THE WAY I FEEL ABOUT MYSELF OVERALL WHEN I'M SUMMONED

THE WAY I FEEL ABOUT MYSELF OVERALL WHEN I’M SUMMONED

The way I feel about myself overall when I’m summoned

out of my blue evanescence to be embodied again and again

as an individual with egocentric limits as if

some cooper of flowers had bound up my petals

into whiskey-barrels for the long night ahead.

Not wise to let apprentice mirages pilot the mindstream

but everybody’s got to take their hand off the wheel sometime

and let the facts learn to trust the true nature of illusion

isn’t a mask the truth wears to conceal its face in public

as if it had a bad reputation that smelled like the moon.

Realism is the death of theatre on an imaginary stage.

A spontaneous image out of the void doesn’t

make you a mage, but I thought I’d be wiser

than I am now, when I was twenty-two and sure of myself.

A lot of trial and error in learning how to love

your own and others’ humanity like the shadows cast

by the flames of desire like a bestiary of extinct simulacra

painted on the wall in carbon and red ochre behind you.

We gather and we hunt as before. We acquire and dispense.

And the pain of letting go is insufferable. Trees

in post natal depression after a windfall. It helps

when humanity appalls you to remember the children

these monsters once were, and how dangerous innocence is.

Love feels like the labour of a lifetime

but if you get up close and intimate there’s

no progression in the work. Intimidating spontaneity,

it’s chaos reversing the spin on the order of the cosmos

so you can see the long and the short of it

through both lenses of your hourglass telescope

and you owe as much to your mistakes as you do

when you embraced as if the gift, the giver

and the given to were three waves on the same river of bliss.

Like greys in a painting, all those beautiful hues

of inchoate confusion, complementary colours

of lament and celebration, harvesting the dark abundance

of the full moon, sowing eclipses in the bright vacancy

of the new, wallflowers of the quotidian suddenly

going supernova in the eyes of unlikely mystics.

Love doesn’t sponsor a school, a cult, a coven, a lab rat.

If you’ve ever truly experienced it, then you know

you’re only experimenting with your own homely absence

when it’s gone. It foreshadows a kind of negativity creativity

that makes you feel as if you were backing out

the front door on your own house of life

and all that used to shine like the glazed bricks of starmud

you built it of to shelter your solitude, had

rejected you like a changeling on the threshold

of your birth sign like an illegitimate passport going into exile.

Just as loneliness is merely the table of contents, the shell

of what it means until you put it in the context

of being with someone and the self-contained monad

of cosmic sentience you are is horrifically amplified

into a bubble in the multiverse that’s about to burst

into a new sense of the vastness the light has to traverse

to enter your eye as if time were too slow

to keep up with the moment, so the present

is never any younger than the past, and the future

is always older than you conceived it to be.

Put your finger on the pulse of love. It’s an ageless waterclock

one wavelength long, one bloodstream wide

with no far shore on the other side. High

as your eyes are deep, a dream that keeps you awake.

Born into poverty, leave home, fourteen, then

fifty years a poet scrounging for life

in the flesh and dirt under the black crescents

of my lunar fingernails, doing without

to keep on doing within whatever I’m inclined to

like the axis of Neptune in orbit, turned on its head,

or the dark matter of turning the starmaps over

like a pilot light in an underworld full of untapped potential.

The severe clarities of the blood oath I took

to remain faithfully disobedient to whatever

I might come to believe too sternly about the world.

The curse enlightens. The blessing corrupts.

Whatever my imagination has done to me

in the name of love you’re either scarred by service

or suicide. And heresy looked like the only green bough

among the dead branches on the tree of knowledge

I could sing from like a serpent with wings

in a choir of fanatical bluebirds on my shoulder

shrill in the false dawn of another morning of mirth.

Despair might have gouged my eyes out at times,

but I never struck gold until I learned

to see like the blind what’s reflected in the black mirrors

of the mind that turns the light around on itself.

And as much as joy might have to say, sorrow’s

always said more than the genius of my silence

could articulate. Not a sententious adage of mine,

but I’ve learned never to trust wisdom if it’s

got a bad voice, too much creosote, too few

blackbirds in the chimney building nests

to make sure the song never dies and the lyrics

are as sweet as music to your eyes when you open them

for the very first time and the endless sky

smiles down upon you, day and night, like a birthright.

