EVERYTHING ON THE GARBAGE DUMP

EVERYTHING ON THE GARBAGE DUMP

Everything on the garbage dump

like the picked over pyre of an unholy death.

The rubes seeing through the ruses of the rich

straight into their computerized living rooms

behind the razor wire and grapevines.

Bad mistake. The poor begin to compare,

and where they wanted to be elite yesterday,

today they smoulder like a root fire

at what’s been done to them

many days before by what goes on under

the cornerstones of our quicksand institutions

imploding under the mass of corruption at their core.

Lies so immense, even the media can’t eat them,

and scum-bag politicians wallowing in what

they don’t want anyone else to have. A cure

for a child that’s dying, after having lost her hair,

a bed for a homeless man who’s off his meds,

a job for his son and daughter, open-handed economics

where the destitute aren’t eating the scraps

that fall off the elemental table of the obscenely overfed.

And this is to put it as mildly as I can

so as not to bully anyone with the truth,

but I grew up at the bottom of a garbage can

and I know who’s sitting on the lid of a buried i.e.d.

that’s about to go off like a volcanic toilet-bowl.

The black dove cries to the burning heavens

and earth’s about to show us why you don’t

steal from your own crib, or piss in your own womb.

The flesh-eating disease has gone too far.

There’s smog in our children’s hearts and eyes.

The wealthy come into a focus on a gun sight.

Revulsion deepens. Everyday you can hear

the backbones of people’s wills breaking

like the great boughs and small twigs

of an old growth forest in an ice-storm.

People close up like stores and the candling parachutes

of the daylilies who stay in bed all day,

grateful for twenty more minutes of hallucinating

an oasis in a desert they know they’re going to die in.

Bad meat down the well. Corporations

with more of an identity than your daughter has,

but ask any drone who she is

and there’s a databank somewhere

that would be happy to tell you for a considerable fee.

She’s nobody that concerns us yet. But the time,

and I mean it more today than I did yesterday,

is coming, that nemetic moment when the guillotines

are brought out like garden shears pruning roses

of their buds, and Wall Street ticks swollen with blood

of their heads. One after another. The regenerative hydra

clear cut like the trees and the tribes of the Amazon jungle.

No more listening to the Lord of Flies brainwashing us

into believing its maggots are butterflies. No more

second, third, fourth, fifth innocence, reborn or otherwise,

for the retroactive alibi that tells us how sorry

and concerned he is that others don’t follow

the same psychopath that he’s making money off,

even if it’s been going on since Uruk and Ur.

Even religion being rendered unto like Caesar.

The shepherds of the black camel build tall buildings in the desert.

No birds sing in the eucalyptus trees of Israel

that spring up like political spin over bulldozed Arab homes.

And the last man born on earth will grovel in the dust

at his sister’s feet. Signs of the end times articulated

by an annihilated Sufi in a zawiya of the thirteenth century.

Who born among us today, doesn’t know exactly

what he was talking about? As we run out of water,

breathable air, edible food, futile hope and dangerous inspiration.

Mineralized humanity fossilized in the Burgess Shale

of a virtual reality exploding into millions of alternatives

to evolution in the Pre-Cambrian Age of mutative technology.

And people will gather according to rule and ask for change.

But their shepherds will only shorten the chains

and tighten their grip on their hearts like a man

in a strip club keeps a grip on his wallet,

but the intensity unvented will supersaturate the air

and mount the event horizon like the anvils of thunderheads

and much will be struck down in an atavistic replay

of the polymorphous perverse trying to figure out

what shape it should assume so the cure remains

more plausible than the disease that the ideological scalpels

just cut out with no distinction made

between a human heart and a tumour.

Beauty and intelligence will become suspect

to the mediocre and ugly, and the ethics of the day

will be the stage directions of a bad morality play

as the captains of commerce and the nabobs of worse

thresh the salted earth like necrophagoi

watched over by the scarecrow of a c.e.o.

I can hear the karmic atrocities of the sorrows

that have muscled the birds out of the trees

with hortatory elegies for the windfall of sour bells

that were cut down like the fruit of a noose.

Injustice will redress injustice with mob sentiment

adamant about the rabid obscenity of human lovelessness

that has been perpetrated like a myth of origin in their name.

