OLD GATE OFF ITS HINGE

OLD GATE OFF ITS HINGE

Old gate off its hinge.

Matted like a lapwing in the long blond grass.

What is there to distract me from?

I pass, but not as a predator.

I seek the high field at the end

of this narrow dark road at dusk.

I’m out for stars. I’m out for solitude.

Like these deep cuts in the road

my scars have taken me out for a walk

in the gathering darkness,

nothing to keep in

nothing to let out.

The sumac denuded.

The last of the asters ruined.

There’s a farmhouse back here

abandoned years ago

like an old book in the basement

under the covers of its collapsing roof.

And the ghosts of two children

hidden deep in the woods

from the authorities,

autistic prodigies

who could fix anything mechanical,

clocks, watches, small engines

anything the neighbours brought them

but their own hearts and minds

and that’s how they lived for years,

with nothing but their own estrangement for company,

fixing things the neighbours broke.

A cage. But with the door open.

A road. But nowhere to go.

A house. But no one to shelter.

A mind. But no one to know it.

The chassis of a rusting car.

A bear.

I get caught in the glare

of my own mental headlights

wary of making more noise than I should.

And then my eyes

adjust my fear to the darkness again

and I’m not sure I should be here at all

unworthy of the silence,

unknown to the trees at the side of the road,

no clockwork universe

to bring these backwoods geniuses

that even they could fix.

A fox on the path. A startled bird.

The barking of a farmyard dog

way off in the low-key distance.

Stars in the ripening twilight.

A clearing with maple saplings to say

here nature picked up where it left off

and broken shards of moonlight

still clinging to the windowframes

as if it had to break through its own ice

to draw water from a stream.

Perseus holding Medusa’s head

above a barn drunker than it looks

swaying from side to side

gaping through its doorless loft in shock

at what is happening to it.

Aldebaran in Taurus, the Pleiades,

Castor, Pollux, Auriga and the kids,

an airliner leaving Ottawa without a sound,

and something that sweeps over me

like the shadow of a thought

with an owl for an eyelid.

So little harmony

so much tension among the stars

and their conflicting myths of origin

in the chaos and confusion of creation

and yet around here

in the stillness and profusion of their radiance

blessed and hexed alike

they all seem fixed.

Here where the unknown breathes

and eternity doesn’t seem

like anybody’s business but its own.

PATRICK WHITE

NOW HALCYON SEAS

NOW HALCYON SEAS

Now halcyon seas, the Kingfisher Star, Alcyone.

No sign of ever having drowned here. Most

are as unaware of the sentient space they’re immersed in

as a fish is of the water it wears like skin

or a bird of the air it plunges through. I was

given a brain. The universe was rolled up

into a ball of starmud, a planetesimal of my own,

that was meant to receive a lot more than it

could ever transmit. The way this bursting bubble

of a multiverse gets you to listen to it

once you get sick of listening to your own voice

trying to lift words and feelings like an ant

with a butterfly wing in its mandibles like a sail

that knows more about which way the wind is blowing

than it does. I may be only a whisper

of the shriek I used to be in a much denser medium

than this when I felt my lungs being crushed like bag-pipes

by the implosions of a black dwarf. Thirteen tons

per cubic centimetre of mass. Things weighed

heavily on me back then like basso-profundo bells

with overactive pituitary glands in a shell game

of the pea in the pod. Maybe I was looking for God,

and God was playing hard to get, who knows,

but the devil, time, death, suffering and the brutality

of certain modes of oxymoronic mystic bliss

have blown like compassionate winds

on my magma ever since like a mother

cooling the burns on her only child’s fingers

as if she were blowing out a votive candelabra in a church.

The river reeds are drawing maps of my mindstream.

I’m going with the flow without letting go.

Serpentine currents of picture-music playing me

like a cobra plays a flute in the sway of things.

Precisely where you run out of rope and road

to hang yourself is where the way begins and ends.

