SHALL WE DANCE

SHALL WE DANCE

Shall we dance, shall we spin and wheel, hesitate, advance,

stall and recover, whirl like maple keys, and blow

the ashes of the starmaps we burned like passports

out of the palms of our hands to shine like dandelions

on an eye to eye level with the light they bloom in?

Sister Lunacy, I watch you uprooting your garden usefully

and shaking the stars out of the clumps of grass

as if you caught Medusa smuggling diamonds in her hair,

and I say such is woman when she forgets to be aware of herself,

and the goddess comes down to earth with dirty fingernails,

a gazelle in rubber boots. And no flower of the field,

no planet in the sunset, no eyelash of the moon over a barn

quite adorns the twilight the way her numinosity does.

And I want to take her by the hand like a binary star system

and circle one another like two hawks in the sky

until the night cools and the loons pack up their keyboards

and the stars work the graveshift on into the early hours

of the forthcoming dawn as if the end of all their labour

were extinction in a deluge of light

that doesn’t recognize any of them by name. Shall we dance,

shall we let the picture-music carry us away

like a word that hasn’t hurt us in a long time,

shall we gather wild rice in the holds of our birch bark canoes

as if we were threshing jewels on the shallow end of the lake,

or do you just want to walk the Road of Ghosts with me awhile

and see what blooms along the way, sunflowers and waterlilies

opening up like observatories and prophetic skulls

with a penchant for looking at things the same way?

Sister Lunacy, be kind to the mandalas and paradigms

I bring you like dreamcatchers woven of spinal cords

like tree rings of heartwood, ripples of rain, the net of Indra

where you mark one jewel and they’re all marked.

Or as Jesus said, insomuch as you do it unto one of these,

you do it unto me, and everyone thought he was special.

As if he owned gravity and everyone had shares.

It’s a radical act to come like a sweetness to ripen

the heart of a human that’s stayed green too long.

Just as you and I know madness is the quickest way

of never getting it wrong and if you’re going to argue

do it in song, don’t exorcise the answer

out of the person who possesses it and bid it be gone.

You can’t post a bond against a ghost.

Myriad guests of the mind, but seldom a host to speak of.

And Sister Lunacy you speak as if you were letting

a thousand voices all at the same time use you

as if they had no other mother tongue of their own,

and somehow it comes across as what you had to say.

So I’m asking you now. Do you want to dance,

do you want to bend space the way a body moves,

reshape the universe in its own image, abberate

a few wavelengths into falling out of synch like damp hair licks?

And I’d remember to remember that only horses sweat

and read your aura by the glow of the hot dew on your face.

After the last lifemask comes off, nothing but space.

Nothing but imaginative room to move as if there were nowhere

we needed to go and we didn’t feel bad about it.

We just went off into the ongoing like everything else

that’s looping and coiling its way through time,

a fragility of the air, caterpillars swaying in the wind

at the end of a fishing line tied to the allure of a butterfly.

Don’t be fooled by the vertebrae, everyone’s flying kites

at the end of a long spine when the air revs up.

You can see them tangled in the powerlines of their ancestors.

Sky burials without altars. Road kill. Cheap cremations.

The whole panoply of the tragically absurd.

But here, sister, here volcanoes still strew

islands in their wake and the birds keep arriving with seeds

and coconuts still wash ashore like prophetic skulls

you’re free to believe or not, and the air tastes like emeralds.

Here you could mentor the stars in their myths of origin

as you made them up to honour some quirk in your character

and they began to speak of you as their dark mother.

And nobody need know what you mean when you spoke to me

about those things that encroached on your silence inside.

I know how to listen for dissonant sounds in the night.

I can hear the falling of a single eyelash of light

when the moon goes out, the footfall of a spider on the stairs.

Sister Lunacy, should I take your hand, shall we dance

to the picture-music that overtakes us unawares,

you with your dark tears, and mine so far in arrears?