Things will still burn, but not in a flame as they used to,

but in a scalding acid bath of eyes learning to read

the graffiti on the wall as if it were written

on their own gravestones. Sybarites with desecrant sensibilities

will destroy without creation anything that reminds them

of who they are not. Art will become

the artificial antiseptic to the toxin of life

and there will be more joy in cynicism than there is

the natural love of a man for his wife and children.

But the litany of metaphorical omens is perilously long

and eventually even Lao Tzu rode out of town on an ox

into the available dimensions of a future in the hills

to die alone among the doomed wildflowers undistracted

by the human race. And Jesus had his wilderness.

Buddha, Venus and his Bodhi Tree, Moses, his desert,

in lieu of the Promised Land, and Muhammad, his cave.

Everyone of these enlightened masters had to get away for awhile

to receive what was given to them to believe.

That all the threads of the strong rope

would come undone in time like spinal cords

and all a decent human could do, when life

oversteps its own bounds into unconditioned chaos

is drive a small herd of goats up to the mountain top

to get out of the way of the avalanche of prophetic skulls

coming down in a rush to avoid their own warnings.

So, yes, if you really care, if you’ve cared all along,

don’t crowd into the shrine of your third eye

to escape the approaching storm, expecting shelter

from that sense of goodness that hovers over you

like an angel using drones. As Muhammad said

the red-haired, one-eyed liar will amaze you

and many now lustrous, but empty, will succumb to its power.

And trivialities will cat walk in the robes of the sublime.

And only branded cattle in the abattoirs of a violent education

will learn the true power of a name. The arks of yesterday

will save themselves like luxury lifeboats

that jumped the ship of state, on its way down,

when it turned into a hospital barge on the rocks,

full of the body parts of abandoned children

who didn’t live long enough to learn how to sink or swim

before they were shucked like baby turtles by seagulls

and the undertakers came, like parasites, to finish off the rest.

Take a break. I know how bilious a heart can feel

eating a spoon of ashes a day from the urn of the world

as if you had nothing left but your spiritual ancestry to live on.

Change your diet. Eat the buds of day lilies, eat

the purple pagodas of the stag horn sumac before

it immolates itself in the fall. Grow yourself a new tail

to replace the one they tried to catch you by, skip your koans

out over a large midnight lake like water birds taking to flight.

Buff the horrors with wild raspberries and the overnight sensations

of mushrooms as big as a skull or the moon emerging from death.

Rejuvenate. Restore. Let the shoemaker tack new soles to your cells,

and reattach the flight feathers to your calloused heels.

Let the wind blow the stars through your hair like the willows.

And the moon hang awhile like dew on the mandalas

of your musical spiderwebs. Learn how to carry a tune again

like water in the bucket of your larynx

or the fire in your gut that once could weep like diamonds

that cut through your tears without doing any damage.

Breathe in and forget that long or short every breath

is infinitely intimate with everything that’s ever lived.

Detached. Disconnected. Cut off. Unplugged.

Renew your erotic affiliation with your body

and see, though bruised, how the starmud still shines

even after you’ve taken a bath in your own grave

and the water runs off your skin like moonlight.

Do this for yourself without throwing salt

in the roseate wounds of your conscience.

Do this in a solitude that doesn’t try to cram the mystery

into the small locket of the human heart

that carries your counter-intuitive likeness

of the way things ought to be in the better world behind us.

Do this to remind yourself of the bliss of what it is

to be a human alone with stars, so you don’t forget

the experience you’re trying to convey to the unmindful and lost

must be renewed from generation to generation

like a dragon breathing into a tinder box of flammable emotions.

And then even if it’s just for the dignity of a lost cause,

or merely the preference of this absurdity to that,

or enlightened self-interest with too much intelligence

to have completely transcended itself inconceivably,

return to the maelstrom like the cult of a contemplative

that’s at least an initiate in the mysticism of action

who doesn’t mistake a sword that kills you back into life

for the wishbone of a harp that pleads with hell for the dead

who will always double-back on you

like the retrograde motion of Mars as you overtake it,

an orbit with an inside track on the sun that naves the wheel.

A habitable planet with a genius for life and love that’s real.

PATRICK WHITE

EVERY STEP I TAKE

EVERY STEP I TAKE

Every step I take either a crossroads, an impasse,

or a dubious suspension bridge that looks like

the work of spiders swaying over an abyss.

Eerie thresholds that don’t scare me the way they used to.