I look up at the stars tonight, and as aloof as they are,

my heart opens up like a black waterlily, and says,

without any prompting from me, after all these lightyears

of staring at each other, they in their heights, and me

in the places I had to climb up to see. Friends.

Because it’s not hard to imagine them suffering

the way I do, shooting into the dark on the midway of life,

like a ray of light hoping to hit a flower or two

to let them know it’s time to wake up like radio telescopes

looking for signs of extraterrestrial life

like a loveletter that doesn’t have to be opened with a knife.

The dire wolves of all my Pleistocene ferocities, extinct,

I don’t think Gandhi’s hearing footsteps coming up on him

from behind, to bring him down like a bison on the run,

but I can still hear their ghosts howling in the dark hills

that surround my homelessness with a local habitation and a name.

Now I’m a gray wolf by acclamation. A gentler adaptation

to my environment than my environment is to me.

I’ve still got my fangs but I’m into smaller, more diversified game.

The beavers are huddled in their mud bunkers.

The lakeshore rocks still bear the scars of the glaciers

that were driven off by the sun protecting its prey.

And the new moon is flint knapping itself

into a lunar spearhead that sinks a lot deeper into the heart

than the old Clovis points used to. And I can smell

hot poppies of blood on the air startling the pungency

of vegetable detritus and decay in the duff

of last year’s holy books going up in flames.

Never been a fan of words unless words are living creatures,

dragonflies in their chrysales. But once the secret’s out,

they have wings of their own, and names that have power

and a unique integrity endowed upon them

like their mystic specificity by the mouths

of the humans that use them like rain.

Thousands of droplets falling like veils

from the wings of a rising waterbird

shattering its own reflection like a sand painting,

a mandala, a spell, a holographic projection

of the pineal gland or a two dimensional black hole

like the urn of the ashes of the Library of Alexandria

after it burned down. John Keats said

here lies one who name was writ in water,

but here it is before us, written on gravestone.

The whole universe is an encyclopedia of wavelengths.

And it doesn’t really matter if you send out the dove

or the crow first, by the time they get back to you

about sighting land, they’ve reversed colour

like chameleonic dice in the cold hands of misfits.

The willows are looking haggard at the approach of fall.

The aspen and the birch leaves are beginning to curl

and turn brittle like gnostic gospels and the sumac is burning.

My thought waves are syncopated to those of the lake.

My heart is jumpstarting the frogs like dozy engines

as I watch the wavelengths of the watersnakes

hunt them down like serpentine wizards

with tuning forks with perfect pitch for tongues

to make up for their lack of ears, as do their scales,

as if amphibians were always half a note off key.

And all this seems so surrealistically mystical to me,

when I consider the infinite number of ways it could have been,

and probably is somewhere in the multiverse like a fruitfly

perfectly preserved in a tear of pine resin creeping

like a snail of incense down the trunk of an evergreen.

It’s the billions of switches in between, not your genes

that determine whether your thought-trains

are going down the right track or not. A diesel howls

like a dinosaur in mourning for the end of things

through the country darkness, immeasurable pain.

Once you realize the way things are are who you are,

there’s no room for separation, even the skeletal wings

of the bracken that fossilized its way back to the living,

even a pine-cone, is a psychological event. What then

to make of Jupiter and Venus descending in the west,

Venus near Regulus in the Lion, Aldebaran in Taurus

and Alcyone in the Pleiades bull-vaulting its horns?

Turn a leaf. Look at a starmap face down. Turn the light around

Exorcise the sprite in the candle. Thaw your eyes.

They’ve been falling for light years like tears on the stars

and they haven’t put anything out yet. Orion soon

and pharaonic kas on the Road of Ghosts disappearing

over the skyline of a black hole that doesn’t come with lifeboats.

But once and awhile, under my Kingfisher Star,

lets things float along in time upheld

by the buoyancy of their own wonder

that things are as they are as you are in a world of forms

where each engenders the myriads of everything else

and no more, even with a razor, than you can

peel the moon’s reflection off the water

can you find a skull’s worth of separation

between the inside and the outside.

