HERE

HERE

Here. But I can’t say where this is.

Now. But it’s hard to determine the time zone

when the sun shines at midnight

like an X-ray of my skull.

Obviously, I’m thinking of you,

but I’m mapping myself like a lie detector

that’s trying to forge my neverending signature

on a pardon that didn’t come through.

And when the priests come like the last rites

to my holding cell

to compare confessions,

I’m wired to the night like a buddha

with his hand on the switch to enlightenment

and I burn for things God did on his own

though I’d be the last to throw the first stone

or plead like a judas-goat at the foot of a tiger-throne.

There’s no honour among thieves

when the shit hits the fan

and the only loyal man

is not a man born of a mother

but there are codes that you can keep to yourself

like ashes in the urns of the constellations

that have never been fingered out

like a suspect in a line-up.

I’m not rolling around in myself

like a thumb in ink

to see what I think

through a crack in the cup of the case,

and I’m not trying to conceal myself

behind the surgically-altered face of the moon

that sags like an old movie-star

over its reflection in the eyes of the morning dew.

For years I lived in isolation

like a message in the eye of a bottle lost at sea

but now I’ve forgotten what it was

I was meant to reveal

when the seal was broken

like DNA on the shard of mirror that slashed my throat

to keep me from singing

like a bubble of light in a lifeboat

or the last flash of a breath in the depths

from the mouth of drowning messiah

who mistook his feet for waves and stairs

and burnt them walking on stars.

PATRICK WHITE

JUST LOOK AT YOU NOW

JUST LOOK AT YOU NOW

Just look at you now,

bound and blindfolded,

prodded by the point of a sword

to walk your own erection

like the plank of a pirate ship

out into the depths of a woman

who receives you like the ocean

as you, who never played fair,

plead like the gulls in your wake

for the garbage she throws from the stern.

Those who live by the woman

will die by the woman,

but little brother,

you’re falling on your own sword

long before she’s even

flung herself fly fishing

from the starboard side

like the grappling hooks of the moon

to pull herself in close

until you’re both bumping hulls

and she’s swinging from the masts to board you.

And I know you’re in pain, it’s got to hurt,

dying like this for a cliche

that ripped you off like a skirt.

But you never stopped long enough

to look at the moon and notice

how it keeps changing the skulls

it superimposes over its tripleX crossbones

like the negative of a stranger

she never finishes developing

and that one of those gaping icons of doom is yours,

but then you always thought

you were the ultimate g-spot

on the Whore of Babylon

and now it’s got to itch to be wrong.

PATRICK WHITE

LONGING OVER-REACHS ITSELF

LONGING OVER-REACHES ITSELF

Longing over-reaches itself

when it turns into a request

so I’m not asking for anything from the stars;

I’m not standing here looking up at the night sky

trying to identify you among all that is shining,

waiting for your light like a remote gift

on this bridge without a past or a future

where a man in the vastness of his solitude

is still not enough of a zenith

to illuminate his passage to the other side.

I don’t keep myself on like a nightlight in the darkness

or churning in the lifestreams

of these immeasureable depths

pretend someone’s saved a seat for me

in a lifeboat that’s already full.

And for all the eternities that I have spent looking

like waves out on the open eye of the sea

for a constellation of my own,

when the moon breaks like a wine goblet

over the stone of my skull

to launch another continental shipwreck

I still don’t think I taste of stars

or that my dick is a reliable lighthouse.

And sure, it’s a lot of bluff and brave talk

when you get punched in the heart

by a bareknuckled squall

and you’re buried at sea

under the black flag of an indelible eclipse

after someone suggests you say something over yourself

as you would for the dead

and it’s lifetimes later

and you’re a dangerously different coast

but I’m beginning to remember what I said.

That you are life is certain.

That you are love

is the wind in a curtain

fishing for fireflies in an open window

as if you were trawling for stars.

And if I were caught like the gills of the moon in your nets

would you haul me up onto your decks

and choosing me like a coin from your purse

to put under my tongue

like a full moon for the ferryman

throw me back into my own resurgency?

I’ve been to the top of the prodigal mountain

that looks into its own heart

like a ghost returning home

only to stand before the scuttled gate

of a dead sea that had wept away its waters.

And I have heard the sirens scream

like poppies in their sleep

rushing to their own emergencies

like blood in the water

waiting for the jaws of life,

but there was nothing I could do to wake them

and they slept through me like an afterlife

that had come to the back door

of someone who doesn’t live here anymore.

PATRICK WHITE

THE BLITHE SURFACE OF THINGS

THE BLITHE SURFACE OF THINGS

The blithe surface of things is the worst scar.

Putting a smile on everything

as if nothing were worthy of darkness or sorrow

and the night that grows stars be sanctioned

by the one-eyed judges of the postive thought police

who are as blinded by their own blazing

as black holes are, grazing on light in the dark.

