PAID THE RENT

PAID THE RENT

Paid the rent. Roof over my head for another month.

Car bills coming up, and contraband cigarettes;

got to feed myself, provide what is needed,

address myself to elemental concerns,

keep my body clean, my clothes, the house, the sheets,

my wits about me on the streets,

and my heart wary of vagrant urgencies

that take a bride like an ambulance to an emergency

just for the ride, and ends up dedicating themselves like a bloodbank

to a wound that isn’t in the book

and won’t be healed,

though I apply the moon like a poultice,

like a scar with a dark side that’s always concealed.

Even who I thought I was,

more life behind me than ahead,

no more than a passing flaw of feeling,

gusts of birds in the groves of a sacred delirium

where the fools make fun of the saints

and it takes ages to understand

why the blood writes and paints

what the spirit sees of a world

that stains the grace of its mystic absurdity

by forgetting how to play with God, the faceless one.

And things are done that rot like bells

and torture and war and rape and winning sells

peanuts in the Colosseum

and no one knows who I am

because they’re clinging like frost

to their own faces

in dangerously intimate places.

And that’s okay; that’s okay too

because I’m just an empty lifeboat passing through

the eye of a dream that won’t wake anybody up,

just another prophetic crack in the cup

that proposes a toast to its host like a grail

as we fail and fail and fail our way through life

all the way to the top of our decline

like a parachute tangled in a powerline

that didn’t know how to jump toward paradise.

And I wouldn’t advise anyone giving or taking advice,

but I will go out and encompass the day like an accident

that didn’t happen to me,

and there will be moments like mini-blackholes

that will grain my image into the ferocious clarity

of a face that bends space like a lens

to cloak the offence of my rarity

among these others who are less

than mysteriously me.

And I will confess in lonely parking lots

that are abused like hookers

that life is a shabby affair with a disaffected angel

with one wing in and one wing out

of a censored bed on a movie-set

that can’t disarm the camera.

But why defame the rehearsal

if life goes on tour without you,

tired of the timing of the same old lines

and reruns of a mind that was never released?

How many suns, how many moons,

how many shadows cast by Venus ago

was the air sweet, and the light elated

by what it shone down upon

that grew eyes to turn the shining into seeing,

and revelled inconceivably in being

with nothing amiss in the mirrors of bliss

that had never been stained

by a suicide note in smudge-proof lipstick

before it opened a vein with a flick of the moon

to let its blood off the leash like a kiss

with a passion for going all the way?

I doubt if there’s ever been such a day,

but it will do me no good

to widow away the grief

by treating belief to a candle or two

that don’t cast the same shadows I do

when I’m trying to make sense of death

with ghosts on my breath,

and gates in my heart that gape at the fact

that none of us are ever coming back

to expose the disparity

between the living and the dead.

And the day is proving horrible

and the little light I hoped

to lamp my way along with

is caught by the wing like a star in a spiderweb

and I’m doing everything right

according to the detective in me

but I’m beginning to suspect a clause in my DNA

has defected like an eye through a loophole in felicity

and there’s no way left that even I can be me

and endure this agony that waterboards

everything I have to say

about all the things I haven’t done

and worse, much worse, to come, to unconfess

when I’m indicted like reasonable junkmail

on the threshold of the wrong address

that picks me out of the line-up like a refugee

even though the sun pulled an eclipse over its head

and rendered its blazing blind to rob the dead

who lie like bad credit in wounded wallets

trying to make the downpayment on an afterlife.

And who knows? Maybe there’s an afterlaugh as well

peached and primed with salt and slime for the cynics.

Or maybe I should spend the last twenty years of my life,

if there’s that much left of myself to pass on,

surfing women like channels to find one I’m on.

Or if all is delusion, absurdity, and despair

and only those too fearful not to, care,

and the air is noxious and the water obscene

and the earth too bilious to bear,

and meaning only the thorn of the facts

and the beauty of the wounded rose is treated

like just another heart attack,

and powerful leaders are seated on skulls

throwing leftovers like people behind them to gulls

hovering in the widening wake of their sterns

as the national garbage barge drifts rudderless downriver

like a corpse in the Ganges

snatched like laundry from the line

by sacred crocodiles,

why shouldn’t I dispose of myself like surgical waste

or crush cigarettes into my arm in self-disgust

until I am all sunspots and craters on the moon

or master all the tongues of PsychoBabylon

slashing drastic alphabets with cuneiform razors

into the moist, starmud tablets of my flesh

like the tight mouths of new moons

unspooling the same old shit.

