CRAZY LADY

CRAZY LADY

 

for Alysia

 

Crazy lady in your masks and vehement opinions

about which of all your secret agencies

tortured the starfish overnight

when you weren’t looking

into confessing what constellation it fell from.

Crazy lady can I take you for a sign

the storm has stepped down from its pulpit

because life never cared very much

if it was understood

and you’ve got worlds in your closet

like the unfullfilled graves

of overly sensitive shoes

that want to try you on like a road

that never goes back on its word?

You’re famous as a lover

among the prophetic skulls of the paramours

for always finding the right house

on the right street on the right night

but entering through the wrong door.

You’re a cat-burglar whose heart

goes off like an alarm

everytime you get away

with another break and enter on the moon.

Though you never steal anything

that can’t be put back

I always keep my third eye open

when I’m around you

even if I’m sleeping alone

so I don’t wake up in the morning

and find my will to live shamelessly gone.

Crazy lady you rain on the sphinx in the desert

and write your name in hieroglyphic birthmarks

inside the cosmic glain of a royal cartouche

to say you were here once

and tomorrow you’ll be born again

as a black swan on a midnight river

and after that who knows

maybe you’ll become a voice coach

for a travelling talent show.

Crazy lady I adore you

for the things you throw away

like the unconvincing lines

of a bad morality play.

You’re the wise witch

of your own stagecraft

on the coal road to diamond alone.

And if the clarity drives you insane.

If your freedom seems in vain.

If you hurt in ways you can’t explain

and people are washing up along your coasts

looking for their ghosts among the dead

who gibber through your head

like bats in a lighthouse

in a frenzy of light

they mistake for a mystic experience,

tell them you salvaged all you could from the wreck

when the full moon bounced like a bad cheque

and the lifeboat overturned.

Tell them you’re not the continent

they’re looking for

and just because you’ve left the door ajar

doesn’t mean they can track their lives in

without knocking from the inside.

Crazy lady you were a widow

before you were a bride

like the new moon

rising over black waters

that broke like a watershed of pain

when you were christened

like the last lifeboat to leave Atlantis

without anyone on board.

Crazy lady no one knows

what you’ve buried at sea

when you trafficked in slavery

and captured me on my way

to have my fortune read.

How lightly I wear your chains even now

and for all the things you might be

I can’t see

forgive you somehow

for the mischance of my liberty.

The world loves freedom

but it hates the free.

The world preaches love

but love remains a mystery.

Take your chains off

and the spiders will scoff

that you’ll starve to death

without a dreamcatcher

to snare the butterfly.

Everyone reaches for high ideals

when they’re down and out at their heels

but they eat their own

like swine and farrow

when you throw them a bone

they can gnaw on like gold

down to the nutritive marrow.

And today talks a lot about tomorrow

as the living talk about the dead

as if they knew

what the dead would say

about today languishing on its deathbed

like the prelude of an afterlife that goes on forever

like a weather warning

trying to keep up with a cold front.

Crazy lady let the others thump

their monkey hearts

in a triumph of bread and circuses

to keep the mob

from spying on the watchers

and everyone and everything in its place

face by face as they put

laurels on the winners for their folly.

Don’t let the blaze blind the candle

to its own light.

Night upon night

your darkness outshines them all.

Crazy lady the fireflies

might align your mirrors

like cepheid variables

to a constellation

that changes your eyes like mood rings

and the wind never finish the loveletter

it was writing to you

in a language only you could understand

like the leaves of the poetic tree-letter Q

in the apple groves

of a Druidic tree alphabet

that sings like an orchard in bloom on the moon

because there is no end

of the things it can say

about the way

everything changes around you

like Daphne turning herself into a laurel tree

just as Apollo catches up to her

as if he were catching his breath.

Crazy lady if the others can’t see

how brave you must be

to be so free with your light

in so many dark places

where the world is not impounded

by the memory of what it thought it was,

remember they can only know the outlines of things

however they connect the stars like dots in a thought-chain,

but you know how to break into light

like a night without laws.

Life happens to them from the outside

because they don’t know how to live as you do

like a cause that’s free of its own effects. 

Take perfect from perfect it’s still perfect.

