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What I Wanted To Show You

What I wanted to show you,
you will not see.
What I wanted to give you,
you will not receive.
The wind may mourn your passing
like an abandoned dog
and the leaves of the silver Russian olive
may be baffled into silver
by the way you left the gate open
to a bigger, colder, darker world than it was
before you told me you loved me
like an arsonist in a wheat field,
a comet above the willow tree
that wept its way into autumn.
Go. I lay no claims or obligations
at your feet anymore than I would
try to smudge space
with the black rose of the night
that tastes of old eclipses in my blood.
You say ebulliently
you want to know passionately
the depths of love,
but like the fools before you
who blundered into the fire,
you're only witching for volcanoes
with the tongue of a snake.
As well look for fishroads
under the dead seas of the moon
as follow the path you're on.
And your beauty is no excuse,
your body no sanctuary,
your blackberry heart
no pilgrim to anywhere
you can't stand in the light
trying on shadows like lingerie
in the mirror of the delusions
you've clarified like the skin of a bubble
that has smeared the reflection of the world so long
you think you're a planet with trees.
You're a spiritual junkie
jonesing for suffusions of the inconceivable
to animate the dust and galaxies
you have no life or love to breathe into
other than that little wind
you carry around in a bottle
in case you're ever stranded
without an emergency exit
from all the lies you tell in paradise.
You suffer the mythically inflated gigantism
of your own unbearable insignificance,
and abase yourself prophetically
before the mountain of your own lostness,
hoping for a map
of your wandering in stone
that would authorize your confusion
as holier than the rest.
Lonely for converts,
you tell me I'm sure of heaven.
Just as lonely I reply
if someone like me
were to show up in heaven,
it couldn't be much of place to aspire to
and how could the blessed
not feel cheated?
But you don't get it;
you really don't understand
that life isn't an audition of angels
and the black cartoon
you've made of yourself
to win a feather
isn't a prelude
to the main feature
when the lights go out
and the ushers
who conducted the dead to their seats
evaporate in the aisles
and you upstage the movie
with your nakedness
as if God couldn't see
the snake-flute of your body
dancing with serpents in the dark.
Lust alone would have been enough
to keep us together
but waking from your dream
of forbidden undertows,
washed ashore again
on your oracular island,
you kept trying to weld the right light
to the wrong shadow,
and eventually
even the most exotic futility grows boring.
You dipped the stone-flaked arrowhead
of your aboriginal heart
in the toxic fires of your own undoing
and pointing it at mine
tried to deceive yourself into a direction.
And now you want,
now you long,
now you want to come back
and immerse yourself in the life
you once stepped over
like a drunk asleep on the sidewalk.
You've suffered and grown,
you've wept and derived humility
from irreparable loss;
you've trembled before
the first, terrible intimations of the vastness
of the sky in your heart
like the virgin flight of a lost bird,
and you want to be given another chance,
to surrender yourself at the gate
you once walked through backwards
so enamored were you of your shadow.
And you promise the river your tears,
the moon your scars, me
the rarest of your orchids in the night.
But when I ask you
what the drunk was dreaming
you still look blankly around the room
as if everything in existence
were merely the baffled clue to your beauty
and the answer
something black and revealing that clings.
You still can't imagine
how easy it is
to say no to you.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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First Yellow Leaves On The Black Walnut Trees

First yellow leaves on the black walnut trees.
The original digits on the wristwatch of the sun.
Waterproof to any depth you want to drown in.
The trees are homesick.
You can tell by the way they’re giving up.
Comes the season of the dead in harvest time.
The dark abundance of the light
inspired by the muse of the earth
to write poetry
that touchs everyone
like water and wine
whether the apples are gathered or not.
The mystic grape finds enlightenment
in the mouth of a human
when it breaks like a koan
that tastes of something older than the truth.
It’s good to walk through an open field by yourself
as if home were just over the next hill
as the night comes on.
It’s good to feel fulfilled
without knowing much about why
as if some subtle stratagem of the sky
had worked out a truce with life for awhile
and everywhere the armies of the grass
were surrendering their shields like flowers.
It’s late August
and the cedars gather on the hillside
like old testament prophets
come down to the river
to baptize their roots in fire.
Chicory in the eyesocket
of a baby muskrat’s skull
half-buried in the earth like a small moon
that returned to its mother’s breast
several autumns ago.
If the medium is the message
then the message of life
is its timing
and the whole of its content is now.
The dead don’t walk among the living
squawking about things
they’re missing in paradise.
Ten commandments might be good advice
but there’s one bit of wisdom
that wasn’t written on a gravestone
that threatened to bury you
in the valley of the shadow of death
like an avalanche down the world mountain
for ever and ever and ever
should you ever wander off the beaten path
by as much as one black sheep away from the flock:
It’s not your door if you have to knock.
Your life’s the key to your own lock.
You can ask the flowers.
Beauty isn’t enslaved by its own powers.
Clarity sees through the brave
as easily as the cowards
as two sides of the same fear
and no river’s flowing the wrong way to the sea.
Autumn is a lonely voice
that sadly rejoices in what it must be
but what mad wonders
it hides under everyone’s breath
like marvels it keeps to itself.
The best place to hide
is out in the open
like being and seeing and thinking.
And if you smell the wind
at this time of year
you can tell that it’s been drinking
to drown its wanderlust in words
heading south with the birds
who carry the souls of the dead away
like fires that ascended to heaven
on a ladder of bones
and a spinal cord
threaded through the eye of a needle.
A snake sheds its skin and vertebrae at last
and turns its scales into wings
to become a dragon
that burns its bridges behind it
like waterbirds without directions
disappearing from their own reflections
before the first ice.
I reach the top of an old hill
and I can see what I look like
a long way off from here
as Venus breaks like a mirror
low on the horizon
through the black mascara
on the eyelashes of the backlit pines.
And there are spirits of the air
summoned by the darkness
with eyes that glow
like charcoal on the fires
of yesterday’s myth of origins
to look up at the stars
and make up some kind of a story
about what they’re doing there in the first place
like the afterlife of the mystery
of the night before time and space
as if the history of our prophetic skulls
could still foretell the future
of an advanced race of cannibals.
You are what you eat.
But the time is long past
when I could tear my heart out
and offer it up to the unappeasable gods
like the fruit of a human
who has wandered the earth
like a rootless tree
true to his own homelessness
like a fire that kept faith with a heretic
who made the ultimate sacrifice.
Who would be there to receive it?
If I wrapped it up like a foundling
and laid it on the stairs of the abyss
late at night when no one was watching
or sent it down the river
in a basket I wove from cattails
like a baby in an empty lifeboat
drifting down its bloodstream
on its way to something better
than a promised land it couldn’t enter
what life on what distant star
would bend down and pick it up
like a message in a bottle
from life stranded on an island galaxy
waiting to hear the likeness of its own echo
in the voice of the light that answered
help is on the way?
And that sword’s been long drawn
out of the barren stone of the moon
that gave it back to the waters
like the blade of an old perfection
it once fell upon
like the reflection of a man
with a noble calling
in the absence of volunteers.
I haven’t sacrificed my innocence
to that invincible agony in years.
And there’s more than one crown
I’ve thrown off a bridge
like a trinket of my powers
to self-destruct
as if I knew somehow
you can’t keep
what you won’t give away.
You can run deliberately straight as a highway
or weave spontaneously like a river
but if the first
just regard the extreme chaos
of conditioned conciousness
and if the latter
you’ll shed many lives
like skies and skin you’ve grown out of
following the long journey of yourself
all the way from your tail to your head
passing like a serpent through the grass
as if you had a secret
you keep to yourself
that were better left unsaid.
But there’s a third extreme
that just as intense as the others
which is the way I stay the course.
I put wings on a horse
that’s never known a saddle
or been bruised by the stars like spurs
and we’re up up and away
as if we’d never heard of the Medusa.
The Great Square of Pegasus
going down behind the pines
like a card up my sleeve.
I don’t want to turn anyone into stone
or blind them with my shield
as if the light knew judo
and how to use my enemy’s strengths
against it.
I don’t want to decapitate anyone
who was once the priestess
who fed sweetcakes and honey
to the oracular pythons of Delphi
and long before that
along with her two Gorgonic sisters
was the virgin wife crone phase of the moon
shedding her graces like skin.
I’ve jumped into enough snakepits
for one lifetime
to know how easy it is to get in
and how nearly impossible it is to get out.
One fang of the moon kills you.
The other heals you.
But you’re never the same after that
and there are scars that hurt worse than the wound.
But you can see things before the arising of signs
and there’s a crazy wisdom that embodies you
like a candle in the darkness
talking to itself.
And I can hear what the serpent said
quietly to Eve
just before it offered her the apple
from the forbidden tree:
Don’t lie to anyone you’re trying to believe.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Not Even The Light

Not even the light of the stars
shining like the keys to the ancient love-letters
bound among the secret jewels
of the queen of heaven
penetrates me as deeply as you do.

