YOU THINK LIFE IS

YOU THINK LIFE IS

 

You think life is something

that is happening to you

from the outside

like upcoming events

posted like leaves on the wind

because you think your skin

is where you end

and the world begins

but to the wind

you’re just another sail

that thinks it knows where it’s going.

What’s the point of trying to mend

all those constellations

you’ve torn on the thorns of the moon

with a mouthful of pins

you keep sticking into yourself

to make someone else hurt

like a Barbie doll playing with voodoo?

What kind of magic

keeps getting caught up

in the weird starmaps and crazy webs

of the spells you try to cast over me

like toxic revelations of what it’s like

to see the world through the eyes

of a spider on acid

who thinks she’s the queen of the honey bees?

But it’s not the flowers

that fuel your delusion

of the occult powers

of a born-again schizophrenic

that keeps trying to carry me

like Rasputin’s cat in a burlap bag

down to the same river

you rescued Moses from.

You want to be the only wand left

in a snakepit of lesser magicians

when the pharoah asks for proof

you’re on a divine mission

to lead your people out of Egypt

by cleaving a sea of red shadows on the moon

to run like holy blood from a demonic wound.

That novella of facts without a theme

you’ve been working on for years

is just another interpretation

of an anonymous dream

that ended up on your desk

like dirty pictures of someone

blowing the whistle on their own life.

Your acutely annotated confessions

are always sins of omission,

waivers of space,

fevers of grace,

breaking news

that your life,

that franchise

of discounted miracles,

is finally in remission.

And I’m beginning to think,

and maybe I should be flattered, 

that I was the only sin you could find

that was worthy for a while

of the severities of your redemption.

Where else would you look for a cure

if not in the heart of the disease,

but why put your own eyes out

to heal the mirror?

Why heave yourself ashore

like a tidal wave

over some unsuspecting island

just to wash your hands of me

when the sea closed

like an eyelid over Atlantis months ago

to dream the afterlife of a different death

that didn’t foul my last breath

with the sterile purity

of listening to you

make your rounds

like the moon in reverse

in the halls of the terminal nightward

where Lucifer never rings for the nurse?

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EVERYTIME I LEFT

EVERY TIME I LEFT

 

Every time I left I came back to a different door.

My blood never wandered.

It just didn’t recognize the heart

it kept returning to

like a tide to a shore

that was never the same.

Now I can’t tell the way I’m leaving

from the way I came

but the only time I ever feel lost

is when I want to be found.

There may be the flakey arrowhead

of a primitive direction

chipped from the basalt rock

by some Michelangelo of flint-knapping

nestled like the shard of an ostrakon

somewhere among my bones,

but if I’ve ever been headed anywhere

it’s always been here and now

where space and time don’t exist

and I’m going off in all directions at once

like everything else in the expanding universe

whose lonely thresholds follow it like light

deeper into the growing darkness 

like the footprints of an unenlightened man

back to the native homelessness

where he began.

Even the script of a bad play

can be a myth of beginnings

when the actors could be anyone

who can feign a face in the mirror

like a traffic sign

trying to read between the lines

of what makes the puppets dance

to the scarred guitars of their tears.

You didn’t understand my joys

and I couldn’t fathom your fears

or how anyone could sit on their throne

like bait in a leghold trap

and not expect to get bitten

by the jaws of the croc of their crown.

It wasn’t me that swallowed the moon.

Your body lifted me up

and my spirit brought you down

like a parachute that candled

everytime you pulled the rip-cord on the sky

to ease your fall from grace

but you were the sacred flame

of a hot air balloon

that thought she was a comet

who came as a sign

to everyone else but herself

that I was about to fall from a high place

like a snowflake on a furnace

and disappear like a waterbird

without a trace or a tear

or a farewell kiss

to empower the clown

to be true to his own hopelessness

whenever you weren’t around

like a lifeboat on the moon

and things ran aground

on the reefs of your scuttled seas.

And the sails that huddled like blossoms

on the dead branch of the wharf

have given the orchard up to the wind

like a lost soul on a long journey

that can’t see the oceans in your eyes from here.

But I could have told you,

I could have climbed up

on the scaffolding your constellation

and shouted from the rooftops of my voice

like the rooster of a supernova 

shaking up the shining

in a distant galaxy 

that even when you’re out of sight

the stars still don’t lie to the night

but you were the one

who was convinced

the truth always deceived me

and I’ll confess it now

like Galileo recanting his own eyes

flat on his stomach before the pope,

my tears as contrite as my lenses,

I wasn’t enough of a telescope

to get a liar to believe me

when I showed you

the shadows of the mountains on the moon

were not those phoney eyelashes

you put on every morning

like an eclipse that painted

with a broad brush

the blood stains

on the relics of a martyr’s remains.

