DON'T KNOW WHOSE SCHOOL IT IS

DON’T KNOW WHOSE SCHOOL IT IS

Don’t know whose school it is, but three days a month

for the last few years it’s been trying to teach me

not to care about the things I’ve cherished most in life.

One of the sunset attitudes of old age? Maybe. Though

the jury’s out for lack of circumstantial evidence.

Even apocalypse disengages, but I see a glorious sunset

in the manes of the old lions driven out to walk alone like wisemen

who don’t want to go through all that ferocity again.

The sorrows ripen like bitter, green days into mellower dusks

vivid with swallows. The earth has been at things a long time.

Like a shoemaker that knows her craft. Like a midwife

and an undertaker on the same nightward, listening

to people die in their dreams like train whistles passing through.

The dead come and go here in this small town as

unceremoniously most of the time as they do anywhere else.

You’re friends or enemies with someone for forty years

and suddenly, one day, they just disappear, and you’re given

a few details and facts as to why, and everyone acts contrite

and steps back from the grave because they’re afraid,

prayers, testimonials and floral wreathes laid,

and you realize what a trivial gesture life is compared

to the immense forevers we occupy when we run out of time.

People hang breezy curtains over a black hole

and live on the other side of them peeking out their windows

as if they were looking through a glass darkly

at the solar coronas and haloes of a total eclipse,

trying to make light of how eyeless it is out.

Even the Neanderthals threw cornflowers

like the paint rags of blue skies in the graves of their children.

The dead stare straight up and the living mourn for themselves.

Life goes on as everyone swears it must as if

we were being whipped in some kind of Oregon land rush

to lay a claim to an idyllic cemetery of good bottom land

down by the river, or atop a hill, with a beautiful view

for the pioneer kids who died of scarlet fever

to watch the waterbirds returning to the flooded marsh below

as if there were hope for them yet. Pythagorean

transmigrations of souls in the bodies of birds

or the hearses of Canada geese that carry the Ojibway dead

south and west, once the bones in their medicine huts are dust,

aviaries of angels singing them to their rest.

Raleigh in the Tower the night before his death.

We live in jest, but we die in earnest. Though that strikes me

as more of a trope than a truth, at best, a good guess

it’s just as easy to go along with for the sake of the rhyme

as it is to contest the conclusion until you get there,

keeping in mind Emily Dickinson heard a fly buzz when she died.

Ever listen to an old man trying to be clever about his death?

How odiously underdeveloped it seems. I think animals

are more honest when the hawk falls and the rabbit screams.

Grey hair on the mountain and you’re stilling going

through a sea change of the Burgess Shale as if

you’re never going to grow out of yourself into something new.

Is personality retained like the Conservation of Data Principle

even in a black hole? Once here, though we always had to be,

are we indelible? The mindstreams of flooded pens

that can’t be washed out of our pockets even by

the great night sea of awareness that’s swimming toward us now?

Roman short swords of the gladiolas are sprouting

in the heritage cemetery like green scissors or the beaks

of insatiable baby birds beseeching their mother.

Fifty thousand thoughts a day, not counting

the infinite elaboration of incommensurable emotions.

I can’t look at a grave without thinking of the Library of Alexandria.

Skull bulbs. Do you believe there’s a connection?

Uneasy the sleep of the man who goes to bed at night

thinking he’s a success. Life walks us to our graves

and every step of the way we’ve been crossing thresholds

that are neither exits nor entrances in or out of here.

What a strange dream to believe it might be possible

to be fossilized by your own biosphere. Life doesn’t

let you linger in the doorway for very long before

it slams the coffin lid in your face for not stepping in

when you’re asked, for fear of tracking starmud into the house

as you did at the beginning, as you will at the end.

And this is the brave part. Either learn to drown

like a sea star in the efoliant oceans of the rose

or get ready to be lowered down into the ground

like a lifeboat that doesn’t float. Even as far as China

if you’re out seeking knowledge of spiritual states

or the Beagle rounding the coast of Tierra del Fuego.

Holy ghosts and Hox genes, mass, gravity, space, time,

light, matter, black and white, annihilant energies

quantumly entangled in each other’s creative lives

in the Vas Hermeticum of the alchemical earth

breeding regal quatternios of golden life

out of the ore of base metal, effluvial waterlilies

out of their own putrefaction. Conceptually neat

and numerically comforting, but emotionally unsatisfying

in its mystic details. The green dragon has mercurial eyes

that shine with a peculiar lustre all their own.

