VAIN IDIOTLOGS

VAIN IDIOTLOGS

 

Vain idiotlogs in squirmy smiles

and miles of opinionated ties.

Pudgy party toads squatting

on lilypad platforms rooted in the muck.

Hypocrites.

Liars.

Gluttons.

And the viciously ignorant.

Voces populi.

The voices of the people

embodied in corrupt men

like birds in a fireplace chimney.

The voices of the people

unspooling eclipses of lies

that smother their words in oil

like the Exxon Valdez.

Juvenile geriatric ferocities

that have run out of patience

with the protocols of decency.

Look at their faces.

Cantankerous old men

looking for a use for themselves in life

like barbed wire and bleach.

Arsonists in a volunteer fire-brigade

throwing matches out the window

of an obsolete Martin Mars waterbomber

to give themselves something to put out

like Empedocles on Aetna.

For years I’ve listened

to these fascist clowns

being interviewed like tumours on tv

to see if they’re benign or malignant.

They pour themselves out

like Niagaras of iodine

into every wounded issue

that falls down and scrapes its knees.

Their cures are contemporaneously racist

but long ago they liberated the disease

like the ceo’s of global companies

calling for free market economies

to tear down their natural immunities

to a parasite that claims it eats symbiotically.

Leaders of men.

Leaders of women and children.

Leaders of the mute and helpless.

North stars of the unchosen people

for whom no seas part to let them pass.

Blinded by their own blazing

they shine like the stars of a new constellation

bent on cleaning up the slums of the zodiac

but they’re still the same old spiders in the cosmic web

spinning the dark matter of the masses

out of their bulbous asses.

Hatred grows as reasonable as a snake

in a nest of baby crows.

And the emperor is dressed

in common clothes

like a rose

slumming among the weeds

crowding the perimeters of the garden

they’re never allowed in

like another heartworm up for re-election.

Like any infection when it takes a stand

they claim the doctor

can’t cure the disease

unless he has it

and in the name of spreading the word

they never wash their hands.

Rabies running a primary against water.

Hydrophobic oases in desert sands

where every revelation’s the mirage

of an experienced snakepit

that fell like manna from heaven

misleading the caravan

along the Perfume Trail to the Promised Land

like the Platonic ideal of a democratic newsreel

with a real feel for Egypt.

The text might be archetypically abstract

but the footnotes

are written in the blood of people

who never learned how to read

and however you spin the writing on the wall

it’s the graffitti under the spray-bombed bridge

that reveals their tragically anonymous fates

not the monograms on the dinner plates

that are laid out like harvest moons

for the tapeworms of state

who celebrate themselves

like infinite boons in banquet rooms for all of us.

They also serve who only stand and wait

but it’s getting late

and everyone wants to go home

like a desparate nation

to a refugee camp in foreclosure

where the landlords of life

with a marketshare in evolution

read Adam Smith

and practise infantile exposure.

One self-serving maggot of a man

when he hatches out of his own filth

can lay enough legislative eggs

on the forehead of its electoral host

the eyes of innocent children

can’t see the stars

through the flies that swarm them

as if Beelzebub had become a creator

and genesis read like genocide.

And it doesn’t matter

how hard it snows

on the political domes

of our subservient masters

to purify the outcome of the issue

the heat of the dungheaps underneath

burns their Arctic ice-cap down

everytime they let out a breath

like a gas of global warming.

Choirs of sirens have learned to sing

like lighthouses without a warning

along the dangerous coasts

of another red-eyed morning.

The foghorns call us to the rocks

like the pterodactylic dying call

of the last species of dinosaur

stoned out of existence

by the mobs of those without sin. 

Rats gnaw the flute of the Pied Piper

who lost his way out of Hamlin

and turned around like the Black Plague.

Gulliver’s bound in a straitjacket of Lilliputions.

And government’s the cult leader

of the analectic Confucians

who keep exact records

of the murders next door

like the ancestral bloodlines

of praeturnatural planets

hooked on bad astrologers.