Sometimes I think I must be out of it

to still be here, to hang on, not to let go,

like those autumn leaves that cling all winter

like gnostic gospels in the snow

to the only tree they know.

Time isn’t an abstract concept

when it’s happening to your face

and space is closing up behind you like holy water

that washes you off like a bloodstain

and heals itself

by vetting your name to forget you

like an unwelcome tenant at an old address.

And the day is a Nazi firehydrant on standby

in a blizzard of ashes from the chimneys of Auschwitz,

and even the fires in the mouths of the lion furnaces

are disgraced by the taste of the human deformity

that waters its womb with glass

and bubbles with eyes that are blown and cast

like fanatical jewels through storefront windows

that shatter like icestorm chandliers

and scapegoat constellations,

or the only eye-witness to a murder of mirrors,

or nations.

Who lacks so much light at noon

that they withdraw like black holes

into the bloodlines of their shadows to hate

everything their glory can’t illuminate?

The candle in the lamp can’t soil the eye

and the sun burns all day without soot

and the flowers may keep

the bees like golden chimneysweeps,

and creosote turn to honey in the mouth of the hive,

but genocide vents like money and no one is left alive.

And of this infectious darkness is the day composed

and my spirit in the background

nothing but the universal hiss

of the deaths of millions, and hardly a tear,

except for the pathetic mercy of thoughts

that come down one by one like blunt windows

and the eyelids of the quicker guillotines

that couldn’t stand to look at the horror

of what a species with a view can do to advance pain.

And there are skulls like sterile moons among the vegetables

that blight the food the starving grow to feed me

and atrocities in the bank that certify my cheque

and wash the blood off with diamonds

that shine with the lustre of rain

in the gutters of pain.

And it occurs to me in a shopping mall

in a flurry of wayward consumers

that there’s always a quota

of people somewhere in the world

who must labour and live and give and die like aphids

for every ant here chatting up the cashier like yogurt.

But those are not cherries in your cheese, my friend,

they’re body parts in death carts, crushed hearts

in the makeshift morgue of your pantry.

And the day takes an evil, surrealistic twist

like asphalt and licorice and the odour of snakes

and I don’t have what it takes

to pull up stakes

and find a new grave for the vampire

and every princess I meet has already been kissed

and every rib of the child I used to be

is the rung of a burning ladder

that hasn’t grown enough to rescue me.

And I’d put my hand on the news and swear

I’m not the man in the videocam nightmare

in the jackpot airport

with the backpack on,

tweaking his pixels with lightning

to avenge the death of his mirrors,

but there’s no end, no end, no end

to this labyrinth of bull-leaping shadows

that threads me like blood through the eye of the needle

to mend what I didn’t tear

like this day’s black sail

that spiders across the web lines of my horizons

at a slip of a stitch in time

to poison my voice with moonlight and lime.

And it isn’t as if I haven’t tried to cool

these feverish jewels of seeing

in the eyes of the dragon sages

and worn out my share of straitjackets

and picked the psychological lice

out of my golden fleece on the funny farm

as if I were panning for mountains in the mindstream,

looking for the dicey cornerstones of the lost worlds

that have slipped from my shoulders like an avalanche

or the stools I’ve kicked out from under me

when I found a good branch

to upstage the star of the posse

like the understudy of a dying art

that knows its part, and hangs on every line.

PATRICK WHITE

I SEE YOU IN THE EYES OF THE RAIN

I SEE YOU IN THE EYES OF THE RAIN

I see you in the eyes of the rain

and in the broken aspirations of the swallow

that hit the windowpane dead on.

Fire that no longer burns.

Water that no longer drowns.

Earth that no longer receives.

A gust of air that no one breathes.

