YOUR FACE WAS A MOON I HAUNTED

YOUR FACE WAS A MOON I HAUNTED

Your face was a moon I haunted, and your body

twisted me into agonies of sexual driftwood

that wanted to burn at midnight under the stars

like the last signal fire of an isolated survivor

high up on your affluent shores.

I wanted to do dark things with you

in the shadow of eclipses that put their hands over

the eyes of the flowers and sent the birds to bed.

With you, I would have asked for closure

from the spring constellations swarming overhead

like free radicals paroled to the wind

tuning up the larnyx of the birch-trees,

I would have lain down with you in the bedlam

of a thousand cares and zirconium delusions

and lived beside you like an island and a telescope

drunk on the wine of your circus mirrors

that crash before they talk; all night, all night,

wave after wave, I would have caressed

the famous reflection of you in black carnation panties,

and lavished the wealth of the sea on your ears.

And we could have built a little shelter among the shipwrecks

or lived rent free with the swallows

in the silo of an aging lighthouse,

listening to the foghorns bellow like slaughtered cattle.

And it’s sad and lonely and fearful

watching the sky fall on the swords of its own horizons every night

and no one to mourn the sunset

that unspools from the wound like a bewildered snake,

and it’s dangerous the way I go erect as a symphony

around the hives of killer bees

still swinging from the old steeples believing

they’re just a misunderstood form of fruit.

And I’ve tried to master the dictionary of razorwire

that’s propping up the blase window, but I don’t like the way

I’m always a rose short of blood at the end of the day,

and the bouquet of startled flashlights

you placed on the nightstand keeps blacking out

like the eyes of dying bees in pollinated coffee-cans

and you keep looking at my balls

as if they were always nesting pelicans with something to eat,

and I haven’t talked to you about

dismemberments and Orphic skulls

in a good all-night asylum for years. What a shame

I won’t get a chance to toke with your firing squads,

or be secretly committed to one of the volunteer rehab centres

you’ve franchised like a brain selling straitjackets to lightbulbs

suffering the opprobrium of their maladjusted shades.

There aren’t more pages in the book of sorrows

or ghosts on the moon compared to the cults of the silver tide

I would have filled you with

like dolphins swimming ashore

to get their landlegs back. And think of the horns we’ve missed

charging through the labyrinths of our blood enraged

by the stungun behind the cape of the corrupt matador

gored and trampled like a bat in a blaze of honesty; how

some conversations would have hung in the air for years

like the get-well elegies of postcard suicides.

And maybe worse, because sooner or later,

I would have been compelled to confess

three mountains I didn’t name after you

to honour your breasts on the last lunar landing I made

to read the fine print between the lines

of the pre-nuptial tatoo of the anniversary spider

I signed on your chest

when you took your bra off like an hourglass

and there were questions just too momentous to ask.

PATRICK WHITE

THE BLACK ANGEL

THE BLACK ANGEL

The black angel in my blood tells me it’s time to die, go, disappear

from myself into the next loveless oblivion

like rainwater down a snake’s hole. The black angel

in my heart laughs and reminds me how worthless I am

to any of these who keep dying like rivers in a desert

everytime I look to see if there’s anything real to drink

behind the mirage of their smiles. Look how they all salt their own gardens,

killing anything green that had a chance to grow

with their incessant no no no to anything

that isn’t a straitjacket they ripped off one of their mental dolls. My heart

says die, my heart, too hurt to cry on any more fires, says die

and be done with all these shifting sands and lies

that look like life but turn out to be nothing more than nothing more,

black match heads trying to bloom in the dark, extinct flowers

cut off at the root of being by their own refusal to open.

