NOT LONGING FOR, NOT MISSING ANYONE, NOT WISHING FOR MUCH

NOT LONGING FOR, NOT MISSING ANYONE, NOT WISHING FOR MUCH

Not longing for, not missing anyone, not wishing for much,

maybe the last half of the rent, my muse stepping

out of a thicket of hawthorn, a white-tailed doe,

into a clearing in my mind that doesn’t care

if she licks the salt block or not. The town gearing up

for Friday night, the roaring flatulence of bad mufflers

throttles up like distant echoes of the bad boy dragons

in the urns of ageing bikers, each of their women

astraddle a horse of her own like a black leather saddle bag

studded like a starmap of the pyramids on the plain of Giza

as they gauge the number of points on the handlebars

of each other’s chrome plated antlers underneath my window.

Buck with you, anytime, bud, but loud isn’t going

to outshout the whisper of the past that lives

like a ghost in your ear. Man up to the fact

your heart’s done a lot of hard time in solitude

and if you haven’t gone mad, you’re a little more

thoughtful and kinder than you ever expected to be

discretely intrigued by the second innocence of the novelty.

O, the racket of the screening myths of decultified fish

still removing the baffles from their gills, so

their four-strokes can sound like it’s their engines

not them, having the heart attack. Idle, down, brother,

idle down. There’s only so much time and then

there’s eternity. Let the moment seize itself

for a change. What do you think? The dark energy

accelerating galaxies over the event horizons of your precipitous eyes

into an abyss that’s been stripped of its patches like stars

among rival houses of the zodiac, are trying to take

advantage of the opportunity? If so, toward what end?

Better to have never been born isn’t bad or best.

No need to be wounded spiritually in a holy war

between the Pollyanna and the pessimist in you.

Be a good Roman and make room for both

in that pantheon of tribal superstitions you brought

home with you like skeletons in your closet,

and remember to take Sophocles, cum grano salis,

in jest more often like the black farce of himself

that made him one of the tragic clowns of comic Athens.

Sniper or snowball, this is your life alone

and you get one shot at it with unlimited ricochets

but you’ve got to get a lead on it like the light of a star

if you want to hit a moving target on the fly

you’ve spooked out of the bush like the moon

as if there were no comprehensive alibis for anything.

Time, death, the devil, and suffering aren’t

the mercenary allies of a local apocalypse,

anymore than the moon is a golden chariot

on a milk wagon run on the spiral arm of a galaxy

delivering bittersweets with a free razorblade

and Vas Hermeticum to the alchemists

in the bloodbank of a Pleistocene slum

going through glacial withdrawals at the end

of an ice age. Haven’t you noticed yet how all

your threats have turned into sententious adages

on the backs of frictionless matchboxes

as if you finally put some clean oil

in that short shag flying carpet of yours.

Instead of kicking in doors, try valves for awhile.

Why labour to bite a snake back in the throat

like a wavelength you weren’t wary enough

not to step on in the first place? And however

you caress them love won’t make snakes purr

like a highway you can train to bite other people.

Hate’s a limp arrow. As if somebody fletched

a spaghetti noodle and then boiled it

like an old guitar string on a compound bow

glued like a splint of bone to your broken heartwood

trying to let it all hang out and what don’t hang

pull like the ripcord on a candling emergency chute.

But if I say it’s all the same to me this morning,

please don’t mistake that for the hidden grail

of a dead metaphor buried like the skull of a cure

to the black plague that ratted out the Middle Ages.

No ship to jump from. No port to quarantine

with silence. No one setting themselves afire

in a danse macabre of self-flagellating scarecrows

crucified like martyrs by their own slave revolt.

I’m listening to the rush of the wind in the crowns

of silver Russian olives like the wings of a white horse

grazing in the starfields of a slow, easy moonrise

in this labyrinth of roads that have made a calling of my life

disappearing like the keening of a waterbird

into the evanescent distances of getting lost

in my own eyes as if the ride, stars in the nightsky,

never comes to a dead end where your tattoos wash out.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN PROUD OF THE WAY

YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN PROUD OF THE WAY

You would have been proud of the way

I honoured your ghost as the focus

of my loneliness after you left. I refused

to malign your solitude or mine

by attempting to come back to life.