Tat tvam asi. You are that. Your mind

arrayed before you like jewels of your own seeing,

almost a Mephistophelean compassion for humanity,

more that of others, than my own, to judge by the way I’ve lived,

estranged by my own familiarity with what I wish

I didn’t know. Ah, Faustus, why this is hell, nor are we out of it.

With this one inclusive exception, that if you were

to ask an angel where heaven is she’d say the same

as a fish would say it’s all the sea, or a bird, the sky.

If you want to be a pilgrim walking around with a death mask on.

Don’t be surprised by the apocalypse that dooms you

like an out of date Mayan calendar that knew time

was an eternal recurrence of a moment with no afterlives.

Maybe you’re a spiritual humming bird sipping

nectar and ambrosia from the goblets of the gods,

or an existentialist dimming the lights with tunnel vision

or you’re an alley-cat going through triune phases of the moon

as if birth, sex, and death were all synonyms

for lyricising the same event. But reality

is a lot more original than it’s usually given credit for.

Even in science, mind is an artist, able to paint the worlds,

and the masterpiece you paint is the world

you’ve been living in for as long

as you’ve shown up to model for it.

That’s how you know there’s compassion

quantum-mechanically saturating the whole universe.

Everyone’s living in a world

that fits them like skin they’re growing out of

like waterclocks shedding one world for another

like watersnakes of serpent fire with backbone.

You see those constellations in the crowns of the ironwood trees?

They’re not out there shining at you across

the vast, vacant, interstellar spaces out of earshot.

They’re all paradigms of your own mind

whether you look at them in a gallery or paint your own.

They’re every bit as intimate as sunshine

that gets in through your eyes or caresses your face.

And if you give them names, not words,

Aldebaran, Regulus, Alcyone the Kingfisher Star

and let their dead metaphors age like sages of heartwood,

they’ll whisper in your ear creatively

about the leaves of the silver Russian olives

glistening like Byzantine lunettes

in the markets of moonlight with a dusky touch of soul

low on the horizon of a visionary mindscape.

Look at the stars? What do you see? If it isn’t

your own eyes shining back at you without

a mirroring consciousness in between,

it’s got to be traffic lights for fireflies who’ve gone blind.

And that, too, is a fingerpainting of your mood and state of mind.

And further proof of a compassionate universe

is that no one can abuse another’s work

by using it as a palette for their own because

when you’re wholly effaced by what you’re doing

there’s nothing to imitate but what you see before you alone,

the urgent potential of a whole world of your own

crying out like a nightbird in the plenum-void of the darkness

kun fia kun, fiat lux, let it be, and it was,

like the first taste of light and longing in your mouth.

PATRICK WHITE

HOLDING IT IN, THE PAIN, THE DOUBT, THE SOLITUDE

HOLDING IT IN, THE PAIN, THE DOUBT, THE SOLITUDE

Holding it in, the pain, the doubt, the solitude.

Caging my wild heart out in the open where the stars live,

and the bars are all on the inside like toppled pillars

still holding up the friezes of a few high ideals as much

out of habit, as to show a lot of class

in the way you fall to your knees like a bull

in a tauromachia of the zodiac with seven sunbeams

like acupuncture needles or porcupine quills in your back,

as your ear is cut off like Van Gogh’s and thrown

like a rose of blood to a lady in the crowd.

Living in the lunar half light of all my uncertainties.

Trying to see things I’ve been dying for most of my life

not as expiring consolations on a terminal night ward,

night lights in the morgue, flowers beside the bed,

soft, white shoes whispering down the polished halls of the dead

so they could get a good night’s sleep, knowing

there were more nightmares in their lives

than the hard pillows of the world

they lay their heads down on as if

they were getting used to their gravestones.