Crazy lady I know you know

like a voice in a stairwell

that knows you’re there

hiding from a thousand thousand things

enlightenment finds its wisest fools

among the rejects of the usual schools

who couldn’t shape their radiance to the rules.

Their lamps can find their way to the barn.

Their starfish can cling to the rock.

But you’ve got eyes that shine alone in the dark

like two waterbirds disappearing

into the waywardness of their wings

without leaving a trace of their wandering anywhere.

They’ve got too many palings on their fence

to find a hole that would let them get out

and beyond things.

And there are locks on the gates

of the secret gardens in their hearts

they keep shut to keep things in.

They might collect stars

in the canning jar of a telescope

but crazy lady you’re the one

that undoes the lid

and lets them all fly free.

You’re what the rest of us

are supposed to be.

Free and happy

just to see

peerlessly into the mystery

there’s nothing we can’t be

or have been

or will become

that isn’t as clear as freedom

to the stars that envy us

the rarity of seeing

beyond the lucidity of being

into our own unwitnessed reality

that views the world on tour

in a field of play

that makes its themes up as it goes

like a river that flows

as easily up the mountain

of its lone reflection

as down the one

that took off its clothes

like spring snows

and jumped in.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GENIUS ISN'T A GOOD GUESS

GENIUS ISN’T A GOOD GUESS

 

Genius isn’t a good guess that thinks it knows what it’s talking about. It’s not an eagle that can be lead around by a jackass like an eagle on a leash. It’s not the happy ending of a lot of puzzled fossils. It never answers itself the same way twice. It hasn’t got doors and windows and stairs and a threshold with a welcome doormat. It isn’t a house like that. And even the great thieves of fire don’t know how to get in. Its keys and locks are mercury and it’s founded on quicksand from Mars. It doesn’t possess and it isn’t captivated by anyone. It’s not the hot point of a spear of insight flintknapped from the cold stone of the moon. And it’s not the igneous bend in the argument that pours a luminous river of gold out of the dark ore of the amusing philosophers who think they need to defend it like a windmill. It isn’t the will. It isn’t the idea. It isn’t the world as we know it. Its eyes aren’t the muses of seeing nor its ears the sirens of hearing. There’s a breeze of dark matter blowing through space but you can’t raise a sail to catch it. And it may weave the light into the cosmic web of a dreamcatcher but there’s no jewel of a spider to bleed your butterflies like lovenotes to a hadron collider. It’s not the God particle that everyone’s looking for or the unified field theory that explains the light to the stars as if you had to hold a candle up to a candleflame to see what’s burning. You can’t earn it. You can’t deserve it. You can’t reserve it like a table in the corner of a private conversation. Like water it goes where it wants as if its own nature were its only direction. And you can lie about it all you want but it doesn’t care if your constellations are true or not. Or if you’re just flying kites with long lifelines that end in the palm of your hand. It’s not an asylum for fugitives who’ve got one foot in the boat and the other on land. It doesn’t mean anything and there’s nothing it’s trying to understand. You can call it freedom. You can call it enlightenment, liberation, moksa, kensho, satori, the abyss, the void, the blaze or a black lightning bolt from the brainpan of the Sahara that struck the tree of knowledge like the dawning revelation of miles and miles of treeless grassland. But however you try to squeeze a sphinx out of a shapeshifter you’re still just scrawling pictures in the sand the wind will efface like a human with the head of a dandelion. Because genius has no likeness anywhere in the universe. No simulacrum, mithal, or metaphor you can point to like a myth in the sky and say that’s where the light comes from. You can squander the moon in a wishing well but the black mirror still isn’t urgent to be known by your reflection. A donkey looks into the well and the well looks back. It doesn’t echo with answers like a voice with a change of heart and a course correction. It doesn’t show up like a used compass at a quest for perfection. The moment you take it for a guide it leads you astray. You can’t run from it or hide your face in your hands like the dark side of the moon because the light’s too strong. It can rise up like a gust in a backalley and blow stars in your face that can blind you for years and then it can flow the way of water like a luminous path out of the labryinth of your disillusioned tears. There’s not enough content to it to maintain a teacher but all teachings are mere whispers among the shadows of it. Silence within silence like the end of the play within the play, the dream within the dream. But when the buddhas have nothing to say. It’s a good time to listen.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE POINT IS

