En.Citatepedia^®.ro

When My Heart Isn't A Hummingbird

When my heart isn't a hummingbird on a keyboard,
it's a spider on a guitar. The long fingers of a surgeon
my mother used to say, the air bright with potential
and the creature with a purpose, a future it meant,
a destiny it was born to fulfil like a chain reaction.
Now it's an error of evolution just to make it through another day.

And nights, sidereal ballerinas leaping like Cygnus at zenith
over the toxic wavelengths in this snakepit of street life.
Blessings on everyone's head, I've shed a few lives of my own,
but I mean the nights, sometimes the nights,
scatter my own ashes over my head in mourning
like a nuclear winter that won't let me forget.

Now there's nothing perennial about my paradigms
and the flowers don't grow as imperial as they used to.
Ferocious weeds spring up among the downtrodden
and swarm the gardens of the sun-king, the cattails
impaled, and the heads of the poppies on pikes by the gate.
I'm looking for new moons in the calendars of chaos
to sow the teeth of a dragon under. Soil made vintage
by the dissolution of the dead who are buried in me
as I keep on living their deaths like an impossible ending
to a recurring dream I haven't woken up from in years.

Red alert. Don't climb higher than the mountain is tall
unless you've got a star in your eye you're going to follow
for the rest of your denatured life. But no one's listening.
They're all taking polls of bad examples on talent shows.
Can't stand the artificial lights or the trained hilarity
of the audience defrocking sacred clowns at a cult ritual.
But I found a flap at the back of the circus tent
I like to slip out through and let the darkness
wash the patina of blazing out of my eyes
and encounter six thousand stars whose shining
ease the mind by enlightening its unique insignificance.

I like to blunder my way into places alone
where who I am is nobody's business but the willows
and they're not saying anything to the wind
that's heard it all before. One moment you're the canvas
and the next you're a paint rag up to your alligators
in muddy oils trying to save an orchid from its own hysteria.
If there's any rafter of my life left standing
it's as fragile as a compass needle wobbling on a thorn.
One moment you're teaching spiders to play the guitar
without barring their chords, and get rid of
those old harps of theirs that have been collecting in the corner
like dreamcatchers they couldn't hold a note
if it were a velcro butterfly, and the next
you're boiling strings like spinal cords in a bird bath.

But alone, where there's no assent or denial,
and the false redeemers are orphaned
in their baskets and mangers among the hay and bull rushes,
I can juggle the crazy wisdom of myriad worlds
bubbling up in my blood like a playful multiverse
without dropping one of them, and swallow the swords
the moon lays down on the lake in tribute.
No blackboards in my freedom. No chalk fossils
among my crayons, I have been schooled
in the ghettos and still life studios of my solitude.

Here where the river emerges from a larynx of dead trees
I can think my way into the most open-minded modes of death
without having to turn around and go home again
or forget I'm just an organ of light that makes things visible
for anyone with an eye to spare, or the time
to listen to the picture-music where their senses meet
like parallel lives that have suddenly come into focus.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Could Bring You A Shattered Windowpane

I could bring you a shattered windowpane,
I could bring you a musical whip that's been trained
to read the stops of your flute
and how your fingers move like windproof spiders.
I could bring you the red brick of dried blood
that was left of my heart when I threw it through the window,
and it broke into a thousand chips of rose petals
that shed like flakes of dried paint off the eyelids
of a revolution that hasn't woken up yet
to finish what it started in a recurring dream
of mystic junkies flagging their fits
until Faustus sees Christ's blood
streaming across the firmament like mother's milk.

Should I ever come to know you well enough
to let you drink from my hidden starwell in my field of view,
I could raise your spirits up like a candelabra
to be whatever constellation you wanted
among all these myriad stars dying to be given a focus.
And if at first you didn't know where you were, I'd be your locus
until you got your sea legs on the moon,
and learned to walk on fire without getting burned.

You could be the punk mermaid who beguiled
the seasoned sailor of my oceanic awareness
you were still flinging your nets far and wide over
like spatial tides of ionized wavelengths
keeping time with the stars in a Babel of voices
that stratified the lyrics of the seven visible celestial spheres
that could be seen with the naked eye
like the black grammar of the multiverse
trying to keep the light in some kind of context.

And if I drowned to compliment your singing.
You could write a biography of bubbles
about my life and times in the depths with you
and I'd be happy to sign it in the cursive spring
of the year's first seance to prove
every word I've said to you is a cult of the true,
even before I began to write secret loveletters to you
in the nebulae and clouds of unknowing in the stars
that precipitated out of my breath on a glacial windowpane
of an ice age that couldn't thaw fast enough
for me to open my eyes and see you shining
in ten thousand lakes all at the same time
like the orbits of a prophetic skull at vernal equinox.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Muskrat Skull, Albino Asteroid, Chunk of the Moon

Muskrat skull, albino asteroid, chunk of the moon
fallen to earth, ivory doorknob picked clean
by ants and wolves, half your teeth stacked like books
on a shelf behind the crescent moons of your fangs
and their reflections, as above so below,
that don't quite meet in the middle of the bridge
you're building like an engineer with overbite.
When I look down upon your cranium from above it's
a beautiful amphora, handles like arms at its side,
a woman hoisting her long skirt up to cross a river.

Musquash, you must be a holy food if they let the Catholics
eat you at Lent in place of fish because you spend
so much of your time aquatically. Do the wolves,
the owls, the foxes, the mink, the hawks, the fishers,
the feral dogs know they're enlightened
by the flesh of your body? You, alone, of all
the animals who tried and failed, the Gabriel
of the native creation myth that touched bottom
to bring back the starmud that made the earth,
the Gilgamesh of these Canadian wetlands.
Did a rat snake steal your herb of immortality
from the shrines of the cattails you build
at the water's edge, the bigger the harsher
the winter to come, like siloes you can take shelter in?

Little rodent, here by the river tonight, where
I'm sitting with my heart as skinless as yours
under the stars whose light feels like thorns of insight
piercing my blood, you are my only companion.
I look into the gaping sockets of your eyes
glacially excavated like most of the lakes around here,
though my third eye is aloof and impersonal
compared to the other two, and I realize
how ruthless enlightenment is, still, little guru,
I want to cry like a river that's come to rest in them
because I can see in you, like a locket of bone,
the same image of life, the Beloved,
I carry in the moonrock of my own prophetic skull.

Did the wolves do this? Did the pike eat your young
and cousin of the vole and lemming, you achieved
your climacteric like stars at the zenith of a precipice
and commit suicide at the atavistic urging of ancient enzymes?
Or did you die naturally like moonset in its crone phase,
the light slowly seeping from your eyes? Best fur
bundled up in yourself for the winter, your tail had scales.
What happened to them? Were they feathered
like dinosaurs into the boas of vaudeville strippers
that teased you with the mystery of their nakedness
and yours, by holding something back from the revelation
so there would be something left to dream on next time
like this amulet of your skull cradled in my hands?

Nocturnal janitor of the pond after all the lights
were turned off and the raucous business of the crows
had gone home for the night, what stars did you sweep up
like fallen blossoms and waterlilies trashed on the shoreline
like the first draft of origami swans
that couldn't swim in the heights with Aquila and Cygnus,
attached as they were to the earth like kites
at the end of their spinal cords, until the stars took pity
upon their lunar aspirations and landing like waterbirds
on the pond, came down like bodhisattvas
to teach them how to fly when five petals open
and one flower blooms from a seed of fire
that travels on the wind? Undertaker and midwife
what did you bury under the root fires of the hearths
of the bronze age barrow tombs you lived in with the dead
from one equinox to the next standing on your threshold?