PATRICK WHITE

SITTING HERE BECOMING WHATEVER DRIFTS MY WAY

SITTING HERE BECOMING WHATEVER DRIFTS MY WAY

Sitting here becoming whatever drifts my way.

Cedar boughs smouldering in an attic to smoke the bats out.

Thought-watching without looking for the answer to anything.

Spiders like badges walking on the waters of my mind.

The autumn’s new, but it’s the same old passage of things.

Apples like bells in the trees of the steeples, shepherd moons

of sloppy solar systems strewn on the ground

with seeds that are going to take them down

a notch or two yet before they make a comeback.

Seven times down. Eight times up. Such is life.

I watch the picture-music flowing through my mind

like a home movie that’s happening as fast as I am

playing the role of everybody else in the universe

all at once as if every ray of light incarnated

in the emanation of an essential existential insight

into the nature of every mystically specific human being

could all be traced back to the root of the same star.

And what does the star do when the many return to it

if not apocalyptically go supernova into transcendence.

Just because the ashes sleep sweetly in their firepits and urns,

doesn’t mean they’re not dreaming and scheming

to wake up from themselves

I’m firewalking in the ether like a sad volcano.

I’m alone in life and it’s not as bad as I thought.

Prolonged solitude blurs the distinctions between

the trivial and the sublime. Beauty seems

the most engaging waste of time I know of.

I think about love more as an event than a thing,

and I’ve made enough attempts in my life

to convince me it wasn’t for lack of trying

that I’m walking alone with the Alone like Plotinus

trying to keep my telescope in focus and stay open-minded.

But as John Keats said. If it come not as naturally

as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.

Space, too, has its sirens. And time, its lamias.

A gust of stars and the desert’s full of fantasies.

A star blooms and a comet falls from its dark halo

like a queen bee looking to start a new hive

and I’ve seen enough oases with hourglass figures

turn into bag ladies in paradise to stay shy of gardens

that don’t have any weeds in them that might

uproot me as so many have like a botanical mistake

as if I were some kind of hallucinogenic angel of death.

Amanita ocreata. A mushroom in the death cap

of a nuclear winter when all I am is interspecially creative

in the way I adapt to my extinctions. Attentive and tender

toward the flora and fauna that inhabit my solitude.

Though the peduncle is always lost in the ensuing phylum

as I am like the star in the eyes of the women

who’ve drowned me like a firefly in their tears,

I still send bouquets of constellations to the asylum

like the last of the New England asters this time of year.

Sanity might smudge the tomb with a noose of sweetgrass

but the madness stays clear as the waters of life

in the womb of enlightenment giving birth

to bubbles in hyperspace that can spontaneously pop

as easily as they cohere like skin to the shape shifting multiverse

for better and worse, and all the permutative modalities in between.

God bless them all. Each, a rite of passage

I stumbled through like the blessing

of an excruciating ordeal that seasons you

for what’s to come, or who. I must have loved them

better than I thought to miss them as much as I do

now that I do not. Incubus, muse, sphinx, witch,

oracle and water sylph, I gave to each my crystal skull

they could wear around their neck like a prophetic locket

to remember what we were to each other once

before the moon in the corals fossilized the shipwreck

to set sail on this sea of shadows without a star to go by.

Amor vincit omnia. Maybe. But I’m more a pirate

with the eclipse of my third eye for an eyepatch

and a parrot that’s teaching me to keep my mouth shut

than I am a navy even if there isn’t a rudder on this lifeboat

or a bay to sail into of my own. And I’m not looking

for a northwest passage to Cathay through a periscope

that’s stayed under too long to know where it’s going

without a starmap. I’m not interested in exploring decay

from the inside out like some submersible in a lunar ocean.

I’ve sailed under the skull and crossbones all my life.

And I’m not about to strike my colours like the maples,

lay them down like the burning blades of the angels

at the gates of dying garden. I’m going to hold out

long after the irises have surrendered their rainbows

to a retinal circus without any sacred clowns or animal acts

where the judas goats train the tigers to jump

through the brindled hoops of their own screening myths of fire.

It’s wise to tread cautiously among the duff and detritus of death

like a protocol of your own instinct, good spiritual manners

among the extinct so the dead don’t sink into oblivion

like a garbage barge. I revere the autumnal exorcism

as much as the vernal summoning to a seance.