Stripped of meaning like the frayed ends

of my thinning neuronic synapses pared to the bone

without any insulation to bear up to the next lightning strike,

that would make even the weathervanes shriek like rust

with the pain, the pain I’m holding in, on trust

it’s going to transmogrify itself into something

death-defyingly creative, the art of a noble calling,

like a snakepit of gamma ray bursts as if space and time

were hemorrhaging like a miscarriage of the heart.

Biting the bullet, eating the pain like an organic vegetable

that’s good for you, hoping the character it builds

isn’t Frankenstein, or the missing link in the madness

of some other species of suffering keeping its distance

because it can’t believe it’s descended from you.

My heart numbed by laughing gas, an ice age of novocaine,

I’m still trying to pull the thorns out with my teeth

like a physician who knows how to heal himself

but if the truth be told, feels more like a toxin

than an antidote milked from the fang of the moon,

a junkie slumped in an abandoned back alley easy chair

like a lotus-eater among the feral cats inclusively alone

to nurse his despair into dreaming of no better life than this one.

I’m still trying to pull the sword out of the stone,

a syringe out of the arm of a lion, the last hinge of the door

that’s hanging like a lapwing without a wingspan anymore.

Down on myself like a meteor shower trying to exchange

one hundred and thirty-five million years of dinosaurs

for just one warm-blooded moment with a mammal.

As new a day to me as it is to a baby, and I’m doing my best

to live wholly and now in the moment,

without losing my appetite for time

or letting the starfields be overgrown by underbrush,

but when there are more scars and skeletons on your dance card

than there are wounded new moons making a recovery

on the rebound, you can feel like the abandoned ark of a barn

scuttled on Mt. Ararat like a love cruise that wants its money back.

And time is just a snake-oil salesman that heals nothing.

Space turning to glass. Time in convulsions

having tasted a little of its own medicine

and the light that broke this morning like a halo of hope

around the rim of the black hole that had swallowed me live

I was being so cooly detached about, though my heart,

voodoo doll it may have been in the past, beat as fast

as the rain stitching up the seams of the mirrors on the street

as if they were on the same wavelength as a surgical sewing machine,

until it realized this false dawn was as dark as the last

and all it was doing was patching up the ghosts of the past

with clouds of unknowing that had no secrets to reveal

and pathetic fallacy aside, knew nothing about the way I feel.

Trying to be a human who healed more than he wounded.

Trying to be a man that his jeans aren’t ashamed to wear.

Trying to be a Zen hard rock strong enough to climb the mountain

than come down on everyone like an avalanche of cornerstones

giving up like Sisyphus on pushing another moonrise up the hill

even when I’m swimming through quicksand

or paving a way that others might follow as lost as I’ve been

on this long, dark, strange, radiant road

that isn’t just another starmap with pit stops,

that isn’t the asphalt of spiritual La Brea Tarpits,

or a labyrinth that ends in a cul de sac of glass ceilings

like the crumbs of the dreams of a habitable planet

I saved like a rosary of near-earth asteroids

just a few fly-bys outside the Van Allen Radiation Belts

I wore like a bodhisattvic warrior without any scalps

to bring things back together that have been too long apart.

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOU DON'T TAKE THE RISK, JUMP THE ABYSS LIKE A FIREFLY

IF YOU DON’T TAKE THE RISK, JUMP THE ABYSS LIKE A FIREFLY

If you don’t take the risk, jump the abyss like a firefly

between two polarities, how are you ever going

to release your potential as the stem cell of a bridge of light

from one hemisphere of your brain of starmud

to the other side of your shining? Whenever

there are two eyes it’s crucial that you make a third.

