RELATIVELY PAINLESS DAY

RELATIVELY PAINLESS DAY

Relatively painless day. Half sunlight

smothered by grey. Don’t expect mercy

from the way life kills without regard

for the nervous system of its prey.

Sunday in a small town with thirty churches.

Secular kindness releasing oxytocin.

Civilization, not wheat, or temple,

but the fire that gathered people

with nothing but stories on their hands

while their meat cooked for easier digestion.

Bachelor buttons in the Neanderthal grave

of a child. Prophetic skulls buried under

the hearthstones like a calendar of the dead.

When did we last consult them? Now

is the hunting ground they set out alone

to discover. Envoys to the afterlife we

enacted on their advice as if it were real.

We had embassies there with paper-shredders

that called themselves priests. A new way

to eat the body of the god buried in the corner

of the field we fertilized like a ouiji board

to yield all the answers to the randomness

of the weather. Agriculture began to reform

the consumers. From now on the vines

were on trellises. The brown, gas giants

among the planets, who couldn’t shine

by a light of their own had shepherd moons.

The executioners offered anaesthetic

to the condemned man they were about to kill

and the church handed over unconfessed heretics

to the expedient firemasters of the law

at an auto-de-fe to burn. They couldn’t

have blood on their hands and live

up to the ten commandments. Or down

if you understand how arrogant hypocrites are.

They still stone women in Pakistan

for seeking knowledge as far as a cellphone,

like glass houses that have never sinned

bruising the flesh of a miscreant with

a meteor shower, space-junk in orbit,

determined to fall from their dark haloes

and wipe out a species according to the law

that lived like they had a god under their thumb.

How long does it take a thought to travel

from one neuron to the next? Or water

need a map to find its way around

an irrigation ditch, or woman be sacrificed

at the altar of her own dark mystery,

a divinely sanctioned death, paternalistic as hell,

or murder if you think it’s got nothing to do with God.

Regard the chaos of extreme conditioning.

We take the stories more seriously than

the unsayable they were meant to point out

like a negative space with an affirmative voice

that wasn’t listening to what we told ourselves

before the meat was cooked. You’re going

to sup with the devil you better eat

with a long spoon below the salt. Or there’s

no purgatory for you as if you were on

probation in death. I can’t believe as a child

I was originally sinful or that I was equally

innocent in an isolation cell. I learned

to carve loaded dice out of my bones in order

to survive to pay the slumlord who listened

to all that jive, and wondered if I did too.

I sing lullabies to lovelorn razor-blades

that took a vow on the sword they’d

placed between them to conjugate the verb

I love in Latin. In public. On the radio.

So Hux Huxley, editor of Florilegium,

cousin to Aldous and Julian, wasn’t disappointed

with the dying classics I studied with him

beside the aquarium of Australian stick insects

who didn’t know that all Corinthians

were liars at heart and I am a Corinthian

can you believe that, dedicated to getting

at the truth through a spurious art

of Moebius metaphors, like snakes

that eat themselves up to the head

and then what do they do if not go beyond that

even broken, the circle remains intact

as if the rain made it, or the tree rings

make solar systems that jump orbitals

in the heartwood of a willow that looks

better by night than at the beach by day.

I take things so seriously, boy, do I ever, I play

when things get me down in a small town on a Sunday.

PATRICK WHITE

TOOK IT TO EXTREMES

TOOK IT TO EXTREMES

Took it to extremes to see how much

people would care if they were told

it was in their own self-interest to look after

another. That feeding the poor, easing

the fever of the ill, might be the privilege

of privileges for those who call themselves healers.

If money is the root of all evil, don’t

stick your nose in flowers with tainted pollen

or you’ll go the way of the honey bees.

None of the petals love you and green

is the most perishable colour of them all. Comes

the fall and that wad of bills will shed you

like a turncoat for opening you’re wallet

like a pine cone in the middle of winter.

What you want to do is learn to bloom in fire

like the udumbara flower once every

seven thousand years. Do you see how

inflammable the tears of the dolorous conifers are?

You can make a little fire for yourself

of dry moss, twigs, and birch bark and not

let anyone else sit at it but the elect

in the board rooms of an ancient religion.

I eat you. Now you eat me. That way

we’re always full. Leavened bread

from genetically modified wheat

rises like a loaf of the harvest moon.

