INFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Is it true

the most commpassionate people in life

are the ones in the greatest danger?

That the most generous

will lose their hands to the ones they fed?

That the bravest will be hunted down by protected cowards

and when the last of the heroes are dead

and the dragons who inspired them

are the advertising themes of amusement parks

those with the smallest balls

will give themselves the biggest awards?

Is it true

those who are creative

chafe the destroyers like anti-matter

and give the intellectuals diaper-rash of the mind?

That just to open your eyes

to watch the stars and fireflies

is enough to make other people feel blind

and insist you black them out

like pearls in an air-raid?

What’s a starmap to a mole?

What’s a lamp that shines in braille

to someone without fingerprints?

Is it true that beauty summons the worm

as a material eye-witness to its ruin?

That genius is devoured

by cannibalistic Neanderthals

into homeopathic magic

for the power of its brain

to turn thought into protein

with a high creatine content

that can make your dick strike twelve anachronistically

so you can go on knapping flint

for the next hundred thousand years?

That genius is a freak in isolation

that gets its own back

for being pecked at

like a phoenix among chickens

by opening Pandora’s box

like the atom at Los Alamos

like the geni in the lamp

and making a Trojan horse of its gifts

gives them everything they want

because anything as red

as Van Gogh’s hair and beard and ear in Arles

must be either a phoenix

or a fox with chicken-pox.

Sometimes you have more to fear

from the keys

than the locks.

Is it true

that a friend is a random event

in a space-time continuum

that’s got no room in its impersonality

for loyalty or sentiment?

That the heart has replaced the golden rule

with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

and everyone’s looking for love

like a Faberge easter egg

that’s already hatched its ugly duckling

sans fairytale?

Or the Czar’s family?

I asked Annie

as we were landing in Toronto

from the West Coast

like a waterbird with its wheels down

on a tarmac lake

is it true

that everything we thought sincere

has been exposed as fake?

That forever isn’t worth

the loveletter

it’s written on

for twenty minutes

because of temporal inflation?

Is it true

that all roads

that lead to Rome or Ottawa

never return the way they came

like arrows and fishooks and Vercingetorix?

That justice is a celebrity fame-game with ratings

brought in by a jury of mirrors

selected by the reflections of their peers

to convict the innocent

for their sins of omission?

That the God-particle

everyone’s looking for

like something they can’t get out of their eye

might not be

trying to make a point at all.

It’s hard to get a fix on

just how fundamental you are

in the scheme of things

when you’re stuck in the starmud

up to your knees

looking for your keys like koans

you swallow like pills to feel real

but hey

no big deal

but I was meaning to ask you

is it true

that we’re wounded by death

and life is the way we heal?

I know how you feel

about what’s real

but you can have all the money you want

and that still doesn’t mean

you’ll ever really know

what it means to be rich

without having to steal.

You’ve got the disease

but none of its symptoms.

Is it true

that the most successful grow

by never accepting a challenge

that wasn’t a bigger failure than the last

and call the summits of their Himalayan defeats

experience and progress?

Answer no.

Answer yes.

Answer yes and no.

Or just nod your head diagonally

like the sum of the squares of the opposite sides.

Because the questions were less rhetorical

than sincerity being facetious

I don’t expect people to answer the doorbell

or read every piece of spiritual junkmail

that shows up on their doorstep

like a flightfeather to paradise

on the wings of a seagull.

If you’re wounded deeply enough

there’s no resentment in the pain.

You just play with your brain

like an angry child plays with the eyes of a doll.

You control your rage like a nuclear reactor

or Chernobyl goes cosmic

and you throw a tantrum

that expands like the universe.

You can polish the mirror all you want

and call it clarity

until your sleeves are as threadbare

as the carpets under the windows

you’ve been staring through

as long as it take to turn your eyes to glass

but enlightenment’s on the dark side of the mirror

like a star is

like your eyes are.

Like waves on a lake

that takes things as they come.

Myriad deaths in a single birth.

Life on earth.

Intense heat.

Unusual sprouts.

A Zen sententium worth consideration.

But the clear light of the void

isn’t radiation.

It’s a lucidity

with nothing to illuminate.

It’s the Uncreate that plays creatively

in the absence of itself

like a child alone with its imagination

making the world up as it goes along

taking the Inconceivable

and making it believable.

Giving airy nothing

a local habitation and a name

as Shakespeare did

and danelions do in the fall.

As I am now

by asking if it’s true

you haven’t noticed yet

how it’s always the overprivileged

who send the underprivileged off to war?

Death in the hearts of the governors.

Death in the hearts of the profiteers.

Death in the hearts of the generals.

Is it true

this spider-web shines

like democracy in the morning

star-spangled with dew

but late at night under the streetlight

it’s tearing under the weight of its own greed?

That obese spiders who once pulled the strings

of a sticky mandala to eat well

ripen like the dead weight of toxic fruit

hanging from the branches of a dead tree?

This web is not a constellation.

This web is not a starmap.

This web is not a bloodstream

that gives back what it receives.

This web is not the lyre of a siren

that called people to the rocks of a new continent.

This web is not an electric guitar.

Is it true

the interminable buzzing of panicked flies

stuck to its strings

like masses of people

waiting to be consumed

is not the music of celestial spheres?

Empathic ingestion of agony over many years

like a fish trying to identify with heavy water

by adapting to it like a sick mother

who passed on her genes like Love Canal.

Is it true

you can die tending the ill in a hospital?

Carnage without redemption.

Eye-soup.

Severed feet.

Outrage imploding into black dwarfs

that warp space like a child’s mind

into believing God is best served by the blind

than those who can read for themselves

before they martyr her body like a judas-goat

to God’s great design

for the faithful dead

who expressed their gasp of divinity

in a holy war

a marketable crusade

a deniable genocide

a mass grave

a defensible border

that doesn’t know who gave the order

to drop cluster bombs

and white phos

on the hospital

when it ran out of bandaids

and watch it flower like a white dahlia

or a belly-dancing jellyfish

with poisonous tentacles

spreading out like the spokes of a beach umbrella.