And if you haven’t got the courage to jump from your artificial paradise

without knowing whether you’ve got a parachute on or not,

go ask the dandelions gone to seed how to take a fall

like the free radical of a kiss on the breeze, touch life

lightly as if you were feeling the weave of the silk mist

rising like someone’s last breath off the morning lake

or ask the seasoned helicopter pilots of the dragonflies

and maple keys about doing double wheelies like dna helices

when you’ve driven way past the end of the road like Thelma and Louise

and your animation’s been suspended trying to cling

to the wind like a rafter of air you can hang from

like the larva of a caterpillar repelling down a Dutch elm

on a thread of fate you’ve got to pull like a rip cord

if you want to be a skydiver instead of a half-baked butterfly

always on the run from base-jumping spiders

on a strafing run of balsa wood gliders that never got off the ground.

If you don’t jump into this life like Basho’s frog

into the pond of the world. Splash. At the end of time

when your life flashes before your eyes like an implosion

going supernova, just before you drown in your own tears,

you’re going to realize that all along you were

an estranged embryo that committed suicide in the womb

by making a noose of your mother’s umbilical cord.

How wide does the sky have to be before you’ll fly?

Or the sea, to swim? You want to know the flightplan

and the wingspan of the wind before you decide

if you’re going to ride it or not, dig your spurs into the storm

like white lightning into the heart of a brahma bull

or run before it like a rodeo clown who wanted to be a matador.

All my life I’ve run into cosmic matchbooks

with a solar flare for bucolating back on themselves

like ingrown hairs festering they’re not the galaxies

they once aspired to with the candlepower

of a single illuminated insight without mirrors

that was enough of a wavelength to surf for light years

and would have carried them all the way there

like Hero to Leander across the Hellespont,

if they’d only been creatively self-destructive

or counter-intuitively absurd enough

to trust the road born with their own feet to walk it

so all your crutches don’t have to do it for you.

How could any of your planets be habitable

if they’re still hanging like a mobile of green apples

on a skeletal bough in autumn long after the leaves have flown?

Cowardice always did have the worst sense of timing

and an alibi like a sin of omission it didn’t commit

against itself like a moralistic etch-a-sketch or the tabla rasa

of a travel journal that never got any further than the page

it wasn’t written on like a tidal pool cluttered with relics

of how dangerous it can be to set sail

on the great night sea of awareness without

even so much as a petal of the moon for a lifeboat.

Falling isn’t for petty people. Go ask the waterbirds

descending into their reflections ascending from the deep,

or light being twisted like a lock of hair

around the finger of any black hole

with the gravitational eyes to point you out

like Icarus re-entering the atmosphere,

a white feather of fear going up in flames,

a meteor with a biological impact on change.

PATRICK WHITE

SEEKING THE SHADOWS OF WHAT YOU ARE

SEEKING THE SHADOWS OF WHAT YOU ARE

Seeking the shadows of what you are

you miss who’s standing in the light.

Eternity with its tail in its mouth

can’t taste much else in life but itself.

Where did these words come from

just a moment ago out of nowhere,

and if it were to rain, would that be

shallow or deep? And maybe a labyrinth

is just a snake that’s swallowed its own head

and is wandering aimlessly in despair

through its own digestive track

like a salmon leaping upstream

through a waterclock with self-similarity

on its mind, oviparous replication,

the material immortality of genetic time.

Nothing’s irrelevant or inelegant

if there’s nothing to choose from

so everything shines in every mystic detail

as if it had never come unglued in its solitude

and bifurcated its unity into the subject

and the object of its awareness just to have

someone to talk to, an intimate familiar

it could rave at or serenade in a manic love affair

it was having with its own creation

like an artist talking to his masterpiece

with the caress of every sable-haired brush stroke.

Insignificant for the long haul, or famous

for fifteen minutes, either way,

you wouldn’t know it by looking

at the fossils we didn’t bring back from the moon

or sifting the grain from the chaff

from the ashes of the wheat

the wind scorched like a dragon

on its way to bring rain. Why

drive a nail through your third eye

and delude yourself into believing

you’ve been crucified, the king

of the waxing year sacrificing

your body parts to ensure a good harvest?

You want the virtues of your noble enemy?

Slay yourself and eat your own heart.

