ISN'T IT OBVIOUS

ISN’T IT OBVIOUS

Isn’t it obvious by now

matter is the language

of the spirit

that expresses itself

as flowers and trees

and you and me

just as we are.

Matter is the mother-tongue

the alphabet

the periodic table of elements

of what can’t be said about God

without resorting to signs

like water and oxygen.

The runes of the mountains.

The purple passages of the sea.

And the moon who couldn’t find

anything beautiful in her bleakness

long before Samuel Beckett.

Out of an almost perfect vacuum

out of nothing

out of space

its thirteen atoms of hydrogen

per cubic centimetre

like magic beans

a longing for existence arises

spontaneously out of the abyss

as if it just remembered the name

of something that came back to it

like a lost thought

and happily blurted it out like the Big Bang.

God mind the abyss nothingness

the cosmic id

call it what you want

they’re all just waves of the same sea

iridescent bubbles rising out of the depths

like independent cells with shapeshifting nuclei

or the membranous worlds in hyperspace

that start with a kiss

and end with a face in the window

staring out into the same old darkness

like a syllable of dust

in awe of the silver-tongued stars.

Mind does its best

to take a good guess

but it doesn’t really matter

if you’re right or wrong

because everything’s

been clear and true all along.

The point is.

There’s no point to this.

You just break into song

like a bird that can’t help itself.

You gather everything into yourself

like a blackhole

with a creative affinity for stars

and a key turns deep inside you

and suddenly you’re walking

through an infinite number of doors all at once

that have freed you from yourself

like a replicating cell.

Water looking at itself

with eyes of water.

Mind looking for mind with mind.

The snake trying to swallow its own head

as a sign from infinity

that it’s going to take forever.

Illusions of light

burning like jewels

in the mirror of rain

rooted in the starmud

of the human brain

that thinks if it elaborates enough laws

it can hold the universe to account

for the cause of its behaviour.

Oceans roll off its tongue

like drops of water

from a blade of grass

and things keep on happening

like galaxies and starfish.

Be the bright vacancy

that shines out of your dark abundance

like a waterlily putting a white spin

on the death and decay of the swamp

that aspired to it

like the Buddha watching Venus in the dawn

or a magnanimous loveletter

as long as autumn

at the end of a mean affair

that sweeps it like stars and leaves

off the helical stairways to heaven forever

like the memory of mutant genes.

Be the eleven that comes of seven

and dot the dice with the starmaps

of the chance constellations

that rolled your way

like a genome

without asking for your advice.

If you were really down on your luck

you wouldn’t be here to know it

so why not risk it all

like a universe in the beginning

in one throw against

the wall in a dark back alley

that’s been breaking banks

and bringing the house down ever since

like an incommensurable decimal

that escaped the confines

of a whole number

that couldn’t restrain it like a straitjacket?

Add yourself to things like zero

and amplify their effect

like a deep canyon foretells

the echo of things to come

that are well beyond your voice.

You don’t need to choose

when there’s nothing you can’t refuse.

There’s nothing to win or lose.

Time may well be

the adolescence of eternity

that puts cracks in its vinegar

and wrinkles its wine

but who wouldn’t rather play

than work at being who they are?

Honour the wound with a scar

that’s worthy of what you have suffered

to express yourself as you are

like a firefly in a palace of light

with a deep insight

into the black mirrors of dark matter

that multiply your afterlives like stars

in the eyes of the windows

in the house of life

that were broken from the inside out.

Astound your own vision

with the kind of crazy wisdom

that knows the crown of the universe

doubles as the dunce-cap of a cosmic egg

and say what you have to say

to add yourself to the conversation

like a bridge to the few bars of picture-music

that look and sound just like you

when you refused to crush

the head of the serpent under your heel

like the end of the long interminable road you were on

to salvation.

And you were amazed

when it struck you

like an elixir of life

emerging from the eclipse

of a dark venom

you didn’t get up off the ground

like St. Paul who had been Saul of Tarsus.

And you weren’t the Tiresias of either sex.

There was no blind catharsis.

But your heels sprouted wings

that mastered the wind like words

and the snake flew away like a dragon

with a lot in common with birds.

PATRICK WHITE

LIFE'S A GENIUS

LIFE’S A GENIUS

Life’s a genius.

Not a mediocrity

looking for reasons to live in the morning.

Life’s not a plan.

It’s a spirit that doesn’t need one

whether things go right or wrong.

Life is light and water.

It delights in going everywhere at once.

Mediocrities have genius

but they don’t know how

to play with it like a child.

