I COULD SAY NOTHING

I COULD SAY NOTHING

I could say nothing. Or I could exert my imagination

to say the way it never is, nothing but exceptions

working to rule, functional disparities between chaos

and clarified thought, the dream grammars

of magicians on the nightwatch asleep on the job.

It’s a polymorphous perverse multiverse

that will take any neo-gestural suggestion

as seriously as a potter shapes the emptiness

of the urn he’s making for himself on the wheel

of birth and death, his hands caked in starmud

that comes with its own kiln baked into the mix.

I could say nothing about the lack of an inexplicable reason

for why it is the way it is and return to my ignorance

by default like a solar prominence lashing out

into the dark as if it were scourging the softness

in the eyes of the upper atmosphere almost in tears

for the way it rants at a planet determined to see for itself.

I could busy myself, soul-searching for words

the silver-tongued Russian olives might risk

whispering into the ears of the willows still in their gowns.

I could mine the crude ore of the asteroids and turn

the motherlode into subtler refinements of the mind,

as the soothsayers of greed have foretold

like an oracular app on their stealth cellphones.

I wouldn’t be alone in this, with all

these affable spy satellites and drones for familiars

keeping watch on what I write about the breadlines

outside the surrealistic circuses that distract us

with the infinite variety of living like people

with no choice but to be consoled by the private rights

of wild animals shocked into performing

for a ringmaster with a whip and a footstool

to keep the savagery of our rage from getting out of hand.

Or something disgustingly cute to take us off the ball

we’re losing our balance on, keeping in mind

inside every sentimentalist is a nasty brute.

Trying to seed a sea change with bullets in an exchange

of gunfire is the forget the immaculate conception

this sea of precarious awareness first had of us

when it breathed light into the waters of life

like moonset into the barrier reefs of the sponges

and corals that engendered us to live outside the law

as if we were honest with ourselves. First impressions

shall be the last, and the last shall be the worst of them all.

If people don’t concentrate enough to lose their focus

in someone they love anymore, the rest is fate, and we

just dissipate back into the void like a passing thought

or the one way tickets of Monarch butterflies on the way home

like illegal aliens estranged by the toxicity of our pestilential

presidential run-offs as we research how to musically embrace

extra-terrestrials in a bond of cowering friendship to feel

we’re not alone in the world, except together with each other,

where it isn’t familiarity that breeds contempt,

but the encylopedic holy books of our hatred we keep

preaching to the choir like voice coaches and spinny healers

laundering the bedsheets in a cult hospital of blood-stained angels

racially profiling the stranger at the gate

as if his shadow fell any darker on the earth than ours

in the doorway of a house on fire torched by a burning cross.

Dry ice for tears, people don’t cry for each other anymore,

they evaporate spiritually, they sublimate, they sigh

for a better world than this worst of an infinite number

of better alternatives as they arm their innocence

like a children’s crusade on the way to another holy war.

Is it feasible any image we were created in the name of

to love one another is as rabidly addled as the memes

we follow like Ibn Attar’s pilgrimage of birds

to look into any god’s eyes and see ourselves

in a parliament of corrupt politicians padding their travel-fares

as they do their bodies, egos and hairdos at public expense?

When hasn’t the death hex of the military industrial complex

not been a blessing in disguise to the corporate undertakers

who wash the corpses for burial like sins off their hands.

Offices of great state enshrining human rights on the Vietnam Wall.

Dividing, we rule. Together, like the old woman

who unwound her spinal cord into a million weak threads

as if she were sorting out the bloodlines of xylem and phloem

in the heartwood of the tree of humankind, we open

a school of assassins to preemptively protect the golden rule

with concealed weapons against the genocidal madmen

who secretly feel, by killing children indiscriminately,

they’re pschoBabylonically on the road to becoming one of us.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN SEE THE LOVE AND THE LOSS IN YOUR GREEN, GREEN EYES AGAIN

I CAN SEE THE LOVE AND THE LOSS IN YOUR GREEN, GREEN EYES AGAIN

I can see the love and the loss in your green, green eyes again,

stars away from the light I wanted to be in your life.