This is your nagual, your tulpa, your mirage,

your nightmare, your doppelganger,

your reflective familiar, your shadow

holographically projected in 3D by the pineal gland

of your third eye tattooed on the skin of a black hole

that is neither an ignominious exit through the grave

or the celebrated entrance into a secret garden,

and it can’t be any more empowered than you are,

and there are no walls to walk through

if it wasn’t you that built them to keep the poor

from vaulting them to steal your apricots

like the hungry ghosts that haunt

the orchards of your abandoned thoughts.

Savage homeopathy, perhaps, a holy war

of starmaps torn out like pages of sacred text

against the leaves who think they’re responsible

for keeping the whole tree they both spring from intact.

The autumn burns like an heretical apostate

that’s fallen away like faith in itself.

What nonsense, when they’ll both end up

doing a ghost dance on each other’s graves

where neither the dead nor the living

can be reunited in peace at the same seance

because the flame of life is duelling with its own candle

like the branch of a spear with the flint-knapped blossom

of the point it’s trying to drive home through its own heart.

A lethal waste of energies for echoes

to seek the destruction of their original voice.

When the waves of the light, the sea, the mind

bare their necks and swan

for the double-bladed axe of the moon

that separates things like conceptual consciousness

as if it were cleaving water, and heads come off

like the leading rose-buds of multi-cephalic hydras

that bloom the more they’re pruned like zinnias,

even death considers the slaughter an abuse of time.

If you want to live in the house of life as a martyr,

a bodhisattva, a spiritual mujahedin who

blows himself up in the temple of the money-lenders

and discount dove merchants, or even a poet

who enlisted in the ghettos of the Chilean art brigades

like Victor Jara, or Archibald Lampman’s

warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope

dying of a heart attack in Ottawa at thirty-six,

or Emily Dickinson listening to a fly buzz when she expired,

the only blood on the blade you fall upon

you should ever taste is your own if you

want to speak to a big-hearted bell of enlightenment

without the forked tongue of a perjured witching wand

or the self-defeating absurdity

of seeking clean water with dirty hands

or trying to reach out to touch the stars

when they’re pouring through your fingers

like the sands of an hourglass remembering

all its past lives gathered around the village wells

like telescopes looking through the wrong end of themselves.

PATRICK WHITE

EVEN WHEN I'M DOWN, YOU'RE A FIRST MAGNITUDE ECLIPSE

EVEN WHEN I’M DOWN, YOU’RE A FIRST MAGNITUDE ECLIPSE

Even when I’m down, you’re a first magnitude eclipse.

No one I had rather stand in the shadow of than you.

Even at high noon, when I’m ingathered like black wheat

into the siloes of my dark abundance, and the sundials

can’t tell what time it is, you’re the midnight in my house well

that makes the stars more beautiful for having disappeared

from the bright vacancy of the day into this deeper darkness

where the blood rushes to my eyes to stand at the window

beside my heart, and be amazed by your moonrise

I couldn’t have anticipated were I a Mayan astronomer in orbit.

Or the third eye of the Hubble sifting through the rubble

of the old temples to the gods we abandoned

and left to the snakes and the swallows to make of what they will,

as if we could take any of these prophecies that have come true, back.

I’m turning you like a black diamond in the light,

and I’m listening to your dark harmonies like wavelengths

that have traversed great abysses like the gypsy photons

of a gamma ray burst with the power of ten billion suns

going off all at once in a rapture of radiance

as lethal as enlightenment. You bring out

the snake-charmer in me and I want to sing to you

as if all these crows had burning guitars for voices

and the choirs of the dumbstruck doves

were switching from acoustic to electric

when they see how you sway

like the matrix of space and time to the music,

the flying carpet of a dangerous grace,

the membrane of a new world about to explode into hyperspace.

