I DON'T KNOW HOW TO BE ANYONE ELSE

I DON’T KNOW HOW TO BE ANYONE ELSE

 

I don’t know how to be anyone else.

I confess my ignorance.

I am more possessed than possessing.

I’m a ghost haunted by humans.

I’m not some maggot of a blackhole

eating my way through space.

Between heaven and hell

I prefer the earth.

A little to the left of the salt.

People are more mammalian there.

A higher quality of laughter.

Better taste in the protocols of compassion.

A good place to hide out

when you’re tired of running

from the enhanced versions of yourself

that keep rolling out on the runway

for you to take a test flight in

without an ejection seat.

Who is there to share

the meaning of your life with

when even you can’t see through it like a glass darkly?

I’m fond of the light.

It’s the flower of clarity

but what could it mean to anyone else

that you are who you are?

They might love or abhor

their interpretation of you

but that’s a theme of theirs

not yours

from many lifetimes back

and it says more about them than you.

Every accusation is a confession.

But we’re like stars.

By the time we’re revealed

we’re somewhere else beyond the light.

And how could I explain all this darkness to anyone?

It’s an illusion that we know what our words mean

when they say us out loud

like a secret we meant to keep to ourselves.

And who’s to say what’s happening

beyond these event horizons

that keep losing you

like the road you were on

before it turned into this one?

Walk one road well

and you walk them all at the same time.

There’s no need to choose to be confused.

So I stick to my lonely homely mystic self

like a poster for a play

that got tired of waiting for an opening night

and tore itself down from the wall

like a bad review of yesterday

and went my own way without a script.

Or I could be seventeen again

on acid in San Francisco in nineteen sixty-six

and any minute I’m going to come down now

and discover my old life

like one long dark strange radiant trip

someone else took before me

and didn’t come back.

And I’m still waiting for a postcard

from the edge of nowhere

from someone I haven’t seen in a long time

and probably won’t ever again

though I hold him with affection in my mind

like a blossom that never let go.

And over the long forever

of this afterlife ever since

I’ve tried to forget what he saw

that made him disappear

but he was the only poet I ever met

whose suicide was sincere.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I DON'T KNOW HOW TO BE ANYONE ELSE

I DON’T KNOW HOW TO BE ANYONE ELSE

 

I don’t know how to be anyone else.

I confess my ignorance.

I am more possessed than possessing.

I’m a ghost haunted by humans.

I’m not some maggot of a blackhole

eating my way through space.

Between heaven and hell

I prefer the earth.

A little to the left of the salt.

People are more mammalian there.

A higher quality of laughter.

Better taste in the protocols of compassion.

A good place to hide out

when you’re tired of running

from the enhanced versions of yourself

that keep rolling out on the runway

for you to take a test flight in

without an ejection seat.

Who is there to share

the meaning of your life with

when even you can’t see through it like a glass darkly?

I’m fond of the light.

It’s the flower of clarity.

but what could it mean to anyone else

that you are who you are?

They might love or abhor

their interpretation of you

but that’s a theme of theirs

not yours

from many lifetimes back

and it says more about them than you.

Every accusation is a confession.

But we’re like stars.

By the time we’re revealed

we’re somewhere else beyond the light.

And how could I explain all this darkness to anyone?

It’s an illusion that we know what our words mean

when they say us out loud

like a secret we meant to keep to ourselves.

And who’s to say what’s happening

beyond these event horizons

that keep losing you

like the road you were on

before it turned into this one?

Walk one road well

and you walk them all at the same time.

There’s no need to choose to be confused.

So I stick to my lonely homely mystic self

like a poster for a play

that got tired of waiting for an opening night

and tore itself down from the wall

like a bad review of yesterday

and went my own way without a script.

Or I could be seventeen again

on acid in San Francisco in nineteen sixty-six

and any minute I’m going to come down now

and discover my old life

like one long dark strange radiant trip

someone else took before me

and didn’t come back.

And I’m still waiting for a postcard

from the edge of nowhere

from someone I haven’t seen in a long time

and probably won’t ever again

though I hold him with affection in my mind

like a blossom that never let go.

And over the long forever

of this afterlife ever since

I’ve tried to forget what he saw

that made him disappear

but he was the only poet I ever met

whose suicide was sincere.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTHING SADDER

NOTHING SADDER

 

Nothing sadder than the soul of a clown in spring

or an old man sitting on a park bench alone

like a garden gate someone left open for good.

And deep underground I can feel the roots of the flowers

waiting for news of the weather

so they can decide what to wear

and which colour goes with another.

And I can’t look at the white chalices of the morning glory

whatever it’s tangled up in like a junkie

without seeing some kind of grail-quest going on

and I always want to say

Don’t look for it before it’s gone

but delusion too is a way of getting on with things

and what have I ever gone looking for

that wasn’t just as beautifully foolish?

