HOW TO WRITE POETRY IN A SNAKEPIT

How to write poetry in a snakepit

without getting bit.

It’s easy enough to prophecy

from the bottom of desert wells

on mountaintops

in prison

and it would be sheer mercy

to be torn apart by Daniel’s den of lions

or swallowed by a whale

instead of being consumed

for what you believe

by maggots and tapeworms.

Parasites have no sense of a noble death.

But how do you write poetry in a snakepit?

How do you weave flying carpets

out of diamond backs

that strike out at anything that moves

as if their fangs couldn’t help it

you were born with the reflexes of a loom.

What wipes the blood off the crescents of the moon?

Where’s the antidote to the toxic tatoos?

Why all this treachery deceit and meaness?

Is it cool to shine with a reflected pettiness?

Almost fifty years

half a century

I’ve been sitting here doing this.

Trying to listen to what the stars are whispering

over the universal hiss of primordial assholes

who’ve been there from the very beginning of the myth.

In an ugly world

beauty isn’t just a mesmerist

in the eye of the beholder.

It’s a dynamic form of protest

that can kill someone into life

without a weapon.

And it’s hard enough

trying to understand war on the molecular level

the slaughter of the innocents

the loveless obscenity of its pornographic expense

the way it snatchs lives

like scraps of children

off their parents’ plate

and leaves them hungry for the rest of time

and try to reconcile it with a unified field theory

of infinite worlds within worlds of wonder

each with a cause of its own

and a monopoly on the means of its laws

to insist on being itself.

But if you want to see hatred and delusion

on a quantum mechanical level

as it is here up close and intimate

look into the faces

of twenty of your friends

and then turn the mirror on yourself

as if you had your finger on the trigger of the moon

in a game of Russian roulette

with intensely unhappy strangers.

In an ignorant world

insight isn’t just the usual suspect

and wisdom its unwitting accomplice

and the facts their DNA and fingerprints.

It’s a way of splashing acid in the faces

of illiterate extremists.

A way of teaching them how to read

from the burning books they’ve banned

like a child’s eyes

in the name of God.

It’s the most humane way of planting

improvised roadside explosives

that will blow them into kingdom come

like a field full of ripe poppies

milky with snake serum.

All snakes are addicted to their own venom

and speak of it as if they were the fountainmouths

of a secret elixir in the hands of a great magician

who once worked miracles for the pharoahs of Egypt

before that bastard Moses showed up and ruined everything

by throwing down his rod

to see whose serpent was bigger than God.

Snakes are full of penis envy

and you can’t train them to bite other people

or regurgitate the cosmic eggs they’ve swallowed

into a litter box.

And it took years and tsunamis of tears without eyelids

to learn how to be mastered by the skill of it

but the first trick of learning

how to write poetry in a snakepit

is knowing how to turn their scales into feathers

and putting wings on them

without them knowing it

shed them like dragons of old desire

heading south from a cold-blooded climate

like the souls of the dead in the bodies of birds.

Don’t let yourself be hypnotized

or turn away like words

from the eyes of snakes

but remember you can’t live like a fly

and write like an eagle

and turning your pen into a talon

with a firm grasp of the issue

as if it were a neck you’ve pinned down

with a witching wand

look them straight in the eye

and ask them how many children had to die

to keep them safe?

Then drop them on the rocks below

until they learn how to die for themselves.

And it’s crucial

to keep the universe

at the room temperature of fire long enough

it burns like dry ice on their skin.

Poetry is an oxymoronic pursuit

of the highest by the lowest

in a conjoining of mutually engendered opposites

and the lowest will always sting

the way you feel

like Paris stung Achilles in the heel

with a poison arrow

or Hades contracted a snake

to kill Persephone

so he could rape her in the spring

and drag her down below

like the corpse of an anti-romantic necrophile.

If you don’t want to hold a grudge like summer

so that even the earliest of your flowers

are inspired by the muse of grief

tear out your hair like Medusa in a fit of rage

and realize it’s better to go bald

that try to get the cowlicks out of mop of snakes

that never wear the same hairdo twice.

And always remember

it isn’t just the angels

who keep their places like baby teeth

under the ancient stone of the pillow

where you lay your head.

It’s not just the apple-trees

that have to worry

about who they let slide into their orchard beds

but there are rattlesnakes

under the rosebushs as well

that can smell you coming with their tongues.

And if you’re at all spiritual

don’t be naive about illumination.

The light fans out in all directions

like the wavelengths of snakes

thawing like knots combed out of the locks of the spring.

If you want to sit full lotus

in the middle of a public snakepit

and think of it as a private shrine

keep in mind that the same light

that opens the gates to heaven

like the eyes of the flowers

falls into the blackhole skull sockets

of spiritual Calcuttas as well.

If you want to be a lamp unto yourself

you hold up to the darkness

on a vision-quest

remember that creative enlightenment

is radiantly omnidirectional

one mile east is one mile west

and the same firefly that reveals paradise

is a traffic light at a crossroads in hell

that never turns green

and that the worst demons

like the crumbs of celestial dreams

you broke like bread

to share with those who had none

love to gather in the corners of your eyes

like spiders weaving dreamcatchers

to ambush the butterflies.

And though it might seem tempting

to take Medusa for a muse

when you’re trying to write poetry in a snakepit

remembering she’s the death phase of the moon

with immediate access to oracular powers

but it’s just as hard to learn

how to go down on her without turning into stone

as it is to look back on Sodom and Gommorah

without turning into a pillar of salt.

Consider the quality of the inspiration

and its source

and think before you drink deep

from her Pierian spring

like black cool-aid from dixie-cups in Jonestown.

There’s a darkness deep within you

that the light doesn’t know anything about

and it never goes out like bright things do

because it’s the long night

that gave birth to the stars

out of its own emptiness

as it did me and you.

It’s the black mirror

that shines more deeply than the white

once your eyes have adjusted to the clarity.

