I IMAGINE SPACE AND TIME

I IMAGINE SPACE AND TIME

 

I imagine space and time and light

not saturated with a pervasive intelligence

that wanders through the multiverse like a mind

musing upon itself

like a hidden secret that wished to be known

and is

but as wavelengths of thought as they are

toying themselves into matter

almost as the afterlife of a darker issue

that hasn’t quite come to peace with itself yet

that used to go by the name of God

but has recently started to call herself

a Unified Field Theory.

But however you wash

the old simulacra off like soot

on the inside of a lamp

or refurbish the Sistine Chapel Roof

with colours for proof

that things weren’t always this dull

everywhere people continue to look

for symbols and signs memes and similies

as if they were still one of the main themes of evolution

if not the prime mover.

The mind transcends thought

like a bird the sky

or a fish the water it’s swimming in

or a painter her creation

and though you can’t say what it is

because in everything it speaks for itself

and to seek your mind with your mind

is to mount your horse

to look for your horse

is to reach out with one hand

to pull the other up over a precipice

in the hope of saving yourself

like a godsend from a bad fall,

you can sit still and let your mind know you

like something delightfully new about itself

it’s just come upon

like an unknown world

that’s been growing

inauspiciously under its eyelids all this time.

And you can dress it up anyway you like

like a mirror that’s trying to stand on its own

just before it goes out into the world

to see for itself what it’s all about

and you can call it a world view in the making

as the branes break in hyperspace

like a profusion of cosmic bubbles

but you’re just seeing double

through your hydra-headed mind

what it means to dream when you’re blind.

The age of nothing is now

and the place where you find it is here.

The moment you add a past and a future to it

like a head and a tail

the Titanic’s set sail

and you’re making constant course corrections

in your wake

like the path of a glass snake through the night grass.

Things don’t come.

And things don’t pass.

The Japanese plum blossoms in autumn

and its leaves fall in the spring.

The morning doves lose their voices

and the crows start to sing.

When has it ever been

any other way?

The lucky day is when you discover

it’s all one day.

Meaning the eternal specious irreproachable present

of this Bergsonian moment now

where there is no death or birth

and whatever you’re becoming

is the way you change to stay the way you are.

The star looks past its own light

into the vast bipolar night

that includes it in its darkness

like love at first sight.

And God knows her own mind

in everything and everyone one of us

like the moon reflected

in myriad drops of water

like eyes she looks through for a sign

she can see again and again and again

what’s she’s made of herself in her solitude

wasn’t in vain.

The answers call for questions

and the questions explain.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'VE LOST THE URGENCY TO BE

I’VE LOST THE URGENCY TO BE

 

I’ve lost the urgency to be

anything other than what I am.

I’m not the ambulance on its way

to another emergency

I used to be.

Things have calmed down for the moment.

No oceans of commotion roll over me.

No undertow of mixed emotions

sucks me under.

And I don’t know

if this is what I really want to say

but the starmud’s settled to the bottom of the mirror

and things are very clear.

There’s no one here to tell anyway

because the darkness explains itself

and the light always gets the last word

at the end of the day.

As far as I can see

on this one-shored sea of life

there’s not a sail in sight

like a live blossom on a dead tree

and all my event horizons

have taken a deep breath

and withdrawn like tides.

And if I ever thought I needed to be saved

I’ve given up hope of rescue

like a voice in a bottle riding a wave

headed for the rocks.

I’ve learned to open the door

before anyone knocks.

And I can see what isn’t there

as if it were a lifeboat in the fog

singing merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

life is but a dream.

I’ve stopped bending my light

in the eyebeams of the jewel-cutters

who cut along the seams of my lifelines

like doctors undoing the stitches

of wounds I’d forgotten how to feel.

Unreality isn’t the other side of real

no more than a wave

is the opposite of water

or the sky is contradicted by a bird.

But I haven’t retired into the grand harmony

by going back the way I came

like a planet that’s tired of beating around

the burning bush

when it speaks to the sun

about what it wants done tomorrow.

I haven’t changed like the seasons over the years

beating my cannon back

into labouring ploughshares

listening to the bells of sorrow

that toil and toll for everyone.

I don’t need to finish what I didn’t begin.

And I refuse to perish for my origin

by becoming my own assassin

in a holy war of one

against an estranged infidel

that rose to heaven where he fell

for his own illusion 

like a mirror off the wall.

I don’t answer the call

of anything but the wind

when it’s trembling with stars

to turn my eyes toward the same vision

of things as they appear to be

when clarity isn’t troubled by indecision.