The planet wheels into the night
bearing its burden of humans
murdering each other
to enforce one state of ignorance
upon another
as the rabid bees
strafe the demented flowers
on the far side of the world
for enriching their radioactive pollen,
convinced in their madness
more honey than blood will flow from the wound.

I walk by myself
along the brittle banks of a frozen stream
among the detonations of the cattails
waiting like Napoleonic cannoneers
to stoke the charge of the next volley.

The snow in the sunset
is stained a spectral apricot
that disappears like breath on a cold window
and the sky is vast with my insignificance.
Two or three decades of life left,
if I'm lucky,
and though I have tried to use my time
to leave a gift for someone I will never meet,
long ago I realized
there is no way of assessing
what they will find
after the coffin closes like an eyelid
on this long, dark, radiant brevity
that once shone like the moon
in the ores of my blood.

Like the wandering of this rivulet
my heart has always been
a pilgrim without a shrine
and the direction of prayer has encompassed all
like a man getting up off his knees
and walking through an open door
to drink from the cup of his lover
in the shadows of the autumn willow
that sways like kite-tails
from the flights of fire
she ignites among the stars
that gather in the dark like strangers
before their own ghosts.

What the wind
has torn away from me like apple-bloom,
like poems, like smoke and leaf, like skies,
like tears and blood and faith
it has replaced
with these deeper revelations of you
that hang like a windfall of scarlet bells
from the branch of a dead tree in winter.

The wine of your life and light
has matured in the ferocious crucibles of the sun
and you have been poured out
like the passion of a sword
to cleave the stone of my heart
with these truant rivers of wounded silver
that flow through me like blood.

A young breeze
tries to hone the edge of its blade
on the rising moon
as a black ribbon of water
runs like a snake of oil
between the enclosing jaws
and cataracts of ice,
tiny wavelets scaling its skin
scintillant with the small commotions of stars overhead.
The bush wolves
have been nosing for muskrat
and you can almost taste the steam
rising from hot meat on the air.

I squeak like a pulley through the virgin snow,
following the banks of my own meandering,
owing nothing of myself to anyone,
wholly my own solitude,
as I pass through the gates
of the enclosing darkness
trying to enter the abyss and the mystery
of what I have lived so precariously
over the last sixty-three years,
what it means, if anything,
to be a human among these paper birches
on an island in the stream,
looking up at the intimate unattainability
of the stars,
knowing you are growing old,
that death is more populous with friends
than life, that love
has sloughed you so many times
like a viper's skin,
like the phases of the moon,
like a shrine of smoke and ashes,
that the phoenix hesitates
to robe itself in the full glory
of its former plumes of fire.

My mother will die soon.
I must say it,
voice it in my blood
to be able to bear it
and my children are clouds in the world
that no longer look for their reflections
in the eyes of the lake they arose from
as if they were merely breathed out.

And how in any god's name
can a man define the absence
he has grown to be,
except he standardize his own spinal cord
as the only measure of loss
he has to go by?
And even after
all the millennia of my walking,
standing up,
I'm still only six feet closer to the stars
though my mind can embody all of space
in a solitary thought.

And the deep, inner silence
in the empty throne-room of my heart
where even the most profound events of my life
are seen to be ultimately no more
than the antics of a jester
playing with shadows,
turns out after all to be
just another mode of weeping.

It takes a lifetime
for a dropp of water
to gather the courage to fall
from the tip of a blade of stargrass,
and the tongue has tears
the eyes know nothing of.
I admire the cool crimson
on the brushes of the ground willow
as they try to catch my likeness
on the ice-primed canvas of the snow,
but suggest
to portray me as I lived
they need to be loaded with blood not paint.

Like the moon
I have worn the same blossom
as a face
for years now
and I still don't know the fruit
that ripens beneath it;
whether my life has sweetened
in orchards of light,
or black dwarf of the forbidden apple
on a dead tree,
I taste like a full eclipse.

And what could it change even if I did know?
When the diaspora of my starseed
breaks bread
at a harvest of thorns;
who is the host
and who is the guest
and who asks for a menu?

And no matter how far from home
the journey takes him,
whether down a dead-end alley
or further than the stars
was there ever a man
who didn't walk to his own funeral
like a bell
looking for any beginning
that might not be lost in the end?
Or does the snake
that takes its tail in its mouth
as a gesture of eternity
eventually end up swallowing
its own head
like this stream before me
making its way to the sea?

I stepped across a star sill
through a vertical door into life
and in the leaving of it
I shall knock from the inside
on a door that's horizontal
to continue my descent toward earth
down a ladder of thresholds;
and what began so earnestly
among family and friends and lovers
will be concluded by a stranger
who will wear my name like a gravestone.

But here among the tangle
of these fallen trees, their roots
fleshed out
and washed like a corpse
by the water and the snow,
Venus peers through the fingers
of the branches above
where two crows have paired
like quotation marks
around the hearsay of the night
though I am left speechless
by the random beauty of the scene,
as if my voice had been released like a bird
into its own most intimate, inward vision
and that vision were everywhere you like the sky
it disappears into like I do
everytime my heart is opened
like one of the lockets of time
and I stare into your eyes
and the universe stares back
as you breathe out the night with all of its stars
and then I breathe you in
just as a golden feather of the moon
lands without a ripple
or unravelling wake
on the mirror of these lonely, black waters
I have followed deep into the darkness
like the urgent secret of my own lifestream,
and I know it's you. I know it's you.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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So Lifetime After Lifetime

So lifetime after lifetime, sorceress of shadows and dreams
you step out of the dark wood of yourself,
a shy doe, a mournful lighthouse and a warning off the coast
of your infinite solitude, you, the singing bird
on the green bough of your flute pouring yourself
like sorrow over the eye of the sea, your tears,
the ancient wells of an eternal longing unanswered by the secret stars
that have entrusted their radiance to you, fireflies
drowning their light in your black candles,
the blind music of your lonely flowing. Is your flute, a bone, then,
and this rose I bring you, this heart, this blood
that has turned into a goblet of luminous wine,
drunk on the wonder and the missing in your phantom music,
is this rose nothing but a wound, a coffin-flower,
the unmarked grave of a mystic embryo?

Do you fear the tenderness, the meeting? Does the moon
strike at her own reflection in the mirror of her midnight waters
to wander like an orphan along her lifeless shores?
Boy and man, you murder me on the steps of your serpent shrine,
your eyes, cold glass, eclipses of crystal, your spirit
that once drew in the light like breath,
now a slow glacier, an age of ice
pushing your heart before it like a boulder,
like a temple-stone that one night flew out of the abyss
and buried itself like a meteor, a charred jewel, the demon seed
of a religion without saviours, your implacable creed
scriptures of blood in a mouthless book
that only love can open. Once there were swallows in the tree of life,
asylums of celebrants greeting the morning in their madness,
in the garden, in Eden, hurled through that first dawn
like a young girl's heart trembling like a dropp of light on a blade of grass.
Now your voice is a gypsy-crow on a dead branch,
your music, confession without atonement, your flute
without leaves, without orchards, an eyeless spring,
buried in its manger-cloth for years, nothing
but a crib-death, a broken wand, a phoenix
that has lost its faith in fire under the weight of its own ashes.

Beloved, again and again you kill me
in this dance of slayer and slain, tear out
this page of love like a like a child's tongue, like a mute heresy
you are doomed to rewrite forever
in the indelible inks of your seeing.

