AS THE EVENING PORTENDS TOWARD ITS MORE OCCULT PROPHETIC ENDS

AS THE EVENING PORTENDS TOWARD ITS MORE OCCULT PROPHETIC ENDS

As the evening portends toward its more occult prophetic ends

of candles and incense and blue glass skulls on the windowsills

of perception the marshmellow emotions of the day as the darkness

that is here to stay overwhelms them into writing little thing

razorblades of suicidally incisive poetry unquestionably influenced

by the exhaustive torment of light and shadow going on in my body.

The piebald clown takes on a serious tenor

and forgets to laugh at himself in the mirror

when he sees the six crows feet streaming

like bicycle handlebar comets from his eyes

six weeks ago have frayed into the thirty-three tributaries

of the split end strong rope rootfires of the Nile delta shrieking mandrake.

I’m emptying into the Mediterranean sea. I’m an old sphinx

with rainmarks from when the desert was green.

I’ve aged five years around my eyes in the last thirty-three days.

Dorian Grey is crackling. The varnish is yellow

as amber eras of age. Time take your foot off the gas.

I’m going to pass. Dark energy cover your eyes and face and move over

I’m expanding too fast for the stars to keep up with the pace.

Maybe if I go far enough into the abyss with this

I’ll start moving backward in time and the next time I look

I’ll be a boy again begging salmon from the fishermen

that came in to port at sunset to unload and oil their boats

at Johnson Street Harbour with the ballast block cast iron bridge

that swung like the pendulum of Thor’s hammer

to keep time with the pulse of our comings and goings

as they stacked my forklift arms up like cubic cord wood time capsules

to take home to my mother to make her proud of me,

and say, hey, kid, tell us when enough is enough is enough.

PATRICK WHITE  

THE EVENING DEEPENS INTO THE LEES OF ITS MORDANCY

THE EVENING DEEPENS INTO THE LEES OF ITS MORDANCY

The evening deepens into the lees of its mordancy.

The broken pines seem more tragic. The corpses in the cemetery

less lifelike. Spirits move over the face of the leaf littered grass

as if someone were throwing thousands of loveletters away in disgust.

The darkness is more threatening. You can feel the presence of the dead

slipping under the doors and the cracks in the windowsill

like smoke and cold wind and life threatening protestations

of undying love. Not a rumour of sound from the town.

The wind is holed up somewhere in a bar that doubles as a lair

knocking another one down for the obliterate illiterate night ahead.

Recite. Recite. Recite. The unlettered prophet was told

by the angel of light. I don’t recite so much as I let it write me

into the destiny scribbled on the lines of my forehead,

birds coming and going like musical notes on hydro line staves

with ivy treble clefs coiling around the pole like medical snakes.

Baby, I’m a caduceus. You be the dove above it all.

The silence pregnant with manifestation. The furnace

has stopped cracking its knuckles. The flanks

of the American flag above the real estate office downstairs

has stopped flexing its muscles at the command of the wind

and the horse whisperers are out in style trying to calm things down

to a ghastly serenity. The stillness is a bread knife

cocked diagonally on the white vinyl kitchen sink counter

like a sabre of the new moon sitting there the koan

of a blank but focused stare with an essential existential question to ask you

about whether you want to live or die by seppiku.

The mirrors are hiding their eyes. Someone’s in bed

bleeding to death because of a loveletter they’d just read

that said life was better off without you falling in love with it

all over again with the unbearable pain and joy

of having to leave it this way through a hole in the wall

they just painted over to sell the thralls to a new slumlord

from the underworld who keeps bragging about his dirty jewels

and excoriating the fools who are not dead enough yet to appreciate them.

PATRICK WHITE

WAITING TO TALK TO THE RADIOLOGIST

WAITING TO TALK TO THE RADIOLOGIST

Waiting to talk to the radiologist at the Burr Cancer Wing

in Kingston Ontario by a fortified lake of grey round houses.

Homogenized labyrinth of anonymous posters in the halls

of undecorated functional duplicate rooms doubling arithmetically

as moonlight incommensurables. Where the hell am I?

I ask for directions from sympathetic lighthouses eager

to guide me like Rubrich’s cubes deeper into my bafflement

pharmaceutically emotionally isotopically induced.