All the muses are bottled water

compared to its oceanic expanse.

It’s much better to sail your paperboats

like cherry blossoms

downriver to that

than it is to ask a snake

to inspire you with serpentfire

so you can write lovenotes to a sparrow

as if she were sitting on cosmic glains.

Snakes are all throat and no voice

except for the occasional rattle

but what they entrance

they swallow

and there’s no more music

in your whole notes after that.

You’re poetry goes flat as a gutted shell

or the shedding skin of a used rubber

and you’ll never get it up again in your afterlife

even if you sprout wings on your heels

like Hermes Trismegistus the Thrice-Blessed.

Pegasus is dead.

Long live Icarus.

Even tarred and feathered for flight

by an abusive muse

I know it’s hard to live like this

refusing to eat shit

and call it your daily bread

or waiting for manna to fall from heaven

like an airlift from a spiritual foodbank

that doesn’t understand flesh and bone

when you’re a species all of your own

trying to write poetry in a snakepit

and they ask what you do for a living

and you say

I paint and write

among things with two gashs for eyes

that squirm and coil and flare and hiss and spit and bite

out of the pure spite of their snake-nature

no matter how well Orpheus picks the lute

or the snakecharmer fingers the stops of his flute.

Expect to get bit

but don’t be ashamed of it.

I’ve lost track of the number of wounds

I’ve had to suck the venom out of

as I could feel my nerves numbing out

like the unempowered lifelines

to the lights

of a city off the grid

as a night of cold came on like a slow glacier.

And I’ve got so many puncture marks

all over my body

I feel like a cross between a starmap

and a popular voodoo doll on a good day

and a birthday balloon for porcupines on a bad.

Crush a few skulls with the stone of your heart

if you must

but even if the Sufis are right

and you take on the characteristics

of anyone you’ve been around more than forty days

even trying to write poetry in a snakepit

and this is of paramount importance

whatever you do

don’t grow scales on it.

Don’t look for a quick fix

but build your tolerance up slowly

as if your poetry

were the bloodwork of a syringe

that breathes in

as if it were taking a deep draft

and deliberately takes its time

like a good wine

to push back.

Don’t try to regulate the heart

of a warm-blooded mammal

with the rheostat of a reptile

or you’ll wind up writing

haikus and heiroglyphs

that read like the lines of vipers in the sand

and no one who’s ever written poetry in a snakepit

like an antidote to an ancient poison

will ever forgive you for or understand.

PATRICK WHITE

SINCE I LAST WROTE TO YOU

for Alysia

Since I last wrote to you

I told a Napoleonic goldfish

who thought she ruled the shark bowl

to take my job and shove it

as the measure of a man

who still hasn’t acquired the habit

of eating shit

and calling it his daily bread.

I’ve gone back full time to my art

and now I’m eating paint

and enduring the tedium of terror

in a dangerous life

struggling to pay the rent

as I paint and write

knowing I am bereft of the elements of life

for refusing to be economically deprived of my freedom.

If you’re never hungry

you’ll never know what it means to eat.

I laugh blackly like a raw martini

at the cutting edge of irony

when I think of my art as a Zen oxymoron

that’s discovered a way of starving

that bears fruit.

I can taste my food better now

and if I don’t waste anything

it’s a much happier experience

when it isn’t done out of principle.

I count the probability of the number of years

I have left to live

the springs and autumns

I have yet to become

on my fingers and toes.

And I try not to let my disappointment

in the humanity of demons

keep my heartwood

from blowing tree-rings up to heaven

just to give the angels something to crow about.

I’m alone and sad most of the time

and lately I’ve noticed my solitude

flirting with the idea

of turning into a conviction.

Women approach me

with the ambivalence

of a koan in their gut

they can’t resolve.

But it’s not a good idea

if you’re trying to get laid

to baffle the mystery

with your estrangement

and I strive real hard

as often as I can

not to spook

the middle-aged youth

by being a younger man.

I greet guests warmly when they arrive

but it’s rare that I grieve for anyone

when they leave

like most of what was left out of the conversation

we didn’t have

about who among us was telling the truth.

It’s been awhile since I’ve heard a good lie

that didn’t bore me.

I’m an all-inclusive recluse

more interested in studying the psychology of time

as I get to know it experentially

as the immediate intimacy

of the serial-killer at my throat.

I’ve decultified my work

to keep it from turning into a career

but even as we speak

five poems are being translated into Spanish.

And upon learning

I was the last poet laureate of Ottawa

and after me there was no deluge

they could find to fill

the empty ark of my shoes

I emptied on the mountain top:

or I bruised everyone’s feelings so much

like a pebble in their boot

that turned into an avalanche

I endangered my species with extinction.

Whatever the case

I feel the mystic glee of blacklight fireflies

igniting randomly

like stars and lighthouses

I’ve never listened to

about looking for shelter

from the storm of dark energy

that is released by knowing I’m the last of my kind.

And my spirit and mind

have missed you too

as the months have gone by

as if the colour of my blood in autumn

were missing from my palette

and my heart were an urgent artist

who wanted to get out

and paint with you in Kamloops

where the rivers meet in a sacred place.

I’ve never wanted facebook

to be all that I know of your beautiful face

or the starmaps of our cosmic loveletters

to be all that I know of the grace of your shining.

I can still see the stars mirrored in the flowers

in our gateless garden on the moon

where the roses that fell on their thorns

have healed well enough

to go on blooming without us.

I think I felt more like a weed than the waterlily

I wanted to bring into your life

like a paper ship

I floated down the mindstream

to see if my favourite siren

had any use for an empty lifeboat like me.

On the worst of days

when misery gloated

that pleasure might be a principle

but it was a fundamental law of the universe

even as a shipwreck going down

I could still be entranced

by the memory of your singing.

You get a different view of moonlight

when you look at it

with the eye of the sea

from the bottom.

