a ghost
but there's no end of this longing
that keeps making me up as I go along
trying to be true and strong
to what I love the most about being dead.

I think of you
and I burn in the terrible clarity
of a light that's never fallen on anyone
as if illumination were endlessly eyeless.
I think of you
like water looking up at the moon as it rises
and I realize the wingless openness
of the dark gates before me
and pass through like a midnight sun
whose seeing evaporates in the morning
like visions and words and waterbirds
that have been transcendentally uplifted out of the graves
of their own reflections.

We are what we need to be to each other
without knowing what that is
like a phantom kind of picture-music
that's always changing its lyrics
to keep up with the mood of the times
whether it's the high definition tunnel vision
of the smokey beekeepers
trying to bring law to the unruly flowers
or the dark energy of an expansive space
driving the stars like exiles
into the absolute sublimity of a starless place
deep in the heart of God
that even creation can't fill
or we're just kicking pebbles down the road together
through clouds of white sweet clover
like afternoon companions of each other's solitude.

Time is the poetry of the eternal
when love sits by itself under its willow tree
and watches the stream pass by
like the flowing eye it drinks from.
I drink pellucidly on the moon
from old grails of sacred blood
like an ark that survived the flood
only to find itself abandoned like a farm
on a mountaintop with two of every kind
except for one

who made his way down alone with the alone
to sing his lover up out of the dead
as if he were missing one of his eyes
and the other had turned to stone.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Just Before Dawn Venus In Leo Between The Moon And The Beehive Nebula

Just before dawn Venus in Leo between the moon and the Beehive Nebula.
The chimney of the old shoe factory reflected
like a toppled obsidian obelisk in the Tay River.
Couldn't sleep. Now I'm heading home with the bats and the ghosts.
I've firewalked enough tonight, and the coals are beginning to dim
in the ashen light of my waning spirits.
The Perth Soap Factory still hasn't managed to imperialize
the fragrance of the last of the wildflowers crowding
the crumbling parking lots and leftover wedges of field,
but it's trying. I envy a squirrel its quick Zen energy.
And three crows think they know something about me.

Happens a lot in a small town, as I know you know,
because someone you know told me. You must think
I'm crazy talking to the air as if it were you,
but even out here, you've been inside of me all night,
and now it's time to make some space for you beside me.
I like the feline water sylphs that follow me home
like feral cats in the early morning when there's dew
on the brass heritage plaques of the lawyer's offices
with ultramarine peacock's eyes waxing in the windows.

I've been learning to play Jeremy's violin on my spinal cord all night
to see if I can get you up and dancing like a kite with no strings
in a gust of stars. But so far all I've managed in my solitude
with you as my intriguing familiar is a happy kind of hangover
from a seance just you and I attended. But I'll get better.
You'll see. I'll master this new medium of picture-music
half way between witchcraft and mystery. And beyond
if you want to walk with me that far. Or fly, if that suits you better.
Pick a star. Or the softer option of a nebula, knowing you
as I'm beginning to. Alcyone in the Pleiades, perhaps.
Or maybe an unknown destination that exceeds
the wavelengths of the speed bumps of the asphalt starmaps.

I'll go there with you. And I'm as loyal as a skull.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

There Was Nothing Ever To Forgive You For

There was nothing ever to forgive you for
I'd say to you now if you were still alive.
Pain doesn't maintain an agent,
though as many who have lived
have been named as perpetrators;
it just occurs
like happiness just happens
like a stroke of luck, a touch of grace
in an astronomical lottery of famished chances.
Voices arise in my head to address you
in the immensities of time and sorrow
like spokesmen for my heart
and another part of me
listens from the audience to this play
that's been going on for light years without you.
I suspect I'm still trying to perfect the way I loved you
out of force of habit, knowing how
redundant and absurd that is
long after the play closed
and the plaster cherubs
on the Ionian cornices of the theatre
were buried in the rubble
along with the comic and tragic masks
that shed their petals when the lights went off
and everyone was left face to face with themselves.
You have drifted in and out of my poems for years
like a curtain at an open window
in an abandoned house,
like blue smoke from an autumn fire,
the fragrance of the bath you draw from the stars
and sweeten with the salts of lunar wildflowers
whenever you want to renew your virginity
like the kings' mistress
stepping out of the sea
like some Renaissance Venus
covering her sex up with a serpentine lock of hair.
You're the sparrow on the finger of Catullus' lover
except now you can only make it as far
as my windowsill
though I leave everything open to you
to come and go as you please and must.
No illusory skies. No broken necks.
No more finger-stroking the soft walnut of a bird's head
like a lost locket full of grief,
like a small lamp that can't grant anymore wishes
however you caress it.
Ah, the genie's out mingling with the Milky Way
like all unencompassed spirits of the night,
like dead souls in the bodies of Canada geese
heading southwest
though their echoes are veering northeast
as if their homeless ghosts
had a place and mind of their own,
an airy nothingness
without a local habitation or a name.
In my view of the world as picture-music
in an expanding universe with its foot to the floor
on a pedal of dark energy
the vision's always too big
for any frame or stage or star map
you bring to it to try and express
where things are improbably at now.
We were young together for awhile
and we sought to embrace the world
and everything in it
even if it meant kissing the dead on the forehead
to wake them up gently from their long dream
of flying in formation with Canada geese,
though it never did.
I tried it on you more than once.
I kissed every bead on a rosary of prophetic skulls.
And still to this day no one answers, no one hears.
I tried to scry the future
in the crystal balls of my tears
but all I ever saw was the same old moon,
the same old stars that crossed us off
their birthday guest list
like a calendar of total eclipses
that had already taken place.
And I knew the future was far behind us.
And your early death could only make you more beautiful
as the years wore out their threadbare flying carpets
and those rare bright nocturnal spirits of life
you were meant to meet and fall in love with
like the heart loves its bloodstream
like a waterclock loves the passage of time
when it's full to overbrimming
with water on the moon
grow rarer and further apart
like stars on the skin of our cosmic enlargements.
Just like this open window
that never lets eternity become a barrier to the dead.
I've never closed the curtains on the play.
I've never drawn a veil over
the fountains and the waterfalls
the wetlands and rapids of my mindstream
and said to the lady of the lake
in her garment of mist
this is live water
and that water's dead
as if there were a wave of difference
between the one that carries forth
and the one that carries away.
The cloud and the snow on the mountaintop
both speak the same language,
share the same mother-tongue
as does the fog in the valley
the ice, the rain, the dew,
as if what's false about the living
were true of the dead as well,
everything sublime, everything trivial.
Hydra-headed water shapeshifting
through our hands
like the desert sands of an hourglass
that dump the pyramid
and finally get out of the box.
Lunar landscapes
with transmogrifying mindstreams
that apply themselves like water
to mending gardens on the moon
while death waits like a stranger at the gate
to commend you on the green thumb
that's apparent in your choice of wildflowers.
I can still feel you bend time
like the body of a guitar
when you're around me
trying to tune the spider webs
in the corner of the room I write in
to your cosmic whole note of silence.
And just as you were a muse of mine in life
and I drew your intoxicating waters
deeply from the well
and we walked under the stars awhile
without caring where we were going
so even in death
I can feel you come to the dead branch sometimes
like inspiration to a night bird's heart
when it doesn't really matter
if anyone answers or not
because you flower like longing
in the roots of my solitude
and the moon blossoms
and my poems unfold like leaves.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

