DON'T BE A STRANGER, COME IN, COME IN

DON’T BE A STRANGER, COME IN, COME IN

Don’t be a stranger, come in, come in.

My house is your house. Out of the wind

for awhile, a hovel of broken mirrors

that help keep the cold out, or a palace of tears

synarthritically fused together like a glacier

of chandeliers by a candle in an igloo

slowly glazing its way to the calving sea

like the Nazi demolition of Warsaw.

When you’re dog-paddling in a shark bowl

of circling sundials, or you’re coming up from the depths,

remembering you’re a mammal, through

an airhole in an ice floe hoping your second innocence

doesn’t get clubbed to death as your first one did,

it’s only natural that the world dispossesses you

of your heart momentarily and you cringe.

This is where I’ve lived most of my life

like a poor boy that didn’t make good

in his mother’s eyes and now it’s too late, too late

to even hope I ever would. Not every sword

you fall upon like the truth guts you

quite the same, and some you don’t want to remove

for fear of what might come out that would

hurt you worse like a great black hole

in the center of the universe that’s bleeding out.

This is a shrine, asylum, shelter, lair, sanctum,

third eye of a hurricane looking back at you

like a snowblind computer screen which isn’t

quite what you expected of the enlightened,

and I don’t understand it either but here

transparency doesn’t mean you have to go to school

to learn to be a window. No sea change anyone

has to undergo like a mirage that’s just discovered

real water is the source of its eyes and the light

is an absentee father most of the time until someone

gets in its way and gives it a reason to shine.

No harm will befall you that I haven’t died for first.

But I won’t stand on the sum of all my failures

and call myself authoritatively experienced.

You’ve got to blow like a nightwind

on the apricot blossoms yourself to see

if that much beauty is as scattered as they say it is,

and we’re just a shadow of chaos lingering in the air

like the fragrance of an old song that came out of nowhere,

or creative annihilation is how we waterclock forward

into fruition like the ripeness is all windfall

into the big plunge into the abyss like Icarus

coming undone like candle-wax feathered in fire

like one too many parabolic flightbys of the sun.

No path to illumination but you can see

your way in the dark by the glow of fireflies

I keep like old insights that shine like night lights

through the eyes of my prophetic skulls

like metaphoric answers to questions that burn the soul

like a lantern held up to the stars overhead

to decipher the occult life lessons of your own starmud.

I started out afraid to write this poem but now

I see you standing in the doorway of this

my alternative, shapeshifting universe

playing transmorphically like a child on the moon

with lunar phases of its knowledge forms,

the crazy wisdom of my solitude waxes empathically

like a dream grammar coming into full harvest,

and for my sake as much as yours, I’m afraid to stop.

PATRICK WHITE  

DARKNESS, LET ME ENTER

DARKNESS, LET ME ENTER

Darkness, let me enter. Oblivion, open your arms.

Sweet liberty, lengthen my chain by light years.

Venus in the Pleiades, let me feel your charms.

I want to ride the light, o yes I do, as far as I can

toward some flowering of the mystery

I can add myself to and bloom as the stars do.

My most intimate familiar, solitude, eras of it,

yet it’s never known my name. My best feature

once you get pass the indignation and the anger,

compassion. And though love seems to me

the sum of many hearts, trying to express itself

as one, when have I not been a doorway to the dead?

When have I ever preferred my happiness

even as my last rainbow bridge went up in flames

and there was no where else to cross before the falls,

to that of the ironic beatitudes of the forbidden and the blessed?

Make me a star again one day with a few habitable planets,

each with at least one moon that can make me crazy as this one.

Promise? Promise me it will be so and mean it.

I will continue. I will keep on. I will endure like a mountain

that never capitulated volcanically to my own rage.

I’ll walk the road standing up. I’ll traverse it on my knees.

I’ll be the nightbird. The green bough. The apple bloom.

I’ve learned. I’ll listen. And when I’m overwhelmed by words,

I’ll give you my voice and let you speak for yourself.

Whoever, whatever, you are not or you are,

though I hear you’re too ineffable to get to know,

should the day ever come you want to disclose yourself

like a hidden secret that wants to be known,

I’ll understand that, I’ll be the night in your mirror

that shows you four hundred billion stars in the eyes

of as many life forms and more in the multiverse

than you can see without being astonished by the beauty

of all the secrets you’ve kept to yourself for light years.