We can talk to the mythically inflated shadows

within the magic circle of our own

prophetic skulls in a Stonehenge of moondogs

haloed with a hint of brass on the clouds

or the aura of fool’s gold glowing at night

on the low hanging branches of an avalanche

of windfalls when the moon descends like an ax

on the nape of snakey apples in the grass.

We can remember the war bonnets we tarred

and feathered like black swans for non-compliance

with starmaps that sounded more like treaties

than a land grab. O the music of the spheres

is a celestial requiem. The lightyears are paced

like professional mourners learning how to dance

like ghosts, and the plumes on the horses

of the hearse are black as the turkey vultures that circle

and swarm the corpse of the Great Square of Pegasus

going down in the west over the Lanark hills,

slowly dying like an inspired sacrifice in

the name of humanity in myself and others

I quickly came to hate for the sake of the tribute,

not knowing if it was a comic death or

the life of the party that was hardest to believe.

I celebrated against the odds that praise

was enough to overcome the triumphs

that we suffered in a holy war where the cause

was already lost long before we took our vows

to terminate ourselves before we caught on

like a firewall that didn’t work to stop the flames.

The whole hillside is burning its slash off

like the ashes of the sacred clowns who

polka-dotted their faces they painted in the spit paste

of an urn that had scattered them prematurely

like the blossoms of a rootfire breaking into the open.

PATRICK WHITE

GREED. POLITICS. CORRUPTION BEYOND SURREALISTIC CONCEPTION

GREED. POLITICS. CORRUPTION BEYOND SURREALISTIC CONCEPTION

Greed. Politics. Corruption beyond surrealistic

conception. I’m going mad in self defence.

The delusion of insanity doesn’t look so bad

from here. How did these distortions get

elected to represent the things I stubbornly believe

I so breezily accepted in the sixties? The mediocrities

are fracking the well of the muses and the astronauts

have grown old and died of gravity that use

to float freely high, high above the earth.

There are perennial truths to our experience

of humanity, of being human, that endure,

without divine sanction, or with if you prefer,

to this very day like oxygen and water. Love

and understanding, compassion, empathy,

pity if it’s not meant to destroy someone,

freedom to say, protest, or create without

a profit margin being where all things come to rest

like autumn leaves in a gutter with an iron grate.

Fifty years, a poetic heretic, a literate demon

good for the angels’ imaginations if they’ve

got one among them left of their own. As well

as those abject modes of starmud that

have no idea of what’s shining within them.

The frogs have dressed up like cannibals

far to the east and everything is scum,

born that way like the cosmic eggs of a priest.

Is the day ever going to come, not as

a supernatural act of intervention, whether

God’s an extraterrestrial or not who sneers

at our technology, people realize they need

each other as a coral reef needs the moon

to remind the polyps they’re not alone?

I’ve had enough. I’m overwhelmed

by the termites munching in the house of life,

untimbering the heartwood of the rafters,

undermining the foundations we built

our pyres on, turning our walls to a weather front

as if the rest of us were the asteroids

of a natural catastrophe with hidden strings

like a kite that nose-dived like a puppet

into the powerlines that ignited a universal

conflagration, a good capitalist that fed

on everything it touched, Midas in a vegetable garden

looking for a golden harvest under

the genetically modified rocks that feel

more like a skull of dry ice that’s been fuming

forever it seems, sublimating itself as smoke

and ghosts since the beginning of this new fire age.

I can’t believe how the one-eyed liar can deceive

the many new ways of communicating life

and death issues with the convenience of a cellphone.

A fly on a computer screen. Even walking

beside the Tay River that never lies to me

like my own mindstream offering me a mirage

of what there is to drink from my own reflection.

I see the stems of the fallen leaves stacked

like a logjam or the wicks of clear cut candles

whose flames are single petalled starmaps

of someone who didn’t have to ask if they

were loved or not better in solitude than company.

I feel the suffering of everyone until

I can see it somewhere between the treeline

where the river winds, and the stars overhead

that made it all possible in the shining forges

of their fire-wombs, the sacred smithies who said

one half of you shall plough the moon,

the other, raise a sword against water

that can’t be wounded by the tears in your eyes.