There is no holy war between the negative and the positive,

the mother and the son,

one wing of the bird and the other.

You want the waterlilies and the blue hyacinths

but you don’t want the swamp they grew out of,

you want the flowers and the wine

you love the blossoms on the vine

but not the mangers of sheep shit

that cradle the seed and warm the root.

Is it postive to be negative about negativity

or are you just trying to keep up appearances?

Is anything made brighter by your denouncing of the dark

or are you just another sunny puritan of noon

trying to bleach the stars out

like stains on the bedsheets

when you shake the nightbirds

out of the bedsheets like shadows and crumbs

from your queen-sized skies?

We are humans. We suffer.

We break like trees in an icestorm

and sometimes the untethered kites of our minds

burn like kamikaze loveletters in the powerlines

after the big disconnect

and we just fucking well hurt.

And there are spaces so vast and impersonal within us

that even the silence is afraid of the answer

when gods die like tigers in an abandoned zoo

and all that is left like the last insurgent in Bagdhad

is you waiting to go off like a bomb

to begin the universe again, without pain

like the child that was just identified

by her left foot

stuck in the blood and the flowers

splashed across a new running shoe.

And I know at any moment

you’re ready to tell me how many angels

are dancing on the head of a pin,

and that the darkness can only be conquered with light

when I’m afraid of being me in the night

opening my eyes

and looking down into the ocean like a wave,

but how many wombs does it take to fill a grave?

Or do you distinguish one emptiness from the other

as if one were the recipient, and the other, the organ donor?

Is birth on one side and death on the other side of the door

or is nothing given so nothing can be taken away

like the renewable virginity

of this maculate whore of a moon

that beguiles us with the beauty of her fangs

and the way she kills us into life

by unlocking the bolt on the gate

and releasing the bullet from its chamber?

But if I tell you that rape is the atrocity a la mode of genocide

being waged against the tribal chromosomes of the Congo

even just to nudge a thought like a stem cell toward the issue

that might grow the other half of your heart

you sour like ice cream

and change the theme

to flowers and babies that are born like fists

as if you were the only nurse

on the midnight shift of the nightward

and I were the resident gravedigger for the nursery

always knocking on things like wombs and skulls

to see if I can raise the dead in the rosebed

to make room for more.

Life may well be a form of emptiness

shaped and turned, effaced and urned

like a lump of wet clay on a wheel,

the starmud of a squalid planet,

celestial leftovers on a dirty plate,

but you approach it like a potter

with two right hands

trying to avoid turning left

to the far side of your brain

and when you do

you damn it like original sin

and then go around trying to milk the moon

as if you could separate

the positive snake serum

from the positive toxin

that unspools like honey

from the crescents of your lipless grin.

PATRICK WHITE

MAYBE IF I TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT

MAYBE IF I TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT

Maybe if I try to understand it

I can forget what it means, maybe

these breakdown, blasting cap tears

I’m wired to like a beaver dam

about to wash out the road

like blood at a crime scene

as the sky lies down upon me

like a collapsed lung, or a mattress

that enslaves rubber tires in chains

to deaden the explosion,

might leave something clean

like the glowing fields in the sunset

after a thunderstorm.

And if I’ve been trying to train my diamonds to flow

it’s only so I can take a bath in my own grave

to rinse myself off the shining like coal.

But it’s bad form to throw the world

down your neighbour’s well at night

like bad meat

so I keep my horrors symbolically discrete

by sowing stars in the wounds

to cauterize the pain

and pretend that everything is sweet.

I write poems about waterlilies

and float them downriver

like paper boats on the moon;

or I set myself on fire like the origami rose

I folded out my bloodstream

just to add a little colour and class to the ashes

or run my tongue along the sabre of the crescent moon

to hone the eloquence of the mad slasher

into something more than a papercut

and a comma of blood on my thumb,

but it’s hard to get chatty in Auschwitz

when everyone around you is playing dead or dumb

and the afterlives of the Nazis

are the cornerstones of the new millenium

they’re building for my convenience down the block.

And I want to talk, I want to say myself

wholly and unholy as I am

but my muse has turned into a Medusa

who thinks she looks good wearing

that snakepit on her head

and trying to say anything

is like trying to turn my tongue into a jackhammer

to get down to the bottom of my emotional life

like this nameless gravestone on the moon

I keep carving out of bedrock.

So I seep back into my self like blood on a sword

or a shadow at noon

or the frown of an eclipse

in the facepaint of a starless oilslick

that swims in its own skin like a snake across the moon

as if it were the sad path of a road

that never makes it home

and drown my rage like a torch

in the fathomless silence of a black mirror

to burn like the afterlife

of a dragon in an urn,

or swallow the moon whole

and drown myself in the rain

like a candle that blew itself out

to keep from boiling like a heretic in its own tears

and keep the farmers at their prayers

happy for years.

