TEN THOUSAND VOICES IN MY HEAD

TEN THOUSAND VOICES IN MY HEAD

 

Ten thousand voices in my head

some living some dead

but I don’t let a single one of them

get in the way

of what’s trying to be said.

Let the whole orchard

break into a song or a symphony

and it’s still not worth listening to

compared to the wonder of a single note

that isn’t attuned to anything

but sits with me

like a guitar in the corner

that picks me up occasionally

and strings me out over the emptiness

like a suspension bridge

engineered by the spiders of music

all the way over to the far side of nowhere.

I’m that extra day in the calendar of a light-year

that shows up once every four years

to try and work things out

but it’s what I do in my spare time

when I’m not called upon to balance anything

that intrigues me.

It may be one planet

but it’s got an infinite number of axes

sticking through it like pins

through a voodoo doll

or sun swords in the back of a lunar bull

depending on what angle you’re looking at it from.

Remove yourself from things

like the universe expanding out of sight

and the curse is lifted

that stood in your light like eyes

that got in the way of your seeing.

Put your mind down once and awhile

like that embryo of a sword

in a womb of dark ore

you’re still trying to pull out of the stone

to be made king of the iron age.

Just for once let things begin with a big bang

that shocks you out of yourself

not a haemorage of rust

that pops like a wet paper bag

and gets sopped up by an old rag.

The play’s the thing

not the poster

and existence isn’t a method actor on tour.

Reality is an acquired taste

that serves the rapture before the wine

the meaning before the sign

and holds the dark mirror up

as an example to all

of how to see

before it’s smeared

like a spray-bombed wall

by every passing reflection.

Ten thousand voices in my head

and everything they say is true

whether I want to hear it or not.

And they all can carry a tune

better than I do

or follow a theme out to the end

like a lifeline on the palm of their hand

that’s always Niles longer than mine

that dies in the desert an oasis shy of Egypt.

I might work with words and facts

but they’re a grammar of birds

with a secret syntax

that takes me out of context

every time I try to join the conversation.

None of them speaks my wild mother tongue

this far from home

without a voice of my own

I can follow back to where I came from

like petrified footsteps in African stone.

But there isn’t a dialect of the silence

I haven’t mastered when I’m alone

letting the universe speak through me

like the wind in the leaves

as if I were a language

of flesh and blood and starmud

more verb than noun

more participle than gerund

no royal antecedent in the background

of the common pronoun

but I can look any part of speech in the eye

like the alpha of an indefinite article

that gets things rolling

like dice at the foot of the cross of the

wondering how many full-stops it’s going to take

not to come up snake-eyes.

Ten thousand voices in my head

some beautiful some wise

some playing dead in the sunrise

some raging like fists against the sky

and the face that turns away

from the broken window

like the full moon

some oracular clowns

and others just bad medicine.

But there’s one that doesn’t pray or bless or curse.

It doesn’t summon me like the dead to a seance

and even when a fire breaks out like a muse

it doesn’t panic like an emergency exit.

It can speak of life

without trying to second-guess it

and when words aren’t enough to say it

it’s suffered in silence long enough

listening to me shoot off my mouth

like a Friday night cowboy

trying to shoot out the stars like streetlamps

to find my own way home in the dark

to know how to play the blues

as if there were no one else around.

 

PATRICK WHITE 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE SINGULARITY

THE SINGULARITY

 

You were the singularity at the bottom of the blackhole

where all the light and life and love and money went.

You were an abyss that just couldn’t stand being empty.

You wanted to be a fat void in the midst of plenty.

You took your own body as the Standard Model of the Universe.

You were a death-maze that tried to make a living selling breadcrumbs.

You used to tell me

I could run from the blessing

but I could never escape the curse

of being an optimist for whom

things kept turning out for the worst.

You always did try to make an original point of the obvious

but your clarity was invariably cruel and cunning.

So I gave up arguing with you

and learned to grow orchids

that slept with secrets

in the shadow of that outhouse on the moon

you kept up like a diary of your changing moods.

Being the stupid one

I thought love had substance and content

the way thought and feeling had flesh and blood.

You thought it was a wardrobe of auroral attitudes

you could put on or take off as you wish

like smoke in a mirror

or a whisper of lingerie.