Peace isn’t learning to live according to your scars

after the scalpel of the moon

has made its last incision

and removed what ailed you about her

like the tumour of a pearl

stuck through the tongue of an oyster.

And the greatest absurdity of all

is undermining your own powers like quicksand

when the walls don’t fall at your command

and the sea and the sun 

like King Canute and Joshua

when you ask them to stay in their place

like the shakey time-honoured cornerstones

of a nomadic race founded on bones

break into gales of laughter

and blow the world like dust in your face.

Happiness is not a mystical chalice

you can go looking for anymore

that you can squeeze inspiration

from the tit of a virgin muse.

Happiness just happens all by itself

like everything else in existence.

And don’t fall for that old ruse of an ego

that suggests you accept

that you’ve been neglected

at your own insistence

as if you had some say in the matter.

Listen to any fire long enough

and you’ll end up talking about water.

Pray for peace and war breaks out.

Look for guidance

and you deepen the loss.

Follow your star far enough

and you’ll wind up blind.

Seek enlightenment

and you’ll lose your mind.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BITTER AND RESTLESS AND ANGRY

BITTER AND RESTLESS AND ANGRY

 

Bitter and restless and angry

I can’t find a way out of the way I got in

I push the moon like a fish hook

all the way through my left eye

to the other side

where only the dark part shows

and the moon wipes off her white facepaint

in a black mirror that isn’t trying to be her.

I don’t feel like a man who’s going anywhere

I feel like some kind of a creature

crawling out of my dark lagoon

in a double feature

from the matinee of my childhood

at the local theater on a Saturday afternoon.

I don’t want to live anything over again.

And there’s not a whole lot to look forward to

except maybe a ghost dance or two

with Sitting Bull in old age

if either of us makes it that far.

The demonic version

of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin

is how many bubbles can you break on the thorn of a rose

and as the answer always is

get a life and cancel the count.

Love pulls back the crescents of the moon

and baits a beartrap with the heart of a fish

but a wolf howling at the moon

with his nose in the air

steps into it by mistake

and ends up chewing his leg off to get away.

And why when you get to the bottom of things

whether it’s the science or art of knowing

you sink through like a stone

is there always in the very nature of things

the despondent god of a dying religion

trying to cheer you up?

But I’m too out of it

to know whether the world’s gone insane or not.

The sinners can’t cope when the saints get caught.

And things are definitely not what they used to be

or even seemed

now that beauty’s a morphing cultural meme

and the torch that the Statue of Liberty used to hold up

is melting like ice-cream in its own fire

and there’s a hundred and eleven dimensions

to the ways you can lose yourself in the multiverse.

Black-hole constellations eye the dice

and don’t know which way to fall.

Heaven’s hooked on drugs

and Hell’s a cartel.

Preacher: leave them kids alone.

The night might be an elixir of stars

that never grow old

but more and more

the darkness that overwhelms everybody

from the inside out

like the godsend of a broken promise

is beginning to taste like black cool-aid.

And the serial killers

study comparative atrocities

in the finishing schools of their seedy educations

and millions are wiped out every year

like a smudge of life on a tv screen

and everyone is so shocked

by the horror

they go out and buy

a bigger, clearer monitor.

And there are so many things

so many tongueless, eyeless screaming things

done in the name of a human

you couldn’t even ask the devil

to forgive you for

the pornography of gore

makes unranked amateurs of the Aztecs

when it gets right down to hearts and skulls

in the race to blood the altars of our highest ideals.

And I’m so sick of listening

to these paragons of oxygen on the news

who cut their hearts out like oyster-kings

everytime they open their mouths

to talk to the sea

and another halfbaked pearl of wisdom drops out

like the jewel of a fool

or the adolescent crescent of the moon from moonschool

where they teach the iron rule

do unto others before they do unto you.

Love is food.

Knowledge is food.

Sex is food.

The universe is food.

God is food.

Ignorance is food. Junkfood.

But everywhere in the world

people are starving.

In all ten directions everywhere at once

the whole universe is its own illusory cure

for all its illusory diseases

and even a single blade of grass

is enough of a herb

to sweat out any fever of stars

that binds us to our delirium

like dark blood to the blindside of the Mysterium

and yet everywhere people are afflicted

people are wounded

people are dying in the name

of a few cruel ideas

trying to give birth to a new world

that thinks it would be better off without them.

Baby-talk in the savage maws of Baal and Moloch

who will not be appeased 

by the sacrifices our children made

to save the depraved from the grave

they dug for themselves.

