LOST IN THE GUTTER

LOST IN THE GUTTER

Lost in the gutter, skeleton keys

that used to be people before

they ran out of doors to open.

How many thresholds back from here

to yesterday? And those eyes,

such dark jewels, where can I

get a pair of sharky shades like that?

Ghosts dance around a burning oildrum

where the prophets are boiled in alcohol

for not saying anything of much worth,

like a poem no one wants to steal

the hubcabs off, or a rainfall in November

too late to do the flowers much good

or the working girls on the corner

like cotyledons in hot pants. Indoor orchids

under tungsten grow lights in the snow.

When the mystery wanes unadventurously

and what you see in life asks too much

of your eyes at dusk and moonrise

to look for a black box that isn’t

a voice-over of the stars’ untimely demise,

but might be the genuine you singing to yourself

in your sleep like a hermit thrush

trying to accompany its own silence

with something sweet and sad that beguiles

your melancholy for awhile, the jester

too deep to ever take himself seriously,

the apostate mystic enters a surrealistic circus tent

redolent with the cheap thrills of enlightenment.

He walks around like the ground of being

with a sacred limp believing he’s experienced

a meaningful death much more profoundly realized

than the nocturnal longings

of the wounded street gurus

busking outside the liquor store

like a cult of uncut koans on a Friday night.

What an estranged world this is

that has such exiles in it. Intense heat,

unusual sprouts, and this era’s been unbearable.

Something mean about the water

we’re depleting like our own housewells

of oxygen as we kick the issues to death

for fracking on someone else’s astroturf.

O look, a finger puppet show of gang insignia

spray-bombed like Kufic writing on the wall.

Why is it always the literate who are the last

to learn how to read that? Tomorrow comes

soon enough. And yesterday’s an obituary

with spelling errors. And as for this moment

together with you in the abyss, you’ve got

an imagination. Make it up for yourself.

And I mean that as a gift, not an insult

to the unkept promise of your native intelligence.

Madame Maudlin with her magic phials

of snakeoil and tears guaranteed to restore

your sense of pity like a purgative at the end

of all these endless tragedies, says

there isn’t a watershed in the world deep enough

no matter how far it got her down like Atlantis

she couldn’t buoyantly bubble up from

like something obnoxiously effervescent

about her nature. And you notice her breasts

on the marquee of the matinee, and you know

right away, that’s a double feature of her

dogpaddling on the moon with mythically inflated

waterwings making flightplans for Leda and the Swan

like one of her runaways and a john.

What kind of a coma is it to live dissociatively

in a society where even the emergency opioids

can’t numb you to the recurring nightmare

of orphaning your dream of a better life from sex

like an unwanted child you’re trying to keep clean

by driving it away from yourself like a scapegoat

into a wilderness with the sins of a tribe on its back?

Street wisdom is the occult science

of demonizing the innocent by exalting

the deviant as a special form of the straight and narrow,

the fledgling rain targetting the tree rings

and rootfires in the heartwood of its own arrow.

Here comes another heroic prologue

from the Bronze Age to make a coward

of the text. When you receive a loveletter

you’re always the envelope trying to read

what’s been written on the inside of your eyelids

but send one that unfolds like an encoded flower

and you’ll always feel as if you were putting

your emptiness to good use, your silence

to the task of deciphering your third eye in solitude.

Ever weep and not know why like a waterclock

trying to keep pace and pulse with a time zone

as big as oblivion overflowing the abyss of your heart

like the bucket wish of a watershed appealing

like a housewell to the rain to bail you out by

filling you up until your skull cup runneth over

like a gutter on the moon that cuts through your heart?

Among the lost arts, suffering is the most

ferocious form of compassion the imagination

of a human being can be disciplined in

without any effort on our part at all because

we were all born with a genius, if not

the motive for it, or the experience, from the very start.

