WRITERS STRIVING SO HARD TO BE UNLIKE ONE ANOTHER

WRITERS STRIVING SO HARD TO BE UNLIKE ONE ANOTHER

Writers striving so hard to be unlike one another

as they’re looking for new similitudes between themselves

and the many in the one, the one in the many,

everyman writing the autobiography of his loss of identity.

Everywoman etching hers with her fingernails

like grafitti on a glass ceiling breaking

like chandeliers of rain along the fault lines

of a shift in continental plates. Captain of a dreamliner

I set myself adrift like a lifeboat a long time ago.

I sing to my own silence whenever I want to be heard.

Savagely vatic, a wry surrealist with mystic outcomes

I rely on too much, I can see the horror and the humour

in the sublimity of the black, morality farce

that gets laid over your face like a death mask

people can recognize you by like a patina of soot

on the thin chapbooks of the butterflies sipping

from a Venus fly trap like the wellspring of the muse.

Young, in a room that doubled for a shrine,

I had an dark genius for making people mad.

Later, as islands emerged out of my magmatic rage,

my fist relaxed and I acquired a grace for making them cry

but that was still the lunar achievement of a journeyman

watergilding children walking skinless through the world,

wrapping their tears in the iridescent sheen of the nightsky

like a lullaby that had compassion for their dreams.

Master of nothing now, working in the creative freedom

of an abyss that entices me out of myself

like nature into the vacuum of an unknown medium

when I’m not a genie on call, I can hear the laughter

of the sacred clowns in the iconic guildhalls

of a little skill, more yielding than a thousand acres,

you can carry around with you for life like the voice

of a nightbird that knows how to penetrate the dark

like the embodiment of a longing that asks for nothing back.

Ripples on the waters of life. Echoes in solitude.

If I shine, I shine without deliberation. If I love

I rise like foxfire from the ashes of the inspiration.

Ragged in the cloak of a noble calling, sometimes

I’m wrapped in darkness like the skeletal kite

of a troubled bat that can hear more than it can say.

The night is not a reward, but there’s never

a credible alibi for not laughing at yourself

for the crazy wisdom of an allegorical starmap

trying to get you to sit still like a fixed star

for your astral portrait in eighteenth dynasty starmud

glazed in Babylonic lapis lazuli and copper from the moon.

The gesture of a Mosaic snake among the pharoah’s magicians,

I wear the jester’s cap of a daylily when the stars

look into my eyes too seriously to see what keeps me burning

after so many light years away from the island universe

on which I was born. Life, the mystery of perishing perennially,

there’s a hidden secret to being clear that supersedes the obvious.

And when death calls for it, I gouge my eyes out

like symbolic jewels embedded in the underworld

so I can envision the eschatology of meanings

trying to justify their ends as if death had embarrassed them

by not making any sense they could cling to for solace in life.

I celebrate the absurdity of the insight death brings forth

like a firefly with the candlepower of billions of stars.

How the mighty must fall to appreciate the magnificence

of their own insignificance raised up like a grain of sand

to keep the pyramids in perspective like studs on Orion’s belt.

I enjoy a hermetic social life among a variety

of prophetic skulls, but even the moon isn’t a palliative

for my solitude when I hallucinate the fate that awaits me

like a lover at every corner of my coffin. Pay the mourners

before the tears on their cheeks are dry. Didn’t I write

the most amazing odes to catch their beauty on the fly?

Didn’t I publish the names of the flowers and the stars

that moved my spirit to give them something

to remember me by like the lyrical elation

of an unpredictable moonrise? Didn’t I emblazon

the heraldry of new constellations with argent starmaps

on the shield walls of exoskeletons in the Burgess Shale?

Wasn’t my madness enough to convince the shore-huggers

of the imminent dangers of an oceanic awareness

beyond the eyes of their circumspect tidal pools?

Came a time when I realized it crucially necessary

to be given up for lost like a heretic with nothing to confess

but forgiveness for the spiritual search parties

in the labyrinths of everybody’s fingertips in order

to decipher a way out of here like Braille hieroglyphs

breaking trail like a cul de sac in a desert of stars.

Don’t the homeless still seek shelter within

the boundary stones of the firepits I left in my wake

like lost and founds along the way I had to take?