What Did You See Just Before You Committed Suicide?

in memory of Heidi Clow

What did you see just before you committed suicide?
Did the snake mesmerize the bird that used to sing inside
your rib cage, turn it to stone, dis the lyrics of its song
with a cosmic hiss that underwhelmed all other sound?
Did you die from the inside out or the outside in?
Was there a light that summoned you to the end of the tunnel
like candles on the hillsides of Blue Skies, or did you
step out on stage in the glare of a bare lightbulb
in an interrogation room where you finally answered
what you were keeping secret from yourself? I won't ask you
to forgive the candour of this if it's cruel. I've been
the kind of demonic fool the earth opens up
and swallows from time to time, so I know
death has its jewels as well as life and when the dark energy
expands your eyes like space, you can see them shine
like wolf's eyes in the black mirror of a midnight lake.

And I've always found the brightest diamonds of clarity
that could cut through everything like the clear light of the void
in the darkest, deepest diamond mines of my igneous soul.
And I remember the cotton candy clouds of the pink angels
before I jumped from paradise, but that was so many shrouds ago
I've learned to keep my fire at a distance from inflammable hair-dos
that have been backcombed and hairsprayed too much.
I don't graft a crutch to the tree of knowledge
and expect it to bloom. And even when the moon blossoms
on the dead branch, what fruit ever comes of it?

I don't think you ever liked me much, but if push
had ever come to shove I would have thrown my weight
like the mass of a black hole on your side of the argument.
My heart was too much of a stump to efoliate
in the fires of spring and I was autumns away
from the gates of the garden you brought to the door
with flaming angels and untempered swords
that weren't hard enough to fall upon yet,
but you were in love with my room mate for awhile
and I gave up my studio to the two of you
so you could both work the guile and wile and style
of your respective arts like alchemical spells upon each other
while I retired to the living room like a benign sunset
with a smile on its face over the darkening hills
to re-read Spengler's Decline of the West
intrigued like a ghost at a seminar-seance
by the morphology of knowledge forms based on metaphors.

And I remember you coming over once,
bombed on Fireball Whiskey, grabbing the neck
of the half-finished bottle like an unexploded artillery shell
and falling backwards over a table into a large rubber plant
as you collapsed like a laughing inferno that bounced back
in adolescent tears as we picked you up like a circus tent
or an emergency parachute that didn't open in time,
covered in potting soil, as you apologized over-crucially
about the slashes and striations that scored a painting of mine
I finally repaired years later with scars of pthalo blue after you died.

And I thought of you as a high wire act on your spinal cord that night
as I mixed the luminosity and values of the hues
on a palette that seemed like a small, sacrificial altar to you
of my grief and affection in the crazy wisdom of a human insight
into the nature of the tragic follies of love and life and how
we endear loss to ourselves like wounds, like graves, like flowers
we inflict upon the heart in such a way they'll never close
because the sorrow is what binds you to us
like a rose to the thorns in our bloodstream.

And then all your friends came over in a squall of concern
as Spengler and I went and stood by the large bay windows
and looked out into a vast night we knew we'd never understand
as you poured your beauty and passion, darkness and doubts
out on the couch in a flashflood of tears and alcohol, realization and laughter.

Only ever saw you in passing after that and sometimes
you'd say hello back and sometimes you wouldn't
as you seemed embedded in some kind of tempestuous trance
oblivious to the world as you danced around your own fire
deep inside, though I never thought it was any of my business
to guess what it was you were praying for or whether
you were firewalking a warpath into the military as I later
heard you did and thought how strange that such a dancer
should want to learn to march and even Spengler didn't have an answer.

Or I'd watch you from the Perth Restaurant, strutting your stuff
up Gore Street like a model on a runway, range-finding
the effects of your cosmetics and high heels and auburn hair
on an encampment of your boyfriends absent without leave.
But I never saw you, rare for the young women of this town,
being led around by a donkey like an eagle on a leash
and by that I knew the intensity of your vulnerable independence
and the savage innocence of a passionate heart in the wilderness.
Then, I forget who told me, but in a single sentence, you were dead.
An ice storm had shattered the rose like a crashing chandelier
and blunted all its thorns like those stilettoes you used to wear
The dance, the strut, the march was over. Late frost
on an early metaphor for the springtime coming into its prime.

But I need to know, when you fell into the black hole
did it turn into the fountainmouth of a white one on the other side
of a whole new universe that hadn't grown as old and blind as this one?
Teach me the signs so I can rearrange the stars in time
like new astrolabes and starmaps to keep the Milky Way
from turning into the Great Barrier Reef that rips the hull
out of the lifeboat of the moon as it passes over
the brain coral and starmud of other shipwrecked minds
that put to sea looking for salvation in the oceans of the rose
only to return like salvage from the storm washed up
on these isolated shores of haunted islands in the mindstream.