Deadly nightshade and sunflowers, I remember the loveletters

that used to arrive like wounded doves with strawberry hearts

bleeding through the snow, wild roses in an ice-age

with flint knapped thorns and the lunar horns

of a dragon of desire for firesticks. I would have

smudged my ghost with a noose of sweetgrass

from the highest rafter in this house of life long before this

if you hadn’t left the gate of your absence open

to the dark paradise of the abyss I’ve been falling through

ever since love got precipitous as a Clovis point with a razor’s edge

and every nightbird in the repertoire of the songs I wrote

started playing with my jugular like a one-string guitar

strung like a highwire act over the voice box

they’re still looking for close to where I crashed.

Some people focus like telescopes on what they can see.

And some look under the eyelids of their deathmasks

at the dreams disappearing like the fragrances and vapours

of the spirits that changed the way they look at life

like a waterclock of endless nights that write their names

in their breath on the black mirrors of a seance of new moons

that can’t meet the same stranger twice, given once

is enough of an afterlife to make death seem petty

compared to the nightmare of the exits we have to go through

to get here, alone and homeless as a welcome mat

on the threshold of a fire escape that descends into a dark alley

where I jam with the feral cats on the urn of a burnt guitar

I carry the ashes of my love poems in like a moonrise in my throat,

birds of the morning singing in the false dawns

of the creosote clinging to my vocal cords like boat-tailed grackles

on a powerline that came down in a storm, how

could it have been otherwise, like a bullwhip across my eyes.

Fireflies are intimate with the tenderness of pain,

but the dragons of love wreak utter destruction in their wake.

And everybody dies in the intensity of the conflagration

like a savage heart on the bone altar of its pyre

just to keep the fire fed like a star that consumes itself

for the sake of shedding a little light on the immensity

of its solitude, many, many nights without curfews ahead.

I resent nothing. I regret less. I don’t plead

like a rosary of skulls beaded like black dwarfs

on an abacus of love that renders an account of all I’ve lost.

If I’ve grown wise as an enlightened eclipse from the encounter,

it was an accident, and if I’ve deepened my ignorance sufficiently

to understand the evanescence of dark matter, there was

never any intent to seek shelter under the wing

of an evil portent that mentored me to see in the dark

that the petals of your loveletters had stopped blooming

in the Jurassic greenhouse of your eyes, like the flowers

and feathers we hoped would evolve out of our scales

like guitar picks into the quills of an oracular snakepit

of picture-music singing back up to the hidden harmonies

in the lonely ballads of the cosmic hiss that puts a finger

to the lips of the silence in a command performance of bliss

that made the darkness shine for awhile, and aged the wine

in the bells of the sorrows that emptied the urns

of the skulls we once raised to celebrate fire on the moon

like lunar starfish burning under water like a shipwreck

of white phosphorus in the Sea of Tranquility

you had to learn to handle like fireflies piloting the Pleiades

through the earthbound starclusters of the New England asters

as if it would always be September ever after

like the crossbones of a harvest moon perishing

like an outdated calendar with the scenic view of an abandoned house

where life once happened in the shadows of the candles

in a wax museum I’ve never been able to put out

like a nightwatchmen that keeps all the doors to his heart unlocked.

A gust of stars settling like dust on the windowsills of the past

and if I don’t say it in a rush of light, I forget

all the words to the song and start making things up

like the flying buttresses of fossilized dragons

I dredge up from my starmud to support the loss

of the faith I used to have in my memory not to lie to me

about how rapturously intimidating it was to see you

walking up the driveway to the door

that keeps opening me up like an unread loveletter

as if you were always standing on the other side

of the pain thresholds I’ve crossed out like the tree ring

of my name carved into the heartwood of a scratched guitar

just to see the love and the loss in your green, green eyes again

and maybe sing, o yes, sing a little in the dark

of what you meant to me like a star in the willow boughs

of the saddest poetry I’ve ever recited like a fire in the night

I ghost dance around in the war bonnets of love

I shed like the swan songs of summer stars in the autumn

as our flightpaths arc like arrows fletched in flames toward earth.

PATRICK WHITE