God for example.

Or enough light

in an ice-storm of a woman

to survive the night

like a wooly mammoth

though it lasts twenty-five thousand years.

I keep trying to carve chandeliers out of glaciers

but everything just ends up in tears on the sea-floor.

Or the wind wants to give the waves a haircut.

But as my brother would say

That’s ok too

and expand his black laughter like space

to include everything wise or foolish

that wants to take its place inside the theater.

Existence is an occasion I dress for like a human.

And one size fits all.

So I assume everything lives as I do

even inanimate things like rocks and bones

as if we were all modes of the same intelligence

that excites us with insight

when the light strikes the water

and we all begin with no proof of anything

except somehow we’re all here alone together

rising and falling like waves

on the great night sea of awareness

that cradles us in its arms

like the full moon between opposites

and shines down on everything alike

purring with ancient lullabies of reality

and says in a voice even children don’t fear

You can trust the universe completely.

Even when the babies fall down

like blossoms torn from the fruit.

Even when the wind gusts up

like a dervish of stars in your face

with the moon like a dagger between his teeth

and his blood like a savage rose

and says There’s nothing to affirm or refute

but you should try dancing

for a change of direction

and spins off like a galaxy into deep space.

An echo perches on the branch above me

like a bird from a distant valley

feathered by the shadows of death

and asks me if I know how to live

and I let the green bough in my heart answer

poem after poem like plum blossoms

trying to be serious

God may have had the first word

but the last word will be up to us.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MUSIC

MUSIC

 

Music.

What the shadows think of as water.

Shadow-water on the grass like the tide of a tree.

All the windows in the neighbourhood

look cold and lonely.

Only crows and gulls on the wind.

Was just about to take the next poem out of here

when I started wondering

if our shadows think of us as their identities.

Poor things.

Nothing sings

as the tree slips its finger

through a lot of token engagement rings

that were the growing edge of last spring.

And though the flowers look the same

as they did last year

I’m sure they don’t remember me

and to be honest

I’d be somewhat insulted if they did.

Music’s not the memory of someone who’s listening.

Music is what time feels like

when it gets carried away like a leaf.

Music is the bell

peace takes off the shoulders

of a refugee grief

looking for shelter at the side of the road

among the weeds and the wildflowers.

What’s the mind

if not picture-music?

Things flowing in and out of focus like fish

swimming through space

swimming with stars

swimming through the wind

as it coils and unspools

like a snakedance on the mindstream

when the moon lays its feather on the waters?

Music.

All that is intangible

about our joys and our sorrows.

The unattainability of what we expect of ourselves

when our longings grow infinite in the darkness

and music is the only light we’ve got to go by.

Music on the rocks

is still a siren you can drown in

and Orpheus still loses his prophetic head

for driving the maenads mad with his lyre

and frenzied choirmasters that scream like fire

still echo the agony of eagles in the valley below

that wakes up to the death-throes of unknown predators

high in the mountains above

where music has stood its ground for years

like one of the clouds that circle the pious peaks.

Music is all eyes that can seek what you’re looking for

when the wine goes looking for the grail

like blood that’s out of touch with its own heart

but it doesn’t do the finding for you.

That’s your part.

But even when we fail

music takes its tail in its mouth

like the old symbol for eternity

and shows us a way of thinking for ourselves

that doesn’t bind us to anything.

Music is hunger and food.

Music is sin and redemption.

Music is what the Buddha knows

that he never told anyone

when he propped his loveletter

in front of the mirror

where no one could find it.

An anthem in hell.

A hymn in heaven.

A requiem

and epithalamion on earth.

Music dresses for the occasion

but everybody listens to it

as if they were naked.

And then it throws you the shirt off its back

and walks off stage skinless.

Doorway and exit and entrance

music crosses its own threshold

with every step it takes away from home

without looking back

to see who might be following.

 

PATRICK WHITE 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LILACS AND CRAB-APPLES IN BLOSSOM

LILACS AND CRAB-APPLES IN BLOSSOM

 

Lilacs and crab-apples in blossom

and here and there a wild cherry

abandoned in an old farmyard

like an unfashionable chandelier

that kept on dancing with itself

long after the stars went out.

If for nothing else I was born

to tell the trees how beautiful they are.

What an elegance and grace of earth.

Embodiments of time in the concrete.

Brides at the weddings of matter.

The solid become real. Mind

when it gives up looking for itself.

Fountains and clouds.

Life whispering into its own ear

about the birds and the bees

in a native language of its own

that blooms like the demotic tongues

of a Babylonian renaissance

that doesn’t need a translation.

