Saturday, December 24, 2011

AND I WANT TO CRY OUT


AND I WANT TO CRY OUT


And I want to cry out, unburden the bell of my pain,
release the shadow this storm has been walking for years
like a man over abandoned landscapes the earth will never finish,
let the tears flow in a flashflood of ripe sorrows,
tie a noose in a rope of roads I’ve travelled to the end of
and kick my heart like a chair from underneath me,
fruit on the tree at last, an apple sapped by lightning, black,
but sweeter than stars, ready to fall
from the blasted nightbranch
of one too many devastations, one too many blows
on the edge of a sword of light
that could cut the tongue out of an anvil.
I want to ask for forgiveness for having been a man,
but I don’t know why or from whom in the silence
that can’t tell the difference between the thief and the theft
anymore than I can peel the moon’s reflection from the river.
I want to let go, fall to my death, revive from annihilation,
a sage of silver herbs, words that heal more than they judge,
but I’m bound to the mast of my spine in fire chains
hotter than cold snap radiators
that tighten like anacondas around me
everytime I let another ghost go like a hostage of rain.
And I keep telling myself the singing I hear in the distance
isn’t just another firefly in the harps of the willows,
another caprice of light with skillful fingers
that licks the blood off its last painting with a smile,
but I’m broken and old and too forgotten to care
if it’s mine or someone else’s, or just another contribution
to the emergency bank of plastic bladders
waiting like silicon for larger breasts.
And the wind now is always a memory,
and I keeping losing my mind like a bookmark
that’s forgotten where it left the book,
and there are pleading voices that gather around me at night
like starving children with the faces of wounded cherries,
and I seem to have less than nothing left to give them.
And when I look for a meaning to my life,
I seemed to have lived in the wreckage of an accident
that happened before I was born.
And there is no holiness in loving the earth and the people in it
with a passion honed by desperation;
and I never could see what they did in their laughing mirrors;
mine was always blacker than a sail off the coast of a waiting widow.
And now I’m here in this house of empty ballrooms on my own,
trying to box the essentials of what I’ll take with me when I go
to anywhere I’m not, and the ceilings are weeping
all over their plaster rosettes, their second empire sundogs
like blood seeping through the ceiling
while carbon-tipped spears of regret
for all the things I should have done and didn’t, or did
and wish I hadn’t, pierce my voodoo heart like micro-meteors
from a chance of God. And it isn’t as if I didn’t try to be good,
or wise or useful for the sake of earning my mouthful of salvation;
I could do what others couldn’t because to confess
I had less than nothing to lose. Sacrifice is easy when you’re free,
and waterproof stars that don’t run in the rain like tears
or the longing lines of homing poems at dusk,
no trick at all if you’ve been raising yourself from the dead for years
in rented tombs where the angels leave their junkmail at the door,
and the landlord watches everything that’s going on.
And I know this will come as a shock perhaps
to a few who tried to care, but the best I could manage of love
was to lead them away from myself
like the stairs of a burning house. I smuggled them in the night
through a hole in the razorwire fence of my heart like frightened refugees
into a better place with a green card that could walk away from me.
And there’s nothing more of dignity in this
than if I’d rescued a fly from a toilet
or put a child back on its fallen bicycle
with a warning not to talk to strangers.
No anti-hero, no tough romantic anymore,
not even an arsonist in a volunteer fire-brigade
and the moon too often these days just another cold stone with craters
come of all the goblets I once raised like a branch with a pear
to the women I drank to the bottom of their dead seas
only to fall down drunk under the crash of their smashing chandeliers.
And it’s always been something to furrow this acreage
of paper and canvas with gestures of fire and seed
watching the earth turn like flesh under the ox-driven scalpels of crescent moons,
but lately it seems that I’ll I’ve been doing for fifty years
is ploughing a minefield covered in snow with the Big Dipper
to make way for a hearse in a hurry.
So what do you say to your hands when they want to pray
and you don’t know what to ask for?

