CHILD, IT'S OKAY TO BREAK

CHILD, IT’S OKAY TO BREAK

Child, it’s okay to break.

Go ask the trees.

They’ve been through a few ice storms themselves.

And, yes, sometimes the lightning

mistakes your unicorn for a lightning rod

and strikes it like a drone out of the blue

when no one’s home but you on a Friday night

because you’re ashamed to go out

for fear of people seeing what your boyfriend did

when he came down on you like the Leonids.

And I’ve seen how you’ve tried

to craft tiaras out of broken chandeliers,

how you’ve sat late into

the darkest hours of the night

alone at the kitchen table

trying to pick up the pieces

and try to put them back together again

like a jigsaw of your battered reflection

in a shattered mirror that cracked

more like a fortune-cookie than a koan.

And, yes, I understand how hard it is

the more he’s false to you

to have to be true for the both of you

to keep the dream alive

of something nurturing, something

the way you imagined it would be

for you and your son and his misunderstood father.

And it feels like a wasted sacrifice to the wrong god

when you realize for all the pain you’ve suffered

you’re just a pyramid

trying to do social work with quicksand

that keeps getting kicked in your face.

You’ve been pouring a mirage

into a bottomless cup of emptiness.

And you’re afraid of your own happiness

as if you were raising the shadow of its assassin

to follow it everywhere like a personal diary.

And isn’t it true you’ve learned

to shred your joys in secret

like an embassy that abandoned you

when you asked for sanctuary

like a candle in a storm

and they suggested there was nothing

that could be done for you or your son

or your misunderstood boyfriend

but blow the light out

if you want to see better in the dark

what you’re running from. Denial,

rejection, self-recrimination, self-disgust

at how much bad meat your wishing well

has had to swallow, and even worse,

how your love potion number nine

smells like wild orchids blooming

in the shadow of an outhouse, and tastes

like someone watered down the wine with mouthwash.

Hey, pussycat, you’re trying to build a bridge

across a river with only one bank.

And it’s brutal, yes, when you take

the blindfold off and realize

sometimes love’s a kidnapper

and all you’ve been doing all along alone here

is walking the plank to get to the other side of nowhere.

And even after he’s gone,

paying a ransom on your emotional afterlife.

Or you were keel-hauled on the moon

when the ice-berg struck

the Great Barrier Reef of an ice age on the move.

You’re the last lifeboat

that’s got any room for your son

and you’ve been grievously wounded

by trying to walk like Cinderella

on the thorns of glass

that are all that’s left of your crystal slipper

splintering across the sky,

the sign of a constellation

on the verge of a nervous breakdown

trying to distinguish the dreamcatchers

from the leg hold traps.

Child, it’s ok to break. Cry.

It’s not healthy to live too far away from tears.

And, hey, kitten, a little advice from the alley

you’re living three doors down the passage to hell.

It’s not wise to wear your heart on your sleeve

when you’re in a knife-fight with a serial killer

who keeps sticking it to you over and over again

just to prove he loves you

like the cheap thrill of the killing.

It’s one thing to be taken in lust

by a god in the guise of a beast,

but it’s another altogether

to upstage yourself in the name of love

and throw the fight out of habit

to keep the peace with impotence

shaking its fist at your sex because it fears

the magic in your medicine bag

is a lot stronger than the two little beans

he’s waiting to sprout beside the bed

as if the story of Jack and the Beanstalk

went to his head gigantically

like an ax with a castration complex.

Child, it’s ok to break. Laugh.

Come on, just once, if you can’t be happy,

try a little evil glee at least.

It doesn’t mean you’re spitting on a deathmask.

You don’t have to aim

like cobras and the Taliban

for a literate girl’s eyes.

But wouldn’t it feel good,

just for a second to wipe the smile

off a cruel clown’s face with industrial disinfectant?

Wouldn’t it be absurdly gratifying

to confront the mirrors

that have been bullying you

with a shepherd moon

on a collision course

plotted out by the flightplan in your hand

and watch them run from you for a change.