THE POINT IS

 

The point is not to find yourself through your art or anything but to lose yourself so completely in whatever you’re doing you forget who it was you were looking for and what you hoped to achieve. That way the whole universe collaborates in its own becoming in every mystically specific moment of you and nothing’s left out. Yours is the secret name of God written on six million leaves and you’re the wonder of whose work this is. And who can assess the number of stars it takes to make one eye that can turn around and see them? Just don’t underestimate the creative power of extinction. Or forget that silence is the ultimate theme of the music that it gives birth to. And stop treating your questions as if they were a long chromosomatic line of impoverished relatives trying to save up enough to buy their way into one blue-blooded aristocrat of an answer that quickly forgets where it came from. Separation is evil. Severance and self-containment are the eyelids of death. You should take hold of yourself if ever as if you were cupping water in your hands you’re about to return to the river.  What did the Sufi say? Be melting snow and wash yourself clean of yourself. That’s the way to get back to the root of things. Life blooms from below. If there’s a painter left at the end of the painting to say I did this, or a poet who’s still a poet by the time he’s finished writing, or a lover who still knocks on his beloved’s door from the outside, burn them at the stake of their own delusion for not being heretical enough to be consumed. Extinction isn’t the end of things anymore than mammals are the end of dinosaurs. Or God leaves off where the devil begins. But you haven’t emerged here alone in this vast space to seek the eventual forgiveness of this long night that marrows your golden bones with dark matter. You’re not the skull-bound period at the end of a long spine of a sentence that’s learned to walk upright. Pour the elixirs and snakepits out of the grails of being at your feet like stale wine and the emptiness is charged with becoming again. Lighting it up and blowing it out; it goes into action again. Ask any candle. Enlightenment isn’t a long river that anticipates the sea. The wave breaks where it begins. And its greatest delight is in being the no one it always was. With no one watching in the shadows of insight. Consider how nothing amplifies. Put zero beside one and a feather becomes a wing that’s ten times bigger. That’s how you start a universe from scratch. That’s how you take to the sky. Throw yourself like a lot of nothing into the mix and there are stars strewn everywhere across space like a nervous breakdown trying to get a grip on things like starfish and galaxies. But there’s nothing to be afraid of. Water doesn’t drown in water and fire doesn’t burn in its own flames. And when you get right down to it nothing isn’t the exhaustion of being that’s run out of thresholds to cross. It’s the original homelessness that set us on this path to everywhere like a direction that couldn’t leave anything out. So bury your name in the night and forget who you are in your solitude and let the torch of your blood flame out like the setting sun. And strange stars will appear to tell stories around their fires about whose house they think you were born in. And when no one can answer for certain. They’ll pull back their curtains of light and gape at each other like wide-eyed windows staring out into empty space as if it were your face alone that they looked through.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE POINT IS

THE POINT IS

 