Ubiquitous creature, materfamilias of the litter,
or randy male, lingham in the yoni of the yellow lotus,
Muscascus, it is red, your Algonquin name,
what spiritual immunity did evolution bless you with
that you could live in the sulphurous streams that ran
from the eyes of the coal mines smearing their mascara
at their first sight of hell they tunnelled into,
rooting for diamonds stashed by the star-nosed moles,
and thrive in the same polluted waters that killed
people, frogs and fish? Teach me that, if you can.

I'm an island of a man in the middle of a dirty river.
I'm a human on a barge of the moon that's dumping
the garbage of my species into the gutter of the sea
that returns like high tide to the bay
in the waters of the womb I was born in
like a salmon to swim upstream against
the effluvium of the tomb that washed me out
of my vision of life like something that got in its eyes
or one of your tumuli in the spring run off
when the river ravens with the wolves along its own shores
sweeping the baskets you weave of reeds
for orphaned prophets far out to these oceanic nights
among the wavelengths of life and death I share with you.

Millions of leaves on the ground like the fossils of flames
snuffed out on the candelabras of the trees of life,
the stars may have their crystal skulls,
but yours and mine are mineralized calcium phosphate,
fire and milk, the moon among the corals,
where the living and the dead cohabitate
like collagen turning to concrete in an underwater reef
that will rip the keels out of our driftwood lifeboats
like the envelopes of unanswerable loveletters
cut open from the bottom up. But no shelf
of exotic curiosities in the lost and found of my studio,
no bauble of death to alarm the sedimentary books
above my cherrywood desk for you my friend.

I leave you where you lie upon the earth
on the banks of life beside my mindstream,
nightwatchman of the pond, nurse on the nightshift.
I circle you three times like a spiritual orbiter
a Zen master in bloom, your skull, not
the spent canister of a milk weed pod,
but a wild orchid supple as moonlight
even in death as in bliss, attending
to the business of nirvana like a passing cornerstone
in a clearing of this floating world you weeded
like the empty cup of your eye socket
I look into like a despondent stranger into a black hole
and feel the passionate insight of your eyebeams
shining up at me like stars reading
the Braille of my face with fingertips of light
to see if I've understood yet that life in its passage
is an enlightened message, not the frightened warning
that ushers the dead back to their graves before morning.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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And You Shall Forever Be

And you shall forever be
all that could not be said of me
though I spoke for myself as long as I could
to answer your absence in paint and words
like this night creek talking in tongues to itself.
I see the maple leaves rotting in manuscript
like the dead civilization of a mummified language
that never made it into print.
And though I know every name
of the wildflowers that did, and of the stars,
their perennial myths of origin,
and of the fireflies, their efflorescent haikus,
tonight I walk among bones and pelvises of ice,
the desecration of forms, limbs lobbed off
like the right arms of offended trees and the eyes
of small skulls plucked out like stillborn moons
that never made it through the winter.
Alone with this emptiness which yet remains
the biggest clue I've ever found
to the whereabouts of myself,
I am not estranged by my usual compassion
for outcast things with no voice of their own.
There is no pillow of snow over the mouth
of what can't be said without me.
The dead don't hold their fingers
up to their lips to bid me keep silent.
They're all dancing wildly to lyrics of their own
in a winter carnival of deathmasks
that have shed their bodies
like the hags of the withered waterlilies
trying to wash the brown out of their gowns
like sunspots from the memory of the stars.
As if there were an eloquence
in the radiance of their rags
that overwhelmed the silence
with the sacred syllables of a mother-tongue
that has no word for time or death.
No word for life that distinguishes them from me.
Not just moonlight on the barkless limbs of mannequins
that have shed their skin seductively.
Not the dead of a northern Pompey
frozen in ash and ice and snow
catastrophically posed for generations to come
but the hymns of the homeless
who've finally found common ground
with the tent cities of the stars high overhead
and the gypsy moths in the Dutch elms.
The long vowels of the living joining hands
with the skeletal consonants of the dead
to make one whole word we can say in our sleep
like a secret we keep between ourselves.
And for the moment I feel almost complete here
like the first draft of a book
that the dead have yet to rewrite.
And though I've said it thousands of times before
in as many ways as I was inspired to,
like a fire that reared up at the mere shadow of the whip
to outrun the starlight for the sheer spirit
of challenging the will of this body
dug like a spur in its own ribs,
it was clear from the very beginning,
as clear as poppies and marigolds
in the summer of their oral traditions,
no more can be said in the dead of winter
than can be said by the living
to coax the wild crocuses out in spring.
You might be a lone night bird
that inhabits the woods like a magus
with too many stars to follow
to follow any one of them
and gratify your life by stargazing
and calling the faithful to prayer
like a muezzin in the morning
with the voice of an underground river.
And for all your lucidity you might never find
the long shadows of your ancestors
erecting the waterlilies of their tents
along the riverbanks of those rivers and lifelines
you keep returning to every year like waterbirds.
Or you could find no sign of anyone
for light years who could recognize you
for who you are even as you change time-zones
like a child with ageing eyes
who was raised by the alone with the Alone
in an incomprehensible solitude that included everyone.
Here where distinctions break down
and the dead and the living both draw
from the same source as they've always done
each is known to the other
by attributes that neither of them have.
The warm heart of a black rose
looking back over its shoulder
at a bend in the night creek,
the moon rising up over the valley,
a pearl in partial eclipse,
taking one long, last look
at the broken cages of ghostly tree limbs
and shattered ladders of lifeboat wing bones
that drowned on the way to their own rescue.
Is one side of a window truer than another?
Inner and outer, I and the other
truly separated by this mere hole in my eye?
Do the stars streaming through my mind
feel a subtle change in the nature of the sky
when they do, a different feel to the darkness,
something strange about the flowers
they open like loveletters, sensing someone
has been tampering with their mail
as if the message were still the medium
but with a different return address?
Is my absence any less baffling than my presence?
These with the hearts of departed things
any less whole or real or displaced
or death any less of a prelude to time
than any other point in its passage is?
Even in death, even when the sun
shines at midnight it's always dawn.
The waterbirds go. The waterbirds come back.
Like an ongoing dialogue in an hourglass
where content is the same as timing
and the most enduring of things
are the things that most readily pass
between the bright vacancy
and dark abundance of life
like the moon that keeps growing
without coming or going like a journey
standing in the doorway
of its own unending threshold.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Now That Youre Gone

(bernard edwards/nile rodgers)
My nights grow long
My nights grow long
Now that youre gone
My nights grow long
Now that youre gone
Now that youre gone
My nights grow long
Now that youre gone
Now that youre gone
Im living my life all alone
Or hit by a blow
To my pride
But Im doing ok
I wont let you see
What this has done to me
I guess Ill just take it in stride
Come what may
My nights grow long
My nights grow long
Now that youre gone
My nights grow long
Now that youre gone
Now that youre gone
My nights grow long
Now that youre gone
How can one do what should be done by two
I guess thats a crazy question to ask
I might seem happy
But dont be fooled by my appearance
Make no mistake
Im just wearing a mask
My nights grow long
My nights grow long
Now that youre gone
My nights grow long
Now that youre gone
Now that youre gone
My nights grow long
Now that youre gone
My nights grow long
My nights grow long
Now that youre gone
My nights grow long
Now that youre gone
Now that youre gone
My nights grow long
Now that youre gone
My nights grow long
My nights grow long
Now that youre gone
My nights grow long
Now that youre gone
Now that youre gone
My nights grow long
Now that youre gone
Now that youre gone
Now that youre gone
My nights grow long
Now that youre gone
My nights grow long
My nights grow long
Now that youre gone
My nights grow long

song performed by by Diana Ross
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Feel Like There's A Beast