Even if I’m just talking to myself like a waterclock

pouring my mindstream from one ear into another,

whether you’re there or not, or just the matriculated anima

of a pineal gland projected onto a holographic space time continuum,

and my spirit be no more than my own breath

condensing on the diminishing window of this cold sky

where I write the name of someone I’ve never met

with a frost-bit finger, longing for encounters I won’t regret,

let me flow into your awareness like a wavelength

into a river of light or let me burn in the immutable darkness

a firefly of thought, a thread of lightning, a distant star,

a thinning fragrance of a wildflower you might have known

a long time ago that reminds you of someone

so many changes away from anyone you’d recognize today.

I’m not looking for someone to whine to.

I’ve been omnidirectional since I turned forty-five

so I don’t need anyone to tell me where I’m going.

I’m not looking for a soft shoulder of the road to cry on.

After so many nights of laying my head

on this hard rock pillow of a world

that’s refeathering itself in scales and razorblades

I’m not dissing the occult wisdom of my consolation dreams.

The way it seems is the way it appears. Let it.

I grew up on the streets, drastically. I know how

to break a mirror in case of a catastrophe.

Just let me pretend for awhile out here in the woods

where I always feel as a human it’s the first day

of a kid in the schoolyard until I make friends with an owl

or the occasional, curious bush wolf wondering

what I’m doing so far off my natural turf, and why,

just like a dog from the city abandoned on a farm

I feel so disowned sometimes I should learn

to snarl back at the moon when it bares its fangs at me

instead of baying its praises to the rest of the asylum.

Just let me suppose for awhile that a poet

isn’t the orphan of the absurd, that there’s

a bloodline of meaning that still seeps into everything

like the dye of a black rose in the night that steeps the heart

in all frequencies and colours of the clear light of the void

that tastes like the mystic poetry of the waters of life

on the tongue of a stranger who’s just wandered in from the desert,

his lips dusty with the stars he’s been drinking

from an hourglass rimed with sand and salt.

I don’t want to receive everything only to find out

I prayed for nothing, so I won’t, but if you’re

the shapeshifting creatrix of subtle intelligence

I intuit you might be sometimes when I’m alone

with the stars like a childhood that hasn’t forgotten me,

and there’s a sudden breeze out of nowhere

that grazes the back of my neck like a sabre of the moon

so close I could swear we were lovers in another life,

light a candle for me somewhere in the universe,

and you be the light by which the light is known.

Show me your smile like moonrise on the lake.

Let me see your eyes in the rain, so inter-reflected

they can’t help shining out of everything as if

no one could keep you a secret for long, except you,

and for the moment, at least, I’m not accepting this.

Don’t care if I’m painting a lifemask to put on an abyss

of molecular indifference. You should see the tears

I’ve smeared under my eyes to save face

with the sacred clowns I’ve been from time to time.

You keep your distance and I’ll play hard to get as well.

You take one step toward me, and I’ll go the rest of the way.

Devotion’s always been a weakness of mine. One sign

and I’ll light up like an esoteric zodiac that just went electric.

I’ll meet you on a bridge at midnight, and I won’t forget

when fire comes down to the water’s edge, fire

has to use the bridge as well. Just tell me that you care,

if not for me, for all these humans that die like roadkill

stunned by the highbeams of oncoming circumstance

as if nothing in life, however rightly or wrongly,

however young or old the blood on the hands of the clock

that kills them as if they were as devoid of characteristics as you

could console them for the loss of what they dared to hold close.

That’s the gamma ray burst of the protest that has kept us apart

since my innocence first started bleeding in childhood

for the impersonality that mutilates 3.5 billion years of evolution,

the sum of all our infirmities and strengths, as if there were

nothing to cherish or venerate in us, like a homeless drunk

beaten to death on a fire-escape in a back alley just for the fun of it.

That’s the thorn in my heart. I watched my mother

half beaten to death three times by my father before I was seven

and it wasn’t you, it was me, that picked up the ax

to put a stop to it. Who could aspire to heaven

when that’s going on in the snakepit at your feet?

How do you return to your toy truck after

the cop cars and the ambulance has left with your mother

and the absence is so terrifying even the nightmares

don’t dare echo an answer that isn’t an atrocity of guile

that lies to a child about the good that will come out of it.

I’m sixty-four now and ever since my eyes were pryed open

like the petals of a flower that wasn’t ready to bloom yet,

everywhere I look, the indignity and ferocity

of intrusive happenstance inflicting itself upon life

with a few intermittent truces to lick our wounds

like razorblades in candied apples. Yes, I stand my ground.