And, yes, my ego is afraid of the agonies of clarity

it might have to endure like the excruciating transformations

of a mirage among constellations, a firefly that expires

like the wick of a candle in a squall of stars

that knows the timing is just as crucial

as the content of the light when it’s too early

for the bud of the black rose to bloom yet,

and if you want to see deeper into the dark

you can’t pry the petals of a matchbook open

before it’s their moment to shine. But black lantern

I may be, blind, empty, looking for my mind with my mind

and losing it in the glare of its own light,

and though I’ve gouged my eyes out to find it,

yet when I think of you, you fill my eyeless homelessness

with billions of unnamed stars with habitable planets

and shepherd moons keeping the secrets of life to themselves

like black pearls in the lockets of oyster shells

opening their mouths like old calendars of stone

to sing the praises of the new moon on this event horizon.

I may be the holographic projection of a fridge magnet

stuck on the two dimensional skin of a black hole

in the great watershed of the Conservation of Data Principle,

but when I’m flatlining like that, mirage, or no,

you’re the third dimension I keep manifesting in.

You’re the occult jewel that has fallen

from my black halo of comets into the sun

that shines at midnight. You’re Immersion.

Ingathering. Illumination. Dispersal. You put flesh

like loaves and fishes on the skeletons of the dragon’s teeth you sow

and every abyss that ever echoed the silence of the nightbirds

that had given up their longing like a begging bowl

is brimming over the rim of my skull cup like a full silo.

All my mirages are drowning in their own reflections

like fountain mouths of real water on the moon,

trying to wash all these deathmasks off

like so many visions of the world that stuck

like the dust of the road clinging to my eyes

like gusts of stars that make me want to weep

to polish the shining in the dark mirror

that’s looking at you like the occult light

at the end of the tunnel of my reflecting telescope

so that even when I’m down, I’m a miner with hope

buried deep underground in this chamber of mystic diamonds,

where I’m painting picture-music in the carbon

of my own charred bones, the kissing stones

of my prophetic skulls wiping lipstick off the petals

of a black rose, face paint off the eyes of all my sacred clowns,

to celebrate the dawn of the new moon pearling under my eyelids.

PATRICK WHITE

LIVING ON A PLANET THAT KILLS MORE PEOPLE THAN IT HEALS

LIVING ON A PLANET THAT KILLS MORE PEOPLE THAN IT HEALS

Living on a planet that kills more people than it heals.

And the most dangerous of predators, our own ideals

turning on us like ingrown hairs, solar flares the wind

blew in our faces without any of the veils or auroral graces

that used to adorn our amazement at what our eyes

in creative collaboration with victimized ions, could do

with the last breath of an expiring sun god to make it

mystically beautiful and awe-inspiring. Just

to be a witness to it was enough to keep your mouth

shut for the next ten thousand years, the silence

before the sublimity of being in the presence

as convincing to the farmer as it was to the astronomer.

As civilization progresses into an improved savagery

and people grow more bovine in their living rooms

as the one-eyed liar at the nadir of the third eye

entrances them into believing they’re still

grazing in the starfields of genetically modified astroturf

they were raised on, slowly, from a moon cow’s point of view

it’s beginning to dawn on people that civilization

is nothing but the history of war since Sargon of Agade

first turned the plunder of cattle and women

into the military imperialism of the few against the many

by staying like a parasitic cosmic egg laid

on the pineal gland of a host caterpillar so civilization,

mimetic word, a cattle prod, an axe, and an abattoir,

is coming to be seen for the death trap that it is.

Muddy Waters, there’s anotha mule kickin in yo stall.

I grew up in an impoverished neighbourhood

where the garbage cans were full of people

but I swear, and I’ve seen a lot I wish I hadn’t,

I’ve never seen so much rot, corruption, and ignorance,

lacking even elementary street smarts, as I do

in the portulent politicians and their fanatically kempt hags

that make you feel so sorry for their hairdressers,

and the tailors that have to fit them like a hidden agenda

of hate and greed, oozing through the seams

of their shapeshifting, deformed-fitting suits.