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Play On

(eric carmen/scott mccarl)
It a hard life but you play it for laughs
Its a cold-hearted business keep away from the draft
And your fingers and your throat get sore
But theyre out there callin for some more
So play on
(while the lights shine around your head)
Play on
(every night in a different bed)
And the nights go on and on
Get a break and find a place you can hide
cause tonight youve got to be a star personified
Youre rushing round to get your plane
And its back in the bubble again
So play on
(while the lights shine around your head)
Play on
(every night in a different bed)
And the nights go on and on
Critics comin cause youre number one (number one)
Play all your hits and all the girls will come
(play on), play on, (play on), play on
Yeah, so play on
(while the lights shine around your head)
Play on
(every night in a different bed)
And the nights go on and on
It a hard life but you play it for laughs
Its a cold-hearted business keep away from the trap
And your fingers on your throat get sore
But theyre out there beggin for some more
So play on
(while the lights shine around your head)
Play on
(every night in a different bed)
And the nights go on and on
The nights go on and on

song performed by by Eric Carmen
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Journey

I’m on some kind of journey
but I don’t know where it’s going;
I’m growing wings and shedding them,
and I’m true to every thought in my head.
I’ve got a heart, worn down at heels,
a used voodoo doll quilled like a native,
a meteorically battered planet
that wobbles between a kiss and a fist
in the way it keeps running itself around.
I spend too much time alone.
There are no obstructions in any direction;
and barefoot, I’m walking on stars and poppies,
talking to myself like a candle,
weaving my way among the shadows
like a fish through the supple harps
of the silver river reeds. I see
that I’m taking a bath in my own grave
to wash the soiled skies of the painted world
off my eyes, to behold
the brief career of the leaf of life
and how the light gusts out from the windows
like curtains and bird-nets. Life is short
and the new temple never gets further built
than a hole and a single cornerstone, the rest
left to the business of the earth,
all that beauty and magnificence,
unravelled among the mud weavers.
I was inoculated against death
by a splinter of the moon;
by how little time there is for love,
for the root to get drunk
on the fruits of enlightenment and compassion,
by how little I will ever know
of the road to the doorway I stepped through
to stand in awe before the moonspill
on the raven blue waters,
and to look so deeply into the eyes of a woman
who has just conceded an island in her passage,
and the fragrance of unheard music
that I am a pillar of wonder
before the unsayable
as she lets dropp her shadows and feathers of light,
and the blood-god assumes
his flowering crown of fire
to enhance the splendours of his courtly intensities.
What I have lost in the river
I will find in the river
and what I have taken from the sky
I will give back to the sky,
and there shall come a day
when the eclipse will be the brighter mirror,
and the darkness that overtakes me now
will be a gate of stars to a water palace
where the dragonflies and waterlilies
are the sceptres and crowns of a human divinity
that will endure like a whisper of radiance,
a more haunting taste of light,
the rumour of a black rose
that outshines the angels
that coax the lanterns out of the night.
I will evaporate like the flaring of fireflies
on the windy shore of a trembling lake,
like the blue hat plume of smoke
from a gallant winter chimney
into the vastness of my own mind
like a waterbird without a trace into a sweeter, wilder solitude.
And these words will come and go
like the tides of the ocean I was,
like the providential leaves
of unfurling fortune-cookies,
like an avalanche of gold
washed down from the mountain upstream.
I write them in flowing diamond,
I write them in auroras of blood,
in dawns bluer than the iris of a peacock’s eye,
in fire and water and the mystic inks of the night
in the fleeting, indelible dream
of doors and hands and moons,
in warm breath on a cold window,
in a halo of comets
smeared into light by the sun,
in the sidereal wines that bled from bitter wounds,
I have said what it was mine to say
on a page of the wind
that whistled through me like life
greening the sands of the hourglass
with visions that ripened the bell of blood in my heart
to fall like wisdom from its tower
toward a fallible paradise
that won’t leave me as I am for long.
And I will jump again
into this cauldron of joys and sorrows
to string my spinal cord
over the abyss of the guitar-shaped universe,
walking upright
to plead with my own answers
to thaw like a mirror
estranged from the world it reflects
in the self-effacing flames
of the passionate gardens that dance on the wicks.
The awakening seed
echoes these flowers of fire
in the valley of a voice in the furnace
that lies down in the cool grass
by a stream of idle stars
and arrays its vagrant heart
like a breeze of blood in the dust
to the refugees in the shadows.
They move like eyelids
through all the phases of the moon
from an unspooled well of darkness
to the slash of a razor of light
to the threshing of the full harvest
in the siloes of the nightwind
enthroned like a breath of life
in the midst of its own dispersal.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Trying To Interpret The Silence Like Glyphs In A Jungle Ruin

Trying to interpret the silence like glyphs in a jungle ruin.
Afraid of what they might say if I cut the vines away
like a Medusa's head of spinal cords connected to my brain,
or this octopus of major blood vessels plugged into my heart.
My dna is the long molecule of a Zen cowboy,
with the Mongolian genes of a shaman practising
hunting magic that ensnares what he loves
in the nets of constellations that do no harm
to the wavelengths of the prey. You've got
to keep on dying every day if you want
to be born again in the dream tree of a shaman.
This is the way you avoid taking possession of your transcendence.
This is the way you break out of a cosmic egg
like a dragon without making an aviary of your solitude.

So many voices all at once in my head,
trying to say something in the living languages of the dead
about annihilation in a time urgent with the mystery of need.
When space isn't expanding the potential of its own medium
into the available dimensions of a future
that's already behind us by the time it gets here
like a delinquent s.o.s. from a star we were hoping
had got a fix on us like the maidenhead of a lifeboat,
it breeds. It proliferates like punctuation. It bonds
disparate elements into oxymoronic metaphors
that leave you as elated as a vertiginous Sufi at a crossroads
knowing that ultimate union doesn't have to be
about one or the other of infinite ways to make it through life,
you can shine like a star emerging from its own ancestral ashes
and take them all at once. Or as Dogen Zenji
said to himself one night when the moon was clear:
The place is here. The path leads everywhere.

I emerge from my own flame like a genie of fire
without smoke, and burn invisibly in my own art
like a crucible of the heart. Hermes Trismegistus,
the Thrice-Blessed, in a biochemical retort
bubbling over like the multiverse getting out of the bathtub
without leaving a ring around the womb of hyperspace.
I've washed so many lives off like the moon
it's a wonder I'm not a virgin again, but the return journey
of the second innocence is better than the first
because it's been sweetly seasoned by a universe
looping in reverse through all the stations
and excruciating transformations of my life
that don't have the same sting in their glands
when they first struck out at me like mystic acetylene
and scaled flashes of insight into the psyche of lightning.

