When I Get To The Root Of What I Really Want
When I get to the root of what I really want
it all comes down to the nothing that I've got.
If a mirror were to publish me the way I really look,
I'd look like a rootless tree, scattering all its leaves
and dropping its fruit like tears that got too heavy to bear.
I look at a beautiful woman now as if she were art,
a Caravaggio in a gallery, as my eyes are
just as happy to see, as my hands once were to touch.
Noli me tangere. Because I don't love anyone,
not even myself. Love is a double-edged sword
that can't dance solo, and my longing's been
a wandering troubadour for so long now, I can
mark the eras of my life by the number of windows
I've stood under singing to the waxing moon as it opens up.
I've always been a foolish dream weaver
trying to make a waterbed out of a snakepit for two
knowing how long it takes for the flying carpets to wear through.
I'm Pictish enough to live with a blue body
covered in lunar tattoos, or play the sacred clown
so I can use my absurdity as an alibi for the loss of my innocence,
and everybody's innocent at the beginning of love,
as if the moon were renewing her virginity in you.
I've lived with a lioness, two witches, an apostate madonna,
a beast mistress, one demon with juno, a couple of butterflies
that landed on the tip of the split dragon's tongue
divining for water in hell a moment or two
before their flightpaths got so erratic I couldn't keep up
and not wanting to fly wingman anymore,
tilted my wings good-bye, and banked back
into the depths and the heights of my reptilian solitude.
If things aren't perfect after you get over the shock of moonrise
believe me, the night you stop blaming
the flaws in your telescope
or the cinders in your own eyes
and realize how much dark ore it takes
for a nugget of gold to cast it
like a mountain of shadows behind it,
you'd make a much better astronomer than you are now.
You'd be able to relate to the asteroids
as easily as you do the radiant rings and shepherd moons
with their alluring promise of a mysterious life
just under the eyelids of their ice-caps,
as you peer through the cracks in their cataracts.
My heart's been savaged by firestorms of stars
sweeping across deserts of volcanic ash and pumice
by thousands of delusions arming themselves like mirages
to wound the very water they depended for their lives upon
because they didn't think there were enough bubbles in the hourglass.
You wake up one morning and find the skull of the moon
polluting your wishing well, it's time to pack up
and take your lute on the road again like uprooted rain.
Try for a graceful exit but if it's a little more brutal
than your entrance, do the best you can one abyss at a time
so that when you're on your death bed reviewing all this,
you won't have to wince too hard
at all your futile attempts to remain indefensibly human.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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
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And Should I Recall Whose Eyes
And should I recall whose eyes made the stars most beautiful,
and set the mindstream that flowed though us aflame with fireflies
a moment there and gone and come again like light
in the keyholes of the feral cats that prowled the graveyardshift
wholly to the top of the broom-swept path up Heartbreak Hill,
where the bones of the seven hanged men lay buried
in the duff of our childhood legends, a shadow and a name,
trying love on shyly like new clothes in the shadows of the pines,
where we lay down with the dead on beds of rusty compass needles,
out of sight of the windows of the town, how could I not feel,
here alone now by the Tay, thousands of miles away,
and more years later than it takes to walk a burning bridge,
waiting for the flower moon to appear above the horizon,
the waterclock in the nightbird's song of longing?
And if I were to say what it was like to be touched by her
when she was brave with hunger and my body
all loaves and fishs in the innocence of her hands
and her breasts and lips magic mushrooms without the flies
that swarmed the garbage cans in the back-alleys below,
and though it was not wise to begin a new life
on the last night of the past we were ending together,
like a bell and a cannon that had been melted down
from the same dark ore of a life we were cut out of
like a wound in a loveletter we left unsigned for one another,
because good-bye was harder to write than just to let things go,
what words could I use that weren't already
denuded of their shining like a windfall
of black dwarfs on the windowsills of time,
and the stars that night that clung to the sky
like bubbles in the evanescence of glass
or the grass to our flesh, all washed off now
as if they were grime, the quiet patina of time
gilding the dust like rainbows on the wings of flies?
And the wind asks, and the water sylphs want to know
and the wild willows are holding their breath like a veil
and the Tay is pulling a curtain of water aside in its wake
to hear about another stranger the earth swallowed
like a sacred syllable in the mouth of a snake
that envied the waterbirds their wavelengths and wings,
and though the skeletal birch and prophetic skulls
in the riverbed plead like the end of a dream
for one more lullaby in the ghost story of the moonrise,
I show them the black pearl of my heart
lustrous as hard coal to burn again in the furnace of dawn
on the dark side of the moon in partial eclipse
as I weep like a dragon for the secrets I keep
like myths of origin in the urns of things that are gone
like the irrevocable flightfeathers of the words and waterbirds
under the lost petals of fire that bloom in the eyes of the flower moon.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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When Someone Loves You And You're No One
for Kristine Marie
When someone loves you and you're no one,
what happens then? What do you have to give
that they aren't already in full possession of?
The many I have loved have become one woman.
And this is an orchid that blooms in fire at night.
And this is the dove that returns from earth
with a wing like a broken arrow and asks to be healed.
When someone loves you and you're no one,
what happens then? This picture-music flowing
like a carillon of bliss and despair through
my body, heart, mind as if they were all
poured like dragon iron into the casting of the same bell
that yesterday raised like a sword to kill it back into life?
And this is a doorway you can stand in forever
as if you were greeting someone who never comes.
And this is that butterfly among wildflowers
that flutters about like a symbol of the mind
as if it didn't know whose loveletter it is yet.
When someone loves you and you're no one,
what happens then? Do you give them your emptiness?
Do you wrap space around them when they're cold
like a star-studded shawl you asked the night to weave
for someone very special into astrology?
Or do you minutely examine the mystic specifics
of your life as you've known it up to now
and from somewhere in some dark room
way back of the heart, feel the urge to apologize
to the stars for how much their light's been through
for so little? The star labours, and candles are brought forth.
And this is the delirium of a window the moon drinks from.
And this is that jewel of a tear that didn't
make a big splash on the rock like other tears
and by that you know it's a diamond in disguise.
When someone loves you and you're no one,
what happens then? Does the air as now revel
like autumn in a gleeful chaos of images and insights
the wind unravels like leaves in a tantric realm of crazy wisdom?
Do you see a woman coming through a gate
as if she'd lived her whole life among roses and razor-blades?
And she's not asking for rapture, but you're beginning to feel
there's a peony of a supernova in the house of Cancer
waiting to express itself in the beauty of the way
it relinquishes itself like the moon to the waters of earth.
And this is that mysterious spell that beguiles
the expert hunter into baiting his trap with his own heart
hoping it's irresistible to the fox he wants to take it.
And this is that dawn of a new day that arises like
a strange exorcism of everything that's ever possessed you before
as you greet every ghost in passing off the lake
the same as you've always done, the waterbirds.
When someone loves you and you're no one,
what then? You stare as I do at Venus in the sunset
and write long poems that tunnel through mountains
like work trains full of precious ores that glow in the dark
more intensely as it approaches like a lantern from a long way off?
Or is it just another firefly at the end of my nose
casting galactic shadows across the time and space
it takes to behold them in the furthest reaches of my mind?
I sense a gentleness I haven't known before.
I see a beauty that's as easing to the eyes as moonrise.
And the seeds of words that haven't passed between us yet
are already beginning to open their eyelids and flower.
And there's a soft gray blue sky with a scattering of ashes
to honour the dead and give the wind its due
I can see spilling out of the urn of your heart
to make room for the phoenix I am about to give you
as if it were child's play, when I'm with you,
wholly absorbed like light into bread, to rise from the dead
and feel hunger again, to drink from the fountain mouths
of fire again, and desire and long as I once did
and imbibe the wines of life as if I'd never existed before
without cutting my tongue on the taste
or succumbing to the inconceivable as if everything
that followed thereafter were the afterlife of the inevitable.
And this is the era in which you know
you've already tied your blood like a scarlet ribbon
around a gift no one can determine the value of
if she opens it in wonder, haste and love.
