MAKE SURE

MAKE SURE

 

Make sure there’s fire in the voices

of the demons you listen to,

not ice.

Don’t point to yourself

among the dim stars

of a lustreless starmap

like a consolation prize

as if you were ashamed

of the children of your own shining.

In hell you don’t trip

when you should have fallen

but there’s never anyone to call on

even when you do.

Hell’s valley is heaven’s mountainside.

As above so below.

Hell’s light isn’t red

it’s the last breath of the colour blue

just before moonrise

covers your eyes in wax

to display your likeness to the future

like a deathmask in a quiet room with candles.

The pump don’t work

cause the vandals stole the handles

but there’s no point

witching for water in hell

because the waters of hell are born without eyes

and there’s no seeing in the well you look into

to see what might be looking back. 

To be and not to be

are two wings of the same word

that disappears wholly into the endless skies

of the terrestrial rounds of existence

without ever flying out of itself

but hell is a kind of unbeing

that keeps finding signs of itself everywhere

like a gene it’s never possessed.

Deep in the heart of hell

there’s no doorbell on the emptiness 

that waits like a host without a guest

for no one to arrive.

There’s no salt on the table of the feast

to sit above or below.

No king or queen

who are the first to be seated,

no jesters grovelling at their feet for scraps.

Hell is a history of blind maps

that never went anywhere

they couldn’t be found.

Lots of dirt

but no ground to stand on,

no wind to carry the ashes of the morning dove

like a cry for help in a bottle

to a new generation of stars

to build churches

deep in the deserts

of their braille constellations

to await the resurrection of Mars.

And it’s a great error of insight

to think that hell is a furnace

that only the prophetically inclined can endure

where they pour the ore out

like night from the pure light of day

that gets thrown away

like the memory of an old injury.

Hell isn’t a torment you can anticipate

anymore than heaven’s

a reward you can expect

for making the right mistake.

The good are unrewarded in heaven

and the evil unpunished in hell.

And here on earth where we dwell

among our sisters and brothers

it’s hard to tell one from the other

though we’re all rumoured

to have been mothered

by the same original sin

we don’t honour the distinction.

And it is as obscenely absurd

to be disgraced by your own birth

as if it were a skidmark on existence

as it is to enshrine a worm

in your rose of blood

like a tiny voice

that eats its way through you

from the inside out infernally

like the pygmy oracles of a new Delphi

that mesmerize you with your own magic

into shedding your own blood

on your own thorns

in your own garden

so you can rise from the dead

without horns on your head

to watch the moon without her crescents

pulling the sword out of her wounded light

as she rises like an enfibulated stone without delight

to survey what’s left of her impoverished realm

through the dead eye of a godess

witnessing the abominations

of the nameless generations

that have died with her in labour.

Hell is the space where you realize

you have never really known what life is

because you lived your own

as if it were you

that were doing life the favour

and now it’s all so clearly over. 

Where you look deeply into your own eyes

for any sign of being

as your seeing grows

more and more desparate

not to separate the roads you didn’t walk

from the ones you did

like the threads of the spine

that walked upright like the S-curve of a snake

that wasn’t a strong enough rope

to deliver the punchline of the joke

as you broke into gales of laughter

everytime you failed to kill yourself.

Hell is the moment

you finally get it into your head

that there is more horror

in being condemned without punishment

than there is behind the backdoors of the damned

listening to someone in the darkness

tampering with the locks on their imaginations

to get in over and over and over again.

Hell is the foreplay of pain

not its consummation.

To bring anything to a climax

would be salvation.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOMEONE'S BEEN SPIKING MY TEARS

SOMEONE’S BEEN SPIKING MY TEARS

 

Someone’s been spiking my tears with fire.

Someone’s been shading the truth

like a sin of omission

in the negative space of a liar.

Yesterday I was on my knees

begging for mercy from myself

in front of a thousand Virgin Marys

all strung out on their rosaries

like the skulls of the lovers they used to be

before they bubbled their brains down

like rocks they brought back to earth

after their long spacewalk

to get high on the silver

in the ore of the moon

that keeps changing them like faces

no one can recognize

as the calendar they once knew

before an interrogation room ran their afterlife

like a mugshot through the keyhole of a clueless afternoon.