I see you in the tender, green tendrils

of the wild grapevines clinging to life

like the last plank of a shipwrecked lifeboat

washed up on the shore of the moon.

The most bitter farewells are those

compelled by understanding

to cry a little in the open doorway

and leave as if there were nothing more to say.

Words lightyears beyond communication.

Metaphors like burning bridges

that never quite make it to the other side.

And o how gentle an eclipse comes

to a lover’s coltish eyes

when it’s time to say good-bye

and if you’re a bad man, it’s revenge,

and if you’re good, it’s a sacrifice.

Good-bye, get out, be gone,

I’ll live on in my palace of lonely windows

like a man with class in an hourglass

and I’ll write faceless songs

to the passage of time as autumn approaches.

Leave me now to the pain

I must wrestle with alone

like an angel in my way

that knows I don’t have what it takes

to pull up stakes like a heretic

before I burn for the mistakes I made

on your invigilated test of love.

Once I feel like a loser again

I know I’m at home with myself

and I can feel the clouds laughing in tears

as I get around like rain.

I loved your body like a wishing well.

You loved my brain like an occult spell.

Three afterlives of a star, once you left me

holding the medicine bag of your absence,

I named a desolate street after you

like some kind of municipal gift

to the run down ghetto of a sub-prime heart.

My pain is consoled by my art

like a weather vane is comforted by the weather.

I ghost write the lyrics of the storm.

I incite riots against the norm.

I blood my poems like spearheads

in a wound that never scars the moon.

I shall be the nightwatchman

who makes the rounds of the zodiac

inspecting doors and windows

that are steadfastly closed to him

like lilies in the festering gene pools

of the idle rich in their bridal tents

spawning into money like goldfish.

I shall be an eagle at the extremity

of my wingspan and soar over the smoke

of burning cities like a cinder of freedom

in the eye of a failed revolution

and I will not lament my own extinction

when my starmud settles like a constellation

into the hearsay of bloodshot mirrors.

I will linger in precipitous heights

then shriek like the paper airplane of a poem

down on some bumptious homing pigeon

that was promised a comfortable flight

from here to there, until it was

snatched from the air like a pillow fight.

I will do this because I can feel the glee

of my talons sinking into hypocrisy

like the three crescents of the moon

with an eyrie full of skeletal snakes

that look like a pit full of twisted combs

without any meat on their bones.

Liars convince. Communicators convey.

It isn’t what I say. It’s the way I say it

that makes all the difference to the meaning

that tones me like a moody chameleon

resonating with a tuning fork of colour

that flickers like a photo-op of lightning

trying to get a glimpse of itself in the mirror.

And then I’m an illiterate divinity student

with a heart as big as an orphanage

full of baffled pilgrims that have lost their way

crutching through the labyrinths of the divine

on a cross that walks them to the end of the line

like the rapture of an apocalyptic anti-climax.

I talk to God about you and she talks back

like a comprehensive alibi for the way things are.

She’s got a scar as big as the smile

on the dark side of her face she keeps

turned away from me like an embarassed moon

she doesn’t want to reveal to anyone.

But I can see it in the rear view mirror

of my infernal lucidity leading me away from her

like an atomic Sufi reversing my spin

in the charged particle field of my happy sin.

I walk on the wild side in cowboy boots

in a truce with the shadows of Zen

that says a great general may establish peace

but that doesn’t mean he gets to enjoy it.

And I’m resigned to the sternness of my discipline

like salt to the earth, like a sail to the wind,

like a ferocious heart to a gentle mind.

PATRICK WHITE

AND IT SHALL NO MORE BE GIVEN TO ME

AND IT SHALL NO MORE BE GIVEN TO ME

And it shall no more be given to me

than it is to another to understand you if I could

or you, for that matter, shining above the dark wood

as if it didn’t matter where your light fell or upon whom.

And who could not say your aloofness was not a right?

But there’s nothing more ridiculous than a spurned heart.

I was a flower for a moment, now I’m a red toadstool

spinning around as I did as a kid with nothing to do

but endure a long, hot afternoon on my own

in a nineteen fifties restaurant with a broken jukebox

and where there was a prayer rug rumoured to fly

now there’s just blind linoleum and a repetitive lie

I repeat like a mantra to keep the obvious away.

