CONFABULATIONS IN THE PROTEAN LIGHT OF IMAGINATION

CONFABULATIONS IN THE PROTEAN LIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION

Confabulations in the protean light of the imagination

where all things live and die. Life is perishing creatively

with no good reasons why. Except we trust---

what choice?---it’s wise and reclusively forbearing

of the mistakes we had to make to survive. That

the light adjusts to the eye that receives it like a star

with a cold-hearted message from the thieves of fire

with wings on their heels like plumed serpents

sporting the horns of burning doves on the hermetic skulls

of their helmets. You paint the world you live in

as if you were painting for yourself with your eyes closed

like flowers in eclipse through an hourglass darkly.

You have to feel the colours through your fingertips

like throbbing shades of red, and venal hues of blue,

and sunflower yellow you can eat straight from the tube,

before you go mad as creosote in a stove-pipe asylum

that squats like a black hole in the middle of the room.

So many have died for the flimsiest of excuses,

you’re compelled sometimes to wonder about

life’s attitude toward itself, if it knows something we don’t

that allows it to hide behind the mystique of its deathmask

like a cult with the conviction dying is the gateway

to the apple orchards of paradise seeded by the fruits

of this one we took a big bite out of like a motherhood issue

with an aversion to apple piety. If sin is original

then the virtuous are plagiarists by contrasting anti-selves.

If life is such a heinous act, then death is a sin of omission.

No one’s ever asked to deal with their own absence.

Or maybe we’ll appeal to our more empathic exits

to conjure us back to the entrance of the labyrinth

where this seance began like the opening act

that starts like a little dance it does on our graves.

I’ve been waterclocking my way through thousands of lives

as long as I can remember the flatlining mindstreams

of the thousands of deaths that followed the day

into darkness like the lifelines on the palm of my hand

waving farewell like a nightbird disappearing

into the portentous silence that foreshadows the end of its song.

Maybe I’m just peeking through the ankh of my little keyhole

of eternity into the face of a stranger on my threshold

I once fathered like the prodigal changeling of myself

come back retroactively to claim me as one of its own.

Maybe death has a secret streak of hard compassion.

A diamond in the ore, because the first thing it does

is take away your eyes so you can’t see what’s happening to you,

like a medicine bag of gunpowder put around the necks

of fatty heretics about to light up like a votive candle to God

in the fiery eyes of the snakepit inquisition flushed

with the power of darkness to make a snuff film out of a virgin.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. There’s nothing but oblivion,

dust on the windowsill, urns of the stars

scattering their ashes on the roots of the roses

their own blossoming in fire once brought to bloom in the blood

like the saddest flower they’ve ever looked through the eyes of.

If that’s the case, just like any other night on earth

in the cosmic abyss, listening to the solitude long

for its nightbirds in this restless dream of life,

death doesn’t exist. No hiatus in the continuum

of awareness that persists in keeping us guessing.

Could be a curse. Could be a blessing.

PATRICK WHITE  

BLEAK, GREY DAY

BLEAK, GREY DAY

Bleak, grey day. Dolorous green of the disheartened trees.

Amiable enough, but troubled. More empty awake

than I am asleep. My imagination barely habitable,

as the houseflies cluster between the walls

of an abandoned house of life somewhere to winter

like little nuggets of coal in a coma of black dwarfs,

the negative of a starmap in a galactic dark room.

Big sigh. As if I were weary of understanding why

I keep being exhumed from my garden of earthly delights

like the collective unconscious of flower bulbs

to bloom in this cemetery of archetypes as if

I just came out of sedation in a morgue without a night light.

This is the nadir of my insight into the other side of the mirror.

A heavy bell to bear instead of the feather of light

I hoped to keep aloft on my breath like some semblance

of a songbird that hadn’t had its spirit crushed yet

by airing its innocence out in traffic to the beat

of the speedbumps of roadkill that thump like the pulse

of something momentous it can add a melody to.

Slow motion evanescence of things in the room

and me among them, viscous as the windows

on the verge of glacial tears, glass blown chandeliers,

beaded veils on a widowed lamp’s bronze umbrage.

True Briton’s Lodge, Prince of Wales Chapter across the street,

in a third floor forest of cheap wood panelling,

makes me feel colonially false to my imperial origins

and then I remember how much I prefer

the perishing of wildflowers at this time of year

to that of flags that mythically inflate their lifespan

in inverse proportion to the diminishing echo

of their booming voices fading into the Lanark Hills

like the kind-hearted consent of an eccentric to the pace of doom.

Shabby mystic of a day, a mendicant fakir slumped

in the doorway of a bank holiday that’s done away

with the benches of the moneylenders in the temple

where you could buy sacrificial doves for next to nothing

that meant about as much in the great scheme of deception

as the cries of your children mean in the maws

of Mammon and Moloch. Why go looking

for the key to anything before you’ve discovered the lock?

