WHEN I WAS A CHILD

WHEN I WAS A CHILD

When I was a child

I was uprooted like a weed of lightning

and cast like a dead snake

on a festering heap of garbage.

I was angry before I knew

what anger was;

and ever since

radical dismissals

have cored the diamond drills

of their vacuity into my heart,

sudden abandonments

for no reason; the wind

slamming the door on my fingers,

rejection repealing

the flawed doctrine of my skin.

Pariah, poet, exile, outlaw, heretic,

I was passed a shard

of the broken jug of the moon

like an ostrakon

and then the stern angels

painted an X in my own blood

on the door of my house

to ward me off like plague.

I was a child. I was hurt. I was broken.

I became a law

and enforced my acceptance

with the authority of my rage.

Turned inside out

like a dirty sock

or a black hole,

and every second-hand future

the donors ever tried out on me

to see if they could find one

that fit like a straitjacket,

a catastrophe,

I put my mouth to the sky

like a glassblower

to enlarge a space of my own over me

like a planet

rummaging through a wardrobe of atmospheres

until I could give my secret consent

to the stars that shone down upon me

like a wounded bull

in a labyrinth of alleys

and were so inhumanly far away

I was purged like a soiled surgical utensil

in the intensity of their heat.

I was wholly and serenely me.

I found acceptance

in the delicate rainfall

of their enlightened indifference

and made up new constellations

to substitute for the family tree

that had been ripped open

like a zipper of lightning

and left to stand alone on the hill,

a smouldering taboo.

I traced my bloodlines back

to the elemental anvils and forges of iron

that hammered me out

like the relentless metal of a sword

in their fire wombs

and endowed me

with the magmatic pump of a volcanic heart.

I lived alone

in the torrential eras of the early earth,

and swam through noxious seas

of sulphur and methane,

shedding my gills

like the petals of a rose

for scales and horns and feathers and claws

and the accoutrements of armour

I wore like the shale of impossible rivers.

I was raised on an island in a sea

that tore its own eyes out

storm after storm.

I had a mother.

She suffered.

I had brothers and sisters.

They were degraded by alcohol and lies.

And I have had children of my own since

but they have gone out into the world alone

and the miles don’t smile much between us.

And I have laboured for years

to achieve the unacceptable

to turn the reek and rot of the swamp

into a dress rehearsal of waterlilies

getting ready to go on tour

among the stars

to manage something true and beautiful

that might prove this mauling darkness

that prowls all around me

like my own predatory intelligence, wrong.

I have laid my bumbling tribute,

this eloquence of eyes,

at the foot of the blood-stained altars of the world

as if the giving were the last protest

of a compensating heart

trying to crush the agonized ore

of its ancient deficiency,

the lunar slag of my childhood,

into the glowing wine of a mystic metal

as supple as blood,

as cool and rare

as water at night in the desert.

Like a mad hermit

scraped and tanned

by my own austerities

in these godless wastes

where even a man alone

is a crowd

that trespasses on the solitude.

I have flayed my skin with comets

and waited for millennia

like the afterlife of a pyramid

for these demonic ferocities

of salt and sand

to release me like a river,

to open my fist like a hand

and show me the cities I’ve founded

along the banks of my hemorrhaging lifeline.

But now I realize

that it’s all been just a boy’s dream,

an angry child

trying to fly a kite

in the roaring furnace of his heart

just to prove it could be done,

just to prove

by contesting the implausible

he was just like everyone.

Now let the soft ash

bury him gently in his dream,

and the lightning that rooted in his eyes

be inscribed on the night sky

like a neon epitaph.

Let him not fall

like a drop of spite

from the tongue of the leaf

that is urged like the feather of a green wing

by the summoning stars

that have gathered around

the empty lifeboat of his grave

to enshrine his ashes with theirs.

Let him pass like a squall of light,

an urgency of the night

that shook the tree to its roots

until it raved like a woman in ecstasy

with forbidden galas of wonder.

Now I know

for all that he suffered,

for all that he bore like an ox

under the whips of the shadowmasters

that yoked him to a wheel without a road,

his heart, a rusty oil drum

glutted like a backyard incinerator

with the half-burnt pages

of the obsolete encyclopedia

he committed to the flames like his life,

he was only a black snowflake,

an arctic error

in a glacial blizzard of misery,

a manger of fire in a hovel of ice

with nothing to burn but himself.