There is within me, who knows where it came from,

a laboratory of largess that’s always working overtime

to cure what ails love in myself and others.

As if we were the devoted apostates of an estranged emotion

that didn’t quite know what to do with our devotion.

You can try to drink an ocean in a single gulp

to keep your mirage from evaporating in the desert,

but you’ll only end up just as thirsty and hallucinatory

as you were before, as the goats try to avoid the scorpions.

Or you can pretend you don’t care, and wear

sandpaper for skin, and be as callous to your heart

as you are a can you’re kicking down the road

so you don’t get hurt trying to heal again.

Each votive candle of a woman who lit up for you,

an exotic reference to a different fragrance of pain

so they’re always the orchid in the shadows of cool moonlight

and you’re always a bouquet of dandelions in a funeral home.

Of late, I’ve been trying to chip the coral away

from a lot of sunken masts I used to tie myself to

just to listen deliriously to the sirens on the rocks.

I revelled in the mystery of their wounded music

but my lifeboat always seemed to splinter

like a Spanish guitar on the head of my gravestone.

Flashbacks of your lives and loves, those soft razors

can be harder sometimes than a school of hard knocks.

Cynic, or sucker alike, neither bask in diamonds

and whether you take it like a man or a star-nosed mole

everybody bleeds like a rose on a ladder of thorns.

Love is the colour of life, tender, garish, or obscene,

not some variant of green camouflage, or logo red,

not some bituminous conversion to Mars black,

not like any rainbow you’ve ever seen, not

an albino chameleon, but more vivid than the eyes

are able to see, like the bee paths on certain wildflowers.

And though I might be underwhelmed by how

drab and vapid it seems these days, I remember gold,

I remember silver, I remember the poppies imploding

like red giants and scarlet nebula in the starfields

and I still adorn love like Corona Borealis with Celtic gems.

And though my dragons are masters of myriad stratagems

I never try to impress a woman by forging swords like words

in the dynastic fires of my mouth but diversify

my volcanic energies into making habitable islands in a dream

and chandeliers of fireflies scattered all over the starmap.

I don’t turn eyes into windows in a blast furnace

or blow a lot of glass bubbles into a multiverse

of Japanese floats holding up their fishing nets

like the M-theory of the latest myth of origin.

And where it ends, is exactly where it begins

over and over and over again endlessly like the wind

raising waves on a mirror where many have drowned

in the bliss of listening to their own awareness

as if they cast a spell upon themselves they couldn’t break.

PATRICK WHITE

IT’S GOOD TO KNOW

It’s good to know you’re there;

though the world is a diatribe

of waltzing trains and threshing razors,

it’s good to know

a door burns for me somewhere in the darkness,

a bell waits like a nipple of silence

and your blood waits like a language,

a rose of rain in a starfield,

that my mouth alone can say to the night

in a shudder of light that only the blind can hear,

sipping from a chalice of water

spiked with diamond nails.

My heart flashes across the sky

and buries itself like a meteor

at the cornerstone of a sightless temple

pillared by faithless candles

that flirt with the shadows

of the fire in their eyes,

and I’m bridges beyond any way back the way I came,

my wake the scar of a vapour trail

in yesterday’s cherry sunset,

and I still catch myself at my worst

whenever I’m good;

there’s always a thread of blood on the water,

and a half-finished suicide note on the mirror

scrawled in manic lipstick,

and a gravestone

I carry around on my shoulders like a skull

that feels like the weight of the world,

and a child leftover from an ancient crib-death

that is often afraid of me,

and a ferocity of freedom

that thaws my deepest thoughts like chains,

and bleaches every feeling like a wound

in the antiseptic of the sun

that bites like a mystic arrow

that was feathered with a message

before I was born to find me;

but it’s good to know

your fury and your gentleness,

the glow and heat of your chimneys and fireflies,

your altars of wind and smoke

spuming across the vastness of the solitude

like blood and chalk

and lines written after school

on the blackboard shale of my river skin

still trying to reform its way to the sea;

it’s good to look at the moon

through your passionate windows

and taste the fragrant honey of your darkness

attuning the tines of my tongue

to a fork in the road of your body,

to the delta of an unknown civilization,

to the mystery of rivers entwined like serpents.