In the gutter you can always hear

a sincere young woman singing the blues

like edgy moonlight through a broken window

and later, no crossdraft in a hot apartment,

huddle in the cement threshold of the doorway

where she lingers in the cool of the night

like the smoke of a rebel cigarette posing

like the portrait of a ghost for an empty picture frame.

In the gutter you’re a drop of emotion

in an ocean of chaos and Lady Luck’s

the patron saint of talent, and for city blocks

as far as you can see through the blazing of the blind,

people are either waiting to be discovered

among the bullrushes like illegitimate children

exiled from their own promised land,

or orphaned on the steps of the temple

with blue ribbons in their hands

that meant something much less venal once

than a dynastic return to a pimped-out innocence

riding like a gold rush through a slum

trying to stay an avalanche of starmud ahead of itself,

or the greater vehicle of a medicine chest

of pharmaceuticals hatching out like cosmic eggs

of crackhead serpent fire living the dream

it was cursed by when it got what it asked for,

anathematized by the backfire of the blessings

we don’t bestow upon one another as if

even here in the gutter where nothing matters

given how random forever is, and love

just as seldom and rare as the opportunity presents itself,

o, yes, yes, yes, let none deny it, it especially does.

PATRICK WHITE

DON'T WANT TO THINK ABOUT THE WORLD FOR AWHILE

DON’T WANT TO THINK ABOUT THE WORLD FOR AWHILE

Don’t want to think about the world for awhile.

Humans are insane. Psychopathically intelligent

monkeys inflicting as much pain upon one another

in their camouflage and white collars as it takes

to overthrow or retain the status quo. The big fish

eat the little fish and the little fish have to comply.

Too isolated by the lightyears I’ve journeyed

deep as my shining will take me into the dark

to care whether I’ll go supernova or not,

everything’s been vaporized in the mythic inflation

of a red giant coming to the end of its life.

Humanity’s easy enough to love microscopically,

up close and intimate, near as friendship,

lovers, flesh and blood, a kiss on the eyelid,

touchable lips at our fingertips like envelopes

to the soul as if there were a loveletter inside.

Macroscopically, too, given we die and dissipate

in common with species we depreciate because

they’re not as smart as we are. Rue the bodycount.

We bury older and fitter corpses than we used to.

And even our sorrows glitter with perversity

more than ever for their entertainment value.

Though we’re enslaved by the gruesomeness

of the way we die, hoping for a better life than this.

Fall in the woods and a pungent white mist

sweet and strange with the colours of perishing

like an albino paint rag a ghost too late

to put the finishing touches to the masterpiece.

The cartography of dry leaves slimey

as black walnut leeches when the rain lets up

and the few birds that remain can begin

to search for the survivors. When it’s

your time to go, it’s your time to go. Exploring.

If you don’t fall off the rim of the world

you’re limited by. To find a way to go on

walking through the waist-high grass and grains,

among the nuts and the acorns, the disappointed

waterlilies that made much of next to nothing

beside the blue narcissus and the suede cattails.

Maybe see the last of the chicory and asters

passing like stars into oblivion, into, who knows,

a deep, imageless, state of dream and the pure joy

the holy books speak of, creating worlds within worlds

where there is no love nor hate, when nothing

is opposed to nothing, wave and water, wind

and sky, and the heart doesn’t differentiate.

Just a moment of that to renew my faith

in the chaos and order of life on a grand scale.

Just a moment of that to remind me

I’m exalted by my humiliations. I’m fire

in the hearth of the gods I stole it from.

Not to lean too heavily upon the stars for trust.

Not to trust anything about life as if you

could anticipate it to rendezvous with you at the end

of a collapsed bridge, or one that’s burning,

a delinquent maple where the river bends like

an old shapeshifting Etruscan god salvaged by the Romans

as wholly useable as morphine in the land of dreams

they occupied like the nightward of a hospital

they pacified like a society having trouble getting to sleep.

Fate’s a petty thing compared to the death

of the flowers. And what god, secular or superstitious,

biochemical or divine, ever gave a sign,

except randomly, we were benignly possessed

by the imaginative freedom of the image

we were created in? Freedom, too, can play

the abyss when there’s nothing left to extract it from.