Discretely mad as it must have seemed

at the time to anyone outside the allegory,

still, I mimed the protocols of the dead

as if I were mouthing the words I had

once said to you one night in the afterglow

of wreaking fervent love upon one another

released from my vows by your absence

as the shadows of sacred syllables disappeared

into the silence like a coven of crows

cacophonously breaking the spell of a cold sunset,

helter-skelter, with the asymmetry

of standing there alone without you.

The stars I taught you have returned and gone

many times since then. The maple groves

have shed their foliage like pole dancers

their circumpolar clothes of serpent fire

coiled seven times like the ages of man

around the earth’s axis, a dragon slayer

and healer in one oracular insight

into the hopeless hunger for someone, anyone

to lie naked in the dark beside them

like the tiara on an X-rated starmap of beauty queens.

Other lovers have estranged me from myself

in the name of the same oceanic notions

I can’t help seeing in the unfolding of the black rose

that burns me like a love poem I wrote in blood,

a nocturne of thorns, my rapturous devotions

to a mystical eclipse of a new moon rising

like Orpheus from the dead, my prophetic skull

refleshed with the starmud of the face I had

before I was born to wear this assortment of deathmasks

and return the swords I drew from the wounded rock

to the waters of life like the hands of a cosmic clock

that couldn’t do otherwise than throw them away

like crutches at the top of the temple stairs

I mounted on my knees in the bower of a feather bed.

The down of a dead swan in the eyrie of Altair in Aquila.

Blood on the talon of the moon and all those sad elixirs

that used to make my taste buds bloom as if

my tears had been spiked irrecoverably

by the picture-music of a black rose lingering

like the shadow of a hungry ghost about

to take possession of me again, a creative medium

of love pierced through the heart by the pain

like a searing dream in a black mirror

I’ve been trying for lightyears to wake up from.

PATRICK WHITE

STUPEFIED LIKE THE MOON THAT STAYED IN THE RING TOO LONG

STUPEFIED LIKE THE MOON THAT STAYED IN THE RING TOO LONG

Stupefied like the moon that stayed in the ring too long

and took one too many blows to the heart as the knees

of the Pillars of Hercules are beginning to buckle and my legs

have turned to rubber but nothing’s bouncing back

like a lacrosse ball banked off my prophetic skull

like a wake up call in a game of billiards

nobody’s put any spin on, chalking their pool cues

as if they were standing in front of a blackboard

like a long shot everybody’s betting on

to pocket the eight ball in the far left blackhole.

Alarming as it was at first, I find myself slipping into

the occasional bubble once and awhile like

an alternative universe, and just sitting there

staring back at the world numb as the lens

of a glass third eye embedded in the rosette

of a plaster hurricane. A bit catatonic,

and if not a peaceful recess from the world

as if it were something I were dying to get back to,

at least a truce to gather up the dead like roadkill.

No opinion, judgement, reason, word, or rapture

of blissful ignorance and miserable wisdom,

Neither empty nor full at either end of the hourglass,

feels as if I’ve sat here on my lotus for a thousand years

like a meteoric foundation stone with a Martian lichen

for a brain, as if that were as far as the Rover got,

and Curiosity would just have to go it alone from here.

Cul de sacs, dead ends, and wombs, moments out

of time when you put your starmap down like a sketchbook

and stop looking for your likeness among the stars

as if things couldn’t get any stranger than they already are.

Is this ageing? Is this some kind of spiritual Benz

breaking effervescently like nitrogen bubbles

in my blood like a moonrise that came up

from the depths of its own dead seas too fast

like the great white whale heading for the Pequod?

No one ever really knows until it’s way too late.

O, Mama, tell me again about the future I dreamed

of having before I was awakened by a world

that got in my way like a gatekeeper demanding

obols and boar’s tusks minted from gold dust

I panned on the moon to watergild my deathmask,

especially the part about living up to my own

expectations in life. Haven’t I stood my ground,

starmud caked to a rootless tree, never

taken my eye off that star that’s been wandering

beside me all these lightyears, leaving firepits

in its wake it’s made out of the crowns of the thorns

in the locust trees burning at their own stakes?

