MAD PEOPLE TRYING TO IMPRESS ME

MAD PEOPLE TRYING TO IMPRESS ME

Mad people trying to impress me with the quality of their souls.

Ego-slurry alienated radioactively from the rest of the world

trying to compensate for the meltdown of their lives

by glowing bioluminescently in the dark like the tiny zodiacs

of their watches allotting one star each to all of their signs,

or colourless fish in the depths of the seas of their own awareness

that have no need of the sun to shine by their own lights.

No river’s flowing the wrong way to the sea whether

it goes underground, evaporates, flexes its flowing

in the froth and fury of whitewater turned rabid, plunges

over a precipice into a misty ghost of itself or

trickles down through the faults of old earthquakes

to lie dormant for two billion years in its own watershed

like a dream waiting to wake up in a different hourglass

than the one it drained to the lees of life. And here comes

a cloud in a bong that’s troubled she’s not more of a river

and keeps looking for a lover that will fulfil her like an ocean

she’s dying to drown in. Modes of water all, glaciers

calving into the sea like nervous breakdowns,

or a drop of water trying to leap from the fiery tongue

of a burning leaf in the fall she can’t put out

with how beautifully she reflects the moon in every tear

that hangs on the moment like a glassblower stretching a point.

Fifty years, a poet, it’s not hard to relate to their shapeshifting

or see the fear in the eyes of the paradigms that transmutate

like a seance without a medium into a chaos of evocative stars

that blur and illuminate the nebulae of their vision of life

by the way they associate metaphorically with a darkness

indelibly schooled by the shadows of night into one

apocalyptic revelation after another going off like fireflies

as if they were blasting caps in a beaver dam

they wanted to blow up like terrorists to liberate their mindstreams

like a rush of dopamines in the fractured creekbeds

of their starmud exhilarated into life again like frogs

singing in the climacteric of a seven year flashflood.

Extremeties of heart and mind quantumly entangled

in the disorder of conditioned consciousness, and I’m

no less susceptible to hearing voices in the genius of the rain

suggesting wild irises and extemporaneous lilacs

to the insanity within me that makes a petty life great.

In the company of rootless trees, what’s to get right,

what’s to get wrong? The lightning doesn’t lead

a moving target and birds aren’t the first draft

of the dawn I’m carrying like a sheaf of poems

under my arm to see if they’re in tune with the croup

of shore-hugging swans and astigmatic peacocks

changing their prescriptions like world views every two years or so.

Like powerlines every octave’s a stave of wayward words,

crows, wrens, swallows, bolos of old running shoes,

even when they’re a snakepit hissing on the ground

or just humming to themselves in a summer rain,

as long as you’re singing you’re not sane or insane,

timid as a whisper or so sure of yourself you leave

the whole universe in doubt. Weird as it sounds,

it’s going to work out, I swear, like a jam session

between you and the stars, Vega on the electric harp,

Orion burning its axe like Jimmy Hendrix and o

go quietly, my soul, into the mosh pit

of the Day Glo Abortions singing galactic lullabies

to the cacophony of black holes eating the light

out of the eyes of the picture-music that echoes

in the nightclubs of anarchic Neanderthals

teaching the nightingales to sing like blood-stained buckles.

Chaos isn’t a miscarriage of the dancing star in my soul,

the diffraction patterns of a spider on acid

messing up its webs like mandalic ripples

to empower neo-expressionist bass runs

that like to colour outside the orthodoxies

of its dreamcatcher casting the nets

of starstruck constellations far and wide

as if it were dragging the great sea of awareness

for the corpses of the dead it can haul up

into the empty coffins of the lifeboats on a shipwreck.

Estranged friends, I cherish the negative intimacies

you’ve shared with me over the intervening lightyears

like a blizzard of fireflies trying to make the darkness visible

deep inside the occult priestcraft of your temple telescopes

scrying the stars like eyes in the back of your head

where the shadows enlighten your paranoia

of being left out in the dark alone with no one

to see how bright you are when you shine

like a starmap of lighthouses in the gravitational eyes

of your intensities, bending the light like Beckham and Einstein.