PATRICK WHITE

ONLY THE LONELIEST OF GHOSTS GONE MAD

ONLY THE LONELIEST OF GHOSTS GONE MAD

Only the loneliest of ghosts gone mad

don’t fret their abstractions with facts.

The wind is pure and seedless and the moon

without weeds. Like old windows,

they weep tears of glass for what they’ve seen

like glaciers in an ice age slowly thawing out.

My voice is the tragic black box of many

panicked conversations trying to act professionally

just before things went deeply south. Orphic descents

into the underworld of the dead and the songs

I sang from the heartwood of my lyre, still resonate

like the shadows that flitted through the sacred groves,

the occult feathers of a coven of crows

that taught me posthumous dream grammars

have no verbs because everything’s already been achieved.

Strange, strange, and inexplicably human, how

the imagination is as easily seized upon

at this time of night by the dead and gone

as by the living, mysteriously animate and near.

I don’t deny there are demonic spirits

that can freeze my eyes with fear, lords

of the abyss that know how to clear a stage real fast

as all my dream figures sublimate like dry ice

into more habitable atmospheres, but I stay centred

at the nave of this prayerwheel of birth and death

and let whatever wants to emanate through me

fan out from there like the spokes of a sea star.

Together we make a zodiac of anathemas and benedictions.

The dead can bestow blessings and lift your spirits

like a curse if the timing’s right and you don’t

waste your trust on quoting chapter and verse.

Ghosts are the last inspiration of the air

the living breathe out as if they were returning

the waters of life to the river they drank from.

The moon passes on, but its reflection makes

an indelible impression upon the mind like a woman

grieving in a cemetery late at night for a baby

she held in her arms like the death of the dawn

and even the black dog of the autumn wind

is at a loss to know how to keen as deeply as that.

Voices out of nowhere, commanding no, don’t go in there

and others, gentle as fireflies that summon me

to follow bracken covered trails through the woods

to a plaque in the ground with a toppled Mason jar

of dried chicory and cornflowers that can still move me to tears

a hundred and fifty years after they died at twelve

of some garish pioneer fever with the name of their favourite colour.

I don’t shut the windows. I don’t close the doors.

I don’t smudge the air with sage or cedar boughs

to drive them out of the attic like bats. I let the dead

come and go as they please. I let their sorrows touch me

and my spirit bleed with empathy for the windfall

of wounded bells that haunt the grass like an eerie carillon

of death knells for the music of the past they once bloomed for

like new moons in a calendar of waning skulls. My house

is their house. They cling to me like an hospitable threshold

for homeless atmospheres very few among the living

know how to breathe in and out anymore without resorting

to a seance or an exorcism conducted like a bus stop for runaways

and vagrants common wisdom says it isn’t wise to trust.

Why shouldn’t the unsheltered dead take their place

at the round table in me like the shadow of a sundial

in a garden abandoned by time where dry-mouthed fountains of salt

still long for a taste of the rain in the tears of their dark watersheds

deep underground like wells that have yet to be divined?

The memory of the waters of life is the muse of the wine

they bring to the table like an echo of blood that’s gone on

ripening in them like uncultivated grapevines in the wild.

One drop on your tongue and you’re drunk

in the doorways of life for the rest of time like a dream

you can’t die in like an imperilled heart without

being grateful there’s as much to celebrate at the end

as there is a new start, that living and dying are the same event.

And as often as the dead have come to me in joy

though that might surprise the uninitiated who still divide

the hellbound from the heaven-sent, the fire from the light it sheds,

so the living have approached me like a perennial lament

for everything that’s missing in their lives like a bright vacancy

out of touch with the dark abundance that thrives

in their uprooted shadows like midnight at noon.