The aesthetics of atrocity.

The age of desecration.

Is it true

the next best career move for evolution

like an unknown writer

listening to his legend gossip among rumours

like a suicide note without a table of contents

is unnatural extinction?

The mystery in the riddle of the sphinx

after all those years of sand and stars

is what would she have asked

if we weren’t there to answer.

Is it true

that Saturn’s shepherd moons

have turned into human coyotes

jumping borders like orbits

in the Van Allen Belt

where the asteroids are broken by drug rings

thawing rocks in a crack spoon

to defy the laws of gravity

with deified norms of depravity?

I might be a vague social democrat

walking a Zen plank

like a blindfolded political platform

who doesn’t need a party

to spell out

or sell out

what I believe

but it’s easier to write a folksong

about a successful thief

than a man or woman

for whom love was an art

that transcended its inspiration

and compassion the root of all understanding

and when death approached

because it’s hard to be alive and real

at the same time

embraced it as a great relief.

Is it true

that more similes turn into outlaws

than metaphors do?

That when Jesus asked

the little children to come unto him

he wasn’t speaking in tongues

behind sacred firewalls

for polyglot child molesters everywhere?

The pen might be mightier than the sword

like a mammal is to a dinosaur

but I have my doubts about a bullet

and electrically detonated C-4

wired to a lab rat like the black plague

and holy warriors

with the radioactive half-lives of dirty bombs.

Suras and psalms.

Gardens with underground rivers.

And fruit trees by flowing streams.

Shalom.

Salem.

Muslim.

Jerusalem

Islam

And Bethlehem the House of Bread

that breaks into peace

when it’s shared

like a common word

from the pelican fountain-mouth

of the same mother tongue.

Peace brother.

Peace sister.

May you live to be

forever young and free

of walled partitions

and the double helices

of chromosomatic razorwire

uncoiled like vines

around your secret gardens

where the waterlilies bloom in gene-pools

and the grapes are bleeding

like a miscarriage of sacred wines.

When the Great Lucidity appears

like a star of wheat in the Virgin’s hand

and shines down

on everyone’s shelter for the night alike

no mangers in the beginning

no arks at the end

may we all understand

that the blood-oaths of enemies

are not stronger than the bonds between friends.

May you know the enchantments of life

when it doesn’t belong to anyone

as well as you know the horrors

of disowning it now.

Or as I imagine they would say in Zen.

The pen is the sword.

It’s just a voice with words.

A lamp that gives its light away

like an extravagant geni

you don’t have to blow out to see

but you should

if you want to write good.

Black glee.

Bright vacancy.

Too much pain.

The agony of the seed realizing

the harvest was in vain

not worth what had to be endured

to live it all again.

Eleusinian ergot on the grain.

Is it true

heaven prefers

the hallucinogenically insane

and the sun only comes up

when a cock crows like a weathervane

or a God-struck lightning-rod?

On the return journey

which is more amazing than the first

you get to pass backwards

through all the stations of your life

you progressed forward through.

A prodigal innocence

that resonates with experience.

A dream reflected in a mirror

like a waterbird

dragging its wake through the clouds

like a knife ploughing a wound

through the envelope of a loveletter

no one can wake up from but you.

And no one can take away

because everything is trued by time

to the path you took

just by walking on the earth

alone on a dark night in the starless rain

when you removed the world like a mask

that proved false to your faceless pain

and you realized

how much closer a stranger is to you

than you are to your unrecognizable self.

Though pain may be prophetic

when your heart hangs on a hook

like bait on a question-mark

but great suffering doesn’t reveal anything

you didn’t already know.

It doesn’t stay.

It doesn’t go.

It’s a nothing that exists.

It’s an existence that’s nothing.

A gust of fireflies

from the mouth of a dragon.

But what does come as a surprise

like dusk overtaking the window

are the numberless eyes

that emerge from the depths of your darkness

like grapes ripening on the vine

like fish coming to the surface

like urgent diamonds

growing like mushrooms

in the long night of an abandoned mine.

Numberless eyes.

Myriad stars.

Light-years of memories.

And is it true

every one of them

is a myth in the making

each an enlightened Zen master

with nothing to teach

who insists

it’s not the stars that are shining

it’s your mind?

That they’re all within reach

all the time?

PATRICK WHITE

UP LATE AGAIN

Up late again watching the stars settle like dew on the grass.

I must have been a lamplighter in another life.

Or a firefly in an observatory.

All the windows have gone out but one or two.

The Perth watertower looks like the ghost

of a Daddy Longlegs in the distance

and the tardy townhall clock

is still trying to reset the moon to full.

The gram-masters on the corner

of Gore and the universe

are too drunk and overly curious

for their own good.

There are some dark corners

you should leave to their solitude.

If you’ve met and killed the Buddha in the road

it won’t diminish your enlightenment

by so much as a shadow

to step on the occasional toad.

Delirious with clarity

is still only one side of the mirror.

When you’ve broken the spell of its mesmerism

it isn’t as if another world view comes rushing in

it’s just that another eye opens

and you’re clear about your delirium.

My thoughts are too much of a heavy lift for a coma

and I don’t dream much on the nightshift

and there’s a starless space within me

that keeps blowing all the candles out

everytime the power goes off

so I can learn to see in the dark

where I’m going

and where I’ve been

without carrying the light on my back

like vagrant insights on a midnight mindstream on the move.

Alone in the world

but I never lack company

because the world’s simultaneously alone with me

but we’re both a little nervous

like a seasoned sailor alone with the sea

or a reunion of lovers with what used to be.

I’ve been watching the spring willows

dye their hair blonde in the Tay all day

and now their roots are showing silvergray

in the pewter moonlight.

I like to go down and sit by the water

whenever I forget how to live.

I like the way the willows

pour themselves back into the river

like fountains of lemonade

and at this time of the year

they’re wearing see-through veils

like negligees of Isis

made of spiderwebs

and fishing nets

like the star-crossed wedding laces

of their greatgrandmother’s constellations

passed down through the generations

for special occasions such as this.

