WHEN I WAS A CHILD

WHEN I WAS A CHILD

When I was a child

I was uprooted like a weed of lightning

and cast like a dead snake

on a festering heap of garbage.

I was angry before I knew

what anger was;

and ever since

radical dismissals

have cored the diamond drills

of their vacuity into my heart,

sudden abandonments

for no reason; the wind

slamming the door on my fingers,

rejection repealing

the flawed doctrine of my skin.

Pariah, poet, exile, outlaw, heretic,

I was passed a shard

of the broken jug of the moon

like an ostrakon

and then the stern angels

painted an X in my own blood

on the door of my house

to ward me off like plague.

I was a child. I was hurt. I was broken.

I became a law

and enforced my acceptance

with the authority of my rage.

Turned inside out

like a dirty sock

or a black hole,

and every second-hand future

the donors ever tried out on me

to see if they could find one

that fit like a straitjacket,

a catastrophe,

I put my mouth to the sky

like a glassblower

to enlarge a space of my own over me

like a planet

rummaging through a wardrobe of atmospheres

until I could give my secret consent

to the stars that shone down upon me

like a wounded bull

in a labyrinth of alleys

and were so inhumanly far away

I was purged like a soiled surgical utensil

in the intensity of their heat.

I was wholly and serenely me.

I found acceptance

in the delicate rainfall

of their enlightened indifference

and made up new constellations

to substitute for the family tree

that had been ripped open

like a zipper of lightning

and left to stand alone on the hill,

a smouldering taboo.

I traced my bloodlines back

to the elemental anvils and forges of iron

that hammered me out

like the relentless metal of a sword

in their fire wombs

and endowed me

with the magmatic pump of a volcanic heart.

I lived alone

in the torrential eras of the early earth,

and swam through noxious seas

of sulphur and methane,

shedding my gills

like the petals of a rose

for scales and horns and feathers and claws

and the accoutrements of armour

I wore like the shale of impossible rivers.

I was raised on an island in a sea

that tore its own eyes out

storm after storm.

I had a mother.

She suffered.

I had brothers and sisters.

They were degraded by alcohol and lies.

And I have had children of my own since

but they have gone out into the world alone

and the miles don’t smile much between us.

And I have laboured for years

to achieve the unacceptable

to turn the reek and rot of the swamp

into a dress rehearsal of waterlilies

getting ready to go on tour

among the stars

to manage something true and beautiful

that might prove this mauling darkness

that prowls all around me

like my own predatory intelligence, wrong.

I have laid my bumbling tribute,

this eloquence of eyes,

at the foot of the blood-stained altars of the world

as if the giving were the last protest

of a compensating heart

trying to crush the agonized ore

of its ancient deficiency,

the lunar slag of my childhood,

into the glowing wine of a mystic metal

as supple as blood,

as cool and rare

as water at night in the desert.

Like a mad hermit

scraped and tanned

by my own austerities

in these godless wastes

where even a man alone

is a crowd

that trespasses on the solitude.

I have flayed my skin with comets

and waited for millennia

like the afterlife of a pyramid

for these demonic ferocities

of salt and sand

to release me like a river,

to open my fist like a hand

and show me the cities I’ve founded

along the banks of my hemorrhaging lifeline.

But now I realize

that it’s all been just a boy’s dream,

an angry child

trying to fly a kite

in the roaring furnace of his heart

just to prove it could be done,

just to prove

by contesting the implausible

he was just like everyone.

Now let the soft ash

bury him gently in his dream,

and the lightning that rooted in his eyes

be inscribed on the night sky

like a neon epitaph.

Let him not fall

like a drop of spite

from the tongue of the leaf

that is urged like the feather of a green wing

by the summoning stars

that have gathered around

the empty lifeboat of his grave

to enshrine his ashes with theirs.

Let him pass like a squall of light,

an urgency of the night

that shook the tree to its roots

until it raved like a woman in ecstasy

with forbidden galas of wonder.

Now I know

for all that he suffered,

for all that he bore like an ox

under the whips of the shadowmasters

that yoked him to a wheel without a road,

his heart, a rusty oil drum

glutted like a backyard incinerator

with the half-burnt pages

of the obsolete encyclopedia

he committed to the flames like his life,

he was only a black snowflake,

an arctic error

in a glacial blizzard of misery,

a manger of fire in a hovel of ice

with nothing to burn but himself.