And this is the moment you dread the joy of
when death tastes as sweet as birth in the mouth of life
and autumn lives out of the suitcase of all its memoirs
like the blossoms of a manuscript that has come to bear fruit.
I saw you and you were a gazelle at the easel,
painting the moon like a beauty mark on the forehead
of a sacred slave girl dancing naked in the light that released her
like a butterfly in the jaws of a dragon she could awake with a whisper.
I saw you in a gust of stars, and felt the wings and dust devils
sprouting out of my heels to let me ride the thermals of my heart again
as if the long, dark, strange, radiant journey I'd already come
were merely a hair of the way I had yet to go like the sole copy
of a love poem I had committed to the wind so hopelessly
such a long time ago when my solitude could play
the rosey-fingered sea like a musical instrument
that could make the waves sing like mermaids
without a plectrum or a pick or a ship, as long
as there was desire in your fingertips and urgency in your art.
When someone loves you and you're no one,
what then? Let them be everything to you even
if there's no you to be anything to. Pour your emptiness
into hers and fill the cup up to the edge of the moon
and let it spill over with light as if it had a leak in it
bigger than a record harvest in the horn of the moon at full.
I've cut star wheat in a virgin's hand
in a total eclipse of my senses
and touched flesh as if it were fresh bread
cooling on the windowsill of a hungry man
who can taste the light in it like letters from a child hood
far enough away from home to learn to love it again
with a second innocence more indelible than the first.
As for me and my treehouse with open windows,
I shall welcome a songbird on the cusp of Leo
to every branch and rafter of it, or if need be
at sea on the moon, in the event of a storm,
a lifeboat fashioned out of my own bones
to hang on to like the eye of peace in the skull of the dragon
who looks at you and reads you like fireflies on a starchart
delineating a new constellation out of homeless space and time
and a habitable myth of origin for two exiles in love
among the sacred groves of the rootless trees.
With you I have not come to revere the pain and longing
of hungry ghosts hanging on to every blade of grass
like a flag at half mast in a high wind.
I have come to appeal any destiny
that doesn't bear the seal and signage of your heart.
Nor will I ever surrender any sword to your waters
that wasn't first tempered in the translucent fire of diamonds
that feel like a fool of cool water running down your skin
like a spring thaw of the crystal chandeliers
that melted down their spear points into rain,
that dipped their swords in wax
and trimmed the wicks into fuses
and lit them up like Roman candles
such that my eyes and my heart
are still flowering wildly with you in these starfields.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Something Deeper Than Stars
Something deeper than tears to weep for you.
I weep blood. I weep the silence
on the backstairs with the screen door
that bangs like the sound of one hand clapping
all through the night at the slightest gust of wind
as if a constellation were trying
to strike up a insightful conversation
with a wet match, the sceptre of a spent blossom.
I need a moon deeper than water to drown in.
I need to dance the pain away
in a sword dance of serpents
that know how to carry a tune
like a well fledged arrow, a beautiful toxin,
straight to the heart of the mysterious apple
that's sitting on top of my head like a prophetic skull.
No flower can say. Not any number of song sparrows
returning to the budding tree in spring,
no green leaf of an innocent tongue,
not even this dry leaf of mine in autumn
writing lyrics on the wind no one can read,
not even among ghosts, can find a voice
that isn't already the dead language
of an absence that can't be adorned
by a seance of words.
I light no candles. I summon no gods.
No pretence of knowing where you've gone.
No black hole that's as empty as
your ring on the table, no halo
that ever fell as far from heaven.
Good-bye's too optimistic and farewell's
the rudder of a grave on the rocks.
And if I were to raise the paper sail
of another poem like the waxing phase
of the funereal moonboat
that carried you away,
I'd make it black. I'd raise it
like the shroud of a black magician
that can make things disappear,
like an eclipse at half mast
and patch it with the skull and crossbones
of a different phase of the moon on the dark side.
I wouldn't return your personal belongings
back to the morning like starlings and doves.
But there aren't enough sacred syllables
swimming like moonlit fish
in the watershed of the silence
to open this fountainmouth of grief
like an aviary of flightless birds.
Nor would I risk having you remember me,
and turn around like a false start,
supposing you can still recall anything at all,
like a light you left on in the hall
the night you left home for good.
You were magic while you were here to work it.
You were the black nun of an enlightened cult of one.
You were the black mass of the sun at midnight
and the blood sister of the moon
that nicked your finger
on both her crescent thorns at once
so one was the cure to the other's wound
like the eyes of a cat, the fangs of a snake.
Given how close to the moon you were
it didn't come as a surprise
when you started writing me loveletters
inscribed in bone as if you'd just invented
a whole new language out of your claws
to make love to a poet in the nude when the moon
didn't lay its silver sword down between us
to keep us a threshold apart from our fingertips.
And it wasn't long before the elixir began to work
and I lost count of the number
of consensual metaphors I had for your lips,
similitudes for the night skies
that surrounded your eyes in a delirium of stars
that revelled in the crazy wisdom
of their mystically inspired atmospheres.
As just as beautiful as they were,
so were they irresistibly dangerous.
How many light years now
have I poured this memory of them
like a love potion over my roots
and waited for you to bloom in my bloodstream
like stars and blossoms streaming
through the heartwood of an ageing tree
that has as many dead branches on it as it does leaves,
and like an orchard anticipating moonrise,
knew you weren't coming anymore,
and the night bird had no one to sing for?
But, hey, I'm still a better seance
than I am an exorcism and if you can hear me
calling the faithful to prayer
in all directions at once like a paper airplane
the boy in me has sent out to search for you
like a loveletter in a hurricane of razor wire,
dripping with clusters of blood
the size of hemorrhaging grapes,
fireflies caught in a spider-web
of starless constellations that aren't a sign
of anything except I miss you worst at night.
If you could sense the tremor
in even the slightest wavelength of light
I'm trying to shine on the darkness to find you,
I'd write you a holy book of sacred silence
inspired by the shadows in my blood
that overtake me like strangers from behind
with an urgent message not to return home
to what isn't there anymore.
I'd sit out here all night by myself
beside the black waters of this night creek
unravelling like a ribbon in mourning,
that's been talking to itself
as it walks in its sleep on the water,
and I would beseech the stars with my eyes
to let me know if they've seen you,
and in my heart I would entreat them
with the solo of a wounded wolf
raising its head up in a wild prayer
to catch a trace of you on the chilly night air,
to give me a starmap to when and where
I can see you face to face again
and touch your eyelids in your sleep
like crocuses coming up through the snow.
Like moonrise in the apple blow of the storm
that scattered us to winds like all these poems
I've tried to write for you ever since
as if you were still somewhere nearby
like another pair of eyes
in my pain and my solitude
watching from the woods
the stars, the water, the moon,
under the stones in the river
that mark your grave and name
above the flowing of this endless epitaph
of leaves and blossoms and poems
as if you alone could still read them,
like the comings and goings,
of waterbirds on the moon,
the first draft of words on the wind,
maple leaves and keys on the mindstream,
and still understand what I was trying to mean.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Murder Me Again With Your Voice
Murder me again with your voice,
the moon, your maculate heart, the weapon of your choice.
I am space, light, water, air, stars beyond your reach.
Meteor showers have been looking for my species for years
And still I thrive like glass eyes with real tears,
in the shadows of your amorous extinctions.
You can snuff a thousand votive candles out.
You can desecrate the shrine where I bury my feelings
like the small bodies of gentle birds
beside the ashes of the dragons that burnt out
like solar flares returning to the source.
You stab at the wind. You can try to ruin the sun
with a pettiness that isn't worthy of the moon
that sends no night bird out to look for you
though my longing says you've been missing for years.
Nothing against you, nothing especially for,
though I thought I saw for a moment Bailey's Beads
peeking through the lunar valleys of your last eclipse.
And there was a time I'd trade two of my fingers
just to have a taste of your lips again as they were
when the apple orchard covered your nakedness
in the blossoms of the first drafts
that couldn't improve on you by revising anything.
Come the first time right, or better not come at all
and they fell, each more perfect than the last.