And if they weep now

like young women in the spring

it’s only a light rain

but when they’re fully greened by the summer

it’ll be a waterfall.

But the world’s a snapping turtle

that won’t stay submerged for the night

like the id of the subconcious mind

and there are feathers of moonlight all over the water

where someone who felt

under-rated as a god

just raped a swan on drugs to prove it.

A serpent bites Persephone in the heel

and the spring is black with her absence

and death isn’t a crack in the void

you can easily heal

by sowing seeds

of Virgoan starwheat in the wound.

My prophetic skull bobs

like a horse chestnut

surfing its thoughtwaves

all the way to Lesbos

but I’d rather be a cherry blossom

or the empty lifeboat of an origami poem

drifting down the Yellow River

like a homeless loveletter

with nothing but

mystic black waterstars on my mind

instead of being blind-sided

by my last Maenadic dismemberment.

It’s not easy to get a gig

as a singer

or a stand-up comedian in hell

and even harder to make it big

as a court jester

when everyone’s into mimes.

You don’t raise the dead up to your lips

as if you were raising a bucket

from a wishing well

or your voice an octave higher.

Even if the music’s true

the lyrics can still prove you’re a liar.

And the Lord of Jewels isn’t a pimp

you can readily inspire

to sing along

with Sioux deathsongs at karaoke.

So down I go again.

Orpheus descending

with a wishbone harp

stuck in his throat

like a bird in a chimney

to see if I can charm death into letting you go

even if like the last time

you do look back in disbelief

at what you’re leaving behind

like a deathwish that came true.

River of fire.

River of darkness.

River of forgetfulness.

Lethe Styx and Phlegathon

running backwards in reverse order upstream

because this is hell with hope

Hades of the gibbering shades

and pre-Socratic philosophers

in the thought-fields of Elysium

standing like Druids and wandering scholars

on a sacred hill overlooking their holy wars like referees.

And all the mirrors

write left-handed in invisible ink

like the smile of the Mona Lisa

to keep the living from knowing what they think.

Sisyphus got used to rolling

his heart like a rock up a hill

only to watch it roll down again in vain

but you were an avalanche in the Rockies

and now I’m trying to excavate

a blackhole in the Old Perth Cemetery

beside Last Duel Park

like a backhoe deprived of ls

to sing you back into the light

like a vernal equinox

among the daffodils and bluebells

that keep attending your funeral

over and over and over again

like friends of the family

meant to mourn your disappearance

by showing up early

to avoid the crowds.

A last warm kiss on a cold forehead

or a cold tear on a hot stove

and I can hear the cosmic hiss of the background dead

like the afterbirth of a foregone beginning

thanking me for not trying

to extinguish their fires

like torch bearing Roman dadaphores

in the waters of a Christian life.

My fingertips burned like ashes and urns

putting them to my lips then yours

as I turned sublimely

and walked away into the immense solitude

that followed me like the echo of your name.

Thereafter I could always hear you

as I do now late into the night

sitting by this snakey water

whispering dark insights into the black mirror

that keeps its reflections to itself

like a shadow with the voice of a nightbird

bleeding in a hidden grove.

No man is an island.

John Donne.

Dean of St. Paul’s.

He’s a peninsula.

Marty Balin.

Guitarist for the Jefferson Airplane.

But one wave of you

washing up on the shores of my skin

and I can feel your breath and fingertips all over again

and the urgent way you used to kiss me

as if I were an emergency exit for pain

and my heart turns over like a full lifeboat

far out at sea among the icebergs

that float by like corpses in the Ganges.

Blood-roses for the crocodiles.

Swans for the snapping turtles.

It’s not just the nave

of the wheel of birth and death

that keeps a person centered

but the rim and the spokes as well

so when the dead come knocking

I’m a good host

and let them in

like strangers on the Road of Ghosts

or leaves on the bamboo branch

of a sumi ink painting.

Guests of my heart and art

I don’t enshrine them

in the beatitudes of oblivion

but my house is their house

my life is their life

and what I see they see

on the same side of my eyes as me

because I don’t greet them

like the black sheep of the family

who were determined to go their own way

like a prison break on the outside.

I don’t play shepherd to the dead

and though I sometimes feel like a lightning rod

I’m not a cattle-prod in a hospital morgue

and they’re not Giovanni Volta’s frogs.

Some are true as worms to the dead.

And some are not.

But if you’re a spiritual fraud

the Zen thing to do

is not get caught

fencing hot gravegoods

in the living rooms of your friends.

When you’re walking with the dead

your means don’t justify their ends

and their space doesn’t bend to your thought

even if the likeness is remarkable.

Eidolon spirit wraith

waif on the wind

your simulacrum possesses me

like a bird possesses a rootless tree

that follows it around.

Water and moon.

And this incredible longing

that makes an eye in the moonlight

inseparable from what it reflects.

Let Rhandamanthus recoil in judgment of the dead

or Anubis awake from a nightmare in a feather bed

to weigh the worth of this afterlife

I’ve spent with you

like a grail I poured back into the watershed

I took it from

like life from the womb of the dark mother

who gives birth to all of us

in secret on the far side of the moon.

Inseperable one.

Lost doll.

Sacred whore by the virgin spring

in the temples of the Iseum

sphinx and incubus

whatever sites I open

whatever windows I stare out of

however I channel the remote like a medium

you’re the banshee

the crone face of queen Mab of the Fey

the white goddess on the dark side of Kali

drinking blood libations

to each other’s spiritual health

from the skulls of their devotees

that comes in like a late-breaking wavelength

that jams the news of your unending death

on all two hundred stations.

I’m a creature of flesh and blood

and you’re into Platonic necrophilia.

Get thee to a nunnery

and I’ll sprinkle rue on the river

in our secret meeting place

where time was no friend to space

when the strong rope of our continuum unravelled

into tiny weak threads of fate

with severed Atropic filaments

for spinal cords and lifelines.