One moment you’re spurred on by Altair and Deneb

to break a wild, white-winged horse bareback,

and the next you’re a bicycle tethered to a parking meter

with a fire hydrant for a water trough. And you

have to conclude you were bucked off without a parachute.

But, hey, I’m making the best of it. I’m rubbing

my firesticks like the antennae, if they have them,

of fireflies in a firepit of the draconian ashes of Chernobyl.

Things are beginning to glow in the dark like comets and stars

flypapered on a boy’s ceiling sixty years later as the light

catches up to his ageing eyes that left home a long time ago

as if there were something more to know about suffering

than the charnel house that was under my nose at the time.

O Mummy! O Daddy! It’s dark in here and I can’t

see my way out by the ashes of the starmaps you left me

in this cold furnace of a heart kindled by the coffins

of old books on the occult you told me not to read by myself

I haven’t opened yet like nocturnal flowers whose time

hasn’t come to bloom in fire, whether I force the issue or not.

If April is the cruellest month, September’s got to be

the most foolish as the maples set fire to their leaves

like poems they never want to read again to the wind

blowing on the dead branches of their sky burials

as if there were red-winged blackbirds still singing somewhere

on a green bough apprenticed to a honey locust tree

that whispers like a wounded voice coach it’s time

to forget your thorns like the hands of a clock and blossom

among the bees that will marrow your bones

like the motherlode in the pods of edible pulp fiction

with flat twisted smiles in the hives starclustering

into bee balls for warmth against the weather

when the new moon of the black queen stops laying her eggs

and the sweet things in life are as inconceivable

as the plagues of tainted pollen in the candle soot

of a black mass sacrificing virgins at the autumnal equinox.

PATRICK WHITE  

MY NUMB, UNAPPOINTED NIGHT STARE INTO OBLIVION

MY NUMB, UNAPPOINTED NIGHT STARE INTO OBLIVION

My numb, unappointed night stare into oblivion.

The bar band across the street has stopped

for the night. The silence digs a deeper black hole

in the white noise of the iron lung sustaining

the town shutting down to sleep than the undertakers

of the music buried in the closed coffins

of their guitar cases wishing they were machine-guns.

An end of the hammered laughter, the hormonal squeal,

the amatory barb of weathervanes in whaling boats

going for the heart through the eye of a needle

in drunken tears too well-versed to be believable.

I almost envy people who always have

something to insist upon, incontrovertibly.

I’d throw a punch just for the sake

of the absurdity of it, but I know when

feathers come to scales deep in my R-complex,

the left front parietal lobe of my neo-cortex

wouldn’t mean it except as a Zen cowboy

kind of glee in the energies expressed thereby.

More wings than spurs on my heels these days

when I’m not waxing and waning like Icarus

in a dead fall. And sometimes I’m just another fly

at the window trying to buzz myself in

to an upstairs apartment with an unnerved

security alarm and a cat-clawed bugscreen,

moth holes gnawed in it that look

as if someone bent the bars back

like the wire eyelashes of a jailbreak.

The great escape. To what? Eight beers

and a shot of tequila to top them off, trying to loosen

the sexual mores of a workaday straitjacket

up, thread by thread, as if you were brushing

stray hairs off the bare shoulders of a legal assistant

toying with taboos as she drunkenly decries

the life she’s chained to like a connubial visit

by conviction, irrepressibly proclaiming

to the sheepish citizenry of the permissive street,

no one’s ever getting out. We’re all guilty by dissociation.

PATRICK WHITE

LIFE ISN'T A TOPIC, IT'S AN URGENCY WITH PITSTOPS

LIFE ISN’T A TOPIC, IT’S AN URGENCY WITH PITSTOPS

Life isn’t a topic, it’s an urgency with pitstops

and beatific interludes of relief along the way

that pass for peace. Is there necessity in what you say?

Is it agitated like a spider in the morning

vibrating in its web, a pulsar in a mandala

of guitar strings, a safety net of spinal cords

resonating with true north, a magnetic pole

changing its spin, butterflies witching for wavelengths

well beyond the range of their rabbit ears

as they make slight adjustments to their antennae?

I knew a painter once who was 37% mad,

who chained his spontaneity like a guest to a bed

and planned to be inspired by the blueprint

of the starmap of fireflies he carried in his head

whenever he was off his daily agenda of meds.

Sensitive stuff, but I told him anyway,

if it bears repeating, your silence isn’t original enough.

Who needs to be immortal while they’re alive?

