A REMINDER

A REMINDER

 

A reminder to the positivist thought police

when they're mainlining their fairy dust

not to be negative about my negativity.

There’s a lot of dark matter in the universe

that’s unaccounted for

and if you were born and grew up

in a black hole

it’s hard to think like a fridge magnet.

Do you really think the far side of the moon

spurns the light and grows horns

just to jump out of the darkness at you like an ambush?

I know the night startles you.

You might swim like a swan

on a sleazy river in moonlight

and adorn yourself in feathers of light

to fool your own reflection

but down deep

where your blood turns into mud

you’re just another snapping turtle in disguise.

If I have two eyes. One for the day.

And one for the night

and a third when it’s open

that conjoins them both

into the seeing of a mystic hermaphrodite

that practises love like an occult science

that refuses to husk the light of its shadows

just to make popcorn under a harvest moon,

what the fuck is that to you

who walk around with your eyes

fitted like jewels in your nostrils

to sniff out the darkness in people

like drugs at an international airport?

You can follow the fireflies all the way to the outhouse

if you wish,

you can set an example for us all

with your sterling constellations

hung like messianic traffic lights

above all these T-boned moral crossroads

where you keep slamming into yourself

everytime you change gears to put on the brakes.

You’re a seat-belt away from becoming a straitjacket

as the whole asylum puts the moon on its tongue like a pill

and if by their fruits ye shall know them,

then your straight and narrow way

of threading your spinal cord

through the eye of your needle of insight

to sew up the wounded world like a mouth

is littered with roadkill.

Trying to reform

what will always be perfect

is the Iago of violence

in the ear of the purist

who doesn’t believe anyone

can achieve themselves on their own.

 

PATRICK WHITE 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BIG PIGS EAT AT THE TROUGH

THE BIG PIGS EAT AT THE TROUGH

 

The big pigs eat at the trough like Nazi swine

nibbling on the white blossoms

of their pure bloodline

thinking the flowers might not last

but there’s iron in the vine

to stay the course.

But all the little pigs have on their plate

is a lotto-ticket and a fortune-cookie

with one little sentence of fate

with two spelling mistakes

in a broken skull.

Let the obese circumferences

shepherd their corrupt centers

like sheep where they will.

Even if you know a goatpath back to Eden,

the gate’s unhinged

and only the silence

still clings to the bars

of the abandoned asylum

where even the flowers went mad

trying to open their petals in a straitjacket.

And only a fool would go looking for the bones

of the fallen angels

who swallowed their flaming swords

to keep us out.

And these days the demons

are worried about being possessed by a human

rooting in their souls like a polluted bloodstream

that flows into the dark rivers of fire and death they drink from.

And heaven doesn’t look the same through a smashed window.

And there’s a prophetic guitar in the corner

begging for time like a beggar

but necessity isn’t a moral choice

and I can hear the thorns in his voice

that tear at his heart like a rose.

Illuminated by the means of seeing

as if we could hide in our multi-faceted compound eyes like flies

behind the wallpaper

of a million points of view

we keep looking for brighter ways

of blinding ourselves in our own light.

And we revere the womb of the dark mother like a hearse

though we’re many genes closer to the night

that holds up its black mirror to the light

to show us how we shine on the inside like her

than we are to the new mutation

that makes us blur the world

through the eyes of the good

instead of the wise.

Cataracts in your eyes. Flowers in the sky.

Evil is born of the good of a degenerate insight

that wants to paint loin cloths

over Michelangelo’s balls

to neuter heaven of desire

as if creative fire were a weed

you could pull up by the roots.

And it’s okay if your blood blooms

like a geranium in a jackboot

to ward off poisonous snakes

and you can’t see any further

than the back of the next guy’s head in line in front of you.

But however safe you feel

when you plunge your igneous heart

into the womb of the abyss

to temper it into cold steel,

be sure of this:

the serpent’s still got you by the heel

and the last breath you take

won’t be the wind under your wings.

And when the point you’ve made of your heart

pierces your flesh like a killer bee

in a wounded hive

it won’t be the honey that stings.

And as for all the fireflies and lightning bolts

and constellations in series

you wired like the flashpoints of your fanatical youth

to go off like a firebomb of insight

to reform the world in the image

of your one-eyed disguise

it was you in the third person

who was hoist by his own petard.