Don’t gauge the size of the city by the measure of its gates.

Exits don’t always live up to the expectations of the entrance.

Sometimes the sunset disappoints the dawn.

And then here and gone all things turn around in a heartbeat

like the wind and the sea, and the toxicity of tomatoes,

and all those weathervanes we used to flip through

like telephone books with tenure, set in their ways

like wet cement, appear cumbersomely contrived and shallow

beside the depths of the nightbirds singing

in the shadows of the moonrise they’re drowning

their voices in like stars in the throats of autumn trees

with their hearts in their mouths like the taste of wild blackberries.

PATRICK WHITE

THAT MOMENT OF LOVE WHEN LIFE CALLS TO ITSELF

THAT MOMENT OF LOVE WHEN LIFE CALLS TO ITSELF

That moment of love when life calls to itself

and the summons is answered creatively

and people and things come forth, the stillness

moves and the silence is a song sweeter than words,

the darkness, a shining brighter than the light of stars.

All things are flowers of the mind even

the absence, even the shadows, rooted

like river deltas of lightning in the marshlands

of lilaceous starmud breaking into waterlilies

that enlighten the heart awhile with a beauty

born of perishing, as if all eternity were

included in it, just for a moment, a mystery

beyond wisdom when the words fall away

like petals from the calyx of a star to reveal

the dreamer in the lotus of her emptiness.

Like love, at times, it seems the light

is a kind of impoverished darkness. Bright vacancy,

dark abundance. The candle on the windowsill

of death is a grave-robber opening the eyelids

of the seeds like tiny coffins by the spring.

I’ve seen the radioactive wavelength of the water snake

hunting chlorophyll frogs among the wild irises

harbouring their eggs like the future in the eyes of life.

Happenstantially, it appears. No purpose. No motive.

As if meaning weren’t the end term of what

there is to live for, or why, not even the seeking itself

the grail I’m drinking my life from to green

the ailing kingdom. Love is a happy tragedy

however long it takes the light to get to know you.

To humanize the seeming vastness and indifference

of every star that awakes from its grave within you

like a prophetic skull that’s just had a dream

of a creation myth that leaves the vital heart

of its endless beginning, unexplained. To gentle

these dragons of the abyss with three feathers

of moonlight laid like the three best breaths of life

you ever took, wonder, gratitude, and praise,

each in its own right, the waterbird of an atmosphere

that takes the whole homeless world in under its wing

like a dark mother and gives it shelter for the night

as if it weren’t in her nature not to love

the wayfaring stars that show up at her door

lost, taking their eye off their own light

in a labyrinth of rootfires burning like a starmap

of New England asters to show them where they are.

This is earth where everything we love perishes

like a return journey strewn with plinths and petals

all along the way like the hands of a circuitous waterclock

that renews what flows away on the mindstream

whispering into the ear like the dream of a night creek

to a man walking in his sleep toward a voice he knows

as the woods know the nightbirds. Wake up. Wake up.

We’re almost there.

PATRICK WHITE

MIDNIGHT WATER-GARDENS OF THE RAIN

MIDNIGHT WATER-GARDENS OF THE RAIN

Midnight water-gardens of the rain.

Train-whistle and a singer’s voice.

The darkness seems more musical

and sadder than it was as it falls to earth

like the orbits of earrings and bracelets

when a woman takes off her jewellery

like the windfall of stars from a chandelier

in the mirror of who she appears to be.

Sorrows ripen in the cellars of the heart

like wine waking up from a long dream,

and the ashes of summers that didn’t last

scattered on the wind like mourning doves

from the urns and furnaces of the mind.

The dark silence weeps before the beauty and the love

in the heartwood of yesterday because

of all I’ve been witness to, it never fails

to bring a smile to my face like the tree rings

of the rain or the feel of starmud between my toes

when I take my shoes off out of respect

for the house of life I’m always entering

like a ruined temple that’s been visited by God

in the female form of a life-fulfilling wound.

I resonate on the same frequency as the tuning fork

of the lightning tines of a snake’s tongue

tasting the air to know it’s sweet

with the occult wisdom of a sacred sibilant

caught like the shadow of a wavelength

in the moonlight strewing white rose petals

on a path of thorns. There’s a hidden coherence

in the evanescence of my voice that obeys the laws

of a self-imposed dream grammar that doesn’t have any.