Now it's like French-kissing a voodoo doll
with pins through its lips that makes everything you say
the martyr of a brutal kind of unspoken curse.
Make it worse, if that's all you've got left to feel.
Get it out. Oxyrhyncus Jesus says that'll save you.
I'm an old ghost. Do you really think
you're my first exorcism? Boo. I'm gone
just like the mist off a morning lake,
just like a gust of stars in the lens of a telescope
that can bring you close, or set you at a distance
just like that piece of tinfoil you wrap
like skin around your heart as if you were saving
some kind of vegetable in the cold shining
you think of as the Pleiades on a binge of light.
Screech, shriek, rave, rake your fingernails
down a blackboard like an ice age in a rage,
like a glacial striations cut into shale
and ambush the mammoth, the sabre-tooth, the dire wolf
of twelve thousand years ago when you stole
the water out of their mouths and returned nothing but dust
like you take the words from mine now
that you've uprooted the garden of your own.
Carve on me like a bone if you must, break my skull
like Pangaea into a synarthritic jigsaw puzzle of continents
and I'll do nothing but diversify my species.
I'll turn the scars in my starmud into calendars and alphabets
and wait for the next golden age like honeysuckle
tangled in a cedar fence after a storm
that strikes at itself like sheet lightning,
after your apocalypse has finished venting itself.
You're a white peony, not a wounded rose with thorns,
though you both shed the moon in common
to get down to the withered jester's cap of the star
hiding like a spider under your eyelids.
You kill me and you kill me deeper into life
not because it's me you hate, but what I refuse
to hate about you as a coward who turns her back
at the sight her own blood on her razors and wrists
and runs like a river system on a starmap
toward the emergency exits of the red giants
even as they're imploding under their own exhaustion
who promise to suckle you on the dream milk
of the poppies who opiate you into believing
you're twice as deceiving as death in Aleppo,
racially profiling the stars in infra red for the Gestapo.
What a silly girl you are, to expect a firing squad
to show up for your rescue, every time you click
your ruby slippers like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz
and tiny eyes emerge from the gigantic size
of the blackholes in your deathmasks like gnats
swept up like stars in your stillborn tornadoes on the moon.
It takes more than a snakepit to make someone an oracle.
However you enrobe it in incense and drugs
and mollify your fear in an exchange of syringes.
More fangs on a hydra-headed Medusa than there are
crescents of the moon lactating with antidotes
as if to say the cure is in the heart of the disease.
Let all those boyfriends you stole like corpses
from a graveyard, believing you were the artistic genius
who was mistress of their vital organs, rise from the dead
as if they'd finally learned to stand up to you
and making a move on your surgical flesh
say, hey, now, mistress, come lie down with us
and see, for yourself, what a heady lover death can be
when you don't take your cliches so seriously
you've rewired your waterlilies to the stars
until they all sting like superclusters of jellyfish
tasing you with the acid rain of your own tears
like rootfires of desire blossoming underground
without a flower to speak of or break through anywhere
you could point to and say, there, I grew that out of love
as if I weren't even trying all that hard
to stand here alone, alive, and beautiful as I am
not as an alibi for dying, but as an act of life
as indelible in its absence it is when it's here.
So go your own way with blood on your hands
and blessings on your head as you wish.
And take a last parting shot at the stars
if you want the last word
as you stand like a likeness of yourself
like a commission you've always had done
by every doorway you've ever stood in like an easel,
and step into a smaller realm than the one you're leaving
as if your eyes were too small for my windows
when you hurled yourself against them
like a housefly against a mirage in an hourglass
being emptied and filled at the same time.
And, yes, I will cry for you with deep regret
I couldn't die for you any better than I did,
and you couldn't live for me
just for the cheap thrill of it.
And then I'll wipe my tears on my sleeve
where my heart used to be
and make my comic entrance into the next world
laughing like a sacred clown at the sublimity
in the enlightened madness of it all
as you back up like a tragic exit into yours,
troubled by the punch-lines in your nightmares
you never got.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I'll Wear This Robe
I'll wear this robe like a desert;
and release the hinges on the gate
that is closing like a rib cage
on the heart of the nightbird
that returns to the silence
like water taken from a river.
I'll pour the moon out of its stone cup
and let this vine of eyes,
this bone of light
wander where it will
in search of a face in the darkness
sweeter than the blood-vows of wine.
These flowers aren't the rags
of the legends of radiance
and a dragon doesn't waste eclipses
on the blind.
The wind opens its hand
and I disappear like a gust of crows
in the startled night groves.
I will drag this empty robe of blood along the ground
like a wounded sky,
a desolate poppy
broken like a kite
on the power lines of its dreams.
I don't know what hurt me;
so long, so long ago I was a child,
and now I am a man, and aging
and the water snarls
and bares its fangs of frost,
and impales my heart
inflamed with grief for so much that has passed
without understanding
on the horns of the moon.
My ignorance has been
deeply authorized by life
and more and more often now
my blood coagulates into roses
and seals my mouth with wax
like a regal mandate
to succeed myself in silence
and let my throne
avalanche down the mountain
like just another rockslide,
another round of asteroids,
another fallen temple
freaked with mystic ore that never made it to the surface.
You ask me where I've been
like a road you befriended along the way,
but I'd have to know where I was going
to tell you that
and I've come to the end of myself
like starlight in a loaf of bread,
a candle that burnt like a voice in the night
to obviate the emptiness,
to warm the abyss momentarily
with the glow of our human divinity,
to say we were here once
like the flower in the field,
the star over the hill,
the face in the window
that watches as we pass
like the shadow of a bird
cast by the flames of a hidden fire,
a pulse of the moon,
the eyelid of a wave
that imagined the sea beneath it
before it broke like a vision
on this shore of flesh
where everything must be abandoned.
I want to be with you
like your eyes are
if you'll let me be.
I want to silver my breath
in the longest night
of your loneliest fountain.
And many have sworn,
and many along the way
have perished like echoes and flowers
at the insistence of a rootless word.
And there have been nights,
eras of darkness and sorrow
drawn from a stranger's well
that have bent the path I took,
and scattered my footprints
like refugees and colonists
that turned native
like an exhausted emotion
when their loneliness went wild and crazy
in a solitude even the moon couldn't fill.
And I have stared
long and deeply into the abyss of the night
and felt the stars stub themselves out
in the sandy hourglass of my ashtray heart.
How desperately
I have rummaged through
this encyclopedia of lives
to find one that wasn't a prelude to tears,
my heart a lost boot,
laced with a snapped spinal cord,
its mouth
muzzled like a junkyard dog
with an elastic band
to keep body and soul together,
only to proofread sky after sky,
page after page of stars
pricked out in braille,
fingering my name
carved in funereal kells and runes
on another boundary stone.
Nothing binds me.
No one wants my heart enough
to consult it like a map
to where I'm buried like gold
under the tongue of a dangerous angel
who wants to wake up beside you
like a spear of fire
I will fall upon like life, like a lover,
to wound my way back into paradise.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Won't Mean Much If Your Eyes Aren't Open In Your Blood
Won't mean much if your eyes aren't open in your blood.
If the stars can't see you because you don't know how
to read them poetry in the small cafes of your heart
accompanied by spoons and plates and broken goblets
of the cheap house wine that smash just like love affairs
dashing your skull against the rocks, hoping the mermaids come back.
If you can't hear in the parking lot of a raucous industry
the colours of your emotions, you're a deaf chameleon
and who could make you listen to what you can't listen to
even if you had enough people who loved you around you
to want you to try to listen to your own tears when you cry?
Your ear on the same wavelength as a corrugated tin roof,
maybe you can see what I'm trying to say to you
if you close your eyes, and just listen to the rain without
trying too hard to make a big effortless effort to be
auditorily enlightened by the racket of your delusions.
I can't remember when my life stopped being my own
and I went to bed one night, and I was as human as my toes are
and I awoke, I was merely the afterbirth of a visionary
I didn't recognize, as my eyes were being igneously wrung
from a cope of dark ore like stars out of the distant hills.