Knock me down. I’ll get up again. And I’ll carry my pain

in my heart, in my voice, in my art, my blood, my arms,

in the urn of everything I’ve ever cherished

like a silver eagle, a placard, a birthmark back into the tear gas

of the last crusade that never had a chance, if I must,

until the human divinity that broke the seal of our suffering,

small as our light may be now, leaves an indelible impression

upon space and time, or you, if you’re there,

like the labyrinth of a fingerprint you can’t ignore.

And I’m not asking for an emergency exit,

just take the gate off the entrance and let everyone in

on the secret of why everything seems so brutally true

in the bright vacancy, dark abundance of your absence,

and I’ll dance with you in a garden on the moon

until the lemons turn blue as the wild grapes in late October

when you shall be my folly. And I shall be your fool.

PATRICK WHITE

IN THE LEFT FRONT PARIETAL LOBE OF MY CRUCIFIXION WINDOW

IN THE LEFT FRONT PARIETAL LOBE OF MY CRUCIFIXION WINDOW

In the left front parietal lobe of my crucifixion window,

beatifically blue sky letting the slow motion clouds pass as if

they were too white and puffy to be solemn about things,

chilly sunshine casting a neatly cut geometry

of occult hieroglyphs on red brick heritage walls.

Sunday. Free. Blesses its own bells like the left-handed virtue

of a secular day to celebrate a shopping mall.

No mail. No bills. No threatening phone calls.

No answering machine that talks robotically

in the tone of a guillotine in the Reign of Terror.

Good day to write if you’re summoned by other voices

beyond the range of the usual crows who talk

about the dawn of another encore more like roosters than moonbirds

whose feathers turned from white to black

for going as they were told, but never coming back.

Words aren’t a medium for fortune-telling your afterlife.

They’re vital organs of the trees who have no other way

of singing about what they feel from the bottom

of their heartwood up. All lightning and root fires

flashing on the waters of life rippling like tree rings

when a fish jumps like the mind at a low flying insight.

Twenty first century siege mind, brain meat,

soft walnut in a scorched black skull.

I’m dragon-spotting forest fires from a long way off.

I’ve got a computer for a watchtower and a moat

and if I can see any folly in your madness

that passes for the grailquest of a loyal clown

I’ll lower the drawbridge of my lap top

and show you where to stable your horse.

It’s freedom itself to drift like the sport chute

of a dandelion with a flightpath of smoke

away from the thermals of the canyon walls

of an abyss that’s as open and closed as

a tight-lipped door with no expectations of

greeting my alienation like a threshold that means well

and even the silence doesn’t care if you’re listening or not

to every thought that crosses the moon

like a Canada goose that empties the urns of the dead

at midnight, the echo of an ancient pathos in its voice

even on its return journey to pick up

another payload of solitude like a hearse.

There’s no doubt daylight’s kinder to love

than most nights are because there’s less magic

in its prosaic approach to metaphors that only

glow in the dark like the shadows of strangers

in the niches of sacred doorways slightly left ajar

like a black star saving its last ray of enlightenment

before it goes out nirvanically to see better

in the eclipse of the mirror that nothing can be recognized

for what it is until it’s looking through your eyes

as if you didn’t have an identity of your own

but you were still willing to share your absence with them

like a well-thumbed starmap and a telescope

that occasionally weeps to wash the accumulation of stardust

off its lens for clarity’s sake on a seeing-eye night.

Down by the broken phalanxes of the cattails,

their pale ochre almost a shade of moonlight

on the broken lances of an old war gone long in the tooth

like the shell holes of biopic cannoneers sighting their guns

on the British fleet in the harbour of Toulon

and a sea of lunar tranquillity nothing disturbs for long

except the odd wolf nosing around for muskrat,

the willows waltzing with the wind like ladies in waiting

in the most vernal of their ballroom gowns

under the chandeliers of the stars to the music

of a river in passing like a mindstream retreating through time.

Funny what comes to you when you’re dreaming awake

on a late Sunday afternoon in a small town

that’s going on around you like circuitous ants

in the pheromonic labyrinths of the water-logged grass

greening their prospects of pillaging the larvae

of dragonflies that spend most of their lives as nymphs,

hand-picked by the sparrows like krill from the grills

of parked cars beached like baleen whales on hot asphalt.

PATRICK WHITE  

I'VE BEEN A STRONG ROPE AND I'VE BEEN A MILLION WEAK THREADS

I’VE BEEN A STRONG ROPE AND I’VE BEEN A MILLION WEAK THREADS

I’ve been a strong rope and I’ve been

a million weak threads. I’m waiting

for something green and vital to take root

in my starmud, but I’m oozing eclipses

like the La Brea Tarpit and there’s

the white swan of the moon in the window

across the street swimming through asphalt

and liquid bitumen like a chimney sweep.