And for the mad espionage of the war mongers

there’s always an adulterous fishing net

the dolphins, muscled as they are, get snagged in

like a spider web, a dream-catcher, a suspension bridge

on fire with the naked acts of the truth

that has no where to hide its eyes or alibis or lies.

How many gates and front doors, entrances compared

to the back, emergency exits, second-holes

of a groundhog’s labyrinth in this house of pain?

I see it in the junkie prostitute’s eyes at twenty seven

open to whatever comes though she puts

a smile on her life to gloss over it and keep

up with the Joneses. I see it in the bones

of the baby muskrat the wolves have been

sniffing around for from the day it was born.

And even the thick asphalt of the rat snake

that made its way through the grass like

a highway slick with rain. Pain. Until

it doesn’t matter anymore it tastes the air

as if it were witching for water with forked lightning.

A million hues of oxymorons on a colour wheel

turning grey as the journey gets longer

than shadows at moonrise on a premeditative sundial.

The agony of giving birth to something bigger

than a self. The impersonality of suffering

though you send it birthday cards that are

always well-meaning however absurd it is

to believe your pain taught you anything but how

to hurt as if it were teaching you to transcend yourself.

Even if you wanted to be a fountain efflorescing

like a mirage in an eyeless desert and you

turned out to be a waterclock going supernova

in the endless emptiness of a blossoming flower.

Even if you walk alone by the Tay River

as you have a hundred troubled times before

at night when the willows, in the summer

of their long green locks, or in the winter

when they open a bordello, are on

a first name basis with your business here.

PATRICK WHITE

I SHOWED UP WITH A ROSE

I SHOWED UP WITH A ROSE

I showed up with a rose and you said

it was the wrong colour. I showed up

with my head on a silver platter

and you asked as you danced for another

where I’d buried my heart

like the last love affair of the summer

as I watched your body move

like the moon on a famous river

where others before me had drowned

like fish in a dead sea of shadows,

shipwrecks thirsting for the waters of life

you denied them like the taste of your reflection

in the oceanic deserts of their tears

as they died in a graveyard of wine.

I brought you the fallen leaves

of my latest book of poems like autumn

but you swept them off the thresholds

of your hidden doorways like junkmail

and said, yes, there’s fire in their longing,

but if I’m the muse who refuses you,

next time edge the razor of your tongue in blood.

I retreated like a hermit for awhile

into the severed candle of my solitude

that burned like a comet to return

on the day of my death in your eyes

like the last known address

of my homelessness on the lost gospel

of the loveletter I sent you lightyears from paradise.

O how much I couldn’t second-guess I loved you then,

like a weathervane loves the wind,

how much I learned and took to heart

like the golden fossils of sorrow and regret

that lie buried like sundials and hourglasses

in the secret gardens on the moon

where I used to wait for you life after life

like midnight at noon when the earth

stood still and the light held its shadows

like a drowning man holds his breath,

like content delays the timing of its heart

until it’s too late for anyone to show up

like a water-gilder at a Zen tea ceremony

to mend the broken cup of the skull-faced moon.

PATRICK WHITE

LIKE A CHILD THAT'S BURNT ITS HAND

LIKE A CHILD THAT’S BURNT ITS HAND

Like a child that’s burnt its hand experimenting with matches,

testing your sympathy, suffering in its innocence,

to see if you understand there are rattlesnakes

under the rose-bushes, and they both have thorns,

as the moon sheds its scales on the lake

that turns them into feathers when it’s in

the right mood, kisses the burn and makes

it better, as if your lips were two scars coming together,

I don’t cry out to the fixed stars anymore

thinking anyone’s there to take notice of the hurt.

I don’t turn women into mothers with me

as their only child. Black roses no less

I don’t bring them bouquets of bladder wort.

If a woman isn’t far seeing enough to spot me

in the crowd like the Hubble telescope

toward the oldest, fastest, darkest galaxies

she’s just a mere window to keep the cold out

and let a little light in when there’s light to be had

in the middle of winter. Her eyes don’t

touch me dangerously, there’s no creative mystery

in the way she speaks to me like the Pacific ocean

in a storm or kingfishers flying all over the place

like flakes of halycon blue soothing the waves.

There’s healing in the left breast of the Medusa’s

most ancient body cells, and tumours in the right.

The antidote’s in the last crescent of the moon.

The Milky Way not the issue of mammary glands.