The way I see it through my spaced-out telescope

you’re boyfriend is a tiny mutant asteroid

all ore, no gold inside, that shines

by your reflected light, iron pyrite,

a mere nugget of a man you keep

trying to hang on to like an atmosphere.

Of course you’re going to get kicked around

in this asteroid belt of broken hearts

were everybody’s ready to throw the first stone

at any sign of life that could threaten

the lack of one of their own.

Just once, forgive yourself

for something you didn’t do.

Just once, let go, whether you

fall like Icarus toward the sun,

jump from that paradise you’ve

been trying to make on earth,

that’s been jumping all over you,

or just kick it like a bad drug

that’s been getting high on you

like a voodoo doll on coke.

You’ve been holding on to a lot of things

your son, your dreams, a few ideals,

the odd, outcast trinket

you befriended in your solitude

because you both shared the same fate,

a gerrymandered liferaft

of what was left of your enchanted island

after the tsunami hit you first like a spell to the heart

and then raised its fist against you

for the first time in your life.

Child, it’s ok to break. To weep.

To liberate that snakepit inside

that’s tied you up in knots.

You keep trying to enlighten your chains

as if you could change iron into gold,

and even though I know you think

you sometimes manage it,

and who knows, maybe you do,

but you’re still held as fast to the wall

to face the music, to proofread the warning,

as you ever were

when a hand reaches out for your throat.

You’re handcuffed to your own haloes.

Too much Madonna, not enough Mary Magdalene.

After the blossom, the bitter green apple.

The kiss. The smile. The wince. The grimace.

The unending last farewell whether it’s

the sound of a sad friendship

or an ego breaking up along stress fractures

like the great continent Pangaea

to diversify the species of its hatred.

And then who knows how or why or when

if you’re lucky, moonrise and ripening

as a less percussive music flows into your veins

like an autumn night listening to a nightbird

wondering why it sings in hiding

from all who can hear it, but one.

You haven’t underwhelmed your beauty.

Your vanity is proof enough of that.

Hey, Tabatha, you’re still a witchy cat.

You haven’t sold your innocence cheap.

You didn’t rat it out in your sleep.

If there’s nothing to go back to

maybe that’s because it’s waiting for you up ahead.

But you’re never going to know if you don’t go.

Child, it’s ok to break. It’s how we grow.

All these closed doors and gates of passage

we leave open behind us as if time

might double back somehow to find us again

seeking enlightenment in a cult of black sheep.

If there’s no return address

on the arrowhead in your wound

it’s not a loveletter. It’s not a keepsake.

And, yes, it hurts like hell, you’ve got to

bite down hard on the moon, swallow

the bitter antidote of your afterlife

to push it all the way through

the eye of the needle in an attempt

to mend paradise like an old rag that used to fit.

For awhile you’ll feel like a dying planet

on an artificial respirator in an abyss

so vastly indifferent and impersonal

it makes death look like a rank amateur.

And then your mind vitrifies

and space turns to glass

and time blows bubbles you’re trapped inside

like insight in a multiverse of crystal skulls

and for two or three weeks

you shriek like a mystic to reach

the highest celestial note in your repertoire

that might be able to shatter it

but it’s not until you lose your voice

that it usually does like a koan

that gives up on trying to understand you.

Child, it’s ok to break.

Throw that rock through the window.

Add that flame to the pyre or the stake

depending on whether you’d prefer to be cremated

standing up or lying down.

Get off that planet. Stop wasting

good oxygen on a lost cause

that doesn’t know how to breathe for itself.

Get out of the egg, the net, the noose

and see how big the sky and the sea are,

how good it feels to spread your wings

and feel the delirium of the wind gusting under them

as if it were high on stars,

how pretty your neck is

when it’s not wearing

the usual, brutal jewellery of a punching bag

like a tear-shaped locket

trying to hide your shame

like a bruised pearl from prying eyes.

Child, it’s ok to break.

Like seeds and hearts and cosmic eggs,

you break, and then you rise.