Their eyes peek

through knotholes in the fence

but they sacrifice their longing

on the conventional altars of common-sense

and never throw the ball back over the hills

like the moon coming up

or the sun going down

without worrying about

breaking the neighbours’windows.

Life throws whole mountains around

and turns the cornerstones into quicksand

and goes down with Atlantis

only to come up again like Moby Dick

spewing stars out of its blowhole.

Mediocrity has its feet planted firmly on the ground.

It never goes anywhere it hasn’t gone before.

It’s the kind of fire

that sleeps with an extinquisher

in case things get too hot to put out.

Mediocrity shares.

But life’s the kind of genius

that gives like an apple-tree

that fully expresses itself

through infinitely more

than four seasons

no two alike

without caring if it’s of any benefit to anyone.

Mediocrity’s stunned by the blossoms.

Genius tastes the fruit.

Life’s the kind of fire

that doesn’t have a root

you can pull up and take home with you

to add to your garden

like a new word to your vocabulary.

Mediocrity spells it out.

But genius is the dream grammar

of a spiritual alphabet

that isn’t used to taking orders.

It doesn’t have twenty-six words for inspiration

like potted geraniums all in a row

and only one for freedom

it weeds out like morning glory

and dandelions

whose vagrancy threatens

to overwhelm the rest

with a longing

for the happier memories of their homelessness.

Mediocrity’s a highway lined with roadkill.

Genius is a river

that goes around

not through the hill

and though there are fleets of waterlilies all along its banks

that gather like the Spanish Armada every year

to burn the infidel irises on the far shore

back into the true church

they never set sail.

They stay anchored to the coast

like loveletters from buddhas upstream

rooted in the flowing.

Mediocrity writes a great poem.

Genius lets the poem write itself.

Mediocrity signs its own vanity.

like a work done well.

But genius doesn’t have

anything to sell

that ever belonged to anyone

in the first place.

Life is the generosity of space

that blows stars in your face

and gives you the eyes to see them.

Mediocrity confines the muses to a hareem

to compel their obedience.

Mediocrity is a great sea without any tides.

Genius sleeps with women

it never thinks of as brides

because it can feel their power

like a waterbird feels the waves

breathing like the sea beneath it

wild and profound

cannibal creators

oceans in the black rose

dripping like the blood

of enlightened virgins

from Kali the Crone Destroyer’s mouth

eating her own like the moon

as if she were life itself.

Mediocrity never includes

enough destruction in its creations

to be credible.

It goes along with the swans

like afterlives in the moonlight

but not the snapping turtles

that drag them down into the mud

like constellations brought back to earth like kites.

Mediocrity defangs the moon.

Genius flows down

its first and last crescents like blood

knowing one fang kills you

and the other heals you for good.

Mediocrity is hemmed in

by thresholds it never crosses.

It never colours outside the lines

into the negative space

of the forbidden white beyond.

It’s never gone gone gone forever gone beyond.

It’s a star with a lazy eye in an expanding universe.

It never reads the writing on the wall

between the lines

like fossils.

It’s afraid of the dark.

It fills whole galleries

with works like arks

with two of every kind

that are signed like truces

it made with its imagination

as if the imagination

ever kept its word

to anyone who was afraid of it.

Mediocrity keeps an eye on itself

like a documentary.

It comes to the right door

but it never gains entry.

It’s lost in the labyrinth

of its own fingerprints.

It leaves too much evidence

at the scene of the crime

and turns over on genius

at the drop of a dime

for getting away with everything

like the mastermind behind it all.

Mediocrity sings like a canary in a coal-mine.

Genius howls at the moon

among the mountains

high above the timberline

where she takes

her first and last crescents off

like handcuffs off an escaped convict.

Mediocrity lives

as if it’s always

making up an alibi

for something it never did.

It’s easier to lie about a sin of omission

than it is to tell the truth

as if you weren’t signing

a celebrity confession.

Genius lives out in the open

where everything’s well hid

like a mason jar full of fireflies

without a lid.

Mediocrity hugs the shore

like a lighthouse

that’s afraid of everything

it can’t shine a light on.

Mediocrity shows you its scars.

Genius shows you the wound.

Mediocrity’s amazed

that the universe

got as far as it did on its own.

Genius walks the rest of the way alone

and doesn’t care if the path it’s on

reads like an exit or an entrance.

Mediocrity looks for acceptance.

Genius throws the audience out the window

like an old typewriter with keys missing

and all its loved ones

smiling in the front row

as if they were in on the know

and sits down by itself at the piano

and lets the silence play

whatever it wants

all night long.