And I shall miss him like an era,

the igneous ripening of his last eclipse

sloughed like a skin of the moon

and honour him with tears

that will fall like eyes

from the dragon’s watershed.

Was there ever a poet or sage or fool

who wasn’t verified by their failure?

But it’s as clear as cruelty

that he must go,

that the private constellations

he hung like spiderwebs and flies

in the corners of the room

must be swept by the trees

like dust across the distant threshold of the hills,

and the sail of a starless sky

rise like a black dove

from the boat of his hands

and surveying the eyeless abyss before it

never come back.

When I first opened my eyes,

there was a darkness in the room

that outshone the light,

and when I opened my mouth

to give voice to the dreams of the dead,

for all that I have sung and said,

it was only the wind

swinging like a lonely child

on an unlocked gate.

And lastly I opened my heart,

the deepest bunker of my heart,

as if my pulse were a stranger knocking

on the outside to be let in

and I let her in

as if I played host to the world,

and she taught me how to leave.

PATRICK WHITE

CRAZY, SUNNY DAY OUTSIDE, BLUE SKY

CRAZY, SUNNY DAY OUTSIDE, BLUE SKY

Crazy, sunny day outside, blue sky,

and my shadow’s got me in a choke-hold

so I can barely breathe. I’m wrestling

with the black angel in the way, my own vacuity,

the absurdity of the burning gate that affronts my emptiness.

I’m in a truce with a room that tolerates me well enough.

Sometimes a hush falls over it like a nuclear winter

or somebody’s about to read a poem,

but it’s got big windows, and it’s safer

living above people than it is on eye-level

and I don’t mean that in any kind of way

except everyone’s afraid and that’s when

they’re at their most dangerous. But you can

see them coming from afar off from a second storey.

Most days I’ve got a fix on what I’m doing.

I follow the star in my eye. Portable north.

I lay my strange gifts of refuse and lucidity

on the temple stairs of a goddess I’m beginning

to lose my faith in, and as far as I can tell they’re cherished.

Wonder what it would be like to send a muse packing for once.

Ungenderize inspiration, be the wellspring, instead

of drawing from it with a desert at your back

eyeing you from the crests of the sand dunes.

But how would you get the flavour of sex

into a bottle of water without it

souring into a message for help?

Even the salmon-flaked brick walls

of the chic boutique across the street

that caters to witches and fairies, seem bleak

behind their facade, with a darkness fairies can’t people.

Utter black, impenetrable, unregenerative,

and every petal of sunshine, trivially epiphenomenal,

every gust of stars that wheels into a galaxy

like the evolutionary emergence of birds,

neither the cause nor the effect of anything cognizant.

Life just the flimsiest of distractions

on the skin of a bubble walking on thorns.

There’s a black hole in my heart

that’s lapping blood from the rose.

I’m trying to upgrade my eyes to be able to relate to it.

I’m cloning eclipses out of the stem cells of the night.

I’m grinding lenses out of anthracite, colour cones

without irises or chromatically aberrated rainbows.

I’m transplanting the eyes of all my dead flowers

with black diamonds on the same wavelength

as the X-ray star I can sense shining behind everything

that ever mattered to me, to achieve some kind

of nefarious harmony with the unilluminated doorway

that is neither the exit nor the entrance of being.

Everybody seems mesmerized by the temperance of the day,

all the things they’ve seen before, they’re looking at again,

as if the light could ever be new in yesterday’s eyes,

but I’m inside the seeing like a dragonfly in a chrysalis

trying to pass through this black hole

into an entirely new world that isn’t

just another sketchy metaphor for this one.

I want to see the roots the blossom’s wired to

if at all. Or if it’s just one big disconnect

and all understanding is playing unplugged

like a downed powerline with the oracular powers

of a snake-oil salesman selling holy water to the fish.

Disoriented in the starlessness of the blazing afternoon,

I’m waiting like an image of the imageless

for the darkness to adjust to my eyes as if this time

it was up to God to get used to me, and evolve accordingly

and there were no other recourse for getting around me

except creatively. Except to tell the Hox genes

where to put your eyes, where to fit your mouth

in that lifemask that disguises you like a surrealistic scar

grappling with experience with nothing but your innocence

to fall back on for an alibi no one accepts when you lose.