PATRICK WHITE

HOW RARE THAT ANYONE

How rare that anyone prefers the real,

fire that can drown, water that burns;

the whole of the night sky

form-fitted to your face like a skin

of translucent cellophane

that takes your breath away.

My heart marches like a little drum in a vast darkness

toward a war

it is important not to win.

The stars are strewn like white sweet clover

along the roads of brave men in masks,

but the true holy wars are faceless

and the martyrs always die alone

like leaves without names,

like a species that went extinct

before it was discovered

to be the only known antidote

to terminal literalism.

Follow your thoughts far enough into delusion

and they’ll fray like ropes,

like the deltas of ancient rivers,

like the burning bushes of evolution

under the mammary bell-curves

of thermophilic bacteria,

the voice of God, denuded of its mystery,

the magmatic venting

of a deep sea fumarole.

The fools enthrone themselves like rivers

in a palace of salt in a desert

that withers like lightning in the root,

but the wise know they play with their lives

long into the late afternoon

like toys that don’t belong to them

and will be taken back

by the lengthening hands of the shadows

that approach us like slow dreams.

And what’s the body if not

a bag-pipe full of water

leaking out of itself like the highland lament

of a widow in the rain?

Flesh rises and falls

like the curtain on a bad play

as one by one time ushers

friends, lovers, family out of the audience

until not even the echoes are listening.

Most die like the understudies of stars

that never made an appearance;

darkness falling like the eyelid of a stage

booked for a dress rehearsal of ghosts.

We’re the flame of a little flower

marqueed for the blink of a lightbulb

in the nightclubs of the stars

that go out like fireflies in our tears.

And the mystics wait like massive coronaries

in intensive care

for God to come like a heart donor

only to find she was the wrong blood type,

and the scholars study themselves to death like desks,

and the teachers espouse

their ignorance with authority,

and the lovers get drunk on the blood of snakes

to hallucinate roses and wine,

and most of the poets

desert their own shadows like blossoms

somewhere along the vine

to crush their eyes like emeralds

against the anvil of their palettes,

their mouths the skeletal hulls

of overturned lifeboats

that threw their words overboard like passengers

to save themselves,

desperately hoping

a village of magic lanterns

would run down to the shore in a storm

to salvage savage little me.

Everyone licks the empty, lustrous stone,

the simulacrum of love,

for a taste of life,

but who can draw their tongue out like a sword

from the ore of the dragon

that keeps them from the secret

of what they are?

Who can hear what the nightbird isn’t singing?

Little doors, little windows,

gulfstreams of weeping glass,

when will you ever learn

to sail your own eyes

over the edge of the known world,

transcending all your stars

like starmaps configured

by a random throw of the dice

pocked with shallow graves

like the fangs of a blind snake

that swallowed you in utero,

mistaking your cubist cornerstones

for the cosmic egg?

How else can you hope

to turn your scales into feathers,

stop crawling like a ripple of blood on its belly

to die like another ladder of bone

that couldn’t right itself

like the mast of a waking dragon

in this desert of shapeshifting winds

to climb up to the urgent beds of the rain?

And how rare to meet anyone

this deep into the silence

with the spine

to play the harp of their own lightning,

whose life isn’t the voice of a barnyard bird

they put up against their heads like a wishbone

and pull like a trigger.

PATRICK WHITE

EMPTY-HANDED I COME

EMPTY-HANDED I COME

Empty-handed I come; empty-handed I go.

The road has no name.

The destination doesn’t exist yet.

By my side, no one. Little bird, you want to drink

from the dragon’s chalice, but faces from now

I will not know you; the mirror

will not breathe. Unlovable, strange, some

warrior mystic under an expanding sky

where the stars move further and further apart

I hammer swords of light out

on the igneous anvil of my heart

folding the metal

like the first edition of a holy book until the edge

draws blood from space

with a slash of lethal intelligence.

The clowns of God are rehearsing for a play like this

and you have your lives, your disgraces to live;

your clock of lies that says

it’s always a lonely time to forgive. Now and here, never

anyone or anything, all objects turned to thought;

ahead, the eerie seduction of living for nothing

and all behind, the auroral dispensation of delusion.