Mediocrity makes a big splash

like an inert gas

in a flickering neon sign

advertising one night stands

in a cheap roadside motel.

Genius shapes space like black matter

that stays hidden

on the far side of gravity

behind the leaves

that grow on its boughs like galaxies

that wait like nests in the treetops

for the shamans babies and birds

to fill their bright vacancy

with the dark abundance

of a language older than words.

There are lyrical swords

that have mastered the art

of writing their eloquent history

in scars that pre-date cuneiform.

That’s one muse.

And when the dark mother

who gave birth

to the ten thousand things

whispered the mystery of the universe

into her own ear

she said it in stars.

That’s another.

And when you listen to the moon

as she summons her own

like lost echoes and mad shadows

to the fullness welling up inside her

she sheds her eyelids like loveletters

she’s read over and over again

out loud to the lunatics

like cracks in a dry creekbed

or a prophetic skull

waiting for rain.

She’s beauty pain and death

all rolled up into one

black rose of inspiration

she hands out

to those of us she loves

like an eclipse

without an explanation.

Mediocrity doesn’t understand this.

Three lucidities in one black mirror

before the arising of signs

and all it’s looking for

is its likeness

in the meaning of everything.

Humans may have been created

in the image of God

but the world’s not created

in the image of humans.

It’s a lot crazier than that.

Mediocrity makes a habit of significance

to justify its eyes

to the nightwatchman in the mirrors.

Genius pulls the hat out of the rabbit

and the magician disappears.

PATRICK WHITE

HAVEN'T THOUGHT OF YOU IN YEARS

HAVEN’T THOUGHT OF YOU IN YEARS

Haven’t thought of you in years but here you come again like cosmic weather I never know quite know how to dress for except in flesh and blood and a lot of love. You shine through the valleys of death like Bailey’s Beads through the gaps in the mountains of the moon in full eclipse. I taught you the name of every star in the sky in four languages sitting high up on a rocky ledge of Heartbreak Hill overlooking the neighbourhood. You smiled and taught me to shine. You taught me there are no names for the best things in life. But yours was. And by a reflected glory mine.

Lachrymae rerum. It’s always been your tears that I’ve tasted deep down in the heart of things like a dark elixir of well-aged sorrows that transformed all those yesterdays into vintage tomorrows we never got to drink. Memories. New knives for old wounds that have grown over the years like shortcuts to a chasm. The pain might come and go but like the moon it never loses its edge. And there is no scar worthy of you to close the gap. My blood flows like a flag at half mast for a lonely heroine in a holy war of one Spartan heart against a Persian mind. You told me once that you’d rather commit suicide than surrender. And a truce with the obscenity of human lovelessness that you were living at the time wasn’t an option because your father was a maggot of a man pimped out like a wannabe butterfly who taught his daughters the value of working the street was his lightbulb of a creation plan for the future. And brought his drunken friends home to desecrate what was left of your innocence. You said it made your skin crawl like dirty money that couldn’t be laundered by anything spiritual like death to remove the smell. You were the wooden maiden on the bowsprit of a moonboat the navy boarded every Friday night like a body whose heart had already gone down with the ship. You said you hated the old men most who grabbed your breasts as if they were grasping for time. And those who afflicted their sex upon you like one of the seven plagues of Egypt as a self-righteous punishment for what they had just paid you to do against their religion.

You were my first and best girlfriend. And face to face or back to back we had each other covered on both sides of the moon. It was too dangerous to grow orchids in the shadow of a garbage can but up on our precipice high above the world alone together again at three in the morning I swear by all that is holy and wild I felt as free as the flightfeathers on the wings of a phoenix to escape the ashes of the crematorium we were put through like a racial cleansing of childhood even if I had to walk on stars for you. Or kill your father.