Not a lot of self-respect from the beginning, maybe
it wasn't that hard becoming everyone and everything else,
and I was a prime candidate for effacement
but when I looked into the mirror of my
ten inch, equatorially mounted, clock-driven, reflecting telescope
I used like a canning jar to capture and mount stars and fireflies
on a black velvet starmap, all I could see
was this abyss staring back at me that couldn't say
where I'd gone, but the last I thought I heard
was that I got a job as a janitor in an hourglass
sweeping mirages out of a desert of private school stars.
I say what I see as it occurs to me spontaneously.
And I'm compelled to say it without hesitation
so the vision isn't tainted by the colour of the jewel
it's passing through, from one eye to the next, ad infinitum.
No light pollution in the shining, though there's something
about the idea of purity that continues to appal me
because I never had so much against chaos from the beginning
and I sense a deep hatred of all that is soiled and flawed,
in which case, I'd rather be an outlaw than one of these monks
who disdain me because I can't help seeing their discipline
as uncreatively redundant. Eventually, if they're blessed,
all our faces are going to fall off by themselves
like the scabs of sunspots that healed the wounded light
like a wildflower shedding its petals like nurses' caps
and deathmasks frozen like a moment in time meant
to last forever though we go on being estranged by them forever.
Uncanny transformations of the solid into the real.
Maybe it's time to let the mindstream flow as it will
and let the burning bridges of our delusions cross us for a change
to get to the other side of a life that's only got one bank
and it's as clear as space, we're not even standing on that.
Hang on. Let go. It's just your hand opening and closing
like a door in a dream, and you'll find your falling
just as fast as you ever were and if you were to ask your eyes
they couldn't tell in this vastness whether your were falling up or down.
When you've dismantled all you've desired,
post neo-deconstructionism sets in like spiritual rigor mortis
and you can't tell if you're sleeping with the living or the dead
when you haven't got your mask on. You can wear holes
in your shoes, and windows and carpets, pacing
like a waterclock of the heart in an hourglass of waiting
like a boy at the edge of the curb with his elbows on his knees
and his face in his glum hands, waiting for a parade
with sacred clowns throwing away free candies
like stars along the route of the mystic Milky Way.
Just be sure to keep your eyes open like a spring thaw
so the light can recognize you like the flower that brought it
to full illumination this time last year like a candle
that keeps blowing its petals out so you can see
the black matter of what you are not deeper
into the eyeless dark than you've ever bloomed before.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Flesh Your Spirit Out In Starmud
I flesh your spirit out in starmud. No creator.
No created. Between the leaf and the sky
I mix the colour of your eyes on the palette
of a rainbow that let's the darkness
sit at the same fire it does. Because the spirit is free.
I hang crescent moons from your earlobes.
I release the sacred deltas of small night creeks
into your veins, and talk to deserts on the moon
about the manes of sidereal lions for your hair.
I search the darkening hills at night for a black rose
with eyelids as cool as mushrooms, and lips,
that are more the wings of auguries, birds and bows
disappearing into the distance to imagine you
than they are the words and arrows
of a flightless heart dipped in stars that don't ignite.
I'm a blind man in a room, painting eyes,
trying to grow flowers out of last year's fragrances,
interpret every syllable and sacred pixel
of your red ochre glyphs of lipstick
I used to bury myself in when I lived in caves with bears
and rubbed the stuff all over my face
like blood and corn flowers under the hearthstone.
Now I'm a dragon rising from my urn of ashes
like a volcano of serpent-fire out of the chrysalis
of my crystal skull, looking for signs, hints, clues,
any whisper of linear B as to who you are
in the shadows of the sundials of the mountains
you go walking with at night with your dogs.
And the stars you must see in the clear-eyed desert
when the temperature drops and all you've got
to keep you warm from the inside out is not
you in my arms, but this small dropp of blood
in our chests, this cosmic thermometer of a heart
on the night ward of a perilous greenhouse.
And I went to a cactus with thorns like a voodoo doll
with oracular powers to ask about the shape
of the body I should root you in like an hourglass in sand
and she said to me, a rootless peach tree on the moon.
And ever since, I've touched your skin
with eyes at the end of my fingertips
like a new world gnostic gospel for the blind
that can see you in the flesh, naked, sublime
like a desert island it would be worth drowning for
just to be washed up on the curvature of your dunes
like a starfish when the mind comes back to its senses
like the first sign of life on the moon in a long time.
You emerge like wild irises of hydrogen out of
this cloud of unknowing, this cocoon of nebularity
like one star among many in an almost perfect vacuum.
I can see you. I can almost taste you. I can feel
your last lover trying to squeeze into the chrysalis
of the infinite straitjacket of your last exorcism
as if he'd finally run out of dawns as alibis
for why he didn't want to leave just yet. Who
hasn't stood in the doorway of Orion
sinking down in the west? For some
the threshold's the longest part of the journey
and they make a nadir of everything at zenith
by letting their horizons down like a crosswalk
waiting for a change of colour blind traffic lights
that don't know, for all that Stop. Go. Maybe so.,
anymore about passage than the road does
or a starmap that always certain of where it's going
but never has a reason why it should
jump the gun like a star and get ahead of its light
like a car on a long dark dusty country road at night,
one headlight out, trying not to hit a doe
in the glare of the sun at midnight
on its way out of town, whether that's up, down,
or omnidirectionally radiant as the Pleiades in tears.
Drift and mingle, merge, enhance,
dance, glance, shadow and glow,
still more ghost around you than I am a mirror,
I know what it means to be summoned to a seance
and not know what to wear. What lifemask to put on
like a Mason jar full of fireflies trying to decide
what constellation has the fewest short circuits in it
and is the least likely to lead anyone astray
when the lights go on and off like a fickle tranformer
or a Cepheid variable that was just born that way.
And here, now, your ears and your hands, your arms
and bones of your own that don't owe a thing
to anyone else's bird cage after the bird has flown.
And now I think I've got the eyes just right
but it's the heart calling its rivers back to it
like the sea I can't quite find the likeness of
even when I appeal to the most ancient galaxies
in the Hubble mirror for a similitude of love
that might serve as the understudy of a metaphor
in an expanding universe that keeps exceeding
the boundary stones of the stars at zenith
and even the chipped cup of the moon full
and a skull that used to juggle mirrors
like shattered insights into reality for those
so spiritually inclined at harvest time to listen
to the blue moonrise peering through the cedars
like an effulgent pearl of wisdom shedding her skin
like a mystic in rapture on the dark side she keeps to herself.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Fluctuation In The Cosmic Void
A fluctuation in the cosmic void,
a wink of atoms,
a fallen eyelash of light,
the seeing of a lifetime
nothing but candle vapour,
ghost-water on the moon,
the exhalation of a vagrant star
looking for its lost constellation
like a berry or a gem
that had wandered off road
from the vine of a crown.
The eye that regards all
as it rises like a blue mystic sun
over the morning eyelids
of the remote hills
waking up in the arms of their shadows
demands exposure of the sky,
a clarity pure enough for stars
as it turns the day over
like the palm of a hand
to reveal how our lifestreams
join and break
at the junction of sacred rivers.
And the vision,
the illusion of the way I see life,
the romantic intoning
into the bell of the abyss
for a hopeless beauty that died like a bird,
the lostness and the loneliness,
the unknown sorrow
that seems to bleed out of the air
like a black rose born to grieve
for the separations of long ago,
and the child in the brutal fire
that pleads at a window
weeping in the heat
for rescue from an afterlife without salvation,
all that the heart features
in the deepest silence of the night,
nothing but the auroral trash
of an over ionized mind
trying to touch its own burns tenderly.
Until I became the knowing
even my own ignorance
didn't recognize me.
Until I vastly improved
the integrity of my lies,
every mirror I looked into
like a woman's eyes
was corrupt,
the prelude to a death certificate
in lipstick, a thorn of honey
that dripped like the fangs of the moon
with mysterious toxins and elixirs
that could scald and bleach the heart
or restore it with the kiss of a silver herb
grown in the garden of a cool eclipse.