The fixed stars roll like loaded dice

across the darkling glass

and one-eyed Cylopean skies

of our glacial cataracts

as if everything in existence

had a secret agenda

it’s clinging to like a stolen identity

waiting to show its face

like a rattlesnake under a rosebush

that talks in tongues to a spirit of thorns.

No matter how many eagles they eat

they’ll never learn to fly

and when they look to the sky

to point themselves out

like a constellation

brighter than the rest

the stars quickly get their nebulars together

and shine like false magi

on the afterbirth

of all these maggots with horns

trying to put a new spin

on the corpse of a dead myth

that reeks like a hieroglyph

just leaked to the press

about how we got into this mess.

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOU'RE LIKE THIS WANDERING DAWN

YOU’RE LIKE THIS WANDERING DAWN

 

for Layla on her way

 

You’re like this wandering dawn

thirty-five thousand feet above the Pacific

and I’m like this horizon

back here on the ground

at my desk in Perth

wondering if all that splendour

might ever stand in my doorway again.

I don’t think yesterday ever stops

or there’s ever an end of beginning

because everything includes everything

from the very start

like water coming down a mountain on the moon

whole in every part of its flowing

in the expanding here and now of its knowing

the entire sea of awareness

that fills all the cups of time

is contained in every drop

that spills over the brim of a human heart

that knows the journey is the whole of its destination.

We are most homeless on our own thresholds

just as we are crossing them

to go out into the night

like fireflies among the fixed stars.

And most vulnerable

when we take off space like skin

to show someone we love

there is no outside or in

no end or origin

no departure arrival or road

in the way we begin each other

like worlds we could live in

like birds in flight through the night.

And you could bring your own stars.

And I could be as wise as the seasons

and discover the whole earth

is the philosopher’s stone

and throw it through the mind-mirror

that makes love look for alibis and reasons

like small cracks around its eyes.

And birds would be the first words

of a sky that’s learning to talk.

And later you could teach it

to play the stars

as if the universe took the shape

of a beautifully made guitar

in the hands of a wistful siren

whose longing is the music of her solitude.

And I would come to you

like the afterlife of a tree you once loved

and whisper things to you

even the wind doesn’t know

when it opens its ears like leaves.

We could steal the moon

from each other’s window

like lovers and thieves

and get away with it all like joy

because no one believed we could. 

You could be the sacred groves.

I could be the rebel wood.

You could wear the night for clothes

And I could stand there in my strangerhood

and let the flames fall from my body

like feathers from a phoenix

and burn so hot

you could see right through me.

Space is faster than light or thought

and space is the dark mother

that opens the gates to everything

in between the lines of an unsigned loveletter

that writes itself as you read.

I am the way I am

because you are the way you are

said the darkness to the star

the flower to the bee

the mountain to the sea.

You could be a mystic river

and I could be your reed.

You could be a fire-giver

and I could be your candle.

You could be a grail of rain

and I could be the search.

You could be a rose of pain

and I could be your church.

You could cry like a late-night violin

and I could be your Handel.

And that’s the way the world emerges

out of the emptiness of a boundless abyss

and love calls out like one voice with myriad echoes

you could be the furious dream

of the butterfly princess

who dreamed she woke up to a kiss

and thousands of miles away

here at my desk

I could be the bliss

of watching you rise in the morning.

You could be a comet

passing through the sunset.

And I could be the vapour trail

of your new-age prophet

and explain you like a message to the rest

any sign of your light

is proof to the fruitful

there are still cosmic eggs

that break like worlds

waiting to be born

that fly from a shaman’s nest

high among the stars

and a full moon in the apple-tree

whose passage is blessed

by a lone Druid

in a cathedral forest

struck by lightning

back here in Canada

counting tree-rings

like so many scars till spring.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHNNY WAS SHOT UNDER ANOTHER NAME

JOHNNY WAS SHOT UNDER ANOTHER NAME

 

Johnny was shot under another name

robbing a drugstore in Vancouver.