I’m as sincere about my farewells as I am my hellos

as I watch the wavelengths shift from blue to red,

lowering the frequencies of fountains into watersheds

as if a musician were putting his guitar back into the coffin

he carries it around in. Green bough. Dead branch. Same song

as far as I’ve learned to sing to myself in the dark coming on.

The snakes can tie themselves into knots and hibernate

as long as they want, and all my summer visions

can turn into hard cold facts. I’ve still got a dragon of serpent fire

walking my spinal cord like a high wire act

without safety nets because I’ve always made it

a point of balanced awareness along this dangerous coast

to sail with the wind behind me like the light of a star

a wingspan ahead of my fall. The ghost of a battle scar

that’s made it this far into a wounded future

without a pyre or a lighthouse to chart the course

of my desire not to live like yesterday’s flowers

strewn on the corpse of tomorrow’s hearse.

PATRICK WHITE  

I WOULD SPEAK TO YOU IN MY NIGHT VOICE

I WOULD SPEAK TO YOU IN MY NIGHT VOICE

I would speak to you in my night voice

if you were still here. If you were even as near

as the stars commingled in my breath,

I’d thaw my secret zodiac of crystal skulls

and let my mindstream run wild at your feet

like a flashflood waking the dry creekbed up

from its long dream of making the desert bloom

with real flowers in a mirage of metaphors.

I would ignite the pilot lights of a thousand stars

to blaze in an honour guard of mythic starmaps

waiting for you to bless their colours,

because wonder’s never been known to start a war

with a world it’s amazed by in every mesmerizing detail

without annihilating itself first, bursting

its own bubble in an efflorescent multiverse.

I’m a surrealistic mystic to give it a funny name,

and you’ve seen my hidden housewells, sacred pools

receiving the moonlight on the water like the blades

of ceremonial swords that tasted my blood first

like a rose bleeds on its own thorns, now let me

show you my watersheds, the fathomless voids

of dark abundance and bright vacancy

where my eyes swim like the Circlet Of The Western Fish

that never swim out of themselves

or the oceanic awareness they’re luminously

immersed in up to their gills in the clear light

of the emptiness shining back at them like a distant mind.

Under the icy eyelids of methane seas on shepherd moons

I can feel life stirring like the muse of itself

and though it’s too early in evolution to see yet

I’ve jumped ahead of myself like the light of the Pleiades

and gathered up a herd of wild telescopes

grazing on the stars like big-eyed, thin-legged antelopes

waiting for you to make an appearance on opening night

and watch how they’d dance and leap for you

like grasshoppers in the Bolshoi Ballet

who didn’t give a damn that autumn was on its way

to throw cold water on the fire because in this universe

imagination is the physics of the place, and the ants

might busy themselves gathering butterfly wings

like the covers of slender chapbooks of poetry,

but I’m drunk on these lyrical elixirs of the mind

that I take as a sign that you are near in the night

and who has to worry about snow,

when they can live in your light on an occult planet

where myriad seasons can pass in a moment of spontaneity

and the fruits of life invariably fall toward the sky?

Are we both not rooted in the ancient fires overhead?

Nervous systems of black matter, scaffolding the mind

climbs up to paint the origin of worlds before their grand openings,

dark palettes of our third eye, skeletons of pictographic bones

beneath these scriptures of flesh we can read with our fingertips

like holy books and X rays written in the boustrophic signs

of the last time we ploughed the dark side of the moon together

and filled the siloes of the stars with galaxies

that spun like Tibetan prayerwheels, or Moroccan Sufis

or dust devils at the heels of winged messengers

conducting us like the flightfeathers of the dark arcana

we can read in each other’s eyes like loveletters

written in the cursive dream grammar the heart sings to itself in

when it’s a lonely nightbird, and you’re there like the stars.

PATRICK WHITE  

NO MYSTERY IN THE STIGMA OF THE MISERY

NO MYSTERY IN THE STIGMA OF THE MISERY

No mystery in the stigma of the misery, regret rebounds

as cynicism and disgust, the way it is with us,

every emotion a life study in a death mask,

every thought the pose of a moment that eludes us,

and the stars hair-braided into the tresses of the willows,

and the bridges we burned like the Milky Way so

no one could cross after us into the abyss,

the prodigal homelessness of our return address,

as our tracks are swept away on the Road of Ghosts,

actions of strategic gestures of peace with ourselves,

a truce, at best, with the dangerous stranger within

that plays host to the dead as if he were one of the guests,

as the ideals we die for demonically bless the means.