My bitterness and fear
have made me less susceptible
to the empty boats that arrive
to take me on like some kind of foreign export,
a cargo of ashes and stars,
the bodybags
of the casualties and refugees
that perished in an unknown holy war of one
that I can't stop waging
against a universe that won't let me in,
but my solitude
could defeat me with a feather,
could shock the fool I am to hide
with the shadow of a wing
breaking the spell of this birdless sky
that seems to go on forever beyond the wind
like a caravan of rain
that's outwalked the longest known road
into a wilderness
of rootless trees in big city back alleys.
When the rose
has been stripped down to its claws and horns,
how few have the eyes
to keep yearning?
Let me drown in tears of fire,
in wells of thoughtful quicksand,
rack me on the iron in my blood
and stub my cherished stars out
like angry pincers applied to my feet
like a firewalk through a snakepit
and I will confess to nothing
but an earnest ignorance,
I will not betray the abyss
where I buried myself like nuclear waste.
I will remain true
to the merciless emptiness
I uttered to myself like a vow
I didn't know if I could keep
four decades ago.
Now I lay my head down to dream
on a stone pillow full of stars
that shine like rare metals in the night,
and when I wake
I seem to know less
about everything it took me a lifetime to master
than when I first
abandoned my eyes
like oceans on the moon to see
inconceivably, what has become of me in my absence.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Eyes In The Shadows, In Blood, In Space
Eyes in the shadows, in blood, in space, incubating the light
that has yet to be born, wild asters in the deflowered fields of death,
and the return of the living out of the eyeless abyss, delinquent,
and a redness in the air of this September night,
saturating it like a deep wound it holds under its breath,
a black rose, a fossilized thorn that no longer grows old,
memories fixed like crucified bats to the sticky brown stars
of the fanatical burdock trying to wear me like a starmap
as if every day of my life has felt like the approach of autumn
watching the constellations turn like the pages of a calendar,
a waterclock of new moons flowing like dark matter,
sundials at midnight encircling me like shark fins
slashing the water like sabres with surgical precision
and their eyes, oblivion, a focus of shadows, perennial night
after a supernova of dismemberment, dehumanizing horrors
in a hydrodynamic abattoir. Spirits of old root fires
smelling of pine and cedar at large in the dark like hunting magic.
And the clouds a wolf pack of shapeshifters among the stars,
the exhilaration of spiritual wariness out in the woods alone at night
where it's unwise to trust anything too beautiful at first sight,
and a sudden flash of inspired self-destructive courage
to do just that in protest of the abuse of beauty as a Venus fly trap.
But it's not hard to tell a real muse from a false one
because a real muse never wastes her passion on the sane,
and if there isn't an occult side to a poet who works his madness
like a medium in the dark he had to sacrifice his eyes to see
beyond the visuals of the retinas and the cameras
with lizard eyelids that blink like guillotines, into
these visionary realms where galaxies are shed
like the feathers of migrating swans, gravity's gone,
and if you want to go up, you've got to go up without a parachute on.
Mystic physics. The illogic of the heart delighting
in the absurdity of itself just because it can and you can hear
a sword master of black Zen singing his heart out in a brothel:
A good heretic never disciplines his disobedience.
The brutal moon offers me the cup of my own skull
and says drink, and I know it's death to hesitate
because you lose control of everything in the moment
if you do, so I drink it like an elixir of dark tears
from the eye of the shark in eclipse, and I peer
into the black mirror of a midnight lake to see
if I'm still alive or dead, and the mirror breaks
like the unleavened bread of a gnostic gospel in my hands,
wholly enraptured by a spell I wasn't ready to wake up from,
and I can feel the lustrous radiance of a light
so inconceivably darker than the one I go by
like a shadow of that, the ferocity of the clarity
immolates my heart with a terrible joy
in a prophetic furnace of hot diamonds
that howl like the insights of a firestorm of dragons in extasis
breaking out of their cosmic shells like stars out of the void
shining out of the dark heart of things within
like eyes seasoned by compassion
for the low hanging bells and fruits of the earth
trying to express the infinite solitude between birth and death
where we walk alone together forever with everyone
and everything, like pilgrims sleepwalking
in the unattainable dream that animates us all
to keep on divining the inspired limitations of the impossible.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You Can Aim Your Shining But Better To Burn Like A Star
You can aim your shining but better to burn like a star.
A calm continuous explosion. Just like the Big Bang
before dark energy entered the scene
and things started to get interesting
as they accelerated. Space grows.
More light years between stars
until the last firefly goes out like a nightwatchman.
Everything's like that, people, love affairs, gardens
at the end of summer, suicides, girls
that have never worn purple before, wisdom
and the love of knowledge, honour in a life of crime,
flying carpets that never made it any further than the windows,
fruit trees, the eyes of luck fixed on a starmap of dice.
Everything's evaporating into a breathless abyss.
One day every cell in my body is going to feel
like the lone survivor of a homeless colony on the moon.
The trees, the birds, the stars, everything will have
transcended itself spontaneously including
any heaven, afterlife or reincarnation,
or even long oblivious eras lost among the molecules,
you might have planned on as a pit stop along the way
gone with nobody left to know it.
Especially when I'm down by the river at night
in the early fall, and the air is pungent with duff
after a rain that really messed up bookbinding the leaves
and the stars are moving to their winter grazing grounds,
I feel it more than think it like a deep wound in my heart
this inclusive sadness for everything that has ever been
or is and yet to be. And I want justice now
for generations that have yet to be born
and though it's as elusively numinous
as trying to make out what constellation
the fireflies are trying to shape out of the valley fog
after a lightning storm has just passed over
and everything is as clean and disordered
as the dishevelled bouquets of the wildflowers
beside the singing ditches and in the vetch bound fields,
it seems like a desecration to have arrayed
all this beauty, these woods, my eyes, Arcturus and Aldebaran,
even the anti-mystic details of the history of war
we keep a record of to consider ourselves civilized,
and all the hurt, the sorrows, the disappointments, the sacrifices
and even in the way we born to love each other like appetites,
all that and more reaching out to attain the unattainable
and then the startling realization, like a mirror
recognizing its own twin in a crowd of unrelated reflections
you are the abandoned crocodile that grew up
in a slum of radioactive slurry, and at this time of year,
when the wild grapevines are ripening like shepherd moons
with life-sustaining seas under methane ice-caps
and dusty mauve cataracts, without an eyelash of distinction
you are the wine that life is intoxicated upon
and extinction is a kind of trance we go into when it's time to sober up.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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True Love Takes Time
This song was first released on the one world album. it is the only album it has been released on.
As I travel down the road and search the empty sky
Waiting for the moment when my eyes will see
Many are the memories the mysteries of time
How they dance around and whisper endlessly
Yes Ive travelled down this road before
Where so many men have come and gone
But you know it takes time
(true love takes time)
You know that true love takes time
(true love takes time)
And its so very hard to find
(true love takes time)
You know that love takes time
It seemed impossible that I could care again
So it seemed I had forgotten how to give
What is this miracle that brings me back my dreams
All at once I can remember how to live
Yes Ive travelled down this road before
Where so many men have come and gone
But you know it takes time
(true love takes time)
You know that true love takes time
(true love takes time)
And its so very hard to find
(true love takes time)
You know that true love takes time
I have been too much alone for oh so many years
Looking for someone to sing with me
Sweet harmony
My heart is open now and tender to the touch
But there is love enough to heal me in your hands
Ill give you all my nights
All my sun and rainy days
Ill give you all the time it takes to understand
Weve travelled down this road before
Where so many fools have come and gone
But you know it takes time
(true love takes time)
You know that true love takes time
(true love takes time)
And its so very hard to find
(true love takes time)
You know that true love takes time
(true love takes time)
(true love takes time)
(true love takes time)
Words by dik dernell and john denver, music by dik dernell
song performed by by John Denver
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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A Thousand Years From Now
A thousand years from now
who will remember me
once I've disappeared from this windowpane,
a vapour of breath with awareness,
a nebular stain on the clarity
that will wash its hands of me
like a scar of water that has clung too long?