Farewell to all that. Evolution can take its cue

from me for a change, and branch out dendritically

like a flash of lightning rooted in my starmud like a cedar fire

sweeping underground through the valley I just passed through

like the mirage of a waterbird through

a shapeshifting hourglass of stars

that are not fixed, but protean myth givers responsive

to the darkest insights of the human imagination

that doesn’t create worlds in the likeness

of a preconceived image but each to their own medium

turns the light around on them like a revelation

of what they conceal like a jewel of water in their eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LONELIEST, MOST PROTEAN MODES OF MADNESS

THE LONELIEST, MOST PROTEAN MODES OF MADNESS

The loneliest, most protean modes of madness

rage in my cells like nightmares in isolation

watching the fireflies dance through the bars

as a secret gesture from unknown, sympathetic stars

in a collusion of constellations to keep up with the times

and shuck off their old myths of origin

like the straight jackets of a fixed place,

debate whether the light-bending darkness is chaos or freedom

or the old heirarchies of seraphic emanations of insight

still trickle down like oracular snakes on burning ladders.

Now if I wanted this to mean something

I’d look for a precedent for the shadows that dart like birds

across the tunnel vision of my line of sight

and I’d drink from the same fountain where the leaves

lap their water like books full of experience

and I’d borrow light years from other men’s eyes

to verify my seeing may be new, but it’s sound.

I don’t have any use for knowledge

and that’s why it trusts me and let’s its hair down

as if there were nothing of any significance to impart

to the diamond-hearted translucency of an engaging madman

whose enlightenment sweats the details

in a fever of crazy wisdom that plays with his mind

like a child on the moon fascinated by the solitude of its intensity.

But you who can hear me in your blood without asking

will recognize me by the accent of light in my voice

and know that I don’t walk in the footprints of grammars

that wore down this trail like a carpet that wouldn’t fly away

until they got as far as they could vocally could

then turned home for good, as if that were the end of the tail

that began and ended like alpha in the mouth of omega.

But time sweeps eternity away like a waterclock in a deluge,

like chalk on a blackboard, a ferocity of jewels out of the eyes

of bitter ores that couldn’t see anything shining in the dark

by their own light like a fish out of the reach of the sun,

that became a lantern unto itself, a revelation

on its own wavelength that illuminated the depths

of a darkness deeper than light years are far

and there’s no way to divine a sign in the immaculate darkness

for a teacher or a star. Here where the ladders don’t reach

and there are no reflections of a higher clarity

all senses are intensified into one medium of perception

that doesn’t individuate the morphology of knowledge forms

your mind holds up like a black mirror to a chaos

of hidden harmonies that depend inexhaustibly upon you

to add your voice to a new species of seeing,

like a mutant gene that’s never been heard from before.

Even in a cage, my humanity is what’s measureless

about all things if you enter them deep enough to understand

you can’t drown in the mirage of your own emptiness

or badger the stars to break their vow of silence

without giving yourself away like a secret

everybody’s been keeping to themselves like tears

under their breath, in the wells of their heart,

in the dessicated watersheds of their art

with nowhere to fall but up into the nights within them.

The unattainable aspirations of a madman grasping at fireflies

like the cornerstones of a new palace of stars

that dance like chandeliers in the rain

to the timing of their musical visions in the night.

Among the journeymen who labour for lasting results

I do with great discipline exactly nothing,

masterfully done. And the picture-music is undeniably

perishable. I burn colours in the sun on a pyre of hawkweed

like the works of a dead chameleon evaporating

like a rainbow body that isn’t making promises to anyone

you’ll ever hear from it again, though mantras

echo through the mountains like the shrieking palettes

of wild birds revoking the ease of the nocturnal silence

with more vivid mixes of the hues in the eyes of crazy wisdom.

I make great leaps of disbelief into the abyss

off the ledge of a lover’s precipice into the emptiness

and my heels flower into wings and it feels

as if I’m departing at last like a hermit down a mountain

with a contemporary vision of my own empty immensity.

PATRICK WHITE

I BRING YOU NOTHING LIKE A FEATHERLESS BIRD

I BRING YOU NOTHING LIKE A FEATHERLESS BIRD

I bring you nothing like a featherless bird

that’s fallen from a nest, a sailor that knows

how he’s failed the wind all by himself

like a black sail off the coast of his hopeless gates.