And now once again

your voice pearls me

like a grain of sand

you can see in the universe

if you look closely enough

under the stones

where the angels keep their ancient places.

And I couldn’t be more delighted

that you still love me

and that your heart aches

like an unanswered telephone

or a wounded seance

when my ghost doesn’t answer my absence.

I’ve lain here like a dead seabed on the moon

for so long waiting for you

to pour your ocean into me

I was beginning to think

the vast expanse of my interminable emptiness

was nothing more

than the homely measure

of a cracked teacup

the little I’ve known of you

that was wet

kept leaking out of.

And it would take a great void

to embrace the depth of your waters

and a clear sky immense enough

not to inhibit the flight of your white clouds

and even if my feelings

were to break

like telescopic mirrors on your rocks

it would take a great three-eyed stargazer like me

not to see that you can’t point

to a piece of me

like the firefly chandelier

of a shattered constellation

that was too spaced out

to fit into anyone’s zodiac

that doesn’t still reflect the whole you

on any good seeing night.

I look at you

as I look at the stars

and you’re the lucid muse

of what’s radiantly possible

deep in the dark secret heart of the improbable.

And I want to reach out

like the uppermost branches

in the crown of an inspired tree

and touch you on the cheek

as if my fingertips

were a chaos

of falling apple bloom.

I want to fall asleep with you

and share the same dream

that summons the waterbirds

and scatters the Japanese plum

like loveletters everywhere

under the eyelids of the wind.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN FEEL MY THOUGHTS

I can feel my thoughts tearing my mind

as if it were a piece of paper.

As if space had a zipper.

I’m playing Russian roulette

with cosmic bubbles in hyperspace

and I’ve got a hole in me.

A puncture.

And I’m leaking out.

I need a new universe

that’s never heard of lifeboats and arks

to acommodate all the dimensions

and inflections of my afterlife

there is no room for in this one.

The grapes are wounded

on the thorns of the barbed wire

that runs up my back like a spine.

Metal stars that don’t shine

like neo-romantic legends

that bloom on the vine

The right flowers

but the wrong lifeline.

My blood.

Their wine.

The full moon at lunar perigee.

Bigger than it’s ever been for the last two decades

and more illusive

than its bluesy encore in October.

Canada geese high overhead at night

because the ice is late in leaving.

There’s nowhere to land.

Cataracts on the shattered mirror.

There’s a sadness in the passage of life

whether it’s coming or going

that transcends the complexities

of what we think we understand

of the grand and beautiful

with the homely immensities of knowing.

Shards of sky in the funeral home parking lot

I keep falling into

taking a shortcut home

like a lost waterbird

with deranged magnetons

trying to fly through windows and mirrors

and spring rain on the unresponsive asphalt.

Someone’s torn out the eyes of the stars

and all I can see

are the black snake-sockets

in the skulls of the leering dice

leading me on through this white night

like the blind luck

of a negative of a photographic starmap

of the thirteenth house of the zodiac

the sun never enters for fear

of infectious eclipses

crossing their heart

like white paint on a plague-door.

Someone’s ripped out the tongue of the wind

like the dead language of a leaf in autumn

and every superstition is listened to

as if it were good advice.

God I miss the fireflies and the loosestrife

and the timelessness of long country roads

that don’t care if they ever go anywhere.

But now isn’t then

and I’ve given up approximating

what’s been bereft of reality

as if I knew.

Is anyone out there?

Would you answer me if you were?

Leave the bottle.

Leave the message.

No one’s coming to the rescue.

The skulls of all of yesterday’s selves

turn into the dice of the moment

and the moment keeps coming up snake-eyes.

I paint.

I write.

But the heavy water of my tears

isn’t intimate enough

with the plutonium intensity

of the rogue reactor my heart has become

to keep myself from melting down.

It’s easy enough

to second-guess yourself

into being someone while you’re alive

but it’s a lot harder to know

who they’ll be burying when you die.

I expect more lies have gone south than truths.

Or if you’re into transmigrating soulfully with the dead

like the Ojibway Pythagoras or ancient Iranians

in the bodies of Canada geese

in late September

when the asters come up

like expressionist constellations

to challenge the classical traditions of the old

and you’re an oxymoron like me

who prefers two wings on his angels

in a coincidence of the contradictories.

And sometimes three.

Then you could always look back on your youth

and ahead to your death

as if life were a hole in the truth

and you can’t fall into love with one

without assenting to the other.

But if you’re completely honest with yourself

nothing does any good.

It’s like a star looking back on its own light.

By the time you see it

it’s somewhere else.

Life is always changing.

Life is a shapeshifter.

A dream-breather.

Vertumamnis.

The river’s turning.

Morpheus.

The great serpent of desire

Kama-mara

playing the flute

to charm herself

as she swallows her fangs like swords

and eats her own fire.

And it’s one of the strangest

mystic twists in life’s crazy wisdom

a reflection in a warped funhouse mirror

the simultaneity of two spaces in one

that seeing is being

and like the moon on water

like enlightenment and life

they don’t submit to the knife

so you can’t seperate the shadow from the light.

In order to know yourself as you were.

In order to know yourself as you are.

The original star.

You have to be someone else.

I look back over the years at what lives

and what dies

and how all the lies come true

and all the truths turn false

and all I can feel is a sorrow

so deep and beautifully devastating

in the heart of my most adored illusion

that all I can hear

is the sound of my tears

letting go of my eyes

as if it were their turn for a change

to do the falling.

As if they longed like the waters of life

like broken windows

that finally put their fist through the view

to be someone else.

As if the only way

to be truly me

is to be truly you.