What sea do the Styx, Lethe, and Phlegathon flow into

that isn’t the same for the four mindstreams of awareness

that poured out of Eden, or the gardens and underground rivers

among the fountains of Salsabil in Jana or the waters of Babylon

Zion sat down and wept by? Or the dead leaves

of the burning maples I watch floating by on the Tay

like experienced fires inspired by the starmaps of autumn?

PATRICK WHITE

AND I WONDER AND I WONDER AND I WONDER

AND I WONDER AND I WONDER AND I WONDER

And I wonder and I wonder and I wonder

even in the midst of this harvest of wheat,

this windfall of apples, the siloes of the sun

full, and this blue moon coming back on

for an encore, if I have kept the blood oath

of my word, to God, the abyss, my mother,

myself. I have lived and died like a poet

starmapping the waterlilies in a swamp.

I have been true to the creative revolution

of the sixties when imagination was given its due.

I have not practised more than a verbal violence

against the churches, slumlords, social workers,

truant officers, and their children who sit

on the garbage can lid meditating like frogs

on a tin lilypad while people are entangled

in the drowned roots of the slime they’re engendered by.

I have ruined my life in the pursuit

of an earthly excellence the mediocrities were not

capable of. I was a golden boy for awhile

with an overachieving future prescribed for him

down to the women I dated and left

because of their attitudes toward people

on welfare, who, in politics that matched

the couch in their minds. were the reason they suffered.

You know how many beautiful women

are ignorant louts inside with about as much love

as a praying mantis for a sulphur butterfly?

Some mirrors are meant to be smashed.

Yet these were the people I wanted to impress

and be accepted by to make my Mum proud

of her womb, and say, hey, there may be more

like me at the bottom of the garbage can.

Why don’t you stop by sometime and take a look.

I was young. What a laugh. So I made my own way

book by book swimming through hidden watersheds

in the moonrock I polished into crystal skulls

like the lenses in the telescopes I used for easels

to paint my way home, because my mother

had been an artist, but I ran out of Prussian blue,

and the plain truth is I’ve been homeless ever since.

Alone. Though women have tried to do

the best they could. And I’m grateful for

the poems they inspired in me, and the days

I let my sword be used as a ploughshare,

and the fields I rocked like cold meteors

in my starmud in an attempt to be fruitful and multiply.

Possessed by their beauty and their guilt,

I was demonic enough to understand the exorcism

when it drove me out into the wilderness

pelted by ostrakons for being more intense than appropriate.

Who am I to say anything was wrong

with their ongoing assessment of the mystery?

The cooper cut his barrel in half

and burned out the last of the whiskey,

but I wouldn’t mistake me for a flowerpot

just quite yet until you see what I’m growing

when I sow my path with dragon’s teeth

instead of the usual rose petals and thorns.

Far from the bunting lambs and goats

of sacrificial religions cutting their own jugulars

like psychopaths, I keep the scimitars

of the moon sharp and haven’t forgotten

the point of my horns among the stars

in the long days and nights of these

circumpolar ways the ancient dolmens

taught a tiger burning in black and white flames,

taught a dragon at the forge of its sword-making soul,

to keep the princess of the spring equinox

and the pauper king of the autumn in exile

in the same heart-shaped locket they’ll be buried in

together, illicitly forever, like blood in holy water.

PATRICK WHITE

COULD I BREATHE THE STARS

COULD I BREATHE THE STARS

Could I breathe the stars, I would expire in light.

Were I the harvest moon, I would retract my claws.

Were my heart anything other than what it is,

I would be a windfall of silver apples burnished by crows

and not this rag of a man with a mouthy wound.

I would not be this perversion of radiance mutating

in these acephalic mirrors warped by shape-shifting space.

I would see clearly the angry red berries of the hawthorn

and adopt them as a solar system. And think I was blessed.

And, o yes, spiky woman, when love was in eclipse

if I were not so afraid of falling upon you like a sword,

I would notch the moon like a gunsight

with its own valleys and mountains,

and let the light shine through like Bailey’s Beads,

and place it on your head like a laurel of fire,

the enlightened corona of a door I’ve left ajar.