Old pond. Frog jumps in. Splash. Basho

jumping to conclusions like the sacred syllable of a haiku

that’s gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond

the boundary stones of the prophetic skulls

that set an acephalic limit to the taboos

of the wandering scholars among the mad and homeless

born to bloom like wildflowers and mushrooms

beyond the fence of cultivated gardens

that don’t make any more sense than the untampered seeds

the wind scatters like weeds driven into exile

for tasting the wheat, pomegranates, fly agaric and apples

of the forbidden windfalls under the fruitless tree of knowledge

even the bees couldn’t churn into honey

in the asylum of their hives without a black queen

to colonize the stars like the crazy wisdom of a dark mother.

Freedom isn’t bound like a motive to itself

and the abysses of love we fall into like diminished I.Q.s

remedially reading the writing on the wall

by plunging deeper into the darkness beyond

the blindness in the blazing of a one-eyed midway

might be the portals to another universe

more lucidly irrational than this turmoil

of common sensical chaos labouring to order itself

like an elephant graveyard of gateway precedents

poached like tomb robbers for the tusks of the moon.

Who isn’t a lunatic, each after their mystically specific fashion?

Enlightenment isn’t bound by the heretical vows

it makes to its own disobedience, just as the mad

aren’t the repeating decimals of cosmic incommensurables

running on forever like rapids in the waterclocks

of their mindstreams as Heracleitus reminded us,

if you were paying attention, you can’t step into twice

anymore than pi can build a bridge to the other side

of this shoreless river of life or your third eye can visualize

through its tears what it’s like to have the stars

kicked in your face by the bullies of random chance

because some are born to walk upright on their knees

and others, more wisely, have taught their crutches to dance.

PATRICK WHITE

I STILL BELIEVE THE PURSUIT OF AN EARTHLY EXCELLENCE

I STILL BELIEVE THE PURSUIT OF AN EARTHLY EXCELLENCE

I still believe the pursuit of an earthly excellence,

not in name alone, but in the act of elucidating

even so much as a firefly’s insight into the darkness

to add your experience and confusion to the abyss

like a myth of origins in progress, is a noble calling,

a privilege accorded by the moon to wear the hide

and head of a wolf when the spirit howls in longing

to lift the agony of humans up to the stars as if

there were no greater sacrifice we had to give than this

that makes us peers of those fires, eye to eye, mirror to mirror

as above so below, the jewel of compassion in the slag

of our suffering, the beauty of the rose in the midst of its thorns

weeping holy blood on the skulls of her prophetic children.

A poet among people, a voice, a hermit thrush or an owl,

a red-winged blackbird on a dead branch or a crow

on the cabled bridge of the green blackberry,

or an indigo grackle, the eclipse of the mourning dove,

regardless of who or who isn’t listening to the wind

rasp over this desert of stars in an hourglass

like the wavelength of a serpent of fire as a sign of intelligence:

Say what is uniquely human about you so that

others might recognize themselves in the music.

Mourn as you must as if it were your funeral

you were going to as one day it will be,

your ashes in the locket around a loved one’s neck,

and break trail along the way as you explore

the wilderness of your loss so that others might follow,

assured by the dolmen of your presence in their solitude

the dangers of the journey are humanly surmountable.

A poet among people, that’s what you can say to yourself

on your deathbed and mean it in gratitude with a smile

at whatever shape of chaos you’re worshipping at the time,

you had a summons to suffer, praise, rejoice, mean and go mad

on behalf of other people, you, a self portrait of them.

Your love of them voluntarily going into exile,

or driven into it by the very ignorance you’re dying to overcome,

to know their homelessness as if it were a threshold your own,

to sow the available dimensions of the future

with metaphoric weeds and wildflowers in the starfields

so we don’t forget what all the fuss about enlightenment

means to a species rooted like a waterlily in its starmud

as if that were the dark genius behind all that shining,

the apex, the acumen, the anthos, not the denouement

of our flowering, and no future habitable that isn’t freely human

to express its awe and wonder at being imaginatively alive

like a purpureal crocus under an eyelid of opalescent snow.

Poetry is the discipline of a crazy person

who walks wisely among people half-fearful

of how fiercely vulnerable you must become to love them

as if there’d never be anything in it for you,

the most indefensibly human of them all

o so much more substantial than your dream figures

once you wake up, stubbing your heart on the rock of the world,

a razor blade to the artery of the rose that bleeds

just a profusely as you do when death cuts obliquely

into the stem and presents it like the ear of a bull

to the moon in a sacred brothel around the corner

opposite the Iseum where they make the partial whole again.