Consumed in the auto de fes of distant starlight breaking

through the pyres of dead branches it’s placed

like a laurel around the feet of a lighthouse in a desert

firewalking its own lunar mirages of oceanic consciousness,

did I not light a candle in a shrine of unconsecrated sky burials

following creation myths of their own making

as if they were breaking trail for offroad zodiacs

instead of going by the book and covering their tracks

like a life in the shadows of posthumous pyromaniacs?

PATRICK WHITE

TRAIN WHISTLE

TRAIN WHISTLE

Train whistle then the rush of surf from its wheels on the track

as if it were hauling an ocean somewhere.

Graffiti from North Carolina on tour, one long art gallery

spray bombed by underground American artists

on its boxcars and tankers. When I stopped at the crossbars,

driving cab, I always wished I could publish

a poem like that, one line coupled to another

as if our metaphors were holding hands at a barn dance.

Then on to pick up the next fare as if you were cruising

the red light district for a working girl who called

without a return address, mind-reading doorways in distress

as if you were ambiguously oracular about where you were going.

More sedentary now, the crackheads trust me less

about where I dropped them off and picked them up

than they used to when they knew I had taken

an unspoken street vow of silence like a vehicular priest

who confessed everybody for their indefensible humanity,

on his way to somewhere else that was seldom paradise

with its feet on the ground like a corporate pharmaceutical

wallowing in its own starmud as if someone

had just thrown the shepherd moons of its pearls

before real swine, sometimes, who blackened the reputation

of the death mask they wore as if Zorro were a dealer

fencing with the delusions of Don Quixote tilting at windmills

he mistook for prayer wheels. You don’t know whether

to be mad or sad, or just as bad as the fools that milk

the wrong fang of the snake they’re buying the antidote from.

There’s more loneliness in moving than there is in sitting still.

This road of ghosts is dotted with tasteless pit stops

like a starmap with nuclear, attention-getting

big city magnitudes of light on all night outblazing the stars

like a ferryman on a graveyard shift who’s trying

to stay awake in the wheelhouse by the pilot light he’s been given to go by.

Coffee and cigarettes please, in the snowblind glare

of a lap top that’s got a long, hard drive ahead of it

I play like a keyboard on its knees that’s got

no idea of how to get there from here before it invariably does

through a labyrinth of cul de sacs and train crossings

that don’t attract as many Sufis as they used to

when I was dancing my way deeper into my homelessness

for shelter against the white noise life was humming to me

as I watched the deaf grooving like water snakes to flute-music.

Now I take long, dark walks along the Tay River

where I’m least likely to meet anyone coming my way

as I watch the stars flicker in the river like lures

on the fishing hook of the moon trying to catch the big one

like the legend on a starmap it never fails to throw back

into the sea of tranquillity its awareness jumped from

like a northern pike that arises from the bottom up

like a covert insight into the nature of life eyeing

what’s inspired it to strike like the imagination of a madman

caught a moment in his own highbeams like the ghost

of a white-tailed buck leaping out of the headlights

like enlightenment with no intention of adding itself

to the pageant of roadkill along the back roads

of the shadows of lost sheep in the shepherdless valleys of death.

See how I wrote that like a train passing through town

in the dead of the night like a found poem

I’ve spliced together like the neurons of railroad lines

from all over North America like delinquents with winged heels

rising like waterbirds from a million weak threads

of a river system bound into the strong rope of a spinal cord

you can climb up to heaven on like a fuse or the lifelines

rooted in the palm of your hand like a crosswalk beginning to flower

with zodiacal traffic signs because the mindstream flows

horizontally onward like an egalitarian that will come to harmony progressively

like water seeking its own equilibrium from the same sea of awareness,

each at the level of the thresholds they’ve crossed

like a sword dance with a waterclock that’s always on time

as if it were running on sundials with alarmist hour hands.