And even the search parties of fireflies

I sent out to look for you

like my own eyes

came back with zen messages

from an echo in an empty bottle

that had been smashed like a lamp on a rock

where they expose the bad babies

like flawed light

to clarify their own place

in a starless vision of night

before the arising of signs.

But I learned to read your eyes

like the lees of the dark wines

that haemorraged like the moon

at the bottom of every skull you emptied

like a fortune-cookie

or the shell of the sea that was you

you held up to your ear

like someone who’d stopped breathing

to overhear what even the voices

in the backrooms of the future

that never came,

though it had promised you so much,

couldn’t make clear.

And you’re not to blame.

And I’m not to blame,

and there’s no need

to limp around on our skeletons

like a crutch we’re trying to throw away

like a miracle at the top of the stairs

we climbed on our knees

to have our hearts cut out

and held up to the roaring sky

like sacrificial examples

of how to greet the moon

like the kissing stone

of a plundered temple.

A thousand and one mirages may gather

like shadows at night

around the wells of a dream

they draw from like the eyes of a desert

to recall the themes of their gods

like the flames of fire

the morning puts out like a star

the light has washed away,

and when they wake as we did

to the curious irrelevancy of this new day

with no one to forgive us for forgetting

who we were and might have been to each other,

who could have imagined

after such an appeasement of lovers

at the extremes of each other’s altars

we covered in cloaks of blood

to keep the angels at bay

we’d both end up gaping at the moon

like the open wounds

of experienced messengers

with nothing to say?

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MY ENDS ARE NOT OLDER

MY ENDS ARE NOT OLDER

 

My ends are not older than my beginnings

just as autumn is not older than spring

or spring younger than autumn.

The leaves were already falling in the seed

and the fruit bruised on the ground like wine

long before I raised my sail like a blossom

out of the bud of my boat

only to end up shipwrecked

like oxygen on the moon,

my rudder the past tense of kindling

and these storm-driven fleets of poems I set fire to

like pyromaniacal ships drifting into the Spanish Armada

caught in the larynx of the English Channel,

urns full of the ashes of ambiguous angels.

And there are nights when I drown like a tree

in my own leaves like a sea of shadows

that are all that are left of the birds

that bound me like a mast to their singing

and hope is a skeleton in a lifeboat

that didn’t go down with Atlantis

like a surgical barge of death masks

when the big day came and went

like everything else that lasts forever

moment by moment.

Where’s the joy, the fire, the light, the inspiration

that could evaporate stone

or liberate glass eyes

like tears in the mirror

to run down a mountain like rivers?

I watch the fireflies in the valleys of life

flick on and off in the dark

like dead bics

trying to see where they are

and remember when they fired up new constellations

after torching the condemned houses

in the slums of a rundown zodiac

like gleeful arsonists

that delighted the eyes of the night

like random luck in the lotteries of unwinnable fate.

And who made pulp fiction

of the exquisite myths of the women

who taught me

that gravity was just the downside of light

and if space and time are one continuum

they won’t ever be any further away

even when they return to the stars

than they are now?

And when did freedom grow ugly?

When did chaos gang-rape the graces

and fathers begin to throw acid

in the eyes of their daughters

to bleach their shame in a sin

that fouls hell itself with an atrocity

that stains even the lowest heirarchies

of the demonically insane

drinking from their own skulls

like blood from a bell on a rope

that never stops ringing

like a phone that insists on an answer?

I try to read the roots

between the lines of the flowers

that have put too much make-up on

for the last of the philandering bees

to try and better understand

the grand reciprocity

between seemingly disparate things.

I see fossils in the stars

and stars in the garbage

and untune my seeing

like a stringless guitar

to let whatever wants to play upon it, play

the discrete harmonies that can only be heard from afar

like a child crying alone in a room late at night

when no one’s home.

It’s hard to look at the haemmorage of the rose

and see the birth of an ocean

or walk upon a planet scarred by atrocities

and look up at the deathpits on the moon

through the eyesockets of a skull

it can’t identify as its own.

I’ve never been able to walk on water

but I can swim through stars

to get to the other side of things

where the shores are lonely and cold

and the waves are frozen in time

like chipped glass

and heaven and hell

are the same hand of light

like well-thumbed cards fanned out

like the eyes of a peacock

playing solitaire on the horizon.