Unborn, unperishing, I believe we're all here indelibly
because you can't pour the universe out of the universe
or where's it going to go, and since the whole is in every part,
that includes you and I and everyone in one way or another
eternally. Is it so, Heidi? Do we move like waterclocks
from world to world, our eyes evaporate into the light
because whatever form we take, fireflies or lightning,
we are, perennially, the shining of our own unique insight
by which the light is known by the light we cast upon it?

That we're the light by which the stars are known
and those immensities in which we hold them deep inside,
as now we do you who have added yourself to the whole
so expansively we must grow like space to keep up with you
and the way we humanize the unknown, as the stars do
like lanterns entering a dark room, is to embrace it as intimately
as you have like the available dimension of a future
we've all been moving into like supernovas and galaxies
from the beginningless beginning of all things, tomorrow
like yesterday, here, now, as you are, and have always been
as if the history of seeing were the biography of the light
that blossoms in each of us like wildflowers in the starfields,
or in every wild rose, as you were, the incarnation of a passionate insight,
even in its passage in the autumn when the rosaries
of the Canada geese call as they're crossing the moon
high overhead, transmigrating the souls of the dead
to the thresholds of new constellations hidden under our eyelids
like Venus in the Pleiades near Aldebaran just before dawn?
No death or birth in the moment, like time in a dream,
how can here and now where we all abide with the stars
and the planets and their shepherd moons ever be gone?

It's night now, Heidi, back in Perth here on earth and it's raining.
I'm watching the ripples in the puddles playing water like music
all up and down Foster Street from my upstairs apartment window.
And how the streetlights are dancing in their garish gypsy scarves
barefoot to the rhythm. As I imagine you're doing right now
among similar wavelengths just out of reach of my eyes
Though I can see you so clearly when I see you with my heart
as I do the stars and the willows and the waterbirds
down by the Tay River when I stand on one bank of life
and look up at the other like the far shore of the Milky Way
wheeling like the girandole of the spiral arm of a starfish.

And though I thought of putting poppies and wheat upon your grave,
remembering you were a sailor back in my hometown,
and hope is a lifeboat that keeps us all from drowning in our tears,
it reminds me of you somehow, and I make a wish upon it
like the star of Isis the ancient sailors used to tattoo
on the left palm of their hands to make it through the storm
and had, somehow, come through the squalls of time like you
there in the heights, a water-sylph of the radiance
shining on like that star just to the right of midnight,
breaking through these clouds of unknowing, like Heidi Clow
looking down upon us all on the nightwatch,
whispering like the carillon of the rain, three bells and all's well.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