As if it were you here alone by yourself

fighting for your life after midnight

with a painting knife in one hand

and a viper of a poem by the neck in the other

trying to take cheap shots at your art

as your blood turns cadmium yellow deep

and the sunflowers bow their heads and weep

at the futility of these excruciating transformations

I keep going through

like a small boy’s notion of being the hero

who puts on a mask like Zorro

and faster than light

with the sword of a painting knife

or the toxic arrow of a Mongol rainbow in reverse

a spitting cobra

loosed from behind like the line of poem

from a galloping horse

falls on and by it again and again

as if his life were the wounded zero

that came to the rescue of the endangered one

by making everything ten times more immense than it is.

I put wings on the snake.

I put wings on the horse.

I put wings on the fires of life

and watch them rise like a phoenix

that has no fear of flying too close to the sun

or plummeting to its death like Icarus.

If you want to learn to fly without wax

you’ve got to be sincere.

Tar and feathers don’t have enough

of the right stuff

to make it to the moon and back.

I ride the dragon.

I swallow the moon

and speak in the tongues of prophets

that regurgitate whales

to turn the vomit into perfume.

It’s raining eyes outside.

I ride the light like Einstein

on his way home from his work as a clerk

in the Swiss Patent Office

and stop time on the drop of a dime

to lengthen my life interminably

like a repeating decimal

that refuses to be defined by its limits.

I summon the corpses of the absolutes

buried in the graveyards of relativity

to a seance of vandals

that knocks them over like headstones

that are too slow on their feet

to win the argument.

The worst way to try to understand an artist

is to believe whenever they say something

they know what they mean.

Stop listening to them

as if you were talking to the dead.

You’ve got to be on the same palette as the painter

to understand the psychology of green.

Colour is food for the hungry.

Colour is the fire of the burning bush.

Colour turns one face to the public

and the other to the stars

like the moon.

Colour works until noon

and then takes a rest in a gesture of shadows.

Colour is the secret password

that the blood says to the heart

when it’s too late to stay open

and it asks what thing come thus

and the blood flashes its familial mood ring

like an angry chameleon

and says

there’s room in there for both of us.

Red’s always willing to take a chance

and be the first to leave home

but ultramarine blue enjoys the love-life of a Druid.

And if black looks dangerous

to the righteous greys

that’s only because they’re estranged from themselves.

Black is at peace with who it is

like a life-changing experience

that can’t be shared

because there’s no birth or death in it.

Black doesn’t act like a rainbow

when the rain makes love to the sun.

And it doesn’t despair when the colours run

like painted tears

and autumn leaves

in a downpour.

Black is the last mirror

your eyes will ever look for themselves in

before they break into clarity

realizing there’s no one there but them

to be whatever colour they want to be.

Right now I’m full of creative admiration

for the chromatic aberration

of ferocious chandeliers of fireflies

and the wet dreams of reflecting telescopes

who have both eyes open in orbit

and burn with the wonder of life

as if they just spotted a naked woman

bathing in stars

to wash off last years’ constellations

like the smell of old loveletters to the light.

But every time I try to emulate them aurorally

it’s everything I can humanly be

to see that I’m this uber-romantic toss-up

between a full eclipse of the moon

and a death-wish with a geni.

It puts the whole of me into every picture

where I feel I’ve always belonged.

I live in a the foursquare tent of a canvas home

I can set up anywhere like an easel

that’s been driven out into the desert like Azazel.

where I live from one mirage to the next

by painting them to look like real water.

But then I’m scraped out

like a drastic colour

when the well runs dry

at the beginning of every spring

and there isn’t enough viridian around to cry

or burnt sienna left to try.

And my geni can tell

by the way I’m abusing Prussian blue

how sad it is to be born

with the soul and eye of an artist

who revels in mixing his complementary passions

so every orange has its blue shadow

and every stiff-dicked bananna

the stillness of its violet afterlife.

Now the iris of my eye

is the random halo of light

around a blackhole

but it’s deep inside

where they can’t be seen

where the colours come to die

one by one like elephants

remembering a mindscape

they passed through many years ago

like a night of pthalo blue

and Payne’s gray

when they weren’t hunted into extinction

by a blacket market

for the warmth of their ivory whites.

And life was a master

who stepped into the on-site studio

at the last moment to rescue the fresco

from catastrophic banality

and make it live

by knowing exactly

when and where

with great abandon

to put the highlights in.

PATRICK WHITE

ANOTHER DEATH IN LIFE EXPERIENCE

Another death in life experience

or just my life unravelling as so many times before

like many weak threads from one strong rope?

I’ve got a used shoelace for a spinal cord

that isn’t quite long enough to hang myself with

and all the breathable air in the house

is streaming out under the door.

I know what the moon felt like when it lost its atmosphere.

Someone’s throwing rocks through the windows from the inside

as I wait like a dinosaur for the meteor.

There’s already a taste of nuclear winter in the air

and soon the Buddha of Extinction

will be standing on the bank corner again

with a begging bowl the size of an impact crater in the Gulf of Mexico.

But hey

the dog is off the clothesline

and I’m not running

back and forth

back and forth

back and forth

across town anymore

delivering pizzas door to door.

The Pizza Delivery Dude of Perth is dead.

And so’s the Mutt of Pizza Hut.

With all due deference to Rimbaud

so much for my advancement into simple toil.

I’m free to be wholly me again

in the unforeseeable Open of the Great Void

alone with the mundane terrors of of my cosmic insanity

trying to hold myself up to myself

as an example of what not to do

when money’s tight

the principle you stood your ground on

is turning into quicksand

with the tears you’ve martyred to your fears

and all you’ve got to fall back upon

is the mindless life of the life of the mind

a lottery ticket

and the loaves and fishs of your art.

Still life with heretic.

Poetic salads and painterly pastas.

The muses don’t leave a lot of food

at the eastern doors of the dead in late September.

So the better angels of my nature

don’t eat a lot

and my demons are always hungry for more.

I’m not van Gogh

but I understand

why he ate

chromium yellow.

If you want to live a life of art

with a big view

you’ve got to throw your life overboard like ballast

to gain altitude.