And I am so sorry I wasn’t there to care.

But I ran out of highways on the way back

to the doors I never passed through

because you were you

and you never let anything out

that wasn’t either a talk-show or an issue

I could ever do anything to resolve

because the point was

to go on suffering like a celebrity

no one had ever heard about

with problems no one could solve

who wasn’t you.

You were in the passing lane of evolution

and I was always a revolution too late

to overturn the head of state

for a kinder kind of emergency

without all the hysterical urgency

of a fire that couldn’t be put out

unless you were crying like a fire hydrant

about all the snakes in your hair

with minds of their own

that turned you to stone

everytime you looked in the mirror.

Fear of anything has never been

the beginning of wisdom

for anyone

and little queen

and you were no exception

in your bulletproof limousine.

The elastic years may have snapped back on me

like a hairpin turn in time

and my donkey-cart of a heart

plunged into the abyss again

as it always did in my vain attempts

not to lose my footing at the top

of your cosmic view

of how far I had to fall

before I was demonic enough to love you.

Things may have changed,

pages turned

bridges burnt

stars gone out

grief grown bitter

in a one room urn

trying to identify its own ashes

and the questions we both asked

that used to bunt their heads like baby birds

on the ancient rocks below

grown feathers enough to fly away

or softer ways to knock

without demanding an answer

you didn’t have to live your way through

like a corpse on the pyre

of everything you ever knew.

I sighed for you.

I cried for you.

I died for you

many more nights than I ever

sat down alone with myself

and crossed off all my full moons

like so many corner shots

eight-balled in the pocket

as I watched you sink the table like Atlantis.

Now I forget how many years it’s been

since I was finally convinced

there was nothing I could ever do or be

that wouldn’t somehow shadow your shining

and in a timeless moment at the airport

that winter night I said good-bye

and took off with ice on my wings

death went on forever without a destination.

But I still remember

how cool I thought I was

before your creative intensities

went off like a destructive universe

in my boundless mystic immensities

and things heated up for the worse.

I’m more spaced out now than I ever was

but the funny part is

it’s not so cold anymore

and things are beginning to feel

a lot more like home

and the darkness is sweeter and deeper

than I can ever remember it being

and there’s a place I’ve discovered within myself

where parallel lines do meet

and I lie down there with you often

without the sword between us

and say those things I would have meant

if things had been different.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HOW MANY MIRAGES

HOW MANY MIRAGES

 

How many mirages does it take

in this desert of stars

to fill a glass of water?

How many ghosts must be summoned

to pull one corpse out of its grave alive?

How many birds

how many stars

how many nights and days must pass

to open one eye?

And how many facts and lies

must be gathered,

how many truths and mysteries ignored,

how many people die,

how many fake fossils

be gathered into a horde

like the skeletons of leaves

cut out of cardboard

to illustrate the tree of life in autumn

just so you can say I am

in the midst of existence

as if reality knew what you meant?

As if you said water

and flowers bloomed

as if you said star

and the light was exhumed

from the darkness it was buried in.

As if you said mine

and love disappeared,

and if you said self

and the universe wrote you out of its will

and left the rest to history.

As if you said me

and the fruit no longer knew the tree

it fell from

or the roots it fell toward

and the moon was no longer moved

to blossom on the dead branch

where no bird sings anymore

in its own voice

as if it had no choice.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THERE'S NO POINT

THERE’S NO POINT

 

There’s no point

throwing your diamonds

into the stove on a cold night

like memories you don’t want anymore

hoping they’ll catch fire and burn away the past

malingering in all that adamantine luminosity like coal.

Blue flower.

Black dog.

Ariel and Caliban.

One lies more in the arriving

than the other in the leaving

but good-bye and hello

are lies I’ve never told

to make myself feel better about anything.

You can call all those sweet thoughts

around the campfires of life marshmallows

but I know they’re just more shit on a stick

walking around like a man

trying not to burn his mouth on them.

The wounds I suffer

that no one ever means

are worse than the ones they do.

Here comes hell

through a smokescreen of ideals

and heaven on the heels of Armageddon

and people competing and cheating to eat

the four horses of the Apocalypse

that have been lying

in the bombed-out streets

of our cities for years

because they’re hungry

and those antique waterbombers

too heavy to fly

who think they can put hell out

like a forestfire with rainbows and tears.