I’m a poet looking out at the rain through a window.

I remember the harsh delights of flesh and blood

that made the purple passages of my solitude

I had learned by heart seem blessed by what

kept cursing them back into life, night after night,

reaching out to touch someone like the other coast

of the great nightsea of awareness you’re sailing

like the shadow of a sundial into the wind.

Light years away, a lifeboat on a shipwreck

that went down with the gold we plundered

like the patch of the new moon over our third eyes

at harvest time when the living was easier

than the songs that would later be written about it

as the ghosts of old bells dripped from the roof.

Enclosures of silence like those taboo sacred spots

you just wander into sometimes alone in the woods

until the dead tell you to get out as if

you were the demon they were driving out of them

like a scapegoat into the wilderness

with unknown sins on your back that bleed

like the stigmata of a black rose gored on its own thorns

or the childhood innocence of experienced bull-vaulters

torn on the horns of the moon and cast aside

like paint rags of love too close to the subject

to see the big picture from inside the allegory.

Less than generous to sour the wine with tears

of bitter vinaigrette. Let the ice sublimate

into cirrus clouds that catch the light of the sun

like silk that feels like the wind on wet skin

the seeds of the starfields we walked through together

cling to like root room in the lonely palaces

of our lunar watersheds peering out through

the eyes of the rain like an abacus of mended necklaces.

PATRICK WHITE  

EVEN HARMLESS AS DAY OLD PORRIDGE

EVEN HARMLESS AS DAY OLD PORRIDGE

Even as harmless as day old porridge no guarantee

of safety anymore, ducking down behind your anonymity

as if the one trick evolution gave you was being overlooked.

Big Brother is here, and it isn’t as if we didn’t

see him coming from a long way off. Reproach

the lighthouses. Swear you’ll keep your highbeams on.

Fall back on believing that sooner or later

everything’s that’s broken now will be amended then.

Comes the Cambrian again to the nexus

of that one atomically-timed moment

when predators acquired eyes and the prey

started armour plating their soft-bodied exposure to life

with oracular exo-skeletons like the cracks

in heated tortoise-shells. Axonic razor-wire

like a crown of thorns on the foreheads of the martyred rich.

Siege skull with a mouth for a drawbridge

it isn’t wisdom to open within hearing

of nano-tech houseflies cruising in squadrons,

observatory eyes slashed open a crack

like a paper cut envelope on a return loveletter

to look at the stars looking back from the other side

of a keyhole that looks like it was made by a bullet.

The darkest, the most exacting. Those whose playbooks

would make indifference seem like a homey word,

and you, just another example of a finely honed

stereotype grazing on your own mirages

in the climate-controlled Sahara desert

in a water-winged hourglass with nothing to drink to

like a shopping mall where the consumer is consumed

in a single gulp of greed. The snake swallows the frog.

Everybody expects to be cheated by their own birthday party.

That’s not honey in the hive. That’s a pinata

of killer bees. Who doesn’t feel swarmed?

Polarized. The laser beams copy writing rainbows

as corporate logos, lobbyists and lawyers worming

like loopholes in the misty covenant of peace

that will follow in the wake of global warming

from sea to shining sea, from Los Angeles,

o city of drowned angels, to the East Coast.

Can you teach a ghost to swim? The earth

redresses the Tao of our conditioned extremes.

Chaos swings its pendulum by the neck

in the secret rendition of a third-world dungeon.

Psychotic shadows of the curious inquisitors

burning the eyes of a telescope out

in the Court of the Star Chamber because

no one puts any credibility in the whisper

of the truth anymore unless it’s shrieking.

Spiders at the loom of the news weaving their nets

into the tapestry of the truth like prayer rugs

and flying carpets over New York in a new sci fi movie

about tourists caught off guard, sight-seeing

the garbage cans of the have-nots in the slums

and favelas of the Land of the Narcotized Dead

floating face down in the lotus garden of their toilet bowls,

or waiting for the bus, on a winter morning, to go clean

somebody else’s house of life without welcome mat of your own.

Paradigms of precisely organized atavistic insects

dressed like heavily eclipsed swat teams of robotic ants

to keep the collateral damage of the helots, the aphids,

the kamikaze heretics that prefer suicide to murder in line

with the corporate foodchain of their modified dna.