Do you dip your pen like a water-bird drinking
from its own image, putting out your eyes
to deepen the darkness, the scars of your sin
the lightless letters of a hidden language
pricked out on your skin, black stars and braille tattoos?
The pages and the years may turn like wings and hinges,
and a thousand deaths, all your own,
tome the field with gravestones,
breathless flutes and hollow bones, ancient futures;
and you the only mistress of those solitary realms; still,
your legend will remain moonless and sunless,
the story of a night sky, the eyelid of a black rose,
that couldn't break into light. Until
love stands beside the heartwell of another
as if it were its own sacred fountain,
one blood, one wind-mingled music
playing the waves like plectra, and raises the rim
of the single goblet to its lips and tastes,
only silence answers the terrible vastness,
only death graces the obscenity of these loveless wastes.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You Are Crazy

You are crazy and beautiful
and wounded and wild
and the youngest daughter
of a coven of poetic sea-witches,
and dangerous as the moon in your changes,
the fragrance of night
hovering over the blue star-honey
of your seductive hive of candles,
the skulls you drink from naked,
anointing the fire
with libations of blood and wine,
dancing to the passionate lament
of ancient serpents
unfolding their wings
like eras in the lives of stars,
constellations that have come and gone like leaves,
seasons that are only distant whispers
in the hourglass of the hills,
voices that have outlived the ears to hear them.
And we are no more contained
than is the wind, the white cloud
in our approach to lucidity,
and we have been wave and shore
many times for each other already,
and I have heard how
the night flute of your solitude
suffers like an island,
and the wizards have worked
an extra contemplative shift
to make you the gift of a gate
when my love of you
alloys my will
to the light of the urgency.
There is a wholeness to your being such that
even when the night shatters like a mirror,
all of you is reflected in every piece,
and your eye at the keyhole
unfolds me like a starchart
trying to locate a deep sky object
burning ferociously in wavelengths of black.
I am enrobed in your mystery like a waterfall
and you swim, a silver fish,
through the roots of my mind like the moon,
and the shadow of every thought
is a likeness of you
that I’ve conjured out of space like an aurora,
a feather of smoke
to limn your features mystically
in apricot-violet fires that flower like paint
and I take you away with me sometimes
where I can savour you alone like a mountain
where the silence prowls like a cougar
and you keep the wilderness to yourself
and your presence is enough of a fountain
to turn my heart into a mouth
entranced into speaking in the tongues
of the hidden grammars of blood
that pi the spirit with golden ratios
and passionate incommensurables.
You are a star caught
in the curtains of my seeing
and we are only eyelids away
from finding a flower
worthy of the sight
as you seed the darkness with light,
and I carve your face,
your transformative beauty,
out of a block of eyeless uranium
that glows invisibly like an emotion
that only blooms in exile,
a genius among elements
that gives herself away
like an orchard in a storm,
a serpent in the labyrinth,
the blessing of a weapon.
How could I know you in any other words;
how could I win the trust of your riddles
and climb the stairs of your neglected shrines
to the reluctant priestess
chanting in the shadows
of her own eclipsed altars
for a sacrifice that would answer
the impiety of a lifetime?
If I don’t touch you there,
if you don’t feel my breath upon the nape of your neck
like the wind on a lake,
if your blood
doesn’t turn into a red light district
without emergency exits
at the thought of being caressed
on the other side of your skin,
on the other side of the tapestry,
how could the hidden clarity
ripen into the crazy wisdom
of the bird that was born of a jewel
and you exceed yourself like wings?
You are all flavours of the fire
that bewitches the tongue of the snake
to divine the air for grails of water
with a branch of conscious lightning
that wants to taste you through its fingertips
like a note in a tuning fork
that will open the dark gate of your radiance
like the key to a secret release.
And I know how often
love is a dream in a graveyard
where only the rootless flowers say
what they can about severance
and the abyss of the heart that falls from its crown,
and the urgent vacancy of a throne
that governs lying down
beat like grief against the cageless door of a cold stove;
I have wept on stone,
trying to make a lie come true,
a mirage turn solid,
a ray of light linger in my bloodstream
like a locket dropped from a bridge,
I have been the timely extinction
of mystic alarms
that woke me early to grief
and what the thief left of my afterlife,
and I have been the razorblade,
the knife that bled to death,
that cut itself out like the tongue of a wound
rather than inflict a law upon love
that would tin the waterlilies
with savage indignation.
I have made one infinity of two zeroes,
and handcuffed myself
to the top of a tree
to throw the pack of chainsaws
that chased me up it like a scared messiah
off the scent of blood
that rippled through the heartwood,
and climbed down
like a quiet last judgment
when nobody was around
and stood in the doorway of my grave
like a letter delivered to the wrong address,
and cursed myself
for all the things I couldn’t save.
I have tried to knit honey
from the smoke of the fire
that spread like pollen over the fields,
but it was always tainted
by the taste of a black saint
retreating into a starless night
like the shadow of a bird
that had nothing to sing to the dawn.
And I withdrew from life
like the cult of virulent addiction
and lived like a ghost in detox
parsing planets like flaws on a rosary
and idling among the late night shadows on the walls
like a stone fish among the reeds.
And my name
was a word in a foreign language
I didn’t understand
until you said it like a wind of light
that had wandered like a road through time
to breathe me again
and pick my body up like a lost glove
lying by the lifelines in the wineskin valleys of your hand.
Until you were you
among the veils and interpretations,
black swan enthroned in a sky of fire,
the ghost of a bell
in the rain mirror
that arrayed your face like a whisper of islands,
I had never looked into my own eyes
as if they belonged to someone else.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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The Serpent

The serpent sits enthroned
at the top of its own stairwell,
helically reposing in its own empyrean
like an August hawk
coiling up its own thermals;
its fangs, a stargate
to an unknown afterlife, emancipation,
and the jewel of its head,
the first stone thrown,
a small planet without
the eyelid of a sky,
a nugget of mystic uranium,
looped in a turban of orbits,
a sacred arrowhead
that flys from itself like a bow
drawn back long before the wind
knew its first feather.
Lethal healer,
the sword that kills is the sword that saves.

This morning,
the drubbing of the rain on a tin roof,
the hiss of traffic
flaring like matches down the sleek asphalt,
if I were to say
I want the emotional life of space,
I don't know if I'd mean it,
but I'm so weary
of being this slow crisis of a bird
mesmerized by the swaying eyes
of the black lightning
that has caught me in the net
it weaves of my own nerves,
I want to douse my heart
in the next providential tide of tears
like a torch I put out in the night
to see better in the dark.

I asked for wings
and my spine was adorned with fire.
I asked for water
and I'm a fish on the wind.
and now this desert I hoped to remain,
a craze of sand,
has grown teeth
and is overgrazing the starfields like pyramids.

I don't think
I will ever recover
from the wound I received
like the hidden twin of the moon,
trying to love the world, myself, women, people.
Every word was a road, a pulse, an eye,
a dropp of blood
I could ride to the end of and beyond
into the implacable subtlety
of my own empty, ageless temples
where even the silence isn't ghost enough
to conjure a medium
to jar the table as a sign,
and death is buried in its own vacuity
like an embryo in a mask without eyes.

I was bound by my own boundlessness,
my nerves, wicks in the abyss
that enhanced the darkness
by cleaving me like a tree
vision after vision,
another world
with every blink of the eye
that wiped the mirror clean of me like an ax
until I understood
that even the most enlightened watersheds of wisdom
are just a smear of perception
on the least dropp of that splendor
I went looking for like a cloud
saturated with the ancient seas of the moon
that was covered by my own looking.

I lay at the bottom
of my oceanic odyssey,
trying not to sink,
but I wanted to give something back
for what I felt I had received;
not an ethic or a metaphysic,
but a spontaneous action of the blood
that remembers it was once a rose.
I wanted to return spring like a water-key to the moon;
I wanted to harvest the shadows
of my own non-existence
and break bread
with the famine of ghosts
that came like royalty to beg food from their servant,
blind doors standing on the thresholds of awareness
asking me to address myself
to the terrible openness
of their unanswerable need.

I have eaten my own ashes
in the furnace of every star
I have ever looked upon.
I have drowned in the wells
of the faceless, fathomless mirrors,
and every woman I have ever drunk from
was a grail with an enigmatic black pearl in it
lustrous as the moon in eclipse.

O promises of bliss
that tuned the webs of the spiders
like a guitarist with perfect pitch
to the frequency of my spinal cord
that I might entangle a star
in the silk of my conceiving;
that I might seize a firefly
in the fangs of my thought
and taste the honey of the lantern
that lit my dark corner
in the era of the moment.

O sweetest of lies to ripen with longing
like the eyes of a child in the darkness
far from home.
I was trying to find a road
that fit my walking like shoes on a mountain;
I was trying to walk on water with mystic crutches;
I was looking for an arrow
dipped in the blood of a serpent with wings,
set aflame by a demonic star
and feathered by spiritual fire
to restring me like a bow
severed like the branch of a sacred grove
by the oracular blade of the moon.

I was too deeply sheathed in the truth
to appreciate the arcane sagacity of my lies.
I stood like a shadow in the burning doorway of my own fire
and looked deeply into the night
to answer my own knocking
like the echo of a stranger in the darkness,
walking away from someone who didn't know
how to greet himself.

I was a tree crucified on a man,
a vandal in the shrine of the moment,
bleeding like stained-glass,
a rosary of vertebrae and skulls
reconstructed in the future museum of now
I played myself into like a funeral plan.