Did you do well? Did you do poorly?

Are you clad in the rags or robes of life?

Is your mind wired to lightning

or are you just another flake of heat in the desert;

a gesture of extremes, hallucinating?

I’ve never liked people much; they

bruise the eye of the wine

and keep the flowers of night in a straitjacket.

They don’t know how to take themselves seriously,

mistaking maggots for magi. Their diamonds

don’t flow; across the streams of their being

they build dams out of crutches, houses of God

out of the bones of the ethnically cleansed.

Their children sit at the feet of eggs

giving lectures on the perils of flight. Offered wings

they cling to their fear of heights

and dread death like a crack in the sky.

I’ll take the hawk over the barnyard every time;

the wolf over the house-broken dog, I will not

masticate shadows in a well-trained field.

I may be only a drop of blood

hanging from the horn of the moon, a nail

of salamander gold regenerated in the fire

to plank a leper’s coffin, all my work, the invention of the wheel

for birds, a leader that follows, always a needle off north.

I would rather see what the widow sees

in the petty eyes of her beloved

when he’s laid out in the living-room

like a gambling debt even death couldn’t pay.

I would rather be impaled in hell

on the tip of an eyelash of true insight

than wobble my way through this gallery

for the blind

begging donations from the light. Let those

who have gerrymandered their minds

into emergency wards for the heart receive

silos of what they’ve sown, seven years

of lean and fat

and a mini-series of death certificates

notarized by a grave-digger

taking invitations at the door. I would rather

rage like a pagan wind in the orchard of my own face

than to have even the slightest of my solitudes

whisper one word of falsehood

at this trial of seeing. Let the dead give witness,

let the blind swear, the ignorant insist,

the cripples lie and the cowards balance; still

you will be sentenced

by a knock on the door in the silence; still

you’ll expire like a parking meter

or a pensioned saint

on the way to paradise, mermaids in the wave,

maggots in the rose.

PATRICK WHITE

IN THE NAMELESS REALMS OF MY MINDLESSNESS

IN THE NAMELESS REALMS OF MY MINDLESSNESS

In the nameless realms of my mindlessness

where everything that could be said

has been spoken

without being understood

the multiverse keeps repeating itself

like the decimal point of an incommensurable.

The needle of an early sixties record player

worn down like a diamond with cataracts

in orbit around a black LP of the old celestial spheres

still trying to waltz to the picture-music of their chandelier tears.

I’m expanding the available dimensions of poetry

to give myself more lebensraum

without goose-stepping across Russia

as if I had a golden egg up my proverbial.

I conquer in diaspora like the stars.

And I don’t really care

if anyone believes me enough

to understand this

but if they look into my mind

without a mirror between us

they’ll find their own

as clear and unique and homeless as space.

And the darkness that scrys

their prophetic skulls

will conform to the lines in their face

like a love poem

deep in the heart of the night

when it’s raining crystal balls.

And the dirt on the window

that was drawing all day

people the size of its thumb

will show its masterpiece to the stars

to be hung like a new constellation.

And the green bud who cut

her throat on the moon

to free the rose in her voice

will speak to her lover

like a scarlet ribbon

around a gift that she meant to send him.

And you who judge these affairs

as mere rumours of the heart

will come to know

what longing means

when fact falls in love with art.

In the nameless realms of my mindlessness

there’s a room that is waiting for everyone

to show up like a door.

And in the vastness of this mental state

their feet are the threshold and floor

of the last address

of the nightbird in the tree

that waits for the moon like mail.

And you can hear its impassioned reply from here

like the kite that just flew out your window

to solo on its own.

If you look the dragon in the eye.

If you’re not afraid

to stand like a stranger in your own doorway.