And this is the flower that no one picked.

And this is the one that they did.

This voice is as poor as a syllable

and this one a stickler for syntax

and this one ran all the way home

with his pockets full of the lies

a little toe will always tell

when it runs out of alibis.

I’m trying to put an end

to all these leftover beginnings

that haunt me like premature ghosts

by exorcising myself away through

the blowing curtains

by the open window

like water vapour tired of crying

over cracks in my mirrors

cracks in my tears

cracks in my mystic waterbed.

Dead-to-me doesn’t mean

I’m going to live the rest of my life

standing here like a gravestone

erected in your name

spewing wisdom over your bones.

Life is a deeper wound than death

from the very first breath.

All you need to do

is look at any tree

if you want to see

how just to be is painful. 

The Agon.

The Struggle.

The victory and defeat alike.

For what?

You went looking for wings

to match your sandals

and ended up trading your legs in

for a golden crutch.

You lit a thousand candles

in a burned-out church

believing some god would eventually

turn all your random fireflies

into fixed constellations

but you blew out like a lightbulb

in a cheap marquee

you still can quote like scripture.

You were beautiful in your sphericity

but you followed

the tiny starmaps

on a pair of loaded dice

over the edge of the known world.

Now you compare

impact craters with the moon

worrying if anyone

can see your scars from earth.

You tried to square your own circle

into a ratio of luck with better odds.

You placed a bet on a race with the gods

who bumped you off

when they’d had enough

of your sudden upsets

and dead heat finishes

like a bookie in eternal arrears.

Now your eyes run nose to nose

way past the finish line

of your camera-proof tears

and all your schemes are also-rans

walking over to congratulate

the four horsemen of the apocalypse

who beat you out of the gate.

And it might be the same old song

on the green bough

and the dead branch alike

in the same old spotlight of the sun

but the clarities of love

still sing better

than the purities of hate

and when all is said and done

and it’s time to change atmospheres

and dream on like the weather

out over an unknown sea

of what might come like sails

and strange constellations

to the windowsills of our event-horizons

like the birds of a new continent

returning south

with more words in their mouth

than they left with in the spring,

and even if they are two wings

of the same extinct bird

that logs its wingspan

like a flightplan in the book of shales

I’d still rather lay my head down at night

on a pillow stuffed with feathers

than a pillow stuffed with scales.

I’d rather lay my body down like an old shoe

that’s gathered all the roads it’s ever walked up

into a single knot of smoke

on the altar of my dreams

like a man who has lived long enough

not to waste his life looking

for grails of reason

in these ailing seasons of the absurd.

Reason was always the cheap thrill

of a snakeoil elixir that gave me the chills.

A man with no stones to throw at life

no acids to splash in its face

no crosses no advice

on how to get your thorns to bloom

no horns on the moon

no hill of skulls

no atheist landfills

no nails.

Not a master.

Not a slave.

Not the chaplin

of the skull and crossbones on my sails.

A relic of nothing holy.

No cornerstone of the wind.

No rudder of water.

No night of ore

that eclipsed the gold of the day within.

No hidden treasure.

No X that marks the spot

like a jealous angel

guarding the plague door

to all I’ve got.

A man who understands

he transcends death most perfectly

when his heart is wholly mastered

in every part like blood and breath

by the lost art

of waterguilding his own skin

like an aura thinner

more precious

more lustrous than the gold

that limns the clouds

like the moon when it’s rising

over the silent mindscape

parting the veils that no one parts

to reveal what was never concealed

of the demonic and mystic details

of a life that successively fails

to hold its ground

by keeping its head down.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

even if they are two wings

of the same extinct bird

that died for no reason

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

even if they are two wings

of the same extinct bird.

that died for no reason

 

mastered the absurd.

 

season

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IN THAT SLUM OF A NEIGHBOURHOOD

IN THAT SLUM OF A NEIGHBOURHOOD

 

In that slum of a neighbourhood

you were the Butterscotch Man.

Old. East Indian. Seikh. Kind.

Long white beard and hair

pouring out of your turbin.

