HEY, A LITTLE LIGHT

HEY, A LITTLE LIGHT

 

Hey, a little light.

A glow within.

The silver bit of the moon

is in the mouth

of a dark horse

as big as the world.

I’m sick of the sanctity

of these old clothes

that keep hanging on like skin

well into winter

like leaves that don’t know when

to let go.

I need a new lover.

I need a new mythology.

I need someone who knows

that a genius gone too far

is too far gone even for a madman

to get a fix on.

And everything’s the north star

when you look at it from all directions.

And I’ve said in the past

and I’ll say it again

and I’ll probably say it tomorrow

I’m nothing if not the humbling

of God’s Own Zero

expanding space like dark energy

that amplifies existence inconceivably

by blowing bubbles in hyperspace at everyone

like myriad worlds within worlds

where all things are as possible

as they are real

and nothing’s ever diminished.

But it depends on how you feel I guess.

Me?

The mirrors undress in the moonlight.

And the windows wonder

what everybody’s looking at.

I turn over the rock of religion

and discover a child molester.

I turn over the cornerstone of politics

and there’s a worm growing fat on the marrow

of a fossilized anti-war protester.

Yesterday’s galactic

turns into today’s local yokel

as tomorrow’s nano-fly’s eye goes digital.

Viral dreams

mineralize my cells as I sleep

in the treetops of knowledge

like the history of autumn

an apple too far out of reach to fall.

Been bad so long it looks like good to me.

Data hasn’t found a place yet

to tatoo the mystery of its binary code

like a fast-track starmap to the back of the cosmic serpent

laying eggs like eyes in the night.

And which of all these waves

on the sea of awareness is me?

Just because I’m blind sometimes

doesn’t mean I can’t see.

Black on black

darkness within darkness

eclipse after eclipse

the interminably open gates

of an eyeless clarity

of an unwitnessed lucidity

sheathing its shadows in light

like noon at midnight.

In the danse macabre

of  medieval futures to come

dark matter fashions me a new skeleton

and I scourge the sun’s flesh

with comets of self-flagellation

and whips of white phosphorus

that claw at my back

like the nine afterlives

of nine heretical cats

to save me from laughing myself to death in perdition.

These days though

it’s enough to keel-haul myself

on the hull of the moon occasionally

just to get the barnacles off.

Hey, a little light.

An extra star.

A gesture of a firefly

trying to land at the LA International Airport

in a severe crosswind

like a tantrum of braille for the blind

that lets everyone see just how ridiculous they’ve become.

And most especially me

blighting my own lucidity

like an inept clown

with a crow’s laugh

that isn’t all that funny.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HEY, A LITTLE LIGHT

HEY, A LITTLE LIGHT

 

Hey, a little light.

A glow within.

The silver bit of the moon

is in the mouth

of a dark horse

as big as the world.

I’m sick of the sanctity

of these old clothes

that keep hanging on like skin

well into winter

like leaves that don’t know when

to let go.

I need a new lover.

I need a new mythology.

I need someone who knows

that a genius gone too far

is too far gone even for a madman

to get a fix on.

And everything’s the north star

when you look at it from all directions.

And I’ve said in the past

and I’ll say it again

and I’ll probably say it tomorrow

I’m nothing if not the humbling

of God’s Own Zero

expanding space like dark energy

that amplifies existence inconceivably

by blowing bubbles in hyperspace at everyone

like myriad worlds within worlds

where all things are as possible

as they are real

and nothing’s ever diminished.

But it depends on how you feel I guess.

Me?

The mirrors undress in the moonlight.

And the windows wonder

what everybody’s looking at.

I turn over the rock of religion

and discover a child molester.

I turn over the cornerstone of politics

and there’s a worm growing fat on the marrow

of a fossilized anti-war protester.

Yesterday’s galactic

turns into today’s local yokel

as tomorrow’s nano-fly’s eye goes digital.

Viral dreams

mineralize my cells as I sleep

in the treetops of knowledge

like the history of autumn

an apple too far out of reach to fall.

Been bad so long it looks like good to me.