Sex with you was always a good day

and we had a lot of them

and that’s how I ended up staying for six years.

That and the compassion I felt

for the tears of rage you would shed

like rain on the lava of a wounded volcano

that would pop up on the west coast without warning

and bury both of us like Pompey and Herculaneum

trying to grow geraniums on its harassed slopes

like the hippies who grew pot

on Mt. Saint Helen’s

who aren’t selling anymore.

I always thought you gave your love to someone

and that’s what made it a gift

but you bestowed yours upon me

as if it were a right

I should be grateful to receive.

I was abolished from diplomatic lip-service

in the court of the mad queen

time and again

for things I didn’t mean

even in my native language

that were just too insane to believe.

But the body endures.

The mind copes.

And despair and ashes to me

given the tragic optimist I am

are full of high hopes

like spiritual loveletters

in earthbound envelopes.

And just as I did then

when at least I taught you

what not to look for in a man

I hope you’ve found the simulacrum

of the real life you were looking for

and it’s healed that crack in the mirror

that used to scar you like a black sail

on an empty horizon

waiting for cosmic news of the weather

that kept running you aground

like a widow on a beach

every time the tide came in like providence

and left you just out of reach of yourself

like a wedding bouquet

the bride tossed away over her shoulder

without looking back.

As for me

things have gotten worse for the better over the years.

Swimming through quicksand.

Swimming through stone.

Impersonal revelations of intimate stars.

Sometimes the moon shows me

the fossils of the ancient oracles

she’s pressed between the pages

of her darkest shales

like deep wounds

gashed in the matrix of space and time

that were the distant ancestors of us

who have survived the truth of their prophecies

like scars without a myth of origin.

I still end where I begin

like the black grammar of a white magician

answering for myself before my own inquisition

for heresies that were holy enough

to be condemned to the fire as proof

of their volatility.

Your blood was a watercolour.

Mine was an oil.

And red was the colour of pain.

I shook things off me

like water off the fur of a dog

that’s just come ashore

on the far side of the river. 

You ran in the rain

like a crazy ribbon

from the gifts you were given to give

and didn’t know how to survive.

But wanting to live

isn’t the same thing

as trying to stay alive

though they’re the two ends

of the same telescope.

When despair becomes

the orthodoxy of the age

and sinks like a heavyweight

who threw the fight like Atlantis

when it lost its sea-legs

the only true protest is hope

and the abandoned courage of a bubble

expanding like the universe

to break the surface

in a rapture of aquatic freedom

and disappear into the new medium

of an evolving atmosphere with wings.

And sometimes it’s hard

to remember the way things turned out

as if the certainties were brief weathervanes

of the good days that never came

and the doubts went on forever

looking for scapegoats they could blame

like the leftover smoke of an extinguished candleflame.

And though I might be slow

I know I’ve been thorough over the years

in wishing you love and life and laughter among friends.

So I’ve never summoned you by name

like a ghost to a seance of strangers

who think they know you better than I do

and make way too much of too many little things

that don’t matter anymore.

I haven’t swept the stars off my stairs in years.

And there are loveletters piled up in the mailbox

that say I’m in arrears

and when the windows cry

as they sometimes still do

looking out over the vastness of the view from here

at the solitary figures fading into the landscape of their homelessness

I try to cheer them up

like a reflecting telescope

by getting them to look at the bright side of things

by exchanging their lenses for mirrors

the way love does

new lamps for old

when everything that’s beautiful and lucid

disappears under a veil of rain  

like old eyes looking out at the world

through the new tears of a stranger’s pain

like a faithful death-wish that’s come true again.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AN ANTI-DREAMCATCHER

AN ANTI-DREAMCATCHER

 

An anti-dreamcatcher

who likes to give the cool jewels

that take her place in the window

a taste of the spider.

She’s catches stars

and unwary butterflies in her web

that she can read like music

and gives them each their own myth

and a place in her constellation.

She’s a blues guitar that’s not

on the straight and narrow.

She weaves her own strings

into any rendition of chaos she wants.

The darkness is a friend of hers.

She’s been maltreated by the light.

Her eyes are a secret experiment

deep underground

where she’s looking for anti-matter

like proof of the night she was born.