PATRICK WHITE

THE WORDS ARE AS BIG AS THEY'VE ALWAYS BEEN

THE WORDS ARE AS BIG AS THEY’VE ALWAYS BEEN

The words are as big as they’ve always been

but the mouths of the people that use them

have grown small, their voices the size of wrens

when they once could shriek like eagles in defence

of the precipitous eyries of their aquiline principles

as if they hadn’t spent their lives with their wings folded

in an aviary with a bird’s eye view of what

the earthworms are looking at. Songs in the dawn,

aubades, but from a cage with an executioner’s hood over it.

People can’t get the word love down their throats anymore

without masticating it to death like flavourless gum,

and the dragons have forgotten how to unlock their jaws

to swallow the moon whole to bring on the rain.

Pain narrows the eyes of oviparous children

like thorns that have upstaged the wounded rose that lies

on the sidewalk in a pool of blood that bloomed like bullet-holes.

Stigmata of concrete. The virgin’s eyes are a morphine drip.

Remember the old Zen mondo about a man

chased over a cliff by a hungry tiger, clutching a bush

slowly pulling out of the side of the cliff wall

like the piton of a mountain climber, while another

open-mawed carnivore waits down below for him to fall

and what does he do, in his moment of peril, but reach out

for a ripe strawberry growing beside him as if

to retrieve something good that might distract him

from the issue at hand. Umm, good, like a cigarette

in front of a firing squad, rabid meringue on the mouths

of the distempered hydrophobes who believe

they’re drowning like waterboarded lifeboats

that drink spit from other men’s mouths like Cool Whip.

Madness in diaspora focused like a gunsight

trying to shoot out the stars like a sniper firefly

with an arsonist’s tendency to return to the scene of the crime.

Ice burns like crystal fire in the heart of a sophisticated savage

electronically wired to its own ideological rage.

I have an expansive heart accelerated by dark energy.

Friends and lovers, children, and family, gods, art, the stars,

things have grown further apart over the lightyears.

Meaning showed up like a gateway drug in my life

and I’ve been interrogating my sorrows ever since,

why we must die, what we were born for, how to live

so you don’t puke at what you’re reviewing on your death bed

just before you drown in the omnipresent abyss

that lets you down like a lifeboat into your own grave.

Words had a facility for me. I was the best liar on the block.

Myths poured out my mouth. I liked to arouse the wonder

in people, watch their hearts gape at the mystery of being alive.

Maybe I was only trying to convince myself, but the power

of the magic I felt was irresistible, and there seemed something sacred

in the sharing, the mutual enhancement of awareness

I could be the catalyst of, and who knows, maybe that was good,

maybe that was love, and though the child in me felt like roadkill,

maybe I could still steal fire like Prometheus with my liver torn out,

maybe there was still some use in the world for a corpse

that could speak like a prophetic skull for what’s about to befall

all of us, by directing their minute attention like the big picture

to the mysterious beauty and ardent truth of here and now.

And if love wasn’t a gift with my name on it, I could

achieve it somehow by making a gift of a gift, by living

open-handed in the midst of so many fists. Not as a martyr,

a messiah, a guru, a walking encyclopedia, a shaman,

an emblematic poor boy who pulled himself up like the universe

by his own bootstraps, I hated all of that as pretence,

fraud, screening myths for an ego coiled like a rattlesnake

under a rose-bush. My head in the stars, my feet in the gutter,

nothing was occult to me by the time I was seven, and yes,

you might feel like a witchdoctor for a moment

like one of the gram masters of the dynastic streets,

but more often than not, your eyes were pierced by dirty needles

like a voodoo doll, or thrown on the pyres of your love affair

with yourself, like a strawdog after a religious ritual.

I was prematurely wise and grey as the concrete I’d been raised on

like bedtime nightmares about some things. I’d seen

what people can do when they’d been taught by disappointment

to hate themselves like a cult of futility dedicated

to evangelizing the viciousness of Sisyphus standing

under an avalanche of stones that rolled back down upon him

like a calendar of moonrises that didn’t have the mountain gears

to make the grade. Spiders of stone enthroned in the dream catchers

of shattered windshields and rear-view mirrors.

Words not a cure-all, no, but still mightier than the sword

to judge by the ones that have been thrust through my heart.

Poetry, the most compassionate of the arts except

to its practitioners. A noble calling with a muse

as old as prostitution. Words the sacred whores

outside the Iseum, not thirty years of Vestal virgins

keeping the home fires of Rome burning. I don’t care

what you had for breakfast. I read your book.