Here nothing wears

the skin of a mirror

to hide its face in yours.

Here black lightning is frozen in time

like a crack in an empty cup

or a fissure on a skull

that set the wine, the being,

the bird in the chimney free

to see deeper than their own eyes

into that light upon light

that eclipses the radiance of the dawn

by psyching the world

like a spent match at midnight

or a star that’s just gone out

to see in the dark on their own.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I CARE JUST ENOUGH

I CARE JUST ENOUGH

 

I care just enough to say

I couldn’t care less what you think of me,

or how many insights you try to stick like pins

into that little charred voodoo doll

you’ve made as an effigy of me

but is engendered from a likeness of you,

I’m sorry your life is not what you wanted it to be.

I deeply regret there are times

when I can’t understand you

though I’ve tried harder than an attic window

to see what your childhood must have been

buried under that pyramid

you carry around like a chip on your shoulder,

daring the world to knock it off.

I can only imagine the chronic rage

at the indignity and injustice

of the cards cutting like bad genes

at the beginning of a life

that survived the dawn like an accident.

And it’s not impossible to forgive

the occasional volcano

rising up over Herculaneum

like a demonic sculptor

wanting to recast

the perfect marbles of normalcy

into the writhing shapes of agony

that have fleshed clay

with the thousands of tiny, indigneous deaths

you suffer every day.

But you keep butting heads with the world

as if you were on a collision course with a continent

you want to shake down to its foundations

like an expiring god

tasting the same stars

you were born under

when he dies

like the bitter ghost of his own medicine.

You want to bulldoze the round earth flat

and plough the moon with your horns

and sow seeds under the cloak of an eclipse

that will fill the siloes of the heart with thorns

that strike like assassins from the shadows,

but my heart still breaks like bread

when I see how everyone is suffering

the same inequality of pain.

If the poor man laughs

at why the rich man weeps

his joy is still squalor;

and if the rich man keeps

what the poor man lacks,

his joy is an indebted dollar

withdrawn by a vampire at a bloodbank.

The donkey at the end of the line

is in the lead

when the line turns around,

but the unlocateable point

of the turning world is,

the braying of losers and winners aside,

they’re all still donkeys in a line

nose to butt under their unbearable burdens.

Happiness is an aristocrat

posing as a man of the people

who pursue it like a fox before a constitution,

but sorrow is a true democrat

and sooner or later comes to everyone

like the vote.

Why scandalize yourself

by running as a candidate for either

like the slug-line of a bitter joke?

Why narrow your eyes

like mean, little windows

that gossip about the stars

behind their backs

as if they were always talking about you?

You can hate some of the people

all of the time

and all of the people

some of the time

but you can’t hate

all of the people all of the time

without turning your hatred on you

like a scorpion stinging itself to death

in a ring of fire

that bites like a halo.

And there will be no way

to rose the gore on your sword

like a pope indulging Jerusalem

when you fall on it

like the rage of a murderous crusade

to liberate the victims from the victims,

the true believers from the infidels

in the killing fields 

of your own murderous self-afflictions.

More has been suffered by many

than what you have suffered,

agonies that would appall the deepest underworlds

of the darkest imagination.

But your ears are not tuned

to their high frequency screams for help

like bats flayed in a spider web

as the sun comes up like Chernobyl

or the wounded eye of a cannibal Cyclops

crying out in the darkness for the blood

of those who ran out on you

like Jesus at dinner

as soon as you unhinged

the stone at the door of your cave.

You let the sheep out

like a bad shepherd

who couldn’t distinguish

the defections of Judas

from the ruse of the blues

in the lament of your unbounded wound

justifying the ethnic cleansing

of the dove’s dirty needles

like a junkie hooked

on a rush of eagles

screaming down like the designer aerlirons

of a dive-bombing amphetamine

above an unending line of refugees like me

who just pack up their thresholds

like hearts and flowers

and flying carpets

and leave.

You couldn’t bring yourself to believe

in the blessings

that lay themselves down

like clean dressings

like the cool herbs

and prolonged kisses 

of the silver swords of the moon

on the oilslicks

that pour from your lips

like a snake eclipsing birds

or the caustic words

from the volcanic fissures

of an open wound

that scalds its own waters

with tears of acid rain

and fouls itself

like the mouth of a monostome

that talks its shit into leaving

the way it came.

 

PATRICK WHITE