Life says so much without meaning to.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOU'RE FREE TO BE FREE

YOU’RE FREE TO BE FREE

 

You’re free to be free.

You’re free to be bound.

Attachment too is a Buddha activity.

Unborn

there’s no need to begin.

No beginning.

No end.

Draw your own conclusions

but don’t be a small snake

and get swallowed by a larger.

Move on according to your own wavelength

and let go of everything

like a myth of skin

like a tatoo you just had removed

now that the romance is over

and time’s fallen out of love with eternity.

Separation where there should be love.

Modernity’s the ultimate divorce.

We’ve disinherited the planet.

And all our children

are spiritually illegitimate.

Boo hoo

plays a little blue violin

on the streetcorner

outside the bank

and runs to buy a rock

he can crank like music

with the small change

of compassionate passers-by.

I’m alive now as I ever was

and I’m not a time-traveler from the sixties

having been here all along

but I was young in that generation

and if we were better than anybody at anything

I think it was

we didn’t lie to our imagination.

But I wouldn’t bet on it

knowing the mind’s greatest virtue

is not that it remembers so much

but that it knows so easily how to forget.

Smoke is not the historian of the fire.

Shadows are not the ink of the light.

Thoughts don’t know if there’s a mind

anymore than you know

if there’s a god

and your feelings have never heard of a heart

that makes a damn bit of difference.

Each of these things has a life of its own

but death doesn’t know anything about life

and what is there for life to live through

that can only live through itself

like water being a fish

that you could possibly experience as death?

Does the fish swim out of the water?

Does the bird fly out of the sky?

The great sea of awareness sheds its sky like skin

and swims on through itself.

You can’t pour the universe out of the universe.

Water finds the witching wand

like seeing finds the star

that’s been following it.

You are what you are what you are

and that’s not a consolation

not a victory or defeat

not Buddhas at your feet

or the chains of your leftover freedom.

It’s not Merlin killing stones with chemical Excaliburs

or the curse of a heavy life even Atlas couldn’t lift.

It’s the mystic specificity

of your own irreversible life

flowing down the mountains of matter 

saying you into existence

every moment of it

like water talking to itself in the womb.

And time speaks with a human voice

about the sadness of its passing

and the eye that seeks the seer

looks in all the best directions

for the jewel of its enlightenment

like a mirror held up to space

looking back at its own unshapely face.

And that’s who we are

when we don’t stop to think about it.

We’re not lumps of intelligence

in the dark matter of it all

or crude approximations

of futures that never happen.

Our lives our lies our truths

our sorrows and joys

our love and disappointment

our foolishness and wisdom

our compassion and savagery

the things we keep faith with

and the things we betray

everything we are

and everything we are not

aren’t the masters of the medium of us

as if we were the stuff

the universe worked with

to shape small statues of itself

like a terracotta army it could take to the tomb

as a precautionary keepsake or momento mori.

We’re not the story of heroic elements

transcending themselves

around a periodic table.

That’s just another scientific fable

about the subjugation of Tiamat by Marduk

and how humans were made out of the filth

of her dismembered son Kingu

to serve the gods like faithful dogs.

White dwarfs shrinking heads into blackholes

as if oxygen could be enslaved by hydrogen

and her bitter tears turn into water.

And hydrogen beget helium

and helium begat carbon

and carbon beget us

like a polygamist at an orgy with oxygen.

Cowards coerce power with superstition

like mind maggots replacing the seeds

in the core of the apple of knowledge.

True gods don’t need to be served.

And real love doesn’t demand you do anything.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOUR PICTURE SEEMS VERY COMPOSED

YOUR PICTURE SEEMS VERY COMPOSED

Your picture seems very composed. As if you were trying to believe in yourself. But a rose is a rose is a rose and yours is dark and beautiful as if your heart knocked and the night let it in. I hope one day the dance of love chance and occasion lets me sleep with you like a dragon in advance of the rain. I’ve never slept with an eclipse before but I’ve heard they swallow you whole. If you’ll forgive me for taking this small moment out of my cathedral and choir to be kind to my lust. Someone left it like an orphan on the stairs. I think it’s yours but it keeps calling me by my name like a moth to a candleflame like lightning to a firefly that wants to get higher by deepening the darkness with a glorious death. You brood. You allure. There are bruises on your arm. You’re an amateur celibate. Your broken vows are fortune-cookies that forsake themselves like ostrakons. It must be dangerous being a beautiful woman. A siren on the moon summoning her waves back like shadows she once exiled like the tides of providence she didn’t take. You’re a precipice but you look like an island where the drowned sailors wash up on the shores of your flesh with smiles on their faces. And can you see, even as far off as you are, my little white sail on your event horizon like a feather from the wings of Icarus making his way toward the sun that shines like you at midnight?

PATRICK WHITE