But the doves in an avalanche of regrets

couldn’t reach that far into an advanced salvation

well past the last unmanned constellation of the cross.

I do not bring you my martyrdom like a relic of coal

from a primeval eclipse of occult flowers

for you to weep over like diamonds on a sunny day.

I do not ask you to kiss the curse of my birthmark

nor average out what’s crucial about the way

I approach life like a dragon in its sleep

as if I wanted to whisper something new in its ear.

I don’t need a sunspot to play dice with the sun.

Nor the rafter of a bird in flight to hold my tent up.

I’m not looking for someone to lie down nude

like a threshold to my solitude in candle light

so I can define the perimeters of my mindscape

with the boundary stones of sacred meteors

that found whole new religions just to find out

how far from home they’ve fallen from their cornerstones.

My skull and crossbones can’t be wracked up

on an abacus of one-eyed grocery clerks called to account

for the way they nibble like a lottery

on the tender green shoots of hope rooted

in an astronomical chance against making a quick recovery.

Look at me, little sister, look at the scars, look

at the skeletons I’ve welded back together

like bicycle frames in a back room repair shop.

Look at the lost chains of the orbits that wouldn’t gear down

to roll their planets over the hill, and the hot spears

of the stars that extinguished the radiance of their rage

on my flesh like killer bees. There’s no starmap

I’ve tattooed on my heart that’s going to guide you

to Treasure Island. I’m the sky burial of a crystal skull

born without a ghost to keep up my grave

out of affection for all the good times we’ve had.

The mines of my eyes are empty of jewels.

But if I were to encounter you shining

like the high priestess of the silver star

it would be as a sword I return in tribute

to the water sylphs that enchant the holy pools

that have washed my face off more than once

like the wounded reflection of a lunar deathmask

not a plough that ruts the moon for seeding.

I bleed like stained glass when I lose my faith in nothing.

And you can smell sacrilege on my breath

when the wolves are wiser than the sheep they shepherd

and the wind isn’t quoting chapter and verse

to the birds that circle the mountain like fossils of stars.

I snarl and snap at the hands of the children

they send to tame me, gnaw through the throats

of snake-necked swans that glide too close to shore

like a small town flotilla in a lilac parade for heritage tourists.

I’m a reptile with my third eye open

to the cold bloodedness of life witching in the grass

with the impersonality of an agitated shard of glass

and a bird’s eye view of what won’t get off the ground.

I’m an igneous anvil of planets. My pulse, the windfall

of a heavy bombardment of toxic oxygen

adding another hallucinogen to the atmosphere.

I live in swamps and low places like a rat snake

in a nunnery of waterlilies with perfect penmanship

though I seldom write letters home to the ones I love.

I invite the silence to remain dangerous and alone.

It’s not a career where the talking’s all done for you.

It’s a calling, and you have to listen hard

for what you cannot hear. What you cannot

see with the eyes. Calibrate with the mind.

Imprint on the heart when it’s at its most vulnerable.

Opiated affections and their buzzed out imitations

as passionate as thermostats at room temperature

might be okay for goldfish in a shark bowl

but I want you fed to me viviparously alive.

PATRICK WHITE

CITY ROSE

CITY ROSE

City rose, you don’t bloom like the other flowers

the sun coaxes into unclenching their fists, you unfold

like an ocean at night lingering in your dark depths

behind a veil of fish hooks swaying

with the bullwhips of the kelp to the pulse of your tides.

How suburbanly garish you look all trashed out

like the black farce of a substitute for love.

A poet and a prostitute. Doesn’t get much more skinless

than that. We’re both walking through the world naked

in a blizzard of thorns blunting themselves

against our ice-age hearts in an interglacial warming period.

Dying on the instalment plan to make a living,

there’s a glint in your eyes like moonlight on a knife,

and you’re armed to the teeth with fingertips and lips

and hourglass hips and here you can have my sword

even before I surrender as you know you can

when you walk into my life like an eclipse of the moon

with mascara running down your cheeks

and ask me if I still love you as I ever did

and I say, lady, you’re an innate releasing mechanism for me.

I sublimate you into poetry like dry ice.