Everything about her is new

and darkly modern

but if you look more closely

at the circular firing squad of Stonehenge

you’ll see that she’s the revenge

of an extinct species

that’s learned to live on nothing.  

She’s a black equinox in handcuffs

that jingle like bracelets

she swears she made

from the old ecliptics and equators

that used to ring her wrists like a tree.

Fossils of rain

embedded in her heartwood

you can still see the scars

climbing up her arm like a calendar

or the rungs of snakes on rope-ladders.

And you just know

she’s looked into the eye of the dragon

and it was the dragon that turned to stone.

She’s got sisters

but this Medusa cut out on her own

to see what the snake-pit of the world looks like

when you peer into it like a mirror

that doesn’t dread your eyes.

Compassion isn’t sharing

forgivable lies with the cold truth.

The immeasureable abyss

doesn’t sit at the feet of blackholes

but she doesn’t get caught up

in those old fishing nets.

She sheds her skin like lingerie

and finds her own way in the way she is

so much like water on the moon 

still enthralled by the last eclipse

that showed Alice her true reflection

in the looking glass

just before everything turned to stone.

The snake knows more than the rabbit

and she’s got a tongue on her

that’s the tuning fork of a lightning strike

and despite how she tries to disguise it

her intelligence is an ineradicable habit

she bears like a curse

and flaunts like a blessing.

And she’ll dance for you

when she’s in the right mood

to flow along with the music.

She’ll rise like serpent fire up your spine

and open all your chakras

like blossoms on a dead vine

but you’ve got to find the right flute

and you’ve got to play like wine

that’s been aged a long time in a dark place.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IF YOU KNOW MORE

IF YOU KNOW MORE

 

If you know more

about what you don’t want

than what you do

you might think you’re wise

but I just think you’re aging

whether you’re eighty-six or twenty-two.

Many friends and lovers have died.

Many dark windows without eyes.

But only on the outside.

Inside they live with me like clouds

in the uninhibited vastness of a sky

that goes on forever

like the memory of some small kindness

that revealed everything about them

I ever needed to know.

They come and go like birds

each a theme of light in their own element

that is embodied in me like starmud

that has become human.

Water or carbon

fire or wind

I taste of them

like an autumn apple tastes of the sun

as the sun goes down.

I drive by the houses

where they used to live

that other people live in now.

And I don’t always know

who I’m praying to or why

and it doesn’t really matter if

no one is listening

or standing at the window

but I ask whatever powers prevail

even if it’s just to nudge an atom with a thought

to fill their sails with generous horizons

and make a warm wind

their forwarding address.

I thank them for who they still are

not were

like the memes and genes

of the better part of my dna

that makes me me.

They are the dark matter

of things I cannot see

that shape the universe I’m living in for now

discretely.

The trees are more compassionate

because they lived

and the stone of the world

on which I lay my head at night to dream

is softer for some memory I cherish of them.

The rain is more loving.

The grass is greener.

The flower more red.

But that doesn’t mean

when I lie with a living woman

I’m making love to the dead

or she brings a cemetery to bed

or I’m the corpse on a pyre

and she’s the fire

that feathers the phoenix in flames.

I don’t look at the moon in passing

and see a gravestone with many names.

And if I howl like a mad man sometimes

just to hear an echo in my solitude

it’s the agony of life not death

that smokes the cold night air with my breath

high above the timberline

where the stars may be uncompromisingly clear

but they’re not cruel.

Life isn’t death’s fool

if you don’t live it in jest

like a guest who’s forgotten

how to be grateful for all the fireflies

you followed like stars in the east

as if you were a magus

on your way to a feast with gifts

not the grave-goods of a funeral.

Disappointment and pain

have aged you faster than time.

You’re a stone bird transfixed

by the indelible eclipse of your lucidity

swallowing you whole like a cosmic serpent.

Even your constellations are jaded tatoos.

And the wines of life

with all their chameleonic world views

no longer get drunk on you

and since you’ve drained

the colour from your eyes

like the iris of a rainbow

you might conceive of things

as if they were clues

of broken promises yet to come

but you’re inspired by albino muses

paler than the skull of the moon

waning through its final phases.