And look more like the movie for dramatic effect.

In the biogenetic labs of the alchemical farmers

flowers that were just following orders are on trial

for genocidal war crimes against the bees. Dead fish

on the shoreline of your doorstep after the oilspill

gave its word it would never happen again and again and again

like a skidmark on the dirty laundry of the earth.

Privatized slavers buying prisoners wholesale

like the children of the Visigoths for a little dog meat.

Shoot first. Then ask endless inquiries later

to keep the rest of us informed about what’s happening

to the innocent. Democratic window dressing

hung like garlands of laurel over the sacrificial manneqins

posing in front of the Lincoln Memorial to have

their pictures taken by the NSA. before they cut

the throat of their bullshit like a religious offering

to propitiate the compromised supremacy

of a human bill of rights to a televised prosecution.

Isn’t it so? Or are you still looking into the third eye

of a security camera in your bedroom, calling it

enlightenment though it replays like a snuff film

of serial killers on a red carpet at a cinematic festival

celebrating the loveless obscenity of our prime time inhumanity

to those we’re insulated from by our reality shows?

All the glossy junkmail of the news. Your political views

sponsored by feudal coalitions for a baronial charter

of divine rights against the Peasant’s Revolt.

Monsanto just bought Blackwater. Here come

the Chinese warlords. Black ops for fracking rights

and genetically engineered popcorn for all of Africa.

It takes a lot less than having your picture taken today

to have your soul stolen for good. The stars demoted,

the gods are spy satellites. Smile, you’re on Candid Camera.

Pyramidal hard drives in a desert of data resurrected

like a conspiracy theory about whistleblowing graverobbers

taking a short cut through the afterlife of a cemetery in the dark.

Be sure. Be sure. There will come an end to all of this.

Chaos out of conformative order. Messed up lives

dismembering their childhoods like celebrity voodoo dolls

in psychic theatres of the inane and absurd. Citizen Kane

and Lavrentiy Beria dating the same movie stars.

The scars on the face of the earth caught in a hurricane rose

of razorblades will heal like the shapeshifting cartography

of climate change and lakes in the wake of the storm

will open the eyes of the Sahara again to the water-gardens

of new mirages getting ready to bloom. Doom has its day

and then ends up as homeless as the rest of us

seeking shelter in the shadows of its paranoid rage.

The people are impoverished. The people are bullied and sad.

Repression. Depression. Aggression. The sewers

are roiled by the savage indignation of the bad

coming to the surface of consciousness like snapping turtles

buried in the muck of their starmud, slowly arising

like the moon out of a nightmare it’s wholly possessed by

to redress the sidereal pretentiousness of trumpeter swans.

As below. So above. Eventually. Beware the rage of the mob.

It kills without the imperial niceties of rank and distinction

like the protocol of a furious abattoir looking for signs

of its revolutionary historicity in the Sybilline Books of its blood spatter.

Civis Romanus. Cannon fodder Goths slaughtering Dacians

under the aviary of eagles on behalf of six Mafia families

fighting turf wars all over the known world like Halliburton

and Exxon to get their hands on the silvermines of Moesia,

the black camels of oil in Iraq just like the Wall Street gangs

of New York, promising illegal immigrants hunting, happiness

and home, access to a profiteering cure all for firebombing

incidental villages without hospitals like the ones they came from.

To live palatially in a place and time where you can

grow fat off the garbage of Toronto while

twenty-five million kids a year in a civilization

based on agriculture are mummified alive by starvation.

What to do? Take your fingertips off the keyboard.

Touch a rock, the skin of a lover, a baby’s hair.

Pierce the earlobe of a rose with its own thorn

and hang jewellery you made yourself

like chandeliers of rain and stars as a drop of blood

pearls like a berry of paint from the wound.

Keep the same attitude toward life as oxygen.

Break loves and fishes, if and when you can,

and throw a little salt of the earth of Mother Russia

over your left shoulder on them, and if

sometimes you have to eat bitter, black bread,

throw a little jam on it and pretend it’s

a kind of surrealistic dessert. Common sense, yes,

just enough to get by on, but rely upon your imagination

to show you a back road deeper into the woods

where you were at your most lost the last time,

when all those tears like a flashflood in a mindstream

levelled out like water seeking its own equilibrium

and you saw all those strange constellations

waiting to be named, reflected in the lowest of places.