Bring on the Romans.

Bring on the Carthaginians.

Bring on the Christians

like nabobs of salt

who shouldered the nations

like heavy crosses

it was their station

of suffering in life to bear.

And the wombs they ruined

are more immaculate now

than ever

their prosperity

has taken a few pounds off the equator

and everyone’s doing their best back home

to put a little nest egg away like an alligator

biding its time

until things look up

like another unwary unicorn

down by the river

dipping its horn

in virgin water

that flows like slurry

from a nuclear reactor.

Trying to find out

who I am in the way it is

is like trying to drink fresh water

from your own reflection in a sewer.

The mirror is not pure.

The mirror is not impure.

Nature and nurture

in one sorry face

looking back at itself

and what’s to come

and the way things are

as if evolution had already gone

a species too far.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I WATCHED YOU WALKING DOWN THE STREET

I WATCHED YOU WALKING DOWN THE STREET

 

I watched you walking down the street

as if your feet were bells

with a smile like a two dollar bill

that said

sex sells.

You looked like the executive

of a bargain store for cheap funerals

and I was a shabby syllable of a man

who’d been through one too many cremations.

But you stopped to talk

like a biodegradable gravestone

about green revolutions anyways

and I listened like an old cemetery

trying to remember

if I was buried there or not.

You spoke like the wind in an urn

about all the wonderful places you knew

with an amazing panorama

of a waterfront view

where I could scatter my ashes.

And at first I honestly thought

you were trying to sell me

real estate on the moon,

living space for the dead

in a sealess seabed,

spiritual lebensraum

in a high gloss magazine

with airbrushed pictures

of all the places I’d never been.

I watched the way your lips

grooved to their own music

like a flowchart

going in and out of total eclipse

as if you were a patient coming to in recovery.

You convinced me you were a good investment

but just as I was about to put

what I’d been saving up

for a comfortable death

into your startup company

my whole life passed before me

like the flash in the night

of an alarmist firefly

with conspiracy theories

about how the Big Bang

was just another lighthouse crying wolf.

And then the sky caved in

like a stock portfolio

without a golden parachute.

But when you walked out

of your private bathroom

wearing nothing but your business suit like skin

and summoned me like a ghost

to a seance on the internet

to merge my interest in you

into a global corporation

I knew I was dead

and whatever I said

would fall so far short

of your expectations

I’d bounce like a bad cheque

in a kangaroo court

that laid bare

my marsupial intentions

for all to see

I was guilty as an empty wallet

of following you home like funny money

trying to make headlines on a counterfeit press.

How was I to know

you were as superstitious

as a paper-shredder

about making love to the dead

but when you asked me

to read the lifelines

on the palm of your hand

like a lot of deadlines you had to meet

wasn’t it sweet of me

to extend your fate

like an unlimited line of credit

you could draw on anytime

you were in a pinch?

And I remember that night

in your twelfth story penthouse

when you crashed like a market share

and fell on the floor in a riot of hair

that looked like a run on the banks

and talked about ending it all

like the flowerpot on your balcony rail

that hadn’t seen water in weeks.

But just as you were about to

make your leap of faith

like a company too big to tail

into the recycling dumpsters

in the alley below

your dusky swansong press review

your broker called like a driven man

with a brand new life insurance plan

riddled with perks and tweaks

like coins hidden in a birthday cake

as you said with tears in your eyes

cradling the phone

like a bird to your ear

that if I really loved you

as you said I did

I’d take the fall for your sake.

I felt like the short straw

in a last chance lottery of one

that just had his chips cashed in

by the bouncer at the emergency door

of a bankrupt casino.

And later the doctor told me

in intensive care

how lucky I was

you came every night

like blood to a haematoma

and said a little prayer at my bedside

that I’d wake up from my coma

like a change in my will

mumbled in my sleep

that left everything

I had in my pocket

like a momento mori to you.

And I’ll never forget that first night

of my afterlife without you

when we walked together in one solitude

and the moonlight fell

like lime on a pauper’s grave

and you asked if I had any regrets

and I could feel your fingers on my frets

like an archaeologist going through my bones

and all my words were summoned out of the past

like the ghosts of lost cellphones

to your last seance

when I said to you

as my voice began to soften

you were an insight with attitude.

After all

how often

does a poor boy like me

get to see

well-dressed money in the nude?