The labyrinth lost in us, looking for an exit sign,

the planets spinning their wheels in our starmud,

intractable kings of the hill waiting for the equinox

to light up our bones like kindling in our barrow tombs.

She’s not at peace with herself because she remembers

nothing she hasn’t repeated to her friends like an ally

that doesn’t know who or what she’s fighting against,

seldom for, anymore, that nothing makes any sense

and her life’s spread out like a Tarot pack on the floor,

pondering the destiny of sex with the ex of an old lover.

Nobility among the humble trivialized into the whim

of an action hero trying to live up to the movie

made of him like a two minute trailer

in a Bronze Age scarred by copper and tin.

He’s a voice coach in a choir of echoes

half a note off the ghosts of the nightbirds

that used to send a cold chill through the woods

before the agony of their unadulterated longing,

the infallible sorrow in the depths of the hunger for love

went extinct as yesterday’s moonrise.

His eyes are always busy as a security camera

but see nothing that’s unusual about him

except for the way his ego is always mistaking

his reflection for someone who might be sexting him.

Window-dressing and mannequins of expendable democracy

looted by the firelight of rioting thieves

demanding the same private rights as the key

to the executive washroom the slumlords

and feudal bankers hold over the heads of the peasants

like a watercloset over a common moat.

There in the red emergency exit light,

crumpled like a potato sack up against the door

that only opens one way, would you believe

that junkie used to sing as if she were having

a heart attack on stage like a sparrow hawk

shrieking into a microphone at the top of her lungs

as she went after every note like unsuspecting prey?

What do you say? It’s plagued me most of my life

as if my heart were insufficient, and compassion paled

in comparison with the damage done, irrevocably real,

as the mind takes account of successive images

and mouths some idiotic abstract mantra

about the collateral damage of the tragic element

in a comedy of errors in the eye of the beholder

looking upon the aesthetic desecration of idols

in the modern era like fourth century Christians

gone heresy hunting in the name of the Lord.

Maybe it’s time to upgrade my pagan superstitions

into benign cosmic theories about quantum foam

as if the universe were frothing at the mouth in a fit

of hydrophobia adrift on the waters of life.

Eye-witness to the suffering of others there’s

so little I can do anything, nor have the right, about

love beyond desire has its will bent

by its own redoubtable impotence as its first line

of self-accusatory defence. How many times

have I simply wanted to reach out and touch

the despairing silence in someone’s eyes

with a image of beauty, indelibly undisguised

without its deathmask on and no sign of perishing

from one breath to the next that might reveal

the hidden jewels in the slag of the ore they’re

buried in like exiles in a darkness far from home?

Cults of shadows dance around the lanterns

of the nightwatchman slowly being ground down

like a lens that gives him something to focus on

that’s more starlike than mere reflections

in a window no one looks out of anymore.

Every intention has its effect, but the effect

seems drastically out of touch with the ailment

it was meant to cure and the good deed elaborates

into superficial paradigms of the sacrificially complex.

You end up speaking like a hex of God

upon the freeborn waters of life at an altar with a knife

you don’t know whether to gut yourself with

or drive through someone’s heart like a righteous kill

as you ask out of a lingering sense of feasible compassion

that anyone’s will, other than your own, be done

as it isn’t right now with heaven’s hand

over the mouth of hell like an enculturated cellphone

meming the iconic oracles of the last prophetic skull

we listened to as if our lives together depended on it

like a happier estrangement than anything

our imaginations could have fervently wished for.

PATRICK WHITE

FOXFIRE BLOOMING IN THE AFTERBIRTH OF THE ASHES

FOXFIRE BLOOMING IN THE AFTERBIRTH OF THE ASHES

Foxfire blooming in the afterbirth of the ashes

that engendered it, green violins of unaged bracken,

the timeless lyrics of life reviving an old songbook

grown hoarse as paddlewheels and swans

making their way upriver by the lights

left on in the ghost towns of familiar ports of call

where breathless singers busked by the wharves

and watergates of the straightforward stairwells

anyone with sea legs ascended like a special form of a curve,

the uncarved block of the ten thousand things

the womb of an unborn guitar attached by its strings

to the abyss in the heartwood of a song that will

never be heard like the wind whistling

through the umbilical cords of a suspension bridge

swaying like an empty cradle in a forgotten lullaby

as if life burns its bridges, not just after, but as often,

before it crosses them to the other side of nowhere.