I take them now as if I were dancing

with clear-sighted surrealistic suicidal abandon

and what used to threaten me so deeply

I laugh at now as if it were just another buffoon

that overdid it, and turned its legend into a farce.

The furies that swarmed me once for things

I couldn’t even imagine doing at my most bitter

have mythically dwindled into black flies of the mind.

Now I smile at them like a miniature Pearl Harbour

dive-bombing a rotten piece of fruit. Malignant pests.

Even in my homelessness, kamikaze pilots

drunk on sake, bad house guests binging

on a divine wind that sweeps them all away

from the brittle sky above the windowsill

that fakes them all out eventually, though it’s sadder

on the other side, to witness the death of birds.

Once you accept you’re going to lose everything

you’re inestimably freer to spit in the eye

of your tormentor, and in that moment of enlightenment

the power and superstition of a madman in the joint

that could scare even Joe Frazier like Muhammad Ali

losing it at a weigh-in, overcomes you as if

your death were already behind you, inconceivably achieved.

You learn to stay ahead of the past, like a star,

shining down on the future history of who you are

even when you’re convinced you’re not anything

whether you win or lose and everything you do

is a risk you must take to keep on deepening your solitude

without shaming the eagles by living like a maggot

who sees a rainbow in a drug-induced mirage

and dreams it’s turning into a butterfly

with the dead-eyed instincts of a bird of prey.

Compassion isn’t the mirage a white flag you hang

like a bed sheet outside the window

to surrender your ego like a weapon.

Like a flower, it’s a sign of resistance that begins

deep underground in the blood roots

of a cult of rain and light that death cannot suppress.

It’s a compact with pain that enlightens the way of the other

by taking the egg-laying turtle of the world off the road

or using your own backbone to splint the broken rafter

of a house of life that could not stand without you,

one light enjoined to another like honey in the heart of a beehive

buzzing with stars. Not an alchemical crack house

freebasing its own mythic inflation like a dealer

tripping out on his product in a riot of vacillating ideals

that wobble like uninhabited planets losing their spin.

Compassion is a warrior. Not a martyr of circumstance.

Or the short straw of the last chance to be someone

on your deathbed like a sword between you and what you loved

as you lay side by side together and dreamed

your courage away by hesitating in the moment.

Sometimes mystic disobedience is a greater sign of love

than all the echoes and shades of our oaths and vows are.

Compassion’s a candle with the heart of a dragon

and it roars into the silence of its imperious empathy

like a black czar at the wedding of the waterlilies,

raising them up like paupers and constellations

or the crystal palace of the Celts wheeling in Corona Borealis

like a Sufi dancing with the dust and the wind at a crossroads

to celebrate his own annihilation in the rapture of his wisdom

to leave every room in his heart open to everyone else

as one of the fundamental conditions of intelligent space.

Not to fit the uniqueness of the human face to a life mask

compounded of enculturated delusions of its just proportions,

but to see in every one of its tears, a locket with the moon inside,

like a ripening lyric to the beauty of longing fulfilled,

a windfall shaken down in a sudden squall of stars

that fall to earth like the seeds of urgent cherry blossoms

to make way for the vital fruits of their unspoken exile.

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOU WORRY ABOUT WHERE YOU'RE GOING

IF YOU WORRY ABOUT WHERE YOU’RE GOING

If you worry about where you’re going

before you go, you’re not worthy of the road yet.

If you’re not having some black-hearted fun

with your worst nightmares, because they’re

just as surrealistically absurd as the bliss

of your most recurring dreams are, how

are you ever going to avoid taking yourself literally?

If you’re not crazy enough to wander

through a cemetery saturated with the moon

in the early hours of the morning, trying

to organize a choir of singing gravestones,

how are you ever going to recover a voice of your own?

That dowdy wren you let go of when you first discovered swans?

If you ever want to sweep across the lava plains of the moon

in a rush of emotion of a homecoming ocean,

but you can’t feel the tide in a single drop of water,

you haven’t cried enough yet to drown in your own sorrows

and see everybody’s life flash before your eyes

as you go down in retrospect, wiser than bubbles

in the way you descend like feathers trying to smile.

O, it’s hard here, isn’t it. Isn’t it brutal at times?

All your beautiful teeth knocked out against a concrete curb?