I’ve met you where the rivers meet

at every fork in the road

between your legs

at the junction

of wishbones

witching wands

lightning bolts

and snakes-tongues

anywhere one face

could speak to the dead

through the mask of the other

without feeling estranged by their violet eyes

like a blacklight on the wedding dress

that drowned Ophelia in flowers

when they recovered your body

like a blameless sacrifice to an unknown river

I’ve been sitting by for hours

like the white nights

of a winter Saturnalian

or a lovelorn dragonslayer

wan and palely loitering

waiting for his lamia to show up

late to the seance.

You’re the python priestess

in a prophetic trance of magic mushrooms

that fills my Orphic skull

like a message in a bottle from the future

with inspired oracles of oxymoronic wisdom.

You’re the divine coincidence

of my contradictories

karmic redressal

for the dress rehearsal

of my favourite incarnations.

Apollo will keep chasing Daphne

on the winds of time forever

but every moment’s a crossroads

where the dead intersect the living

like time and the eternal

like the mortal and the praeternatural

like the celestial equator with the ecliptic

at the equinoctial colure of spring

pouring out of Pisces into Aquarius

like the sea into a waterclock on the moon

where time stands still

and the midnight sun beds down with Virgo.

But this time around

you ditched the laurels

and turned into a willow

so I could run my fingers through your hair

in a whirlwind of lovers

like Sufi poets

and Paolo and Francesca

under the demotic breath of Dante in a dark wood

lost for good in his vision of Beatrice

like the ashes from the urn of a moth

caught in the updraft of a candle.

But then again

alive or dead

when were you ever not an inspiration?

Muse and atmosphere

for years

I have breathed you in

like a fragrance of light

from an intimate eye

in a private garden

passing the time

flower by flower.

And I’ve blooded every breath

deep in this heart of mine

where the vine bloods

the darkest grapes with wine

and myriad meanings make one sign

of the two of us

like many streams flowing

under the name of one river.

I have lived with you for lightyears

in a house of the zodiac

the sun never enters

because it has no fixed address

and no one looks out through any windows

that don’t belong to the neighbourhood watch.

It has no thresholds

or doors to open and close.

There are no walls

no floors no roofs or cornerstones

no living rooms and long halls

where the mirrors sleepwalk at night

no stairs to climb

no skeletons in the closet

to remind us of better times

just you and I

urgent with life and longing

listening to the watercharms of the willows

rinsing their roots in the river.

You’ve been dead for many years

but you’re not a watercolour

washed out by the rain

or stained by human tears.

You’re not a ghost

that came back to haunt a tent

like a painter you once sat for

who’s packed up his canvas and easel

and moved on like a one man caravan

to the next well of the closest mirage

that wants its portrait done.

Death is undying.

And life is unborn.

So they’re both as ageless

as ashes and fire

and what was lost in the autumn

is found in the spring

and everything that seemed

voiceless mute remote

cold as the stars

shining down on the snow

suddenly begins to sing.

And though different birds different words

might change the lyrics and intonation

from generation to generation

once a muse always a muse

and there’s no expiry date

on the inspiration

that keeps me up this late at night

like an empty grave that can’t contain

the life that stirs within it.

Everything’s that gone gone gone beyond

like Venus over the horizon of a sunset

meditating on life and death

like Buddha under the Bodhi tree

or you and I under the willows

enlightened by the morning star

returns to a dawn without limits

not a blackhole in space with its grave-face on

like the unscalable summit

of the world mountain

founded on the back of a snapping turtle

with its eye on the moon like a swan.

It’s the silence within

that shapes the word without.

It’s the fish that jumps spontaneously

that articulates the stillness of the water.

The branch that interesects

the circumference of the moon

that amplifies its roundness.

And just as you have

these many years

it’s the dead

that intensify our lives

with the intimate absence

of everything that was near to us.

Voice within my voice.

Mindstream flowing into mindstream

though we think we drink alone from our skulls

it is not true

it is not true

that we don’t pass the cup to the dead

and say as we do to one another here

like a prophet in a bottle

or a message in a whale

drink up

drink up

drink the whole river in a single gulp

because sweeter than the waters of life

from the watersheds of the dead

are the tears we shed with them

and that delirium of awareness

that is neither spiritual nor material

neither now nor hereafter

neither then nor yet to come

that we share with them like crazy laughter.

Under the willows together

at this time of night

as the wind combs out their hair

and a snapping turtle

tries to bury the moon

like a cosmic egg in a sandbank of stars

as proof that it’s really a dragon

who can bring the rain.

No world other than this one

that includes all the others

like the boundless eye includes the stars.

The way I am included in your death

like an intimate familiar

from no other side than this

we’re all on

like our eyes are

and the stars in all directions

neither near nor far

but here

where you are

and nothing’s ever missing

because now has never heard of life

and forever isn’t convinced it’s death

and you sweet one

nectar of grief

elixir of joy

honey alloy

that pours like gold and willows

from the pollen and ore of my soul

you are the belief that I’ve forsaken

as nothing more

than the schoolproof signage of fools

and you are the dream that wakes up in me

and keeps me from my bed

life after life after life

like the death in every breath I’ve ever taken.

PATRICK WHITE

BECAUSE I DON'T CONFRONT YOU

Because I don’t confront you

doesn’t mean this tree

doesn’t know how to stand up to the wind.

If I bend like a river reed in a current

I’ll still be here

long after the current has passed.

To the unenlightened it’s inconceivable

there’s nothing to win

because both opposites are empty.

Take empty from empty it’s still empty.

No reason to put a gun to your head to check it out.

Just because you’ve got a trigger

like the first crescent of the moon

doesn’t mean you have to pull it.

Three for three.

Blood and cartridges.

Strange lipstick.

But you’re still banking on the one that’s empty.

Those that have the power to hurt

but will do none.

Shakespeare.

Sonnet 94.

Lonely advice to those who never take it.

And it’s not hard to imagine

better things to do in the world

than trade barbs and stingers

with third world killer bees.

And there’s nothing unholier than a holy war.

Or a faith that festers

because it doesn’t know

how to clean a wound properly.

Even maggots make better nurses than that.

And besides

as unlikely as it seems at times

I’d rather be loved than right.