I'm a big boy. The acquiescent khan of millions,
the Golden Horde who would rather make love than war any day
of the Great Tectonic Year, trying to read the fault-lines
in my own skull, volcanic fissures between continental plates
and the surrealistic empires crowding my stargates.
I can take the pain. I was born for it. Raised in it.
Even if I'm deciphering my own gravestone,
brushing away the stardust like a patina of mirages
with my eyelashes for a broom, my tongue for a dustpan,
ripping away the roots like the nervous systems
of the things that cling to it like the cornerstone of a ghost.
Been alone so long in the company of stars,
raising this hourglass of time to the beauty of their eyes,
even quicksand can look like the oasis of a distant galaxy to me.
And this skull of a headstone, crumbling like bread for the birds,
not a ruin, but just another phase of the moon I'm living through.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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There Was Nothing Ever To Forgive You For

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Home By The Sea

Creeping up the blind side, shinning up the wall
Stealing thru the dark of night
Climbing thru a window, stepping to the floor
Checking to the left and the right
Picking up the pieces, putting them away
Something doesnt feel quite right
Help me someone, let me out of here
Then out of the dark was suddenly heard
Welcome to the home by the sea
Coming out the woodwork, thru the open door
Pushing from above and below
Shadows but no substance, in the shape of men
Round and down and sideways they go
Adrift without direction, eyes that hold despair
Then as one they sign and they moan
Help us someone, let us out of here
Living here so long undisturbed
Dreaming of the time we were free
So many years ago
Before the time when we first heard
Welcome to the home by the sea
Sit down sit down
Sit down sit down sit down
As we relive our lives in what we tell you
Images of sorrow, pictures of delight
Things that go to make up a life
Endless days of summer longer nights of gloom
Waiting for the morning light
Scenes of unimportance, photos in a frame
Things that go to make up a life
Help us someone, let us out of here
Cos living here so long undisturbed
Dreaming of the time we were free
So many years ago
Before the time when we first heard
Welcome to the home by the sea
Sit down sit down
Sit down sit down sit down sit down
As we relive out lives in what we tell you
Let us relive out lives in what we tell you
Sit down sit down sit down
Cos you wont get away
No with us you will stay
For the rest of your days - sit down
As we relive our lives in what we tell you
Let us relive our lives in what we tell you

song performed by by Genesis
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Undevoted, Free, And Wild

Undevoted, free, and wild,
no one to answer to, no one to answer for,
the urns shattered, and the ashes scattered,
and the fire liberated to perfect its own combustion
and the stars without anyone to walk home,
and the solitude silent, dark, and deep, cool
as the bliss of a wine-cellar talking in its sleep,
I have grown mad in the heat of the purple sun.
I have spoken from the mouths of the caves in the desert
and not expected the echo of my own voice
to return to me like a pilgrim stashing a gnostic gospel
deep in the sand, without realizing
how much closer to the stars dirt is than I am.

When you're no one but the wind in disguise
you don' need to be humble, you don't need to wise,
nothing to trust, and no one to rely on,
you can watch the dead at night
streaming toward Orion
like a blue-white ribbon of light
undoing the gift wrappings off the bodies and eyes
of people who can see and be again.

And you know it comes to everyone
like a nebular orchid with a fragrance of stars,
that the Sahara will green and bloom again
and the wind sing hymns to the grass
and the gazelles sport their elegant legs,
adolescents in the spring brush,
running like violins succulent with beginnings,
and it doesn't matter you're alone out here
listening to the ashes of a mirage
make up legends to tell the fire
about its ancestors buried on the moon anonymously
and how their blood once stained the earth
like a scarlet letter even the stars couldn't wash off.

The mystic anti-hero of my own dragon myth
I exalt in my isolation like a shriek of revolution
and overthrow myself like a book in the flames
to keep something I don't understand alive in me
as if I had to keep on dying to sustain myself
and the distinction between one and the other were lost upon life.
It's a touch, it's a feel, it's a hole in veil
with one eye looking out at me to see
if I've intensified the dark enough to break into stars,
if I can unravel my heart like smoke like water like fire
and perfectly disappear into the atmosphere of my dispersal
without a shudder of farewell to the masks I wore like scales.
Not to be constrained by even so much as
the single thread of a straitjacket, the husk
of an abandoned sanctuary left to the imagination
of the hermetic flowers to do with as they wish.

I shriek freedom across the heavens like the death cry
of a hawk waking the valley up in the morning.
I whisper to the water things the wind was never meant to hear.
So faithful to my calling, I lead those who come, away from me,
as if it were the perennial custom of the universe
to meet like this for a moment in time and space
and then disperse into the darkness alone like a unlit candle.
I'm a riot of fools in the sublimity of the presence within me
that elates the crazy wisdom of my spontaneous ignitions
and schools the black lightning of its absence
in the folly of trying to enclose my spirit in gates
like a candle in the niche of a tempestuous vision.

Yeeeeeeessssss, I scream into the face of nothing
like the efoliant scripture of my confession and protest
that life doesn't need an alibi to live and die by,
no extraneous, no outer, no other, no object, no subject
no flying buttress to act as a bridge
over a flowing river of Gothic stone,
no strong tree standing on its own to cut down
and carve into a crutch, no cork to keep the ocean out,
no bucket to bail the moonlight out of the lifeboat,
no jade Buddha to make your supplications to,
no footprints on the water Jesus walked,
no cave in Ramadan to receive the angel of light,
no Kabbalah to baffle your way through the night,
no Schmidt-Cassegrain reflecting telescopes
on clock driven equatorial mounts geared to the heavens
to thread the golden needle of the mystery
without any knots in your spinal cord,
to penetrate the vulva of the sea like a sacred shell
that once gathered armies on a burning hillside
to contest their revelations with the tongues of swords.

I shall tell you, my brother, I shall hasten to you my sister
like moonlight through your window, I shall not
hold back from you the least shadow of the furthest star
releasing its dark wisdom like the black doves
of its own excruciating ashes glowing like the pain
of horrendous transformations into light.
I shall not bring you the skins of the dragons I've shed
but inspire you with a fire you've never been burned by before,
a spiritual immolation into a godhead without a metaphor
to guide you by, a torch you can't drown in your tears,
a long firewalk down to a river of stars,
and there you shall cross on a burning life raft
of the bones you've been carrying around for lightyears like a body.

And it's a heresy of silence to say, but there
you shall you shall lie down in the nocturnal emptiness
in the long blue seagrass of the moon
and empower out of your own creative abundance
whatever worlds your longing inspires you to embrace
to amuse the bright vacancy of eternity with time, like love,
and the dark abundance of unperishing potential
with space, like wisdom, and the clear light of the void
and the unspeakable absence of any other voice
to ruin the silence with the bliss and sorrow of seeking
the mystic night you found within you longing like a bird
for the stillness to write it like a lyric of the wind,
a passage of blood through the labyrinth of the heart,
a shadow against the moonrise of a compassionate awareness
there's a divinity that sings like a human
in the heart of everything that breaks its long fast of nothing
with praise and celebration, with fire and light and rain
with the firstt sacred syllables to touch the lips
of the black rose charred in the heart of the dragon, like poetry.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Crazy Man Dancing With Fireflies

Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
Another one trying to shoot out the stars.
I hear the woman next door weeping again tonight.
I don't know what for.
Desire's a phoenix in love with water
if that's what it is.
The torch is plunged into the wound
to stop the bleeding
and the ashes get carried away.
I've loved nine women for years
and they've all buried me in a different place.
Or saved my skull to consult the dead
about a future that wasn't living up to the moment.
The white poppy of the moon
bats her eyelashs through the pines.
I've never been as innocent as a cynic
nor quite as susceptible
but I remember the pain of separation
like the mirror of the lake remembers lightning
as the most brutal of all its revelations.
And how you can walk in and out of some doors
all your life like faces
without ever opening them
or knowing whose they are.
Everybody longs for the threshold they haven't crossed.
Poor stars trying to live up to their radiance.
Wondering why it's always behind them.
Why the dreamcatchers never get finished
and love ends up like some kind of cold fish
swimming through endless windows.
Music from far across town
this late at night
like a ghost answering a seance.
It rises above the trees like smoke
and disappears into the moonlight.
Someone's trying to bloom in fire.
It happens but it's rare.
I take a firewalk down memory lane
but all my cremations seem no more to me now
than the shadows of candles
and though I feel intimately removed
this afterlife of mine is not scar tissue
whether things got over me
or I got over them
no matter.
Attachment too is a Buddha activity
and though passions that once
made even the trivial sacred
and the impossible slight
have transformed
the hot blue flame of their hydrogen
into the carbon and oxygen
of more sustainable intensities
the selflessness of my impersonality
is not aloofness or indifference or exemption
or the consolation of wisdom won by acclamation.
Time distills the spirit out of all things human
and you can delight in your past
as if it were the future of someone else
who lives it like the unfolding
of leaves in the spring
that shadow the ripening apple
until it tastes like the tears of the autumn sun.
Joy and compassion
and the lucid spontaneity
of staying improbably ageless
again and again and again and again
as the years rejoice in the young and old alike
climbing the ladder of the tree
from so far down in the dark earth
they're beyond the reach of its ancient roots
and the utmost of its aspirant branchs
scratching at the windows of heaven.
And then most amazing of all
someone comes to the window
and parts the veils
and like the last line of the last act
just before the curtain call
you fall.
You fall toward paradise
as if you'd failed
and had to do it all over again.
But if your heart needs healing
offer your love up like a transplant
to anyone who can use it
and your mystic eyes to the stars
that want to see through them
what their light looks like
from deep inside
the expanding vastness within you
that can hold all that shining
like the sky or the sea embraces
all kinds of its own weather
without ever overflowing the brim.
The skull you drink from
like a wishing well
in the desert watersheds of the dead
is a cup without a horizon.
A real mirage with imaginary water.
A seabed of shadows on the moon.
Low-tide at noon.
Providential midnights when it's full.
But if you don't like
what you've been hearing about yourself lately
when you stop to listen
to what your saying
and don't recognize the voice
you're speaking in as your own
hold your ears up like conch shells to the oceans
that have never heard a recording of themselves
and carefully watch their faces.
And if you make the same stupid mistake
you swore not to make again
learn to recycle your ignorance
so you can save a bit of wisdom
for the rest of the world
to remember what it was like once
to be alone in Eden
with no one else to rely upon
and all you had to add
to the conversation of the rivers
that flowed out of it
all you had to share with your solitude
and boundless emptiness
was your unanswerable longing
even as it was being shaped
by their waters
into the form of the unimaginable.
Into the form of a woman
who tasted then
and tastes forever now
of the original light
of spontaneous creation
however many worlds
and lives and years and nights had to pass
before you first saw her
and felt your afterlife condense into a star.
Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
And it doesn't matter
there's no one here
to understand my delight.
Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
It's hard to read me in so little light
but when you fall asleep
it's the world that dreams
and though I feather the wind
with firebirds of desire
and write loveletters
long into the night
that grow like the graceful tendrils
of ink dissolving in water
whatever the sign of the season
there's no bitterness in the vine
and no departure in the reason.
Though I'm a leaf with the wingspan of autumn
even in the dead of winter
the phoenix is green
and by late summer
there's a crazy man out dancing with fireflies
down by the Tay River
who is too carried away
by the picture-music
of what he hears with his eyes
and sees with his ears
of all that he's been and will be
alone together with everyone forever
in love and out
full cup and empty
eclipsed and forgotten
or charged with the radiant urgency
of fireflies after the rain
to care what any of it might mean
when they fire the valley up for a moment
like blasting caps in a beaver dam
that's flooded the road.
And everything's so nimble with light
so vital and effusive with joy
so mysteriously near and always
all darkness all pain all sorrow
all that's lost and weary
and fearful of ever being found again
of being loved or despised
is absorbed blameless into bliss
like a tender intimacy
into a great vastness
that lives within us all
even as we disappear into it
like the sky in the heart of a bird.
Or just before the soft flare of moonrise
through the leafless veils
of the glowing birchgroves
on that far hilltop
where the pioneers
used to bury their boys with a view
a night just like this
as illusory as it is real
suffused with a spirit of water
that heals the wounded swords
the bruised flowers
the fevered promises
that are offered to it from the bridge
between this shoreless delirium
and the next.
A presence that's always flowing away
like a mindstream among the stars and fireflies
with the power of time
and the effortless wisdom of change
that makes the going stay
and the perishing persist.
A night just like this.
A momentary kiss
that keeps faith
with the eternal flames of the fireflies
that adorn the darkness and waters of life
with indefinable joy
in the exuberance of the mystery
and unspeakable trust in the onceness of forever
and an abiding intuition
that even the fiercest thorns of pain
that have tasted first blood
and greyed the hearts of their lovers
can never be estranged
from the beauty of the rose.
A night like this
The great abyss
lucidly alive with its own shining
and a woman's eyes
and a crazy man dancing with fireflies.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Want To Make A Contribution

I want to make a contribution.
I want to leave something on the stairs of the temple
in the dead of the night and steal away like a shadow,
hoping my small gift of a gift is well-received.
That the stars don't think they're wasting their light
to shine down upon it. Nor the wind resent the seeds it carries.
Fifty years of poetry. Painting the picture-music
the darkness pours into my heart and my heart conveys to my ears.
I can taste thousands of wildflowers like eyes in my blood.
I can taste the homelessness of the rogue stars in my tears,
and pull the wounded swords I cull like thorns of the rose
from the stone of my brain that fell in the farmer's field
like a rock through the window of the abyss
and make it clear as Merlin locked in his tower of glass,
that the stars only look fixed from a distance,
up close and intimate as atoms they're in a frenzy of creation
like a cloud of gnats in the last rapture of the sunset
radioactive with the bliss of being alive to know this.
That we're all longing for home in the lap of an expansive awareness
that threw the starmaps away the moment we were born
into the radiance of things that let go of the light
as if they knew something they just couldn't keep to themselves
without doing great injury to the flowers of life
that space was mind, and time was its emotional life
and as the dark mother said to her last incarnation
as it was stepping through the doorway into a stranger,
we're just going to wing it from here on end.

I want to be a strong storm tree twisted and bent by the wind
like the last letter of a sacred alphabet with no alpha or omega
to mark where things begin and end like death in life.
And wind up like a windfall of sweet fruit without end.
I want to make something of my falling, I want to honour
the table I eat at like iron and carbon and oxygen
by bringing something back for what I have received
without asking, or making a decision when I was not aware
of some unimaginable god that holds me personally responsible for it.
What a sleight to humans everywhere matter enjoins them
in a common labour to resonate so perfectly with the light
that lucidity isn't the exclusive property of the unknown,
and just because it's dark, the new moon of the black swan
shedding the feathers of the white, doesn't mean, it's not enlightened.

Though I come like a bird to a windowsill, though I pass
like a star from the window, though I sing of death
on the green bough, though I sing of life on the dead,
though I have been a dragon, a kitten, and a bee,
though I have floundered in sorrows like a lifeboat
way over my head, and lived through starless nights of fear
pulled down like executioners hoods over my eyes,
waiting to see what the morning brings that's vital,
I have not trafficked with my life like a pimp in a flower bed.
I have endured whatever excruciating transfigurations
I've ever had to go through, naked as a knife of light
unsheathed from the ore of this body that can no more
be cast off on the slag heap, than my spirit can paint in blood
a mural of all the changes we've been through like stars and mud.