I may be the bullet. But you’re the trigger.

And what’s a voice without a tongue but a gutted gun?

How could I ever use you on myself when the day comes

if you weren’t here with me in this wilderness

dancing for my head like a mirage in the skull

of a vast abyss that’s gone on dreaming all this

like a boy with a book under the covers way past lights out?

You give me that funny look like I’m half mad

or I might be making light of you, but your spinal cord

resonates like a guitar strung with powerlines

on the same wavelength as the crystal in your dreamcatcher

and I know your listening for disturbances in your web.

And I remember when two roads diverged in a yellow wood

like a wishbone the separated the song from the bird

and that night you came pleading to me out of the rain

to let you into my homelessness, and I took you in

like a wet kitten with claws and needle sharp teeth

that never knew when to let go of my heart

like a piece of raw meat you were always snarling over.

And you weren’t exactly the noble enemy

I always hoped would eat it, more a foodbank as I recall,

but you can’t always choose the heroic sacrifice

you give yourself up to, and I gave it up to you,

saying to myself you don’t always need to believe

in the witchdoctor to take advantage of the medicine,

and I’m always moved when your sunflower

turns toward me like a full-faced friend into the shining

and I’m the one who feels I’ve been following you

like a starmap to the dark matter shaping the universe.

But tonight the rose is bruised. You’re crying

like a broken window pane over the death of the wind.

Your eyes are funeral bells and your body language

is indecipherable, and I don’t know what’s hurt you so deeply,

and it’s only worse when I guess, but there’s

a dragon in the heart of the firefly I’m trying to be

that’s got a scorched earth policy toward anyone

who tries to lay their hands on you for any reason

other than lust. And though I’m an intimate of the oracle,

I never ask. You franchise your body like a fast food business

with crooked books, but I’m not your spiritual accountant

just because I died before you did and I don’t

think of the unknown as something impenetrably mysterious.

You, for example, whenever you discover

the young woman in you that isn’t looking

for vengeance upon herself for lying about

the things she wanted to be to her dolls.

Voodoo dolls or not. With marbles or buttons for eyes.

And you abuse her like a country mouse for reminding you

how you used to live off the crumbs of everybody else’s dreams

but now you’re a cultivated rose of bling and tinfoil

that wins all the garden shows they weed in Eden

like the bad girls from the good, but, off-stage

when there are no lights shining on you, and the rose

wipes her lipstick off like blood on her sleeve,

I’ve seen you mesmerized like a stone bird on a fountain

staring into the eyes of a snake pit of venomous regrets

for the way you abuse your innocence as if

it were subject to experience and time, all used up,

too much scar tissue over the wound that kept its mouth shut

like dawn over the ashes of a dollhouse you burned to the ground.

Did you ever go back in for your dolls?

It’s not too late, you know. It’s never too late

to stop treating yourself like a straw dog at a black mass.

It’s not a religious ritual. It’s just a bad habit of misperception.

And however much sulphur dioxide there is in the acid rain

of your tears, the rain still doesn’t fall in pentangles

and the stars and the wildflowers in the abandoned fields

still don’t attend opening night rehearsals

to improve their appearance on the catwalk of the zodiac.

They’re still walking the same old fence they always were

like gold medallists on a balance beam at the Olympics.

And I can see that the moon, as it does in you,

still dies inside them like a swan at a ballet except

you come to the climax of the dance dressed in Satanic black.

And that’s just the scarlet letter of a dead alphabet

you’ve carved into your forehead with a fingernail,

not the Rosetta stone that’s going to open you up to yourself

like Egypt with the eyes of a mood ring. O yes,

I know how many thresholds you’ve crossed,

how many taboos and cracks in the desolate sidewalks

you’ve stepped on to break your mother’s back,

but she wrote her alibi on a gravestone a long time ago

and she’s well beyond anything you can do to disappoint her now.

Born into sin, isn’t death a drastic enough measure to take

to clean the slate with the tears that should have been shed

while we were alive? The roots that should have been

watered with stars, the hands that should have been revered

like gnostic gospels even in a time of persecution and exile.

Maybe the blossom was betrayed by the roots

and the fruits were ruined. Who can say for sure

whether the tree’s a strong rafter or a coffin door,

or you’re just punching holes in your own lifeboat

to be spiteful, but I suspect you’re tired of sinking by now.