You’ve got to learn to live with bad debts in your attitude

that would put leechs and blackholes to shame.

You’ve got to stay one nirvana ahead of Armageddon all the time.

You can run like a voodoo doll.

You can fly like the spirit of a crucified butterfly

from a dead metaphor

to escape the curse

of dancing angels sticking pins in your eyes

like burning spears of insight

but try as you might

you can’t lift it

and things only get worse

when your cornerstones

grow silver wings on their heels like mercury

and the Black Taj Mahal doesn’t like what it sees in the water

when the light turns into dark matter

and space is the only available emergency exit

for a panicked universe

to worm its way out of a bad affair with the whole of itself.

One moment you can think you’re following your life like a river

down the world mountain

like a mindstream as clear as a mirror

and the next your reading your lifelines

like cracks in the way things appear

like dry creekbeds of starmud

like fractures in a skull

and reality sheds its delusions

as if everything you held dear

were nothing but paint flaking off a mirror.

The patrician poverty of a poet

is a ghost-dance that doesn’t bring rain.

And who can explain to the undead

what it’s like to be a painter

who looks at cadmium red

and feels pain

because he can’t pay the rent

or strung out on the bolts of black lightning

the gods keep throwing at him

like hydro bills

as if he were an angry Druid in a studio

with a fragile nervous system

that’s about to burn out like a mystic filament

because he wasn’t prophet enough to keep the lights on

falls to his knees

and prays to the starless night before him

not to turn his eyes off?

Why is it this way?

Is it self-indulgence

to find your only true pleasure

in the absurdity of your work?

To intensify your labour like water

until it turns into the effortless effort

of unmastering the part

you play in your art

like a snowman in the spring?

Is there a secret libido at play in my creative aspirations

to express what’s most human about me

when I’m most alone with what isn’t

that gives offense to some Puritan work ethic

that conceives of me as a heretic

that should be burnt at the stake

like women and pearls and paintings

in Savanarola’s Bonfire of the Vanities

because work isn’t work until it’s pain?

The Upanishads claim that work is a form of worship.

In Japan it’s an enlightenment path.

I think of it as another form of sex.

But here the ocean of awareness

washs the feet of the world mountain

in material servitude

and inspiration is already history

by the time it gets here like starlight.

I see madmen looking sideways at the truth

as if it were some kind of new invention

that hurried back from the future

to save Martha and Mary

the one who listened

in rapturous contemplation

and the other who washed the floor in frustration

from having to work so hard for their own salvation.

Is it too radical to tusk up the roots of my spiritual erosion

with the ferocity of a wild white boar

in a garden on the moon

to discover for myself

why self

is the first face

on the totem of my lunacy?

If I am nourished by the light of my own imagination

and refuse to make a living off the dead metaphors

of uninspired holy wars

between this bitter black farce and that

and call it my daily bread.

If my spiritual freedom exceeds

the constitutional niceties of my liberty

to be intimately estranged from my place in society

because I’m more at home in my homelessness

than I am standing in the doorway on the threshold of my limits

like a rocket that never took off

for fear of transcending gravity.

If I don’t exclude even the ingenuity of the rat

because of my fondness for dragons

from the cunning

of my aesthetic for survival.

If I’d rather share my fire with a phoenix

than a sword-swallower

trying to prove he’s mightier

than the ashs in the urn of a word.

If I don’t think of my life as a loop-hole

in the protocols of an honourable suicide

that’s lost face with the world

and insist on living

as if every moment

were an age of insight.

If my best feature is the crazy wisdom

of realizing my eyes are clouds

and my tongue is a leaf on the wind

and anything you can say about life

must be said playfully

for it to make any sense.

If I celebrate my mystic specificity

because I understand

that the onceness of my being here

is the lifespan of the universe I am

and this now is my age

and here is the only address

I’ve ever been able to call my own.

Tat tvam asi.

You are that.

If I refuse to cower like a nightsea

that’s afraid of its own waves and weather

and take great subjective risks

with my material well-being

because I think the sirens are worth the rocks.

If the surest sign of genius to me is a big heart.

If a single seed is my conception of life

and compassion is the fruit of thought

and beauty is the blossom

reason the leaf

and enlightenment the root.

If wonder and imagination

look at a tree

and see the history of an event

not a thing.

If I congratulate the child on giving birth to the mother

and greet everyone

as if they were the myth of origin

of the worlds within worlds they’ve living in.

If I should think that the best way

to illuminate the darkness that surrounds you

like suffering and ignorance

is not to hold the fireflies up to it like lamps

to enlighten it

but to open my own eyes wide enough

to see that it already shines.

If I can see that ugliness and beauty both

are not in the eye of the beholder

but in the choice of mirrors

I hold up to nature

like the third eye of an orbiting telescope

badly in need of corrective lenses.

If I should despair that I’m a firefly looking at the stars

when I consider what good it does

to add my small light to the shining

and then convince myself of something ironically inane

about trying

and add my wavelength to the billions of lightyears

and unfathomable night anyway

thinking the measure of my eyes

is not the size of the insight

and who knows what might come of it

if like the simulacrum of the creative ineffability

I am supposed to be made in the image of

impressed on starmud

I speak my mind in the first place.

In the beginning was the Word.

The ho logos.

More the power to imagine than a name.

Kun fia kun.

Let it be.

And even if when I’m drunk

on the mystically-spiked wine

of the dark and divine

conceiving of worlds within

that can begin like insight

with something as slight

as the touch of a butterfly on my skin

I should resonate with compassion like a tuning fork

and express it like a human.

If I do all these things as if they were

the spontaneous expression of my freeborn human nature

to see and be and feel and imagine

whatever the fuck I cosmically want

am I not still a man?

Am I not still dangerously human to the One-eyed Liar

who enslaves us in miracles that beggar the mind

like Hubble telescopes for the blind?

It is no mean achievement

of grace and inspiration

to go to the mirror in the morning

and see your original face

and not someone else’s reflection.