Bad dream grammar, perhaps. But I bet there’s

a poet-cabdriver in North Carolina with the same

mad picture music in his heart who understands perfectly

the denaturing of creative humanity from his art

isn’t a short cut to that right side of the tracks no one’s ever

been reincarnated on like the side of a bone box

that didn’t express itself demonically like an exorcism

blessing the empty hearses of dead air in the freight cars

with nothing written on them as if some nihilistic orthodoxy

had freshly painted over the hunting magic

of artistic Neanderthals scarred indelibly

by shamanistic spit paintings of genius with blood

like red ochre and night like soot in the mouths

of their lanterns waiting for the lights to change

from the false dawns of fake songbirds in the sun

to the mystic moonrise in the occult guild halls

of howling bush wolves contemporaneously

packing in the dark like the solos of nightbirds

echoing across the lake like the longing

of an unanswerable response to the sublimity of why

we must live, love, desire and die as we do, written on the fly

like the linear A of inchoate thought trains of subversive water and fire,

hissing like spray bombs of scalded metal whenever we come to a full stop.

PATRICK WHITE

NEVER WANTED TO WORK THAT HARD TO BE BEAUTIFUL

NEVER WANTED TO WORK THAT HARD TO BE BEAUTIFUL

Never wanted to work that hard to be beautiful

inside or out, be the rare fossil of a mirror

in the red velvet drawer of a jewellery tower

that slides out like a tiny coffin in a morgue.

Not out to prove that waterlilies have the bones

of astral hummingbirds. Love flowers,

but not in cults. Love the moon enough

not to make a religion of it, life enough

not to resist what it’s trying to put me through

whether I’m howling in pain, set afire,

or mystically exalted by vital bliss

or about to scatter my ashes from any of the bridges

that arc like grey rainbows of partially kept truces

with the lies of the lines in between.

Sometimes I’m mining mini black holes

inside the solar system looking for

new motherlodes of metaphor inside

the eye sockets of a skull crawling with Aztecs

like red army ants attending to their gods,

or go panning for stars well beyond the heliosphere

the way I used to catch fireflies as a boy

just to watch them glow a moment and let them go

like an intimate insight into what I still don’t know

but never failed to be enlightened by upon their release.

People outside my open window, laughing, talking,

setting up giddy long shots like sexual moves

on a hot summer night with a beer in its hand,

and the drunk demotic of a little English on the cue,

and alarmed car horns throbbing like ear aches in park,

and it’s all so intriguingly silly it’s got to be human

and I wonder if a thousand years from now will think

this is what we had to be like. And as soon as I

glimpse that, the whole scene is deepened by time

in the eyes behind a veil of eternity I lifted

while I was alive to see that everything here is indelible.

There’s a perpetuity in our apparent randomness

in the passing of the moment, that spontaneously

preserves us for greater things than we can imagine

like the Conservation of Data Principle

that holds good even in the singular depths

of a black hole listening like a poet through an open window.

A smudge of life on my poem, but I don’t mind

the fingerprints at all. What’s a star without planets?

What’s a shepherd ushering moons toward

the high blue grasslands without a black sheep

that wanders off by itself once and awhile

to check out other things along the way?

My poems pick things up in their flowing

like rivers pick up leaves and tributaries

and small flotillas of blossoms in the spring,

the occult alphabets of calligraphic oil snakes,

and mingles them all into the picture-music

of the mindstream, the motifs of a symphony,

or the themes of a play, that picks things up

and puts them down again like the moonrise

of a rock on a beach. Few of life’s harmonies

are symmetrically balanced crystallographers.

Nights when I look into the eyes of the stars

and even the lenses of my telescope break into tears.

You can take life out of it like a fly in the toilet bowl,

a bumble bee in a jar, a star out of your eye

a spider on a long-handled broom, or the crumb

of a leftover dream from the night before,

or you can leave it in if it wants to come along for the ride.

I’ve heard for so long from people who say they know

that everything is one, I don’t worry about disconnections.

It’s the fallible continuity of life that sings

like a nightbird from the dead branch and green alike

most beautifully to me, the way the light and the rain

and love when it’s real, make unions of disparate things

that depend upon each other for life like metaphors.

I revel in the crazy wisdom of the oxymoronic contradictions

that bond me to the universe like the small volcanoes

of the ground wasps that erupt between the fault lines

along the continental plates of the sidewalks

and apprentice me to landscaping with lava on the moon.