The words run off track, scuttle on the sandbanks,

dodge the light like fish along the shore, lose

their bearings in a gust of starmud from the bottom

up to the abandoned crow’s nests listing to the left

of the angel fleets like the masts of old growth forests

that put to sea like the skull and crossbones

buried in a piratical cemetery like the teeth of dragons

sown among nautical gravestones keeping one eye open

on the lighthouses waiting for salvage

to wash up on the beach in the red sky

of a false dawn in the morning that gave

sound warning to sailors in the know to pass by.

I say what I mean but the meaning’s drowned out

by the uproar of words with a voice of their own

that pass like carrier pigeons with a message

for their ears alone, the medium, an ink-soaked scribe,

blue as the glyphs of Picts, taking the minutes

at a seance I’m never asked to participate in

regardless of how I tattoo the inside of my eyelids

with the Etruscan zodiacs of the dreamscapes

and shapeshifters gathering at the transmorphic bend

where the river turns like the mindstream

toward the deepest watersheds of its collective unknowing.

The wind behind them, how many have set out

like beautiful schooners in full bloom to be

abused by their lives like garbage scows

after their sails were taken down like shark fins?

Set out to chart the stillness on the dark side

of the moonrise and run aground on the mountainous reefs

of lunar corals like sundials and astrolabes

taking the measure of their own shadows

in the shallows of the floodplains scabbing

for the lack of any volcanic depth to the pre-eminence

of their immanental extinctions. If the head

of the fish is rotten the tail will follow

like a thought wave in the wake that encompasses it all

in a heartbreaking farewell from the deck

of a shipwreck to the last lifeboat to leave the island.

Sooner or late the fire will run out of heretics

and no fat to keep them burning, the lanterns

the orthodox hold up like candles to the sun

to see in the dark will grow thin, dim, and lean

as the lights of the city of God disappearing

over the horizon of a black hole with no regrets.

Gravity the tugboat of the tides our lifelines

are anchored to like barnacles on a rock

we buried at sea, tears we shed at Gravesend,

all hands aboard, moonset to the west

of the unthinkable, sinking nevertheless.

Her pillow is soaked with snot and tears.

Her nose is running like a garden snail

that smears her stiff upper lip. Not the agony

in the garden, but still, a bitter cup to drink from.

He quotes his duty as a cover story

for following the psychological profile

of his desire into the misunderstood bedroom.

Garlands on the altars of love and disdain,

and everyone’s partially wrong enough

to be wholly right, and blame it on the zeitgeist

of the witching hour that has come upon them.

I walk by the Tay River like the grave of an old lover

some nights when the stars are blazing overhead

in the country dark, the infra red aura of the town

glowing infernally on the indifference of the clouds

as if it were putting lipstick on the mouth

of a drunk clown in a coma as a puerile joke

to mock him into laughing insincerely at himself

when he wakes up to wipe the smile off his face.

I’m isolated by the surrealistic absurdity I feel

in the mass appeal of the inexplicably funny

when the joke’s on anyone but this black farce

of common humanity like a punch-line in a morgue.

No epitaphs, but a gesture of living at its best,

Graffiti on the box-cars of our coffins laid to rest

after a few hollow laughs at the corpse’s expense,

the last call and curfew to top up our emptiness

as we steal the Buddha’s purse to buy the Buddha’s horse.

Those are the Buddha’s words. Mine have run their course

like a rootfire in the tunnels of star-nosed moles

digging like archaeologists for a future in the ruins

of their solitudinous starmud baked and glazed

into bricks of lapis lazuli left in the sun at midnight

they can aspire to like the past tense of the light

flashflooding like time and the Pleiades

through the circuitous labyrinths of their black holes.

PATRICK WHITE

ESTRANGEMENT YOKED TO THE INCOMPATIBLE

ESTRANGEMENT YOKED TO THE INCOMPATIBLE

Estrangement yoked to the incompatible, is it

some kind of heartless joke? Surrealistic, surely,

don’t average out the crucials and tell me

it’s a compromised oxymoron. I’m twisted enough

to see further than that. My imagination

can remember things that haven’t happened yet,

and equally forget the past wasn’t possible.

A labyrinth of wormholes in the hull of a shipwrecked moon.