Underpainting in. I’m labouring. It will

do for the night. No point trying to put

horseshoes on the muse when she’s digging

her spurs into your side as if you were her ride

for the night. Let’s go anywhere. I want

to step out of the light for awhile and forget

that I exist to witness myself struggling to live,

always wrestling with the next angel in the way,

looking for something illuminating in every defeat

just so I don’t waste that much pain on nothing

like a sugar maple being garotted by its own tree rings.

The silence of the town is peopled by ghosts

that feel like dead air when they gust against your skin

to let you know they’re still there as they’ve always been.

Clear night, but the darkness hums to its own madness

like a hermit thrush, and love numbs the heart

to protect it from worst to come. I was struck

in the throat looking for an antidote to myself.

Even when they’re defining things words are

perpetually expressive of the writing between the lines

of a vicarious human nature that doesn’t know how

to stand up to itself without hurting its own feelings.

Every step I take I’m bridging an abyss like a waterclock.

I pour the waters of life back and toward me

into the emptiness as a sign of uncontaminated respect

for the mindstream I drank them from. I’ve long

been a mirage of starmaps trying to fix by parallax

where the radiant of the light, in terms of tracing back

all these meteors and fireflies of insight to the source

they originate from is, if it isn’t non-existence itself.

The traffic lights must feel as useful as I do this time of night.

Red, yellow, green, they should try mixing

their palette up a bit and start adding a few more

complementary greys to the nature of their outlook

upon life. Hard to distance yourself aerially with the blues

when you’re always in the foreground of your own face

up close and intimate as primary colours

in their second innocence. Green, yellow, red,

like an apple ripening thousands of nights and days

without ever falling from the bough. No windfalls

of low hanging fruit there. The sun ignores the dusk

that has come upon it as if the sky were full of crows

pecking at the eyes of a fox on the run until it’s dead.

Night and blood. Blind before the rose. Is it

prophetic? A big life in a little death or the other

way around? Am I drinking from my skull, down

to the embryonic lees of a stillborn afterlife among

the enlightened who sometimes water the wine down

with vinegar just to rinse the taste of a miscarriage

out of their hearts, or do these mirages of black matter

sing and dance in their own desert starfields

as if there were a watershed the moon could drown in

like a nightsea of awareness in the heart

of a drunk poet reflecting on the hard beauty

of a forsaken life devoted to the unattainable truth

of knowing whether it was worth it or not, somewhere nearby.

PATRICK WHITE

BEEN DOWN THIS ROAD SO LONG

BEEN DOWN THIS ROAD SO LONG

Been down this road so long

don’t even know what I’m looking for anymore,

if anything other than the way it is.

Set out to find something, be someone

and found I was the journey itself.

Passage, my destination. Always

just in time to say farewell to my arrival.

The still point of a black hole

in the gravitational eye of my awareness,

change and change again the most

stable foundation stone of my continuum,

it’s like the wind talking to the night stream

in whispers of moonlight that take

possession of my mind and voice for a moment

as if something prodigious moved

on a far hillside and you couldn’t help be all ears.

Life of the Mind. Function or Source.

Light or lantern, or inseparable bodymind

reflected on its own waters, or

the optical illusion of a dream grammar,

a cosmic tweaking of God-particles

in the third eye of a hurricane of stars

like a mirage in a sandstorm the washerwomen

in your eyes rinse out in tears after

beating your brains against the moonrocks

wonder keeps bringing back from your heart,

convinced there are hidden jewels of insight

in the ore. Even the way you’re weary of thinking

is perpetually new as a patina of light,

constellations of fireflies holding their lamps above

the ancient loveletters of the waterlilies

renewing their virginity as they’re writing

to the stars. Who knows what it means?

Don’t trouble yourself. Make one up of your own

like a bored artist trying to paint picture-music

on the shield wall of plywood boards

around a construction site with siege equipment.

You set out on a grailquest to discover

the meaning of life, and it’s a bad hangover

when you drink from your own skull,

and the next night, you’re drunk, dancing

around a fire with the life of meaning and briefly

you know for certain that mind is inexhaustibly more

than a ghost dance of the flesh longing

like a marriage bed to be crucially urgent

with desire again as a distraction from the pain

of remembering people and things as unattainable

as their memories unavailably lost forever

in the abysmal solitude of an indefensible human

listening with her heart to the irrevocable echoes of time.