I don’t want to lie down with a woman at night

like a body count.

You say I’m not in touch with reality

as if reality were some kind of guillotine

you expected me to stick my neck out for

swanning on the block.

No.

I don’t stay in touch much

with French executioners.

But I can see the world as you see it.

A snakepit with the occasional apple-tree.

You think of reality as a hard medicine

you have to wince like a lemon to take

but if you ask me

the way you put it

reality sounds more like a toxin

than the antidote to the snake.

If the kids don’t like it then neither do I.

The iodine you pour on things

hurts worse than the original scrape.

The cure is more delirious than the disease.

You see the black door of the prison

and you want to paint it pink.

You realign the constellations

like barbed wire around a concentration camp

and reality drives up like the commandant

of what you think

to announce to the inmates

they’re in the real world now

where iron rules

and the watchdogs never sleep.

What happy fool

bemused by watching his illusions

chase their tails

and play with snakes

is going to turn his delusion in

for something as stern as that?

An ideologue is someone

whose spirit is weaker than their intellect

and ideas pack like cholesterol around their hearts

and harden like plack on their teeth.

Someone who is terminally ideational

thinks of reality as a kind of rehabilitation

for the rest of us.

A man asks for water in a desert of stars.

An ideologue offers him bleach

as if he were redressing an incorrigle wino

for giving up on reality.

And when he talks of reform

it’s like listening to a dvd

giving step by step instructions

in how to turn a chameleon into an albino.

And I see something of the same in you.

Ideologues are appalled by the sloppiness of life.

They see it as something to organize

not something to create.

They hate the suggestible mysteries

that never quite come into focus.

They want to refit the Flying Dutchman

with real sails and upgraded astrolabes.

They loathe the Uncertainty Principle

at work in their atoms and their evolution.

They look at beauty as ornamentalism.

There’s nothing functional about a sunset.

Even out in the country

I’ve heard them scolding life

for squandering itself on a flower.

Wild asters and loosestrife

are merely a silly extravagance

and there are so many stars at night

you’d think life was running a casino.

When you tell me I should get in touch with reality

I feel I should be looking for some ultimate

behind everything

some ulterior way of understanding life

that illegitimizes everything under my nose

as mere phenomena and appearance.

The rat behind the arras.

The meaning of things

that makes things irrelevant

as if what my senses perceived

were mere wrapping.

When I look at things

as if there were no inside or out

to them or me

I see the creative contents

and events of a mind

that belongs to all of us.

And there isn’t a thought or a thing

that doesn’t express the whole of it.

Delusion and enlightenment

share the same nature I do.

The star is as much me

as I am the star

so when I say the stars have opened my eyes

to how exalted you can feel

when you’re humbled

by the sublime lucidity of life

my eyes have done as much for them.

You want to put life on a diet.

And time on a budget.

Usually when someone tells me to be realistic

I’m talking to a conservative

who’s in denial about the future.

Nature is nurture

and no one’s ever left the womb

but there are available dimensions

in the dark backward abysm of time

that’s been maturing us for the last

fourteen and a half billion years

out of our own inconceivability

like wine

not vinegar

into this sublime creative collaboration

which is the life of the mind.

Whatever we create

simultaneously and seamlessly creates us.

It’s a child’s drawing.

There are no flaws in it.

What’s unrealistic about a purple sun?

Lebanese cochineal shells

for the togas of the Roman imperium.

The emperor’s got no clothes.

So you dress him up in your nakedness

and paint his portrait in purples and blues

and ask Caligula to lend him some shoes.

It’s a dynamic equilibrium of transformations.

It’s a living cosmic harmony

that’s as mystically specific and intimate

as a snowflake melting on your arm.

The dead branch blossoms

like a witching stick

whenever it’s near water

and the magician’s wand sheds its skin

like serpent-fire on the wind.

These things are true too.

Anything the Inconceivable

does or reveals

is always spontaneous

because there is no way of predicting it.

Every drop of water

that opens itself like an eye

in the infinite sea of awareness

is merely water watching water

shift its shape into fish and trees and humans.

The river turns

and the zodiacal kings of the Etruscans

bow down to Vertumamnis

who will grow up to be kidnapped by the Romans

and raised as Morpheus the god of dreams.

Or Orpheus among the Greeks

if he dreams while he’s awake.

If life weren’t creatively inconceivable

we couldn’t have been born into it

to conceive of the unthinkable.

It’s the empty cup that pours the wine.

It’s the mystery

that all our answers are looking for.

When I look at the stars

though they’re arranged in constellations

to me they are never endlessly one thing

but radiant with beginnings

going off in all directions at once.

You speak of reality

as if it were the negative

of a photographic starmap

elapsed by time.

You’re an equatorial mount with clock drive

and a colour-blind spectrograph

where your third eye used to be.

Thirteen ways of looking at the same blackbird.

Meaning infinite.

And they’re all true.

I am.

And so are you.

And what’s a blackbird

if it isn’t the primordial atom

the many in the one

nuclear fusion

the muse and the inspiration

all the combinations and permutations

of the way it will continue to be seen anew

in every moment

as if it will always be the beginning of creation?

Six trillion miles in a light-year.

And Proxima Centauri 4.7 light years away.

The next star over unfencible time and space.

You look at the insurmountability of these distances

and you think that’s how far it is from here to there

and your isolation brings you to the precipice of despair

when your omnidirectional self

looks creation in the face

and mistakes humility for insignificance everywhere.

And you say to yourself

there’s no point or place

for a period

at the end of an infinite sentence.

And you make a brutal discipline of your irrelevance

and call it reality

and the dead begin to legislate for the living

and the blind for those who can see.

Van Gogh said it best in a letter to Theo.

Some people live their lives

as if they were walking to the stars.

Some take the train.

And some fly.

For the birds

nothing’s ever further away

than their wingspan

as it is with fish and fins.