And I shall miss him like an era,

the igneous ripening of his last eclipse

sloughed like a skin of the moon

and honour him with tears

that will fall like eyes

from the dragon’s watershed.

Was there ever a poet or sage or fool

who wasn’t verified by their failure?

But it’s as clear as cruelty

that he must go,

that the private constellations

he hung like spiderwebs and flies

in the corners of the room

must be swept by the trees

like dust across the distant threshold of the hills,

and the sail of a starless sky

rise like a black dove

from the boat of his hands

and surveying the eyeless abyss before it

never come back.

When I first opened my eyes,

there was a darkness in the room

that outshone the light,

and when I opened my mouth

to give voice to the dreams of the dead,

for all that I have sung and said,

it was only the wind

swinging like a lonely child

on an unlocked gate.

And lastly I opened my heart,

the deepest bunker of my heart,

as if my pulse were a stranger knocking

on the outside to be let in

and I let her in

as if I played host to the world,

and she taught me how to leave.

PATRICK WHITE

CRAZY, SUNNY DAY OUTSIDE, BLUE SKY

CRAZY, SUNNY DAY OUTSIDE, BLUE SKY

Crazy, sunny day outside, blue sky,

and my shadow’s got me in a choke-hold

so I can barely breathe. I’m wrestling

with the black angel in the way, my own vacuity,

the absurdity of the burning gate that affronts my emptiness.

I’m in a truce with a room that tolerates me well enough.

Sometimes a hush falls over it like a nuclear winter

or somebody’s about to read a poem,

but it’s got big windows, and it’s safer

living above people than it is on eye-level

and I don’t mean that in any kind of way

except everyone’s afraid and that’s when

they’re at their most dangerous. But you can

see them coming from afar off from a second storey.

Most days I’ve got a fix on what I’m doing.

I follow the star in my eye. Portable north.

I lay my strange gifts of refuse and lucidity

on the temple stairs of a goddess I’m beginning

to lose my faith in, and as far as I can tell they’re cherished.

Wonder what it would be like to send a muse packing for once.

Ungenderize inspiration, be the wellspring, instead

of drawing from it with a desert at your back

eyeing you from the crests of the sand dunes.

But how would you get the flavour of sex

into a bottle of water without it

souring into a message for help?

Even the salmon-flaked brick walls

of the chic boutique across the street

that caters to witches and fairies, seem bleak

behind their facade, with a darkness fairies can’t people.

Utter black, impenetrable, unregenerative,

and every petal of sunshine, trivially epiphenomenal,

every gust of stars that wheels into a galaxy

like the evolutionary emergence of birds,

neither the cause nor the effect of anything cognizant.

Life just the flimsiest of distractions

on the skin of a bubble walking on thorns.

There’s a black hole in my heart

that’s lapping blood from the rose.

I’m trying to upgrade my eyes to be able to relate to it.

I’m cloning eclipses out of the stem cells of the night.

I’m grinding lenses out of anthracite, colour cones

without irises or chromatically aberrated rainbows.

I’m transplanting the eyes of all my dead flowers

with black diamonds on the same wavelength

as the X-ray star I can sense shining behind everything

that ever mattered to me, to achieve some kind

of nefarious harmony with the unilluminated doorway

that is neither the exit nor the entrance of being.

Everybody seems mesmerized by the temperance of the day,

all the things they’ve seen before, they’re looking at again,

as if the light could ever be new in yesterday’s eyes,

but I’m inside the seeing like a dragonfly in a chrysalis

trying to pass through this black hole

into an entirely new world that isn’t

just another sketchy metaphor for this one.

I want to see the roots the blossom’s wired to

if at all. Or if it’s just one big disconnect

and all understanding is playing unplugged

like a downed powerline with the oracular powers

of a snake-oil salesman selling holy water to the fish.

Disoriented in the starlessness of the blazing afternoon,

I’m waiting like an image of the imageless

for the darkness to adjust to my eyes as if this time

it was up to God to get used to me, and evolve accordingly

and there were no other recourse for getting around me

except creatively. Except to tell the Hox genes

where to put your eyes, where to fit your mouth

in that lifemask that disguises you like a surrealistic scar

grappling with experience with nothing but your innocence

to fall back on for an alibi no one accepts when you lose.