PATRICK WHITE

I'M TIRED OF SHINING


I’M TIRED OF SHINING

I’m tired of shining for the blind, enduring
all these mystical sunspots
mesmerized by their own downtown darkness.
Insanity, my lover, show them one of your lunar fangs,
let the serpent queen smile, the wolf-baron snarl;
the real kings establish their thrones
above the timber-line. No. No. No. No. No. No.
was never a foundation-stone for anything.
When the rocks weep it’s quicksand.
Overcoming delusion to open the fly on enlightenment
is just the next pilgrim wave on its way to some sacred beach.
Beyond beyond I live alone in my infernal solitude
gnawing the ruby marrow out of gold bones
that used to belong to a legless sage. Kitten, this is
the other side, black paint
on the back of the light-fields mirroring this world of things,
the emptiness that makes you you, thinking itself
into its own creation like a snake
that’s got it’s tail in its mouth and a wardrobe of old skins
sloughed like bad tattoos into a library full of holy books.
Baby, this is where the fire puts out the rain
that falls upwards towards the roots and the fish.
This is where the wisdom of the phoenix
is an urnful of ashes dreaming of wild poppies
opening their red mouths in astonishment like bliss in the blood.
No one has lived here since
before the beginning of time. Still heart, listen,
softly, softly, now, to the emptiness taking its first breath,
filling its lungs up with dawn, breathing out the dusk.
Here we come and go through our eyes, hear
with our eyes, think with our eyes, every step of the way home
stumbling drunk on the wine of our eyes, every forsaken mile
the crossroads of our seeing. What does this mean?
The tigers were created before the tapeworms. Pygmies
have little dicks and when they think
they’re hooked like worms on the question-marks.
I can tell by the way you lower
the bucket in the well of your eyes you know.
Sorry for your sex life but things grow.
Besides, there’s lots of space, lots of room under the weeping willow
for a garden full of little tombs. Space doesn’t care,
imperturbably getting to the point. Neither do I
knowing there’s no need to weed the inconceivable. Baffling,
isn’t it; this rash of galaxies you keep trying
your home-remedies on, your whole mind
a poultice on an agony of light? I was like you once,
until I filled the black sockets in the skull of the dice
with eyes that opened sky by sky, petal by petal,
like a beautiful woman waking up in the windows of the shining.
Delusion is enlightenment, the moon spread out on the waters.
Do you doubt it? Then doubt it.
But until you can walk this bank of the river
that flows singing to itself through the night,
without leaving any footprints on your own face,
what you call consciousness is an ape
choosing its own ignorance like a piece of coloured glass
it’s snatched from someone else,
a smear on the revealing. Learn to read
that which has never been written
as your own intimate journal
and all the attics and trunks
of all your hopes and longings, all your fears
that your confusion is your only certainty
will turn their light around
and show you who’s standing like a lover
in the shadows of your eyes.
Most people drift all their days and nights
like empty lifeboats through the hordes of the drowning,
bewailing their lack of direction
to the endless sea that confounds them. You
fence your mental coastlines with erect lighthouses
that call you to your wreckage again and again on the rocks.
And me? I’m tired
of slipping these spiritual razor-blades
into the candy-apples on the tree of knowledge
for all these Eves who keep coming to the door like Halloween
and ringing the bell on the inside
to be let out of themselves like children
afraid of their own unconvincing masks.
Curse or kiss me as you must,
but who’d thread the eye of the needle
with the spine of the serpent
if there wasn’t a wound to patch? Try to get real;
the other side is not
the other side
once you’ve arrived like junk mail
on the threshold of your own homelessness.

PATRICK WHITE

BURNING WORLD, TAKE ME


BURNING WORLD, TAKE ME

Burning world, take me, fold me in your flaming arms
and let me disappear into the unforgiving night.
Among these blind, here, in their black eggs,
eyeless birds who nest in their own ignorance,
I am the leper of light they drive out
with the stone of the moon, the wolf
with the mystic wound that will not heal until the last star
is born of the bleeding. Return me to the cold, brutal beauty
of your mineral wilderness, my bones on Venus
and my skull an abandoned planet circling the sun at midnight.
Let my eyes be the last of my tears to fall
and my blood be strewn like a gypsy scarf across the darkness.
Erase all trace of me as you do the path of the water-stars
who walk here among the dead like spirits from another world
intrigued by our passing. Pygmies in a circus,
cannibals and emperors all, leaping from thought to thought
rock to rock in the lifestream
to the applause of future funerals, o let them fade
like the idiot savants of last night’s dream, meaning nothing
but what they meant to themselves,
trying to jump their own distorted shadows.
What difference between the venom of the bee and its luminous honey
to these whose flaring in the vastness
was the kingdom of a match? At most
lightning on a water droplet shaken from a blade of grass.
Did they think the great fires of being flowed like blood
around their carbon hearts? Sweet world,
bestow your flowerless garden upon me and let me forget
the holy wars of their tiny gods against my solitude.
Didn’t they see, so full of themselves,
there was never any room in their arks and shrines and coffins
moored like lifeboats to the rotting dock
they built like a bridge to nowhere?
I never meant to be unkind or rise from the depths
in waves of light and blood that wiped them out
like the mythical monster of a shore-bound sailor
too far out deep down to be confirmed by their disbelief
or worse, their shallow faith. Leave them, undisturbed
to the shadows of things they trade in
like spiritual money. I wish them no worse, no better
than who they think they are, little prophets
inveighing against the purity of my absence.
The dark mirror is better, brighter, more abundant
than the poverty of their trembling reflections,
mere nothingness more tender than their lies.

PATRICK WHITE