Songs for the nightbirds. Sad music of the mind

putting shadows like treble-clefs and semi-quavers

to the riffs of a widowed guitar proud of its scars

as if that were proof what it sings of sorrow

can be believed like words that silence the heart.

PATRICK WHITE

CAP MY PAINTS. WALK AWAY FROM THE PAINTING

CAP MY PAINTS. WALK AWAY FROM THE PAINTING

Cap my paints. Walk away from the painting.

Came to a fork in the shadows of an old oak.

Let it finish itself. My lungs and legs ache.

Go sit down at the desk. My chair creaks

as if it were always perturbed by something in its sleep.

Listen to the night sounds of the town on a Saturday night

watering down the drunks who by now

have either found sleep, true love, or a fight.

The carpenter rock stars trying to play rock and roll

like loggers are done for the night at the Shark and Bull

above the 1950’s carwash with horse stalls for your car

and hoses hissing like rat snakes on wet cement.

The old banshee of the train whistle howls at my window

for bones the bush wolves dug up years ago.

You ever publish anything blue-white and brilliant

like a first magnitude star that just showed up one night

and did all the shining for you, then watch it grow yellow

like the dusk of a middle-aged book, or the sun?

Jupiter Venus and Mercury in a menage a trois in the west.

Too cloudy for any serious voyeurism this side of the windows.

My telescope stands in the kitchen like an anti-aircraft gun

staring at the titles of over read books I’m going to

selectively dump like ballast soon to gain some altitude

of my own and travel light at the behest of the wind

that’s bullying the leaves on the municipal trees like green recruits.

A turmoil of starmud settling in the puddles, wary sounds

of threatened animals coming out of their hiding places

like feral cats and half-mad strangers that live

in worlds of their own that have yet to be discovered

like life on another planet, and the two or three

weeping adolescent girls followed by concerned friends

up the street, as their tears turn into acid rain

they splash in their own faces, burning to get even

with their heartbreak like jellyfish of white phosphorus.

The whole magnum opus of novelistic humanity in a week.

I speculate but I don’t judge. I perceive but I leave

many of my most acute insights to be blunted by the silence

like a sword I’m returning to the water sylphs

drowning in the sacred pools of their sorrows,

a scorched earth policy no one can use after me

as I progress backwards through similar strategic defeats

I suffered earlier in life. It takes a lot of wounding

and soothing to ripen a green apple bitter as spring.

The little acorns from which mighty oak trees grow

live on a diet of wild pigs from the feed store

and somehow, against the odds of cliched expectations,

between seven come eleven and snake eyes,

love still seems to work out when you leave the heart

to tusk it out alone like the first and last crescents of the moon.

There’s a renovated shoe factory in town that now attends

ballet classes and lift weights in its afterlife and one

that manufactures soap that’s always on the nightshift

that smells like Bouncing Bet, Lady at the Gate,

the Pride of London in a pioneer garden that doesn’t make

as many suds when you hold its sap under the tap

amazed at the fragrance of bubbles in the multiverse.

Peace by acclamation, I’m dispossessed of myself

in the ambient silence that befalls me in the dark

just before dawn when the ghosts begin to drift back

like smoke from the last votive candle of the night

to their vandalized graves in the heritage cemetery.

These days I depend more upon my eyes than the light

to realign my shadows with the insights that are casting them

like the morphic forms of dream figures in a shapeshifting world

across the return journey of a landscape my mindstream runs through.

PATRICK WHITE

MUSIC ON THE WIND EVEN IN THE ASHES OF THE SKY BURIAL

MUSIC ON THE WIND EVEN IN THE ASHES OF THE SKY BURIAL

Music on the wind even in the ashes of the sky burial

of a burnt guitar. And I’ve heard dragons immolating themselves

in the lairs of their prophetic skulls singing in the flames

to shepherd moons that martyred them like muses

that came down off the mountain like waterfalls

unveiling whole new modes of inspiration eye to eye

with stars in the tresses of the willows in the valleys of death.

So many blossoms on the circuitous staves

of the apple-tree boughs suddenly giving voice to birds

or scattered at the feet of a poet who’s just found the right key

to the words of the picture-music leading him astray

to fruition. You can plant seeds, semeni sectores,

in the neo-cortical furrows of a newly ploughed brain,

that might root and grow if the crows don’t spot them first

and your starmud doesn’t die of thirst drinking mirages

from the unused lifeboats of a dead language lost at sea,

but one intuition of a firefly on a starless night

and you can harvest the universe like Spica

in the siloes of Virgo, unmasking the dark abundance

of a thousand lunar goddesses shining all at once,

each of their voices accented by the patois of the earth.