Data hasn’t found a place yet

to tatoo the mystery of its binary code

like a fast-track starmap to the back of the cosmic serpent

laying eggs like eyes in the night.

And which of all these waves

on the sea of awareness is me?

Just because I’m blind sometimes

doesn’t mean I can’t see.

Black on black

darkness within darkness

eclipse after eclipse

the interminably open gates

of an eyeless clarity

of an unwitnessed lucidity

sheathing its shadows in light

like noon at midnight.

In the danse macabre

of  medieval futures to come

dark matter fashions me a new skeleton

and I scourge the sun’s flesh

with comets of self-flagellation

and whips of white phosphorus

that claw at my back

like the nine afterlives

of nine heretical cats

to save me from laughing myself to death in perdition.

These days though

it’s enough to keel-haul myself

on the hull of the moon occasionally

just to get the barnacles off.

Hey, a little light.

An extra star.

A gesture of a firefly

trying to land at the LA International Airport

in a severe crosswind

like a tantrum of braille for the blind

that lets everyone see just how ridiculous they’ve become.

And most especially me

blighting my own lucidity

like an inept clown

with a crow’s laugh

that isn’t all that funny.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IF YOU EVER FIND YOURSELF

IF YOU EVER FIND YOURSELF

 

If you ever find yourself swimming like a fish

through the long shadows of significant moments

swaying like the hands of supple clocks in the mindstream

or an underwater garden of comets

that traded their orbits in for roots

remembering one insight

that has given you pause forever

may it be a night like this

when your breath on the window

is not the patina of death

but a nebulous manger of stars again

breaking into light

like an effusion of lightning and fireflies

into the new myth of an old constellation

down to its last dry match

in the penumbral afterlife

of a broken windowpane.

I remember looking into your eyes

as if they were the alpha and omega of things

the myriad unperishing ends

and unborn beginnings of things

I couldn’t understand at the time

like the stray threads of waterless lifelines

the moon wove into an overview of fate

that kept on changing like you over the years

until there was more lime than moonlight in your tears.

And every chance I’ve had to forget ever since

I’ve not turned away from your image

but raised my skull like a full flagon

to knock my head against yours

like a boney knuckle on the door of the dead

I’m trying to answer on the inside.

You may have been one of the galactic brides of life

but you came to bed like a candle

that shed more light on the vastness of night

than the darkness could handle.

All your radiance focussed in a single firefly

like the sea in a drop of water

like a universe in its motherless atom

filling the whole of space with things

no god had ever been before

you showed up like a rose in a dream

and I showed up like an eyelid.

Sometimes the living are summoned by ghosts

back to the places where time died for awhile

and eternity was left as unresolved as a repeating decimal

spinning its wheels in the starmud

like an offroad vehicle without a winch.

And there may be as many meanings as birds

in your sacred groves at night

but there’s one insight more penetrating than the rest

that holds your third eye up to the light like a jewel

and reveals the whole of everything you thought you knew

about the way things are

to be no more than the universal hunch

of a star with flaws

that can’t be cut by the rule of law

like the ecliptic by the celestial equator

at the equinoctial colure

to tailor any constellation to a myth

that isn’t the way things look through the eye of a fool

that’s got a Buddha-mask on.

But now is not then

and this is not Zen

to crack the koan of the answer

with an enlightened question

that steps like a moment of darkness into the light

like the spirit of another night long ago

when I looked into your eyes

and saw everything I ever needed to know.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LONELY

LONELY

 

Lonely. Abandoned. Irrelevant.

Slashes of broken window on the floor

in a deserted house

trying to pick up the pieces

and see clearly again

what happened when it wasn’t looking.

I watch people keep to themselves

like old housewells

nobody’s drunk from in years.

But sometimes you can see the iron

run like blood in their tears

when they look in the mirror at themselves

like watercolours in the rain

and stains on the bathtub.

The young say

who wants to be them

and the old say nothing

knowing we’re all going to die sooner or later

and the lies we used in our youth

like weapons against others

now turn like the moon’s two-faced dagger

against us.

