NO REASON WHY I SHOULDN'T LEAVE

NO REASON WHY I SHOULDN’T LEAVE

 

No reason why I shouldn’t leave

is not as good as a reason to stay

but the first has its eye open

while the other is shut.

So when I find myself

at a fork in the road

I don’t go either way

but pick it up like a witching stick,

and go off in directions of my own

trembling all the way

like water in a stone.

It can be deeply restorative sometimes

to be alone and lost

as you walk through the front door

of your original homelessness,

remembering where you hid the key.

Your shadow stops following you like the north star

of the threshold you left behind,

unhinges itself like the pivot

of the prosthetic arm

of the disabled clock

you’ve been all these years

and walks beside you like a bridge

to anywhere you want to go.

You can feel what a star feels

when it looks down in envy

at the fireflies all over the map

wondering if their disobedience

to the higher forms of order

might not be the fulfillment

of an enlightened discipline

that radiates out of its own

spontaneous lucidity

free of meaning anything

to whatever it casts its light upon

than the sheer delight of shining.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ADDICTION IS LIKE LUST

ADDICTION IS LIKE LUST

 

Addiction is like lust

is like a bank is like a drug

is like a life of your own

you’ve got to keep on taking

because the symptoms of withdrawal

are more catastrophic

than the risks of overdosing.

And we’re all hooked on the planet

like a big rock we’re trying to break down

like blasting caps in a crystal skull

we found buried in the light

like the motherlode of all bad needles.

We want to do five rocks tonight

and save three for tomorrow

we can sell in the morning

to begin again

the beginningless end of everything.

And don’t say it’s

just a lack of conviction

because the truth of the matter is

we’re fanatically addicted to addiction.

Addiction is what gives our lives

mass and gravity;

if it weren’t for addiction

we wouldn’t know which end is up

we wouldn’t be able to point ourselves out at night

to the blind child within us

like the trackmarks

of a new constellation

shining out for everyone to see

our likeness in a braille of blackholes.

And it doesn’t really matter

what you’re addicted to,

money, art, sex, power, cruelty,

your own abject licentiousness

born of being bored with death,

religion, enlightenment,

the desparate goodness of everything,

the mystic exotica of your own mind

dogpaddling in the abyss

with nebulae and jellyfish,

or even deeper than Freud, the void

that swallows the mind whole;

addiction is the dream that wakes you up

like the lips of a black rose

on the forehead of the moon

just as your skull is going into full eclipse.

Addiction is an art. Is a discipline

that would shrink the rigour of armies

by contrast with the demonic ferocity

of its artificial will to live on death

as if the next door you open like an eyelid

were already the coffin of your last breath.

Addiction doesn’t drink

from the sacred wells

on the holy mountainsides

voicing their prophecies like pythons.

Addiction looks for muses

like dangerous night-mirages

in a desert of inspiration

the wind blows away

like hydrogen ghosts

in a graveyard of stars.

Addiction drinks its own tears

like small drops of glass

it’s purified

from a shoreless sea of quicksand

where every grain

is the tiny cornerstone

of a pearl of a world

that couldn’t stand up on its own.

Addiction is a mode of devotion,

a faithful tide

in the unfaithful ocean

of everything that people feel they’re missing

when they’re washed up on the moon

like a lifeboat with no one to save.

Addiction is a thirsty fish

trying to breathe stars

through the gills of it shadows

like light through the nets of its scars

without getting caught.

You might be addicted

to your own reflection

like a bird to the eyes

of an undulant snake

making you dance like a flute

to your own music,

but it’s as impossible

to be addicted to who your are

as it is for water to drown a wax museum

because addiction is born

in the empty mangers

of who you are not

and sustains itself like solitude

on nothing.

(Black angels like the white

prefer the light to solid food.)

Addiction is the rush of the Second Coming

trying to save enough kick

to sprint to the finish line

past the first Apocalypse

on anabolic steroids

even when it knows the race is fixed

by the last flag of blood in the fit

to fly at half-mast

even before you’ve made an end of it.

Addiction shoots time

like a mirror 

in a dealer’s bathroom

that’s just washed off your face

like a fingerpint on space

that doesn’t belong to anyone

whose last known address

was a loveletter

returned to the sender

like a threshold of homeless snakes.

For those who are falling

addiction blossoms like a parachute

that inflates time into eternity

so that every moment sways Icarus

at the first toke 

like a club-footed pendulum

dancing with chandelier Cinderellas

who never die like candles

at the stroke of midnight

for flying too close to the light.