Farewell to all that. Evolution can take its cue

from me for a change, and branch out dendritically

like a flash of lightning rooted in my starmud like a cedar fire

sweeping underground through the valley I just passed through

like the mirage of a waterbird through

a shapeshifting hourglass of stars

that are not fixed, but protean myth givers responsive

to the darkest insights of the human imagination

that doesn’t create worlds in the likeness

of a preconceived image but each to their own medium

turns the light around on them like a revelation

of what they conceal like a jewel of water in their eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LONELIEST, MOST PROTEAN MODES OF MADNESS

THE LONELIEST, MOST PROTEAN MODES OF MADNESS

The loneliest, most protean modes of madness

rage in my cells like nightmares in isolation

watching the fireflies dance through the bars

as a secret gesture from unknown, sympathetic stars

in a collusion of constellations to keep up with the times

and shuck off their old myths of origin

like the straight jackets of a fixed place,

debate whether the light-bending darkness is chaos or freedom

or the old heirarchies of seraphic emanations of insight

still trickle down like oracular snakes on burning ladders.

Now if I wanted this to mean something

I’d look for a precedent for the shadows that dart like birds

across the tunnel vision of my line of sight

and I’d drink from the same fountain where the leaves

lap their water like books full of experience

and I’d borrow light years from other men’s eyes

to verify my seeing may be new, but it’s sound.

I don’t have any use for knowledge

and that’s why it trusts me and let’s its hair down

as if there were nothing of any significance to impart

to the diamond-hearted translucency of an engaging madman

whose enlightenment sweats the details

in a fever of crazy wisdom that plays with his mind

like a child on the moon fascinated by the solitude of its intensity.

But you who can hear me in your blood without asking

will recognize me by the accent of light in my voice

and know that I don’t walk in the footprints of grammars

that wore down this trail like a carpet that wouldn’t fly away

until they got as far as they could vocally could

then turned home for good, as if that were the end of the tail

that began and ended like alpha in the mouth of omega.

But time sweeps eternity away like a waterclock in a deluge,

like chalk on a blackboard, a ferocity of jewels out of the eyes

of bitter ores that couldn’t see anything shining in the dark

by their own light like a fish out of the reach of the sun,

that became a lantern unto itself, a revelation

on its own wavelength that illuminated the depths

of a darkness deeper than light years are far

and there’s no way to divine a sign in the immaculate darkness

for a teacher or a star. Here where the ladders don’t reach

and there are no reflections of a higher clarity

all senses are intensified into one medium of perception

that doesn’t individuate the morphology of knowledge forms

your mind holds up like a black mirror to a chaos

of hidden harmonies that depend inexhaustibly upon you

to add your voice to a new species of seeing,

like a mutant gene that’s never been heard from before.

Even in a cage, my humanity is what’s measureless

about all things if you enter them deep enough to understand

you can’t drown in the mirage of your own emptiness

or badger the stars to break their vow of silence

without giving yourself away like a secret

everybody’s been keeping to themselves like tears

under their breath, in the wells of their heart,

in the dessicated watersheds of their art

with nowhere to fall but up into the nights within them.

The unattainable aspirations of a madman grasping at fireflies

like the cornerstones of a new palace of stars

that dance like chandeliers in the rain

to the timing of their musical visions in the night.

Among the journeymen who labour for lasting results

I do with great discipline exactly nothing,

masterfully done. And the picture-music is undeniably

perishable. I burn colours in the sun on a pyre of hawkweed

like the works of a dead chameleon evaporating

like a rainbow body that isn’t making promises to anyone

you’ll ever hear from it again, though mantras

echo through the mountains like the shrieking palettes

of wild birds revoking the ease of the nocturnal silence

with more vivid mixes of the hues in the eyes of crazy wisdom.

I make great leaps of disbelief into the abyss

off the ledge of a lover’s precipice into the emptiness

and my heels flower into wings and it feels

as if I’m departing at last like a hermit down a mountain

with a contemporary vision of my own empty immensity.

PATRICK WHITE