I could look at it as a hard lesson

in empathy and compassion I suppose

and learn to make a game out of it all

like a child trying to contrive a game

out of its own bones

just to pass the time

until even death dies in me

along with everything else.

I used to think of compassion as water

but now I’m more inclined to see it as fire.

And I’ve given up those grail quests

and solitary holy wars with my own shadow

all the ferocious sincerity of my seeking

as just so many journeys

that turned their back

on their own enlightenment

the moment they left home.

Returning objects to mind

the house is full of the moon

when no one’s home

and nothing’s missing.

I leave everything behind

and steal away like a thief from my window

as silent and old as the moon.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LONELY

LONELY

 

Lonely. Abandoned. Irrelevant.

Slashes of broken window on the floor

in a deserted house

trying to pick up the pieces

and see clearly again

what happened when it wasn’t looking.

I watch people keep to themselves

like old housewells

nobody’s drunk from in years.

But sometimes you can see the iron

run like blood in their tears

when they look in the mirror at themselves

like watercolours in the rain

and stains on the bathtub.

The young say

who wants to be them

and the old say nothing

knowing we’re all going to die sooner or later

and the lies we used in our youth

like weapons against others

now turn like the moon’s two-faced dagger

against us.

I could look at it as a hard lesson

in empathy and compassion I suppose

and learn to make a game out of it all

like a child trying to contrive a game

out of its own bones

just to pass the time

until even death dies in me

along with everything else.

I used to think of compassion as water

but now I’m more inclined to see it as fire.

And I’ve given up those grail quests

and solitary holy wars with my own shadow

all the ferocious sincerity of my seeking

as just so many journeys

that turned their back

on their own enlightenment

the moment they left home.

Returning objects to mind

the house is full of the moon

when no one’s home

and nothing’s missing.

I leave everything behind

and steal away like a thief from my window

as silent and old as the moon.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AN ABSTRACT SENSE OF BEAUTY

AN ABSTRACT SENSE OF BEAUTY

 

An abstract sense of beauty

is the secret wish of a closet gelding.

There’s nothing abstract about it when it passes

and a rose doesn’t come with its own fingertips.

It isn’t a theory that’s pressed to your lips.

The senses are always autobiographical.

There’s nothing numerical about a woman’s hips

and no wine in the grapes of the cosines

that touch her skin like tangents

or the sick fingers

of great stupid lumbering books

bellowing on like dying dinosaurs about S-curves.

In the war between line and colour

heart and mind

mammal and lizard

skin and idea

sex and death

put your money down on cadmium red.

Wild poppies spread like fire through your head

and even if you’re ashes in the locket of an urn

doesn’t mean you’re dead

doesn’t mean the phoenix has forgotten how to burn

or that ashes are anymore absolute

than good weather that’s taken a bad turn.

Let reason mark the passage of time

like an abstract season with a shady sundial

timing the geese as they return

overhead at night in the spring

like breads on the rosaries of the dead.

It’s your ears that receive the greeting first

not your head

and your eyes that search the darkness in vain

like midnight at noon for signs

and your skin that maps the places they’ve been

like stars at your fingertips

and your tongue that tastes

new water walking on the cool night air

like a ghost returning to an unburied bone

or the moon when it draws its reflection out

like a sword from stone

and magic adumbrates design.

If you think of your senses

as five windows on the world

an apparition of ideas peers through

like the face of longing caught in the curtains

and you feel your blood turn to glass

in a botched attempt

to clarify your rubies into diamonds

and burn like ice in your translucency

wash yourself clean of yourself

like an Arctic thaw

and catching up like river to its long delinquency

throw a stone through your cataracts on the inside

and see for yourself

the true colour of thought isn’t clarity

it’s as lilac as Mercury

in a Piscean sunset in spring

when shy violets bloom like bruises through the snow

and reason is green with envy

it isn’t wearing

Joseph’s coat

like a rainbow

at the bottom of a dry well.

The abstract lyric

of the god caught in the machine

like a spider tangling kites in its own ideas

is the swansong

of the emotional hysterics

of a bird caught in a dark chimney

thick with the moody creosote

of insufficient fires.