How many watersheds there are under the eyelids

of a single tear making its way to a sea of sorrows

with a taste of stars in its mouth like wild irises

that bloom along the shores of rivers in the night

bluer than cremations of hydrogen burning to create

the universe again and again and again

out of the sacred syllables of its own ashes.

O thresher take care not to reap the cornflowers of the Pleiades

when they appear within the sweep of your gathering powers

or you’ll blight the wheat with Eleusinian ergot

that will initiate you into the mysteries of life you forgot

like a bad mushroom trip in the violated shrines

of your heart and mind, when you fell upon the choir

like a talon of the moon in the war bonnet of a great horned owl.

The wolf howls like a wound to heal itself. The mouth

of a human resonates like a cave that echoes

the ancient silence of a dream grammar sweeter than life

and deeper than death buried under the hearthstones

of fires that burned out a hundred thousand years ago.

Can’t you hear the nightbirds singing in the woods at night,

light years of longing in the eras of their voices

embodying the dead in their transmigratory vehicles

to follow the herds of the stars wherever they lead

like nocturnal themes of life dancing around

the ashes of their aubades laid like lilaceous urns

in shallow graves with the firepits of Stonehenge on their chest?

You won’t find many soothsayers in the truncated ellipses

of creative writing classes learning to write with scalpels

in the surgical theatres of collegiate autopsies,

but if you listen like a mountain to your own echoes

you can hear the liberated shrieks of an avalanche

of gravestones rolling away from their tombs

like an asteroid belt trying to get the inside out

like gnostic gospels dreaming docetically

of lamps in the niches of occult cathedrals

that saw holy ghosts rising from apparitions

of boundary stones in the illimitable dark

like spirits of smoke rekindled from the fires of life

that never go out like candles and fireflies alive

in the eyes of the stars that thrive by never turning their backs

on the enlightened visions of the night hidden in their own light.

I don’t impugn the night with my own darkness

and when has ageing ever had anything to do with time?

How strange it must be not to live a dangerous life

or shudder blamelessly before the immensities

of your own soul. What would you have to risk of any worth

if you’ve never suffered the follies and disappointments

of being yourself in this masked ballroom dance of life

where the shadows of the music eclipse the chandeliers?

You have fears? You labour to unravel the knots

in your heartwood without getting bit by the snakepit

of your own irradiant wavelengths fraying like neuronic synapses?

Look straight into the eyes of the worst without

turning into moonrock and remind the Medusa

in her crone phase despite her oviparous attitude toward life

without wings, a snake’s just a chip off the shoulder of a dragon

standing before her like a flamethrower that can fly

to its own rescue without being feathered like Icarus on a white horse.

Swallow your terrors whole like shepherd moons and cosmic eggs

to bring the rain on to keep the watersheds of mercy full.

And as I’ve said many times to the suicidal butterflies in my mouth

if life hasn’t got a guarantee then even death’s a gamble.

Effaced by a black hole do what the stars do and jump

like a gravedigger into the bone box of what’s unknown

by your own singularity until you shine a light on it

like a firefly through a portal to the other side of your eyes

as if it were your seeing, and not the sunrise that made sure

dawn was always breaking somewhere in the world.

You want to write?You want to live as if to live

were still a noble endeavour in pursuit of an earthly excellence

that’ effortlessly attained by failing at it, don’t

keep the shadows of life out of your work, or exorcise

your dragons to devote your dead air space to the cultivation

of butterfly farms. Get down and dirty in the starmud

under your fingernails like tiny fertile crescents

and don’t despise the starstruck savages who are always

the first to give birth to the seed beds of civilization.

What could it matter if you steal fire from lightning

or the gods as long as the roots of the tree of life are burning

as above so below, whether you’re galactic or quantumly atomistic

about your event horizons. And don’t assume you’re as Luciferian

as the morning star because you brought a matchbook

to guide the sun to the same enlightenment path you’re on.

Go off road waywardly and cut a contrail of your own

knowing even these scars of light will dissipate vaporously

like a dragon disappearing into the evanescence of the sky,

like the spiral arm of the Milky Way, like an electron jumping orbitals,

but for a moment that can last a lifetime, the whole universe,

or the face of God, if you prefer, him or her, were lit up by a flash of insight

into the original nature of love we’re all creating in the name of.

PATRICK WHITE