It’s a begging bowl of soggy cornflakes. Where

are the waterlilies? What depths did you write this out of,

or did they evaporate on you like shallow tears

and lunar atmospheres before you had a chance

to shed them? You’re a snake-charmer in leotards, ok,

but where are the snakes? Where are the heretics

immolated in the oracular fires of underground volcanoes

filling their lungs like bongs with visionary fumes?

Burn, baby, burn. Even the library of Alexandria

sang in its own flames enraptured like a star

in its own shining instead of merely talking about the light.

Show me a firefly of insight. Show me a black hole

that dug its own grave expecting everybody to lie down in it

with it like Jonestown, or your buddy there with his

three thousand saddle-stitched individually signed books

he’s flogging like the annals of history, volume L,

at a strategically placed table in a shopping mall,

ask him if he knows how to get drunk on death

as readily as he does on his carbonated stuff like

the sixth pressing of life in the vineyards of the Burgess Shale.

Come on, sunshine, put some night into it. Linger

in the doorway of a death in life experience for

the rest of your life, never, ever knowing for certain

whether it’s a grand entrance or a pathetic exit

or someone’s just poking their head through the curtains

to see if there’s anybody out there listening in the dark.

And if there is, remember this like Simonides of Ceos

or Metrodorus of Scepsis, you just have to show up

like a lifeboat, you don’t need to come on like an ark

in anticipation of the flood that will come after you like the Arctic.

PATRICK WHITE

THIS LATE IN THE DAY

THIS LATE IN THE DAY

This late in the day, could I love you, could you

love me? If I made a black rose of my blood,

redshifting into the dark, and gave it to you,

not knowing what to expect, would you counter-intuit

the wounded watershed of the poetic imagery?

Younger I was a lot more dangerous than I am now,

though I wasn’t trying to be. Dragons raged in me

in infernal crusades of the bad against the worst

as I stood at the flaming gates of the vulnerable

and said to their worst nightmares you shall not pass.

I used my horns and scales to empower the innocent,

trying to turn a curse into a virtue, the atrocities

of the left-handed legacy of my condemned childhood

into something even a stranger might be proud of.

In Zen it’s said that nobody likes a real dragon

and even among those I came to the rescue of

like a Viking long boat with runes like scars

chiselled into stone, and well-seasoned swords

that backed up my word down to the very least detail,

even among the exiles who felt compelled to love me,

even among those who didn’t want to be seen

as hypocrites of their fashionable memes if they didn’t,

I could see people backing away from me

like an expanding universe running on dark energy

and that was ok, I was raised to bite the bullet

whenever my heart was liberated by amputation.

Free of me, I am unencumbered by concern.

I can solo in the night skies I return to without fear

of estranging the stars with my intensities.

Now there’s more mage than king in my immensities,

and time, sorrow and death have blunted my edge

like broken glass rounded in the turmoil of the tides

and Merlin has returned Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake,

I feel more like a rodeo clown in a barrel

with a funny hat, a painted tear, and a flower on my head,

a floppy poppy in red, trying to turn the crescents

of the moon bull on me like a Mayan calendar

to keep from goring the fallen who were mounted

above me like heroes that took a fall. A dragon

sheds its deathmasks like petals of the moon.

So if I presented myself to you as I am

could you learn to love an enlightened buffoon

with the injured nobility of a distinguished demon

guarding a small boy’s notion of doing

some good in the asylum of the raving world,

intrigued with the urgency of innocence

to redeem itself like a mutant gene in the fuse

of an occult chromosome that’s always

about to go off like a bomb buried

in the Milky Way of a fanatical supernova?

Was a time I’d hang the heads of my enemies

like Al Ghoul from my earlobes if they dared

to threaten anything I loved that couldn’t defend itself.

Was a time I’d start a fight at my own funeral

just to stand up for someone when I couldn’t.

Now I’m hemorrhaging like amaranthus

on an infernal summer day and my heart

is a coal bin of all the things I used to be

and there’s more tears in the diamonds than blood.