And long before God said

let there be light

or in the beginning was the word

red was already a fossil of the night

embedded in a chameleon’s memory

that burned like maples

in the Gatineau hills in the fall

before abstract beauty

began showing up at its own funeral

like a face without eyes

that missed the blue of the flowers

it pissed out like April showers in a mirror

all over the vertical feet of its own conceit

as the ears of the hydra-headed hollyhocks

listened discretely from their watchtowers

for the tiny hooves of purple rain on tin

to begin jamming

like the sunburst of a classical tintinabulum

with the electric blue riffs of an unrehearsed first violin.

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOT EASY TO LOVE

NOT EASY TO LOVE

 

for Alysia Bell because she asked me to

and Jesse James who gave me the cue

 

Not easy to love.

Not hard.

Effortless effort

on the downslope of a mountain

you never get over.

Love is empty.

Love is full.

Love is the moon.

Love always has two eyes

not one.

You can drive ten miles out into the country

and drop love off like a mangy homeless cat

but somehow it will always find its way back.

Love always fears what might not happen

like a great sin of omission

more than it takes courage from what has.

Love is poetry looking for a voice

among all these singing trees

worthy of what it wants to say and can’t

and love forgives all things but mediocrity.

Love isn’t just a gesture of enzymes

in a chemical pantomime

of the tragic and sublime.

It doesn’t wear its eyelids inside out.

It’s a featherweight more in the wind

than the wind can bear

and then it’s a black dwarf with radioactive hair.

Love has no colour no form no taste no texture no sound no smell

and yet it is more intimate

than a knife held up to your jugular vein

or the moon at your wrist

or the shock of the new rose in its first rain.

Love is an uninspired abstraction

the heart keeps on life support in vain

for violating the laws of its own absurdity.

One must believe Sisyphus was happy.

Love might not even need to know your name

before it starts searching through its history

for a return address

to add like a dove to a loveletter.

Love sees what it needs to keep itself alive.

Honey turns into the gold of the bee-hive

and love dips the tips of its spears in toxin

as if it always had a violent heart

and a fist like a bad ending to a good start.

Love isn’t wise or foolish

young or old

rich or poor.

Love doesn’t open like a flower

and close like a door.

And it isn’t the disease of more and more and more

walking under its own starless skies

because it hoards the light in its eyes.

Love is gentle compassionate generous wise.

It delights in squandering itself

on someone else’s happiness

like the rain is elated to return to its roots

like the memory of many gardens

that bloomed and perished on the moon

before the angels drove us out of Eden.

Whatever you can say about love in words

love says in blood

love says in sorrow and torment and jealousy

when love grows out of your head like snakes

love says in the abyss of the last kiss

you blow to your lover

as you’re waving good-bye

like an empty twenty-sixer of Fireball whiskey

as your car drives away drunk without anyone in it.

Love never knows what it is or was

or what it’s about to be.

A worm crawls into a chrysalis

like a straitjacket

and something more

than it was before

gets set free.

A grave-digger takes up gardening.

A dead composer steps down

from the lectern of his mountain

and the music of the spheres goes gypsy.

One lover drinks the last of the wine

and the little piggy that got none

grows tipsy.

Mad mad mad mad mad mad love is

to try to walk a straight line

like a drunk on a tightrope in a curved universe

that keeps changing shape as you pass

like a marble with mass in a roulette wheel

looking for an exit off the highway.

Love isn’t caught like a doe

in the glare of the sun on highbeam

and its comets aren’t roadkill.

Love is as much of a river in the beginning

as it is in the end

and you can sail all the paper-boats down it you want

like cherry blossoms and white peonies in full bloom

letting go like snow off the roof

or the eyelids of the moon

but it won’t make a drop of difference

if all you give back to the river

is a crack in a bitter cup of tears

that throws acid in the eyes of the water

and fills its ears with empty chatter

about who got done wrong

and who got off light.

Love might look for outlaws

who have remained true

to their disobedience

like a wanted poster the stars

have pinned like a constellation to the night

but love knows its own at first sight

by the scar of a smile

and the innocence of the wound

that bleeds in good faith

to save the world.