I want to deepen the roots of the flowering night.
I want to beseech the poppies with my eyes
for more luminous experiences of cadmium red light
for more mystery among the stars than even they're aware of,
for more moons in the apple, more suns in the bread,
for more crazy wisdom than there is the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
I want to show the pine-cones they're pagodas as well
and point out where the mourning doves nest under their eyelids
and the shamans dwell in the upper branches of their evergreens
waiting to see if down will come cradle, baby and all,
or the next ascent is a red-tailed hawk at liberty
to fall upon whatever it likes, raising the snake of the lowest
up into the mystic delirium of the highest
to feather its scales in boas of oxymoronic light.

I want to intensify the dark until people can find
their way home by it, stars that broke into themselves
like morning glory tangled in an old bicycle wheel.
A pine-cone would do, a locket of sky, a piece of straw,
I could offer anything I wanted to, all those nests and pockets
I made in my pillow for years like a cat with a catcher's mitt
trying to find the perfect spot for its nightmare to sleep.
Or any one of a hundred cornerstones that were never built upon
or were torn down before the first brick laid.
Or I could lay my life down like a grain of wheat
among millions, at the feet of a silo so immaculately empty
it's never needed a single one of us, or all the animals
that bleated and bellowed and bled upon the earth
because we started drinking blood long before
we turned to bread like a better body to sacrifice.
Or my eyes like little thumb-drives of everything they've seen.

A gift of a gift as was given to me without a giver,
the ashes of a dead butterfly on a pyre of autumn leaves,
without ritual, celestial spin, I just want to come by myself
like a human in confusion we make the labour of our lives
as if I were stepping out of the trees like a white-tailed buck
come down to the river to drink from the moonlight
and add my reflection to the water that gave it to me,
with my head bowed toward the earth like a broken branch
heavy with the scarred fruits of life that have sweetened
like the moon over the years, poems I can recite by heart,
like the names of the stars and the flowers and the birds
and the ghosts of all those sad, passionate women who
tried so hard to be happy their tears clung like eyes
to the mystery of the windows they kept looking through
as if they were resilvering the mirrors of old telescopes
with the dew of a morning from a long time ago
witching in the dark for stars to explain their loss.

I want to bring a word that's been so deeply hidden in the open
like the flower of a rootless tree, it's got no colour of its own,
no seed, no leaf, no humming bird or bee, the tuning fork
of the nightbird, but no song, no honey, no nectar,
no likeness anywhere to compare it with, demonic or benign,
no meaning no mouth has ever wrapped itself around
like the atmosphere of a habitable planet, though the wind has tried,
a word so indelibly original it can't be washed out
like the whisper of a watercolour in the ear of a solar flare,
a word so private it gets said over the graves of the sacred syllables
that died in the mouths of men like the names of their gods,
not a prayer, not a mantra, not the shriek of a war-cry,
not a curse, not a blessing, not the answer to anything,
and I want to say the unsayable so unsayably free of veils
no junkie in the snakepit of a burning spoon, no lover
thawing virgin watersheds in the nunnery of Madame Moon
has ever stood so naked in their own eyes
even the emptiness inside felt overdressed for the occasion.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Found Out About You

All last summer in case you dont recall
I was yours and you were mine forget it all
Is there a line that I could write
Sad enough to make you cry
All the lines you wrote to me were lies
The months roll past the love that you struck dead
Did you love me only in my head?
Things you said and did to me
Seemed to come so easily
The love I thought Id won you give for free
Whispers at the bus stop
I heard about nights out in the school yard
I found out about you
Rumors follow everywhere you go
Like when you left and I was last to know
Youre famous now and theres no doubt
In all the places you hang out
They know your name and know what youre about
Whispers at the bus stop
I heard about nights out in the school yard
I found out about you
Street lights blink on through the car window
I get the time too often on am radio
You know its all I think about
I write your name drive past your house
Your boyfriends over I watch your light go out
Whispers at the bus stop
I heard about nights out in the school yard
I found out about you

song performed by by Gin Blossoms
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Innocent As Gravity And It's Raining

Innocent as gravity and it's raining.
Trying to paint a Monarch butterfly into a starscape
where all the wavelengths have been woven
by a third eye into a spider web. This morning
the left and right hemispheres of my brain
are separated like an hourglass undergoing
the meiosis of galaxies whose lustre's greyed
by the senile pearl of the sky. I want to play
aspirationally like fireflies among the stars,
but a gust of shadows has snuffed all the candles
and if I'm seeing stars at all, it's like a rainbow
wearing a Joseph's coat of colours
at the bottom of a well that hasn't granted a wish in awhile.

My heart's a loom of dissonant wavelengths
trying to weave my bloodstream like a carpet
it can fly away on braiding all these weak threads
and the light of all these images they carry
like the genomes of the souls of the dead
into the d.n.a. of a stronger spinal cord
I can use like a rope to climb up to the sky and beyond.
All my gravitational lensing has turned into bells of glass
and I'm walking on the splinters and plinths
of things that have come and passed, bearing these urns
transmigrationally like amphorae on a shipwreck
to the bottom of a subconscious watershed.
More sad than depressed, but dark just the same
as if all the dazzling suns and lapidary moons
with stars in their eyes that went into the wine
had just closed them in eclipse. Gone back to sleep
as it seems so many flowers to dream a better dream.

What need of my acceptance of what comes or doesn't
when my denial or assent are absorbed in its presence?
As if I had a say in my own solitude. Or the birds
could get in the way of their own singing. Or the rain
could choose the window pane it wanted to look through.
However I labour to refute it, my awareness
is as spontaneously inclusive as time and space,
or closer to home, the sea its own weather, foul or fair.
I can't extinguish the desert that burns within me
in a mirage of water, nor drown the stars in my tears
like the tiny insects that sometimes fly into my eyes
that wash their wings out like sodden punctuation marks
uprooted like sprouting seeds in a sudden flashflood of insight.
I can't catch up to the light. And I can't run from it.
Whether it stings like a nettle or soothes like an aloe
it's always the muse, the mysterium of here and now, as it is,
firefly, or dragon that brings the rain, that I follow
in this discipline of disobedience to what I know and let go of
so that it rains just as often from below as it does from above.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If Only I Could Remember Things For Awhile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Late Spring Snow