And turning the jewel in the light

and looking at its infinite flashs of insight

without the glass eye

of a Cyclopean appraiser

cut it up atomically

like a butcher or a surgeon

deciding on where to make the next incision

I would add that like a star

even after billions of years on the road

whose light never really leaves home

because everywhere it goes

it’s in the doorway

on the threshold

because there’s no discontinuity

no distinction

no severance

between a ray of light and its source

between a way of life and its course

there’s a fourth kind of pilgrim

who just has to look up at the stars

or the sun and the moon

or Venus luxuriating in the sunset

if he wants to shine down on everything.

So if I don’t confront you like a bottom-feeder

on the floor of your thinktank

rising to the surface

like a scumbag to high public office

it’s not because I’m a coward or a fool.

It’s just that I’m enrolled

in this funny kind of school

where you learn through experience

to use your ignorance

as a teaching device

to enlighten the Buddha.

What’s water to the goldfish

is water to the barracuda

without and within

every wave of water light and life

the whole sea of awareness at high tide

the whole sky with all its myriads of stars

tatooed on the skin of a water droplet

that thinks it’s tough

to stick pins through the eye of an inkwell

like an Oedipal voodoo doll

with Medusan issues

because she never had a mother

who didn’t turn her heart to stone.

Water is fish.

Fish is water.

Air is bird.

Bird is air.

Earth is worm.

Worm is earth.

And fire is a phoenix that nests in its own ashes.

And you can ask the moon

if you don’t believe me.

Sometimes the water

makes a quick exit

and swims out of you

like tears and light-years of neap tides

but there’s never going to come a time

whether you measure it in lunar months

or waterclocks

or the wavelengths of a snake-pit

you’re ever going to swim out of it.

PATRICK WHITE

THIS PROPHET SWALLOWED THE WHALE

This prophet swallowed the whale

and there’s a sorrow that haunts me inside

like a heavy bell that’s already written the music

but hasn’t caught up to the lyrics yet.

I’m riding a wave of tears like a dolphin

nudging a drowned man toward a shore

that keeps disappearing over the horizon

like an island that’s afraid of the dead.

I am encumbered by a grief that weeps glass

and moves like a python of lava

a wavelength of life

that’s a path unto itself.

An old unknown sorrow

an ancient ore of suffering

that hasn’t ripened into gold yet.

The empty wombs of the hydrogen clouds

that were the first to give birth to the stars.

The echo of exhausted siloes

that finally found their voice

when there was nothing left to say.

Something I can’t see

but I seem to understand.

And sometimes I even think

the rocks feel it and the trees

and it’s rooted in the very heart of things

like our veins and arteries are.

Not a longing for anything that exists

but an absence that’s been waiting

to be fulfilled by someone.

An incomprehensible sadness

that probes the disposition of humans

to determine the fate of a star.

And yet it has the wisdom of a mountain

and the weight of the sea about it

and in its heart

a thorn like the crescent moon

and the blood of a million roses

that didn’t end in love.

Sometimes it’s so intense

I think I can hear far back in the cave

a wounded Medusa crying alone

that even her tears turn to stone

when she looks at herself in a mirror.

I know the drunks feel it

especially at night

after they’ve fallen down

for the last time

before the morning light

and they look up at the stars

that don’t mind where they sleep it off.

Sometimes it seeps into my dreams

like the taste of saltwater mingling with sweet

and there’s a plea in its presence

as if it were asking me to bury

the afterbirth of death

so it can rest easy in oblivion

knowing the right thing was done at last.

One moment it’s the wasteland

of a lunar watershed

resigned to its lost opportunity

like a widow at a window

making love to the rain

and the next

it’s an unborn child

that’s been wounded by its future

in the womb of now

and knows more about abominations to come

than even the most inhuman of us do.

Bruised flower.

Blue lotus.

Black rose.

Your sadness is a strange elixir

on a poet’s tongue

a fragrance of pines in the shadows

their resins sticky with moonlight

like slow emotions that keep to themselves.

I experience you like a mysterious symbol

of all that is injured and broken by life

of all the struggle and agony

of those the mountains cast down

like the bodies that lie frozen

with their mouths open

on the unapproachable slopes of heaven.

You are the old woman

who comes late to the battlefield with the crows

looking for her son

like a ring that slipped from her finger

knowing the real devastation

doesn’t start until the war is over.

Not even a maggot has ever fouled the light

that shone upon it

but I can feel the silence of your compassion

for all those who have been deluded

into thinking they do

and pass judgment on themselves

like an eclipse upon their shining.

You are the custodian of prophetic skulls

and I sense the great tenderness

in the way you caress them like ancestors

who are grateful to have someone like you

to talk to.

What secret graces

do you whisper to them

to leave such silly grins on their faces

long after their faces have gone?

What do you say

that makes them gape?

If I were to ask them

would they break salt and bread and words with me?

Would they predict the past

turning their zodiacs in reverse

like deep sky objects

ahead of time and space?

Dark mother

what woes do you embody

what unspoken despair seals your lips

what unfinished lives

what green works

what blossoming passions that never guessed

by late spring

among ubiquitous beginnings

they were already past their prime

and perishing?

Is it your voice or theirs

that summons me to listen

to the abandoned picture-music

of these icons in exile

no one reclaims

from the spirit’s lost and found?

The undiscovered genius

who lived too long

to be a tragic loss

and the child prodigy

who died too young

to sacrifice her facility

on the altars of her art.

Do they find salons for the rejected

like eyes that weren’t acceptable

in the open abyss of your embrace

hanging their works

like constellations in the sky

so no can miss

what’s obvious about the night

and singularly rare?

I can feel the desolation in your sorrow

like an elephant in a graveyard

who can’t forget anything.

And what is this buoyant heaviness

but the perennial testamonial

of the leviathan within me

remote and deep

that never comes up for air

but what the sea feels

after so many millions of years of giving life

to plankton and whales

who took what they knew

about being wolves

and turned back to the water

like prodigal sons and daughters

with stories from foreign lands

and extra-uterine worlds?

Lonelier than the small self-effacing smile

of the Mona Lisa

resigned to the truth

she couldn’t share with anyone

that she would give birth

and die young

I sense in you as well

the same ambivalent incomprehension

that stills the wind

and leaves the tides flatlining

to see the number of needles

piercing the eyes of the voodoo doll

you played innocently with as a child

like harpoons in the side of the moon.