You agitate the spiders in their morning webs

into vibrating like the needles of sewing machines

or the clappers of fire alarms, as the sun

takes the pulse of its dreamcatchers,

looking for signs of life from the night before.

I am a creature of darkness. I know the abyss.

It fills you like a universe you just can’t seem

to get your heart and arms around.

It’s bigger than the wingspan of your spirit,

the one vacuum nature doesn’t abhor.

No end of it. No beginning you can hope for.

You embody the impersonality of it intimately.

The dark mother of the abounding stars

whose beauty adds an edge to the emptiness

that keeps you from pleading for oblivion

in an isolation deeper than the dead.

The irises were surgically removed from your eyes

and you’re out looking for rainbows at night with a match.

But there’s no one to keep your promises to,

and just at the bend in the river, where you laid

a poppy on the grave of the white crow

to pay your respects to the end of the road,

you plunge over the edge of a finger-pointing precipice

like a willow of water into an ocean of awareness

and there’s no one there to catch you. And the dreamcatchers

aren’t the safety nets they said they were.

Were I a witchdoctor that knew the antidote to love

I would come with strange concoctions

of the Pleiades and deadly nightshade

ground with a sexual pestle in the mortar of my skull

and spiced with a measure of the inconceivable

and have you rise from your death bed

like a miracle among roses that escaped the frost.

I’d stroke the back of your hand like the head of a swan.

And you’d feel it melting like ice. The moon would bloom

like a love letter delivered to a dead branch.

The nightmare of the dispassionate fever

would transmutate into an elixir of life

that would thrill every flower into believing they had

lightning for roots. Wondrous blossoms of insight.

Into the Open. Into the Absence, the nihilistic emptiness

of the cup poured out in a hemorrhage of the heart

when the wine went bad. Someone there in the doorway

gone like a shadow from the sundial of the farewell

they left you with like the wing of a bird

that doesn’t sing anymore in the morning.

And even the birch groves don’t feel very strong

when they’ve been cast down by an ice storm

into white canes and crutches of suffering

you once could lean on for emotional support.

I would be a lightbulb in a house well for you

to keep you from freezing and more grandiosely

if I were a pagan architect, I would erect a temple

with pillars of fire for you that even time

when its hair grows out like solar flares

couldn’t pull down in a fury of indignant ions.

There would be no lack of heretics, martyrs,

or Norse gods to sing in your flames

because they would have finally found something

greater than their solipsistic selves to sacrifice to

that consumes them with devotion

axially aligned with you. And wherever you walked

true north would be under your feet.

As it is I follow you like an oriflamme

in a pageant of longing I will not be ransomed from.

And even if the court jester to the queen

isn’t the grand marshal that gets to carry it,

the one who rides first in the wake of your love,

his armour burning like a mirror of your reflected fire,

I have raised a small banner of blood

on the lance of a thorn the white knights

would think was laughably burlesque

were it not for the fact that it pours out of a dragon’s eyes

like the eclipse of a black rose in tears

igneously bleeding in the darkness

to temper its fangs like swords it remits in tribute,

from a burning bridge of fireflies,

to the solitary river of the unhonoured waters of the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

THE RELENTLESS INDIFFERENCE OF THE WORLD

THE RELENTLESS INDIFFERENCE OF THE WORLD

The relentless indifference of the world

to the monkeys who think they’re in charge.

How does a human skull not rot like a feral dog’s

killed by wolves? Babies die like a carillon

of columbine above their cribs. I see

through the camouflage of my little hill

of a vantage point, ants on the Ho Chi Min Trail

carrying away the piecemeal wings of the butterfly

for scrap metal spare airplane parts. We’re

on the menus of all other forms of life.

Poachers would kill the white elephant

of the moon for its tusks, black bears

for their medicinal livers, stem cells for body parts.

All branches of knowledge, frayed ends

of the lightning unwinching its bucket of rain

on the root fires of dendritic axons in the garden.