It’s like a ghost trying to haunt a house of life

before the tenet in residence has moved out of it

into a tenured coffin of his own. And I don’t care

how much polish gets rubbed like starlight

into the spurs and badges of the drugstore outlaws

riding shotgun on the golden hearse of the sun,

it’s still just a strongbox of money spiders

when you shoot the lock off of it like the nose ring

of a white winged horse saddled by a green horn

that gets bucked off his own thermals like a burr

trying to break into a circle of milkwagons

to protect the butter urns from savages in blue war bonnets

in an ambush of peacocks with empty magazines.

Not everyone likes the taste of fraudulent margarine,

furniture wax, shoe polish, bear grease or axle oil.

Having their eyelashes cleaned off with turpentine

to keep the flies out of the ointment, the colours pure.

As if light had joined the Taliban and held a grudge

against your eyes. Aniconic palettes. Black. Black. Black.

No foreseeable rainbows on the wings of aspiring maggots.

Nothing but these false dawns and sunsets that taste

like the must of old men smudging their pearls of wisdom

like opalescent cataracts nacreously waning

like the love lyrics of a decresent moon

to the younger undertakers bedding their bones,

pearl divers closing the mouths of the oysters

they’ve shucked like books and lavish satin coffins

as if every cloud had a silver lining that mistook

its perfect binding for a vision of life without salt or sand.

Everyone gratified if their point of view, for their eyes only,

like the colour blue without irises, or a flowerless green,

were reflected by windows into the souls of the fanatically bland.

PATRICK WHITE

FROG SPITTLE AND GREEN POND FROTH

FROG SPITTLE AND GREEN POND FROTH

Frog spittle and green pond froth organic enough

to rebuke the crystallographer of ice that’s coming

when life goes underground to hibernate in its own starmud

numb with the inoculation it’s been given

to protect it against its own pain thresholds.

As earth approaches the sun, it gets colder

above the waist, and hotter below,

the occasional bubble of life locked in the eyes

of a bright vacancy as it rises to the surface of the mirror.

And at night, the dark abundance of stars so clear

they’re cruel. So abysmally remote and unconcerned

they burn your eyes like dry ice, sublimate

like the tears of ghosts on a hot stove, hiss

and dissipate like the wavelengths of vaporous snakes

impatient with dancing to a syrinx of icicles

on a pentatonic scale in common with panpipes

that prefer to feather the phoenix in flames

than risk the fire of a dragon in full plumage.

Things go round circumpolarly like Draco

and the planet has a change of heart. She loves me,

she loves me not. The third eye of the uncertain mystic

freezes in the wine glass like a dirty winter window,

and summer’s ambivalence is frosted over

with brittle absolutes that leave no room for doubt.

Cataracts in the eye. Flowers in the sky and vice versa

when the earth is at apogee in the southern hemisphere

and the grass is green below the waist that the sun

fried brown, and above, crucified crosses upside down.

But for now, frog spittle and green pond froth,

exhausted waterlilies letting it all hang out

like the Buddha’s dirty laundry on a tinfoil starmap,

wasps like angry drunks in the windfalls of the orchards,

the crickets and frogs hoarse with the exhortatory

white noise of procreation run amok in the swamps,

the bears in the dumps among the berries,

larding their lairs for seven lean kinds of coma

as the campers and the geese go south

of the porous borders between the sundials

of the American dream, and the frozen waterclocks

of the snowblind mindstreams further north

where time stops and space is the measure

of the speed of thought outpacing the light into the dark.

As the days grow colder and dwindle into matchstick runts

I’ll squander fire the way, when things were warmer,

I squandered the waters of life on fountains and waterbirds

spuming in courtship, making a big splash of moonlight

on beautiful loons that swam away unperturbed.

I’ll sit up late in the night, listening to the pilot light

on a gas furnace as if the eternal flame were about to go out

and leave me catatonically morose and mentally disturbed

as the desk I write at, making lyrical overtures

to the smoke in the room, demonic loveletters that set

the scarecrows on fire like the strawdogs of harvests past

and make the ice queens weep with warnings of global warming.

Creature of extremes, I’ll live one moment like a dolmen

in the tundra of my dreams, trying to decipher the runes

of the glacial striations on my crystal skull

like Nazca lines on on my prefrontal plateau

for any sign the aliens are about to leave me alone.

And the next I’ll be kissing the Tyrian purple passage

at the end of my frozen fingertips like Phoenician snails

as if I’d been drinking wine with the sea around my mouth,

and the poems were just pouring out of me

like a hemophiliac in a blue blood bank in front

of a firing squad of eleven revolutionary stars and one

that’s a capitalist trying to recoup its investment in life

by drawing a blank that strikes like Rasputin

on the margins of a ricocheting heart, bruised

by the blood flow of a rose in the snow it couldn’t stop.