I Remember The Bees

I remember the bees
moving like heavy slow notes
among the sunflower microphones
two octaves lower than the fireflies
on late August afternoons
perishing in the light.
And the irrelevant felicity of being me
with nothing to do but time.
Many roads and years away now
and this is another life
another town
and I'm staring out of a window
that's been forgotten by the eyes
that used to look through it
at the bleak winter rain
trying to distinguish the oases
from the mirages
in this glass-blowing desert of pain.
I remember white sweet clover along the dusty roadside
overwhelming the still hot air with its sweetness
and how it grew so high and thick
in the drainage ditches
it folded it wings over the road like a swan.
I remember watching the moon
lower its hook into the lake
hoping to catch something.
And now I'm trying to get it out of my mouth
like a question I can't answer.
I'm envious of the happiness I used to know
as if it had all happened to someone else
I could never be again
because even a river
can't step into itself twice
and the same is true of a bloodstream.
So do we all wash ourselves clean of ourselves in the running.
It's the mind's way of not staining its own clarity.
You don't need to see to shine.
There are quantum events of the mind.
There are insights and thoughts
auroral premonitions
and solar prophecies
that flare like the Medusa's hair on fire.
There are shadows of the unforeseeable
that cast their eclipses and sunspots
like exponentially tiny black holes
that steal the seeing from the light
and make space and time gape at their own measure
in the darkness of the heart of a human.
And in the next era of a moment
terrify them with the wonder of breaking into stars.
And most strange and astonishing of all
elaborated out of a chaos of photons
emerging out of the random
like wind on water
like Penelope weaving and undoing the moon on the lake
membranous worlds in hyperspace
blowing bubbles at each other
as if the light in their eyes
were life itself
shaping the multiverse playfully
into mystic glains swallowed by cosmic serpents
and fireflies caught in the drapes
by the open window
like jewels in the net of Indra,
like primordial atoms going off spontaneously
for the sheer thrill of it.
Mark one world and they're all marked.
And there's no end of the accounting.
That's why the most gracious of numbers is zero
and in any world I find myself possible in
I am the spacious friend of its infinite variety.
Even in Perth on a Sunday
among the flagging ambitions of leafless backyard trees
that have given up
dreaming of the doors and arrows
the coffins and lifeboats
they could have become in the hands of a mastercraftsman
and content themselves by staying out of the way of the powerlines.
Worlds within worlds within worlds being born
under my skin
at the tip of my nose
the end of my fingertips my tongue
pouring from the precipice of my lips
like lemmings and words not afraid to take a chance
the wind might feather their falling.
If compassion is worth the weight
of one single tear
of what life suffers here
then all things must be falling toward paradise.
Even the willows with their yellow-tinged hair trapped in ice.
Even the mailman who was convicted of taking his own advice.
Even the young beauty queen whose mouth overflows with saliva
as she dreams her makeup has turned into a pillow
that's trying to smother her like a serial killer
trying to get her attention on the news.
Do you see?
When you get right down to the point
there is no point.
Ask Heisenberg.
There's only you and I
and what we are
embodied in this memory
is merely the shadow cast
by what we are becoming.
Ask any star.
Keep the light behind you
like a ufo file with a due date.
Make a photonic leap into space.
Jump orbitals.
Release your infinitesimal quantum of energy
into the mind-bending unforeseeable gateless expanses of space
and instead of depending
on the fossils of cyanobacteria in Martian meteors
to improve on being alone
create worlds of your own
where space isn't time flatlining
but a field of imagination
where the absurd lets its muse run free as an enzyme.
Why do you keep coming home empty-handed
like Ponce de Leon searching
for the disabled fountains of youth
when you must know by now
it's the questions that are the watersheds of the truth?
It's the questions that keep you alive and searching.
It's the looking and not knowing
that keeps the fires of life
moving and growing
one step ahead of their ashs.
It's not the questions.
It's the answers that are killing you.
You might seek like a phoenix
but all your lanterns are ghosts.
Your eyes might be faster than light
but you're still blind if you can't see
that the world is
merely the shadow of an insight
you cast behind you
like the stars
like the candles
like the fireflies in your skull.
And it's good to know them all.
It's good to trace the lifelines
on the palm of your hand
and follow them back to the source of the Nile.
It's good to know the imaginary animals
that talk like your fingers
held up to the lamp
like constellations on a starmap
like zodiacs and arks
like a dog that barks
in the voice of a human.
It's good to see your own face
in the shadowplay
of subatomic particles
and take small intimacies with the profound
as if you'd just opened your eyes
like God's umbrella
in the spirit's lost and found.
It's good to stand in your own light
under the nightskies
and add your lustre to the stars.
It's good to abide in clarity and law.
But enlightenment is a darkness that shines
beyond the reach of your eyes
and just as space is bent
by the mass of Mars
so time is as supple as water and silk
and yesterday
is just as much the future of tomorrow
as the perennial brevity of this moment now
flowing down the lifelines of the mindstream
like a wavelength of night and time
that can't be measured in lightyears.
I reflect on everything I'm missing
and my grief turns to wine,
my tears to honey.
I resonate with the forked harmonies of time
like the tremulous skin of serpentine cosines
it sheds as it moves up my spine
like a waterclock of snakefire
pouring into the watershed of my mind.
And all the threads and rivulets
of my string theory thought
and the membranous theses
that are spun from them
are gathered up
and woven into whole cloth
over the black hole
of an acoustic guitar
the shape of a universe
as if it were a loom of music.
Time is music.
Space is music.
Life is music.
And death isn't where the music stops.
When you listen to it
not just with your ears
but with your eyes your heart your mind your blood your skin.
When you let it come empty-handed
and go empty-handed
without trying to grasp it like a thing
you realize that everything is singing
about what it is to be a human.
And you must be a human to hear it as such
because you can never understand
more than what you are
out to and beyond the youngest stars
that are the oldest of your insights
into the birth of the universe.
Time is music
and neither time nor music
leave anything behind.
Here once
here for good.
Though time has a past and future
a coming and going
a lament and a longing fulfilled
reflected like opposites on the watermirrors of the mind
it's still the same waterbird
cosmic note
first word
from the void in the mouth of now
waking itself up from a dark dream
with the sound of our voices
arriving in joy
and crying with relief when we leave.
I can hear the locust tree in spring
even with snow on the ground
and this hopeless duty
of a bleak window before me
singing in my ear
like the slow whisper,
the murmurous humming
of an intimate voice full of bees.
Time is music.
Life is music.
Death is music.
All the syllables colours notes thoughts feelings images and symbols
all the doubts and half-lives of the certainties
all the ardency of our holiest guesses
and starless inspirations
all the brutal black lightning insights
and firefly epiphanies
that have ever expressed the hearts and minds of humans
all the homeless clarities
and godless vagrancies
of what we're doing in the world
feeling lost in the doorways of our own thresholds
where every step we take is arrival and departure.
They're all the picture-music of us
and we're as indelible
as the moon dropping her petals and feathers
her hooks and thorns
her horns and claws and surgical fangs
like white swans and peonies on the river
like the eyelids of a mask she takes off
a drowned nurse
to remember whose face she's looking at.
And you can't remove a quaver of it.
Not the slightest detail.
Not one black swan.
Not the swerve of a single photon
with an identity crisis
striking the lightning rod of a nerve
that runs it to ground
and roots it in the body
until the mind opens
like the eye of a flower
a New England aster
that can see from the inside out
that life is a phoenix
in the ashs of a blue guitar
with the wingspan
of a locust tree in the spring
and the afterlife of a star.
Light flows through the roots
of my dendritic lifelines
like a zodiac of fireflies
streaming through space
for a place in the sun
and I can remember the bees
before the arising of signs.
I can hear them with my eyes.
I can see them with my tongue.
And I might not know
all the words to the song
or even what the lyrics
are all about
but that's never kept me
from singing my heart out.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

The Ring

Words and music by bob seger
By the light of the moon
To a 50s tune
He pledged his love to her
A girl so rare
A girl so fair
The girl for him for sure
He could see himself getting up every mornin
For the rest of his life
Just to look in those eyes so blue
It was all he ever wanted to do
She was all hed ever need to see him through
They were still in their teens
When he gave her the ring
They were married late one may
And they moved into a little house
On the far end of town
Out by the big highway
And all through the days
And all through the nights
The cars and trucks rolled on by
And he slept through it all just fine
Every night he slept just fine
Sometimes shed stare at the stars out the window
Sometimes shed walk 'neath the moon
Sometimes shed sit there just watching him sleeping
Hoping the dawn would come soon
Shed done well in school
Shed followed the rules
And shed always stood out from the rest
Shed go off to college
And work her way through
Then move to some city out west
She had it all planned
Shed have her career
Shed have all of the things that shed always lacked
Shed wake up one morning all packed
And leave here and never look back
Most of her friends thought it soon would be over
Not many thought it would last
Most seemed to think they were all wrong for each other
And soon it would pass - soon it would pass
Now twenty years have gone
And her kids have moved on
And shes still on the far end of town
Her youngest ­ shes livin somewhere in l.a.
And her oldest he works on a nearby farm
Her husband comes home
And they talk over supper
Hes usually the first to turn in
Another day comes to an end
Another day just ends
And sometimes in the wee hours when the traffic dies down
Shell hear the sound of some bird on the wing
And shell look out the window and shell look at his picture
But not at the ring not at the ring
She never looks at the ring

song performed by by Bob Seger
Submitted by Lucian Velea
Vote! | Copy!