Late spring snow on its way.
Dead ochres and colourless greys
that have never heard of the impressionists.
It's a landscape
it's a mindscape
but it behaves like a still life.
I've been staying up late
trying to paint my way
out of my life
until dawn every morning.
The windowpane a ripening phthalo blue.
It's compositionally deranged
to hear the birds singing
when you're totally exhausted.
Mentally physically spiritually emotionally financially
gone gone gone altogether gone beyond.
All my happy endings orphaned.
A sum of depletions.
I'm living this creative life
scribbling down the notes of the picture-music
that doesn't just run through my mind
but is my mind
colours and words
down on canvas and paper.
When I'm writing
when I'm painting
when I've wholly disappeared into what I'm doing
for a few holy hours of life
immensities open up like the multiverse
and I've got a window a wormhole
I can fly through
and out out out among the starfields
with the evanescence of smoke
or a bird
putting itself in the picture
as a finishing touch to the sky.
And I am free to explore the intensities
of my own creative peace
as I keep saying to myself
one eureka moment after another
turning into a mantra
no no I can't leave that.
I've got to bring that back and show them.
They'll be delighted with that.
They won't believe it.
You've got to write and paint with an open hand.
Let the brush hold you.
Let the pen.
Then you're the meaning
of what the words are trying to say
and it's o.k.
you don't have to look any further than that.
Sublimity slips into the mundanities of the world
by creative accident
and you stand down from bliss
and spend a reverential moment
in its presence
just looking at it
not knowing where it came from
or whose work it is.
And it's the wonder of that depth of ageless being
expressing itself as a gesture of time
that's kept me at it
for forty-eight excruciating years.
I get off this chain gang
where I've broken down more rocks than a junkie
or saxifrage in the rain
and the pain the labour
the enervating futilities
and terminal successes
of all those ambitions
that run counter to the flow of life like salmon
disappear from my bloodstream
like apparitions in the morning.
And I am more me
the less I grow aware of it.
When I consider the chronic agony of life
I sometimes think that God created the world
not because she was a hidden secret
that wanted to be known
but because she wanted to forget she was God
and lose every cosmos and atom of herself wholly in it.
Paint till dawn and you'll know what that means.
As the great Zen master sort of said
you can swallow the whole of the river you're painting
with a single gulp.
You can chug the well of the muses
with every drop.
And just when you think
you're working in a medium of illusions
that are playing you like a gravedigger
that likes to get to the bottom of things
they all begin to taste of life.
The mirages water the flowers
in this desert of stars
and everything blooms.
You're back in the garden again
before anybody knew anything but the names of things
to distinguish them from the angels
and life was too vital to need an explanation.
As you go to write
you can take all your dark energy
and intensifying it
by letting it empower you
bend space into a gravitational eye
that gives you a deep insight into
how even a blackhole can be creative.
How what's been left out of the shadows and lights
says as much as that which was included.
Who you are not
is just as much of an artist
as the one who signs the painting.
And don't think you can do things by half measures
one foot in the boat
and one foot on the shore.
Talent knows the tear
but genius knows what hurt
the feelings of the watershed that let it fall.
It's the same in art poetry love enlightenment life.
You've got to let a mask every now and again
wear your face just to play fair
and see how things look from the inside out.
You've got to let the fireflies
make up stories about the stars
that haven't got anything to do with shepherds.
You got to be free enough
to let the world be all kinds of things it isn't.
You can only hex yourself
by taking a voodoo doll out of the arms
of a sleeping child
like the new moon out of the arms of the old
because you deny the darkness within you
its return to innocence
and try to separate the roses from the thorns.
Living your life
as if you were always
applying yourself to the world
like the task of the business at hand
is as destructive
as trying to pry the petals of a flower open
with a crowbar
because you haven't got the time to wait.
Paradise is effortless.
It doesn't have a gate.
It doesn't have a custodian.
It doesn't maintain a teacher.
Adam was born knowing the names of things.
Not how to keep books
on the comings and goings
of the saints and the miscreants.
The first lie out of a tempter's mouth
is to ask Eve if she believes
she's worthy of the truth
as if it were something that could be acquired
without her.
There's more innocence
in running the risk of being left out
than there usually is among the deluded
who play it safe by dissing their doubt
to be included.
You've got to take your church your mosque
your zendo your synagogue off at the door
as if they were hats and shoes
when you enter a holy place
or you'll track the world in
like starmud at your heels
and desecrate it with religion.
And this is as true of Druidic birchgroves
in an abandoned Westport field
with the wild geese flying overhead
just as the stars are coming out
as it is of a poet climbing burning ladders
up to his beloved
as if every rung were the vertical threshold
of a mutable transformation
that estranges and illuminates her face like water
as it changes his eyes.
Don't add your feather of flame to the fire
like the flightplan of a faint-hearted phoenix
with ambulances standing by
in case things get out of hand
but light yourself up like a Buddhist monk in Vietnam
or a filial vegetable seller in the souks of Tunisia
who set the Middle East on fire
and consume yourself wholly
until there's nothing left of the geni but the lamp.
When you let the way come to the end of you
how can you say you're lost?
That's where your freedom begins.
When the object of your quest
can't find anyone to look for it
and there's no one there to know,
King Lear writes Shakespeare.
David sculpts Michelangelo.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Jumped Out Of Nothing

Jumped out of nothing. The fish did. Golden.
A flake of the moon. When I wasn't looking.
Into a lifeboat cupping something precious in its hands.

The mind an old junkyard that's been collecting windows too long.
So many points of view. So many glass eyes
looking for the stuffed animals they belong to.

Death after knowledge. The silence that follows the music
after the bird has flown. Is the abyss death's rebuke
of life's dangerous proposal to let us look through the keyhole

at what's going on in the uninhabitable room next door?
To dream a little in the interim between two enormities
abstracted from the need of our perishing to persist

aeonic light years beyond anything we can imagine?
The golden fish jumps into the boat like an unsought insight.
No hook in it. And you can tell by the scales of light it emanates

it's risen from the starless darkness of its own depths
like moonrise out of the encyclopedic corals
of accumulated knowledge that's found a place for everything

like a polyp on a library shelf, calcium in a cave
shaping itself into temples from the top down.
Stalagmites and stalactites of cathedrals inspired by water

to enshrine themselves in form as an aid to the blind.
Though things along the way might change
does the journey stay the same ad infinitum?

Did you amount to everything you dreamed you might be,
or were there more stairs to climb than doors to enter,
more walls than windows in the way you saw things?

I've seen the most sublime things humbled by their own insignificance.
And I think I've heard God more than once
weeping at the stern of a sinking ship for a turn of events

she couldn't do anything about once they were set in motion.
And I've listened to people my whole life
talking in their sleep about how to put a rudder on a dream

as if there were a focus and a direction for life to flow in
like a solid, particulate thing instead of the wandering wavelength
of this exiled mirage of water that it appears to be

depending on the mood of the chameleonic mirror you're looking into.
The donkey looks into the well and the well looks back at the donkey.
It couldn't be any clearer than that. Tat tvam asi. But, then, again

why muddy the mirror by dropping the penny of the moon
down a wishing-well that never gets what it wants
and ask for something you've never really been missing?

I learned in my mother's kitchen long before I went to school
that just because you can ask a question doesn't mean
you have a right to expect an answer that satisfies you.

And even when you do receive an answer unexpectedly
it will be the quality of the question that determines its nature.
The single petal of a candle flame the size of the fire of life in your heart

like the apple-bloom of a thousand orchards in the Okanagan
thrives on the winds of change that blow it out and away
like a butterfly from the open palm of your hand

wise enough to know a hand is not just for grasping
and let it go like a mind of its own without knowing where.
Indirection is an indeterminate voyage of discovery,

a star's way of probing the darkness radiantly
without knowing how the light's going to be bent ahead of time.
Destination is a postcard from the edge of nowhere.

If you want to see anything worth looking at
while you're still alive enough to know it like your own name
don't adjust your eyes to the size of the window

you're looking through like the keyhole of an orbitting telescope
but the spaciousness of your own mind like a sky
no starburst of bird, word, or thought has flown to the end of yet

Whether they're bearing the souls of the dead south or west
like early transmigratory hearses yoked to a brace of angels or not.
Life still greens the tree with meaning even in the wordless dead of winter.

And who hasn't been, from time to time, a thriving neighbourhood
that left town to seek its fortune buried in its own back yard
only to return empty-handed to watch its homelessness being torn down?