The most brilliant error a human can make

is to mistake themselves for an individual

they always wanted to meet. We die on familiar terms

with the strangers we’ve faithfully been to ourselves.

A mirage of fish pleading for the waters of life

from a housewell in a desert of stars when we’ve been

the real thing all along, though we keep seeking it

as if the inestimable gift were only of value

if and whenever we found it on our own. The Milky Way

smears a silver snail track across the starmap of the long way home.

Compassion compels the softer alloys of our souls

to humanize the oceanic abyss of consciousness that surrounds it

with habitable metaphors rooted in tangible sorrows and joys.

Even the earth must sometimes stop to wonder

if the dead ever miss it, and marvel at a flight of sea birds.

PATRICK WHITE  

NIGHT. A WHISPER OF RAIN

NIGHT. A WHISPER OF RAIN.

Night. A whisper of rain. Peace in my heart.

A penny on the third eye of the hurricane

I’ve been trying to ride out all day without

having it throw me off like a big cat on its back.

Farewell, turmoil. I retract my claws

like quotation marks and crescent moons

around the silence of your name.

The fallen pine boughs of your broken wings.

Inspiration doesn’t trample on things

like flowers and stars. No more. No more

of those feelings that were meant to be as famous

as a Trojan horse to a poet grazing on the plains of war.

Eyes running down the windowpane in tears

as if they were teaching it to cry. Listen to the rain

deepen the silence like the roots of silly flowers

when you fire the voice coach

and teach them to paint watercolours.

It’s sad. But I add that poignancy to the light

like a fragrance of the moon to an apple orchard

and let it dream like wine in the dark

until I taste it again in the windfalls of late September

and in the retreating rosaries of grace leaving like birds.

For the moment I am the inclusive intimacy

of a passion that doesn’t scorn the fruit of its outcome.

I kiss my skull the same way I kiss the blossom.

Come life, come death. Two feet on the same path.

I don’t split hairs like the wishbone of the road I’m on

and not expect to lose my way back home

wherever that is now the astrolabe is blind and starless

and I drift like a paper lifeboat in a truce with the sea.

I should raise naval flags like spring flowers

to signal the relative victory of a few short hours

but the candles have already sent the message in flames

and the shadows have answered: message received.

No need of tomorrow and much less of yesterday

let the moment tend to the affairs of its own will

I’m an apostate event unbound from the stake

of the irreligious history of the world trying

to burnish lead into gold in the wrath of a volcano god

someone met on the way to the promised land

and asked to join the caravan at the wells in Median

to compound the absurdity of visionary matchbooks

that rained manna and vipers from the opposite eyes

of the mirage of an hourglass skinny-dipping in the desert

to renew the virginity of time like a sundial on the moon.

Rare revelation to the changelings of lust

released on the river like prophetic decoys in a false dawn

to lure the waterbirds into friendly fields of fire

as if to say you can come this far, no higher.

There’s never been a star named after a human

except for Cor Caroli, the heart of Charles the Second,

dimly under Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider,

under the handle of the Big Dipper I raise to the lips

of a mermaid in the desert like real water

to a true believer in the midst of delusion

just to hear her sing again on the rocks of longing

like a waterclock on a windowpane in the rain.

And I don’t want to tie her to the bowsprit of a shipwreck

that went down at the end of her song,

the whole town on board this leaking ark

and she’s the only one that’s crying into a lifeboat

like a woman with her face in her hands at the news.

Forty nights and forty days of rain in the spring,

the earth’s a hydrocephalic with water on the brain.

And the roads are cobbled with sloppy frogs,

and the darkness is dense with a wardrobe of sorrows

that hangs in the air like an era of hesitation

above the crystal slipper dancing shoes and rubber boots

in the pungent closets of the watershed

that waltzes them like rain on the Tay River

under chandeliers of light-footed starmud

in the abandoned ballrooms of the willows dancing

like gusts of air to the heritage harps

that shine like constellations in their high-strung hair.

A train howls like a wounded animal in the distance,

an iron horse. The nightwatchmen have gone out

like fireflies, but not the streetlamps that have stayed on

like starmaps in the rain to walk the drunks home

arm in arm, crying in their cups like watered down wine.