Now everywhere the wind is a pilgrim,
I leave my heart like a shrine
I will never return to.
And the sadness, and the solitude
and the vastness of my insignificance
is the shadow of a bird on a cloud.
The only way to perfect my defeat
was to sit at the feet of my most cherished delusion
like a rootless flower watching over a coffin,
then rise like the wind
from the rubbish of the shedding,
the loneliest pillar and sole cornerstone of the sky.

Now my apish profundities
no longer crack fleas of light like stars
I picked out of God's burning beard
with the forceps of the moon.
Now I am infested with constellations.
I no longer turn the pages of the waterlilies
like the holy books of an inspired swamp.
I no longer seep down to the river
to drink from the moon
like a serpent at the water's edge
and watch the panicked angels jumping
from the reflection of an uncrossed bridge
that collapsed like a covenant with hell.
I no longer shred my heart
like a secret document
in an abandoned embassy of swans
looking for asylum further south,
tormented by the unattainability
of a woman's beauty,
looking for sanctuary
in the ashes of a black sail
that flared like a poppy with passion
at every gust of desire
that silvered the trembling grass
with sidereal aspirations.

Why bother to laminate your lovers, your legends?
Let them go like autumn leaves and smoke,
the last breath you took
before you were interred
like a scream in the larynx of a deaf-mute,
a foreign currency you couldn't spend at home.
Naked is the only way to dress for the rain,
but it doesn't matter which
from the wardrobe of all your many lies
you wear to the fire that waits for you
like a fledgling waits for its plumage.

And this is a long river
and this is a long day and a night
and maybe only the silence is listening
to what the stars are preaching
from the pulpits of the flowers,
and this that says me now
is just the promo for the intensive care ward
of a new religion
the founders are always the first to betray;
but when I truly let go
it was my falling
that taught me to patch my shoes with the sky.

And have you come this far,
passed through this many gates
for wisdom, compassion, freedom,
wandered aimlessly until you could not tell
the stars from the sand,
the journey from the arrival,
suffered worse than all the things you cannot say
until you forgot what you were looking for
in the first place, until
you despised what you craved the most?

I don't remember how long I slept
before my dreaming woke me up
and I realized
no fool could defame my solitude
and that life
was only the story of a scar
looking for the knife that inflicted it
like a shadow
in the forsaken valleys
of the mountains of the moon.

Looking for a pearl of light
I had to plunge into a darkness
deeper than anything
my eyes had ever given birth to before.
I had to swallow the key before I could open the door.

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Women I Have Loved

The women I have loved,
the taste of old fires in my mouth,
wild orchids
that summoned me
with their fragrance in the night
to mystery, ecstasy, danger and agony,
betrayal and loss,
intensities hotter than stars
that could thaw space like glass
in the coldest, deepest abyss of their beauty.

Seizures of flesh, potions of pain,
delirium of black poppies, eclipses, cloaks,
the sweet doom of paradise
in the effulgent bells of their hips
and their skin always
a starmap back to the earth, luminous braille
only the eyes in my fingertips could read.

Each was a way of breathing
in water, in fire, in stone, on the moon,
an atmosphere that clung to me
like the smell of an autumn night in their hair,
an era of seeing
that rooted like lightning
in the starmud of my poems.

Some were the windows of a palatial awareness
that astonished my heart like a peasant
and others, the rocks that crashed through it.
I tuned all my mirrors
to the high notes
of the most beautiful stars
in each of their constellations;
and the ones I loved best
were the windows
that could see both sides of God
and you could taste it in their eyes.

No doubt I was ruinous
in ways that it's taken years
of deep solitude and suffering
to clarify, the ore
wasn't always worth the metal within,
the volcanic rage of my baffled aspirations,
the urge to express, release, affirm, excel,
the way I parted women I loved like seas
in my quest for the promised land
and the way they closed up on me like pharoah,
like a flower that doesn't want to look at the night
and lowers its lonely eye,
like coffin lids
that were once the petals of a mystic rose.

Who knows who was buried
on those sexual slopes
that overlooked the motif of the river
wandering easily
through the vistas of the valley,
or how the story truly ended
that went on writing itself
as it does today
long after we were villages,
tiny necropoli, perfectly preserved,
and wholly usurped
like utensils by the afterlife
of the erupting mountain
that put an end
to the interminable funeral orations
that unrolled us like thunder in hell.

We slashed heaven
with the bloody razor of the moon
like the vicious legates of a papal threat
to spiritually salt the holy ground
we were rooted in
like lava, blood, and lightning.

I am still a confusion
of wounded dreams,
and when I look at the moon,
the bruises, the dead seas,
I am devastated again and again
by a ghostly sorrow
that returns to my heart
like a dove to a dark bell
that once knew the morning with another.

The truth is slurred by time,
and the confessions we made to the sky,
gusts of shame and contrition,
tiny burnt-out match-heads
that once flared into big fires,
slagging their depletion
like ore in the rain,
were abysmally true to the moment,
as we felt the ground beneath our feet
sinking like a continent.

We may have drowned like Atlantis
but how many decades since
have we lain here
like a thousand other toppled shipwrecks
offering the hilts of our masts
sheathed in coral
and the bunting of weeds
to the sea that slowly accepts our surrender?

All the beauty of that seeing,
the laughter in bed,
the aloof eternity in the form of the woman
at the end of the garden,
seen through the kitchen window forever
as if I had never made love to her,
pulling weeds from among the asters,
forever true, forever
preternaturally true,
the mystery that transfixes
and devours me yet.

I have not laid my dream down
like the head of a child
on the pillow of a stony heart.
I have not looked upon the stars
that shone over us those long walks into each other
as if we were two banks of the same river
and we were still a wonder
and a temptation to each other,
two wings of the same gate
hopelessly opening.

I am still summoned against my will
to those dread nights we went out in each other
like down-turned torches,
and the bouquets of the daylilies,
those truces of fire and water
we burned beside,
turned into congested refugee camps
that plunged into civil war with their own reflections.

All along this road
where I carry my life
like the shoes in my hand
there is broken glass,
shattered goblets of the moon
we once drank from together,
shards of the suicidal chandeliers
we once danced under
like the tails of the unnamed comets
that followed us like paparazzi
as if we were the prophecy.

Vampires once cloaked like assassins
in the darkness of the light,
they still come for blood,
pleading in the shadows like beggars for alms,
and I am often aghast at my own compassion,
feeling the quick tendrils
of their tongues flickering in my heart
that my blood still feeds these candles in eclipse.

Perhaps there is more spontaneity
in the darkness
than there is in the light,
but I have not let my mouth
turn into an open wound,
or wielded the cold flame of my tongue
like a dagger of fire that could only be put out
in the blood of another.

Leeches and lilies
are born in the same pond
and I have not denounced one
at the expense of the other,
but have stood before both in silent awe,
trying to overhear any whisper
of what these things might mean
that they should still sweeten and startle
my deepening ignorance
like the shadows and stars
that leap out of their own darkness and light
to ambush and detain us with love and life
all along these lonely, vivid roads
that walk us like the wind
that moves me now to remember
the generosity of loss that is love,
and the flaring of the dust that we once were,
this frenzy of dust, this urgent dance of the dust
that will forever be
like the wind, like love,
like fire and life, like the nights
that bent down over me while I slept
and kissed me good-bye,
the journey whirling in the arms of its own destination.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Am A Dragon