If you’re fanatically desperate enough

to thread the eye of the needle

like a noose in the knot at the end of the road

where the world stands on the shell of a turtle

waiting for the big moment to make a move

taste this thornapple of your own madness

and I shall make a gift to you

of my freedom and solitude

and everywhere you walk

like a nightwatchman

lamp in hand

the candle will not be lost

on the long road it’s been following like smoke

and gold will pour from your wounds

like bliss from the ancient ores of your sadness.

I shall not take you by the hand.

I shall not allure you in the wilderness.

I shall not walk beside you

like a mountain or a lighthouse

or reassure you when it isn’t

that it was all just a dream.

In the nameless realms of my mindlessness

there are no holy wars

among the godless telescopes

trying to explain what they don’t understand

by quoting sacred books

like laws they make up

from the prophetic gossip of man.

There are no teachers.

There are no guides.

No signs.

No starmaps.

No cosmic paradigms

to snare the psyche in its thesis

by reassembling all the pieces

like a butterfly in a spiderweb.

But I will offer you this black pearl

of a new moon

like the primordial atom

of a spontaneous beginning of your own

and from the wellspring of the first moment of creation

you will know the agony

of the inspiration

and the expanse of the abandonment

in making a world

where all things lead away from you

like stars and people and water.

But you will feel deep in your heart

the intimacy of a stranger’s gratitude

for the immeasurable giving

of an inexhaustible abyss

that’s been going on for lightyears.

You will stare at the hair in the brush

in front of the mirror

where your dead sister

used to renew her virginity

and you will call out a thousand names

as if they were all the echo of your own

clones on the telephone

but none of them will answer

the same voice twice

until you’re alone with the Alone

and there’s no need to ask.

Here you will recover

the crazy wisdom of your lost clarity

like the comet of a long forgotten memory

that will come blazing back into your mind

and gazing up at it

like a sign from your sister

you will realize

the original nature

of your own mind

is the engine of change

in this world of time and passage

and to have been conceived of once

is enough to outlast eternity.

In this space

the guest does not lament

the lack of a host

but understands it

as the apex of grace

to make him feel completely at home

by leaving him alone

to make it his own.

Does the dream age

into a waking adage of bone?

Are you tempted to wake God up

when you’re sleeping alone?

Are you screaming so high

you’re breaking eardrums like wineglasses

but no one can hear you

like a dogwhistle

that calls nothing home?

You can’t cling to your misery here

like a voodoo doll

you raised as your own assassin.

There are no bullet-holes in the mailbox.

And no one gives the dice

a second chance.

Like the wind

when it’s wild in the trees

there’s an address

but no identity.

And no one’s an orphan

because there’s nothing to belong to

that can let go of you

as if you didn’t exist.

The raindrop isn’t separate

and the river isn’t one.

Between the moon and its reflection

between the candle and its flame

between the person and their name

between the chaff and the grain

there’s no distinction.

No one lucid.

No one insane.

And if there’s a routine to follow

it’s that there’s no path

that leads away from you

that isn’t the spontaneous discipline

of the effortless mastery you were born with.

Inspiration sets up its tent

like the capstone of a pyramid

rooted in wind and sand.

And there’s no way to explain it

because there’s no one

who doesn’t understand.

In the nameless realms of my mindlessness

the deserts aren’t a way of counting stars.

And whether you look up at the sky

or down at your feet

the light can’t be measured

in the wavelengths of snakes

that aren’t on the same frequency as your eyes.

There’s only one law of physics here

and that’s

that everything is a complete surprise.

PATRICK WHITE

I TRY NOT TO CARE THAT IT HURTS

I TRY NOT TO CARE THAT IT HURTS

I try not to care that it hurts

that everytime I find a branch to perch on

and think about putting down roots

I send myself into exile

as if I were condemned

to keep abandoning my mother

like my father did

though I suspect

that’s too profoundly obvious and neat.

It’s not a true eureka moment

if it doesn’t liberate.

It’s not a true insight

if it doesn’t shed light photonically.

If it doesn’t burn holes in your starmap

it’s only another mirror.

Stars through the dirty windowpanes

on a sweltering night.