You might have been turned out but you hadn’t learned as you would later to curse the wedding and bless the hearse. And we talked of marriage shyly. You were just looking for tenderness and I’ve been grateful for the last forty years of looking back that you said I gave you that. We gathered each other up in our arms like flowers from a garbage-can, flowers from the grave, and planted them in our hearts like a secret Eden only we knew the way back to like a starpath up the world mountain that kept coming down on us avalanche after avalanche like the premature karma of an afterlife that was killing us in this one. Courage is an elixir of spiritual spit in the fountain of youth when you’re outnumbered by dry-mouthed cowards trying to drink your blood like geriatric vampires in love. And we were brave as silver stakes driven through their hearts. We flintknapped our emotions into Salutrian Clovis-points and hunted wooly mammoth voodoo dolls into extinction. Our eyes were at war with the windows and mirrors that glared at us as if we were thieves and whores of our own making at fourteen. And well beyond the snake-oil redemption they talked about as if they were immune to breaking. But we knew the broken black filaments of fragile lightning that couldn’t jump the gaps in their lightbulb heads weren’t starmaps to the chandeliers they hung above the snakepits of their mangers for wiser fools than us to follow. But we didn’t throw sparrows at their blood-stained windows. We were hard rock partisans of the lower class who knew how to headbutt their crystal skulls into shattered glass. We robbed every butcher baker candlestick-maker who had ever dropped a dime in your jukebox to fit his needle to your groove and dance to a spasm of music. Outlaw justice is full measure and a bit beside. And we got more than our own back. If they bruised an eye. We blackened their seeing with the unholy ghosts of burning businesses rising like demonic smoke from the ashes of amateur exorcists. Eventually they came to realize that we were selling death insurance and stopped taking you like a risk. And for awhile we were as happy as a union of arsonists on an igneous nightshift comparing mythologies with out of work dragons on welfare. We were perfected by each other in our solitude when our lifelines flowed into each other like estranged orbits well beyond the reach of the sun that had driven us out on our own like an evil portent of things to come. We weren’t the warning. But we were the writing on the wall. We were the lie that came true in a beautiful nightmare of love like a happy ending trying to convince itself that as it was above so it was below. Even though we knew better and said nothing to break the spell of the fireflies in the blackholes of our wishing well hearts.

If you don’t eat the pain you can’t taste the pleasure. But if the pleasure gets eaten like the last apple in Eden, all you’ll taste is pain. I repeated that kind of sententious symmetrical bullshit for lightyears to myself like a mantra to control the terror of your absence after you just announced one night out of the starless blue of your eyes you weren’t the woman I deserve and putting your clothes back on disappeared. Just disappeared. Poof. Gone. A candleflame. As if we had never existed. And then, yes, the note that came six months later like a flightfeather from the wings of a loveletter passing high overhead. Forever. One word. That’s all you said. One horrifying word that came down like a life sentence without parole on all I’ve lived ever since. In isolation.

I don’t ask the birds anymore on my windowsill that peek through the bars if they’ve heard any news of you the way I did in the first few years and when I’m out in the yard by myself alone with the stars in their gun towers trying to make out the constellations through the glare of the light pollution I don’t search the open sky for you as my longing once used to. Because the impersonality of your absence is rooted so deeply in me like dark matter that can’t be seen everything that blossoms like eyes and stars and earthly light on spiritual apple-trees anywhere is an intimacy of that first morning we woke up beside each other and began learning the hard discipline of how to keep a soft dream of love alive by sweeping it aside as if it were nothing.

PATRICK WHITE

I LOOK INTO PEOPLE'S FACES

I LOOK INTO PEOPLE’S FACES

I look into people’s faces

and I see the same wound

under many different scars.

I look into their hearts

like a stranger at night

through a passing window

and I see how suffering through

the agonies of life

has ripened some

with sweetness and compassion

and others are already

rotten before they fall.

I look into people’s eyes

and some are vast starlit skies

and some are the iota subscripts

of scholarly fireflies

that footnote the constellations

at the bottom of the page

with details off the beaten path

of their MLA mainstream cosmic thesis.

And some are like moons

with parenthetical crescents

with nothing in between

both sides of their smile

that isn’t a cynical aside

about the lost innocence

of a phase they’ve already gone through.

And some stare back like eclipses

that have pulled the blinds down

over their eyes

like sunglasses disguised

by a witness protection program

but you just know

they’re oilslicks

on the Sea of Shadows

as they were in the womb

and in the Gulf of Mexico

the black blood

of an incorporated miscarriage

that hemorrhaged like the pot of gold

at the end of the oleaginous rainbow.

I look into people’s souls

and I see how afraid

they must be of life

to hide out in the open

like an ocean

that hasn’t kept faith

with its own depths

and tries to pretend it’s

as airy and light as the sky.

The birds are flying through the roots.

The fish are swimming in the treetops.

I see judas-goats chained

to the stakes of their ego-Is

like sacrificial tiger bait

devoted to their cunning.

I see the anti-muses

that shadow Mt. Helicon

like black holes

in the death valleys

of human imagination.

And I wonder how they ever got here.

What bend in space

led them to this twisted place

like a forsaken road

they keep taking

like a wormhole through time

into the womb

of a stillborn universe

where the moonlight

burns their embryos

on pyres of lime

beside the dry creekbeds

of nameless rivers going nowhere?