O Little Sister

O little sister you're an alley-cat alto-sax
howling on the fire escape
under a blue moon
that's driven you into heat
just outside my window
for that arsonist boyfriend of yours
who used to puke in my potted geraniums
every time the two of you got drunk enough
to crash across my coffee-table laughing
even with each other for a crutch
you haven't got a leg to stand on.
I was charmed by your romantic desolation.
I was intrigued by how much original sincerity
you both saw fit to squander on a cliche.
C'est la vie, c'est l'amor, c'est le guerre.
Elvis Presley is well and living in Tweed.
And Arthur Rimbaud is running guns
with Jim Morrison in Ethiopia for Al-Shabab.
Most people work harder at hope
than they do at achieving their downfall
and you were a fire hydrant
and now you haven't got a hose.
No pun intended
I've known you too long
to see you this upended slurring your words
like the simultaneous translator
of an hourglass speaking
out of both sides of its mouth at once.
I don't know why he left you.
Maybe there was nothing left to put out.
You burned out.
A piece flew off your heat shield upon re-entry.
Maybe any man who couldn't hold his liquor
realizes sooner than later he couldn't hold you.
I don't know.
Go ask my geraniums.
They've got more to say about him than I do.
You make your death bed.
You got to die in it.
Next time build your house on stilts
in Stanthorpe Queensland
to keep the snakes away from your pillow.
What can I say?
He had a shoulder on his chip
that just couldn't hold his end of the world up?
And don't get me wrong.
I'm not laughing at your pain.
I don't laugh at pain.
Pain is pain.
Different planets.
Different moons.
Who hasn't gone swimming with dolphins
in the saturnine seas of Titan
or dropped a comet like a match
on a methane moon of Neptune?
Endomorphs and dopamines
can make you do a lot of funny things
that love is at a loss for words to justify.
Even if just for one wild night
of occult hunting magic
everyone longs to run with the wolves.
And howl, o little sister, you can hear them howling
in their blood agony at the waxing moon
as if something had died within them
that was so deep and crucial
it tore their hearts out
in an ecstasy of unrepentant pain.
And many many years later
when the solid abyss and hollowness of life
has grown even greater
you can still hear their voices
screaming like winter winds
above the timber-line
so high-pitched no echo
has ever been able to reach that high again
without shattering like a night bird
against the mirage of the open sky in the window.
Like you, little sister, now.
I'm not a sump-pump for anybody's tears
not even my own
but I've been known
to throw a little heavy water
on a nuclear meltdown every now and again.
Pain. Separation. Loss. Dream death
you keep reliving like an afterlife in your sleep
you're dying to wake up from
like a coma that's lost everything worth waking up to.
Not two. Not two. Not two.
That's the way it is here.
That's as far as words go.
That's where Statius takes over
from Vergil on the nightshift
and the stars nod off like children
who couldn't finish the story
and the quality of the poetry drops
as dark genius opts out
of the company of bright mediocrities
trying too hard to make it a better world
than it needs to be.
For things it didn't do.
And in a merciful world
that lived up to its teachings
and didn't shrink the heart
with fear of its own extremes
while everything else is expanding
shouldn't be asked to suffer like a placebo
in the glands of spurious cure.
And, yes, I know sometimes
it's hard to keep up with the mysteries
like the elements of life on a geometric scale.
How many jugulars does a woman have
for someone to cut
like the downed powerlines
of the Medusa's head
for having cast the first stone at herself?
You can wake the serpent fire
at the base of your spine
just above your coccyx
the hardest bone in your body
the little throne
the modest gravestone
you'll be resurrected on
when you're summoned from the dead,
but you can't train love
to bite the people you want it too
and run like an antidote to the rescue.
That's why you're getting high
on your own poison right now.
That's why your drunken tears
oscillate between a broken chandelier
that's bleeding out
and acid rain that burns like love
congealing into a new ice age.
However deep you dig the grave
to bury someone you once really loved
even a desert at night
when the stars weren't looking
wouldn't be enough to fill it in.
It's a wound without scar tissue
for the rest of your life.
The ghosts keep being pulled out of the box
like that kleenex you keep using
to dry your eyes at this seance
you've called on the spur of the moment
to be appalled by how lonely it is
to plead with the dead for severance.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

City Boy Blues

Fireflies in dogfights
Runnin hot in the heat
Street noise, another bribe
Things too hard to believe--so head out
My hearts in the country
My feets in the city with you
All my friends are eatin sushi
Talkin bad about you know who-who-who
My tongues talkin riddles
But I just cant seem to find a clue
So I take a swig of whiskey
And jump into the saddle with you-you-you
And I just cant seem to break the shackles of the city boy blues
I got the city boy blues
I got the city boy blues
I got the city boy blues
I got the city boy blues
And I just cant seem to break the shackles of the city boy blues
Cats in the alley
Rats in my snakeskin boots
All my neighbors think Im crazy
And my girl thinks Im losin my cool-cool-cool
And I just cant seem to break the shackles of the city boy blues
I got the city boy blues
I got the city boy blues
I got the city boy blues
I got the city boy blues
And I just cant seem to break the shackles of the city boy blues
Dont look to jesus to change your seasons
Its the american dream
Souls of gypsies, road of stone
Cant seem to find no peace--so head out
And I just cant seem to break the shackles of the city boy blues
And I just cant seem to break the shackles of the city boy blues
I got the blues, I got the blues, got the city boy blues
And I just cant seem to break the shackles of the city boy blues
And I just cant seem to break the shackles of the city boy blues
And I just cant seem to break the shackles of the city boy blues
I got the blues, I got the blues,
I got the blues, I got the blues
I got the blues, I got the blues,
I got the blues, I got the blues

song performed by by Motley Crue
Submitted by Lucian Velea
Vote! | Copy!