Nothing divine, earthly or infernal, the eye of time

no more vernal in the east where the moon rises

than eternal in the west where the sun sets,

I’m not playing solitaire in the rain with old regrets,

I’m at peace with the stars that are caught like civilians

between storm fronts, as their seeds get washed away

like flower bombs in a flashflood of shell-shocked rivulets

someone stepped on by mistake. And I’d rather keep

the worst of my war-stories to myself, than swap them

with the vets being strafed by the rain of ricochets

in the Legion’s parking lot where things are fought all over again

as their wives usher them to the passenger side of their cars.

Just the rain and me. As if we were born a moment ago.

And neither of us had anything to fight about.

And I was the bud of a wound that hadn’t started bleeding yet,

like a shrieking poppy or a stoic rose, and it

wasn’t the cure that washed all the blood off

like a paint rag of a sail in a Pacific sunset hemorrhaging at sea.

Just the rain and me. Doing what we both do best.

And all our labour effortless as tears in the eyes of the night.

PATRICK WHITE

BEEN LIED TO SO LONG THE TRUTH STICKS OUT LIKE A SORE THUMB

BEEN LIED TO SO LONG THE TRUTH STICKS OUT LIKE A SORE THUMB

Been lied to so long the truth sticks out like a sore thumb

at three in the morning on a deserted highway. I know

some of you think you’re on top of this, but look again,

for all the applause that follows you around like an encore

of professional mourners, you’re not the lightning bolt. You’re

the weathervane, you’re the desk clerk, the hat check girl

that lives like a hot tip of insider trading for pittance

as everyone stops to ask in passing, did time leave any messages?

Nothing for you, I’m sorry, as you pick your spirit up off the floor

in both hands, on either side, like the luggage of death

and make for the door hoping you don’t get caught

as if you’d just stolen the moon like a half-used bar of soap.

Stray images from estranged mindscapes, heralds of smoke

gathering like ghosts at a seance ahead of the field fire

coming this way like a scorched earth policy of scarecrows

seeking lebensraum like real estate agents in the Ukraine.

I’ll take shelter among the stars. Even in the slums of grace

the houses of the zodiac are fireproof. I’ll tune my voice

like a flame to the tongue of serpent fire that’s always

taking the bloom off the candles with their noses pressed

against the window waiting for someone they know well enough

will never come, but have grown accustomed to the absence,

and I’ll sing my heart out like the deathsong of a circumpolar dragon

on the ledge of a high precipice only the truest of lovers

have ever jumped from, scattering the ashes of their shining

on the wind to sow the emptiness with the stars and fireflies

of transmorphic constellations with more than one myth of origin.

I’m sure I’m living someone else’s solitude. What

a palatial abyss! What a hovel this is! Is there

a return address above the door? Does anyone live here

anymore? Am I the only one home? Am I

lingering in the doorway of a pathetic exit

or a grand entrance? Either way I’m lost. I end

where I began, midnight sun, new moon, Venutian Lucifer

under the eyelid of false dawn that turns me on and off

like the lightswitch of a wildflower looking for enlightenment

in the dark heart of a total eclipse that blows the candles out

so it can get a quick glimpse of what it’s waiting for.

Celestial tears of mystic chandeliers aren’t going to water

my roots deeply embedded in star mud or put out

this underground fire that seethes with life

independently of the light like a volcano in the caldera

of an oracular seabed where the dead remind the living

life’s always been more a matter of going to extremes, like breathing,

than hugging shore like a broken mirror clinging to what it reflects,

the white feather of the moon and the nightsea’s tidal regrets.

The truth isn’t sculpted out of Carrara marble like Judaic David

in a body cast with a broken arm Brunelleschi will later sew back on

once Florence isn’t Republican anymore. It’s a cave

that’s always been sand-blasted by upper class hourglasses

of gentrifying lies trying to scrub the meat-eating smell

of the Neanderthals off the walls of their hunting magic

expressed in carbon and red ochre like the secret syllables

for blood and night, to make the place more habitable

for vacationing gazelles with more time on their hands than predators.

The lesser of two lies is still pinging the short straw

on the tine of a tuning fork that bites like a snake

in the middle of a dancefloor where the roses waltz with thorns

to keep their finger on the pulse of a dead cultural life

that makes perfect sense to the unimaginative.

All the white knights have floated away like ice floes and snowmen

that couldn’t take the heat when ice came to fire

as an alternative way of destroying the dragons of the earth

and wept away what little time they had left.

I’ve never been betrayed by anyone or anything

I didn’t believe in first. I’ve cherished the worst with sly ideals.