Along their flowerless banks

I see the rib-cages of dead snakes

that went witching for water

with tongues and tines

of Kundalini lightning

that ran up their spines

like time through a waterclock

and the hulls of empty lifeboats

that died in the desert

at the bottom of the mirage

they drowned in

hoping to find themselves

among those who survived

by learning to swim through sand

like fish in an hourglass aquarium.

I’d rather walk on stars

reflected in the shattered mirrors

of my last self-image

than repay

the generosity of my solitude

with mass ingratitude.

I listen to people’s voices

and they all seem like the same echo

with many different mouths.

I’ve tried to respect

the mystic specificity

of the thousands of fierce individuals

I’ve met over the years

but the more I’ve learned

about myself and others

the more I see the same mind

in many different skulls.

The same genius of inspired water

that poured an ocean

of sentient awareness

into everyone of our cells.

Union differentiates.

Separation binds.

I look into people’s faces

however young or old they are

and I see infinite spaces

moonlighting as time

on the nightshift of the stars.

I see horror and compassion.

I see butterflies sipping

the nectar of diamonds

like honey in the promised land

and maggots born in excrement

thriving on offal

like the janitors of the dead

because everything grows best

in the soil it was born into

like karma in the fortune-cookies

of wombs and eggs and cocoons.

I look into people’s eyes

like sad stars

through the generous end

of the telescope

that brings the far near

like impact craters

and I see how some people

cling to the memory of themselves

like underground seas

in frozen lockets

of water on the moon.

I look into people’s secret shrines

they build like birds

in the eye of the storm

looking for salvation.

And I can hear

the echo of their prayers

bouncing back off hydrogen clouds

like a nineteen twenties radio show

thousands of lightyears away

as if they just said them yesterday

and the universe as usual

threw the words back in their face

like the cosmic background hiss

of snowflakes on a furnace

going out like stars.

I’ve seen the innocence of fireflies

making halos

and the blood-rose weaving thorns

around the massive blackholes of death

as if they were merely

a pinprick in a voodoo doll

that got into white magic by mistake.

I’ve looked into

the nuclear blaze of madness

like an A bomb with shades on

and seen the flash and shadow

of embryo silhouettes

spit out like cave paintings

on the firewalls of the fusion wombs

that give birth to the heavier elements

it takes to survive.

But the water’s not mad

just because the moon’s a lunatic.

The mirror might seem

just as angry as you are

but it doesn’t feel a thing.

Learning wisdom is learning space.

It doesn’t eat flowers

and the weeds don’t sting.

It takes everything it embraces to heart

and nothing’s left out

from the very beginning.

Like the whole of the moon and the sky

in every eye of water

that’s ever looked into me

and seen that everyone

is the heart of a mystery

whose lucidity

is their only true identity.

It’s our seeing

that makes the flowers open

and the stars shine.

It’s our hearing that gives

the wind something

meaningful to say

and the grass something

to whisper about.

Whatever you touch

walks in your skin from thereon.

Whatever you taste

be it roses and nettles

or sulphur and wine

or the sour-sweet radiance

of the stars on your tongue

you’re the flavour of the day

in everything.

It’s your nose

that gives the burning leaves

in the urns of autumn

the spectral fragrance

of chrysanthemums

that are barely holding on.

And it’s your mind.

Your heart.

Your blood.

Your body.

Your imagination.

Your intuition.

Your wisdom.

Your ignorance.

Your darkness.

Your light.

Your spirit

enlightened or deluded

whatever you think or feel

is abundantly missing

or dream you’re waking up to

that makes the world real

in every mystically specific detail

of who you are.

Who else?

I look into myself

as far as the stars

at the edge of my seeing

fourteen point five billion lightyears away

and I can see how much time and space

how many species of life

generation after generation

have been born to give birth and die.

All the roses swept

from the stairs

of our hopeless tomorrows

because they were a tribute to love

meant for someone else.

All the spontaneous joys

that cast their long random shadows

like occasional fireflies of insight

across the lunar mindscape

of this afterlife of sorrows

where every church is the gravestone

of an unsuspecting god.

I look into my own seeing

like light upon light

in the vast expanse

of an unknowable night

and I’m cosmically astonished

by how many worlds within worlds

eyes within eyes

minds within minds

lives within lives it takes

to make a single habitable human being

meaning everyone of us sacred fools

fit as a genius

for the crazy wisdom

of a creative life

in a self-inspired universe.

PATRICK WHITE