Inoperable cancer. The savage inexplicability

of the death of children it would be sacrilege

to even think there was an acceptable answer

to appease the loss, to satiate the grief. And I know stones

I’ve turned over I wished for years I hadn’t, things I’ve seen

that make me wish I’d never been born with eyes,

that have rendered my nemetic courage dysfunctional,

estranged from the Pleiadic radiance of my seeing

as if it were a black farce on tour in Taurus.

But if you want to shine like the fire of a pioneer star

in the clear light of the void, as I keep reminding myself

like a mantra over and over and over again,

you’re going to light up the intensity of hell

as readily as you do the cruel immensity of heaven

when it terrifies you with joy. Be a brave boy, I say to myself,

resolved to live all the lives of the Tarot Pack

and then go looking for the cards the Sufis say are missing,

just to say and smile at the end of time, if only to myself,

yes, I played all the stations of my life

as if they were the winning hand of an inveterate gambler

calling my own bluff in an unbeatable casino.

Seven come eleven, I’ve rolled my prophetic skulls

up against the wall like a printer in inky coveralls

in the back alley delivery entrance of a cosmic newpaper

on its lunch hour, throwing snake-eyes around

like the fang marks of a prison tat turning to Braille.

If you haven’t blooded your sword by falling on it yet,

and hemorrhaged by a river wild blue irises, just to add

a little Zen beauty to your death in life experience,

if you haven’t felt love slash its nadir across your wrist

and worn it like the talismanic bracelet of an unmentored initiate,

how are you ever going to transit zenith

as if you were crossing the threshold

of that thirteenth house of the zodiac

you raftered with your bones to accommodate your heart,

to cherish your own ashes like the mystery

of the afterlives you had to live through

until you burned like a star that had learned

the art of shining is the art of inexhaustibly letting go?

More doubt in our joy than in our pain, if

you don’t learn to ignore your certainty to the point

you disappear into the abyss of an expanding universe,

giving no second thought to whether you exist or not,

with no nostalgic attachment hovering over your emptiness

like the halo of a black hole, how are you

ever going to evolve the mystic green thumb you need

to root sunflowers in the darkness like neighbouring galaxies?

How are you ever going to adapt to the things you cherish

if you can’t endure the transformations that come with them?

If you skip the cocoon and go straight to the butterfly,

all you’ve really done is traded your birds in for a kite

that doesn’t know how to sit or sing on the power lines

it’s entangled in, nor how to negotiate the wind with wings.

You may glimpse the unattainable, yes, like a moth

at a closed window, wondering what it must be like

to be annihilated in a candle like an old love poem,

but the vision’s not sustainable as a way of life of your own

until you’ve set fire to your own antennae like wicks

that are not consumed by the flame, or extinguished in the rain.

Spiritual diamonds don’t forget where they came from,

their perishable beginnings, and though they can shine

like water and rainbows, their clarity smeared

by the chromatic aberrations of their colour-blind telescopes,

they haven’t forgotten how to burn like bituminous coal

in a basement furnace, or melt the intensity of their emotions

like a glass river making its way to the sea or how to use

a meteoric explosion as a way of sowing adamantine insights

like seed stars in an immaculate ocean of enlightened awareness,

the life-mask of the inconceivable assuming form

to express itself as an event in time that outgrows itself

transcendentally without a revolution or message for anyone

but itself, thereby ensuring, given our inquisitorial nature,

that everything from stars to rocks to apple trees to humans,

overhears it as a revelation of angelic gossip

waxing the long after-hour halls of a demonic institution

that was founded synarthritically on the cornerstones of our skulls.

Zen might be the taste of tea. But if you’d rather spice the water,

do it with all the flavours of life, dip an eclipse

in the full moon of your cup now and again,

and let the darkness work its cure upon you like a spell

deeply steeped in your imagination like a school bell.

Attend to your shadows, not as a theft of flowers,

or the clone of a brighter garden you’ve lost your way back to,

but as mute voices with a grammar all of their own

deep enough to show you the stars you wish upon

from the bottom up of a well with fireflies caught in its throat

it articulates like chimney sparks, even at noon,

or when the black sun shines at midnight

through a clearing in the tree-line of the starfields.