If you want to be spiritually free of yourself

like an opressive religion

you made of your youth polyp by polyp

thought by thought,

that Great Barrier Reef

that keeps tearing the bottom out of your lifeboat

and keel-hauls you on the moon

whenever you run aground

in the karmic squalls on your sea of shadows

as if you could navigate your way to true north

by mastering the seamanship of a mirage

that weeps like a desert in an hourglass

for everything it isn’t;

whether you’re a sad old woman

a mad old man

or a neon chameleon of embittered youth

wondering what colour you were on your own

before you were a flash in the mirror:

it isn’t a matter of the ignorant who listen

and the wise who hear

or one who looks

for what another sees.

The sound of the sea is the same

in the fortune-cookie of everybody’s shell

and the light that was the first to know

what it’s like to be young in hell

shines down on everyone alike.

And is the wine truly any older

than the vines of those feelings

that blossomed into the endless loveletters

that piled up at the doors they couldn’t open

like junkmail on the thresholds of your youth?

When you feel pain

do you insist on proof?

And enlightenment is even easier.

Just stop mistaking clarity for the truth.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LIGHTING IT UP AND BLOWING IT OUT

LIGHTING IT UP AND BLOWING IT OUT

 

Lighting it up and blowing it out

I try to make my way through the dark

by beginning at the end

as if the coming and the going

were the same door

or good-bye were the first thing

you would say to a friend.

I approach things like a night stream

as if my death were already achieved

and behind me.

And all the atoms of my being

dancing like frenzied gnats

in the sunset glow of a last eye-beam

are certifiably primordial

and any one of them

when they lose it in the light

could begin a world.

And what can you say more of a life

that dreams of what it is

than it’s the taste of the same wine

in many different cups?

And as any fox knows

the grape is always sweetest

when you can taste it with your eyes.

Though why foxes eat grapes is anyone’s guess

but life makes itself up as it goes

like music in a fish’s earlobes.

It feathers its themes in fire and light

and goes up in smoke

like the ghost of a tree

looking for habitable planets among the stars.

New wounds with innocent root-room for old scars.

Chalking the cue to bank the long shot

you’re trying to spin off into

the deep, dark pockets

of your game-winning afterlife.

And I don’t believe in much anymore

though that hasn’t stopped me from crying

like a slow window trying to keep

the stars from leaking out of me

as if there were a black hole

somewhere in my heart

waiting for an iris to make it an eye

whose seeing might be a new way of healing

what can’t be healed.

Once here. Here forever.

But whether we’re the eternal children of forever

or just another breath on the night air

that doesn’t even know we live,

even death is just another way of killing time here. 

When everywhere’s the center of everything else,

the centre holds,

things don’t fall apart.

They disappear.

And that’s the mystic art

of knowing how to make the most out of existence

by offering no resistance

to the rocks in your own mindstream

that part the waters like the thoughts

of an exile in the promised land

who can’t go back the way she came.

The river can’t step into the same you twice.

And in every direction

your eyes have ever burned like stars

you can see the dark jewel of your own life

from the inside

before it breaks into light.

Sometimes I’m the lonely sign

on the only path to nowhere

and others I’m positively amniotic

with the schools of my blue lucidity

the albino dolphins of the moon leap through

without a chance of changing their colour.

A flower of prophetic blood bleaches my skull.

I swallow the snakefire of my last eclipse

like a lump of coal

I’m trying to turn into a diamond

that doesn’t burn

and never sloughs its skin.

Reality isn’t a religion or a science,

or the back and front of a mirror

that doesn’t know whose eyes its looking through.

Religion: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

Science: how many pins can dance on the head of an angel?

Totem poles on a telephone booth where no one ever picks up.

Voodoo dolls that hex the cause of their effects.

The apple bloom on the tree of knowledge

lets go of its flightless wings

and follows the wind

like the eyelids of unfeathered angels

who opened their eyes like flawless fruit

as they fell toward paradise

without a parachute of smokey virtue

or the scale of a snake for a vice.

Emergence into the open

like a hidden secret revealed

is the engine of evolution

that empowers the dark matter

of this incorporeal starmud

to arise like the high note of a bird

that’s flown beyond the night in its voice

like light beyond its myth of origin.

And the peduncle is lost in the ensuing phylum

as a madman is lost in the scream

that woke up the asylum,

or a god is lost in his own creation.

And the mountains listen

to the holy voices

in the valleys of their shadows

they deepen as they arise

like the guests of an echoless calling

to greet the unknown host.