The point is not to find yourself through your art or anything but to lose yourself so completely in whatever you’re doing you forget who it was you were looking for and what you hoped to achieve. That way the whole universe collaborates in its own becoming in every mystically specific moment of you and nothing’s left out. Yours is the secret name of God written on six million leaves and you’re the wonder of whose work this is. And who can assess the number of stars it takes to make one eye that can turn around and see them? Just don’t underestimate the creative power of extinction. Or forget that silence is the ultimate theme of the music that it gives birth to. And stop treating your questions as if they were a long chromosomatic line of impoverished relatives trying to save up enough to buy their way into one blue-blooded aristocrat of an answer that quickly forgets where it came from. Separation is evil. Severance and self-containment are the eyelids of death. You should take hold of yourself if ever as if you were cupping water in your hands you’re about to return to the river.  What did the Sufi say? Be melting snow and wash yourself clean of yourself. That’s the way to get back to the root of things. Life blooms from below. If there’s a painter left at the end of the painting to say I did this, or a poet who’s still a poet by the time he’s finished writing, or a lover who still knocks on his beloved’s door from the outside, burn them at the stake of their own delusion for not being heretical enough to be consumed. Extinction isn’t the end of things anymore than mammals are the end of dinosaurs. Or God leaves off where the devil begins. But you haven’t emerged here alone in this vast space to seek the eventual forgiveness of this long night that marrows your golden bones with dark matter. You’re not the skull-bound period at the end of a long spine of a sentence that’s learned to walk upright. Pour the elixirs and snakepits out of the grails of being at your feet like stale wine and the emptiness is charged with becoming again. Lighting it up and blowing it out; it goes into action again. Ask any candle. Enlightenment isn’t a long river that anticipates the sea. The wave breaks where it begins. And its greatest delight is in being the no one it always was. With no one watching in the shadows of insight. Consider how nothing amplifies. Put zero beside one and a feather becomes a wing that’s ten times bigger. That’s how you start a universe from scratch. That’s how you take to the sky. Throw yourself like a lot of nothing into the mix and there are stars strewn everywhere across space like a nervous breakdown trying to get a grip on things like starfish and galaxies. But there’s nothing to be afraid of. Water doesn’t drown in water and fire doesn’t burn in its own flames. And when you get right down to it nothing isn’t the exhaustion of being that’s run out of thresholds to cross. It’s the original homelessness that set us on this path to everywhere like a direction that couldn’t leave anything out. So bury your name in the night and forget who you are in your solitude and let the torch of your blood flame out like the setting sun. And strange stars will appear to tell stories around their fires about whose house they think you were born in. And when no one can answer for certain. They’ll pull back their curtains of light and gape at each other like wide-eyed windows staring out into empty space as if it were your face alone that they looked through.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O THIS MORNING MORE THAN EVER

O THIS MORNING MORE THAN EVER

 

O this morning more than ever

I want to disappear into my life

like a bird into the blue oblivion

of a migration of one

that’s never coming back.

Things aren’t solid.

They’re real.

And tonight I will appeal again

to the subtle intelligence of the dark matter

that resonates throughout space

like energy musing upon itself at rest

after long labour

to let me evaporate with the stars

like a breath somebody took

deeply into themselves

and then breathed out.

Did my eyes sweeten the windows

they looked through like women?

Did my looking help ripen the stars?

Strange wounds.

Stranger scars.

There’s no end

to the myriad afterlives of water

that a human lives through

like the weather

of an undiscovered sea

and time just keeps

carrying things forth into the carrying forth

like a clepshydra of severed heads

bleeding like buckets

one into another.

An alphabet of prophetic skulls

that never finish a sentence

because the things we say

already have more in common

with the dead

than they do with the living

from the very first word

that falls from our mouths like an apple.

If I have spoken in tongues and symbols

and mixed occult elixirs

like secret constellations

to heal the injured night

my voice never forgot

that it was a mere gesture of moonlight,

a mystic adagio of picture-music

dancing alone in its own shadows.

And if I went crazy in the pursuit

of an earthly excellence

it was just to pass the time.

Anyone with a spirit needs a cosmic hobby.

Anyone with a mind

needs to let go now and then

like a universe that expresses itself completely

and then stands a human up

like a finger to the lips of a prolonged silence.

And what can you say

to those with a heart

that wait for blood to return

like the wind to their sails

with good news

like oxygen from Atlantis

that things are beginning to look up

except drink up

until you’re sober as dry land again.

The ecliptic intersects the celestial equator

at the equinoctial colure

and it’s spring again

in the northern hemisphere

where the crocuses

are poking their noses

through holes in the snow

like bruises beginning to bloom.

If there is no wonder in your love

you will never know

the profound delight

of being grateful for your life

and the stars won’t humble you

when you ask the night who you are

into knowing what they do.

Stop listening to everything with your mouth

and sit down beside the fountain

like a road or a sundial

that’s found its way back

and hear what your ears

have been saying for years

about the coin you lost in the mindstream

like your passage across the river of death

coming up like the moon

over your left shoulder

to take your breath away.

Wisdom renounces the wise

and therein lies enlightenment.

Ignorance embraces the fools of the spirit

and there are no words for it.

The best is clarity.

Clarity is all.

This is a doorway.

This is a wall.