Dark matter perishing into its moment

of radiant flowering like English ox-eyed daisies

and stars. Maybe being born into this world

is the shallow death of a black hole in labour?

As much of the elm underground as there is above.

Six million leaves in the beaming sunshine

feeding the dark that scatters them like birds

from a fountain, words from a poet’s mouth

that grow old and die like solar panels erected

on the far side of the moon that lives on starlight alone.

Death can be as useful as roadkill to a turkey vulture.

Hominids lapping marrow for bigger brains

from the charnel houses of the predators

they most fear when they risk extermination

out of the trees being culled by the encroaching grasslands.

Everybody’s too busy running from it

to look death straight in the eye to see

deeply into the black mirror they can’t find

their reflection in, as if you couldn’t shine

without a shadow telling you what time it is.

If I lose my eyes do you think that will

bring about subtle, but lasting changes in the light

adjusting the filaments and stamens of the way

things flower for reasons you were meant to take

as a guess you could build on like a tent

with a portable threshold like a meandering crosswalk

instead of institutionalizing your creation myths?

I have an innate mistrust of the lies that back up

certainty, including the lie behind the alibis

of the tenured sceptic. Dubito ergo sum. Doesn’t

leave you much of a leg to stand on

like a mountain village gathering foundation stones

from the last earthquake. Or a Mongolian

pyramid of skulls promising you an afterlife

to assuage your surrender. Some are washed

in the blood of the lamb and some the goat.

What was pagan about the Romans who bathed

in the blood of a bull? I wash in my own tears

and that’s as close to capitulation as I ever get.

No doubt I may be about to blend into the Great Mystery

with a lot of regret, but, to hear my mother tell it,

I wasn’t too happy when I got here anyway,

and except for a few malignant Catholics who

imputed sin to my original nature, if, in fact,

that’s where things begin, I was innocent as far as it goes

in a world that cuts off its nose to extol

the righteousness of its toes in an infantile mouth.

May be a blessing. May be a curse. Maybe

one foot in the boat, one on shore, and a topknot

tied to a low hanging bough on the tree of life

like a ghost with a dislocated hip and a limp.

Who cares? The river’s running full out of the garden,

and the leaves are better poets than the wind

ever imagined them to be according to modern standards.

They don’t seek awards for the folly of their calling.

They don’t keep track of the anthologies of foliage

they’ve been published in. They just give themselves up

to the mad genius of the wind like the flames

of wax candelabra in diaspora that don’t equate death,

like seeds, with exile. The harvest moon in the hands

of the sower without the plough of the Big Dipper

to show her how. And yet there’s grain in the arms

of the Virgin as if her lover were a scarecrow,

driving its equally innocent twin of a scapegoat

further and further out into a wilderness

where the six and eight pointed stars

thrive on the trash of the universe recycling itself.

Maybe I’ll be the reason sacred dung beetles keep rolling

the starmud of the planet up into a larger cranium

to accommodate the fatty abyss they’ve sipped

from my marrow as the ants who drained

the wetlands and watersheds of my eyes

are beginning to conceive of the bigger picture

my mind painted when I look at them like a visionary

that didn’t believe you had to stick to the beaten path

of somebody else’s pheromones, that you could

put out your own little blossom of stargrass

like a sign of amazement you’re still alive and aware of it.

That death wasn’t a closed door anymore than life

was an open gateway into a garden of wild delights.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN THERE WAS WINE IN THE GOURD, NOT VINAIGRETTE

WHEN THERE WAS WINE IN THE GOURD, NOT VINAIGRETTE

When there was wine in the gourd, not vinaigrette,

and we didn’t put a brown paper bag

like an executioner’s hood over the bottle

we drank from each other’s skull like an sos.

Crazy elixirs that tasted like poison at first

until I fell in love with what they turned me into.