I once thought I heard the mermaids singing to me

but it was just a pod of killerwhales disciplined by trained seals

to hit the high notes like flying fish out of their depths.

When the glass grows too dark like soot

on the third eye of an imperfectly burning lamp to see

the fireflies and stars deep within, lay the full moon

like a penny on the eyelid of your telescope,

kiss it on the forehead and wish it better dreams next time

than the nightmares it focused on in this life.

Go out to the woods late at night under the early spring stars

and from the bottom of your solitude, without

seeking an answer, speak to the ferocious clarity

of their indifference like a madman drowning in his own eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

THE GREAT SPRING NIGHT PIVOTS LIKE A PRAYERWHEEL

THE GREAT SPRING NIGHT PIVOTS LIKE A PRAYERWHEEL

The great spring night pivots like a prayerwheel

on the inconsequential circumstances and events

of an unforeseen order of chaos that doesn’t give many hints

of what’s to come. The larval nymphs of hibernial dreams,

sleepwalking through the soporific winter, comatose as snow

are stripping off their eras of clothing like space-suits

and drying their wings like stained glass straight out of the kiln

adapting to the new medium like an open window

breaking up like a miscarriage of ice in desolate bays north of here.

A pregnant pause in the air. The premature hilarity

of late revellers liberating hot tears of alcohol

on the grey acreage of the X-rated pavement down below,

where unknown movie stars write their names in wet cement.

This is the phoney war, the sitzkrieg, the false dawn of Armageddon.

The snapping turtles keep their helmets on.

Felonious spirits man the nightwatch like roosting crows.

The nemetic depths have had enough of superficial catastrophes

crying wolf every time some celebrated non entity

breaks another painted fingernail like the last crescent of the moon

just to flaunt the waning mutability of the law

as Caligula makes his horse a senator

at a see through toga party for transparent government

throwing acid in the eyes of the oracles who can see lightyears beyond

the pernicious longevity of their corporate gene pools.

The moguls, ghouls, and mutants of neo feudalism

crusading like iron chastity belts against birth control

in the lobbies of brothel hotels and banks with the room service

of slummy hospitals and debtor’s prisons for the poor.

Everybody knows they’re swimming through stone

in the cement galoshes of Al Capone as the gangsters

run for office to be of future use to their own careers.

The apple bloom of the human spirit is remedially cankered.

The northern lights that no one has ever lifted like the veils of Isis

are the delirious fever of a solar infection breaking out in sunspots

like mold on an orange. Say it isn’t so, Joe, say it isn’t so.

Yesterday’s grailquest to heal the ailing kingdom

is the dark labyrinth of today’s video game

stockpiling weapons against the expressionless zombies

of the walking dead hiding behind the coffin lids

of their homeless graves like slow-witted assassins

trying to ambush Seal Team 6 like an unemployable working class.

At this preeminent hour the street is lined with eyeless windows

into the human soul downloading an app to livestream its dreams

in high definition like a Caravaggio painting that invites you

to stick your finger in the bullet holes like a doubting Thomas

the wound in Christ’s side chalk-marked like gore on the sidewalk.

Someone’s overturning the gravestones of the angels

that kept their ancient places like a Confederate cemetery.

The barons in their hill forts look down from their overviews

surveying all they own like paranoid pleonaxiacs covetous

of their neighbour’s need to eat and live and breathe and breed

in peace as if he had a birthright to his own regeneration,

one anonymous stem cell of a creative imagination

that all else follows from of its own accord like dragonflies

and leaves on the fourth growth trees and pariahed waters of life.

The dark is supersaturated with the indolent intemperance

of vulpine rabies about to go pandemic in a hydrophobic rage

of anti-biospheric spirit enflamed by a vindictive madness

that will afflict itself on people like King Omega of the Waning Year

on a terminal ward where desolation just wants to get it over with.

Didn’t the poet say, enough, or too much? Desecration

on a crime spree against the laws of hospitality

toward strangers from the past, rape a Brazilian bus.

The stars above the yellow riverside willows coming into leaf

shine more simplistically as the subtlety of our seeing

is dumbed down by the political conditioning of watchers

watching the watchers as they hand out bread and circuses

at a black mass of wafers and viviparous passions

where every contestant regresses through the stations of virtual reality

like an anti Eleusinian mystery play based on classical mycology.

Little tree, little tree, in the Eden we can’t return to,

you’re a soft-hearted thornapple cooler than moonlight

flaking like the flesh of silver fish on a thriving lake

where water preoccupies itself with being alive.