You blew your head off at Christmas

and sent your wheelchair flying across the room.

They must have liked you

they must have trusted you

if they only broke your back

for leaving the company too soon.

Even when we were kids

Johnny was always looking for someone to kill him.

Hope he’s out of his misery now.

I think your parents did that to him.

As I watched them do so much to you.

Anyway. You were two brothers.

Now you’re dead.

And you were my best friend

growing up in a garbage can

that reeked of home.

Johnny was crazy with rage at fourteen.

Remember the day we hung him by his neck

from the limb of that tortured tree

that grew out of the side of the cliff

in the prison-yard they turned into a highschool?

He never carried a gun around us after that.

He was cyanotically blue

by the time we hauled him down.

And he knew that we knew

how to keep our word.

Hey, and that day when we made a pact

to stand up to Nick Paris and Grant Basanta

and I broke Nick’s nose

and you took a baseball bat to Basanta

and we took off like antelope through the backfields

exhilarated with joy

in the heart of the dark error

that had called down hell upon us?

I still haven’t stopped laughing.

You couldn’t do much for yourself

so you always fell in love with women

you tried to save from the things you knew.

What didn’t we know by nine

you still couldn’t tell

the average thirty-year old?

Prostitutes, junkies, battered wives

and the occasional rich bitch

who’d slum down with you

to avenge herself on a life

she couldn’t give up.

You wanted to be the hero

but they wanted to fuck a dragon

and I knew you’d never get

that thorn out of your heart

by trying to turn their scales to feathers.

You couldn’t love anyone

unless they were a lost cause.

But I heard the last one to leave you

came clean out of rehab

as you de-cultified yourself

from Vatican business

to make a new start.

I remember you

cutting your little finger off

when we were teen-agers

and giving it to Alice

in a little white jewelry box

with cloudy cotton stained by blood

the day she came to say good-bye forever.

I wanted you to know

in a way you’ll never forget

what you meant to me you said.

That was your poor boy’s notion

of being noble.

She thought you were out of your head.

I knew you were romantically intense

and made a wry remark in a footnote to myself

about how hilariously helpless you were

whenever another princess beat you senseless.

I guess things didn’t change much over the years.

A finger? A life?

A difference of degree not kind.

And remember when we played

at being Romans

when we were kids in cardboard armour

with six inch nails at the tips of our spears?

You’re a suicide, my friend.

The Romans are going to cut off

your left hand

and bury you without it. 

But there’s an unprofaned glory

in the way you fell upon your sword

in obedience to your dark code of love

as she was leaving

to show her how much she had meant to you.

Born into a life of lies

you would have lost your mind

if you hadn’t kept one thing true.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SO FAR DOWN THIS ROAD

SO FAR DOWN THIS ROAD

 

So far down this road without a destination

my childhood doesn’t recognize me anymore.

So far into this life I’ve never been outside of

I can speak to myself in a foreign language

that no one can understand

as if it were the ancient dream-grammar

of a past tense

that talked its way into the future.

So far into what I’ve become

the peduncle is lost in the ensuing phylum

and of all thought

I’m the first monkey

to look for its origins in an asylum.

The crow on an autumn branch in the white rain

laughs more than it ever did

at the specious foundations

of my ephemerid profundities

dropping like apples at my feet.

The minstrel warrior of the forlorn hope

I took up arms in a holy war of one

I was doomed to lose

like a sad generation of demons

who knew the wound would never close.

If heaven isn’t a club-med in a specific place

but saturates all of space

like mystically dark matter

then we’re all falling toward paradise

like particles and wavelengths of water.

Heaven may be the whole cup

and hell a crack in the wine

and earth the place you sober up

like a bad hangover from the divine

but it’s a party I walked out of aeons ago

more a stranger than when I came

like a manger without a sign

like a magus without a logo

to an inn that had been empty for years.