And as I can remember you now

fifty-four years later

you were a cloud circling the peak

of Mt. Sumeru

the world mountain

that walked among children

handing out one hard butterscotch candy to each.

You’re always there in my childhood

on the corner of Douglas and Hillside

by the totem-pole telephone booth

everyone jimmied for change,

reaching deep into your tattered sportscoat pocket

with a look of gleeful gratitude on your face

that the light had smiled upon you like a child

asking for a candy.

We were too busy playing for keeps

to know how or when you died.

One day we just knew you did.

And we broke into your small ratty house,

that crutch of a box that could barely stand,

and we saw how poor you were

so much poorer than us

and even though you had an address

here in Canada among us

and stared out through the same windows

at the same demeaning day

at the doors of the deperately poor as we did,

how inestimably far you really were from home

and how alone.

There was so little to steal

who could have robbed you?

But I remember the strange calendars

no one could tell the time by in sanskrit

shedding the pictures

of the same unnamed goddess

in flaming sunset colours

like the petals of a lotus with its eyes closed.

I can’t forget the calendars.

Or how we went on looking

for large hairy black wolfspiders

hiding in the darker corners

of your abandoned rooms

we could drop hot match-heads on

to watch them run like startled wicks.

Some kids grow up like saplings.

We grew up like sticks.

But that one butterscotch candy

you were always good for

like some unknown kindness

we could infallibly depend on

however the rest of it hurt

has kept on releasing its sweetness in me

over the years

like some philosopher’s stone

that rolled down from a very high mountain of a man

that still stands before me in his turbin

even at this distance

through the bluing of time.

I can still see you on any clear day

like snow-capped Mt. Baker on the horizon

across the Straits of Georgia

all the way to Washington State 

from the southern tip of Vancouver Island.

And if you were alive now

I would thank you better than I ever did then

when we approached you like a bird-feeder

apprehensively as birds.

You were handing out

your wisdom your life your light

the largesse of your spirit

without words.

Now I’ve come back alone

for all of us who’ve gone our different ways

like the wind and the waves

and the heavy clouds

of the world we shared back then,

some to prison

some to god knows where

and some to early graves

like the seeds of bad beginnings. 

And it’s not that I want to set things right

because things are never really wrong

to a strong mountain

that knows how to stand on its own

among humans

without blocking the light

and there never was a time

whenever I saw you as a child

I didn’t look upon you with delight.

But now as a man

I see you as a long dark night

streaming with stars down the Himalayas

like the eternal Ganges whose waters

I imagine myself standing by for your sake

to throw my heart in

like that shoot of a rose of blood

you rooted in our ancestral starmud 

like a Taj Mahal of light in the slums

of a North American night on earth

where the children who went to bed

in that cast-off neighbourhood

like unanswered prayers

stoically beyond their years

like prodigies of disappointment

brutally acquainted with the dark side of Santa Claus

wondering why they weren’t worth much

to the people who were supposed to love them,

remembered you

and how much of the world can be saved forever

like the taste of kindness

in a half-finished butterscoth candy under a pillow

as hard as stone

dreaming of a huge big-hearted mountain

that thawed the milk of human kindness

to run down our lives like the lifelines

of the melting ice-cream cone

you looked like to us in your turbin.

Thank-you.

May this rose of a poem

find you everywhere

like the children’s eyes

you opened like moments of light

to star in a dark world

as if every one of those timeless moments

were the lifespan of one of your many afterlives

handing out candies on the corners

of all the myriad worlds

where the children run to your shining

like children of the morning

with eyes as bright as morning dew

to greet the Butterscotch Man

and pry open his fingers

like the sun on Kashmiri flowers

to see what he’s got in his hand

that would taste like love on the native tongue

of any land as wise and old

and as compassionate as his forever is

or as ours was then

unfeelingly young by ten.

So thank you.

Thank-you from all the children of when

the world was a shabbier place

than this homelessness of now

but somehow you always managed

to corner a little kind place for each of us

in that spacious heart

that seemed to understand

how to stand forever before us

in a turbin of snow

like a sacred mountain

in the body of an aging holy man

as if the deepest secret of life

were as childishly simple

as a hardrock candy in the open hand

of the Butterscotch Man.

 

PATRICK WHITE