Makes you want to stick the old peace sign of the sixties

down your throat and throw up. Or pack up

a small tent, like a refugee or an emigrant

and get in line with the rest of the waterlilies

who’ve finally given up on trying to turn

the festering swamp into something redeemably beautiful

and would rather be homelessly lost among the stars,

floating down the Milky Way with wild black swans,

than sit like the eggcup of a crown on the skull

of a false prophecy missing more than one link in its evolution.

And if you think not to be appalled by the stink of the world

is a kind of experienced wisdom, a seasoned outlook,

then I might suggest that you’ve aged like offal

complicit in the contagion of worms in the grass

where the children play on the swings. And your last best hope

is that your eyes have retained some of the original innocence

of the fool that you used to be,

before the Medusa turned them to stone

and the colour flaked off like the irises of violated covenants.

Radical in the sixties, I was into self-creative destruction,

tallowing sand candles out of napalm and beeswax

that went off like fifty calibre lipstick shells in your face.

I occupied. I dropped out. I blew my own mind

more than once just to make sure the bridge was burning

by the time I got to the other side of my own mindstream

and no one was following me like another blistering ideal

that got thrown like acid in the maculate face of the full moon.

It was easier to believe in everything back then

than to make peace with myself even now,

though I know it’s just one illusion dead set against another

and I’m sitting naked in the Himalayas alone at night

trying to hatch a new cosmic egg for myself

or at least a new cosmology for this glass third eye

I’ve ground like a lens or the mirror of a reflecting telescope

with gritty carborundum down to within an angstrom of perfection

just to be on the same wavelength as quicksilver and diamonds

when it comes to seeing things that don’t easily disappear.

Now I can see the stars dancing clearly from the inside out.

I’m looking for an abandoned observatory on the top

of the world mountain standing on the shaky cornerstone

of a snapping turtle, and I’m not being driven out this time,

exiled among exiles, like some scapegoat beaten

like an objective correlative for what is most ugly in humans

that don’t sacrifice themselves for their own sins.

I’ve been leaving of my own accord for the last thirty light years

of this wilderness experience for the wind knows where.

And I still care. And I still help the waywards of life

that blow across my path like losing lottery tickets

and one winged butterflies trying to fly

like the unbound page of a book with half a wingspan.

I still fight with words and actions that have been blooded

like Damascene swords in the sacred forges of my infernality.

I’ve gone on exploring the elusive dark energy

of my expansiveness long after the universe went out

and sight stopped being a kind of love as lucid

as the imagination on a good seeing night for the sky bound.

But as my compassion has grown deeper, more holistic

and mystically specific simultaneously so has the sadness

of feeling so many suffer the indistinguishable pain

of simply being alive to endure the agony

of cauterizing their cosmic wounds with the very stars

they wished upon a heart break ago when the waterclock

broke like an ice-age dam and the baby mammoth

was washed away like starmud in a glacial flood

of Pleistocene tears. And life seems so randomly perilous

in the way it maims and kills the body and the mind,

it seems even the wise and the sublime die as surrealistically

as the sarcastic mentors of trash and trivia

trying to distract our attention away from our dilemma

with cheap thrills and punchlines about the meaning of nothing

so we can’t feel the house burning down around us

until we’re reminiscing in our urns,

as if we were still haunted by eyes in the dark

like some lingering significance to our demise.

Lachrymae rerum. Sometimes I think the mute rocks

don’t just speak, they weep like stars

for the things they’ve seen like the headstones

of prophetic skulls in a cemetery of ancestral asteroids.

An abandoned observatory, yes, the jewel in the lotus,

and a large garden where I can grow my own constellations

like esoteric zodiacs of asters and sunflowers

and a lover I can bed down with like an equinox

when our celestial equators intersect our ecliptics

at the equinoctial colures of our cosmic G-spots

and we can implode like supernovas in each other’s presence

just for the pure joy of immolating ourselves in bliss

to renew the tenderness of the fireflies who know

there are no limits to how far we can take this.

PATRICK WHITE