Incited by life to be demonically playful in the darkness,

angelically withdrawn like the stars and shadows at noon,

cherish the inconceivable nights that are not rewards

for anything you could have done or earned, as love

and inspiration aren’t, and marvel the more

at the strangeness of the miracle that things are this way.

Exhausted mid stride between the noon and dusk of your life,

don’t underestimate the mysticism of action

in the mundane labours of the day responding like bees

to the floral opportunities of tending the larkspur

like a voice coach pinging a tuning fork on their stamens.

Work at nothing that isn’t a form of worship

that demands your passion. Not to be fascinated by your life

is a child labour sweat factory of human enslavement.

The petty won’t brave their own happiness

nor that of anyone else, but the generous will

who understand that happiness is a grace of the heart

that happens to you from the inside out like a fortune cookie

not a law of causality misery is endlessly trying to repeal

beyond a reasonable doubt of ever coming true.

But seldom a joy without a bruise for a poet

whose bell of sorrows depends like most humans

as much upon the rain as the light to ripen

into the warm sugars of life like wild apples at sunset.

The eyes that look the deepest are usually the saddest

like housewells anyone’s free to draw from

but god, what poignancy of light smiles favourably

upon the faces of the tragically fulfilled

who lived out their singular prophecies

to purge everyone’s terror with empathy for their fate.

Arete, excellence. Aristos of merit. Beauty of soul, mind, body, heart,

the quality of your awareness, the largesse of your experience,

the natural humility of the bow you return to the mystery

of a tree in bloom, and the wisdom of an old stump,

not in the way of perfection, but the brilliance and courage

of your failure to attain the unattainable, enlightenment

the ultimate defeat for the benefit of all because it’s never complete

even when the Buddha goes straight to hell like an arrow.

Not void bound, bless the intuitive disobedience of the poet

who burns in the flames of her most sacred heresy,

savagely curse with compassion the erosive injustice

of the greedy legislating impoverished standards of living,

raise your voice when you see murder being done

so your silence isn’t complicit and the power of your rage

mollified by the slag of association that blunts

the edge of your sword when the only mercy is a quick kill

with a sharp blade and you go to it like your own execution.

I don’t care if you’re a junkie sleeping on a car seat

on the back porch of a crack house in the summer,

wondering in a moment to yourself if the stars ever weep for us,

or an associate professor of English at the University of Victoria,

cherishing a pair of thin leather gloves some raving beauty

left in your office and though she never returned

to reclaim them and you as for years you hoped and hoped

still rot like black banana skins on your windowsill,

a divorced housewife doing investigative forensics

on what happened to her life at the kitchen table,

share whatever starfields you’ve sown with tares or wheat

as if there were always enough bread to break with everyone.

Take the gold coin you call a career from under your tongue

like a false moonrise and washing your corpse

in your own grave, take the edges off your sphericity,

average the crucials out like a pebble or a planet

in the great tides of life you’re immersed in

like a human panning their own starmud for a little more light

to be shed in the depths of their oceanic awareness

than there was before you showed up like one bright fish

and lit your cells up like votive candles dedicated to the dark

and started seeing things by the light of your own life,

not the Rosetta stone of three dead languages

that never spoke from the heart about the ruses

of being human that get us through the darkest nights of ourselves,

so when someone takes a greasy volume of poems

down from the shelf, the cover worn off, the glue

of the perfect binding crumbling like dreams

in the corners of their eyes as they wake up,

and they’re shuffling loose pages as if they were

paginating a deck of cards, or trying to keep

the leaves of an autumn tree together, though you’re dead,

though your tongue is a leaf on the wind

and your eyes are clouds, your breath gone proto-nebular,

and it’s three in the morning, and the solitude is withering,

and insanity is grinning in their face as if to say

you always knew this is what it would come to,

and they reach for you like a home-brew of magic syllables,

yarrow sticks and tea leaves, liver spots and fossils

in a bonebox at the bottom of your skull cup,

write in such a way they don’t just read what you’ve said

but sit down on the ground with a friend they can share things with

and break your book open like a loaf of bread

spiritually cooling on an open windowsill as fragrant

as white sweet clover growing along the roadsides of paradise,

but as substantially nurturing to life as compassion for the flesh.

PATRICK WHITE  

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