I am a dragon,
but I’ve got cloudy teeth.
You are a vase among jars,
a feather among scales.
Obviously you are the sea
and I am the seabed.
In the darkness you are the shining.
I come to you
like lead to an alchemist,
base metal to gold.
Already I am transformed
by your mirrors of fire.
There is a light, a glow,
invisible but more illuminating,
not of the moon, or sun, or a star,
but of the heart and mind,
the light of life itself
when it’s the only candle in the room
dancing behind its veil of shadows,
and in the least filament
of the down upon your thighs,
there are suffusions of fireflies and galaxies,
mystic lanterns
ripening like apricots
over the open doors of worlds within,
over eyes that bloom like wild asters
rooted in the earthly fields of the heart.
I have been a ghost
trying to say itself into existence;
and my bread and my blood
have been the whisper and breath of you.
Not the mountains, not
the mothering floors of the wheat seas,
not the forests or the hills or the rivers,
not the ladders or roads or miles between us,
nor the seasons of the threshing clock,
have kept us one eyelash apart;
we have been wings to each other;
we have been the secret tides of the rose
in a bay of blood to one another;
we have been the substance of a dream
that lingers like the impression in cool grass
of where the deer slept the night before.
In the flights of winter birds,
on moist winter days,
I have rehearsed endless summers to come,
when the sky whispered your eyes
in bells of sidereal fragrance
into the abyss of my longing for you
and love seemed a petal of light on the wind,
and you were that petal,
and I was that wind.
And though I have stood for eras
on this bridge of night alone
waiting for you like a letter, an afterlife,
a voice of fire in a well urgent with stars
I want to live with you,
we have always embraced, not two,
arrow and bow,
pilgrim and shrine,
release and enlightenment
reflected in these visions
the insistent palettes of the heart
paint on the impassioned waters
of the deepening lifestream.
I have been a storm of blood and stars;
I have drowned in the crypts of my own tears
and learned to breathe through a new medium,
set the crown of my fin on a rose of gills,
and bloom in a mythically enhanced
immensity of sorrows,
and the shadows under my eyes
have mourned for me
like black bells in a tower of thorns,
two horses of night chained to a heart
that dragged itself around like a hearse
looking for a lost grave.
I buried myself in women
who were torn like the satin lining
out of a coffin just
when they were about to give birth.
Their pain always tasted of an afterlife
that danced like lightning on the tip of my tongue
until my blood caught fire
like a rose with a voice of wine.
Black, apostate, madonnas
of body, heart, and mystery,
even the moon a bead of devotion
on a thread of their blood,
a dream vow under the eyelid of an eclipse.
I never knew what to say
that wasn’t a life shy
of an inadequate skeleton
trying to reflesh itself with the ashes
of its last sidereal cremation.
I was born again and again
like a sword drawn out of a stone
to hurl my humanity
like a sparrow
against the windows and eyes of the gods.
They knew I was right
to live the prophecy
written in the book of my wings by the wind,
but their tears fell like glass rice
on the stairwells of the bridal mirrors
that wept like silver serpents
at the heels of the moon
and whatever road I walked,
whatever direction I wandered in
like a drunken river
I passed through my own ribs
like an opening gate
to a sealess exile on the moon,
a lighthouse to the sail of a ghost in a desert.
Events of the spirit,
and the imported executioners
of tormented ecstasies
that made our bodies shudder with oblivion
until even our shadows glowed
like feathers of light
that glutted the abyss we pillowed like stone
to lay our heads down upon and dream,
every emotion,
keyed like a highwire
over the infinite emptiness
of a guitar in the corner of a tomb
eating the dust of a blackboard
that schooled the scrawl of the angels
into the writing on the wall.
How many lovers have perished in me
like the rings and eras of a tree,
and what enormities of childhood it takes
to sweeten a single ruby of fruit,
what tides of blood and light
collapsing like eyelids on the mystic circus
that pulled off miracles
under the sheets and skies and skin
of our lascivious tents:
now I am a dunce in a wizard’s hat,
a cone of light,
the pillar of a fallen shadow,
freeing the wings of wounded birds
from the nets and mesh of the stars.
I am a dragon
with the soul of a bridge to here and now,
a weed on the stairs of an unknown temple
to a god that sweeps me away like ashes
with the broom of my shadow,
and my face is the footprint of the wind
as flowers are the footprints of the light,
and my heart is a pebble
I keep dropping down a well
to listen for an echo from the depths,
for a whisper of fire on the water,
to deliver me like a burning dove
with a leaf of the moon in its beak,
a letter from you,
to say there is a south of the heart
that can thaw this arctic desolation
that overtakes me like an ageless night
as my thoughts fall away
like the flames of descending matches,
like angels and demons
tilted from heaven,
from the plane of their orbital hearts,
toppled like towers and lighthouses
by an urge to kiss their own reflections.
I am a dragon
chained to the nightrain
that inks the roots of the locust tree
with thorns and stars and flowers,
and my blood is a dusky mess of dawns and ancient sunsets.
My heart was scaled like the moon
by the phases of an empty cup,
my eyes were birdless skies
and nothing flew higher
than the feathered shadows of the trees
that roosted in the grass like water,
and there were no tears left
in the wineskin of the heart
withered like a lily that bloomed for a day,
the soft clarion of a bruised trumpet.
Now I think of you
so many nights and miles away,
and I walk like a bridge toward you,
and my wings are spread out
like the pages of ample skies
that have yet to be written on by the stars,
and I must blow on my longing to be with you
like a spoonful of hot diamonds
just to keep the deserts of my thought
from etherealizing the tropics of my blood,
my eyes evaporating like crucial oases
in the heat of these visions
that burn the air
with fountains of fire
in this tavern of mystic passions
where I drink alone to you,
the furnace of my blood
silked like a black poppy
when I reach out,
a tree in winter,
the afterlife of lightning,
to touch your face like the moon.
I have been a lonely crusade of one
fighting for the gravestone of a dead god
enthroned in the leaf-fire of his falling,
lost in his dream like salt in the sea of the world,
stars in the seed of the apple,
a shadow devoted to the cause of the wind.
I am an era of scars
inspired by the talons of the moon
seizing my heart like a rag of meat
in these elevated bone-bowls of birth and death.
I have been a poet among humans,
an indignant warrior of the heart
with an army of seasoned candles
reconnoitering distant fires in the night
that bloomed like the breath
of insurmountable divinities
gathering like birds
in the border hills of the darkness
that always took the form of a luminous woman
bathing naked in a sea of eyeless windows.
Crowned like an apple star
for the brilliance of my defeats,
I fall like a key of crazy sugar,
a mysterious elixir of midnight orchids,
a squall of renegade stars
into the transformative valleys and bays
of your forbidden paradise,
happier than a fireproof heretic in the flames,
singing into the abyss of an unknown god
that has robed my heart like a wounded boat,
a solitary on his island,
in these auroral tides
that play my blood like the pulse
of this keyboard of light
where I drown like a stone messiah
true to the excruciations of his faith
in these delinquent oceans of you.
All my poems, chalk-dust,
all my mystic nightbirds iron weathervanes
bent by the lightning toward earth
like the forlorn hope of a battered metal,
all my paintings a bleeding and bruising of snow,
and the sincerity of the ways I got lost
in this labyrinth of mirrors
unspooling like a thread of blood
from an immortally wounded star,
an agony of human fire
rooted in the voice of the wind like a bird
the abyss of a night without bounds
squanders on the supremacy
of the oldest silence
time ever distilled from the eyes of the dead,
the perjury of a perishing light,
if I did not love your ashes and orchards more,
the way you tear your constellations
on the thorns of the moon
and bleed like black silk
for an innocence that never found its way home.
I can taste the dark prophecies
and oracles of infernal delight
written in scars on the dangerous mushroom
of your nuclear body,
and flow like the silt of stars,
white mountain gold and night honey,
through the hives and deltas
that enshrine the ore of the rose.
I can prolong the dawn like the wishbone of a note
broken like a harp
in the throats of the singing masters of the flesh.
I can blood the night with a fever of poppies
and scoop weeping diamonds
from the black fountain
in the furnace-heart of an electric glacier.
I can wield ecstasy
like a blade of the moon bewitched by its wound.
I can untie the knots and nooses
in the spinal cord of the butterfly
pinned like a calendar of eclipses,
a quarantined blossom,
to a dead branch under a bell of glass
and wire Eden back
to the infernal nerve of the lightning
that severed the afterbirth of the moon
from the dark mother in the garden
like an angel with a slash of fire at the gate.
I know how to make love
like an embassy of shadows
to the most distant longings of a woman in exile.
I can pour the oil of winged serpents
into the lamp
and entice a ghost of snow
to dance naked in the fire.
I can lead the lost cloud
out of the mountains of the key
to the doorway of candles and stars
enshrined in the skulls of seeing.
And even when I turn my back
on the darkest flowers of fire in my roots
to rise up like rain
into the immeasurable wingspan
of these desert clarities
that bead me like a caravan
of nomadic moons,
no more than a breath of light
in a gust of stars,
I’m still only a ladder of thresholds away
from stealing you away
from the refugees and shadows
that crowd your room
like the night sky
through the astounded vowel of an open window.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Someone Belonging to Someone

I know how I feel
Lonely in the black of night
There can be no love for me now
Nobody listens when the words ain't right
And you get into someone else
It's hard for me to know
Who's lovin' who
And where do I stand
What did I do it all for
There's no one I could love more
I did it for your heart alone
All that I try to be growin' inside to me
I can be strong if you're there

And there is someone belonging to someone
And I got no one belonging to me
I live in a world where the face of an angel
is all that a fool can see
You got the power to find me whenever I'm lost
Where are you ? Who are we?