Three bells and all’s not well. And you remember

how you wanted to fly with the effortless beauty

of an arrow straight through the heart of a falcon prince

who came when you called out like a night bird

for someone to hold you against the dark like a door

love leaves ajar like the place in the book

where you left off reading and started dreaming again.

You’re taking a bath in the squalor of your own grave to renew

the ambiguity of your innocence as if you were

holding your breath underwater until you turn blue,

but there’s an expiry date that doesn’t matter if you’re late

and you don’t need a passport to walk through the gate unchecked.

The mindstream doesn’t cling to what it reflects.

It clarifies itself like flowing diamonds in its own running,

like crystal skulls thawing like honey in a blast furnace.

You can project yourself imaginatively like clean water

on the moon, and still feel the rain is a message

to someone else more like a watercolour than you are an oil

but before you begin painting in pain again,

look in the mirror. Isn’t that mascara running down your face

like a black willow rendered in sumi ink by a sad geisha

or is that just you washing off another eclipse

like a dirty window you’ve got to break to look through?

The light will find you all on its own if you stop

using the night to cover your eyes with shadows

when there’s something you don’t want to look at

that shines like a waterstar in the face of a sewer

blindfolded to the beauty and grace of its own imperative to change.

Be that as it may. Just because the exit’s false

doesn’t make the entrance unreal, and I can see how

you’re looking out the window for something

to fix your gaze upon like a reflection from a bridge

you let go of like the hand of someone you loved

to wear this blossom of a painted life mask

like a screening myth for the reason you let her drown.

Hurt, and lovely, and sad, battered down

like an orchid in the aftermath of an unexpected storm,

you make me want to cry for everything in existence

all at the same time, for what happens to us here.

I feel my vulnerability in yours. Half-insane for a moment

looking out the same window you are I become the pain.

I embody the sorrows of the trivial and sublime alike

and there’s no one to scream out to who isn’t wounded themselves

and I’ve died repeatedly not to make a philosophy out of love

just to satisfy death with a verifiable alibi for what

I was doing while I was alive, and none of it

lessens the sum of our suffering by a single tear.

We can put cushions around it and bank it up with dolls

and throw a warm blanket over it and kiss it

goodnight on the forehead as somebody else should have done

when childhood was wholly the timing of the content,

and go to bed with a will like a broken arrow

and a heart bruised like the blue rose of a starless sky

waiting for some small light, even a firefly of insight,

even a black hole on the negative of a starmap back to our eyes

to emerge from all this like Venus sinking down

over the darkening hills of her eyelids as if to dream

in the solitude of her beauty of rescuing her voodoo dolls

from the fire she threw them into, casting spells

like the shadows of moonless nights on earth

when pain had no value, and love was of little worth.

But in the face of it. Staring it in the eye

like a star or a reptile, trying not to lie like a placebo

to the spiritually hysterical about to give birth to the new world

out of their apocalyptic expansionism, not minting

cosmic keys to things that are not necessarily locks,

mustering my dusky yellow blood into the fire sage of a dragon,

and foregoing my penchant for self-destructive optimism,

the deepening of the terrible silence of our suffering

is the only reason I can come up with that our burning doves

don’t come back like loveletters we write like waterbirds on the wind.

There’s a silence within that is slowly ripening into the new moon

of the black pearl we’re making of the dirt in our hearts.

It’s not a third eye, or a rosary you can say the names of God on,

not even a sacred syllable of a secret that keeps to itself,

but something distinctly human that sacrifices its suffering

on the dark altar of the absurdity there’s no metaphor

to cling to like the lifeboat of a shipwrecked paradigm.

That everything’s been left relentlessly unexplained

as if only the silence were pure enough to receive our sorrow

the way our roots can’t conceive of the fruits of their labour,

or the sea receives the rain like a mirror of eyeless tears.

Sweet one, sleep without redressal. in the quietude

of what appears to include you in its innocence

like sugar in apricots when the locks fall away like ripe fruit.

The rained out peonies weeping their eyelids away

like phases of the moon by the open gate always

look ravished by the wind’s indifference to bliss.

The nightwatchman’s in the next room playing

solitaire with the scars of a wound as old as the stars.

PATRICK WHITE