I don’t expect to be believed.

But if the stars ever ask me

what return they ever got back on their light

in the way of all that space and time

they laboured into life and insight

like an estranged poet down on his luck

trying to suck the venom

out of the fangmarks on the dice

I will open my mind and my eyes like a human

who has suffered creation like an afterlife

in the wake of his annihilation

like a dream within a dream of the world

and known them both to be nothing more

than two wings of the same waterbird.

Two shores of the same mindstream.

I shall rise like a mountain that has stared

into the grave of its cradle since it was born

to dig it deeper

the higher it rises

and shaking like a tectonic voice in the void

in the place of a divinity who could speak for me

I will say by my own light

to the dark mother hidden in her radiance

I have lived my life as you have

by the insights given me to go by like fireflies

and suggestive constellations

conceiving of cosmic questions

as if I were a human

but not being deceived by the earthly answers

as if I were a mortal god.

What is most perfect about me

is that which is most deeply flawed.

I REMEMBER THE BEES

I remember the bees

moving like heavy slow notes

among the sunflower microphones

two octaves lower than the fireflies

on late August afternoons

perishing in the light.

And the irrelevant felicity of being me

with nothing to do but time.

Many roads and years away now

and this is another life

another town

and I’m staring out of a window

that’s been forgotten by the eyes

that used to look through it

at the bleak winter rain

trying to distinguish the oases

from the mirages

in this glass-blowing desert of pain.

I remember white sweet clover along the dusty roadside

overwhelming the still hot air with its sweetness

and how it grew so high and thick

in the drainage ditches

it folded it wings over the road like a swan.

I remember watching the moon

lower its hook into the lake

hoping to catch something.

And now I’m trying to get it out of my mouth

like a question I can’t answer.

I’m envious of the happiness I used to know

as if it had all happened to someone else

I could never be again

because even a river

can’t step into itself twice

and the same is true of a bloodstream.

So do we all wash ourselves clean of ourselves in the running.

It’s the mind’s way of not staining its own clarity.

You don’t need to see to shine.

There are quantum events of the mind.

There are insights and thoughts

auroral premonitions

and solar prophecies

that flare like the Medusa’s hair on fire.

There are shadows of the unforeseeable

that cast their eclipses and sunspots

like exponentially tiny black holes

that steal the seeing from the light

and make space and time gape at their own measure

in the darkness of the heart of a human.

And in the next era of a moment

terrify them with the wonder of breaking into stars.

And most strange and astonishing of all

elaborated out of a chaos of photons

emerging out of the random

like wind on water

like Penelope weaving and undoing the moon on the lake

membranous worlds in hyperspace

blowing bubbles at each other

as if the light in their eyes

were life itself

shaping the multiverse playfully

into mystic glains swallowed by cosmic serpents

and fireflies caught in the drapes

by the open window

like jewels in the net of Indra

like primordial atoms going off spontaneously

for the sheer thrill of it.

Mark one world and they’re all marked.

And there’s no end of the accounting.

That’s why the most gracious of numbers is zero

and in any world I find myself possible in

I am the spacious friend of its infinite variety.

Even in Perth on a Sunday

among the flagging ambitions of leafless backyard trees

that have given up

dreaming of the doors and arrows

the coffins and lifeboats

they could have become in the hands of a mastercraftsman

and content themselves by staying out of the way of the powerlines.

Worlds within worlds within worlds being born

under my skin

at the tip of my nose

the end of my fingertips my tongue

pouring from the precipice of my lips

like lemmings and words not afraid to take a chance

the wind might feather their falling.

If compassion is worth the weight

of one single tear

of what life suffers here

then all things must be falling toward paradise.

Even the willows with their yellow-tinged hair trapped in ice.

Even the mailman who was convicted of taking his own advice.

Even the young beauty queen whose mouth overflows with saliva

as she dreams her makeup has turned into a pillow

that’s trying to smother her like a serial killer

trying to get her attention on the news.

Do you see?

When you get right down to the point

there is no point.

Ask Heisenberg.

There’s only you and I

and what we are

embodied in this memory

is merely the shadow cast

by what we are becoming.

Ask any star.

Keep the light behind you

like a ufo file with a due date.

Make a photonic leap into space.

Jump orbitals.

Release your infinitesimal quantum of energy

into the mind-bending unforeseeable gateless expanses of space

and instead of depending

on the fossils of cyanobacteria in Martian meteors

to improve on being alone

create worlds of your own

where space isn’t time flatlining

but a field of imagination

where the absurd lets its muse run free as an enzyme.

Why do you keep coming home empty-handed

like Ponce de Leon searching

for the disabled fountains of youth

when you must know by now

it’s the questions that are the watersheds of the truth?

It’s the questions that keep you alive and searching.

It’s the looking and not knowing

that keeps the fires of life

moving and growing

one step ahead of their ashs.

It’s not the questions.

It’s the answers that are killing you.

You might seek like a phoenix

but all your lanterns are ghosts.

Your eyes might be faster than light

but you’re still blind if you can’t see

that the world is

merely the shadow of an insight

you cast behind you

like the stars

like the candles

like the fireflies in your skull.

And it’s good to know them all.

It’s good to trace the lifelines

on the palm of your hand

and follow them back to the source of the Nile.

It’s good to know the imaginary animals

that talk like your fingers

held up to the lamp

like constellations on a starmap

like zodiacs and arks

like a dog that barks

in the voice of a human.

It’s good to see your own face

in the shadowplay

of subatomic particles

and take small intimacies with the profound

as if you’d just opened your eyes

like God’s umbrella

in the spirit’s lost and found.

It’s good to stand in your own light

under the nightskies

and add your lustre to the stars.

It’s good to abide in clarity and law.