I believe in time
Can eat away a heart of stone
And baby if I leave you too late
It's just a feather and the bird has flown
It's colder when the fire dies
With all the trouble I'm in if I lose you too

Then what is my life
If I don't wanna go through
Anything without you
Couldn't be life at all
I could be lyin' on
You are the only one
We didn't make it by chance
And there is someone
belonging to someone
And I got no one belonging to me
I'm caught in a world on
the edge of tomorrow
It's all that a fool can find
I don't belong in the arms
of a love that is lost
Nowhere to cry
There must be something we
can say my love
Something except goodbye

And there is someone belonging to someone
And I got no one belonging to me

Repeat above

song performed by by Bee Gees from Staying Alive (soundtrack)
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Your Eyes For Awhile

Your eyes for awhile
were the only eyes
I could see through
to catch a glimpse of god;
were windows into my own soul
that I could look through from the outside
without throwing the moon
through my reflection like a stone
in the hand of an angry boy.
And it was always as true
as the way your heart grew
that you could love strangers
easier than I do even now
after all these years of learning how
to talk to mirrors in their own language.
And you were not one woman
but all women forever
when I saw you once
bending down like the dusk
to touch the last of the flowers
as if you would never see them again.
As serene as the evening
there was no labour in your beauty
and I swear when I saw you that night
I felt as if I were the whole world watching
time put a finger to its lips
and pour its fountain
into the flow of your body
as if it were the sum of all passage.
And though I was your friend in all things
every evening since
the candle went out
in the lantern of a lost tomorrow
I have walked out into abandoned fields alone
and asked the saddest questions
of the most distant stars
knowing there is not enough light sometimes
even in the eyes of God
to be a companion of our sorrows.
And the questions grow longer
as the darkness deepens
the echo of my longing
in a well as dry as my skull
and closes its gates like scars.
And then those nights come
like a life or a day
or even just this moment
when I stop asking
why human suffering
is always indescribably true
and joyful as an irreproachable buffoon
sword-dancing alone with the moon
who writes me dangerous loveletters
as if she were the Lady of the Lake
receiving me back
like a funeral ship
into this mysterium of you,
I can almost believe that you know
even though the night mocks the crow
that pines for mercy
and turns its lightless face toward you
as if it could still feel
the warmth of the sun at midnight
in your eyes again
like the afterlife of light
playing with fireflies in the abyss
now that the summer constellations have gone down;
that somehow you must know
like a guitar
on the far side of a room
where someone is singing
as if they had their ear
to the womb
of your irrevocable absence
that binds me to you with every breath
I take for two
as if I had learned to live on death
to keep you alive in me
where you still flow through the seasons
on the nightstreams of my blood
like blossoms and leaves and stars
and the moon leaves no scars on the water;
must know. Or a demon’s a kinder face
to bestow on the darkness
than a black hole without eyes,
though it’s taken many, long, painful years
for the night to share the light with its jewels again
and as many schools as there are fools to fill them
that even just one
of those slightly compassionate smiles
you would send across the room
to cool the furnace of my heart
with the lightness of one snowflake,
one feather
gracing a change in the weather,
knew more about love
as a raindropp knows the sea
than all of us
who have been washed up
on this cold, lonely shore together
thinking we may have been saved
for something more
than this tidal longing
to brave the sea again
and even if doomed to drown
as I have learned
from this shale of pain
that has carbon-dated the eras
of my missing you
like a life that didn’t
flash before my eyes
as I went down for good with everything,
to thank-you, o, yes,
with nothing but love and light in my heart
and your face in the eye of my solitude
as I stand before the sea in gratitude
to thank-you
as you well knew one day I could
for the generosity of the wound
that has run like my life
down these eyes
these windows
this page
these empty mirrors
of autumn rain
that have wept for years without you
just to see you again
for one moment more
than the time I have left
to know that I never will.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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In You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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So Far Down This Road

So far down this road
without a destination
my childhood doesn't
recognize me anymore.
So far into this life
I've never been outside of
I can speak to myself
in a foreign language
that no one can understand
as if it were the ancient dream-grammar
of a past tense
that talked its way into the future.

So far into what I've become
the peduncle is lost
in the ensuing phylum
and of all thought
I'm the first monkey
to look for its origins in an asylum.

The crow on an autumn branch
in the white rain
laughs more than it ever did
at the specious foundations
of my ephemerid profundities
dropping like apples at my feet.

The minstrel warrior of the forlorn hope
I took up arms in a holy war of one
I was doomed to lose
like a sad generation of demons
who knew the wound would never close.

If heaven isn't a club-med in a specific place
but saturates all of space
like mystically dark matter
then we're all falling toward paradise
like particles and wavelengths of water.

Heaven may be the whole cup
and hell a crack in the wine
and earth the place you sober up
like a bad hangover from the divine
but it's a party I walked out of aeons ago
more a stranger than when I came
like a manger without a sign
like a magus without a logo
to an inn that had been empty for years.

I don't presume to teach people
what they already know.
Even hanging on
is going with the flow.
This is a delirious place
where the mysteries cut deep
and silence is the native tongue
God speaks to herself in.

So far down this mindstream
like a paper boat I made of a poem
and set aflame like an orchid of fire
to honour a poet
who said it right in China long before me,
I bloom on the water of a prophetic dream
true to the unpredictability
of a sleeping dragon
to wake from the brevity of oblivion
with the eyes of a narcoleptic chameleon.

Joy binds
what sorrow releases.
And thought might prick the lifelines
of an amniocentesis
and offer up my embryo like a thesis
on whether I should have been born or not,
but I drink from my own skull like the moon
when it's full to the brim
above the starwheat in the Virgin's hand
to the stealth of the wind that dropped me here
like a lone seed in a huge empty silo
I'm trying to stud like the Venus de Milo.

It's not easy rooting in stone
like the invasive metal
of a sword that will make you
king of the waxing year.
Things just fall apart on their own
like grain from the chaff of a fickle harvest
that rose from the dead
like the bitter bread
of an abandoned homestead
that walked out on itself too soon.

But I've never been one to talk
about leaving it all behind
like some dark gate of the mind
I could pass through
like a unilluminated comet through space
to shine in the light of a star
that was alarmed at my approach
and blind to my passing.

I'm more at home in the dark
with a firefly and a chimney spark
rolling koans like constellations of loaded dice
as if they were two diabolical buddhas
in the back alleys of enlightenment
pushing their luck to the wall.
They rise
and I fall.
I rise
and they fall.
Readiness is all.
Ripeness is all.
Lear shakes his fist at Hamlet.

The blue harvest moon in total eclipse.
All loveletters die like political pamphlets
up against a closed door.
So far into this cloud of unknowing
I have given up hoping
will ever become a star
and break into light in all directions
to show me where I'm going
I give up on myself like rain
and release my waterbird eyes
to fall wherever they might.

Readiness is spring.
Ripeness is fall.
Seven come eleven.
No one wins it all.
Two squared skulls
up against a crooked wall.
I shake the dice
and you call.
You shake the dice
and I call out to luck like a random goddess
to see if she still loves me
as she did once tomorrows ago
when I won everything back.

Whether you're giddy with happy truths
or more profoundly belled by the sad facts
it's scary at night in the spirit's lost and found
when the lights go out
and no one's around to look for anything.

Gardens of black umbrellas,
the wings of folded bats
stacked like unseasonal eclipses
that have lost the will to bloom
like flowers at a lavish funeral
for impoverished aristocrats.

And courage isn't a home
that's all that easy to return to
when you're out here on your own
like a lifeboat full of midnight on Mars.

So far along this long homeless road home
I have worn out my faithless friends like shoes
I took from the feet of the dead
to walk on ahead of myself
like a star with a jump on where it's been.

Now even I don't know what I mean
when the words say me
like some black benediction
over an unknown grave
as I mourn the roadkill
and try to bless the turkey-vultures.

Earth. Air. Water. Fire.
Four cultures that bury their dead differently
but all to the same end.
Who could have guessed
the angels that came to earth first
had the wingspan of loitering scavengers?
I give my soul up to the birds.
I give my eyes up to the sky.
I give my voice up to these words.
I give my mind up like water to water
light to light
darkness to darkness
to the star that has misled me this far
into this wilderness of myself
where I'm preaching stealth to shadows
and air to ride the wind.

I give my heart up
to the thorn that gored the rose
like a deep insight
into the nature of the moon's
bright vacancy
dark abundance
like two sides of the same face.

I give my will up to chance.
My blood to the conviction of the poppy it's fire.
So far beyond my last event horizon
I'm never coming back this way again
what does it matter if the path
is crooked or straight?

I lay my tiny wisdom down like a hazelnut
on the track of the silver thought-train
to see if it can crack it like a koan.
I lay the mantle of my dynastic ignorance
over the shoulders of an avalanche like snow.