Sharkfin soup.

Canned dolphin.

As if the only food

that could be tasted anymore

in this feeding frenzy of appetities

the only things worth ordering

on this menu of an abbatoir

were all taboo.

Bad meat.

Blood in the water.

Peacock’s tongues

and butterfly antennae

the livers of black bears

and tiger dicks

original Viagra

elephant tusks

and rhino horns

and the hands of silver-backed gorillas

and whales in the morning

running from slaughter in pods

beached and dying

under their own weight

all along the beach

like a miscarriage of faith in life in Jonestown

because there’s nowhere left to swim

where the sea hasn’t turned into black kool-aid.

All the lifeboats returning like surgical barges

full of body parts

torn from your womb

as if it were the backdoor of a hospital

without a crematorium.

I wait like hieroglyphics

in this desert of stars

with long afterlives

and no islands

for you to open your mouth

like a Rosetta Stone of scars

and speak to me in the native tongue of your sorrows.

My gumboots are stuck in the starmud

like words that weren’t invited to the dance

and the guitar in my voice

is that dunce in the corner

gathering dust

waiting for new strings

like a puppetmaster

who can pick it up and play the blues

for a lady of the lake who’s worth more

than the dues she’s paid

to keep it all in

like wounded water

in a lunar womb

that never breaks.

What spirit of sad wine

are you trying to mature to birth in me

like autumn in the grape?

Have I not already thrown

the ceremonious sword of my lunar art

like a sacred blade

that was raised on my blood

from the rainbow arc of the bridge

as a tribute to your river

that it might be washed clean of me

without profaning the mindstream?

Young moon in the arms of an old light

it’s well past last crescent

and I still don’t know

if it’s a lover or a crone

that’s opening the gate

this late at night.

But I’ve left the door ajar

and a candle burning in the hall

for you to find your way

across the threshold of my homelessness.

I have established peace

among the duelling keys

that kill one another

to be privvy to the secrets of my heart

by taking off all the locks.

And every breath I take in the dark

is the atmosphere of an unknown planet

looking for signs of life

when it opens its eyes to see you.

Is Isis in mourning over my dismemberment

or are you the star on the left-handed sailor

that will keeping me from drowning

in the great resevoir of northwest passages

you keep like a private library in Atlantis?

How long must I wait

like a dead seabed of shadows on the moon

for your ancient ice palace to thaw underfoot

for you to lift your own veils

and throw off

this dark pall that shrouds me

in your carboniferous wisdom

like the cube of the Kaaba in imageless black

and offer me your longing and your lips

like the cornerstone of a meteorite

putting my forehead to the ground

I can bow down

and kiss?

And if I’m done.

If I’m finished.

If you’re the crone

who knows where I am buried

and you’ve come back for me

like a widow I am married to in the future.

Unhood Horus.

Take the blinders off the falcon of the sun

like bandages off the new faces

of the mummies and plastic surgeons

and let him make whole

that which is partial and scattered.

Gather me up like wheat you’ve sown

within the compass of your blade

under the second full moon in October

and let the wounded bull of my heart

ensure the fertility of next year’s siloes

by pouring the mystic bounty of my blood

the dark abundance

bright vacancy

of my life and art

like the high tide of a libation

over the skull of the moon

so that I can feel you flooding in on me at last

through the trees

through broken windows

through the mirrors that fear

they’ve lost their beauty

through the hidden jewels

in the ores of illusion

through the eyes of hurt children

and the adolescent lenses

of moody telescopes

projecting their passions on the heavens

through the cataracts of aging visions

that have let the clouds

overgrow their gardens in the sky

like weeds they can’t keep up with

through the damaged hearts of irreparable mailmen

who shut the moon out

like lunaphobic loveletters they never send

imagining somehow someone might actually answer

even the damned

who live in fear of miracles.

Inundate me like Noah

Atlantis Mu Dilmun

The Bay of Fundy at high tide.

Let me drown like a lover

outside on a rainy night

when the streetlamps are smeared

like lipstick on a mirror

with a painting knife

and no one’s coming to meet me but you.

I picture you as the view

that all windows aspire to

and you as the janitor of lost causes

that sweeps the stairs of stars

like discarded lottery tickets

and scars on the cards and dice

that could have cut either way

but didn’t win.

Seven came and passed

but eleven was too much to ask.

To begin is to risk

and no one risked beginning again after that

because they had nothing left to lose

except you

and you took them in

like a condemned hotel

on the wrong side of the tracks

of the high-flying zodiacs

and gave them a place for the night

where not to have any luck

was still o.k.

Just because you’re a black hole

still doesn’t mean

you can’t be starstruck.

The ravens haven’t stopped stealing the silver.

And the fish still rise to the lure

like city pimps to something pure.

But I sense you’ve always known this.

That you’ve always been the best of healers

because you don’t apply

the moon like a poultice

to lepers

to draw the infection out.

You don’t attach leeches like eclipses

to bleed the fever

and treat the mind

by putting blinds on its delirium.

You are the mysterium tremendum et fascinans

and your eyes are more potent

than the laying on of hands.

You let the dead summon their own saviours

from the grave.

You let the cowards walk with the brave

so the heroes can deepen their courage and heart

by learning what it means to be afraid.

And for those who think

that timing is the content of life

you’re the bus that’s late.

Everyone’s a perennial in your presence

even the weeds and the wildflowers

and the hopeless bouquets

with expiry dates

arranged like Zen gardens in garbage cans

by desperately improbable humans

hanging on by a hinge

the slumlords won’t fix

like the quantum gate

to your infinitely expanding starfields.

Sex is an expression of love.

Love is an expression of sex.

And the word fuck

the English stole from the Dutch

when their fleets fleeced the golden ram

means to batter someone.

Do violence to their person.

As in I’m going to fuck you up.

Not let’s make the beast with two backs

in an alchemical connubium

of Hermetic transformation

and turn all this base flesh

into a gold rush.