But enlightenment is a darkness that shines

beyond the reach of your eyes

and just as space is bent

by the mass of Mars

so time is as supple as water and silk

and yesterday

is just as much the future of tomorrow

as the perennial brevity of this moment now

flowing down the lifelines of the mindstream

like a wavelength of night and time

that can’t be measured in lightyears.

I reflect on everything I’m missing

and my grief turns to wine

my tears to honey.

I resonate with the forked harmonies of time

like the tremulous skin of serpentine cosines

it sheds as it moves up my spine

like a waterclock of snakefire

pouring into the watershed of my mind.

And all the threads and rivulets

of my string theory thought

and the membranous theses

that are spun from them

are gathered up

and woven into whole cloth

over the black hole

of an acoustic guitar

the shape of a universe

as if it were a loom of music.

Time is music.

Space is music.

Life is music.

And death isn’t where the music stops.

When you listen to it

not just with your ears

but with your eyes your heart your mind your blood your skin.

When you let it come empty-handed

and go empty-handed

without trying to grasp it like a thing

you realize that everything is singing

about what it is to be a human.

And you must be a human to hear it as such

because you can never understand

more than what you are

out to and beyond the youngest stars

that are the oldest of your insights

into the birth of the universe.

Time is music

and neither time nor music

leave anything behind.

Here once

here for good.

Though time has a past and future

a coming and going

a lament and a longing fulfilled

reflected like opposites on the watermirrors of the mind

it’s still the same waterbird

cosmic note

first word

from the void in the mouth of now

waking itself up from a dark dream

with the sound of our voices

arriving in joy

and crying with relief when we leave.

I can hear the locust tree in spring

even with snow on the ground

and this hopeless duty

of a bleak window before me

singing in my ear

like the slow whisper

the murmurous humming

of an intimate voice full of bees.

Time is music.

Life is music.

Death is music.

All the syllables colours notes thoughts feelings images and symbols

all the doubts and half-lives of the certainties

all the ardency of our holiest guesses

and starless inspirations

all the brutal black lightning insights

and firefly epiphanies

that have ever expressed the hearts and minds of humans

all the homeless clarities

and godless vagrancies

of what we’re doing in the world

feeling lost in the doorways of our own thresholds

where every step we take is arrival and departure.

They’re all the picture-music of us

and we’re as indelible

as the moon dropping her petals and feathers

her hooks and thorns

her horns and claws and surgical fangs

like white swans and peonies on the river

like the eyelids of a mask she takes off

a drowned nurse

to remember whose face she’s looking at.

And you can’t remove a quaver of it.

Not the slightest detail.

Not one black swan.

Not the swerve of a single photon

with an identity crisis

striking the lightning rod of a nerve

that runs it to ground

and roots it in the body

until the mind opens

like the eye of a flower

a New England aster

that can see from the inside out

that life is a phoenix

in the ashs of a blue guitar

with the wingspan

of a locust tree in the spring

and the afterlife of a star.

Light flows through the roots

of my dendritic lifelines

like a zodiac of fireflies

streaming through space

for a place in the sun

and I can remember the bees

before the arising of signs.

I can hear them with my eyes.

I can see them with my tongue.

And I might not know

all the words to the song

or even what the lyrics

are all about

but that’s never kept me

from singing my heart out.

PATRICK WHITE

THE CLOUDS AND THE CROWS

The clouds and the crows

don’t walk the same roads I do

and the dust and the stars are journeys unto themselves

but we all share the same solitude

in a universe that’s going south.

There are things I wanted to be

with a happy brain and a good mouth

that had the spiritual life of a garden

and eras away on a distant island

I took up the pathless path of water

hoping it would follow the map of my roots

creatively

into unnamed flowers and stars.

It was easier to see way back then

that sight is a kind of love

and life is the briefest of bubbles

than it is now

the enigma of light

is caught like fireflies

in masonjars and Hubbles

and the constellations are evicted

from their ancient faces

by the deathmasks of corporate logos.

As you grow you notice the windows you once looked through

at the distant blue hills of your longing

are subtly turning into mirrors

and the heedless dice

you once threw against the walls

like moons and skulls

in spontaneous raptures of virtue and vice

are beginning to talk

in your voice

as if they had no choice.

You realize

there are as many lies

as there are truths

based upon the facts

and when people say they’re lost

and don’t trust the direction they’re headed in

it really means

they’re afraid of living themselves.

They’re terrified of their own rarity.

They’d rather be dead and secure in the darkness

than alive to the dangerous clarity

of following their mindstreams out of Eden

wherever they may lead

and whatever they may turn into

whether it be the ginger fountains of Salsabil

blooming in heaven

or the Styx Lethe Phlegathon of hell.

You can tell by the halo

around the black hole in their eyes

where the light goes in

and never comes out

that what used to be an iris

has lost its faith in rainbows

and nothing is well.

No manner of thing is well.

Even time gives up on them in disgust

at the lightyears it’s wasted on them

like flowers afraid of the Open

and leaves space to measure their lifespans

like event horizons

on the thresholds of tents in a desert.

After them

there is no deluge.

No arks on Ararat.

Just components and bones.

When the mind forgets how to flow

the body sheds its blood like a rose

that’s forgotten how to dream

on the dark side of its eyelids

that its thorns are the swords of a solar matador

at war with the bull of the moon

not a memento mori

thrown by a lover

on the coffin lid

like a kiss that blunts its lips on stone.

But a rose is a rose is a haemmorage.

The moon is gored by the solar sword

and the plenum void

pours forth its dark abundance

to feed the dog and scorpion alike.

It’s hard to look at the world for long

and still think of it as some kind of cosmic favour

some unknowable god did us in passing

but it’s one of the more delusional graces of crazy wisdom

that even to be grateful for its mere presence

and whatever dark energy

insists on being us in it

is a compassionate form of self-respect.

Of according a dignity to existence

simply because it’s you.