It’s what the moon feels

when she fondles her locket of water

and memories pull at her heartstrings

like tides on earth

and music is the way she recalls

the sirens that used to sing

like the brides of empty lifeboats

that prayed like smashed guitars

for the night to sow the seedless sea with stars.

And in every fish that swims through fire

like the sacred response of life

to the longing in its own desire

she knows they got their wish.

Fireflies in the ashes of the phoenix tree.

And the eggs of cosmic words

like serpents in a bird’s nest

learning to fly like dragons

that have just swallowed the moon.

And it’s one thing to pull the sword from the stone

but it’s a greater power than magic and proof

with no urge to rule

that summons the butterfly from its cocoon

by giving the fool who inches toward the truth

along the green branch toward the apple-bloom

that already tastes like the forbidden fruit

of some radical insight

the whole orchard in a pair of wings

and more than enough night and light on its palette

to start a revolution in seeing among the flowers

who still labour in the chains of their roots

to turn their earthbound lucidities into stars

who might look back for a change

with eyes that have gathered like water out of the shining

and taste the light in the honey

that kissed their eyelids into gold

long before the night was old

and it wasn’t enough just to see them.

When you opened your eyes

in the burning clarity of your lone vision

before this matrix of space and time

gave birth to the world

you were free to be whatever you could see.

That’s when the light first spoke to you

in the mother-tongue of your seeing

and your voice broke

like a secret name in the mirror

that didn’t know who you were

and the moon on nightwater

the thief at the window

your breath like stars on the cold, night air

summoned the whole of being

in every particulate shard

and radiant plinth of the mirror

to drive your shining into the shadows

so myriad things can appear as they are.

Many eyes open. Night. An eclipse. One star.

And the darkness an anti-romantic

in love with the moon from afar.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EVERY WORD IS THE SEED

EVERY WORD IS THE SEED

 

Every word is the seed

of a language all its own

that goes on expressing itself forever like a vine

that keeps to itself like a musical theme

with different flowers.

The new moon splits the darkness

and there are uneasy ghosts among the waterlilies

that star the mind with openings

that bloom like gates

it’s easier than water to walk through.

For years I thought I was lonely,

wingless among flying things,

but now I know the intimate liberty

that burns in the eyes of my solitude

is a muse of fire that never goes out

even in the mouths of the dragons

that sleep in my watersheds.

The protean potential of one is greater than two

because there’s no one there to define you

like a straitjacket, a cocoon, a fortune-cookie

that keeps churning out moths and dragonflies

while everyone expects monarchs.

I know no more about what I will become next

than I do about what colour a chameleon will turn

when you put it in front of a mirror.

But I trust my transformations

like a plough in fertile starfields

and honour the skins I’ve sluffed along the way

donating my myths in luminous braille,

the constellations and the leaves I’ve shed

as I moved on like autumn,

to the local library.

You can look at a star from earth

or you can see it from the inside

before the arising of signs

hides the dream of things to come in the light,

and you can say I am this

and here I will build my celestial city

but all cornerstones of self are bad dice

and however eloquent your shrine is

words are not a voice

and Be yourself when there’s nothing to be

is a slaver’s advice to the free.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOU MIGHT KNOW THE OBVIOUS ELEMENTS

YOU MIGHT KNOW THE OBVIOUS ELEMENTS

 

You might know the obvious elements

but you don’t know the jewels of dark matter,

the lightless fireflies

buried in the starless nights

that have laboured to make a constellation of you.

You’ve never listened deeply to your own hidden myths

the wind tells around a forbidden fire

and though there are worlds gathered like candles

like eyes of slow dew on the tongues of the leaves

like roads that have never been walked at your feet

waiting for the first word from you to begin

you sit at the broken window of your imagination

like a footnote to creation

and say nothing.

And all along the coasts of unnamed continents

waiting to rise again out of your sunless depths

there are blind lighthouses waiting to see things

through your eyes

and lamps without wicks

that have run down to the shore

to salvage you like the sunken moonboat

that shatters its light

on the hard shales of your night tides

like a mirror that was never christened

by looking into your eyes.

You have the answers to many things

and you’re a good window who tells the truth

but when’s the last time

you ever stood speechless

before your own mystery

and outgrew your heart like a fountain

into all these many rivers of light and blood and water

that flow out of you like the homeless roots of the wandering sea?