The snake that takes your life grows wings

and turns into the bird and the dragon that uplifts it

with oxymoronic lyrics of fire and rain that are as real

as any symbolic gesture that plays suggestively with your heart

in the cauldrons and fountains of being

that elaborate you as you are, slack water in a mirror

that neither ebbs nor neaps, as the tides reverse direction

like a heartbeat or the flow of your breath.

This mysterious third extreme in between life and death

where everything you sought among the mountain peaks

finds you at the moment of your withdrawal

from your circuitous passage through the valley of longing.

And in every emotive thought, the serpentine wavelength

of the immensity of the transcendent silence

overwhelms you with the intimate impersonality

of its approach to you in every risky step you take toward it.

PATRICK WHITE  

GETTING UP

GETTING UP

Getting up on the first legs of the morning,

waiting to remember I know how to walk,

as my body changes shifts

and I emerge from the dream-mist

not knowing if I’m stepping out of a lifeboat or a cocoon,

if yesterday’s oars have turned into wings,

or the silver blood of the mud bone

greened like old copper

at the scene of a crime

or if my heart has finally congealed

like a suspicious scar

on the mood ring of the moon

as I resent the orthodoxy of the petty rituals

I have yet to perform with blades and foam and water

on a face that almost scares me

it is so diminishingly mine.

And it’s radiant, and the sun

is reflected in every windshield,

in every palace of ice and hovel of glass,

and even the deepest eclipse within me

that weeps like a dragon

is remotely enhanced by the shining.

Today I will make money.

Today I will pay bills.

Today I will fix the car.

Today I will feed myself intelligently and exercise,

trying to prolong my bruising campaign against death;

I will walk in and out of banks and stores

and greet people with as much sincerity

as they are capable of, careful

not to pour the ocean into a teacup

or think a tear sufficient to mourn the dead seas of the moon.

I will be congenial, kind, and generous;

I will scatter tropical trail mix

in the parking lot of Pizza Hut for the birds

though I know it annoys people

who worry about shit on their cars,

and walk away feeling like an insurgent

who bombed the marketplace into life

with dried pineapple not shrapnel,

though it’s a pathetic protest to offend

the protocols of their chronic opprobrium

by feeding a few birds more

than made it through the freezing night before

and excuses nothing in me that I often fear is worse

when I consider what I could be doing and don’t

because the picket up my intimate ass is the universe

and everything turns on that

like the paddlewheel of a Mississippi showboat.

All day long I will apply Buddhas and Zen masters like poultices

to draw the infection of the world out of my blood

like the noxious fume of a festering rose,

and then upbraid myself insightfully,

confessing to a delegation of mirrors

that it is my seeing, my eyes

that smear the view like slugs,

and that I am obsessively defeated by what I condemn

because I am them, I am them, I am them.

And that’s when I pull the trigger on myself like a fire alarm,

knowing no one’s coming to put me out,

because I haven’t been tested for the right emergency

and there’s never a pilot light on the mystic urgency

to at least be right about the way I know I’m wrong.

But no matter how you beat it,

you can’t beat a violin concerto out of a gong

or labour the rime of light on the lips of a black hole into honey.

All day I will look upon small trees

chained like slaves to a square meter

of lonely earth in an asphalt parking lot

and profoundly lament

the intrusive derangement of my species

that abomination after abomination, shames the fly.

And the fate of a shopping mall sapling

may be the bathetic token

of something more profoundly unspoken,

but all day my spirit will be unmothered

by the existential complicity

of being here like rain on the blood of the roadkill

my karmic imbalance tries to unmean

as everything I cherish turns slightly obscene.

But I know a star cluster far away beyond my fingertips

with the body of a serpent woman

who charms the clay she caresses

by playing her fates and phases on the flutes of the moon

as if every breath were the wind in a gust of doves

she scatters like the sheet music of a liberated choir.

And all day I will taste the infinite constellation of her stars

unspooling the lifeline of the mystery I follow

through the labyrinth of the moon’s horn gates

like cool transfusions of night through my blood

as I turn her image in my heart

like a mysterious jewel

that once wept her crown away

to lift a veil of water like an eye.

And I will smile through the day serenely within

remembering so many things, so many lives,

so many fireflies of tenderness that haven’t happened yet,

and the unsayable passion of the lips that wake the dragon

like a flame to the wick that candles the volcano

into a fury of ecstasy that shocks

the starmaps billions of lightyears away,

and she will be my secret and my sail

and I will disappear over her five horizons like a treble clef

or the whole note of a fleeing night bird into its hidden nocturne.