And for those who are rising

like erections from the dead

getting up from the wounded eras

of the afterlives they’ve spent

trying to make brides of their hospital beds,

addiction is the honeymoon suite

that unveils the princess of the mist

like the seven colours of a rainbow

through the prism of Niagra Falls

just before you go over

and down your own throat

like a tiny barrel of Viagra

you hope will keep you afloat

long enough to thread the needle

like the eye of one more salmon run

before you die.

When chaos denudes reverence

and discloses the pillars of our insitutions

are stacked like poker chips

in an earthquake

without rebar;

when the cornerstones

of our spiritual foundations,

the Himalyas of our own imaginations

pushed up like a mountain

by the rutting of continents

into two hands in prayer

cruelly baptized in the tears of things

that run down their cheeks like rivers,

are shaken into dust on an old book

that once looked into the darkness of the truth

with a lantern of lies,

and you look back down the long road

you’ve just walked

and you see nothing but roadkill,

and your own children among them,

and even the bones we put in the dirt

to rise again like heavenly bread

and the ashes we give back to the sky

like the loneliest of clouds, a bird

that hasn’t learned to fly

poured out of its urn

like smoke from a factory chimney,

and no one knows how to live

or die anymore

or what for,

addiction sucuumbs to itself

and becomes the ligature of the world,

the one-stringed guitar

it thumbs like a spinal cord

to keep the dance going

and the one-eyed wine

it serves to the two-eyed stranger

who stopped to ask for directions,

flowing.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When everything in life is blooming

I fear the terrible curse

implicit in Basho’s haiku:

for those who say

they have no time for children

there are no flowers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE REAL CURRENCY OF THE WORLD

THE REAL CURRENCY OF THE WORLD

 

The real currency of the world is a weapon,

the true spider-bankers of the world

behind their dripping grave nets,

full of the dismembered parts of people, 

arms manufacturers. And the weapons

may have evolved

at replicating themselves like genes,

but not the chimpanzees.

Why is it always disfigured old men,

icons of gluttony,

entrenched in their ideologies

like bad wisdom teeth

who send young men off to war

to die like brave ideas

so that they can replace

one bullet with more?

What better market could you wish for

than that in which you sell your product one day

and the boys and toys are broken the next

and tomorrow’s already unmanned?

There’s a young girl

with her knees drawn up to her chin

huddled in a doorway like a fossil.

She’s been broken like bread

among the ravaging soldiers

but still she’s starving.

She looks into the camera of the world

with the frank eyes of a child

who knows it for what it is and isn’t

way too early.

It’s a bag of flour

that’s been dropped

from the back of a truck.

It’s a pail in a makeshift sewer,

the Via Cloacum, the mother of flies;

it’s death to look at,

it’s death to see

inside and out,

both sides of her eyes,

the same mindless atrocity

on the same timeless TV.

mouthing the same processed compassion

as her death goes in and out of fashion.

I don’t know what’s happened to the sun

but in this century

everywhere you walk in the light

you’re followed by your own shadow

shouldering a gun.

And the black holes in the ground

where they keep the nuclear warheads

what are they already

even before they go off

if not mortal wounds

in the heart and mind and flesh of a child

you did not feed

you did not heal

you did not educate

you did not love

you did not keep from death?

Haven’t we learned yet

after so many mass graves

have been buried

by our sensitive distinctions,

that it’s the ghosts of the children we’ve killed

that foul our breath

with the stench of death within us?

Do we live so others can die?

Do we see and think and feel and imagine,

free to peek over the walls we built

by standing on someone else’s skull?

Is intelligence a cannibal

and the truest enterprise

of the human heart,

a blood sport?

Why defame God or the Devil

for suffering in the world

when we thrive

on the self-fulfilling atrocities

of our own evil?

Sweden and Israel

want to sell jet-fighters to India

but the Americans intervene

because Boeing and Northrup

fear the disclosure of their arts

might upstage the wizardry

of their latest, upgraded weaponry,

and there are rich men in exclusive offices

suppurating their morals into ulcers

anticipating dividends

to arm the rabid biophobes with fangs

to make a child haemmorage like a rose?

A million people killed,

ripped like pages from their lives

for every year of the last century

and we’re barely into this one

and how many children

have already been surrendered

to the jaws of Moloch and Baal

eating like overfed brokers of death

in an elegant, Washington hotel?

Love has to put a hood over its head

and lie down with the dead

whenever these assholes

take a woman to bed

to expurgate their stealth

with the roomy privileges of wealth.

How many children

can dance the danse macabre

on the slaughter-house floor

of the credit-card that killed them?