Turn The Radio Up

C'mon everybody open
Up your windows
Turn on the music
Turn on the music
When I feel that this old world
Is just to hard to bear
People comin' at me left and right
Day and night
Here's the thing I do
Turn the radio up
Hear the melody
Turn reality down
There's too much talk about blues
To much of the time
Turn the radio up
Hear the harmony
Turn the ngative down
Turn the radio up
Everything will be find
Worryin' don't do no good
So throw your cares away
Come on people life's too
Short to stay
Hey hey
Everybody now
Turn the radio up
Hear the melody
Play it all over town
There's to much talk about blues
Turn the bulletins down
Turn the radio up
Hear the harmony
Don't 'cha be so profound
Turn the radio up
It'll turn you around
Don't give in
No matter what they say
Out with the negative
You find the positive way
Hey, hey, hey
Turn the radio up
Up with harmony
Pandemonium down
There's to much talk about blues
All over this town
Hey, hey, hey
Turn the radio up
Hear the melody
Don't you be so profound
Turn the radio up
It'll turn you around
Turn the radio up
Turn the radio up
Turn the radio up

song performed by by Barry Manilow
Submitted by Lucian Velea
Vote! | Copy!

Three Flames, My Goldfish Dancing Like Stars

Three flames, my goldfish dancing like stars
in a telescopic lens with a narrow field of view.
Eerie slate blue in the blank windows
across the street, as if they once had eyes.
Blind prophets in the dawn. What do they see?
One poet on nightwatch sitting in an apartment
by himself with the lights out, listening
to what the silence has to say about everything,
nothing, the way the sky is beginning
to keep its stars to itself as if
the great liberties of shining
they took with the night are practising
the greater discretion of candle wicks
that someone lights up and someone blows out
and they end up bending back on themselves
like solar flares, or ingrown hairs,
or tiny black monks concealed under the cowls
of this holy hour like shadows of noon in the sun.

All the deep, soul-searching questions
make peace with all the elusive answers
they've been searching for like a battered bird
the eye of a storm. And the lies of life prove
vastly less intriguing than its truths.
Every firefly of insight, a dragon breathing
in the distance, exhaling chimney sparks
like a furnace in a dream talking in its sleep.
Plumes of smoke dissipating in the air
from the fumaroles of gentle exorcisms,
ghosts trying to get back to their graves
before the day starts to take itself too seriously.

The numinous aftertaste of all the afterlives
I wanted to live in my mouth, one's as good
as another, and I'm beginning to exalt
a little in living this one as a creative endeavour
that's been trying to achieve me all along,
not the other way around. At least
it amuses me to think so though I'm not expecting
a masterpiece. The same eye by which
I see the star is the eye by which the star sees me.
Interdependent origination. Cosmic intimacy.
All these broken mirrors that have given birth to my face.
All these Cepheid variables drumming on the hide
they tanned from my heart like the pulse
of an enraptured ghost dance around a blazing fire.
Listen to one solitary night bird and you can hear
the whole choir singing backup to the human condition.

Compassion is the sweetest sadness when the stars
bend down to kiss the burn like a sunspot
soothing its feet in the lunar shadows of the mindstream
on a long firewalk across the cool sands of a new moonrise
over the Sea of Tranquillity. Why walk
when you can row your way across or fly
like a waterbird through the skies of a million eyes at once?
Mark one jewel and they're all marked for life.
Whisper to the willows in starlight
and you can hear the booming of the abysmal echo
on the far side of the universe like life in a small town.

When life isn't copulating in the brothels
of a false dawn, it's the prelude of a longing
to impart your heart to someone like a secret
you couldn't reveal to anyone else like a humming bird
that's caught the ear of the holly hocks.
You enter the dream without knowing
what you're going to wake up to.
The empty silo keeps the hunger alive.
It's the full harvest that blows the candle out
beside your death bed. Fulfilments of failure.

No one's a sailor until they've drowned
running aground on the lunar reefs
of an enchanted island you washed up on
like a lost cause doomed to be found in the morning
like the guiding light of a dead starfish
still shining out of habit in a dawn that pales
by comparison when a sorceress sets her easel
up on the beach and begins to sketch
a starmap of you that's an exact likeness
of the vision you had of her just before you died.

There's always another side to a black hole.
Turn the emptiness of the hourglass over
like a drink you've finished crossing the bar
and it's a different world with different stars.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Within The Midnight Hour

In the midnight hours, my heart
breaks, the fog moves in, wraps
it arms around the morning's
longing wake. The gentle dew
falls from the nights moon, within
the loving fog, my heart
blooms.

The midnight stars fading one
by one, falling from the darkness,
until the night is done. Stars
floating within my sea of tears,
midnight awaiting for my
love to appear.

Gripping the cool night, feeling
alone, lost in the misty fog,
my heart looking for a home.
Crying to the Heaven's, my
universe in pain, moon beams
playing melodies upon my
broken heart strings.

In the midnight hour, your
sweet name I call, the galaxy
crying, losing light as it's stars
fall. Alone in the midnight hour,
my heart, the pain consumes,
within the loving fog, my heart
does bloom.

poem by Ruth warren
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Forever in My Dreams