And the way you could purr when you were drunk

and I stroked you under the chin like a mantra, aum,

just before we made love to each other as if love

were a sin, not a virtue. Our irrationality was above

the reproach of the little test-tubes and telescopes

taking water sample of our tears to see what

what absurdities polluted us like acid rain.

We made love to each other and we couldn’t

stop laughing at the way people squirreled

their emotions like black walnuts away

in the heartwood of the tree that engendered them.

We weren’t being mean. The humour was existential.

And the last laugh was on all of us.

Just some very serious things seem funny when

you see them from a certain angle, unafraid

of making the same mistake twice, thrice, four times

a night, until there are more embarrassed mirrors

in the house of life than there are mice.

You wore huge moon hoops in your ears

and even your earlobes didn’t break the circle

we were orbiting around each other in

like a binary star system in the grip

of each other’s gravity bridging the gap

between us like a suspension bridge of toffee

or the action of dark matter at a distance

that spun silk mandalas out of its spidery psyche.

I overloaded your server, and you, mine.

After that there was nothing to opine about.

We were selfish, mad children amusing ourselves

with alternative zodiacs the astrologers

had forgotten about like ghost towns when

the moonlight ran out like a silver mine.

With you I lived six months of my life

as intensely as a war torn dragon ever wanted to.

You orgasmed like a supernova in a black hole

that had bitten off more than it could chew.

We exceeded the limits of each other as if

life weren’t fast enough to catch up to our afterbirth

like the light of a star in an ancient galaxy

millions of parsecs away from telling you where

it’s at now. We were finger printed like emission spectra

for the labyrinthine legends of our personal history

and as for the intimate details of the rest, they’re

just going to have to wait until they’re dead

to ride the flying carpet of the flesh

like a wavelength pulled out from under

the noose of sex they tied around their necks

like umbilical cords giving birth to them all the time.

Fire, fire, fire, in my loins that wasn’t fathered

by a mystic note sewn into anyone’s coat

when I see God framed like a woman in a window

fixing her hair for the night, plumping the tresses

of the willow who avers she’s mourned long enough

for deaths and abandonments she can’t do

anything about. Love would make martyrs of us all

if we let it. I wonder if the autumn leaves

ever wonder if they’re dying for something

bigger than they are when they immolate themselves

like moths and loveletters in the candelabra

of a tree they’re drawn to like crows in a winter sunset?

You were the amazing water sylph at the prow

of the moon ploughing the sea like a dolphin.

Seabirds and their reflections burned like kisses

on your shining skin and the poetry didn’t

have a cruising altitude where the worlds level off,

and we, who had drunk from our skulls, knew

of a certainty no one else could do our dying for us

so why let them live our lives, as if

wild grapevines had to grow like English cucumbers.

We were hated for this kind of freedom

to heed ourselves like two hurricanes on nightwatch.

And whenever you were pink, it was

a warning and delight to a seasoned sailor

who wanted to drown more deeply in you

than the moon would ever be able to again.

Love with you wasn’t a reward or a punishment

or training wheels on a dream no one

could make come true and remain

spontaneous about it, which kills it as a gift

and makes it more of a wage, than a windfall.

Our senses lit up like the eyes and fingertips

of enlightenment emerging from the dark like stars

we were quantumly entangled in like

the old moon in the new moons arms, or lovers

in a sacred hotel room that didn’t leave bibles

in its drawers for sinners who have trouble

sleeping at night even with the mirrors covered

with veils nobody can see through to the other side.

I never expected you to make the exit that you did

but, then again, every Perseid has its radiant,

and somebody’s got to wish upon a falling star

just to cover their bets in case the emergency

fire alarm breaks its glass ceiling and secularism

isn’t right, and anthropomorphism sees the light

and man is adorned by the garland and the garter

of a female god that fills the mangers

with fledgling messiahs that win their wings

after they fall for her without any spiritual parachutes on

that will return them to earth gently again.

God bless the meteor that wiped me out

like a species that had to change like a raptor into a bird

to be worthy of the moonrise it sang its heart out to.

PATRICK WHITE