All day she will flourish within me to heal the mystic herbalist

who knows beyond flower and frond

the dark virtue of the black honey

that pours from her own wounded root like time.

And I can be moved by women who are goblets

spilling over with wine, and women

who turn moonlight into glass

and stand sad and empty

against the vastness of the sky,

witching for mirrors, and those

who were Japanese plum tree blossoms in spring,

the dangerous wine of the rose,

now shattered on the ground

as if the moon had slipped its finger from the ring.

And I have loved the loveliest

and least attentive among them,

and those who were mortal and mad,

and the black peonies of the sexually bad

who have indulged me by shedding their eclipses

until we fell down exhausted beside each other,

two petals in the mud.

But she has stars in her blood

that spice the tongue of the snake,

the grail horns of the divining rod

and the tine of the lightning

that tunes the ashes of the burnt guitar

as if it were still a tree

to the tears of the willow,

and I am addicted by a muse

to a delirium of longing

that burns like a loveletter

written in light and blood and shadows

that slides me under her door

with every breath I take

and unfolds me like a sky or a bird,

a fossilized constellation

buried in the shale of a starmap,

to shine deep within all day long

beyond the light like stars

at the bottom of a well at noon

where she comes to drink like the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

EVEN BEFORE THE DAYLILIES HAVE RE-OPENED

EVEN BEFORE THE DAYLILIES HAVE RE-OPENED

Even before the daylilies have re-opened,

walking home in the early morning air,

admiring the blue-green petal

of the new apple of the dawn,

Venus ferociously beautiful, and Jupiter

unusually shy by comparison as Aldebaran

fades faster in Taurus than either of them

in the onrush of light, the town immaculately quiet,

and the traffic light feeling robotically unheeded

and the bloom off the streetlamps

in the parking lot of the new hotel,

the cars immobilized in a coma of stillness,

how clean and eternal the silence seems,

how uncannily pure the bliss of life in the air,

as the birds hidden like celebrants in the trees

planted along the sidewalks, and in the black walnuts

of neglected backyards, sing as if they couldn’t

contain themselves like old guitars in the corner,

or books upon a shelf, that have heard it all before.

Awake at five alone in the morning,

a new solitude surrounds the singularity of my sentience

and it doesn’t really matter what I think

anymore than the content of what the birds are singing

in a language of their own, I am estranged

by the renewal of my own presence

in the midst of all this as if in some kind

of intimately aloof way, I, too, inexplicably belonged.

As did the deserted shops along the street

forlornly awaiting the return of people,

like abandoned pets or lonely barns.

Everything natural and man-made

included in the same embrace

as if space were mysteriously happy

and time gave everything another chance

just to feel how sacred it is to exist here at all.

The ghosts on the night shift return

to their graves with the coffins

of their empty lunch pails clutched in their hands,

having punched in the same hours as the fireflies and stars

and in the rising splendour of the unsayable presence

of wholly being here to experience it, denuded

of the uses and functions we will assign ourselves

later in the day like the smog of insatiable dreams,

achieve as much at this intersection of time and the timeless,

Foster and the universe, where it doesn’t matter

if you waited for the light to change

before you crossed the street or not

because the unseekable waywardness of the moment

will do as much to find and renew you spontaneously

as you do to be lost and exhausted deliberately

as if you always walked in the presence of the dawn

even when you let go of its hand or closed your eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

GARBAGE BAGS ON THE STREET AT DAWN

GARBAGE BAGS ON THE STREET AT DAWN

Garbage bags on the street at dawn

as great fronds of light unfold.

Venus washed out of the Hyades in Taurus

near Aldebaran, but Jupiter the first to go,

first casualties of the new day,

somnambulists outwalking their dreams.

The honking of Canada geese overhead

like ninety-twenties cars. Rites of passage,

thoroughfares of destinal traffic.

Me here, the sleepless witness

to the untimely birth of the morning,

ashes in the urn of the new day

I scatter like pigeons and doves

from the roofs of the unearthly buildings,

a wraith late for the grave, and the rest,

the unlabelled waste of a good beginning.

Bad spiritual protocol for a ghost

to haunt the cradle, to outlive the candles

of the night before, writing suicide notes

to the cults of the stars that don’t really care

I’ve lived for eras alone with the estranged insights

of a native exile longing for a home,

hovel, habitation, palace of space

that doesn’t rest on the cornerstone of a planet.