Close to the morning hours before I awaken,
I find myself looking outside of the window of my dreams-
Sometimes amidst the bleak darkness, the full moon is rising above the treetops,
Stars are seemingly cascading behind mountains of far away places-
I hear footsteps faintly passing by, perhaps down the hallway of my fantasies-
Slowly my eyes would open and I find myself
Looking outside of the same window and
All I can see are shadows of trees that would be
Touching the sky within a figment of my imagination-
Close to the morning hours, close to the time that the world awakens,
I find myself lost in thought, disappearing into some other realm.
The full moon battles with the rising sun, stars shooting and seemingly cascading,
Saturn, Mars and Venus are dancing in rhythm to
The doleful and mystical song of the locusts screaming-
Inside the fortress of my thoughts,
I have made my home inside this kingdom in the sky-
In this place where the light of the moon is overpowered
By the rays of the early morning sun-
The colors of the sky are reborn- cyanotic blue and
Pearl-white clouds, seemingly tinted with gold,
Amidst the phantasmal waltz of my imagination,
I can hear voices familiar only to myself,
Shouting words that terrify and evoke moments of madness-
It has been said that reason can be affected by the light of the full moon
Before daybreak and I would ride bareback upon the tail of a shooting star
If I only could, as it would take me on a journey across the universe,
Perhaps to a safer place within this magical kingdom in the sky-
Close to the morning hours before I awaken,
I have lost myself inside a magnificent place of my own creation-
A place from which I would never leave if I could only wish upon a star-
This would be my utmost desire- as this lurid but dismal world
Into which I was born has not been kind to me-
As my memory becomes a vehicle traveling backward in time-
I can recall terrifying sights only I could see and threatening voices which
Only I could hear- within that moment that darkness transforms to dawn,
I find my spirit having been rudely snatched away from this place of my fondest reverie-
So I close my eyes and then I can see the stars once more, the moon and Saturn dancing-
And I begin to lose myself once again traveling across this pathway of my dreams-
Tears are falling from my eyes as they open because this vision can never become reality-
Tears would glisten with dewdrops upon the leaves upon the trees reflecting the
Early morning sunlight as I close my eyes once again and wish upon that star
As I would for always and forever in every passing thought…

poem by Claudia Krizay
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

I Wish Everyone In The World Were As Mad As You Are

I wish everyone in the world were as mad as you are.
I wish everyone in the world talked the same nonsense you do
and meant as much.
Stop crying.
I wish everyone in the world were as good as you are
and didn't lie to anyone else
other than themselves
about what the truth is.
You shape chaos to your mind
like light to space
to make a habitable planet you can live on
and if it isn't round sometimes
and O doesn't always cast the same shadow
that the others mimic with theirs
I wish everyone could put on your kind of airs
and be as good to life as the kind of atmosphere you are.
Come on now.
Here.
Dry your tears with this.
All those constellations you made up
out of the stars in your eyes
are your own private myths and mandalas
and you're free to change them as you will
and I wish everyone made as much
of the light they were given to go by
as you have.
I'm too much of a thorn
to paint the delicate iridescent watercolours
I see smeared on your tender bubbles
like original pictures of the universe
from a thousand spaced-out Hubbles
but I wish everyone in the world
had your kind of genius for vulnerability.
You hold up a single feather of light
like a candle among stars
like a green leaf in the middle of winter
and the world that is inured to three dimensions
for infinitely tedious reasons
would rather put its eyes out
and gape like blackholes
than see as you do
that there are countless seasons to the soul
that burn like a phoenix
and there's nowhere you can point to in the darkness
that isn't an equinox of love and understanding
when the sun shines at midnight
and spring harvests what the autumn sows.
Having a deep cosmic insight
like a stranger beyond lucidity
into the windows of the houses of your own zodiac
might make you look like a maniac to the neighbours
who keep watch in their asylum
against any kind of freedom
that might release them from their lighthouse
like a geni from a lamp
that doesn't conform to anyone's wishs but her own
but I wish everyone had the courage
you have not to be them.
Life isn't fair or unfair.
Life isn't kind or cruel.
It isn't half-Buddha and half-fool.
Neither impersonal
nor sentimental
life isn't a kind of obedience
to its own rules
as if it were bound like God to keep its word.
Or what?
Who else is there to answer to?
All the taboos want to be thresholds
and all the thresholds
want to run away from home.
Could be a curse.
Could be a blessing.
Could be just more idle words.
But you're not like that.
You're not a fountain mouth
that mistakes alphabets for birds
and holds them to the letter of the law
in a world full of music.
It's enlightenment to sing to a window.
It's ignorance to sing to a mirror.
But you don't sing to either
and your song is clear as running water
all the way down the mountain.
The picture-music
of your eyes and your ears
can already hear the ocean from here
that gathers to receive the flowing
like the heart receives blood
like the mind receives your thoughts.
Look out at the world.
You're the host.
Look inward.
You're the guest.
You can break bread with the dead
without being a ghost.
You can drink wine with the living
and it's the wine that gets high on you
flowing into a seabed of shadows on the moon
that hasn't touched a dropp for years.
Don't believe what the cynics say about innocence.
They have the sensibilities of blackflies
trying to draw blood from the Mona Lisa.
Don't grieve if you're a butterfly
that can't follow the flightplans of the maggots.
There's only a slight difference in wingspan
between a waterbird and a phoenix
but it would take lightyears
to measure a single feather of yours.
There's no cult of the rose
that insists it fall upon its own thorns first
or the moon draw first blood
on the blades of its own crescents.
You don't have to scar
your own deathmask with experience
just to prove you knew
how to eat the pain and bleed.
You don't have to wear your face in public
as if it were something you kept up your sleeve.
Dice might be the foundation-stones of the lost
but that doesn't mean
you have to go pearl-diving
for the moon in quicksand
or change your song like a jukebox
playing the slots
when you're a mermaid on the rocks.
I wish everyone had the same chance
to risk it all as you do
and win back their lives
like eleven come of seven
insteading of seeing everything
as if they were jinxed by inasuspicious birds
turning the wrong way on a prayer-wheel
that keeps coming up snake-eyes
with every roll of their skulls.
You can't heal the luck
of a wounded Nazi
by turning his swastika the other way.
You can't teach snakes to bite other people.
And you don't know enough
if there's anything left to say or understand
and even then there's a silence
that still longs to be heard
like a humming bird sipping honey from your ears
or deep in a telescopic wishing well of stars
burning in a dream of mirrors
they walk across
like fire on the water
or the distant blue notes
of the hidden nightbird
that echoes your tears
as if it were crying out in the darkness
from the safety of a secret place
for the same reasons you are.
As if it were trying to befriend its own sorrow
and weep for tomorrow as you do
for all the things of the past
it won't even know it's missing.
I wish everyone in the world
could live the future as you do
as something that is already happening now.
Even when you're crying
because you don't think you're brave enough
not to.
You're not a lame princess
that anyone needs to rescue.
You're a dragon bringing rain.
And if the snakepit hisses at you
like a social structure
and calls you insane sometimes
because you have wings
and they still hug the earth
all tied up in knots
taking their poisons out on each other
to keep from feeling anything
it's just their way of defining sanity
by the standards of the numbest.
It's not you that's crazy.
It's not you that's the dumbest.
I wish everyone in the world
were as warm-blooded and wise as you are.
When the serpent fire at the base of your spine
has passed through the doors
of all your chakras like vertebrae
and you're already a circumpolar constellation j
just a little off true north
shining like Draco
why worry if you're no good
at the game of snakes and ladders
they play like politics and religion back here on earth
to see who gets to be the pillar
and who the quicksand.
You understand way more than that.
I can tell by the fire in your eyes
that you're a phoenix among stars
and you've transcended the eagles and the houseflies
that can't even begin to imagine
the kind of heights you can reach to
or the depth of the view below you
when you're riding your own thermals
like beautiful helices in the mindstream
for the sheer joy of being only you.
Even now.
These tears
that run all the way down to your lips
as if water had fingertips
what are they
but the way you cry for things
that everyone else didn't?
I wish everyone in the world could be like you.
I wish you could teach us all
to stop living a spiritual lie
on the deathbed of an earthly truth
as if that were the only way
to foolproof ourselves
against reality
like a stranger looking through our windows at night
who doesn't recognize herself in us
because most of us aren't as brave and free as you are
to leave the door ajar
and let whatever wants to come in
come in.
Some track in mud.
Some.
Stars.
And the mud flowers in light.
And the stars bloom in fire.
And one looks up
and the other looks down
on each other's likeness
reflected in the other
as if they were engendered by the same being.
Sight is a kind of love
and I wish everyone in the world
were inspired by the mystic dimensions
and intimate clarity of your kind of seeing
that even through these tears
that I'm not having much luck in wiping away
can comprehend a world
that's more wonderful than it thinks it is.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Crystal Tears And Blues