No is their own rejection; no is the mirror returning their own reflection

like a passport at a border to a face that isn’t enough

to be admitted in, to cross the threshold, to enter, flowing,

the sea. And yet they all say they want to know, want to be

more than the adolescent outside the dollar-store, peering

penniless through the window, over

the monkey-bars of a baby buggy. My God, how they cheep in their shells

at the chance of any real sky outside the cramped confines

of their postered walls. But show up like a crack,

show up looking anything like liberation and growth,

and everyone chickens back into the coop, wingless and terrified

in the shadow of the hawk high overhead

riding the wind for the joy of it. Frauds and imposters,

day-old dainties in a bakery-window singing lead

in a choir of flies. And the demons within me scoff,

and the black angel comes forward out of the miscarried dream,

carrying the dead child that gave its life to believe in them

and asks me if I’ve had enough of their toxic ordinariness,

their insistent tainting of the secret wells it took so long

to divine on the moon with a broken water-wand. Idiot children

peering out of the shattered windows of an abandoned orphanage

like tiny eyeless idols waiting the return of a huge blind god

that can’t see to sign their creation. And it isn’t judgment, it isn’t

any lack of compassion or understanding

that wants to thaw their glass tears and heal

the home-made tattoos that puncture their hearts

with dirty needles of ink, it isn’t feeling above or beyond them

that turns the life-boat into a floating hearse crammed with moaning ghosts;

it’s watching them look for salvation among the sharks

that devour them one by one

in a frenzied graveyard of fins. Tonight, so alone, so dispirited, so

uselessly empty, a suicidal clown in a tentful of humorless junkies,

I weep into my own hands like a man

trying to wash off his own face in the acids of a private hell so complete

death is the only rumour of a messiah

these black winds whisper in the ashes

of everything I wanted to be. What’s the use of love, what’s

the good that comes of wasting a lifetime learning to care,

learning to give and killing yourself off to give more,

giving away your eyes, your heart, soul, hands, blood, time, talent,

until exhausted and immaculately impoverished

you don’t know what you’ve got left to give

when everyone’s smearing lipstick on their rectums

and sewing their mouths shut

so nothing real or true gets said

when they tell you how much they appreciate

the generosity of your death

and ask for more before you’re buried in their bull.

And I listen and I listen and I listen with my ears and mind and heart

until their small doomed stars are splinters of glass in my own eyes,

their pain mine, their healing mine, their fate my own

until the dagger’s buried in the wound of my own being so deeply

I alone am left to the business of dying over and over again

in this solitude of regenerative hell

where to ask for a drop of blood in return, a touch, a smile, a last embrace,

one word of genuine love

to ease the fear of the passing

is to be refused with honey and cunning, is to learn, bitterly

that all you gave as a gift

is taken in theft

and fenced in the seedy pawnshops of their pedestrian greed.

Look, there’s my heart in a greasy window, over-priced, almost

the cost of a new one with a guarantee, and there

by the chipped plaster of a mantlepiece wolf

howling at a nicotine moon, the soul

I squandered like a sudden flashflood

on a dry creekbed that said it was going nowhere.

PATRICK WHITE

I WOULD SPEAK TO YOU IN MY NIGHT VOICE

I WOULD SPEAK TO YOU IN MY NIGHT VOICE

I would speak to you in my night voice

if you were still here. If you were even as near

as the stars commingled in my breath,

I’d thaw my secret zodiac of crystal skulls

and let my mindstream run wild at your feet

like a flashflood waking the dry creekbed up

from its long dream of making the desert bloom

with real flowers in a mirage of metaphors.

I would ignite the pilot lights of a thousand stars

to blaze in an honour guard of mythic starmaps

waiting for you to bless their colours,

because wonder’s never been known to start a war

with a world it’s amazed by in every mesmerizing detail

without annihilating itself first, bursting

its own bubble in an efflorescent multiverse.

I’m a surrealistic mystic to give it a funny name,

and you’ve seen my hidden housewells, sacred pools

receiving the moonlight on the water like the blades

of ceremonial swords that tasted my blood first

like a rose bleeds on its own thorns, now let me

show you my watersheds, the fathomless voids

of dark abundance and bright vacancy

where my eyes swim like the Circlet Of The Western Fish

that never swim out of themselves

or the oceanic awareness they’re luminously

immersed in up to their gills in the clear light

of the emptiness shining back at them like a distant mind.