A changeling on the stairs of the abyss,

I address the indifferent windows

cloaked in their chronic transparency

and ask whose child is this

that no one claims as their own?

Not unmindful of how the world shrugs

the stars off like eyes of dew in the grass,

I am born into this emptiness without a lifeboat

and it’s a long way to swim from here to the moon,

a long way to fall like a feather cut loose on its own.

PATRICK WHITE

A MOMENT AWAY FROM THE WORLD, PLEASE

A MOMENT AWAY FROM THE WORLD, PLEASE

A moment away from the world, please.

Denude me of this coat of killer bees.

I have endured its agony long enough

to know there’s not much honey in a stinging nettle.

This kind of pain doesn’t break into flowers.

The stars have been telling me that for years.

The darkness doesn’t ask for a sacrifice

and you can tell by the New England asters

the light doesn’t treat them like martyrs at a crossroads

between the high and the low. You just have to look

at how wide-eyed the day lilies are

even when they’re dreaming to see

the sun doesn’t burn their eyes out with its blazing

and their tangerine goblets are always full.

Drain these toxic squint-eyed metals out of my blood

but don’t ban me to the slogans of a religion

when what I need is an environmental protection agency

with soul, instead of being buried under

this avalanche of pebbles in a gold rush of cornerstones

like a seven thousand year old skeleton

of an adolescent Archaic Indian by the Straits of Belle Isle,

as if everyone in the world had lain their head on my chest

as a place to rest, or they were looking for a heartbeat,

or they wanted to make sure I never rose from my grave again.

Free my metaphors from these chain gangs of d.n.a.

I’ve spent most of my afterlives here

and I’m not looking to be paroled or escape,

I just want out. Make a chrysalis out of a fortune-cookie,

not a straitjacket, and free me of all this spiritual punctuation

as if thousands of dragonflies were drying their wings

on the eyelids of the waterlilies without any regard for grammar.

Let me flame out like a meteor in the upper atmosphere

as a sign of what I was dying to say and if

you’re going to embrace me because you love me so much

do it like space, so I’m never out of it, but there’s

lots of room for the galaxies and I swear you do that

I’ll open the lockets of the black holes

in the inner core of their hearts, and show you

whose picture is inside of them. Leave me alone

with the inconceivable awhile to listen to the musings

of the unnamed as she washes her hair like a lyric

in her own tears, and sings to herself like a willow

that has been made beautiful by suffering

that has finally lifted its heavy veil of tribulation

from the unmapped mystery in the eyes that remind the stars

of why they’re shining in the first place.

Amor vincit omnia. It said in big gold letters

on a baby blue banner tacked to the wall by doves

above the minister’s pulpit in the First Centennial United Church

I was pressed into for ten bucks a month when I was a kid,

one of the myriad ways, my ingenious Catholic mother

kept us fed. Love conquers all. I suppose.

But then I was never on a crusade against it to begin with

and though I’m an infidel, I’m not religious about it.

And I’ve never lived my life as if

I had to close the gates of the city at night

and if love ever wanted anything from me

all it ever had to do was ask, regardless of the recipient.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not infernal enough

to know how to hammer swords out of the bell-towers of my defeat

whenever anyone speaks to me about conquest.

Free. Free. Free. Freedom deeper than sorrows.

Freedom more expansive than bliss. Freedom

the invisible gift we’re all born clutching in our pudginess.

Like a butterfly that lands on your finger.

A shooting star with your name on it that took aim

and missed. A poem that lands in your lap like a maple key.

Or comes like words to the tree like birds in the morning.

Or shovels you like coal into the mouth of a dragon

brutally wise in the ways of diamonds, and in its claws,

the mercy of scalpels. The compassion of rain

from an ocean of awareness. Free to change

as life would have it without any notion

of betterment or reform. Each as they are, unmaimed.

Freedom the only holiness. Not a state of mind

at absolute Kelvin, motionless entropy,

but dynamic energy creatively shaping

the world out of itself like a child making up a game

when she’s alone, to amuse herself when no one’s watching,

whisper secrets she confides to her own ear

like the sea to a shell on a deserted beach

without a lighthouse demoralizing the mermaids.

PATRICK WHITE