I don’t presume to teach people

what they already know.

Even hanging on

is going with the flow.

This is a delirious place

where the mysteries cut deep

and silence is the native tongue

God speaks to herself in.

So far down this mindstream

like a paper boat I made of a poem

and set aflame like an orchid of fire

to honour a poet

who said it right in China long before me,

I bloom on the water of a prophetic dream

true to the unpredictability

of a sleeping dragon

to wake from the brevity of oblivion

with the eyes of a narcoleptic chameleon.

Joy binds

what sorrow releases.

And thought might prick the lifelines

of an amniocentesis

and offer up my embryo like a thesis

on whether I should have been born or not,

but I drink from my own skull like the moon

when it’s full to the brim

above the starwheat in the Virgin’s hand

to the stealth of the wind that dropped me here

like a lone seed in a huge empty silo

I’m trying to stud like the Venus de Milo.

It’s not easy rooting in stone

like the invasive metal

of a sword that will make you

king of the waxing year.

Things just fall apart on their own

like grain from the chaff of a fickle harvest

that rose from the dead

like the bitter bread

of an abandoned homestead

that walked out on itself too soon.

But I’ve never been one to talk

about leaving it all behind

like some dark gate of the mind

I could pass through

like a unilluminated comet through space

to shine in the light of a star

that was alarmed at my approach

and blind to my passing.

I’m more at home in the dark

with a firefly and a chimney spark

rolling koans like constellations of loaded dice

as if they were two diabolical buddhas

in the backalleys of enlightenment

pushing their luck to the wall.

They rise

and I fall.

I rise

and they fall.

Readiness is all.

Ripeness is all.

Lear shakes his fist at Hamlet.

The blue harvest moon in total eclipse.

All loveletters die like a political pamphlets

up against a closed door.

So far into this cloud of unknowing

I have given up hoping

will ever become a star

and break into light in all directions

to show me where I’m going

I give up on myself like rain

and release my waterbird eyes

to fall wherever they might.

Readiness is spring.

Ripeness is fall.

Seven come eleven.

No one wins it all.

Two squared skulls

up against a crooked wall.

I shake the dice

and you call.

You shake the dice

and I call out to luck like a random goddess

to see if she still loves me

as she did once tomorrows ago

when I won everything back.

Whether you’re giddy with happy truths

or more profoundly belled by the sad facts

it’s scary at night in the spirit’s lost and found

when the lights go out

and no one’s around to look for anything.

Gardens of black umbrellas,

the wings of folded bats

stacked like unseasonal eclipses

that have lost the will to bloom

like flowers at a lavish funeral

for impoverished aristrocrats.

And courage isn’t a home

that’s all that easy to return to

when you’re out here on your own

like a lifeboat full of midnight on Mars.

So far along this long homeless road home

I have worn out my faithless friends like shoes

I took from the feet of the dead

to walk on ahead of myself

like a star with a jump on where it’s been.

Now even I don’t know what I mean

when the words say me

like some black benediction

over an unknown grave

as I mourn the roadkill

and try to bless the turkey-vultures.

Earth. Air. Water. Fire.

Four cultures that bury their dead differently

but all to the same end.

Who could have guessed

the angels that came to earth first

had the wingspan of loitering scavengers?

I give my soul up to the birds.

I give my eyes up to the sky.

I give my voice up to these words.

I give my mind up like water to water

light to light

darkness to darkness

to the star that has misled me this far

into this wilderness of myself

where I’m preaching stealth to shadows

and air to ride the wind.

I give my heart up

to the thorn that gored the rose

like a deep insight

into the nature of the moon’s

bright vacancy

dark abundance

like two sides of the same face.

I give my will up to chance.

My blood to the conviction of the poppy it’s fire.

So far beyond my last event horizon

I’m never coming back this way again

what does it matter if the path

is crooked or straight?

I lay my tiny wisdom down like a hazelnut

on the track of the silver thought-train

to see if it can crack it like a koan.