I don’t dip my pen in the trough of the world,

and I don’t shepherd wolves to graze on the mountain.

Even when space turns to glass, and water leaks out

of the reactor like a constrictor from an aquarium

I endure the inverted question marks

of the hooks I hang on in a deep freeze

as if just to endure were to spite in spades

the cruelty of conditions taking their natural course.

Seven come eleven, but I can look at things

through the snake eyes of frost bitten dice

and not end up piping on a stone flute.

I was born standing in the doorway of an exit

that glowed red at night like a miscarriage of the light

but still the road sign of a back way out of hell.

So if I wrote you a poem you couldn’t understand

would you exalt in your power to unman me

or would you feel the tenderness of the beast

behind the eclipse of the black lion that wears

the corona of the sun for a mane, a sunspot for a face?

Would you trust that the darkness is full of eyes

and some are hunting you, and some are shy

in your presence like wolves that have been shot at

because they’re wild and as cunning as life?

Would you bait the meat with poison in a leg hold trap

or would you defang me into affability

and teach me to lower my voice when the moon was full?

Would we lie in the same bed with a sword between us?

I could befriend your fireflies. I could mitigate your thorns.

I could get behind whatever you dream

like dark matter behind a light filled universe

and when you were sad, let the rain play my scales

like a harpischord or a guitar with a black hole

in the middle of it I would descend into

like an Orphic underworld to sing you back to life.

I would lift all my taboos for you and give you

an exemption in the night to approach me as you wish

and even if your hand weren’t brave enough to ask

I would fill it full of jewels with magic properties

that tempt the thieves of light to risk the labyrinths

of the inviolable graves on the dark side of the moon.

I would beatify you like a grail in a secret society

of warrior saints that haven’t had a drink in years.

And if your chandeliers ever had a nervous breakdown

in a lightning storm, I would dig up the bulbs

of the crystal skulls I buried in your garden for next year

and let you talk to them yourself about your fears

of what’s to come, and how to heal the shattered

with the dark clarity of compassionate crazy wisdom

drifting on the oceans of your tears

like a hydra-headed lifeboat empty but for you.

I would plunder spiritual islands in the wake

of extinct volcanoes to bring you

the rarest herbs of insight prophecy could afford

to see you dancing again like a constellation

rising over my event horizon with no fear of the abyss.

I could do this, I would be this, and will and more

and mean it if you’d let me. I could be the quicksilver

water of life and you could be the white sulphur

substance of the great work, its spirit and activity.

Or the other way around, if you like, given I was born

on a Wednesday with wings on my heels and head.

I could be the dragon trickster, infernal and divine

the hermaphroditic hidden secret

buried in the earth, creature of fire and air,

and you could be the salt, the anima mundi,

the philosopher’s stone, the light of the soul,

the wisdom that gives life and energy their forms,

mistress of the planets and the stars, the divine energy

that moves all things around to bring things about.

What an experiment we’d make, what an art,

what a conjunction of life and love and bodyminds

what signs we could reveal, what prophecies scry,

what freedoms take we could be burned at the stake for.

And the sand paintings we could pour through an hourglass

that would blow away like the dust of the road

and the comets that fell from their black halo

around the sun, and the lifting of waterbirds

in the pewter moonlight feathered on a lake

we could observe, and the scores of new constellations

we could form like new houses of an alternative zodiac

for the dispossessed stars of the homeless

burning their hearts out around oil drums under bridges

that span them like the Egyptian sky goddess Nut,

and the poems that would flow like spiritual transfusions

into the carnal bloodbanks of the burning rose

with a needle exchange of thorns, and the transmutations

of base metal into gold and back again, of dragonflies

gleaming like anthracite in the birth fluids of their chrysales

drying the filigreed silver of their wings in the sun,

paper clipped to the waterlilies like pencils behind their ears,

and the light years of passion and devotion

this would take to be done in unison, in chaos,

in wonder and bliss, in fingertips, eyes, skin and lips,

two alchemists in the Vas Hermeticum of a conceivable abyss.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN YOU LISTEN TO A BIRD

WHEN YOU LISTEN TO A BIRD

When you listen to a bird

you should hear the whole of the sky

just as when you look at a star

you should be a fountain of eyes.