The wisdom of the return journey’s deeper innocence

has been irrevocably lost like the peduncle

in the ensuing phylum, like an empty lifeboat

that drifted away in the fog of an unmoored moment.

The morphology of knowledge forms comes and goes

like a shapeshifter annihilating positrons

looking for God particles to attribute mass

to a Standard Model of Universal Mirages

that can be photo-shopped like a proxy of God to posterity.

Save me, save me from myself cry the chicken little prophets

who keep falling on themselves like skies caving in

to the pressure of laying enough cosmic eggs to meet

a minimum quota of sunny days to come inside.

Power, knowledge, wealth, sex, art, popularity,

Californian encounters with astonishing gods,

as serial killers return the keys to the broken washrooms

abused at roadside gas stations by people passing through

their own digestive tracts, one acidic pit stop after another,

as the wolves dig up teenage girls along the Highway of Tears in B.C.

with cyanotically blue fingernails and mass i.d.

that salves the horror of random killing with an air

of inevitability, given what some of them did for a living,

making love because they couldn’t afford to make war.

The healers are coming up with new placebos all the time

to keep up with the progress of advanced diseases of the mind

The death of so many children fingerpainting in their own blood,

a serious threat to gun rights. Boards of education,

the Praetorian guard. Day care centers at the OK corral.

A run on boomslangs and Bushmasters like Apple i pods,

while everyone sighs trying to milk the moon of human kindness

for anti-venom to undo the paralysis of a child’s mass cardiac arrest.

We’ve been shocked to death by the ferocity

of our own sins of omission trying to put a cold smile on things

like snow on a dungheap, flowers and teddy bears

on the stairs of an abattoir that puts hell with its halberds to shame.

The big fish eat the little fish and the little fish have to be armed.

Evolution is an arms race that can trace its ancestral lifelines

like a bush back to the Burgess Shale. Predatory eyes.

Soft body parts like bleeding hearts in thicker shells.

Heat seekers and siege minds with the internet wired

to their skulls like drone masters in Colorado

with their eye in the sky on the big picture

of draconian starmaps placing their zodiacs

under house arrest in zoological environments

to preserve them from going extinct before they’re questioned.

O Truman, little haberdasher, you let Pandora out of the box

like a nuclear foreign policy that turned the elemental table

against itself like a mad dog biting at its own ulcerations.

Phaeton took charge of the chariot of the sun and set fire to the earth.

Shall we take the reins of Charles’ Wain in the bread basket

of the Midwest and plough the dead under like grain

to renew the half lives of a genetically modified rebirth

as resistant to blight as Jesus in the wilderness harrowing hell

as we reverse the spin on our millenarian myths of origin

and make agriculture the civilized scapegoat for what we cultivate

in our missile siloes? Cain slew Able because his sacrifice

wasn’t acceptable and the crow scratched the earth

like a corporate farmer and said bury him here like this.

Isn’t it true? Now every time we kill a plant

we’re hunting ourselves to death like food?

Greed raised the temperature of the earth five degrees

when the planet came down with us like a fever

and Atlantis sank like an oil platform in the North Sea

all technologically failsafe sailors on board

like true captains of industry manning their executive lifeboats

while we’re left clinging like swim bladders

well over our heads in debt to anything that floats.

Apocalyptic. Martin Sheen on acid in the first scene.

Violent mandalas freaking our punched-out reflections

like spider webs having a nervous breakdown

someone might lift the veil from our face

and see once and for all what we’ve always been,

gravitational eyes shapeshifting empty space

as if, as it never isn’t, I were modelling my inspiration, my muse

into a full body life study in the nude from the inside out

and she had to stand very still in the rain,

in a thin garment of silence, just as I’m about

to say her name like a grave at the back of an orphanage.

PATRICK WHITE

IT'S BEEN TRIED BEFORE, EVIL COME TO THE DOOR

IT’S BEEN TRIED BEFORE, EVIL COME TO THE DOOR

It’s been tried before, evil come to the door

to school me out of my muscular optimism,

my seven times down eight times up approach

to not throwing the fight, the agon of life, until I’m dead.

And even then, even then I’ll probably end up wrestling

with the angel in the way, strategically growing stronger

with every honest defeat. I weld my wounded heart,

the crack in my skull cup into a deeper bond

with these challenges in life that flatter me

with the quality of the enemies I’m known by

just as much as my friends. A medicine man

is only as strong as the wounds he’s called upon to heal.