However much
you love the valley
it will be the mountain
that sweeps you off your feet.

I give my imagination up like a black wine
that tastes a little like me
to the muses who bruised it
like the great night sea
they drank from my skull
whenever the moon was full.

Among so many sages
it was good to be a fool.
One by one the schools
dropped out of me
and settled like mud at the bottom
of a clarified way to see
that everything that passed through my head
like a shapeshifting cloud
was just water looking into water,
me looking into me with water for eyes.

Why be shocked
by the predictability of death
when it's life that always comes as a surprise?

I may have been lame
in my approach to things
and limped my way like an iamb into wings
but I wanted to look down
from way up there
as if I were a star without strings
and be the way things are
when they shine down on nothing
until a nightbird in a far tree sings.

Carrying forth into the carrying forth
eternity might be the ghost
in the starmud of time that perishes
to give forever a meaning
but it's this life now
that talks the talk
and walks the walk
of a human being.

I give my eyes up to the seeing.
So deeply lost upon myself
like an empty lifeboat drifting through
these veils and visions of things
that appear like sails in the fog a moment
and then evaporate into their nebularity.

I give my blessing to the waywardness
of the course
that took me the way I am.
I give up my pain
I give up my sorrow
I give up my love my joy my laughter
like orchids and ashes on the mindstream
that flows out of me like a waking dream
that doesn't insist on seeing me here tomorrow.

But most of all
I give my gratitude
to the mystic vagrancy of the great solitude
I approached like a friend
on my way to nowhere like the sea
as if everything came to an end in me
like a life I couldn't foresee.

Though I have mourned
life's preemptive reverses
I have not scarred my lips with curses.
I have not tainted the well I drink from.

And nothing's ever spoiled
the bread I broke with others.
The feast is free
but it isn't hunger or thirst
that makes us sisters and brothers
it's the way we raise
the cup to each other's lips
like a lunar elixir to a solar eclipse
as if we knew we would pass
long before the darkness did
but still made the gesture anyway.

It's the way we hope
we know what we mean
when we say we love people
we've never seen
as if they were everyone in particular
and love's mute theme
were helplessly gesticular.

You can't keep
what you won't give away.
Life's a long sleep
before a short dream
that wakes you up far from home
beside the unknown road you're on
that winds like smoke among the stars
whispering ghost stories around the flames
of their unbelievable fires.

By all means pursue what is true
but don't forget
mercy has its liars too.
I give my life up
to the mystic specificity
of the medium that sustains it
like a wavelength of light
to a sea of dark matter.

And more than I could have ever lived
living alone together with everyone
crammed into the same planetary shoe
I give up all the vastness
of my awareness of the space within
and how far there is to go like light
before you can open
even a single flower of insight
to end your long winter night.

I give up space
like my place at the table
where I stood like a tower of salt.
I give my imagination up
like an underground cult
that gave its secrets away to everyone
like dark spots on the sun.

And whatever beginnings
are behind me now
like things I'll never finish
I give my past and future up
to the omnipresence of time
in all I live today
as if something
were always coming my way
without expectation
from lightyears beyond my eyes
like letters from home
that never reach me
in time to call me back.

If I have shone among luminaries
like a firefly in an ice palace
of radiant chandeliers
that froze in their own tears
it was as a small lighthouse
on the coast of turbulent mirrors
that kept a nightlight on.

I spent the gone on the going
and trusted the darkness
to keep things flowing along
like a river coming down a mountain
without knowing about the sea
that summoned me to the lowest place
like an unfathomable watershed
in every eye of the fountain
that cried out to the birds
in words that feather the dead
for their long flight through the mystery
I am I am I am
the future memory
of my own prophetic history
before I wrote it down
like the path I took
on my way out of town.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Guardian and BloodRose

BloodRose,
Rose of my love,
My love for Dark moon,
Dark as my heart,
Black as my soul,
And gave me my rose.

The rose of blood,
With petals soft and black,
Never as a rose so beautiful,
Grown not in light,
But under a dark moon lit sky.

Guardian,
Yes a guardian of BloodRose,
With teeth long and sharp,
Claws hard as diamonds,
Scales as dark as night.

My dear sweet guardian,
Guardian black as my heart,
Fire in your eyes,
Shadows in your soul,
A dragon of the dark moon.

A single rose,
With petals so fare,
As dark as my heart,
I now hold in my hand,
The rose of blood.

You are my darkness,
Fear of this love,
This love for you,
Love for darkness,
The cold shadows in my heart
That makes me yearn for you.

Now as you lay dying,
I hold a single rose,
The rose you gave me,
And as I hold it tight,
The thorns slice my hand,
Covered with blood,
My blood.

I have one fear,
The fear of death,
Symbol of my lost love,
Rose as dark as me,
Laying in a pool of blood,
Blood from me.

As I lay dying,
I remember my name,
BloodRose,
I am the rose of blood,
And I died of my own creation.

A creation of perfect beauty,
Petals dark black,
Thorns like small daggers,
Grown from my love,
My love for a dragon,
A dragon as dark as my heart.

Even in my death,
I think of you,
And the rose you gave me,
The rose that killed me,
The Rose of Blood.

poem by Nicolette Gonzalez
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Available Light

Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson
The restless wind
Has seen all things
In every kind of light
Rising with the full moon
To go howling through the night
The sleepless wind
Has heard all things
Between the sea and sky
In the canyons of the city
You can hear the buildings cry
Oh the wind can carry
All the voices of the sea
Oh the wind can carry
All the echoes home to me
Run with wind and weather
To the music of the sea
All four winds together
Cant bring the world to me
Chase the wind around the world
I want to look at life --- in the available light
Play of light
A photograph
The way I used to be
Some half-forgotten stranger
Doesnt mean that much to me
Trick of light
Moving picture
Moments caught in flight
Make the shadows darker
Or the colors shine too bright
Oh the light can carry
All the visions of the sea
Oh the light can carry
All the images to me
Run to light from shadow
Sun gives me no rest
Promise offered in the east
Broken in the west
Chase the sun around the world
I want to look at life --- in the available light
All four winds together
Cant bring the world to me
Shadows hide the play of light
So much I want to see
Chase the light around the world
I want to look at life --- in the available light
Ill go with the wind
Ill stand in the light

song performed by by Rush
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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When I'm Alone

When I'm alone
I want to be with someone,
and when I am with someone,
I'm twice as alone.
My unhappiness
is a snake-pit
I dangle my heart over
like a mouse by the tail
and when joy does show up,
a butterfly with resplendent wings,
it slowly adapts its palette
to the slag and soot and oilslicks
of the black orchard
shedding its petals everywhere
like micro-eclipses in hell.

And all the poems
I gathered like asters
from the autumn starfields,
all these skies that opened above me
as I walked down a long road alone
in darkness and light,
obedient to the wind and the shadows
that whispered move on, move on
beyond the journey and the arrival,
are merely a leaf,
a tattoo on the back
of a serpent of water
sliding downstream
like rain like mind in search of a course
that isn't the cracked map
of last year's desiccated creek bed.

My body is scarred, my heart
a voodoo doll
pierced by a thousand fangs
as it burns like a bee
in a rose of heretical fire
for refusing to turn my honey into venom
or conform to any magic but its own.

And there is no heaven
to appeal to as a last resort.
I endure what I endure
for the dignity
of my indefensible humanity,
knowing the pain
that sometimes turns my nerves
into stand-ins for the lightning
that keeps crackling my cosmic egg
like the paint of my last masterpiece,
also schools my blood like the wine
I pour out joyously
into the empty goblet of the mystery
whenever I host the moon.

Life is neither fair nor unfair
and the seeing, a vision, a poem
is always a bird
born and breaking free of your eyes
opening like a threshold
like a flower
like a crack of lightning,
like the world that hangs,
a veil of water,
from the ends of your eyelashes now.

Love is great, love is much, maybe all,
and the being here incomparable,
and the mystery always
whispering in a field beyond its own compass,
and the wind that tastes of birds,
and the light that tastes of flowers,
and the fountains of darkness
where God washes the stars off her face,
will always urge the extinguished branch
of an astonished pen
to blossom into a poet.

Are the dead any less creative
than the living?
If they don't come from anywhere
how can you ask where they go?
If everything is the unborn energy
of a dancing god
with worlds in her blood
how can even a blade of grass perish?

This world, this life,
this ungraspable now of awareness
is the passion of a goddess, not a passing thought.

Beyond this riot of blessing and anathema,
this racket of loss and acquisition,
of birth and murder,
there is a silence
deeper than the space
between breaths,
an abyss without longing
that knows you from within
as the fire knows the flame,
or a woman,
the haste of her lover.