The circle’s wounded deeper into its roundness

once it’s broken by a branch, the stillness more profound

for the stone that’s dropped into it. Love, when it’s new,

trued by separation. The earth itself, an alloy

of the elemental table. To be truly original creatively

is to seek the low place like the sea and let

everything run down into you like myriad streams

that are neither many nor one, pure nor polluted,

and out of that mingling which is the whole of you,

raise them like weather from the bells of the flowers

to the robes of snow on the mountain tops

and know that with every cloud, every raindrop, storm,

every bolt of lightning, and all the life thereby engendered

is you returning like a shape shifter to your own depths

and everything comes along for the ride as if

they were always on your side, like your eyes are.

PATRICK WHITE  

MY PAST WHEN IT TURNS ME AROUND LIKE THE LIGHT

MY PAST WHEN IT TURNS ME AROUND LIKE THE LIGHT

My past when it turns me around like the light

to compel me to look back upon it

like a mountain the valley it dug like its own grave

I’m ascending out of, an Orphic ghost from the underworld

empty-handed with a habitable solitude for a companion,

Hermes, my sole pilot light and messenger,

seems like a Sufi patchwork of purple passages

winging it like a multiverse of flying carpets

or the sudden emergence of birds from the summer wood

trying to synchronize themselves to the same flightplan

membranous wavelengths in creative hyperspace are on.

Sometimes I disturb the graves of old books I’ve published

in a cemetery of shelves, and I flip through pages

and pages of sedimentary starmud, refleshing fossils

with mnemonic stem cells at a seance of yesterdays.

Time’s running out of itself, and then who knows what

flips the polarities of the hourglass and death

reserves a garden just for you to return to

as your body relaxes like candle wax letting go

of the coffin you posed for. The empire you were

comes undone, does it not?--- fragments, and the feudal warlords

that are heir to your last dynasty, plague rats on crusade,

jump ship in Genoa, and splinter like true relics

of the skeleton they nailed you to like an albatross

to a crossbow. The arrow of time is the measure

of the spatial distances between order and entropy,

the direction all flowers are perishing in like the quibla

of existence aligned like the stillness of the North Star

with the provisional polarities of chaos. The stars

are disappearing like beauty marks on a mythically inflated balloon

that’s got to pop sooner or later like a weasel

chasing its tail around a prickly pear, given

how addicted conceptual ratiocination is to thorns.

What kind of an afterlife longs to live forever, impersonally?

I’ve held the abyss closer to my heart than that.

And I’ve got the bloodlines of these ancient poems

to prove it, though I still remain the missing link

of all I wrote back then as if my life depended on it.

Who could have guessed, the way the mindstream wends

and the heart bobs along in it like an apple

in the mouth of a prophetic skull poetically dismembered

like a prescient addition to a superstitious family,

I’d be standing at this bend in the road of ghosts

looping back on myself like the retrograde motion

of the false idol of the shadow I cast across my path

I eventually caught up to and passed like a somnambulant

Knights Hospitaler on an emergency offroad pilgrimage

going the wrong way like a light year unaccustomed

to the country dark my eyes hadn’t adjusted to

like a starmap blazing high overhead. Timing is

at least as important as content, and the rest

is just the corpse of an excuse you enshrine

as a learning experience you can chalk up

like the white cliffs of Dover to the size of the blackboard

you had to learn on like the Burgess Shale.

Hail, fellow, well met in the flea markets of poetic vision.

The muse hasn’t remaindered me yet.

And the daughters of memory dance upon my grave

as lightly as they ever did. I still prefer

the nacreous midnights of black pearls in the silks

of the northern lights to the opalescent dawns

of the abalone shells that smile like jewels of milk

when the moon is in the clouds and the stars

shine down upon the earth like pale imitations of the real thing.

I once thought I knew the man who wrote these lines

as if I experienced more of him than I could ever

know at the time, or now, once I gave up asking

what’s gone, why, or the approach of the dawn,

bluing the windows with unobtrusive skies

that kept to themselves like lapis lazuli damselflies

with bruised eyelids ripe as plums, when.