And down below on the street

drunk cowgirls on coke screaming

and pulling each other’s hair out

after the bars close

rather than go home

to lead lives of quiet desperation

the way they do the rest of the week.

I lie to myself about how things are looking up

as if I were adding another litre of oil

to a dying engine.

I still love the stars

but I feel like the third eye

of a blind telescope on crutches

tapping his way along the Road of Ghosts

with a white cane.

Somewhere along one of my lifelines

I must have seen

my chromosomes copulating like snakes

to live in the prophetic darkness I do now

like some eyeless Tiresias

being lead around

by this tiny homunculus of a child

that never ages inside of me.

I am the bastard alloy

dethroned from the royal quatternio

of the alchemical union

of the king and queen

who failed to turn base metal into gold

in the coniunction of man and woman

signifying holy matrimony

and the residue at the bottom

of the Vas Hermeticum is me.

I taste like the hot tears

of a demon in its solitude

knowing it doesn’t do much good

when you’re up to your eyeballs in hell to cry.

I’ve met a lot of messiahs

out here in this wilderness

I was driven into

like a scapegoat for the Jewish tribes

hoping I would show up and tempt them like Sarah Palin

but they’re all snakeoil salesmen in disguise

with cash registers for eyes

so I don’t even try.

I leave it to the politicians

and the corporations

to do the dirty work.

They’re better at leaving children to die than I am.

Christ’s blood streams across the firmament

like a wounded banner

in a crusade of immaculate logos

spinning their greed into a holy war

against the lamps and candles

of individual human lucidity

that engulfs the planet like big oil.

The dragon is slain.

An eclipse swallows the moon.

But it never rains.

When God was declared dead

the prince of darkness took to his bed too

and all his court jesters

who made fools of themselves

just for a laugh

were replaced by evil buffoons

who mistook themselves so seriously

for the real thing

the maggots forgot

they were the descendents of houseflies

and ran for office

like butterflies on the wing.

But Beelzebub knows better.

He rules their genes down to the letter.

And then there are creatures like me

who revel in the subtleties of seduction

like Ovid in Tomis at the edge of the Black Sea

trying on one metamorphoses after another

like alternative identities

to escape the Promethean agony of what he had to be

to steal fire like an industrial secret

from the libidinous gods and hypocrites

so everyone could hold the cold mirror

of a stolen passion

up to their lips

and kiss her like a frying pan.

The last mad sad sacrificial gift of a poet in exile.

You can judge the depths

of his silence

by the quality of his sorrows.

You can hear what could not be said

by putting your ear up

to the keyhole of what he did

and watching the shadows of picture-music

he keeps casting under your door

like a personal loveletter

he knows is bound to fail

because you keep throwing it away

like just another tree

wasted on spiritual junkmail

recognize that it’s your voice not his

that keeps the secret to itself

like an illicit affair you’re having with life.

I don’t know how much love

there is in it

but there comes a time

when a smile turns into a knife

and you run your tongue along it

in your immaculate lunar solitude

like a cultivated taste for blood.

And you put love aside

until a day later

like the last fire-hydrant in hell

that might have a chance

at ringing your bell

but the day never comes

like a phoenix in full plumage

to the ashes of your urn

and you burn your poetry

as if you were prosecuting heresy

for believing there’s always been more to you

than you were willing to let on.

The rain beats on a shallow drum.

And the cowgirls have gone home

all bloodied and muddied

to their hobby farms

and I’m sitting up here

the only homely light on the block

watching my goldfish swim

around his aquarium

like a thought

I just can’t get out of my mind.

Is life just a scar

at the growing edge of the universe

trying to remember which came first

the eye or the star

the herb or the wound

the offence or its redressal?

Is it mad

to stray from the air corridor

of the flightplan of the word

like Icarus who flew too close to the sun

carried away by the elation of his freedom

and try to earn your own wings

all the way down?

Icarus falls like this dark rain tonight

all over the inconceivable earth.

Those are his tears

running like mirrors down the window

with the broken shutter.

And those are mine

snaking through the gutter.

PATRICK WHITE