I lay the mantle of my dynastic ignorance

over the shoulders of an avalanche like snow.

However much

you love the valley

it will be the mountain

that sweeps you off your feet.

I give my imagination up like a black wine

that tastes a little like me

to the muses who bruised it

like the great night sea

they drank from my skull

whenever the moon was full.

Among so many sages

it was good to be a fool.

One by one the schools

dropped out of me

and settled like mud at the bottom

of a clarified way to see

that everything that passed through my head

like a shapeshifting cloud

was just water looking into water,

me looking into me with water for eyes.

Why be shocked

by the predictability of death

when it’s life that always comes as a surprise?

I may have been lame

in my approach to things

and limped my way like an iamb into wings

but I wanted to look down

from way up there

as if I were a star without strings

and be the way things are

when they shine down on nothing

until a nightbird in a far tree sings.

Carrying forth into the carrying forth

eternity might be the ghost

in the starmud of time that perishes

to give forever a meaning

but it’s this life now

that talks the talk

and walks the walk

of a human being.

I give my eyes up to the seeing.

So deeply lost upon myself

like an empty lifeboat drifting through

these veils and visions of things

that appear like sails in the fog a moment

and then evaporate into their nebularity,

I give my blessing to the waywardness

of the course

that took me the way I am.

I give up my pain

I give up my sorrow

I give up my love my joy my laughter

like orchids and ashes on the mindstream

that flows out of me like a waking dream

that doesn’t insist on seeing me here tomorrow.

But most of all

I give my gratitude

to the mystic vagrancy of the great solitude

I approached like a friend

on my way to nowhere like the sea

as if everything came to an end in me

like a life I couldn’t foresee.

Though I have mourned

life’s pre-emptive reverses 

I have not scarred my lips with curses.

I have not tainted the well I drink from.

And nothing’s ever spoiled the bread I broke with others.

The feast is free

but it isn’t hunger or thirst

that makes us sisters and brothers

it’s the way we raise the cup to each other’s lips

like a lunar elixir to a solar eclipse

as if we knew we would pass

long before the darkness did

but still made the gesture anyway.

It’s the way we hope we know what we mean

when we say we love people we’ve never seen

as if they were everyone in particular

and love’s mute theme were helplessly gesticular.

You can’t keep what you won’t give away.

Life’s a long sleep before a short dream

that wakes you up far from home

beside the unknown road you’re on

that winds like smoke among the stars

whispering ghost stories around the flames

of their unbelievable fires.

By all means pursue what is true

but don’t forget

mercy has its liars too.

I give my life up

to the mystic specificity

of the medium that sustains it

like a wavelength of light

to a sea of dark matter.

And more than I could have ever lived

living alone together with everyone

crammed into the same planetary shoe

I give up all the vastness

of my awareness of the space within

and how far there is to go like light

before you can open

even a single flower of insight

to end your long winter night.

I give up space

like my place at the table

where I stood like a tower of salt.

I give my imagination up

like an underground cult

that gave its secrets away to everyone

like dark spots on the sun.

And whatever beginnings

are behind me now

like things I’ll never finish

I give my past and future up

to the omnipresence of time

in all I live today

as if something

were always coming my way

without expectation

from lightyears beyond my eyes

like letters from home that never reach me

in time to call me back.

If I have shone among luminaries

like a firefly in an ice palace

of radiant chandeliers

that froze in their own tears

it was as a small lighthouse

on the coast of turbulent mirrors

that kept a nightline on.

I spent the gone on the going

and trusted the darkness

to keep things flowing along

like a river coming down a mountain

without knowing about the sea

that summoned me to the lowest place

like an unfathomable watershed

in every eye of the fountain

that cried out to the birds

in words that feather the dead

for their long flight through the mystery

I am I am I am

the future memory

of my own prophetic history

before I wrote it down

like the path I took on my way out of town.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PATRICK WHITE