Those who see themselves as strangers in the doorways of their own houses of life
are those who ask the most questions about who that is
that threatens them the most from the inside out,

that offer escalating ransoms to their own shadows to let them go unharmed
the longer the silence refuses to identify itself like an answer
to the incomprehensible questions about what they're doing here

like rivers weeping over what's going to become of them
or the sun worrying about opening the wrong flowers
like somebody else's mail without a return address

though all flowers like stars are loveletters addressed to everyone alike,
and it's not hard to recognize a river in captivity by its handwriting
or the jewels of the dead from the eyes of the living by the accent the light

they speak in through the medium of a mother-tongue that slurs the distinction
between a seance and an exorcism once we realize we've been summoned
to the comings and goings of every breath, every step, every

mistake we make with our lives like a revealing insight into who lies
under these deathmasks we wear like crocuses in the spring
under the unpaginated duff of last autumn's petals and leaves.

The way life carries on, it feels to me, is no different
in the heart of the incomprehensible mystery
than the wind that sweeps us away like death

the stars off the stairs in one and the same breath that blew them there
to ensure our continuity is always within reach of attaining
like a river that at all times and everywhere is in touch with itself.

Like a waterclock. Or a goldfish in the deserts of an hourglass
swimming through mirages on the moon that launches
our lifeboats and coffins alike on the same undifferentiated ocean of insight

that washed us ashore in the first place like islands in the night
that have more in common with the stars that at first glance
we might think we do in the vastness of the spirit's lost and found.

But of this I am bold enough to remain uncertain of my bearings indefinitely.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Katy Brought My Guitar Back Today

Katy brought my guitar back today.
I left it there to play, when I'd stay over.
And I remember all those nights
Sitting in the fireplace light,
And how she loved to hear me play;
Katy brought my guitar back today.
Katy brought my guitar back today.
I've seen it make her cry, over and over.
She told me when I wasn't there,
And she would wake up feelin' scared,
She'd hold it in her arms and be okay;
Katy brought my guitar back today.
We had our stormy times like anybody else;
Oh, more than once I broke her heart.
And when I couldn't tell her I was sorry by myself;
I could tell her with an old guitar.
But, I'm afraid this time things have gone too far.
Katy brought my guitar back today.
I guess that means this time it's really over.
And as I sit and play it now,
The songs all seem so sad, somehow,
I wish that I'd of left it in the case
Katy brought my guitar back today.
And I remember all those nights
Sitting in the fireplace light,
And how she loved to hear me play;
Katy brought my guitar back today...

song performed by by Alabama
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Sitting Here Becoming Whatever Drifts My Way

Sitting here becoming whatever drifts my way.
Cedar boughs smouldering in an attic to smoke the bats out.
Thought-watching without looking for the answer to anything.
Spiders like badges walking on the waters of my mind.
The autumn's new, but it's the same old passage of things.
Apples like bells in the trees of the steeples, shepherd moons
of sloppy solar systems strewn on the ground
with seeds that are going to take them down
a notch or two yet before they make a comeback.
Seven times down. Eight times up. Such is life.

I watch the picture-music flowing through my mind
like a home movie that's happening as fast as I am
playing the role of everybody else in the universe
all at once as if every ray of light incarnated
in the emanation of an essential existential insight
into the nature of every mystically specific human being
could all be traced back to the root of the same star.
And what does the star do when the many return to it
if not apocalyptically go supernova into transcendence.
Just because the ashes sleep sweetly in their firepits and urns,
doesn't mean they're not dreaming and scheming
to wake up from themselves

I'm firewalking in the ether like a sad volcano.
I'm alone in life and it's not as bad as I thought.
Prolonged solitude blurs the distinctions between
the trivial and the sublime. Beauty seems
the most engaging waste of time I know of.
I think about love more as an event than a thing,
and I've made enough attempts in my life
to convince me it wasn't for lack of trying
that I'm walking alone with the Alone like Plotinus
trying to keep my telescope in focus and stay open-minded.
But as John Keats said. If it come not as naturally
as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.

Space, too, has its sirens. And time, its lamias.
A gust of stars and the desert's full of fantasies.
A star blooms and a comet falls from its dark halo
like a queen bee looking to start a new hive
and I've seen enough oases with hourglass figures
turn into bag ladies in paradise to stay shy of gardens
that don't have any weeds in them that might
uproot me as so many have like a botanical mistake
as if I were some kind of hallucinogenic angel of death.
Amanita ocreata. A mushroom in the death cap
of a nuclear winter when all I am is interspecially creative
in the way I adapt to my extinctions. Attentive and tender
toward the flora and fauna that inhabit my solitude.
Though the peduncle is always lost in the ensuing phylum
as I am like the star in the eyes of the women
who've drowned me like a firefly in their tears,
I still send bouquets of constellations to the asylum
like the last of the New England asters this time of year.
Sanity might smudge the tomb with a noose of sweetgrass
but the madness stays clear as the waters of life
in the womb of enlightenment giving birth
to bubbles in hyperspace that can spontaneously pop
as easily as they cohere like skin to the shape shifting multiverse
for better and worse, and all the permutative modalities in between.

God bless them all. Each, a rite of passage
I stumbled through like the blessing
of an excruciating ordeal that seasons you
for what's to come, or who. I must have loved them
better than I thought to miss them as much as I do
now that I do not. Incubus, muse, sphinx, witch,
oracle and water sylph, I gave to each my crystal skull
they could wear around their neck like a prophetic locket
to remember what we were to each other once
before the moon in the corals fossilized the shipwreck
to set sail on this sea of shadows without a star to go by.

Amor vincit omnia. Maybe. But I'm more a pirate
with the eclipse of my third eye for an eyepatch
and a parrot that's teaching me to keep my mouth shut
than I am a navy even if there isn't a rudder on this lifeboat
or a bay to sail into of my own. And I'm not looking
for a northwest passage to Cathay through a periscope
that's stayed under too long to know where it's going
without a starmap. I'm not interested in exploring decay
from the inside out like some submersible in a lunar ocean.

I've sailed under the skull and crossbones all my life.
And I'm not about to strike my colours like the maples,
lay them down like the burning blades of the angels
at the gates of dying garden. I'm going to hold out
long after the irises have surrendered their rainbows
to a retinal circus without any sacred clowns or animal acts
where the judas goats train the tigers to jump
through the brindled hoops of their own screening myths of fire.
It's wise to tread cautiously among the duff and detritus of death
like a protocol of your own instinct, good spiritual manners
among the extinct so the dead don't sink into oblivion
like a garbage barge. I revere the autumnal exorcism
as much as the vernal summoning to a seance.
I'm as sincere about my farewells as I am my hellos
as I watch the wavelengths shift from blue to red,
lowering the frequencies of fountains into watersheds
as if a musician were putting his guitar back into the coffin
he carries it around in. Green bough. Dead branch. Same song
as far as I've learned to sing to myself in the dark coming on.
The snakes can tie themselves into knots and hibernate
as long as they want, and all my summer visions
can turn into hard cold facts. I've still got a dragon of serpent fire
walking my spinal cord like a high wire act
without safety nets because I've always made it
a point of balanced awareness along this dangerous coast
to sail with the wind behind me like the light of a star
a wingspan ahead of my fall. The ghost of a battle scar
that's made it this far into a wounded future
without a pyre or a lighthouse to chart the course
of my desire not to live like yesterday's flowers
strewn on the corpse of tomorrow's hearse.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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