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TEMPER THE SWORD

TEMPER THE SWORD

 

Temper the sword of justice in the waters of mercy even if that can only mean sometimes a sharp blade and a quick death. Anger blunts. Compassion keeps an edge on things that cuts deeper than knives. The slayer and the slain dance to the music of the same illusion. Their eyes are not at war with one another. If you encounter a rabid fox don’t blame the fox for having rabies, but remembering there but for the grace of an infinite number of random things, there go you, do what you must. You can’t cure the fox by letting it bite other people. But don’t look for the cure anywhere other than in the heart of the disease. Like great wealth use your health to wake the sick up like children from their nightmares though there will always be some you must let sleep. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, the deranged currencies of revenge. Hammurabi was a businessman. But justice isn’t a way of keeping tidy books that balance. The volcano demands your first born like a pound of flesh to appease it. And you throw something in to escape its wrath like a delusion demands a placebo. Hatred is a snake and when it arises in you like a cobra wearing the hood of the moon like an eclipse of the light there is no flute, no voice, no whip you can use to train it to strike other people. It will sink its fangs like the first and last crescents of the moon into your Adam’s apple and hang on tight like a word it doesn’t want you to say. It will enter your bloodstream like an assassin you raised as your own to get what was never yours back. Life isn’t fair or unfair. Culpable or innocent. And so much must go unanswered like the abyss of the silence that surveys the ineffable loss of its belief in a rational God and knows there’s nothing it could ask for in exchange to make up for it. Justice isn’t a scar you can measure out to fit the wound as if one size fit everyone. It’s a mirage of water and palms in the desert beside a real skull trying to bear true witness to the illusion of it all. That’s why it must not only be done but be seen to be done that whatever judgment comes down, innocent or guilty, the jury confesses its crime like a perjured eye-witness to the criminal.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

COMPASSION ISN'T THE FIRST-BORN OF INSIGHT

COMPASSION ISN’T THE FIRST-BORN OF INSIGHT

 

Compassion isn’t the first-born of insight. It’s not just enough to see suffering and commiserate; you must be that agony as if it were a stone in your own shoe in order to remove it from another. If the healer doesn’t fall sick first, how will the others ever get better? Compassion isn’t one of the sad apples of life. When you bite into it it’s never bitter. Compassion is the action of one true thought that didn’t get lost in the eyes of the mirror like a nightbird in the face of a storm. It delivers its message like blood to the wizard of the heart conjuring the spirits of powerful elixirs out of toxic cauldrons: Let your own sorrows ripen into the sweetness that flows into others like an underground river in paradise and be the dark water that mothers the roots of all. Compassion isn’t a door you open like a roof to let the rain in or the stars out like fireflies you’ve kept in a jar like a lot of good ideas. It isn’t feeling sorry for yourself as a human when you see how others are wounded worse than you are. There’s no inside or outside to it. It doesn’t wear skin to say this is where you end and I begin to the world. It doesn’t take fingerprints. It doesn’t take names. God spoke to Moses from a burning bush in the valley of Tuwa and said I am that I am. Sit still. And know. And compassion answered out of the silence that followed like the female principle of life you are as he is. A vow of solitude that’s bound by the wound deep in the heart of things not the sword that swears by the scar that it isn’t. And insight might come like the sun at midnight to thaw your eyes like the slack glass of old windows that have stared into the darkness too long without seeing anything, but it’s compassion that kisses your eyelids like the moon that whispers her way into your dream like a lifeboat on the mindstream. Insight might stun you with answers but compassion sits down on the ground beside you and asks the same questions that you do with the same mouth, the same voice, the same loss about why there is so much suffering in life and still there’s no word like a stand-in for God that comes like a crow or a dove that knows whether to bless or blame it. Compassion lays her head on the shoulders of the labouring hills like the glow of moonlight and insight understands what its eyes are for when the night looks through them for signs of intelligent life and all it can see are these small gestures of ours that flower among the stars like tears among the thorns. Compassion isn’t the happy widow of a God with horns that gores the world at conception. It isn’t the final term of a law intent on its own perfection. It isn’t a distillate of love that can be isolated from flesh and blood like aspirin from a willow and taken three times a day until the pain goes away. Compassion is the star in the eyes of the dark mother that feels like a familiar constellation too far from home to be seen. Insight might identify the cause of the hurt as desire and prescribe a course of detachment as a copious solution, but compassion opens its orchid of blue fire in the hottest part of the flame like a cool breeze in hell that feels the heat of thousands upon thousands of wounded candles, and taking a breath as deep as the sea, one by one, child by child, leaving the nightlight on like the moon, gently blows them out like a better dream than the one that woke them up.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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