PATRICK WHITE

THE JOURNEY ITSELF

THE JOURNEY ITSELF

The journey itself changes the nature of the destination

until it is so unrecognizable that the notion

of ever arriving is as absurd as waiting for a star

to catch up to its own light. Poetry’s like that,

and love no less than life: Transmute the wayfarer!

Transmute the wayfarer! If you want to preserve

the remains. I’m led astray by where I’m going.

I don’t linger at the gates of my own unknowing.

I don’t read starmaps backwards in the mirror.

The orphanage isn’t homeless. The lost and found

isn’t waiting to be discovered. My madness

never greets me like a visiting hour at the asylum.

I send my prophetic skull on ahead of me

like a time capsule into the history of tomorrow

and the future remembers me oracularly as a sign

anything can happen retroactively you didn’t see coming.

Lost in a labyrinth of eyeless windows, the town

sleeps on the nightwatch. The silence purrs

with the white noise of somnambulant machinery.

I never listen to here as if it were the echo

of other places I’ve been. The train whistle mourns

like a ship at sea. Nothing quite so abjectly homeless

as a threshold with a return address. Better

to sleep on the wrong side of the tracks than

lie down with the suicides like a ladder that had given up

not realizing life’s a two way street, one rung east,

a crosswalk west of here, a burning crutch closer to heaven

than shakey Jacob on a three-legged footstool.

There’s no snakey paradise up the sleeves of my pyres,

no burning doves in the urns of my ashes in hell.

I don’t worship in the shrines of their reciprocal fires.

I don’t sing springtime carillons of wild columbine

to a dying funeral bell in winter whether it’s sempiternal

or not. I might light a few candles now and again

but I never extinguish their wicks in my tears

like the pilot lights of burnt out dragons in pain.

Whatever mirrors I might break like plagiarists

of the way I see myself when I reflect on the lack of one

I can trust, I don’t put brand name constellations

on fake creation myths that compromise my starmud

When I go down in flames, I never expect

the sunflowers to bloom at midnight, or noon

to throw a bouquet of shadows it cut from its own garden

into my grave as I’m lowered into my coffin

like the lifeboat of a meteor impact on the moon

into a sea as tranquil and surreal as it is inarticulately alone.

PATRICK WHITE

LIE TO ME, IF YOU MUST, I'LL BE YOUR CULT OF ONE

LIE TO ME, IF YOU MUST, I’ll BE YOUR CULT OF ONE

Lie to me, if you must, I’ll be your cult of one.

If there’s a darkness you want to lead me into,

a coven of night, a blackhole where you hide your light,

I’ll be Arcturus in the crowns of the black walnut trees.

I’ll follow you down into the underworld, a gibbering shade,

And I won’t look back, I won’t loop retrograde

when you overtake me like a planet on the inside track.

Draw me a starmap. I’ll be whatever configurations of shining

you want me to be, the bestiary of a different kind of zodiac,

and you be the black I’m embedded in and let death

assess the value of the jewels of insight I bring you

like the bituminous eyes of all the snowmen I’ve ever been

intensified into diamonds that will thaw whenever you weep

for reasons you can tell me or not as you please.

Talk to me in your sleep, or write a note for me when you wake

and I’ll hang on every word like a waterdrop

on a blade of blossoming stargrass, or a poet

with his head in a noose hanging like a pendant from your neck

and I promise never to reproach your silence

like a misdiagnosed disease suffering the symptoms of a cure.

I’ll be your dirty old man and you can pretend

you’re the pure embodiment of lust in a nun’s habit,

and I’ll keep my word to the blood oaths and vows,

taboos and alibis we make for the both of us

like the sword that lies between us like the hour hand

of an alarm clock with a snooze button

like a dozy nightwatchman that looks the other way

whenever you want to avail yourself of a pagan afterlife

in a goose-down duvet. Tell me who you dream of being

and I’ll get behind you like a mirror of your shadow

and I swear I’ll never blind you with my blazing

like the legends of the false dawns I once aspired to,

a mirage that wept real tears witching for water,

the ghost of a dolphin in an ocean of maritime stars.

I won’t ask you to enter my solitude without

a wet suit on, or immediate access to a space-station,

or explain my crazy-wisdom to us both as if

you had an anti-venom you milked from the fangs

of the moon that could heal the blessings

of my snake-bit prophetic skull like the eyes

of the dice I roll like the unlucky bones of the skeletal key

that keeps a lock on my heart like the pit of an apricot

until some muse of the autumn lifts my spirit

like a curfew in a half-way house for recovering poets

and there are more unrehabilitated exits in the freedom of my art

than farewells in the tone of the doorbells at the entrance.

PATRICK WHITE