If you think you know something,
cast the thought down
as you would a venomous serpent
or let it strike;
even the poisons
can unspool you like wine
in this delirium of life.

And isn't it more than could have been asked for
just to be here
under a sky
spun finer than the silk of diamonds,
breathing the stars in and out
like trees?

I have been silently and eloquently
stupefied by the wonder
all my life;
and urgently moved to explore
the great ocean of awareness
that intrigued me to experience myself
as the world,
I put to sea with a leaf for a sail.

We must become
more intimate with our vastness, learn
to listen to the whisper
that has always been us
in our own depths.

We have depleted our preludes of awe,
the spirit slags in the pit mines
of our complacent arrogance.
Our own creations
amaze and lull us away
from the sustaining abundance
of what was given spontaneously.

What do we know?
Why water?
Why stars?
Who is it that asks the question?

The fluid continuum of the mystery
is a waterclock
and every receptacle, an era.
And science can advance the shadows of life,
but the answers eventually fall like leaves
and no one knows how to account
for the stars that root in the duff.

What each of us sees
when we see deeper than blood
over the course of a lifetime
are the eyes of the goddess
when she looks at us.
What we are is our own creation,
curse and blessing alike.
You created heaven.
You created hell.
Experience is just the metal
shaped on the anvil of our hearts
into edges that kill like life,
the plough drawn from the stone,
not the sword,
or blades behind the door
that wound like serpents.

You can enlighten or eclipse
the iron in the ore
by pouring it
into a heart or a bullet.
You can make a nail
and build a house
or crucify a teacher.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Want To Take The Moon Out of the Sky

I want to take the moon out of the sky
like a cup, like a rose of black wine
and drink it down to the last shadow of a mountain,
the last, lost eyelash of the light
that floats on the surface, the final crescent.
If I could inhale fire, or snort the stars
like a rail of radiant coke on a black mirror
and pull the darkness up around me
to keep me warm in the night
against the cold drafts that barge through the window,
if the darkness were a woman
I could throw my arms around
and hold her back against my chest in the bay of my body,
a shore I liked to wake up on
still drunk on the moon
and walk in the morning as she
dazzles me with her nakedness and veils,
the litter of the broken jewelry
she arrays in the sprawling waves, I would, o
believe me I would. I would
take this paint rag of a life
this hard, dirty smear of leftovers on the plate
of so many paintings, this injured towel
that has wiped the blood and tears and clouds,
the wounded sunsets from so many faces and rivers,
from so many brushes and knives and tongues
leeched off the rotten rainbows, the flags,
the bad water in the dark well, I would
take this skin of dirty flowers,
this Joseph’s coat of colours,
this blighted, blotted pelt of soiled skies
and corrupted trees, eyes that have dried
into blisters and scabs, lips
that crack like dry peonies, I would take it
and give it a decent burial, already
the poor, leather shirt
of some archaic Indian from the book of changes
lying in the yarrow of his scattered bones.
Or maybe I could acquire the thunder
of a large, rusty oil drum and burn it at night
in the backyard, cremate it and smudge
the evil spirits out of the house
of my prevailing stars, smoke
the adulterous virgin’s disease away,
like clothes after someone’s died of the plague.
There are days, and this is one of them,
when life seems kinder than I thought
to everyone else but me;
mornings and afternoons, but seldom the nights,
that seem like dead dogs
lying at the side of the highway,
ants in their eyes dissolving like soap
and turkey vultures unravelling
their organs and tendons
like the yellow and scarlet yarn of old sweaters
that will be reknitted into something else
that doesn’t fit, days
when I realize I was born middle-aged,
how homeless my heart is,
and how my voice,
though it’s been hurled into the dawn for years,
is such a lonely bird, not even an echo
disappearing into the silence
of the vast, unanswering spaces that overwhelm it.
I write in the air with the wind for a pen
like a madman who gestures at things
no one else can see, believing against belief,
he’s doing his part to better the world
though it comes with asylums
and bills to his door, demanding
mechanical birds on iron boughs,
and revisions not his to give.
I feel like a cinder in someone else’s eye,
a crumb of sleep shaken out of a dream,
a thread of smoke that stings people
into rinsing me out with anger and tears,
the stone of the new foundation cast away
though all I wanted to do
was astound the blind with stars,
make the dark flower with the wild orchids
of a more luminous fragrance,
arrive with islands of wheat and roses and wine
and lay the cool sage of the moon down
like a silver herb on a scalded heart.
I’m a brilliant hoodlum from the late sixties
as one of ex-wives called me, leaving,
and we thought we could heal the world
with love and music and art.
Hearts change, times change, and maybe
I’m the casualty of a slow accident
and this is my coma, these days I spend
witching for water in hell,
for signs of life among the corpses
that fell en mass from a terrible height,
going from one to another,
lifting up their pale arms,
the limp necks of broken swans, looking
at my watch to time the indifferent heartbeat
of the pulsing cursor on the computer screen.
I’m a habit of buoyancy
drifting through dense fog,
an empty lifeboat crying out
to a ship that may have gone down years ago:
“Is anyone out there, is anyone alive? ”
And no one answers
but the gargantuan vacuities
of the atomic distances between us.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Practical Uses Of Poetry

Not to be practical, not
to mean, be, do,
no more than the wind
to insist upon itself, to
move like the wind,
like a disembodied intelligence
over the mindfields
practicing the twin disciplines
of light and rain,
scattering the mystic pollen
of intuitive seeds
that bloom like roseate fire
in the shadowless gardens of the abyss
arranging the cosmos like a wild bouquet
in the blood vase of the human heart.
To remind us
we're not fireflies or stars
stuck on a chromosome
of intellectual flypaper,
a buzzing that will stop,
but a passion of native iron
in the arms of alien oxygen,
urged into creative consummation
by carbon.
Free as water, free as God
the night she put the universe on
like make-up
to attend to the beginning of everything
with a cosmic efflorescence of fireworks,
to speak for the stones, the stars, the trees,
to say them into being,
to say us, to whisper us
into the enormity of her solitude,
the inconceivability of her darkness,
a secret she couldn't keep anymore.
Experience is a child playing,
not function, not a job, not a career.
What's practical about singing alone
because the mysterious nightbird
has come like a blossom of joy
to the bough of the tree in winter?
Or must dancing have a use,
music be enchained to the stone ear of utility?
Bleeding isn't very practical either
but how would you ever know
you were a rose scarred by your own thorns
if you didn't?
Sooner renounce the sweetness
of the star-flavoured summer night air
or teach the wind a compass and a map,
the sky to consult a control tower
than try to grind the stars of poetry
with a stone and an ox
into a function and a fee.
The wages of poetry are always a gift
that takes the recipient by surprise
with the beauty of its subtlety
and a coin as true as the moon.
Who asks to be paid
to dance alone with God?
And even the abyss
has provided you with a world
like a passport to anywhere you want to go.
Among the birds and the leaves
flowing along with this pilgrimage of stars
to shrines that are older than knowing,
if the sun or the moon
should open your voice like a flower
in the deep woods
to hear you singing in the light,
and you are urged into poetry
through a gate as open as the cosmos,
and you discover colours have echoes
and the notes of your song
are a palette of gardens,
and everything you paint with your picture-music
is the portrait of someone you're becoming
until you look like everyone
from the inside out,
every passion
the longing of a planet
to burn with life,
and the deepest watershed of your humanity
is itself
the fountain
where the goddess drinks from her own reflection,
and you understand
that the word in the morning
is the word at the end of the day,
and that the life that adorns your body within
is the wine of the worlds
in a cup of clay
encrusted with stars
and you are the delirium the dream seeks,
the lightning and lucidity of the dark sage
your roots consult like a storm,
would you then look upon the first crescent of the moon
and try to fix it to a plough,
would you look forever
into the wells of now
like the eyes of a lover
who combs out the tresses of the willow like the wind
as if he played the whole of the night
on the blue guitar of your heart,
would you renounce the music as impractical?
To walk through this world aware,
with a spear of moonlight through your heart
like a poet, to feel
everything a human can feel
and have the courage and the art
to sing
the joys and sorrows,
the gardens and intimate hells alike
with compassion and understanding,
even when you often don't understand
because the shadow of the world
eclipses your eyes,
or the windows are saturated with pain,
to be able to do that, to be that
is beyond assessing
because there is no intention to life
or the running of the river
or the unspooling of a poem
that conceives of its seeing as progress.
What the eye writes
on these pages of percipient sky
that bring the world to a focus in us
is not a reality in advance
of the dream that shadows it.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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