Love may hide for weeks

in its nebular confusion

but love can’t bluff its way out of what it seeks

like a blind gambler

rolling the dice like braille.

Love is a ship that sinks before it sets sail

but if you fall into it heart first

think of it as a black hole

that everything falls into

like starlight with vertigo

or in the first few startling moments

when your I.Q. scribbles

a quick suicide note on the mind-mirror

in black lipstick

and jumps

because love has rendered it deleriously stupid

try not to grow feathers all over the place

because you don’t need wings in space

and you have to fall to the end

if you want to crawl out.

Love can turn a butterfly into a worm

that turns into a butterfly and back again

but you’re never going to get anymore

than a housefly out of a maggot.

Love is a little house of transformation.

Waterlilies bloom in the moonlight

rooted in decay and stagnation

like beautiful bhodisattvas

and the hand-gestures of dancing dakinis

silvering their skin in the glow of their enlightenment.

Sometimes love comes like a stranger to the gate

that knows everyone

and asks to be let into the garden

but it’s late and no one’s home

so it picks up the cold stone of the moon

and breaks your window like a spell

on the dark side of the mirror

and you wake and fall in love

with everything you fear

and ride off into the sunset

like Venus on a white nightmare

clinging to the belief

like a Harley to an easy rider

that in every single petal of love

that flys off on its own far from the tree

you can taste the fruit of the whole orchard

and like a refugee that knows the wind has no borders

make the sky your home and native country.

Love is the elixir of whatever you suppose it is.

A sparrow builds its nest in the Buddha’s nose.

Love is the discipline of wizards

born of passion.

Love is the anachronistic whim

of a futuristic fashion

that caught on too late.

But you are young

and love has just discovered you

like a universal language

it will make its mother tongue

and open your mouth

and free your doves

like the voices of dragons

and the roaring blue lions

on the burning towers of Babylon.

Love makes a pauper head of state

and a prince goes begging

with an empty plate.

Love is not lust

but lust is seldom enough without it.

You can look at the Taj Mahals of the spirit

and see nothing but cock and balls

and that mysterious cleft

in the mountain of Venus

that leads to the underworld

as nothing but an empty wallet

or the eye of a needle

a rich man could pass through

easier than a caravan into paradise

and you could look at it that way I suppose

if you were a red-assed baboon

with your butt in the air

bent over trying to touch

your nose to your toes

and you wouldn’t be wholly right or wrong

but then again

even if you were

it would be hard to care

for someone

who only ever made it

to the bottom stair

of wherever they were.

Love may seem a game

of snakes and ladders

of mystical horses with wings

like Pegasus and Biraq

with prophets on them

ascending to the seventh heaven

where the angel Gabriel stands

naked in the light

as hell turns Paolo and Francesca

in a whirlwind of lovers

that reaped the night illicitly

under a full moon

but if love in you

is not the lifeblood of the light

that shines on everyone alike

as it does the eye and the rose

you’re just another one of love’s

puppet Pinocchios

dancing to the grey violins

of a quirky musical spider

trying to manipulate things

by pulling the strings of a dreamcatcher

as if love could follow anyone like a slave

that took her lead from a master.

But for those rare souls

the darkness of love has not blinded

by applying eclipses to their eyes like leechs

and making a poultice of the moon

to draw the wound out of its infection

love is the most cherished disaster

that could ever befall someone.

Jesus entrusts the holy grail to Judas

and Judas drinks his own blood from a skull.

There are many things in life

that could breezily delude us

like fireflies witching for water in a well

or an echo of stars in the voice of a bell.

But just knowing the words to love

isn’t the same as knowing the song

that can hit you like a high note at midnight

and shatter the stars like a bird

love sings to itself on its own.

Love is crazy wisdom.

Love walks alone with the Alone

into the inevitable darkness of so much light

that blazing seems a kind of blindness

until you learn to see

on the other side of your eyes

that solitude is the deepest intimacy

between lovers when they touch

and the black mirror when they’re apart

is the face in the mystery of the human heart.

 

PATRICK WHITE