And this is all the gold of India

I would give if I could

to sit down with Hafiz

by the banks of the Ruknabad

among all those Persian roses

and steal musical riffs from the stream

to say what we impossibly mean

to the young slave girl

with the mole on her cheek

who’s learning to speak our language like a muse.

If I have longed for things all my life

as if they were out of reach

it was one of the dark jewels of my childhood

the died like an eye for a lack of light

that taught me

longing is more creative

than fulfillment

and the nightbird

on its broken branch alone

sings like a wine closer to home

than all the daylight choirs

of happier wings in the vineyard

that inspires the liars into blossoming

like loveletters on the wind

they don’t know where to send.

So I tell them without believing

they know what I’m talking about

to take a page out of the orchard’s book like I do

and when spring’s in the air

send them everywhere.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VASTER

VASTER

 

for you whose name means night

 

Vaster than this lost immensity

I revel in alone

a space opens up inside of me

like a nightsky

with stars I cannot name.

The silence gapes at their radiance

and strange chameleonic flowers gather

like moths to a flame.

The grass is kind.

The leaves are tender.

And the moon is always new.

I can feel lyrical tendrils of longing

reaching out for you in the darkness

like water and wine

in paisley designs

and your fingerprints

are all over the grapes

as if you wanted someone to know

who’s crying in the window.

The night is urgent

with small animals

changing species.

I can feel their eyes

beading on the bushes

as they look out in wonder

at what I might be

as I do you

enraptured with becoming.

You turned the world upside down

like a shotglass at a bar

just for a change of stars.

Now you’re down under.

And I’m slowly getting drunk on your absence

like a dark wine that matured

like a calendar of eclipses

into a choir that knows

all the songs of summer

that could make a grown man cry

for things he wonders

if he’ll ever know again.

So little love.

So much pain.

I’ve become good friends

with the crystal dolmen you left me

like a buddha in the Arctic

trying to thaw the moonlight a little

like an unexpected intensity

in the middle of things.

A little brass statue of Kali

dances beside him

and next to that

the small hand-carved sign

that follows me around like a branch

trying to be a perch for a bird

that’s run out of trees:

Poet’s Landing.

Wherever that is.

And maybe maybe maybe baby one night

you’ll let me see the stars through your window

and I can tell you all their names in Arabic

and what they mean in the ascendant

when I look beyond your eyes

like a drowning man

to read the lifelines in the light

you keep throwing out to me

like gentle nets of water

you bead in your moonboat 

as you’re sailing through Aquarius

mobbed by flying fish

who can’t thank you enough for their wings.

I’m a freedom fighter

for a dreamcatcher

that wants to come true.

I’m a pilgrim

on the last hill before home

back from a holy war of one.

And I look at you in the distance

like a promise I made

to the sun at midnight

and I see what I’ve come back to

like a witching wand to water

is you in every sign of life

that wakes in the valley of the mindstream.

And I think of who you were

before you left

and who you might be

when you come back

and I dream things about you

that please me with the easy way

your veils fall from the seeming

and I’m left

beaming alone like a lighthouse

on a rough coast in a Pacific storm

as if I were high on fireflies

and there were no warning

in the red morning 

in which I have no say

like stars lost in the sun

when I see you this way.

 

PATRICK WHITE 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'VE STOPPED MISTAKING MY LIFE

I’VE STOPPED MISTAKING MY LIFE

 

I’ve stopped mistaking my life

for evidence I exist.

I’ve stopped watering

palm-trees in a mirage.

I’m leaking out of myself

like sand through a crack

in a wounded hourglass.

I’ve stopped doing my time

standing up

and approach things more

like a circle

that’s been squared

by a reclusive hypoteneuse.

I’ve stopped asking

how many legs are on a snake

or what does it mean

when things don’t mean anything.

For all the auditions I held

I never did find a stand-in

for the meaning of meaning.

I can hear crutches breaking

like dead branches

from the tree of knowledge

that rails like an ice-storm in hell

there’s no light for its chandeliers.

How many voices are in a secret?

How many theories in a thought?

How many lovers had to die

to keep one feeling alive?

I deserted the circus of high ideals.