If you’d only turn your coffin over like a lifeboat

and give it back to the sea

like the fossil of an exoskeleton

you don’t need anymore

or roll the moon like a stone away from your tomb

you’d see how the yellow grass greens in the light

and the shadows of the trees and leaves

play upon it like music on water

or a strange intelligence upon the light

that is thereby made visible and alive by it.

A flat earth without ecstasy

and an impoverished ocean

where all the horizons are flatlining

because they’ve lost heart

is the small wave of a petty emotion

in the rapturous tides of life

that wash the dead and the living up alike

in the same turmoil of beginnings and ends.

I embrace my friends living and dead

the way a mountain weaves a river

like a strong rope

out of many weak threads

that spontaneously got it together.

This one wants to use it

to hang himself

and this one wants to

climb up to heaven on it

like a caterpillar.

And this one’s trying to read it

like a lifeline on the palm of his hand

with his index finger

as if it were the alpha and omega of his name.

The dead-and-gone forever

is also here-and-now

where their absence

is alive as melting snow

or the heartwood of a green bough

that keys the spine of the singing bird

like a Spanish guitar

or the dead branch

that holds the moon up like a blossom

or a loveletter to a star.

I share space with everyone and thing I’ve lost

like a shape-shifting constellation

in an expanding universe

where the light that left my eyes

just a moment ago

like people I’ve been and met and cherished

over the long dark radiant years of transformation

it’s taken me to get here

shine as if they’ve just arrived.

Life and death like all opposites

that engender one another

are a collaboration.

They’re not at war.

They give birth to things 

like two hands of the same potter

who doesn’t just work

with the substance of the clay

but the emptiness as well.

Turn it skyside up

and you can turn a funeral bell

into a wine-cup

and pour your life into it

like a sea into the mouth of the moon

and pass it around among your friends

as if they were all kings and queens of the zodiac

getting drunk on the same planet together

around a fire down by the river

toasting the night in tears and laughter

like generous atmospheres of good weather

knowing death is only as far from life

as a wave is from water

the knower from his knowing

the gone from their going

or a cup is from its emptiness

when the wine is flowing.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HAD ENOUGH

HAD ENOUGH

 

Had enough.

Had enough of nothing

and now it feels real.

You want to know how I feel

after six decades on earth

in a fifteen minute interview

about so many things

I know less than nothing about.

Death for example.

Or poetry life art suffering love

what it means to be a human

or who I am in all of this turmoil of being

that just seems to exist to exist

as everything eats to live to be hungry.

Are you a cannibal

if you eat your own body like life does?

Is it so hard to understand the death of children

when we squander so much on war

all over the planet

laying waste to our own womb

as if we were not born of woman?

Had enough of inconceivable suffering

being paged through like the news

and the horrors ending in the bathetic drivel

of pundits expressing their views

about things they know about

and do nothing

as I go about my daily business

feeling like a hypocrite in everything I do

because I know I could do more and haven’t

and probably won’t.

Had enough of watching the injustice of power

bleach the bloodstains out of its lily-white image

like snow on dogshit.

Like a Nazi investigation of atrocity.

Had enough of feeling guilty about the truth.

The few are always dying one by one

in the name of the many who don’t exist.

Had enough of compassion turning its open hand

into a fist

with savage indignation

at what it witnesses everyday

as the human condition.

One lie for all

in a voting booth

that takes a poll of the truth

it’s running against like a rumour

isn’t enough of a right

to guarantee our freedom from delusion.

Symbiosis is not the same as political collusion

and three mutants with a staff of spin-doctors

talking like weathervanes

trying to anticipate

the popular course of evolution

by running God against a monkey in a primary

on the creationist platform of an antedeluvian textbook

to appease the simians descended from man

with a more exalted outlook

on how they began

isn’t the stem-cell

of a new myth of origin

we can all agree upon

like the fossil of a face with a grin

up for re-election.

Anti-Darwinian simians

against unnatural selection.

Sometimes life rolls the genetic dice

looking to change her luck

and everything comes out snake-eyes.

 

PATRICK WHITE 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOMETHING'S EITHER POURED ME OUT

SOMETHING’S EITHER POURED ME OUT

 

Something’s either poured me out

or I’m evaporating

but I’m learning to live without content.

And don’t look for a lifestream flowing

under all the leaves of these topics I’ve been shedding.