This agony of being

we share with ants and Cepheid variables

with great trees broken by lightning on a hilltop

with the fossils of hummingbirds

with those who sit behind curtains

at undetectable angles

with no words for what they’re looking at.

With the maggot the snake and the rat.

With the anything that everything can be.

I’m grateful for the barking of dogs in the morning

and the history of life in the light of the stars that haven’t reached us yet.

I’m grateful for my fingertips my scars my broken bones.

I’m grateful for alarmist poppies and bruised violins

and small creatures burping in the sand through their blowholes

after every wave that washes over them.

I’m grateful for blue

and oscillatory electromagnetic fields at rest

and the lies that parents tell their children

to keep them from growing up too fast.

I want to say thank you for my voice

and the old Arab in the mosque

who taught it words were living creatures.

I want to say thank you for skulls and harps

and the fact that every thought

has an afterlife of its own

that’s as sure as inspiration.

And thank you for the secrets

the paradoxes the enigmas the mysteries the questions

the insights and uncertainties.

Thank you for my emergence out of the random

like the spontaneous formations of thousands of birds

turning on the tilt of a feather.

Thank you for my grief lust rage and ignorance

and these prophetic shades

that are in compliance with my senses.

I’m grateful for the gates.

And I’m grateful for the fences.

What is life?

What is death?

What am I?

Is it light or darkness to wonder?

Thank you for Jesus and Muhammad Buddha and Brahma

and Silam Inua of the Inuit

that were engendered out of our suffering

like cool waterlilies out of the heat of our festering.

Thank-you for the clarity of smoke

and hiding what everyone is looking for

right out in the open.

Thank you for the seeing that engendered my eyes.

The hearing that shaped my ears.

The touching that wired the nerves in my skin

to the raindrop and the butterfly.

The saying that gave me a voice.

The feelings that ripened the green apple of my heart

so that sunset is sweeter than dawn

and to let go

is to live on.

PATRICK WHITE

JUST BECAUSE GOD BETRAYS YOU

Just because God betrays you

eloi eloi lama sabachthani

doesn’t mean

it’s a guarantee of your divinity

or that you can bring anything back from the dead.

Whatever gods I’ve lived through

divinity was never the issue

but how to elevate this human agony

into something that even heaven is not worthy of.

To hold all this suffering in large and small

up to the radiance of the stars

like a waterlily rooted in a swamp

and say Do you see?

This much is ours.

And our powers are great.

We can hold death deeply within us

like the dark flower

of the watershed that blooms

like the fountain of life

and transform the taste

of unimagineable suffering

into something brief and beautiful

that astonishes even God’s expectations.

We can take all the tears and the blood and corruption

and work an alchemical spell upon them

that turns the base metal into gold

when the suffering becomes intense enough

all you can feel is sulphur and mercury

turning into stone.

Medusa waxing philosophical

at the bottom of her black hole

where there is no base metal.

There is no gold.

And maybe this is a good state

but here space slashs me

as if all my feelings

were edged with broken glass

and belief in God were just another way of kissing ass.

And it’s terrifying mystically and physically

to realize how unimaginelably alone I am

in this place where even my solitude

doesn’t cast a shadow.

Dark night of my soul

on a nightsea of awareness

with no sail on the horizon

and I can’t tell

whether I’m a shipwreck or a lifeboat?

Or the usual poetic heroics

of a desperate man

walking his mile of quicksand

on his knees?

Don’t know where I’m going

but I know

this isn’t the road to Damascus

and it’s more than a stone’s throw to Sodom and Gomorrah.

But it’s not really a beef I have with God

because I wouldn’t trust me

if I were a god either.

And I’ve been too radicalized by compassion

to be a reliable heretic.

But to judge from the number of angels

dancing on the heads of the pins

they’ve stuck like insight into my eyes

I’ve got real potential as a voodoo doll.

A fool.

A clown.

As it is

tonight I am trapped in the illusion of having a self

that looks upon the universe

and feels like air in a collapsed lung.

And everytime I am randomly happy enough

to crow in the dawn of my spirit

the sun comes along

and blows whiskey on the rooster.

And though nothing’s a hundred percent

it doesn’t take me long

to grow angry and bitter and willful enough

to steel myself against giving my detractors

the satisfaction of seeing me feel sorry for myself

even when I do.

Boo hoo.

And that’s it.

And then I get back to pretending I’m a Viking or a Mongol.

I put on my wolf’s hide like a polyphrenic shaman

and dance to the music

of my howling at the moon.

Dance like a mad hornet

around my heart

I eat to give me courage

like honey from a hive on fire.

Dance to the dithyrambs

of the warrior minstrels of the forlorn hope

getting ready for their last assault

against the unbreachable walls of heaven in the morning.

Putting their horns on.

Their chain-mail haloes.

Dipping their spears and arrows

in the toxicity of their tears

to make every wound fatal.

I position myself like three hundred Spartans

at the gates of heat in Thermopylae

ready to fight to the death

to keep the fraud of my freedom

from being overun by betrayal.

By a treacherous shepherd

from a neighbouring village.

O Ephialtes Judas Brutus and Abu Sufian

nothing is forgiven.

Thirty pieces of silver.

Thirty faces of the moon.

And I’ve tasted my own incomprehensibility

on the lips of them all

as if they had a secret in common

that hated what’s sacred

about being a human

and could find nothing holy about the wound.

But they don’t know how the lies can heal

like fingertips on torn skin

or how imagination can fake the world

and make it real.

They are kept far from human and God alike

because they have yet to discover

the power of their own vulnerability.

Let he who is without sin

throw the first church.

Let he who is without imagination

not fear the last and the first

as a dress rehearsal for the worst.

Let she who has lost

the innocence of her beginning

find it unstained in the depths of her heart

like a black pearl that changes phases like the moon.

Let her exalt in the arts of her spirit

and the science of her body

without making amends to anyone

that there’s more compassion

in her imagination

than there is God

in the lack of your sin.

PATRICK WHITE