A snakepit of incisive perceptions. A unified field theory

knotted out of stray wavelengths into the flying carpet

of a cosmic hymen that makes a big bang

beating on the membrane of a drum of water,

jazzy butterflies practising rimshots with their antennae

on the third eye of another bubble floating in hyperspace

that feels like a kiss on your forehead from your daughter

for something you haven’t got the slightest notion of

except there’s something quantumly entangled about love.

Since I was sixteen, in a first year astronomy class,

I’ve always thought you had to add a factor for mind

to Einstein’s energy, mass, light equation if you want

to see the whole of the big picture, not just the postage stamp

field of view of a careerist visionary writing haiku

he hopes to get published in a journal of cherry blossoms,

but the Bayeux Tapestry, Monet’s waterlilies in the Tuileries,

thinking if life and death can open their eyes that wide,

how long would it take a comet of thought to cross

the abyss of the nightsky of the mind before I’m

expansive enough to accommodate the many in the one

like a dimension of intelligent awareness beyond

the other eleven, for the moment, we’re circumscribed by.

Where’s the element for mind in the periodic table?

Am I just a shadow of my own constituents,

or did someone spike the waters of life with a star

on the sly to lead me into believing that mind

was more luminous than mere light and I wasn’t

just glassblowing the hash pipe of an alternative universe

in the land of the cosmological lotus-eaters

dreaming like Cambridge brahmins in deep sleep

that I’m the quantum aura of a dream figure

that got sucked down the black hole of a trap door spider

waiting like the singularity of a predator inside

to weave me into the flatlining mandala

of a new cosmic web that drips like silk

and embalming fluid from its hourglass abdomen.

My body a bag of water with nine holes in it

I’m always paying tribute like a feudal river

on its way back to the sea like an imperial bloodstream

with spoils of oxygen and protein led in chains

like the dna of slavemeat by the triumphant legions

behind the throne of the empire that’s risen like Rome

from the pagan dead within me like a lion

reborn in the blood of the lamb on an altar in the Forum.

I may be mad, quantum foam frothing like the sea

with hydrophobia of the mouth, contrails

of white phosphorus like jellyfish in a cloud chamber

but I’d rather be included in the picture-music

of a nightbird with a communal sense of solitude

than be excluded like the retinal circus

of a cameraman circling the earth like a telescope

he never turns on himself as if it were his head, not mine

under the shutter of the guillotine every time I blink

and a new world issues from the void in my absence.

PATRICK WHITE

SISTER LUNACY

SISTER LUNACY

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

stall and recover, whirl like maple keys, and blow

the ashes of the starmaps we burned like passports

out of the palms of our hands to shine like dandelions

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

Sister Lunacy, I watch you uprooting your garden usefully

and shaking the stars out of the clumps of grass

as if you caught Medusa smuggling diamonds in her hair,

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

and the goddess comes down to earth with dirty fingernails,

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

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

quite adorns the twilight the way her lucidity does.

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

and circle one another like two hawks in the sky

until the night cools and the loons pack up their keyboards

and the stars work the graveshift on into the early hours

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

were extinction in a deluge of light

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

shall we let the picture-music carry us away

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

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

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

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

and see what blooms along the way, sunflowers and waterlilies

opening up like observatories and prophetic skulls

with a penchant for looking at things the same way?

Sister Lunacy, be kind to the mandalas and paradigms

I bring you like dreamcatchers woven of spinal cords

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

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

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

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

As if he owned gravity and everyone had shares.

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

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

Just as you and I know madness is the quickest way

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

do it in song, don’t exorcise the answer

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

You can’t post a bond against a ghost.

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

And Sister Lunacy you speak as if you were letting

a thousand voices all at the same time use you

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

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

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

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

reshape the universe in its own image, abberate

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

And I’d remember to remember that only horses sweat

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

After the last lifemask comes off, nothing but space.

Nothing but imaginative room to move as if there were nowhere

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

We just went off into the ongoing like everything else

that’s looping and coiling its way through time,

a fragility of the air, caterpillars swaying in the wind

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

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

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

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

Sky burials without altars. Road kill. Cheap cremations.

The whole panoply of the tragically absurd.

But here, sister, here volcanoes still strew

islands in their wake and the birds keep arriving with seeds

and coconuts still wash ashore like prophetic skulls

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

Here you could mentor the stars in their myths of origin

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

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

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

about those things that encroached on your silence inside.

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

I can hear the falling of a single eyelash of light

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

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

to the picture-music that overtakes us unawares,

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

PATRICK WHITE