I'm not trying to embalm
the elegiac content of these obvious sunsets in words,
and it's hard to shake honey out of these mordant bells
that lie like duplicitous lifeboats to the gullible compasses and maps
that keep crashing like doves that don't have the wingspan
to come back with news of land
to this museum of DNA, two of every kind,
I keep scuttling like an ark on the top of every wave.
And what is a grave if not an abandoned embassy
that didn't have time to shred its dreaded secret?
And sometimes, when the emptiness and the silence
are beyond bearing,
I hold myself up like a passport at the panicked gates
that have made me an exile and a wounded threshold in my own home
and clamour like a continent
to be repatriated anywhere
that isn't a country whose borders are stretched out like refugee lines.
But it's a foolish wish.
And if there's a dragon to slay,
I realize it's only more shadows and swordplay,
and I think of the return of the rain lifted from the sea
and how the sea never feels anything is missing,
and everything is passage without arrival or departure
and how the arrow never leaves the hand of a good archer.
It's human nature to understand,
a sacred mode of disobedience
to look into the eyes of our worst fears
even if it's just to flare like a star without rescue
and scream out in light a moment against its own extinction.
But who or what or nothing is ever there to listen
as we go out like flies and stars in a toilet bowl?
And a love of laws is not the law of love
and there have been so many dragons
left out of the chrysales of their questions like answers
that the heart is not sustained by the impersonal blessing
of ubiquitous entropy in a long, lab coat
as the spirit longs for transformations
a star and a night beyond itself
that might astonish a human
with something enduringly human
like a next breath that can't be smudged by death
or something drastic in the dust that remembers us
when we were stars
that thawed through the windowpane
as if we were looking through the lenses of our own eyes
to discover everything we live is how we die
and we're always a plight and a plea away from knowing why.
Imagine, one night, looking up at the sky
and there were no death to raise the moon
like a calendar above your neck,
and everything you saw around you,
crows, kites, keys,
last year's pine cones on this year's trees,
were not denuded of their mystic specificity
in this mortal profusion of origins
that ends where it begins. Imagine,
one morning, not getting up from the dream
to pan the mindstream for the nugget of a skull
that might be gold, and the luster of the radiance
never grows old like the taste of the moon in your mouth.
Wouldn't this onceness then be eternal,
and what I'm saying now, indelible
as the space that prompts the stars to shine?
Learning wisdom is learning the universe
as if it were your own face, on the inside,
and you were its only eyes,
disappearing from view so that all that remains is you.
Birth, a breathing in; death, a breathing out,
before the first and after the last, this pulse and suspiration,
muses around the wellspring, witches around the cauldron,
planets fluttering like moths
at the windows of the constellations. Like the moon
I pass my hand over like an eclipse as if it were my own skull,
I have been creatively maintained from the start by my own expiration.
Are there no orchards in the hearts of old women?
Are there no graves in the eyes of a child?
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You Can't Embrace Me With Your Moderate Love
You can't embrace me with your moderate love
as if two arms were one too many to give someone a hug,
or one eye were enough to look at the stars in your lover's eyes,
and make up constellations you've never seen before.
I've never fallen in love with anyone who ever
made my whole body feel like it was a ghost amputee
who had never gotten over the memory of having one.
You can't read Braille without fingertips.
And it's either brave and suicidally noble, or something
drastically real about me but I've always preferred
the dark, dangerous muse, to the sunny cheerleader
who cut the bananas into my cereal just for the potassium.
No moon. No music. No slumming in heaven
when we take every other nightshift off from hell
and then walk out on the job permanently like a Tarot deck
to see how it feels to be a shipwreck on the bottom of a prophecy
that foretold, one day, swimmers and drowners alike
would be in it way up over their heads. And that's
when I learned to count on my heart
like an overturned lifeboat to keep things afloat
for me and anyone I love who went into exile beside me.
Got to be ancient starmaps in her eyes
like the return address of extraterrestials
who promised to come back one day
and make crop circles in the hay together.
And fireflies for back up in the long dark halls
of what we were reading when the stars went out
and we opened up to each other about our secret research
into the comparative mythology of each other's psyche.
Even at high noon I want to look out of the corner of my eye
and see in the depths of her silence, stars
hiding out in the shadows on the bottom of her wishing wells
and know that she's ok at either end of the telescope.
And I'll show her the sun shining at midnight
and the moon among the corals, and come up like a pearl diver
with new metaphors to show her how I can still see her radiance
like a lunar eclipse in a mystic moon rise just behind
the guile of her veils and the eyelashes of her tree line.
And there shall be no shadow upon the earth
that she casts behind her that shall remain starless.
And it must be well understood from the very start
that you can't put the wing of an eagle on one side of the heart
and that of a sparrow on the other, even less so, a dragon,
and expect it to fly very good or straight to the mark.
And no broken arrows of the promises
we make to each other at a rain dance for the waters of life.
And no sipping from the river when there's a chance
to swallow it all in a single gulp and satisfy all wells at once
without getting the waterbirds stuck in our throats
like the high notes of sacred syllables above the reach
of the black swans that live in our chimneys for free.
By all means, I want to see the light
but coming out of the dark like a nightbird
with a message that wasn't meant for anyone else.
She can be swarmed by faeries, she can
live on a menu of mushrooms and toadstools,
all the soft gilled things without hooks in them she wants
I don't care, as long as she includes
a banshee or two scratching at her wings like windows
to be let in to the inner sanctum of her devotion
like a black candle at a white mass for wounded voodoo dolls.
And if she wants me to jump through her wilderness fires
to satisfy her occult desires in a coven of one
that's ok too as long as she's enough of a firemaster
to know when I've been done well. Not medium rare.
And I won't have things fifty-fifty, a hundred and fifty percent
and a hundred and fifty percent, or die in the attempt,
because anything less than that is nothing at all.
Love when it comes to the hour of gates, becomes
the best of the other in the leaving, as your lover
absorbs in the turn-counterturn-stand of the perennial dance
things about you she loved at first glance, jewels and virtues,
and all the wildflowers a suffering soul puts out with generosity
that were meant for her eyes only, even you
couldn't see in yourself at the time because even
among the most enlightened of us, the deepest insight
into ourselves as embodiments of thoughtless reality
is always blind. And if you couldn't find what you wanted
together, you always find it under your pillow
once the other who left it like a parting gift is gone.
Don't want anyone after we've broken up
who doesn't know how to honour the memory of what we tried
to be to each other before we outgrew what we meant
when we vowed to console our loss of happiness
with peace and a gentle release of the moon
like a blossom from a dead branch in the middle of winter.
She can come to me flawed, she can come to me wounded.
She can come to me like an apostate sunflower
who wandered off the beaten path to follow the moon.
Selfless as we all are behind our delusions of probity
who remains to be a judge of character except
the most doubtful and disdainfully vain among us?
Let the death masks argue it out among themselves
who is real and who is not, who's been true and who forgot,
as for me and my house, I'd rather be loved than right.
I'd rather have my lover's head in my lap at the end of the night,
or mine in hers. I'd rather stand beside her
and look up at the stars together as if they knew
more about us than us about them, than feel them
hemorrhaging like supernovae in both our eyes
arguing like medieval theologians painting
a picture on the third eye of the telescope
we're looking at through both lenses simultaneously
eye to eye, tooth to tooth, one false idol to the other,
squabbling over whose lop-sided view of the paradise
we planted to live in together, is most worthy of worship,
the hunter or the farmer, the hunter or the farmer,
keeping in mind women invented agriculture.
Intrigue me, berate me, teach, upgrade, or refute me,
just let me feel your hand when I suffer
as if it were the wing of a bird
I was scrying aviomantically to see
if it had healed enough to fly, to make
my homelessness a big enough sky for her
to spread her wings in and wheel
on the passionate thermals of joy
that arise within me like double helices of inspiration.
And in return, I would promise her to never think
I'd found an answer to her mystery, or a reply
to the silences that abound within her
like nightbirds that just won't answer.
And if she's not in her shrine when I come to lay
a bouquet of stars at the foot of her temple stairwells,
or off at a coven somewhere with the Horned One,
trying to get a handle on my polyphrenic diversity
that can speak to the angels as well as the demons in tongues.