PATRICK WHITE

OVERLAPPING BULLSEYES OF THE RAIN

OVERLAPPING BULLSEYES OF THE RAIN

Overlapping bullseyes of the rain

that never misses the mark,

each bullet, each arrow of water

its own target

as if subject and object were none

or seeing the inseparable locus of being

like puddles in the parking lot

and then the gust of a shapeshifter in passing

and every drop turns into a tuning fork

that resonates out of itself like a solar system

or a bird whose wingspan is the duration of every note.

And then someone passes me

like a loveletter they found on the street

under the door of a chameleonic threshold

or a flower down a drain

and I’m alone again

trying to hang on like the last leaf on the tree

to a delusion that has already let go of me

like an address on an aging piece of paper

that’s forgotten its way home.

The mindstream is glutted

with the wrecks of November

and there’s no way across except on the skulls

of these stepping-stone moons

that cling to my emotions

like greasy moss on a moodring

but I’m urgently savage enough

to scalp my own comets

as they venture out of their dark haloes

and exultantly fling their topknots across the sky

like reruns of a warning to an extinct species.

New feathers and fur for old scales, perhaps,

but I’ve always tried

to forget the future before it happens

in order to live now with the assurance of a dangerous dinosaur

and as all the enlightened know

like a jewel opening its eyes

in the back of their brain,

there isn’t any effort to evolution

or floral agenda to the rain

because everything is utterly keyless

when the water guitar strings its own ripples

over the great abyss

and thumbs sad music

for all the missing links along the way,

all the starring parts I never got to play

that undo me like a food chain.

But in a world so elegantly free

even the rain is a mere gesture

of the eye-growing sea I bubbled up from

to explore the terrain like a wheel

until it turned from solid to real

living with purpose

is just a shortcut

to living in vain.

Go ask the rain

falling like tears

from these visions of being

back into its own eyes.

Even the hardest crystal ball

you’ve ever huddled around like north

convinced you could find a passage through like light

will eventually ride its own melting

like an icecube back into the seeing

and you will be the journey

that puts on your body like a shoe

and walks you out to clarify the view

of your own transformative mysteries

until you’re as free and as expansive as the skies

that attach themselves like wings

to the emergent exclamations of the dragonflies

and washing yourself off

like the stain of an indelible eclipse

in billions upon billions of eyes

you will taste the light like honey

in the flower-mouths of all your metamorphoses

and gathering yourself up

like the gods of roots and rivers

who enshrined their passage in everything

as if we were all survivors

of the mysterious gifts of the life-givers,

you will give yourself away to everything alike

without distinction for the demons and the divas,

and the warm compost

of all those undernourished divinities

that distemper your lucidities,

and like a god

among the shining myriads

without anything on your mind

you will bead like light

on the branches of the autumn trees

and falling to the root

like jewels and fruit

you will see what the rain sees.

PATRICK WHITE

I COULDN'T HAVE LIVED IT

I COULDN’T HAVE LIVED IT

I couldn’t have lived it any differently

than it lived me so inseparably

like the moon’s reflection on the water

there’s no point in trying to lift my life

like an emerging face by the corners

out of the developer in a dark room

to see whom I’ve been saying goodbye to

all the years it took to grow into me

all the years I’ve been following myself

like a wanted poster I cut two holes in for my eyes

and wore like a mask into an allnight casino on the moon.

When I look back sometimes upon my life

like a shadow who’s tagged along for the ride

it’s been a long, long getaway to the other side of nowhere

as I’ve lived through these eyeless deserts of myself

from one well to the next

like a slut of water.

And maybe I would have surrendered

if I had found anyone to surrender to

but when I turned around to give myself up

there were no posses in the light

no stool or noose of stars hanging over me in the night.

And everything after that has felt

like the random solitude of the wind

without beginning or end

blowing on the stars

like the heater of my cigarette

to pass the time

and see if I can make them brighter.

But at night the desert turns the mike over to space

and my emotions have a chance to expand

like a herd going over a precipice

or a heart clinging to the moon

like a barnacle on the side of a pyramid sunk in sand

and when I listen to myself

there’s always a left-handed afterlife

living me like a holdup I hadn’t planned.

And then there are times

when I am uplifted by some stray gust of stars

like a dusty fingerprint on the trigger of the moon

I’m pointing like some suicidal holy man at my own temple

trying to convert the thief in me to a new way to steal

from the serpent’s purse that strikes at my heel like a bank alarm

in the desparate attempt of a fading mirage

to prove I’m real.

And then those nights, those long hideous nights

when the darkness hardens like a lump of coal

and shatters me like a windowpane

when I am the least convincing argument

for the existence of God

that I’ve ever met

and the only way that I can forget,

the only way I can keep from going insane

is to live in vain

as if my life depended on it.

PATRICK WHITE