Because you cannot see,

the darkness is not blind

and your consensus of conventional abnormalities

is not reality, is not the source

of the hidden halo of comets that afflict you,

nor the crazy constellations of the fireflies that bless.

I don’t know if I speak for anyone other than myself

but that’s enough to reflect the moon in every drop

of this unvoiced delirium

that surpasses enlightenment and lunacy like old shoes

to walk barefoot across the stars

as if they were no more than cool sand in a desert at night

that’s never been bound to a road,

though every single grain is the cornerstone of the world.

How unsayably me I must be

that so many thoughts and emotions,

so many vital themes of blood and time,

years that have returned their fields to the wild,

have enshrined my namelessness

in this abandoned palace of shadows

I’ve pitched together like a chrysalis out of words.

A true muse is a well

that finds its own way to your mouth,

and I accord mine the perfect freedom to be me,

and drink deeply of the night she pours into me,

until neither of us knows who the other is

though we whisper like leaves on the same tree.

What’s crucial is not to offer yourself up

like a tourist map to the wind

but to let go. To find out where you’re going

not by giving up everything that you know,

but the knowing.

I let my thoughts follow the path

of a snowflake in a blizzard

until they melt like eyes on earth

to show my roots how to flower,

this one a waterlily opening

like a diploma in a swamp,

and that, the devil’s paintbrush.

Should it be otherwise?

Can you turn your eyes back like a clock

and unsee the things

that have looked so deeply into you

the skull of an impersonal space

wears the atmospheric intimacy of your face

like the ghost of an unknown planet?

I have felt poppies of blood

hotter than any prophetic furnace

rend my flesh like starving lions

for things I never knew I believed,

for the heart I laid down like a sword on the altar

to the inexplicable gods of the misconceived,

when I realized that not even my homelessness is shelter

and the only country under the flag of my blood

that might have claimed me as its own

has caged me like an undocumentable alien

in a holding cell of bone.

But it’s foolish to look for passage

when nothing’s in your way,

or seek enlightenment with a candle at midday,

not knowing you’re only washing a mirror with shadows

and handing out wicks to the stars.

And what’s the sound of one hand clapping?

Be compassionate. Be generous. Be kind.

This is the only way to forgive your mind.

PATRICK WHITE

ALCOHOL, SEX, AND THIS COLD SPRING NIGHT IN THEIR BLOOD

ALCOHOL, SEX, AND THIS COLD SPRING NIGHT IN THEIR BLOOD

Alcohol, sex, and this cold spring night in their blood,

the rowdies outside the Crown and Thistle have taken

their chilly elations home. Past midnight, the town quiescent,

the moon, Venus and Jupiter set, the silence of the stars

through the window, mercifully voluble, and an underworld

of new insects are being pawed by cats, crawling across

living room floors like robotic space explorers as

foggy threads of miasmic lyrics are beginning to unfold

like leaves that have never given a poetry reading before.

Who knows? The blossoms on the municipal trees

could be the beginning of fame. You write enough words

you get paid back with a name you don’t quite know

what to do with as if someone had just discovered your skull

like an unknown element on an alien planet. Trick is

to let people hear themselves in your persona the way

a cave returns everybody’s voices to their own silence,

or water returns the moon to its own penumbral seas.

My old familiar, the train whistle howls

at this witching hour of the night like an honorary bush wolf

and I can feel the roots of strange flowers probing my starmud

as if the bulb of my lilaceous heart were about

to break into light again like a poem that’s lain

prophetically dormant through a long winter knowing

timing is as important as content, like the rent,

but spring comes and the frogs and the trout lilies,

the blue hyacinth and the apple trees bloom

like supernovas in distant galaxies, or drunks outside a bar.

So you can’t miss them like a sign of who you might be

when your eyes are open to the mystery of being here at all.