Under the icy eyelids of methane seas on shepherd moons

I can feel life stirring like the muse of itself

and though it’s too early in evolution to see yet

I’ve jumped ahead of myself like the light of the Pleiades

and gathered up a herd of wild telescopes

grazing on the stars like big-eyed, thin-legged antelopes

waiting for you to make an appearance on opening night

and watch how they’d dance and leap for you

like grasshoppers in the Bolshoi Ballet

who didn’t give a damn that autumn was on its way

to throw cold water on the fire because in this universe

imagination is the physics of the place, and the ants

might busy themselves gathering butterfly wings

like the covers of slender chapbooks of poetry,

but I’m drunk on these lyrical elixirs of the mind

that I take as a sign that you are near in the night

and who has to worry about snow,

when they can live in your light on an occult planet

where myriad seasons can pass in a moment of spontaneity

and the fruits of life invariably fall toward the sky?

Are we both not rooted in the ancient fires overhead?

Nervous systems of black matter, scaffolding the mind

climbs up to paint the origin of worlds before their grand openings,

dark palettes of our third eye, skeletons of pictographic bones

beneath these scriptures of flesh we can read with our fingertips

like holy books and X rays written in the boustrophic signs

of the last time we ploughed the dark side of the moon together

and filled the siloes of the stars with galaxies

that spun like Tibetan prayerwheels, or Moroccan Sufis

or dust devils at the heels of winged messengers

conducting us like the flightfeathers of the dark arcana

we can read in each others eyes like loveletters

written in the cursive dream grammar the heart sings to itself in

when it’s a lonely nightbird, and you’re there like the stars.

PATRICK WHITE

NOT SITTING HERE TRYING TO FLINT KNAP THE SPLINTERS OF A MIRROR

NOT SITTING HERE TRYING TO FLINT KNAP THE SPLINTERS OF A MIRROR

Not sitting here trying to flint knap the splinters of a mirror

into Clovis points for pygmies to go hunting mammoths with.

Maybe if I can make them small enough to go on Twitter

or Facebook, two minutes with a hook in the imagination

and I might be able to make of a little stardust, a big constellation

of gaping fish dying of thirst beside a freshwater lake.

I might make a big splash, like Basho’s frog,

for the lifespan of a haiku in prime time for nitwits.

I want to lay my vision out like a surrealistic starmap,

I don’t want some lazy idiot laying its egg on my forehead

like a carnelian, or worse, a contact lens on my third eye

to cure my astigmatism by eating little peep holes in my vision.

I don’t want a news feed for an intravenous muse

spoon feeding me whatever she wants me to hear

like a distant rumour of inspiration running like an opioid

at the end of a morphine drip with fangs.

Beauty’s not an ephemerid, nor the truth

a media fashionista on a catwalk, or an anchor’s desk,

that doesn’t so much as illuminate and deepen

the darkness and the light, but distract the heart with agiprop

and show off its lipstick as if Van Gogh just ate his paint again.

God bless the insane glorious souls dying alone in vain

as the old order changeth and giveth way to the new

and the language of the spirit that expressed itself

in a grammar of wildflowers breaking into a purple passage

of New England asters, is all thorns but no roses

on a bouquet of razorwire that was born without leaves

but still fits the brow of some silly poetling like Apollonic laurel

for having enough money to buy a good book review

if you don’t have the breasts or the chest or the talent

to get it for free.

Why make a mockery of the lie poetry used to be

when yours is so trivial and petty your pretty snowflake

is going to piss in its pants if it ever encounters

an emotional blizzard or a spiritual avalanche?

And that little night light of yours you keep on

like a dream journal beside the bed, isn’t going

to seed the darkness with stars when all you’ve got to sow

is artificial sugar and organic sea salt. And even then,

you’re not Carthage, though you share the same impotence.

What does the candle know of the calling

of a lighthouse on the moon, waiting for light years

or why the foghorns are always in mourning

for the ghost ships it exorcises with a warning

not to come near, or its all downhill from here to the bottom

of a housewell with the literary ambitions of a black hole

the fireflies won’t come to sip from without going out

because they won’t drink from any fountain mouth the stars don’t

and you haven’t even gotten drunk on the blood

of your own skull yet, singing by a river to a moonrise.