But word on the street is

they’re both mafia rats

in a two way mirror

burning saints in the palms of their hands

making deals to open their mouths

taking vows to keep them shut.

An etymological confusion of sex and destruction

eros and thanatos

an alloy of breath and death.

Venus might hang on the arm of Vulcan

but she smells like the sweat of Apollo.

And you might be life

you might be death

you might be light and love

or the Babylonian Harlot

or none and all of the above

but my heart tells me

you’re the crazy wisdom

that blossoms like deadly nightshade

in the lonely recesses of an enlightened brain

where great pain speaks to itself

like the hard rock on the mountain

or a dry well to the rain.

Being and nothingness are not peers.

They’re not cloned from the stem cells of mirrors

and replication might be a material form of immortality.

Everybody’s eyes are black and blue

But reflection is the half-life of a cosmic radiance

that doesn’t see things with the same eyes

in the same light most people do

because when you blow it out

like a candle at the end of its wick

it enlightens the room for billions of years.

The moon jumps over the cow

and compassion transcends its tears

and even the tragic deliberations

of the most serious-minded fools

are the spontaneous schools of the buddhas.

Great illumination

keeps it secrets

like seekers to itself.

And it’s easy to mistake the truth

for that crumb of a dream

in the corner of your eye

when you lie to fake reality

but it’s not proof of anything

except that you’re not awake yet

to your own lucidity.

Your seeing maligns what shines

by not being it.

It’s your own blood

you’re wiping off the blade with your tongue

when the truth wounds.

Lies that heal are wiser than hurtful facts.

And even the midnight sun

that has nothing to do with flowers

when all is said and done

is not the sum of its acts.

Conceptual thinking

is like trying to fix the stars to your eyes

with thumb-tacks.

It’s not the stuff that myths are made of.

The moon doesn’t ride Zeus like a white bull

and Zeus doesn’t fuck swans

with a condom on

because all gods at heart

are socially transmitted diseases

that weaken the immunity

of your own human divinity

to keep them apart

like the sea from sweet water.

And I think that’s what makes you so sad about us.

Like a mother resigned

to the children who doomed

the dreams she had of them

like a miscarriage of life

long after it’s left her womb.

We’re fallible fire-gods looking for fire

among the shadows we cast

like the writing on the wall

in a dangerous neighbourhood.

The gods never ask about the divine

because it’s always

a human that answers.

The gods water the wine

of earthly compassion

that sweetens the bitter truth

like fruit on the vine

with our own tears.

But I’m only guessing

you’re the forlorn muse of the expired hope

that inspires the dead and the living alike

You’re as aloof as the rumours of truth

that disappear into the distance

like prayers and birds

and the smoke of burning heretics

purged of their humanity

at auto de fes

held in public squares

for private control

to remind the crowds

how dangerous it can be

to be

to be who

to be who you are.

To be the thesis

antithesis

synthesis

of your own triune identity.

The three in one version

not one in three perversion

of your own faceless trinity.

And as for me and my house

my spirit moved and bruised

by these suggestions

of who you might be afterall

following me through the shadows

of this temple wilderness

ever since I was a kid

growing up in the logging camps of B.C.

like a big cat

half hunting half playing with me

where parallel paths converge

on the periphery of prophetic vision

I choose the sanctity of a profane woman

to the profanity of a holy ghost.

Your blood is wine.

Your flesh is bread.

You breathe in the last breath of the dead

and you give it life again.

It blooms in you like a flower

and if it’s only for now an hour or eternity

it will still live as outrageously as life on earth

agelessly giving birth

to hearts and minds

that don’t need to waste their time

defending their humanity

against the blind groping for the blind

to put out the eyes

of what’s spontaneously divine

and earthbound about us.

And I suspect prophetically it’s you.

Or maybe I’m just a Sufi weathervane

that’s come to a crossroads in life

and falling to earth from sidereal spaces

like some panspermic meteorite

high on amino acids

I’m elaborating into protein

like the beginning of a new life

I’m finally getting up on my feet

and all this is just a mystic delirium

of prophetic vertigo

to let me know

which direction should take me

to go where I go.

And it’s hard to tell

by the calm of my awareness

whether you’re near

or I’m caught in the third eye

of a spiritual hurricane

like a bird on the wing

but I feel no fear

and I’m used to the pain

and whenever I see you

out of the corner of my eye

and glimpse the beauty of your compassion

and sense there’s nothing about being a human

in the way you look upon people and things

with the emotional wisdom

of your sad-eyed night vision

with all its stars and fireflies

lit up like candles and tears

in the chandeliers of the constellations

writing earthly myths for unearthly lamps

I know there’s nothing about being a human

by the way you love them

not just for who they are

but who they wanted to be

that was ever a condition of anything.

Infinite in your intimacy

you might be the morning star

shining alone in the sunset

of an estranged way of life

that accepts humanity as it is.

Holy water without the fizz.

Nothing to unmask

Nothing to reveal.

No grave to rise from

that isn’t the cradle of a prophecy

that’s already been fulfilled.

The whole shoreless sea

of enlightened awareness

in every wavelength of insight

that illuminates and adumbrates the mind

whatever the weather

and everyone mystically specific

and indiscriminately alone together

in the same lifeboat

rowing with every pulse of their hearts

to the rescue of the illusory bubbles

they wear like lifejackets

to keep them afloat.

And though every glimpse I have of you

is the merest suggestion of a flightfeather

from a nightbird folding its wings

on the waters of life within me

I can intuit from the way I feel

the Y of the witching wand

twitching in my hands

like the cross of a human

with uplifted arms

that you’re near

that you’re real

that you’re the muse

and the inspiration

that raises this goblet

and rises like a living fountainmouth

to speak for the great watershed of the dead

you carry in your womb.

That you’re the void in the voice

that engenders these worlds

within worlds within words

that fit the forms of things like skin

such that

eye to eye

inside and out

with faceless space

where all things end

is precisely where they begin

and the less I know about nothing

the more reason I have to sing.

PATRICK WHITE