And the vines of the words

that have sought me out

like blood vessels and burning bushes

and the blossoming fingers of someone

kneading a face

out of the huge volume,

the pure space of my unattainability:

o you have said things to me

in ink and water and brandy and fire,

in night and moonlight and poppies and tears

that have made the hardest rocks

on the highest slopes

of my mountains and cloudy ladders bleed

to be opened like a harvest of love-letters in a bomb-shelter

by the tenderness of your knives again and again,

urgent with beauty and joy

to be overthrown

by the whisper of your voice in the valley

triggering this skyborn avalanche

of nocturnal thrones.

And the bells turn into vases

and the vases into urns

and the urns back into the wombs

of a thousand terminal exiles

tolling like a heartbeat

with a passport and a threshold,

and though I am no longer

the leaf of hope

that aspired to rudder

the firestream of these volcanic transformations,

it’s good to drift awhile

in the dreamtime of this endless night

like recoverable salvage

among the lanterns of your searching lifeboats

and the reaping eyes

of your eloquent islands of light.

PATRICK WHITE

IT ISN’T THAT I’M LOOKING

It isn’t that I’m looking for eagles in a barnyard

or a phoenix in a match-head

when I observe

by the number of wrecks on the rocks

how few lighthouses there are these days

among so many flashlights.

What can the hair say about the horn

or the feather teach the wind

or quicksand preach

for the edification of the cornerstone?

And must I put a healthy leg

at the service of a broken crutch

to limp along with the mob

at the end of a dying culture

that insists that all roads end

in a cult of cripples?

If I’m walking alone to the stars

on a pilgrimage of one

finding my way in the going,

my heart aligned like the needle of a compass

to a darkness brighter than the light,

and the only map the clarity of my eyes,

why should those

who weep in their ashes like rain,

trying to put glasses on a fly,

who have never dipped

the thorn of the moon

in the night of their blood

and written a love poem

to a skull in a desert,

care if I want to roam

in the hills and valleys of myself

like some homeless shepherd of the wind

taking the stone of the earth for a pillow to dream on

in the high grasslands

where the stars walk

whispering eternal intimacies like black swans

barging the ores of a vacant throne

through my bloodstream,

as all along the shores of my flowing

ancient flowers wake mysteriously

like candles in an eclipse?

If I take the sky for the walls of my house

and leave the rest

like an autumn of junkmail

looking for a door and a last known address,

if I choose not to contrive a world

to accommodate my absence

in the available dimension of the future,

wiping my shadows and ghosts

like mirrors off at the threshold,

even letting go of the door

to enter empty-handed

as the applause

for an understudy of the dawn

that never got over its stage-fright

in the abyss of an abandoned theater,

happy to let the river pan itself for gold,

not laying a claim to anything,

making sure the gate-latch

clamps down like a dog on a bone

when I close it up

like a straitjacket in its own thoughts,

not stringing my spinal court to a wishbone

or the warped neck

of an obvious guitar,

but taking my voice with me

like a wounded bird in my hands,

a star struck from a stone,

moonlight in an empty boat,

the taste of silence

in the mouth of a mask,

my name a rainmark

on the eyelid of a dusty bell

I’ve left to the dream it keeps returning to;

why should it matter to anyone

who lies to the bleeding door

that is wounded by their entrance

everytime they say it’s just me

as if a pillar answered?

I can’t find anything

less than everything to call a self

and there are no mirrors

in an abyss more naked than the sky

to consult like the oracular flights of words

that litter the windowsill of this seeing

like flies that spent themselves,

flints on an empty lighter,

wicks on a glass candle,

consuming the ferocity

of their lives against the illusion of the world outside

they brain themselves against again and again

like small meteors

doused like torches in the eye

of the upper atmosphere

just above the open window.