And even when you give back

to those you’ve taken from

your gifts are wrapped

in the skin and ribbons of blood

you’ve exacted like a cosmetic scalpel

from every child you’ve cut

like a bruise from an apple

or the green star

at the core of the planet

that shines over them like seeds.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GREAT SEX IN A BOWER OF RAZORWIRE

GREAT SEX IN A BOWER OF RAZORWIRE

 

Great sex in a bower of razorwire

and every kiss the splash

of an electrical rose

that just fell into the jacussi

as if it were committing suicide.

I remember you like the proof

of some mathematical theorem

I learned in school.

You were certain proof

I was a fool.

Foolproof then you said

but by then I was so fucked up

feeling like the antiChrist of Zen

I just wanted to be

as simple and lucid

as a horned skull that had fallen

like a chunk of the moon

into an unnamed desert

and let the stars crawl in and out of my eyes

salvaging whatever insights they could.

But you were the dangerous neighbourhood

I fell into instead

like a lost traveller’s cheque

like a miniblackhole in my brain

like a pebble into a wishing well

that taught me like a dead echo

you can’t draw water from a snakepit

even when you lower

the silver bucket of the moon

like your heart into a troubled sea.

I tried to write your mystery in comets

over the old cave paintings

of the constellations

that stuttered across the sky

like the text of an ancient windstorm

you couldn’t get out of your eye,

but you mistook them

for the writing on the wall

and the fear you nursed

like your own assassin

broke them like a code of candles

in the shattered mirror of your seeing.

Everything I wrote after that

was either a lighthouse or a searchlight

looking for you among the wrecks.

I remember stepping out of the men’s once

and seeing you across the bar

when you didn’t know I was looking.

You were that nudged-over, foam-nosed

beer-drinker huddled in the corner

of what you were trying to forget

like an ocean that wouldn’t stay hidden.

You were the long shadow

of a mountain on the moon

wondering why nothing grew

even when you watered the garden.

My dick, my heart, my blood, mind, art

all wanted to bloom for you so badly

like lightning rooting luminously

in your emptiness

just before the beginning of a world

we could both live in

without opening our eyes

like disastrous fortune-cookies

and nightmarish bottles of spider-wine.

But I was only breaking bread

with the crumbs of a dream

to feed the hungry multitudes

you sent against me like armies

to salt the ground of my being

and rubble my stars

like towers of light

torn down by the powers

of your darker night.

I wanted to touch you like rain,

like the moon touches

a wounded iris

and it breaks into flame

like a ghostly lover

that never let the fire go out.

And when there were scales

you wore like sequins

where there should have been skin,

I wanted to touch you so brightly

stars would appear in the night skies

of the blue-enameled tiles

that covered the mosques of Isfahan.

But we were serpents

that never wore

the same skin twice to bed

and it was difficult to tell

who took whose tail in whose head

when we sought to embody eternity

like two waves in search of a tide

that would ferry them all the way

to Treasure Island

where X marked the spot

where we sucked the poison out of each other

like two junkies from the same spoon

trying to shoot the moon.

You had a way of diminishing gravity

so we both could get off

whenever we wanted

to melt like frozen seas

and breathe ourselves away

into the profound inconsequence

of our letting go.

I may have fallen like a meteor

exiled from a crown of fools

for jesting with the protocols

of their imitation jewels

into the dark mirror of my own eye

like a bullet through the brain

when things turned unattainably sane

and the book of life

began to lock its doors at night,

but you wiped out the dinosaurs

for being a species that had grown

unworthy of your scars,

as you often said of me toward the end.

And tonight I confess to the stars

that hang like swords

over both of us again

in deranged configurations of pain,

without the least need of forgiveness,

that like any catastrophic event

you were abortively right

about what my non-existence

meant to you

that era of a moment

you said we were through

and you pulled the sky

over my head

like a volcano on its death bed.

And I want you to know as well

while the snaketongue’s in the bell

how much I’d want to sleep with you again

and let the flesh savage our mystic immensities

like tents in the deserts of Scorpio

stripped like flowers in a sudden squall of stars.

Time is the temperature of the world

but that fever has never abated

and whenever I dream of sex with you at night

I wake up in the morning

with strange tatoos all over my skin

that improve the indelibility of your allure.

But if I was a lizard before

now I’ve crept out of the iridium ashes

and apocalyptic micro-diamonds of your eyes,

and my scales have turned into fur

and my blood warms its hands at its own fire,

and though we’re as compatible

as creation and extinction

through some unexpected transformation

without being born again

into some afterlife of desire,

I’m being improbably true

to the greater elation

of missing you.

 

PATRICK WHITE