If all I’ve done over the course of a lifetime

in these wild starfields is bring a small bouquet

of poppies enflamed by a gust of the wind

to this pageant of perishing picture-music

on the midway of a game of show and tell,

is it the gut of a spinal cord tautly strung out

like a highwire act across the resonant abyss

of an empty tortoise shell, or a compound bow

muscled with bone? Despair, never a welcome house guest,

o the times I wrote into the wind trying to bridge the gap

between water and its mirages like a causeway

of lifeboats the fish had no use for. Still don’t

believe not caring is an effective meme of self defence.

And if the love boat mutinies, so what,

every siren’s got an island of her own

you can be washed up on like salvage of the mystery

all this is taking place after you drowned on the moon.

What I’ve said, let stand. You can’t unsay the dead.

Autumn sheds the Library of Alexandria like leaves

unglued from the perfect binding of its brittle books.

Whether I shall rise out of the ashes of the flames

like a dragon of staghorn sumac, more a thorn

in my own eye than a viper under the rosebush,

or I’ll be blessed by the fire for the heretical attitudes

I took toward the unctious beatitudes of entrenched hypocrisy,

no matter. Write reductio ad absurdum on my gravestone.

If I wouldn’t lie on my deathbed, why make a liar

out of my epitaph? If the dawn was false

what are the chances of being able to trust the dusk?

PATRICK WHITE

COLD SUNSHINE IN THE CHILLY ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE DAWN

COLD SUNSHINE IN THE CHILLY ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE DAWN

Cold sunshine in the chilly enlightenment of the dawn.

A paint rag of dreams I’m working on. I study

the grime on the window like the gnostic gospel

of a dead docetist I’m trying to decipher.

I expected to be happier than this when I woke up

but when have I never? As my bones have stiffened

I’ve grown more mentally supple over the years

like a sapling flaring out of a stump, green fire

shooting out of the ashes of the eyes of a dragon

on its pyre like the second innocence

of a surrealistic fairytale after the myth

didn’t keep the crops from failing from lack of rain

and the temples were burned by those who built them.

I’m an oracle in an observatory abandoned on Mars.

Night after night, I make the rounds of an unknown zodiac,

checking the doors in a ghost town like a solitude

people will come back to if you give them

enough time alone with the stars. I love

the creative energy of the morning like a tree

loves its cambium, but there are signs deeper

in the heartwood of the night that speak like the arcana

of an older magic that keep the lights turned down low

like a subliminal house of life with mysterious windows

into a past they’re looking forward to

like a prodigal afterlife they don’t have to break again

like the waters of life to get into because

death doesn’t stand at the gates of renewal

to bar the path of the returning exile and the morning birds

aren’t the urns of last night’s sky burial.

On the easel, red dragon breathing fire over Chernobyl.

On the computer screen, a mosquito having

a mystic revelation that snowblinds it in the light.

Bad omen to start a poem by killing the first

punctuation mark in sight, but Zen or no Zen,

I’ve got a right to sacrifice a bloodbank

like a medium to the message now and again.

Give the horse I bought with his purse

back to the Buddha because I don’t need wings

to fly anymore. And I don’t mind a little grime

on the eyes of my vision of life. It makes

the windows feel more at home, and even the sun

occasionally sullies its own light beams waking up

to scry its own sunspots like a maculate birth

or if Venus caught up to it sometime in the night

like the transit of a waterbird in a wet dream.

If perception is reality then things are the way they seem

for you and you alone, your eyes only, like a big secret

hidden from all the others out in the open

where you’re least likely to look for it in retrospect.

I’m a prophetic skull in orbit around an ancestral planet

of foundational hearthstones where I burnt the starmaps

of a nightsky so many have lost like the use of their mother-tongue

they’ve forgotten the names of the constellations

they were first born under like the archetypes

of an ancient dream grammar with strong aorist verbs

that don’t sweep their tracks after them like stars in a false dawn

that makes things seem more insane in the morning light

than the madness of the clairvoyant measure

your eyes make of the night when Virgo rises to her feet

and knights the black walnut trees with a stalk of wheat.

PATRICK WHITE