I unfeathered my heels

and stopped trying to invent

new alphabets that would read like birds

before the first snow.

When you’re everywhere

there’s nowhere left to go.

I stopped telling time to its face

what hour it was and wasn’t

and started listening to it

as if it had nothing to say.

I stopped asking space for i.d.

and it stopped showing me

an old picture of me

with one eye.

A voice spoke

out of the purposeless undoing of the fire

and everything went up like smoke

trying to get a little higher.

I wasn’t on a mission

to save the souls of the trees

like native peoples

by converting them

to doors and ladders.

I swept through steeples

like a forest-fire

And the judgment came down:

Nothing matters.

And I knew I was free

to take liberties with the abyss.

And everywhere I rode

a flying carpet of karma

through the infinite darkness

unspooling like a wavelength of light

I made up my own myths

about the stars that were passing

clandestine lovenotes through my eyes

as if they were doves

sent out to look for me like land.

But I had a hell of a flood

of my own going on

and took wing for Atlantis.

I’ve given up trying to walk on water

but I can go for miles on quicksand.

Stars are another matter.

A firewalk you take alone.

I live in a house

where the windows

are lightyears across

and a black hole

is my last known address

surrounded by trees

that keep opening my mail

like leaves of their own

to see who signed

what the light confessed

when it wanted to get

the night off its chest.

Tell me your sorrows.

Tell me your fears.

Tell me your hopes and passions

and I’ll listen like a universe

to its own afterbirth

like a flawed soul

listens with compassion to the rain.

Illusory cures for illusory diseases

perhaps

detailed maps

of rivers that never flowed.

But I take a deep breath

and put my shoulder to the wind like a bell

that’s taken on a heavy load

like a backhoe in heaven

excavating graves

to see if anything

can truly save us from ourselves.

I come up like the full moon

of a mushroom in the night

and I wait for elves

to enthrone me like a footstool

under everybody’s feet

as the last of the hanging judges

takes his seat.

But I know like a man

who wrestles with angels

how to grow stronger with every defeat.

I am no longer defined by things

that don’t know the limits

of what I’m becoming

now that I’ve dropped off my body and mind

like a demon jumping from paradise

without a parachute.

And this is the anti-papal decretal

of the fallible man

they stone with churches on earth

for showing up blessed like a human

who took the shape of the world

from the inside out

not the outside in.

This way lies redemption.

That way, too.

Fire’s not a heresy

that’s committed to its flames

anymore than autumn consumes

the heartwood of its orthodoxies

when it burns the trees.

Desire doesn’t cut the tongue

out of the mouth of love

for saying the secret name of God

as if it weren’t junkmail

on the threshold

of the old neighbourhood

the cornerstones of sounder reasons

had torn down like a slum

to make room

for better things to come.

There are still scarlet geraniums

blooming in red brick clay pots

on the windowsills of longing

that haven’t lost their faith

like leaves yet

one day they’ll return to the garden.

And baby boys born

like heartsongs with hards on

that are not the cliches

of impish cherubs

in a painting of original sin

but angels holding burning swords

at the gates of the mothers

they’ve been driven out of

to guard the way in.

It’s deeply ontological.

But if things didn’t happen this way

how could you ever find

your own way back

to that shortcut you took

like time off at the beginning?

And haven’t you noticed yet

how the universe keeps showing up

a star too late for the end of things

making up excuses along the way

like a touring playhouse on wheels

rehearsing what to say

for the long delay

in catching up to itself like a thief?

You can tell a lot about a man

by what he steals.

You can tell a lot about a world

by the way your life feels

when there’s no one around

to make a sound

as you fall like a tree in the forest.

How many koans need to be cracked

like skulls full of insight

before you get the gist of the joke

that everything you see

is whole and perfect and broke.

Hell and heaven

are only the first two stairs

on this fire-escape

the stars have lowered to earth.

And then there’s a bridge to the other side

of a river that’s given up looking

for its lost shores

to put an end to its weeping.

And I don’t know who she is yet

but beyond that

there’s a woman on her knees

crying like one of life’s immensities              

for her dead baby

as she washes its blood off the floors

with her hair

for safe-keeping.

 

PATRICK WHITE