Let the strong rope unravel as it will into a million weak threads

clinging like a mountain to a spider web, or a spinal cord

that’s never been frayed like the delta of a river or a mindstream

that can smell the great nightsea of awareness up ahead,

or even a shoelace passing like a needle through an eyelet.

The planet’s on fire, this is Dresden, this is Hamburg,

this is Gaza in a squall of white phosphorus, this is the inferno

that sweeps you off your feet like a whirlwind of igneous Sufis

and evaporates your eyes like dew off the grass in a flash

of inflammable insight that not even your guru or your shrink

are fireproof enough to live through this astronomical catastrophe.

And you, you want to write and tell me, in poems

that make me want to ask them to come over and do my hair as well

how domestically troubled you are by the pebble in your shoe.

You blindfold yourself with a no smoking sign

in front of a firing squad that thinks it might be a good career move

to make a literary martyr out of you like James Joyce

going blind in Trieste while Ezra Pound

sends him cabbages and shoes to survive on.

Bathetic, trivial, irrelevant and effete, you think

it’s radical not to explore the roots of things

like an underground fire in a valley of cedars,

or immolate yourself like the sumac in the fall

hoping to ignite an Arab spring in the middle of your perishing.

Two parachutes on your back, and one in the trunk of the car,

and still you won’t jump, even when the stars

are underneath you expecting you to join in the firewalk

and Icarus hands you a fire-extinguisher

and says, here, put them out if things get too hot.

PATRICK WHITE

NO LIGHTNING FROM MY CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING

NO LIGHTNING FROM MY CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING

No lightning from my cloud of unknowing,

now that this season of storms has passed.

Occasionally tears, but a harvest of stars

shining like Spica in the hand of Virgo

and all these dazzling insights into nothing

I hang like wild grapes and chandeliers

above the dance floor where I press the wine.

Not meditative, but darkly absorbed, who knows,

maybe even void bound, drowned or lost,

I’m not trying to seek a way out of the abyss.

Whatever it is, I accept it as it is. Most of the time.

And when I don’t and I’m stuck like a wishbone

in the throat of a nightbird, even my dissonance

is included in the background cosmic hiss.

So I say you don’t have to be attuned to it

to be in harmony with it, and if you’ve gone astray

or been misdirected, maybe that’s a course correction

you didn’t have to make, because all rivers

are flowing the right way to the sea, and as

for the picture-music you hear like a hidden mindstream

talking in a dream in a dark wood, you don’t

always have to hit the right note to be a great singer.

Or name me a bird that sings its heart out off key.

I can feel the stillness moving under my feet

like a road, a mountain path, a rogue orbit,

or Curiosity like a wandering scholar on Mars,

a vagantes, a Druidic refugee intervening in the War of the Worlds

and a machine this time looking for the Garden of Eden

like an alien mirage in the desert, fossils of Dilmun,

the middens of Shangra La, microbes in the begging bowls

of a new myth of origin, where Nasa is God,

and a robot is the first of a whole new race of Martian nomads.

The silence speaks to me in thousands of estranged voices

like leaves on the silver Russian olives moved

by the spirit of the wind tampering with their sterling currency

to lament their passage at the approach of autumn,

though there are only a few flames beginning

to immolate the trees like heretics that had to

bring their own stakes to their auto da fe.

O how easy it would be when I’m down here alone

to slip into this river like an unobtrusive sacred syllable

into a long-running conversation, even if

it’s nothing but spiritual slang, and yet be satisfied

I’ve had my say, I’ve added my voice

like a bird in a birch grove, whether

anything alive tonight answers it or not.