Remain human, if only counter-intuitively.

Celebrate what’s approximate about you, rounded off,

and how wonderful it is when you put it up beside death

to second-guess what your neighbour means

by nodding your head as if you were dorning

at the Wailing Wall. Remember, arrayed as it is,

illusion too is enlightenment but don’t squint

too long into the sun or fixate on an eclipse

through a glass darkly. Compassion without reason

is wisdom. Reason without compassion

is the antic of a vindictive clown. Blood

your abstractions. Ideologies are black spots

on your heart. What’s that compared to the starmaps

you’re charting as you go along with the wind

and the sea along the coast of your own shining,

and sometimes, deep fjords where the knife went deep

into the heart of the continent. Weep when you need to,

one of the stations of your human divinity,

and when you get to the part where you laugh out loud,

buy a dove on the black market and set it free.

You’ll enlarge the sky you’re walking under that way.

Seek, but know the seeking itself is walking

in your footsteps, finding signs of you everywhere,

and when you do find something intriguing

share it. And let there be parity between your eyes

and the stars they’re getting high on, mindful

that tomorrow’s already been achieved before

the light reveals it. That what you perceive

isn’t idle reflection, or the eccentric delirium

of a dust devil wheeling at a crossroads in a desert

to see if it can dance like a Sufi, Allaho, Allaho, Allaho,

but the whole of creation itself collaborating with

your body and your mind, to see what you make of it all

when it looks through your eyes opening

on a clear mountaintop with a view of the valley below

like the prophetic skull of an observatory

gazing at the splendour of the sidereal insights

on one of the great seeing nights into human nature.

From quantum to quark, life is the substance of revelation,

not concealment, It’s got its Burgess Shales,

its Conservation of Data Principles, its black holes

and bad imitators like hydra-headed hard drives that lose

the singularity, the mystic specificity of things

like the tree of knowledge in a labyrinthine forest

that leaves them as disoriented as the north pole

in a haystack of compass needles rendered trivial

as the eyelashes of the visionary evergreens

seeding the fires of life with the incendiary urns

and ash eating furnaces of the green dragons

resting for the moment in the pagodas of the pinecones

like the crumb of a dream in the corner of an eye

blooming in the flames like the return of wildflowers,

to the burnt lands of a renewable mindscape,

coming up with new creation myths

as if we were giving names, like elders

of the Ojibway at the birth of the multiverse

in the life-mask of a child, names to the stars

like fireweed and raspberries, the perennial ephemerids

that wink like fireflies at eternity as if

a blind eye into the future could see as far

into the abyss as a Cyclops, or a one-eyed liar can

with the petrified cinder of an old growth forest

driven like a silver stake of moonlight

through the heart of a vampire caught red-handed

at a bloodbank for low albedos listening

to the audiotapes of billions of nano mosquitoes

coming to get their blood lines back, bro,

because the lowest in the foodchain always eats first.

Virgo, still a virgin in the brothels of the temple

Love with a passion whomever, whatever, whenever

you’re inspired to, wholly dispossess yourself

like a bat from a burdock, a lucky star

from the flypaper of your unwieldly attachments,

and run your hands through the goldmines

of this harvest of light rooted in the darkness

with every stalk of wheat you sow like an arrow

that already found the bull’s-eye long before

anyone were targeted by hallucinogenic missionaries

burning the libraries of Alexandria and the Incas.

Lord, spare me the deathblows of my enemies, but beat off

my apparitional friends with the jawbone of an ass

and wholly save me like a gnostic parchment of human genomes

from the assassin behind the door trying to save me from myself.

Let me fall asleep in an oracular cave somewhere

among the echoes of my poems and the afterlife

of my paintings done in red ochre for blood,

and the experienced fires of life for indelible charcoal,

and when I wake up like a dream figure in the shadows

not let me know when, why, how, or where.

Just let me marvel in wonder I’m transmorphically here at all

listening to the stars whispering to me in my own voice.

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

STARING INTO THE FUTURE

STARING INTO THE FUTURE

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