I don’t follow a theme like an old road

winding through the woods

in the direction of my knowing anymore.

I don’t hold a mirror up to chaos

and expect to see order.

What does a mirror look like

all on its own when it’s truly empty

and there’s nothing left to reflect upon?

I’ve never had very deep feelings for ideas.

I’ve much preferred the subtleties of wonder

that occur by themselves like stars in the night.

I don’t need to make anything up to be me.

I don’t need a ghost writer

following me around everywhere

compiling research for my biography.

What’s the personal history of nothing?

And how can you distinguish one sea from another

when they’re still embryos with their eyes closed

in the same watershed?

The same shit you said about me

while I was alive

you’ll say about me after I’m dead

though we never really knew one another all that well.

The great night sea of life

isn’t trying to keep its waves in order.

And the mind isn’t the foundation stone

of a shrine to higher learning.

I can talk to the stars in their own language

if I don’t expect them to answer me

in my own voice.

I can read what the wind writes

in a Druidic tree-alphabet

like a loveletter to a birch

when I don’t let my eyes

get in the way of my seeing.

And I know you won’t believe me

but even the rocks have told me

time and time again

like old Etruscan kings of the zodiac

you can pour gold

out the ore of the dark matter like light

if you don’t let your life

get in the way of your being.

But I don’t spend a lot of time

trying to peek through the cracks in my brain for insight

when I don’t need a key to get out

or a gate to get in.

I burn my starmaps.

I hop the fence.

I cut across the field.

I find my own way like water.

But whether I’m coming down the mountain

or breaking into flowers

or just fooling around like the rain

to see what comes up

I drink from own skull

like the full moon

when it breaks its cup

to keep the wine flowing.

I don’t think of my body

as a fortune-cookie

with a little ribbon of fate inside

tucked away like a secret chromosome

that’s the writing on the wall

for an entire species.

My life is not a thesis I’m trying to prove.

I’m not seeking forgiveness for the dark.

I’m not spinning galaxies out of a chimney spark.

I’m not trying to put horseshoes

on the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

I don’t make a terrorist of my antithesis

and then waterboard it for the truth.

I’m not trying to save seeds in the autumn

that I sowed like wild oats in my youth

lying beside the woman

who invented agriculture.

I don’t squander my beginnings

on trying to achieve my ends

by taking my tail in my mouth

and swallowing everything up to

and including my head.

I’m not trying to beat

ploughs for the living

out of the swords of the dead.

I’m not driving a chariot of gold through a slum

like a big wheel pimping his ride.

And I don’t think every hooker I meet

is a frustrated bride

or every false hope has time on its side.

I’m not caught up in my own mindstream

like a leaf that dropped off the tree of knowledge in the fall

to be enraptured by the mystic awareness of its own flowing

like a map to everywhere

that didn’t know where it was going.

I think of freedom as something that happens to you

like eyes for the blind

like an empty lifeboat

bobbing off the shore of Atlantis

just before it went down

not a state of mind

backed up by a government

that puts words in the mouths of the dead

and then indicts them for lying.

You can fit an entire universe into a single head

and still have time and space for more

like the sea of life that everywhere

receives itself like a prodigal’s homecoming.

Or you can wall yourself in behind bone

and lead the siege life of a landowning crustacean

or a bi-valved goose barnacle

fixed like a cold-sore to the lip of a volcano

that’s breaking up the continent of Pangea like your skull.

You can choose to choose

or you can say there’s no choice at all.

Or raising your skull up in both your hands

to the health of the universe

drink yourself down to the lees of your last eclipse

and wiping its unfulfilled prophecy off your lips

like wine and dragon’s blood

that doesn’t need anyone to get drunk on itself

black-out like dark matter when it begins to shine. 

Or you can live like a good waste of enlightenment

and never pass the cup around like the moon

so the lost can taste their homelessness

deep in the heart of the earthbound

and know they’re the two eyes

of the same oxymoron

that discovered it was lost

the moment it was found. 

Not one.

Not two.

Water and wave.

Moon-cup and skull.

Empty or full

whatever you do.

Be brave.

Drink up.

Down to the dregs of oblivion.

As if it were last call

and the lights were about to go on.

 

PATRICK WHITE