As a holy book said once on a bus, sitting beside me,

when one jewel is marked they’re all marked

indelibly as stars and eyes and planets,

and there’s a Conservation of Data Principle

in this universe, even in the heart of a black hole,

that says once here, here forever

in this great spiritual lost and found

that can read the whole history of life

in the mustard seeds that yellow the fields around here,

or the stars that do much the same

in a commotion of atmospherically aberrated colours,

burning with the urgency of mystic details

being whispered into everyone’s ear

as if each were a hidden secret of God

that wished to be known and expressed itself flawlessly

like a master of mantric wavelengths

or a mute with an overbite pointing out constellations

and the last of the wildflowers, a signage of light

reciting the fathomless poetry that lives in a name,

ignoring all the fancy lanterns in the windows

of the houses of the zodiac, to follow the flame

of whatever light you’ve been given to go by,

wherever it leads, through the star fields or the cul de sac

of a satoric eclipse with no light at the end of the tunnel

as the only way of ever prodigally coming back.

PATRICK WHITE

I DON'T WANT TO EMBROIDER THIS STRAITJACKET OF KILLER BEES

I DON’T WANT TO EMBROIDER THIS STRAITJACKET OF KILLER BEES

I don’t want to embroider this straitjacket of killer bees

with threads of blood, honey and toxin. I can’t stand

the agony, but I don’t want to lie nostalgically

about what’s happening to me as it is everyone

to dull the pain with the delusional sugars

of an artificial paradise where all the stars are tinfoil.

Sooner succumb with integrity, than subsist

in the shadow of a lie that buffs the experience

as if churning coke in a hive of angry wildflowers.

Half mad with pain I’ve become so accustomed to,

enculturated by out of the corner of my third eye

as if this were a state of affairs normal as oxygen

for everything that lives, and everything, even the rocks

I’ve been pushing up this hill since I was born

like Sisyphus to build a pyramid out of an avalanche

of meteoric cornerstones that keep getting away from me

like the quicksand and mercury that have tainted my sacred pools,

I don’t want to lose my marbles in this game of Russian roulette.

I don’t want to give up like gravity on any habitable planet

and come unravelled like a lunar cloud of unknowing

or an atmosphere evaporating into the abyss

of a vast space as if I couldn’t hold on to my breath long enough

to bubble up from the bottom again like a pearl diver

with a new moon in his hand and a knife in his teeth

he bites down hard on to ensure its not a counterfeit smile.

Anyone can walk their mile standing up

but who knows how to fall for light years

and never come to a stop within themselves

where their hearts are exposed to the stingers of the stars

that approach them like tattoo artists on a binge.

Whether I’m waning or waxing, or just being taken in again

by a snake oil salesmen promoting a dragon of bliss

with stitches in his eyes, I don’t want to be unhinged

like a gate that thinks it’s a bird without a flight feather.

O I dream, I speculate, I ruminate and scry.

I wonder what it would be like to live in a world

where nothing cries out for anything it’s missing,

or counts its blessings on a rosary of tears and skulls

that know all ninety-nine names of God, but not the one

she likes to go by when she’s slumming with you personally.

It’s far too crucial to me, to the spiritual footing

of this palace of stars I’m trying to raise like a tent in the sky

of an hourglass sharing drinks with itself

like housewells in a mirage inspired by life in the desert.

It’s easy to be kind-hearted to your delusions,

but it’s altogether another mode of upended discipline

to be brutal about enlightenment until your eyes thaw

and your glacial heart begins to move on its own melting

and unnamed fathomless lakes are gouged out of your mindscape

like a new cosmology of seeing that perfectly reflects

your being like stars in a firmament of illuminating flaws.

PATRICK WHITE

HOWEVER WE EMBRACE IT INTIMATELY TO HUMANIZE IT

HOWEVER WE EMBRACE IT INTIMATELY TO HUMANIZE IT

However we embrace it intimately to humanize it

and make it ours, ingratiate it into our hearts and minds,

to understand it, and through understanding befriend it,

suffering remains impersonal, oblivious to tenderness,

faceless, a dragon without compassion for our appeals.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods:

they kill us for their sport. Shakespeare. But suffering

is not what we think about it, not the way we feel,

or the little human why of the fact that it exists at all

we shriek into the unlistening abyss, or keep to ourselves

and cry behind whatever lifemasks we care to put on it

as if it were happening to someone else we didn’t recognize.

These are my eyes and they’re weeping blood.

This is my mouth but the tongue’s been torn out

like the flame of a black candle at a mass for the mute.