I want to carry my own road sign protest placard

wherever I go from now on like a cross I’m willing to bear

in the name of knowing where where where am I going.

Cancer Clinic Burr Wing Level l. The doctor will see

you earlier. Wait here please. Fill out these forms.

Cold black plastic vinyl chairs with people sitting in them

sporadically like the last of their teeth in an ass’s jawbone.

Sad foggy faraway look on everyone’s faces and a few

like me trying to face the whole situation a bit too cheerfully.

Dr. Phain. Great name. Epiphany. Sends two interns

in advance like Rosenbrendancrantz and Guildenhilda

to interview me too mechanically inquisitively

to make me feel they’re not so much interested

in interviewing me as a symptom they read about

in their medical texts who suddenly incarnated

as the skeleton of Pygmalion who is answering

them in his bones like bamboo windchimes of what

they want to hear until the doctor gets here and makes

everthing muggy and clear as musical chairs on a merry go round

and round and round and round as a jinxed plaid prayerwheel.

I’m in a hostage situation with Munich syndrome centred

on the radiologist explaining to me the half life of the patient

as all the U-238 in the room slowly turns to dead lead

base metal iron pyrite stoned philosopher’s fool’s gold

disenchanting him of the false dawn of the false hope

he’s going to live more than another six months of this.

Everybody writes that down like check mark quill feathers

dipped in the ink pots of little boxes little blue boxes on forms.

Meantime I stare out the window at northern Lake Ontario

gusting deep midnight Prussian blue with angry white caps

cantering out of suffrage instead of galloping with gusto

through a Tom Thomson painting of a bleak northern lake

as over on the further shore dozens of windmills, windmills, windmills

tall as the war of the worlds bouquet and spread

like wildflowers along the borders of mournful grass leafless elms

and some sad woman always walking off into nowhere

as a sundog light burst breaks through the clouds

it halos in the encircling sky as a sign of the fact

I’m not going to conquer anything like Constantine in the name

of a sign like this no matter how alluringly beautiful and soothing

it is through the dirty grime of the grey cancer clinic windows.

I have my prescription renewed for thrush, 100 more \

4 milligram pills of apo-dexamethasone and an ointment that will help

soften the scales in the crack of my ass like moonlight in a niche

of silver. Rosenbrendancrantz takes a look. Says. It’s got

nothing to do with me. You better see your GP.

Must be nice to be an expert that doesn’t help without permission.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LACHRYMOSE SHINE OF DAMP POLISHED BLACK WORKBOOTS

THE LACHRYMOSE SHINE OF DAMP POLISHED BLACK WORKBOOTS

The lachrymose shine of damp polished black workboots.

The leather of the asphalt street suffused with a patina of storelight

as the ghoulish banks of snow startle the colour white

with albino ranges of impassable blockades from the ice age.

The white’s unreal in the tungsten lamp posts. Blue apricot

titanium corpse. Sybil priestess in a California laundry sheet

in a cult of 1111 who died before the mothership could

take her back. My dear, my darling, do you hear me where you sleep?

Again, tonight, awake and at the window waxing pellucid

about absolutely nothing. The faint cachet of someone’s

distant dreams. No stars, No flowers. A garden of traffic lights

and lamp posts and parking meters. No people. And the trees

garlanded in Christmas tree lights looking like fattened forlorn bulls

for a sacrifice to Mithras Tauroctonus Tautologous whose come back

to claim his birthday from Jesus when the sun is born again

in the winter Roman solstice hammering in the golden nail of the New Year

which is the only poem Horace ever wrote for Augustus.

What am I doing here like a strung out line of Canada geese

migrating like a prayer bead abacus skull nugget calendar

from the studio into the den the kitchen the hall and then

back again as if I were caught up in migration older than my own?

What am I walking off like an exiled hourglass across

the Rub al kali desert full of stars and mirages and itty

little white gravestone pills that give me the shakes when

I try to lie down under them and everything quakes

as if the fault lifelines in my life were about to change for the drastic.

Sick of the drastic. Sick of the catastrophic. Sick of the apocalyptic.

Sick of the climacteric. Sick of the asterisk. Suddenly

a hundred little white pills go running over the precipice

like lemmings in a year of overpopulation balancing the books

of evolution with Malthusian mass suicide chuteless fruitless jumps.