And which among all these many threads and ribbons of life,

unspooled and spooling like eyes in the nightstreams of our seeing,

in the vastness of this shoreless mindscape

of time and space and dark matter

where even the mirrors are waves

that will eventually discover

they were always the God particle they were looking for

is flowing the wrong way

when the flowing itself is our destination?

What, where, why and how

are the elemental memes of a man

who takes the measure of the world in hand

to understand how far he is from knowing

his place at the table

but who is older than hydrogen

and mother of more beginnings

than there are shadows cast

by the light of the first word

into this dark-hearted world of radiant things

that are strung like the skulls of prayer beads on a rosary of planets

by an unsevered thread of light

that leads everyone out of the labyrinth of the moon

like the spinal cord of a waterclock in the womb.

There are those whose eyes are drops of water

and those whose eyes are seas,

but both are elixirs of clarity

in the immeasurable depths of the seeing

in which all things take their being

like fish that glow in the darkness by their own light.

The true whole and simple history

of all that has come of that first summons into the unknown

to let there be

is the creative mystery

that answers the echoless valley back

with the indirect imperative of I am

that stands everywhere enraptured

in a matrix of wonder

at the birth of God whose eyes

are the particulate forms and indelible colours

that run like chameleons in the infinite mirrors of time

looking back at you

like worlds within worlds without end.

But if you need to know where you’re going

and one star isn’t enough to show you the way

and you want to see as much in the dark

as you do in the light

put love in your eyes

like the sun at midnight

or a lamp in a broken window and look.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IN THE DEEP END OF THE NADA POOL

IN THE DEEP END OF THE NADA POOL

 

In the deep end of the nada pool

everyone drowns in their own eyes.

The summer triangle goes down in the west

and there’s a first snow on the last day of November.

How many dirty windows

must the light pass through

before it can see clearly?

And what’s the point of asking

the mirror and the mask

that suffuses creation with intelligence

if all it ever does is reflect you

on all sides of the question

as if you were all rivers

in a single drop of water at once

looking for the sea?

I uphold the integrity of my mystic specificity

like the Higgs boson particle

that gives everything its mass

but I can only imagine myself as far as I am

and it’s as impossible for me to fly out of myself

as it is to measure the wingspan of water.

You can’t pour the universe out of the universe

like a snake out of its skin again and again like the moon

and move on forever with your tail in your mouth

as if you were trying to catch up to yourself

by swallowing your head.

I have hung on.

I have given up.

And I have let go.

But even enlightenment

is the aspiration of a firefly

to illuminate the darkness like a lightning bolt.

And when you burn like a black hole beyond the light

for a deeper insight into your life

and why you’re walking around on the earth

doing what you are

because you were born to enquire

there is no star to guide the lost mountain down

these dangerous goatpaths

into the valley you heard call your name.

And what’s to seek

when everything speaks to you

in your own voice?

And is it better to flow along with things as you do in a dream 

like autumn leaves on the nightstream

that writes all the books

that you read like lifelines on the palm of your hand

to understand not just how the story ends

but why it began in the first place.

In the beginning was the word,

and God said, kun fia kun. Be. And it was.

And the rest is the afterlife of the Big Bang

that came of the foreplay

of branes kissing in hyperspace

to give the inconceivable a human face.

But let the fools of light

keeping rubbing the new lamps

of their impersonal cosmologies as they will

hoping some geni will appear like smoke in a mirror

like the affable familiar that gulled Faustus with intelligence

in the form of Mephistopheles.

Ah, Faustus, why this is hell.

Nor are we out of it.

And the world is full of sound magicians

yearning to be demi-gods

who have forgotten

blazing too is a kind of blindness.

But nur wa nur, light upon light,

when you turn the darkness around

there is more seeing in anyone’s eyes

than there are stars without bound above you.

How can you ever get anywhere you haven’t been before

if you keep knocking on your own door

to let yourself out with the cat?

And have you ever in all these years

of living on the precipice

of your fear of falling

ever stepped out into

the open inner spaces of yourself

without a parachute or straitjacket?

Have you ever walked on stars

or suddenly felt yourself feathered with fire

in that urn full of ashes

that bears your heart in a skull

like a geriatric embryo

that’s given up hope

and madly ecstatic at taking flight

pour yourself out on the wind

like the phoenix of a loveletter that’s long overdue?

 

PATRICK WHITE