And the holy men say suffering purifies. The poet

makes something transformatively creative out of it

as if he had a reptile for a muse that can shapeshift

all around him like a caduceus but doesn’t cure his ills

however he try to dull the pain with an anodyne of symbols.

Two women electrocuted in a pool of water running

to rescue a woman in a car on fire that’s just

brought down a powerline like a cobra from a branch.

The noisy bliss of a school bus smashed at a train crossing

like a beer can in a drunken fist that spares no one,

regardless of age, innocence, karma or the satin in the coffins

to prove that heaven’s a better place than this one

where all we ever see is bloodstains on favourite cotton dresses

little girls with ribbons in their hair are killed in every day.

I’ve opened myself up to the suffering of others

and I’ve seen the waterlilies of compassion

gaping at the stars as if waiting for an explanation

that would make it all beautiful and sane again.

I’ve seen friends go methodically mad trying

to gnaw through the glass lenses of the telescopic eyes

they feel they’re caged in like a spider mount

or a live rat in an aquarium with an exotic trophy snake

blunting the bullet of its head off the walls

until one of the ricochets strikes its exhausted mark.

One man’s agony is the way another makes up for

a personality deficiency by enjoying the kill.

Thirty dead wolves in a pick-up truck culled

by two redneck goofs with egos like guns

to protect the cattle on their way to the abattoir.

And when I drove cab, every morning from six

until noon when even the shadows had to turn away,

I was amazed at how many sick and injured people,

young and old, I drove to the hospital as if there were a war

going on somewhere not far from here,

but the only way you could tell was by

the number of wounded and refugees being carried

back from the front lines to the War Memorial Hospital in Perth.

I was the mobile stretcher bearer for the pilgrims

of the Canterbury Tales seeking salvation from pain

in a secular shrine of excruciating cures.

And I grew angry at a god I don’t believe in

that so many, if not all, were born to suffer

in this way at the whim of a psychopath at play.

And for what? To refine a bit of character

like a nugget of wisdom out of a ton of dark ore?

To attribute a loving cause to a tragic effect?

Clinging to desire in a passing world

might explain a lot and get you by for awhile

in the specious present of mirroring thought-moments

but when you realize you’re just dogpaddling in space

off your leash, and that attachment too is a Buddha activity,

who would dare sit at the bedside of a dead child

and void bound in its absence, quote desire

as the cause of nine cancer treatments

that didn’t send suffering into remission?

War, genocide, disease, poverty, ignorance, perishing,

lock-step ideological synchronicities of power-mongers

murdering whatever they set out to govern

that uphold the very principles their power base

was founded upon by the opinions of their inferiors.

And lovers on either side of the river, their hearts arcing

like bridges Running Bear and Little White Dove

will later jump off of. Pain as transcendent as oxygen.

Mice nibbling through the insulation of the wiring

between the walls like the nervous system of an arsonist

shorting out like a chemical fuse to burn

this hovel of a fire trap in ashes to the ground

and rise from annihilation like a culpable mystic in hell.

Maybe I wasn’t raised to be a good bell, a fire-alarm,

or even an air raid siren hoarse with warning,

and my voice is as useless as a lighthouse on the moon,

and I don’t know enough about any gods

to spiritually gossip behind their backs about

who’s on the nightshift of the terminal wards

and who’s shining like a night light in the morgue

and who’s walking in soft shoes as if

the whole world were a hospital that could attend upon

but not mend a heart that’s ticking like a time bomb

walking through a minefield covered in snow

pushing an electric chair to the edge of futile despair

intent on giving suffering some of its own medicine

like a lethal injection of what we’ve been compelled

to live through with smiles on our deathmasks most of our lives.

I want to see the horror in its eyes, I want it to become

the empath I have, I want it to taste its own tears

pacing a widow walk on its hand and knees

waiting for the sea to give up the drowned.

I want to wound reality for making the pain the rule

and the joy of life a school that doesn’t maintain a teacher

to ask a guru how to dance again without fear

its happiness is going to be shackled to a spider

by a dancing master on the other side of the mirror.

PATRICK WHITE