Shapeshifter though I may be, I promise her
by the time she gets home she'll always recognize me
in the form that most becomes her. I've always thought
that death was shorter than life, because
death isn't lived through even for a moment and if
anything lasts forever anywhere, it's right here
where we can dance like rootless trees to the songs of the nightbirds
and listen to the squirrels in the walls in the morning
stacking black walnuts like prophetic skulls,
and reach out to the waterlilies like dragonflies
that know how to interpret them like loveletters on the sly.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Haze Of Dust On The Windowpanes
A haze of dust on the windows at dusk,
cataracts glowing in the epiphanous sun
that leaves the night coming on like a door ajar
for the light to get out on its own like a cat.
And the next moment all the eyes
that were on the road to Damascus
blinded by a revelation are returned
from the darkness of their clarity
to their normal muddy mundane vision
and I can see the birch groves from here
upping their quota of white canes on the nightshift.
And isn't it strange how things emerge
from one mindscape into the next
like a serpent shedding its skin
like a sky it's been consulting about wings,
or the effortless birth sacs of the dragons
who have made the same transition
from the lowest of things to the highest
like a flying doctor bearing true north?
Polaris and Draco wrapped around
the tilted axis of the earth as if it were
the sign of a caduceus in the hand of a messenger
that says night is the best time to heal
and leaves us to the moonlit herb gardens
we planted in the spring of our dreams
when wild crocuses where just beginning
to poke their innocent noses through the snow?
Now the dark when the magicians come out
and the bats and the stars, and the fairies
are enthroned on their mushrooms and sacred stones
and retinal responses to reality
turn visionary in their pursuit
of an earthly excellence of their own
that doesn't belittle them again
as the gods and goddesses of a world of their own.
And me, I'm sitting here alone
wondering if I do empty myself of myself
so perfectly there's no one left to tell me
I've finally become no one fit enough
to lift the veils of Isis without expecting
to find just another starmap in hiding.
Or if I've rinsed myself clean enough of myself
to be washed from her eyes in tears
that fall like mirrors of mercury
in a fever of mystic thermometers
stuck under my tongue
like the silver bird bone flutes
of the perennial theme songs
I've been offering to ferrymen
in lieu of the obol of the full moon,
my penny in a wishing well,
to pay for my passage into death and back
like an enlightened return journey of a poet
who knows how to find his way home on his own
like a prophetic Orphic skull.
Ride the dragon. Play the flute of fire.
Cast a spell on the winter sunset
and take it off again in spring. O
inestimable nothing
what could I ask of the flower
that I didn't receive from the leaf?
It takes a rootless tree
to show you the way home.
But it doesn't take a road to know you've left.
I can hear my eyes weeping behind a deathmask.
Early wood sorrel under a leaf of duff.
Venus is in my rain washed window,
closer than blood could ever be.
The sky thinks it's a strutting peacock
but I know I painted that window
well over a year ago when I grew weary
of being myself like a stage without a play.
Do you know me yet? Can't you tell
when the roses bloom in the palm of my hand
like the stigmata of a starfish on the moon,
I'm the lost cause of a shadow
demanding more of the light
than a sacred clown on a burning ladder
could possibly know what to do with?
Meagre, meagre me. What immensities
I aspire to with a broken bouquet of arrows
like stalks of wheat in Virgo after a hailstorm.
I am not the slayer. I am not the slain.
I don't hold the crescent moon up to my jugular vein.
Or cut the throats of poppies to milk the dream.
And I don't care a hair for the difference
between the enlightened and insane.
I look at Venus through my windowpane
and the window's clean. Burn white. Burn silent.
Express yourself, but don't ask it to mean
anything more than you are to yourself
when no one's home, including you,
and you're shining for someone else.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I'm Having An Unrequited Love Affair With Myself
I'M HAVING AN UNREQUITED LOVE AFFAIR WITH MYSELF
I'm having an unrequited love affair with myself.
It's surrealistically ironic and spiritually annihilating
at the same time, and I can say from personal experience
black holes have a profound sense of humour.
The waterlilies look up at the stars and wonder
if they could shine like that if they ever dried out.
Fire and water. The serpent fire of my electrical potential
jumps the gap like a spinal cord, a bridge is made.
Spiders weave enlightened filaments in a light bulb
like webs of neuronic wiring into dream catchers
and empowering mandalas. I have ignition.
Billions of eyes light up in the dark like fireflies.
I always thought if I really wanted to do the world some good,
I'd lead it away from myself. My alter-ego
shines like a demon in a dark light whose intelligence
is intent on ruining my life compassionately
out of a begrudging respect for sacred rodeo clowns
with red geraniums sticking out of their straw sun hats
like pathetic solar flares of blood trying to wave a red flag
to draw the bullshit off a Pacific mystic Zen cowboy
about to be gored by a horn of the moon in her crone phase.
All the women I've ever loved, lived, left and will live with
on these thresholds of the sublime and the ridiculous
like a seance that can see a future in calling things back from time,
have come to me in an aura of dark energy
like a poem in a dream expanding into space.
Or you could see Ophelia under her deathmask
drowning in wounded flowers. Two witches,
an apostate madonna, one ferocious priestess
from the dark side of the moon, one incubus,
one lamia, a Medusa, a delusional gold-digger
who kept working me like a motherlode
although I told her from the first all you're going to find here
is the slag of meteoric ore that's been mined out.
The last thing I heard her say when I left her
singing like a canary in the belly of an anaconda,
as I climbed out of the grave she was digging for both of us,
was, I thought you were rich. No, I replied,
a little taken aback at my innocence at this late date,
I just gave you everything I had
because I thought it would make you happy
if I gave you what you asked. Who else
should I have given it too if not you? Good-bye,
with blessings on your house and head,
that erotically upgraded body of yours
and all your excellent possessions.
I'm going to sleep with a bridge tonight
that knows there's two sides to every river
holding hands secretly under the mindstream
and the bird can't fly when it's a lapwing
trying to lure danger away from its cosmic eggs
and all the other wing's doing is flapping its lips.
And one Female Principle of the World
that needed me to help her incarnate in bed.
Muses all. Eclipses and full moons alike.
Eras of my life. Legends of my genome.
Each a different planet with a physics of her own.
And me the mere scaffolding of bones,
the passionate snakes and ladders
they climbed up on to paint their picture-music
on the ceiling of esoteric pantheons
where the goddess is always the pearl, black or white,
and when I know what's best for me,
I'm the big-mouthed lunar oyster shell
gaping at the moonrise in desire and wonder
dying to say what leaves me more speechless than silence.
Never knew a woman who wasn't a sky higher
than my wingspan, a sea deeper than my wisdom
despite the oceanic commotion on the surface.
I was always a continental ledge shy of their depths,
and even though I knew how to swim my way
through the darkest diamonds as easily as I did the night,
I've always considered it spiritual bad manners
and an abuse of grace, if I've paused to listen
to a mermaid singing to me, and I haven't drowned
in applause for her as soon as the song is over.
If you're not willing to die for the picture-music
you're just another flatlining event horizon
looking for a lifeboat like a whole note with a tin ear
that can't hear you singing like the fog horn
of a dinosaur mired in a tarpit like a keyboard of bones.
You don't ask a goddess to be a sacrifice.
Your heart gouged out like an organ donor to the moon
you lay it while it's still beating like a bleeding ruby
on her temple stairs and by that she'll know
you were a real king of the waxing year
and eat it like the forbidden fruit of enlightenment
when the jewel is in the lotus like a dragonfly
in a waterlily, and she smears your blood like lipstick
on the petals of a rose that worked witchcraft
with the flavours of life and love she left in my mouth.
Most of the time there's no interrogative scorpion
of bitterness up my sleeve of stinging nettles,
nor in her shoe when I put her crystal slipper back on,
having just removed a splinter of glass from the paw of a lion
I hope will remember my kindness if we're ever
in the Colosseum together as audience to the act
instead of predator and prey of the fact
that the asters at the end of summer that we cherish most
are adorned by time in a romantic rite of passage
and then apotheosized as constellations of the autumn
approaching our lingering ghosts like a seance
of the fruits of the earth that all fell in their own good time
singularly, or a windfall in the night, sweetened by our ordeals
as if our hearts had always been bears in a beehive
of rapture and loss and paper wasps
getting mystically hammered on our tears
like the lightyears of life that have aged like stars in our eyes.