Physician, rise from death. The dragon’s real.

Though the princess is fictitious and the knight’s

overdressed for combat, what difference between

the slayer and the slain when they’re both quantumly entangled

in the same ghost dance of the sun and the moon for renewal,

the bull and its matador with seven cloaked eyebeams

driven into its back like serpent fire as it kneels

in the garland of its own blood like a rose

releasing its dark abundance from the sweet meat

in the mouth of its wound. Horns and thorns,

the moon gored on its own sword to pour starwheat

into the empty siloes of mammals, crustaceans and reptiles.

Defeat as a sacrificial act of love that shames its victories

into more self-abnegating modes of power that flex

their generosity without knowing where the gifts come from

or who they’re meant for, but uphold the rhythm of giving

like a waterclock determined to make it through the rapids ahead

like a thread through the third eye of a needle

trying to stitch up the rift between the discontinuity of chaos

and the narrative theme of the space-time continuum

that keeps unfolding like the manifest destiny of a bad guess.

If you don’t feel stupid and foolish and empty a lot of the time

trying to attain the unattainable you’re not much of a wise man

or a woman in her craft. The genius and jester

of your own crazy wisdom, enlightenment comes

every spring to the locust tree like unlikely blossoms and honey-bees,

to teach you to respect the unpredictable absurdity of returning to joy

like a dead garden on the moon looking for its way back to life

suddenly breaking into light like a starmap of dandelions.

The destroyers hate the irrepressibility of life

and they’ll come with the Tetragrammaton around their necks,

undertakers with eyes like available sky burials to the dawn

chanting elegaic aubades over the afterbirth of the stillborn

like black laughter at life’s irredeemable inconvenience.

Even the little fires can’t empathize with their trained indifference

to burning in the name of anything the stars aspire to

but an urn of ashes like the fortune-cookie of a crematorium

that begins where it ends like an adolescent geriatric.

You can carve a guitar out of rotten heartwood

and teach it a few chords and a sense of timing

like two minutes with a hook at amateur hour

but that doesn’t make you a singer with a gnostic turtle shell

for a lyre. The destroyers are endlessly tuning

their eye-puncturing guitar strings like spiders

mending fishing nets for the big catch

their nasty boy selves riding Apollonian dolphins

are going to sheepdog toward shore like pitbulls

as if Rubick’s cubes and Moebius strips of feigned emotion

were the necromantic tricks of arcane magicians

they never got out of their own nets to see how vast the ocean is.

Any poet worth their stars has always intuited

a bridge is the third bank on the river of life

and kept reaching out for their opposite extremes

like the wingspan of a waterbird in oxymoronic unions

of disparate elements, hammering the slag out of their words

and tempering their fire like the swords of the vows

they made to the mindstreams of life like an unbreakable alloy

held in trust and tribute until the night they drown

like a reflection of fireflies in the eyes of the stars

sitting lightly like the laurels of Corona Borealis

on the crowns of the black walnut trees that oversaw the fledglings

fly from the nests of their leftover begging bowls

as if the earthbound were holding out its arms

to offer the gift of a gift to the sky from the bottom

of the watersheds it’s rooted in like black swans

among the counter-intuitive waterlilies anchored in our starmud.

No other way to say it or hear it without contamination

except to express it faster than you can think about it,

before your shadow can get a leg up on the light,

or the past starts writing epilogues for a future

that spends its life longing to happen

as if something were always missing

like the truth of a man lingering on a bridge

watching the waters of life pass beneath him

like the picture-music of a sacred verb in a dream,

waiting to encounter himself coming the other way

like the faces of everyone who’s ever crossed to the other side.

The destroyers will always try to live like legends

of something that’s already been tragically achieved

and off-handedly left conspicuously behind them like a rootless tree

so the screening myth goes, walking casually away

from its fruitless windfall like Elvis leaving the building.

They hate the infinite creative potential of stem cells

with no identity of their own so they can live on call

like organ donors with a healthy respect

for the heartfelt failures in life who don’t know why

they tried, but did. And in so doing, fell toward paradise,

feathered by the light, riding their thermals

like inspirations of the earth and the air toward nightfall.

Solitary hawks as clear-eyed as the stars they’re dancing around

like the fires of Cygnus and Aquila in the east

and the burning Lyre we’re heading toward at

18 kilometers a second as the Great Winged Horse

springs from the severed neck of Medusa wishing

happy contrails to the underwhelming grandson of Sisyphus.

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