I save the history of the tree rings in my heartwood for the fall,

old orbitals I’ve jumped like an electron with a negative spin

to release a photonic discharge of light frozen like ripples

in a dark time as if I lit a match to see why the stars had gone blind

or the lantern of a nightwatchman looking for the light

with the light, his mind with his mind, his heart

in the ashes of the rootfires of his blood. Right now

I focus on the green growing edge of what I’m becoming

as if all the cells of my cambium were stars accelerating

like a universe driven by dark energy into the realms

of an unilluminated space that’s ready to receive them

like a new myth of origins that isn’t defamed by where I came from

and even less by this road that doesn’t know where I’m going.

PATRICK WHITE

SITTING ON A PARK BENCH IN STEWART PARK

SITTING ON A PARK BENCH IN STEWART PARK

for Caitlin Fisher

Sitting on a park bench in Stewart Park

directly behind the jumping statue of Big Ben

frozen in bronze and time beside the black marble slab

that looks like a mini Vietnam wall of corporate sponsors,

staring into the sun at the white water rushing

over the rocks under Little Rainbow Bridge,

under the greening willows, galaxies of stars

winking in and out of existence like fireflies,

whirlpools of radiance spreading out across

the reflection of dark leafless tree trunks

shredded by the blue of the sky then pieced

back together again in the wavelength of a snake

charmed by the muscular undulance of the surface

of the pond rippled like a membranous universe

in some earthbound mode of hyperspace, as if

someone took the Pleiades on a clear winter night

and sowed them like first magnitude wildflowers, chicory

and asters, perhaps, in the troughs and furrows

of the sinusoidal waters moving like supple mountain ranges

toward shore where a clash of wild irises

raised their tender green swords up to the sun,

created and annihilated millions of times an instant

in the blink of an eye, white hot and young again,

and for a moment, as fast as an insight

into the nature of a vast intelligence inspired

by the scintillation of its own light playing

upon the waters of life as if nothing, not the skulls

of the underwater stones striated and webbed

by the waves of the golden webs and nets

dreamcatchers and runes inscribed on the rocks

like a language that never speaks in the same tongue twice

in a world of white shadows in unfathomed depths,

things took off the patina of their deathmasks,

and what was solid and inanimate, even Big Ben

anchored to the earth in the afterlife

of his arcing transit through the air forever,

couldn’t help but be alive and real

in every visionary act of seeing that animated

the whole of my being through the eyes

I saw shining out of everything like aeons of stars

opening loveletters like wildflowers and metaphors

addressed to what’s nameless and illuminating

about the substance of sentience that beguiles everyone

in a world of forms shapeshifting transmorphically

as the mindstream turns and the light burns

for the dazzling face of the stranger behind the veils

of the willows rooted in the spring run off of the Tay River

like a flashflood of life threading the eye of paradise

like the creative rush of the fledgling awareness

of the cosmic unfolding of chaos under the wingspan

of Little Rainbow Bridge reconciling the disparities

of light, love, life, in these recombinant unions

of starmud and mind and the heart that smiles within

to feel what’s liberated thereby like the light upon light

of a million epiphanous suns from one side the mind

reflected like the memory of a face you saw in a mirror

in the depths of a dream where you’re bright and whole

and creatively free to wake up on the other

shoreless river of life to realize there’s only

this small, red bridge of blood you’re standing on

watching the flow of things, without waiting

for anyone to show up who isn’t already arrayed before you.

PATRICK WHITE  

STARING INTO THE FUTURE

STARING INTO THE FUTRE

Staring into the future without my hand

on the rudder of the moon. No sail, no wind

but the air in my lungs, no star to set a course by

but the Milky Way in the wake of this

leaking lifeboat I keep bailing like a waterclock

to stay afloat, drifting as if time had lost its way somehow

or Hart Crane had just jumped off the stern of the Orizaba

at high noon, waving good-bye like a conductor

in an adagio of islands in a logical archipelago

of metaphors, or the footprints of Atlantis

on the waters of life before it sank incontinently.

Grey day. Blue funk. My body washed up

like a broken log boom on a pyre of bones

on a beach somebody will set fire to sooner or later

like a drunk undertaker singing folksongs

to commemorate the ashes of cremated guitars,

but my mind’s awake, contemplating the future

like the biggest mistake I could possibly make.

Two choices in the divergent lives of poets.

You either go down with the ship at moonset,

or you jump it like a plague rat in Genoa.