When everything is absurd as this,

and even the tuning forks of the rain

are an era off in their pitch,

and music is merely

the coming and going of ants

in an abandoned syrinx,

and the drum of the heart alone

isn’t enough to start a band,

and the only melody

is a road the wind blew away

like a hair off the shoulder of the night,

and everyone’s trying

to unmarrow the moon like a fortune-cookie,

and every snowflake in the furnace

of this dark fire

thinks it dies like a galaxy

when it’s only an inflection of tears,

am I not free to walk in harmony

with the savage senselessness of it all,

without hanging a bell of advice over my head

like the only corpse

on an island full of gravediggers

who can’t get out of the holes they’ve dug

to bury me in?

I don’t want to live waiting for yesterday

like the light of a star

that’s already gone,

or dream like a seed of constellations to come

like a roll of the dice,

or watch the surplus of your smile

rotting on the docks of a famine.

And don’t think these harvests I leave you

like a trail of breadcrumbs and dead flies

out of this wilderness of thought

are any more than stars

caught in the throat of the labyrinth

that follows itself like a snake with its tail in its mouth,

trying to find a way out of itself

by eating its own head.

And by some chance

if you ever make it out this far,

I’ve mailed back

the same map of fireflies

with its legend of smoke,

three lifetimes a lightyear,

you once handed me to find you

and marked every place I’m not

with a black hole.

PATRICK WHITE

DEEP IN THE NIGHT

Deep in the night that shells its husk of blue

to pan the nuggets of its stars from a darker stream,

the heart an executioner with a fistful of pardons,

and the soft, moist, lulling of the evening air,

the threshing of slow fish,

I’m enthroned alone in a crucial palace of light

that realigns its domains to the borders of the wind,

and I don’t want to feel lonely but I do,

and I don’t want to miss so many, so many faces

stripped from the bough like a savaged telephone-book,

so many feathers of light drifting through the shadows of their names,

and the black granite of the uncarved bell

that turtles the blood under the eyelid of the knowing,

that makes my eyes want to scream

until the pillars of the dead sea fall like rotten salt:

how long can one road endure the passage of everything

walking life off into the stars that measure the miles in skulls?

Was I young? Were you there in the brindled moonlight?

Did I remember how to love you well; did I see with long eyes

how you rose out of the chest of the hills like a spirit leaving,

the blue effulgence of your nebulous departure

almost a cocoon of morning mist, the last breath of a lake

as if an indigo thistle released its silk to the wind

or a dandelion relinquished its ivory mane?

Were you the soul of me that lingered by gates and wharves?

Have you come back now with your bells of blood and lamps of flesh?

Can I feel again the leaves of the silver herbs

in the gardens of your fingertips?

Touch me like the breaking of a fast,

find me like a river in the night,

the dazzled theme of a wandering valley,

and pour your journey into mine like stars into a vine,

shadows running down the worn convictions of the stairs,

the midnight wines of old eclipses in the goblets of your eyes.

Once for the flame that dances on the wick of the tongue,

Once for the orchards that plead with the heart for birds,

Once for the envelope that read the letter it married,

and you, by the river, a sapphire among rocks,

tender blue grass in the translucent water-skin of the night,

loving me once as if your hands were autumns full of departure

and your eyes, the gulf of the world in your eyes, your eyes

were the soft flowing of the dark honeys

that leak from the wounded hives

we carry like knives to the grave.

Distinguished among broken clocks,

sultry and bitter, a quarantined bay of refugee stars,

caught in the threshing blades of a circular waterfall,

a mess of tents I’ve furloughed across the milky distances

like a chain-letter from a secret constellation to you,

I blue the intimate spaces between us with time

and patch the maps with the confluence of our lifelines

and try to restore the eyes in the sockets of our bridges

under a brow of swallows in the dusk. And I remember

all the names of the flowers, all the names of the stars,

all the badges of love that heaven and earth once offered

in lieu of the reasons why

love bares the skin of a poppy

to the teeth of the hunting sun

and then flares like a firefly

over the water-lamps of the moon,

but when it dies of its own self-inflicted wounds,

slashed by shadows among the ripe fruit of its vowels,

and the seed wasn’t asked and the harvest had no choice

there are always two skies,

one bound by roots, the other, eyes,

at the back of every voice.

PATRICK WHITE