There is such a silence in the Vienna Opera
That you can hear even the quietest of Mozart's notes,
As if the city's elite has found its shepherd.
You can't hear the quietest of voices, just humble silence
And the occasional sigh of awe.
Oh, people, he ended up in an unmarked grave,
And look at them kneeling in front of him as if he was a king,
I think to myself while crystal tears
Slide down a dark face on this winter night.
It must be Mozart crying in anguish.
Yet, I'm not so much worried by his bitterness up there,
As by our empty hat down here,
As if ghosts pass us by,
Ghosts of those who threw Mozart into an unmarked grave,
But me and my black friend aren't thinking
Of putting our trumpets into worn-out leather sheaths,
Because the sad ballad warms the heart of the cold winter.
Someone might say that the two of us
Look like we just walked out of a black and white movie,
Not as much due to the color of our skins,
But due to our ancient clothes and music.
In this cold winter's night,
The good old blues wakes the nostalgia
In many walkers,
But there's no coin to sing in the old hat,
Just some black spider starting to weave its silky home.
We're not as worried by the empty hat
And our friend diligently building its new home,
As by the empty bottle.
When winter kisses you, you're bound to cry crystal tears, brother,
And so it's time to stretch our frozen legs,
Find some old hole
Where the poor heal their wounds with liquor
And good old blues.

poem by Walter William Safar
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Looking For A Little Black Water After The Fury Of The White

Looking for a little black water after the fury of the white.
Dark energy after the light as peace
settles down gently upon me,
the sediment of the eras and rivers of my life.
And this cool night in early autumn,
a woman in a dark cloak and hood
I could almost caress if I could just breathe
a little more deeply than the abyss
I've been dogpaddling in because
there's nowhere else among all these stars
I can swim from the shallow end of myself
into the watersheds of my last drowning.

And there's an unprescribed silence,
a herb of the moon that's salving the wound
of the lunar thorn I just pulled out of my heart
delicately with my teeth. I'm trying
to tune my spinal cord to the guitar string
of the Tay River, so I can resonate in harmony
with the flow of things. Starfire walking
on the water of the mindstream without
the crutch of a miracle to help bear me up.

It's not so much a matter of power or self-discipline
as it is well within the spontaneous capacity
of everyone's emptiness to do so because,
labour exhaustively as we do just to find the path
let alone stay on it, all we've had to do
right from the start, is to let life
give us a narrative of our own we can be true to
as it makes you up going along with it
like a lonely survivor singing to himself in a lifeboat
at the last watch of the night. Arcturus
at the tip of our eyelashes, enmeshed
as it sinks in a western treeline of beached shipwrecks.

Reach out, but don't grasp. Accept and let go.
Scatter your blossoms, even when you're
down on your luck, like ripped up lottery tickets
whether they end up in the gutter
or on an impressionist table cloth somewhere
playing checkers with a patient still life.
I've seen whole Japanese plum trees in blossom
be brushed aside like perfect haikus
by a street sweeper at three in the morning
when no one else was watching but me and Basho.

My blood is saturated by an overdose of stars
and I can feel a light from deep within
rooting in my limbs like nightfall
as my awareness is enhanced
by how much unknown compassion
there is the silence, love in a dark time.
Blue moons on the wild grape vines,
approaching the autumn equinox in Virgo
as if they could read my mind like a purple passage
intoxicated on the wine that can be pressed out of its own decay.

The waterlilies are gone with the fireflies,
and the reupholstered cattails are beginning
to show signs of wear already. And soon
the Canada geese will be flying high overhead
bearing the souls of the dead to new latitudes of seeing
where the starmaps fall from their hands
like the feathers and leaves of being
flowing along with the mindstream
like the wiverns, wavelengths, and water sylphs
playing on the shores of the Milky Way
with as many burning bridges,
as there are flames on the phoenix
in the immolated sumac, as there are eyes
to see across these circuitous waters
to the other side of where we've always been going
alone together with everyone who's ever come aboard.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!