The same way Neanderthals used to kill mammoth and stag moose

in the Pleistocene. Driving them over a cliff

with heritage lampost streetlight torches with reduced Led lumens.

Not much life left after they were wiped out like an extinction event

for humans with an appetite for living it a little bit differently.

Where else should I be? That wants to make me live my death

as bad and deep and bleak as this beatifically condemned place.

PATRICK WHITE

MY CAT LIES FULL LENGTH OUT SLACK ON THE GLASS COFFEE TABLE

MY CAT LIES FULL LENGTH OUT SLACK ON THE GLASS COFFEE TABLE

My cat lies full length out slack on the glass coffee table

but for her head poised like a minor sphinx looking

into the long, foggy distances of grey longing

blued by a mood of moving away from things

in a kind of emotional aerial perspective the same

as I’m looking into the open with about as many answers

maybe less than she does. Female feral cat three month

old kitten unfleaed unfixed on facebook I think

I saved a little bit of both our lives that day

I could still drive and got in the car and picked her up.

Took her right out of Rain Dumoulin’s good moon arms

in the embryonic studio of someone who was

learning how to paint to celebrate and counteract

the widow walk dance of her husband’s recent suicide.

What a cruel world that has such lovingly tragic fools in it.

Bang the screen door and we were all the way

back to my red Starfire and you to the back window

to see where you might be going now that

you’ve been captured again all the windows done up

until you learned that I fed you because I intended

to love you and I wanted you to live as an affable familiar

of me who’s got goldfish but they’re awful hard to caress

when you want to reach out and just touch something soft

as smoke wafting across your cheek like the echo of a dream

somebody’s having about being loved in bad economic times

and I was willing to clean up your methane mess for it.

I’m pampering you. You’re living almost exclusively

on treats. If not now when? When do you get a small

special consideration for the emptiness that’s going

to build a little coffin in your heart

and put a picture of me in it like a locket

of Temptations seafood medley singing

softly to you from the tower of Cohen’s song.

Simon’s going to take you. He’s a good man. Loves cats.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN'T SLEEP IN THIS BEAUTIFUL STORM OF TEARS

I CAN’T SLEEP IN THIS BEAUTIFUL STORM OF TEARS

I can’t sleep in this beautiful storm of tears

that keeps showing me how much love there is in the world

now that I’m leaving it through the rose trellis exit

where there’s a drop of water on every

anointed thorn of my thoroughly wet eyelashes.

It’s beautiful loss that’s sad and scary all at the same time.

It’s a flashflood of emotion that thaws the frogs out

and gets them singing like small ice floes in a lily pond

clinging with polar bears to what’s left of the Arctic ice cap

that’s unravelling all around me like a snowman

riding its own melting into an oblivious mindstream.

Easy to love ordinary things now as if they were sacred,

domestic rituals, chores, objects, dust in the air,

dirt in an organized drawer, cracks in the plaster

diversifying the dinosaurs like fractured Pangaea’s skull.

The thunder and pulse of a lost drumbeat in the jungles of time.

Everything glows. Even the dark shines.

With an aura of beautiful mysterious numinosity

that polishes the dawn like a dusty abalone shell

on an opalescent day at deserted beach as long and wet as yourself.

PATRICK WHITE

WASTED IN THE MORNING

WASTED IN THE MORNING

Wasted in the morning luxuriating in the semi-comatose

numbness to the last ghost you’ve seem returning

to its grave without being bothered by it like an immune system

you could take for granted as a sign of the state

of the health you’re in when you can’t get to sleep with tumours

and all you want to do is disappoint pillows. Vita brevis. Arta longa.

Look out the window at the enlargements of the dawn

as much as you can when you’re able to stand.

Pet the cat. Have a long blue drag on a fat cigarette

that’s beginning to look like a pregnant guppy

humping a seahorse in my hands. Remark

to myself that I’m not the first man

to see the pigeons flying over the tarpaper roofops

as if it were fun to be a pigeon with the northern lights

around your neck and I wished I was one of them

waking up in a happy town to throw myself around

like wedding confetti at a morning marriage of bells

or a scrapped manuscript torn to bits because it’s got talent

or apple bloom and mailmen trying to get some coffee into them

cooped up in a restaurant like one of hidden wonders of the age.

PATRICK WHITE