I smash a bottle of Dom Perignon like a French

Benedictine monk over the prow of a shipwreck,

more seaworthy for all the things I didn’t do in life

than those I did. I can swim but I’m better

at sinking like a dolphin in a fishing net. O Carib isle,

where’s the caress of the Gulf Stream in an ice age

when you need it? I don’t have a daddy to throw me

a lifesaver once in awhile when I break through

the iced-over tears of my former translucencies

into the thriving depths of an oceanic shepherd moon

I didn’t evolve from. I will humanize the darkness

and the terror of not being able to relate to anyone

by metaphorizing it with my presence in residence

like dream figures in a total eclipse that doesn’t

make the flowers wince and close up like inverted umbrellas.

I will seed the available dimensions of the future

with the teeth of lions, les dents de leon, a galaxy

of G-7, post midlife, unmarried suns scattered

like the paratroopers of dandelions on the wind

at Market Garden, though I land on rock or good soil.

I’ll write open-eyed starmaps that can see in the dark

what everybody’s been looking at all these years

like chandeliers in the house of life after the last candle

in the lantern I’ve been given to go by has gone out.

Thumbs up, thumbs down, I’ll burn like white phosphorus,

or the torches of the dadaphors at the Roman New Year,

quantumly entangled in the umbilical cords

of my creative annihilations like an albatross in the rigging

of a ghost ship that’s been known to haunt these waters.

I’ll release my blood like the banner of a rose

and wait for the sharks to circle me like sundials

and break my body up like loaves and fishes when they come.

I’ll return my tears like water to the river of sorrows

I took them from like the crown jewels of my heartfelt abdication.

I will not unseat myself from the unforgiving stations of life

I’ve ruled over nothing from. Here in this domain of the future

I’ll endeavour to be as good a pauper-king as I was back in the world.

A prophetic skull that could look into the eyes of the abyss

and prophesy, but seldom interfered with what I saw.

Not a sin of omission, but obedience to an unacknowledged law.

And all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well.

No moon like a goat’s head polluting its own watershed.

I’ll make amends to the dark matter that took me for granted.

I’ll sit meditating in front of this wall of the future

nobody’s written on like a turf war of grafitti call signs

like A Bodhidharma doll. Seven times down. Eight times up.

Such is life. And I’ll introduce my illimitable understanding

of Pacific cowboy, lunatic fringe, seahorse Zen

for those who want to seek wisdom as far as it can be lost in.

I’ll clothe the imageless acts of what’s to come

like a retinal circus of defrocked sacred clowns

that have given up trying to make anybody laugh at themselves

as if they were an in-joke that God just got

like a numbing shock to the ulna nerve of her funny-bone.

I’ll be a trickster, a crow, a fox, a neo-gestural

expressionist gleeman or jester, I’ll be a salmon,

mare, seal or fly that bothers an elderly woman

like Loki, the shapeshifter, saying, bless me sister,

because I’m the annoyance that keeps you from dying

in this oceanic multiverse of bubbles and blisters.

I’ll paint streetsigns named after surrealistic wildflowers

I came across anonymously like a vagrant in the star fields

where every step I take is the threshold of a long, lost road

back to my homelessness that waits for me like the conjunction

of Venus and Jupiter through a western window

as if power and love weren’t the waste of a good heart

dumpster diving for the black pearls of an occluded art

that refused to be blinded by the opalescent blazing

of a false dawn like a silver lining on a locket of slag.

I’ll apprentice myself all over again like a metal worker

in moonlight to the flightfeather of a black swan

in the company of Orphic lyres and the eyes of Arabic eagles

everyone can identify with like the iris of a starmap

shining like a new myth of origins over the tarpaper rooftops

of irremediable slumlords clinging like barnacles

to the skulls of the drowned with eyes that stare

like the lachrymal glands of hourglasses and glaciers

on the move on the moon into a future with the tear ducts

of a snowman inundated on a floodplain of oceanic compassion

for the longing in the hearts of the dolmens of coal

trying to keep warm in the Arctic night like stalwart guides

to the river deltas where this mindstream of flowing diamonds ends

in a penumbral vision of life of an imperfectly flawless life.

PATRICK WHITE