I can still taste the mystery of the dark mirrors
we held up to each other like synchronous swimmers,
that deepened so many insights into the strangeness of human nature,
even long after we entered the abyss of the future
like empty urns, I swear, there's still a dragon in my ashes
that rises up like a pillar of fire or a solar flare,
an eternal flame, a sudden efflorescence of stars,
and makes a deep, sweeping bow to the women I have loved
who left me these gloves of moonlight
glowing on my windowsill when I'm alone in the dark.
And I can hear the Canada geese heading south,
and I remember how vast and eyeless the sky is
when exhausted lovers part like frayed mindstreams
trying to flow past the sacred junction where two rivers meet
without realizing the mingling of their waters is indelible
and it's hard to find reverse in a universe
that just keeps on going the same way
in this time and place, this now and here
the same path of thorns and rose petals
that everyone walks like the wind in love,
leads everywhere like fireflies trying to read a starmap
from the past, that's left its future far behind
trying to catch up to what it just let go of
like an almagest of prophetic zodiacs to come
longing for the Beast Mistress of the animal kingdom
to make them jump through their burning hoops again
like moondogs or the black haloes of comets
that keeping falling through the coronas of the sun,
or a dragon dancing in the ripples of the rain
after it's just swallowed the moon like the cosmic glain.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Slow Dancing With The Moon
Sweet little cherry blossom, blooming before her time
Moving her lips to her favorite song, cherishing every rhyme
Swaying her hips to the rhythm, humming along with the tune
Lost in her own little dream world, slow dancing with the moon
Watching her I cannot help but go back in my mind
And suddenly I find I am 15 again
Slow dancing with the moon
Oh, the stars got in my eyes long time ago
And Ive lived my life like a love sick clown
In a bittersweet cartoon
Just a dreamy-eyed kid slow dancing with the moon
Watching the girl Im reminded shes quite a lot like me
Trapped in the suburbs of wonderland, lost in her own fantasy
Somehow my heart never grew up, no one ever burst my balloon
So here I am swirling in star dust slow dancing with the moon
Still believe someday my wildest dreams will all come true
And Ill find someone wholl make me 15 again
But until then Im slow dancing with the moon
Oh, the stars got in my eyes long time ago
And Ive lived my life like a love sick clown
In a bittersweet cartoon
Just a dreamy-eyed kid slow dancing with the moon
Tag:
Still a starry-eyed kid slow dancing with the moon
song performed by by Dolly Parton
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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You Never Became A Memory
You never became a memory.
You remain as you are in my life.
A living compassionate presence.
I have forgotten more of me
than I ever could of you.
Whenever I want to see beyond the light
I see through your eyes
everything you wanted to show me
that was not petty or tragic or cruel.
I was a profound fool
but you taught me how
to add my darkness to the night
to enhance the shining.
And even now
when things aren't flowering well
I still reach out for you by deepening my roots.
As if I could touch your face again
like a muse of water
lost in her own reflection.
As if I could ignite the same fires again
that blossomed on the dead branch
of the witching wand
that inspired the stars
who thought they had seen everything
to marvel at their own perfection in you.
Inspiratrix of the blue waterstars
that burned like chandeliers
among the constellations of the lilies
pluming themselves like swans
in the feathers of the moon,
how I long to be eclipsed and enlightened again
like a chameleon reflecting the mood of your beauty
as I did before these windows came
like glass-eyed calendars between us
to prove that time isn't space. It's pain.
And change is an absolute
that doesn't like its relatives.
My angel misses you.
My demon misses you
so badly at times
I can't look into the abyss for long
without impeaching my mind
for its awareness of an emptiness
that aches like an existential absurdity
to be put out of its misery
for being born blind deaf and dumb
about whose wind on the waters is rocking
the cradles and crucibles of creation.
The Medusa holds her tits out
like snakepits and grails
and I never know which one to drink from
or if the poison and the antidote
are just the opposite fangs of the moon
as it grows through its waxing and waning
as if a physician found a way
of healing herself
by sloughing her wounds like skin.
The mindstream weaves its way at night
like a garden snake
through myriad blades of grass
like the shuttle of a loom
that doesn't know what theme of life
unspools in the flowing.
And my eyes miss you like light.
I'm a lighthouse on the shore of a dead sea
trying to walk on water like the moon
as the waves chip away at me
like shale flakes off the cold stone
that edges slowly through my heart like a thorn.
And it may make a king of me
to draw the sword out of the stone
but that doesn't close the wound
of having first to fall upon it
to vacate my throne with honour.
If life is the truth
then lying is the only way
to describe death to a god
who doesn't understand it.
What's a church without gravestones?
Aspiration without an expiry date?
And so many different kinds of death
not enough generations of humans
have been born yet to know them all.
Death tries to trivialize the relative
as if the things I miss most about you
had never been.
But your mindwaters are mingled with mine inextricably
like the shoreless starstreams of space
panning for planets in our flowing
we might live on
and have our being and our breath
unblighted by loss. Separation. Death.
And there is no more of the sadness
I used to see in your eyes
as if they were my own
that I still see everywhere in the eyes of all living things
when I know as you would have had me know
as clearly as you did
that even though the neverness
of implacable circumstances and lost last chances
may have separated us like the threads of the rope
you used to climb up to heaven before me
like one who took the short-cut
and one who took the long way home through these starfields
taking his painful time
like the unfulfilled hope of a child
he's not alone when he opens his eyes
like a dream within a dream
that looks but can't find him,
you can polish the missing into a mirror
and wait like a fox by a black hole for things to appear
that will never be the same again
or you can open your tears like windows
and let out the birds of pain
that I have kept as close to me
as the whisper of your voice
in this cold, dark chimney
telling me to let you go as I do now
to rejoice on the dead branch and the green bough
like the flower and flame
of what became of us.
We cannot be the song or the singer
for very long
as our voices dim like candles in the darkness
that have given it all away.
And as you used to say
as if it would always be today without you
and all we have given is all we could keep of each other
like water returned to the river
we raised to our lips to taste
the sad, last drops
of these eyeless elixirs of the moon
that linger like vapours
in the empty goblets of the morning glory,
and I need to believe you more than I do
in this neverness of now
that has come before me without a beyond
or a word from all that has irrevocably gone.
Yes. But the singing. That goes on.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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Under the same moon.
Under the same moon. (poem/storyline)
Separated by Miles,
True love strengthens by distance,
Two hands longing to be held,
Two hearts -Beating as one,
Two pairs of eyes,
See beyond the world,
The sky...Is not the sky,
The moon...Is not the moon,
The stars...Are not the stars,
But a gateway,
A runaway,
To being together,
Bonding as one,
both stare onto the clearing of the moon,
They see each other in the sky,
They stare upon it,
They feel, they realize
Their not alone, But standing face to face,
To find love under the moonlight,
Distance relives but shares the same sky,
The towns people are silent and asleep,
Only two names, one boy, one girl-
Exist as the waxing gibbous turns full,
Seconds pass by fast,
Her hand touches his heart,
His hand touches hers,
A sudden movement,
They are holding each other,
Locking hands and eyes,
Every night they visit the same moon,
Just to be with each other,
The morning slowly breaks the dark,
the sun takes over the moon,
Til' this day the moon has never gone,
But is hiding to come again every night,
to bring two together,
Years past,
the moon still never gone,
what was once a little boy, and once a little girl,
grow older,
They're skin wrinkles,
eye sight fades,
strength dims,
bones weaken,
But now together-
two look in each others eyes,
searching for the past,
for now and old woman,
and an old man,
Still holding each others hand.
That night they both go to heaven,
Together,
But as the moon shall come again,
there they will stand,
Together,
As a little boy and girl.
Holding each other,
under the same moon.
poem by Danie Babcock
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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