Who could look at a woman that way without

a heart of stone back in the Burgess Shale?

If she takes you for a lover, you’ve got to be equal

to the horror and the lust. You’re never going to find

a winged horse in a bird cage made for the heart.

Woman’s what beautiful about being fashioned of starmud.

There is no other image you were created in,

no earth, no night, no sky, no art, as the angels

stood around and marvelled at the names you gave her,

the metaphors you kept compounding into light

as everywhere she walked the Periodic Table of Elements

was set like a garden with underground rivers

and a candle of a firefly or a star to slay death

for a moment in the hourglass figure of the beauty of life.

She’s the crone, the nymph, the nubile witch,

the abyss, the dark mother you return to. She’s

water that burns like the fire of hot tears

in the shedding of the leaves, in the wedding

of her blossoms to a windfall of overjoyed orchards.

You draw a sword from the stone. She draws

a bell that mourns and celebrates your coming

and your going, a door on one hinge

like a lapwing that’s trying to distract you

from yourself as you try to square the round table

like a line you drew in the sand. Assessment hour.

You were lacking for the longest time weren’t you?

Draw a line in the sand. Dare the wind.

If she got the better of you, you didn’t give your best.

I’m not talking about slavery here. No

quisling metrosexual with gender confusion

who smells as if the cows just ate deadly nightshade.

Love is genderless and the law follows suit.

She’s Bellatrix in Orion. She’s the first sphinx

at Gobekli Tepe that we know of like a lioness

that does all the hunting, the bitch that leads

the wolfpack, or lures the barnyard dogs

with her pheromones lingering in the air

like low-hanging fruit the mutt can’t resist.

To be torn apart like a stuffed boy having a temper tantrum.

Hic sunt dracones and blood sports with the heart as a goat.

She’s three bells on the quarter deck and all is well.

The moon lies down on the water

like the Silk Road to a vocal mulberry bush.

And then the silence of a sandstorm coming

in the deserts of the moon blind as the stars

to the havoc they cause on earth. Unforseeable

circumstances that burn the bridges and filaments out

in the light bulb of a good idea. The wicks

and antennae, the lightning rods of a billion fireflies

all going off at once like ladyfingers

or a Gatling gun on the Sioux at Wounded Knee.

One moment you’re having tea with her

mending cracks in the cup with gold as if

you were repairing your own synarthritic skull

or a continent at a Chanoyu Tea Ceremony on Pangaea,

and the next there are volcanoes of dark matter

connecting the dots along a fault line

of separatist feelings that can read between

the gaps of the mountains on the moon in eclipse

like Bailey’s diamonds, hard and cutting as the mind.

She’s to be celebrated, if that’s at all possible.

She’s to be trusted like a muse not a precedent.

She’s to be feared like a blasting cap in a beaver dam

or the beginning of wisdom. She’s the dark mother

of her own inner child for the child’s sake.

She’s the healer of your scarred medicine bags

and she knows what herbs to look for like

silver green Usnea lapponica on the forest floor

as if the moon were in the corals and she made

a lichen tincture for a Zen tea totaller allergic to penicillin.

I owe as much to women as I do windows

and wide open night skies exotic with

Spartan stars culling the helots as the sun

does asteroids. They’ve taught me to keep

things to myself like the private life

of a sad mystery that isn’t trying to cultivate

an audience. Emotions deeper than poetry,

more radioactive than fish bleeding from their gills,

or somebody standing too close to the ricochet

of a rifle shot before the firing squads of the stars,

blind folded no less and not allowed to smoke

as the sentence was carried out against

the unwilling heretic for the good of his soul.

I have been untrue to myself to be faithful

to them. And I haven’t lived long or down enough

to regret it yet. A vow of silence doesn’t

echo in a nightclub, and the shadows in the mirror

put their fingers to their lips as if time

were creeping by like a sundial in love

with the moon on the far side of its dead seas.

And it’s not a matter of grace, not

a stray hair from the head of an imaginable

aristocrat in pursuit of an earthly excellence

by coming down off his high horse like a king

who lived among the peasants, so much as a way

of honouring what I’ve learned of love

and how binary stars learn to dance around

one another like a seance to the trines

and the first violins of an exorcism waltzing

with the willows down by the river

that doesn’t give a damn where it’s going

as long as it’s flowing seaward against its own current.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN HEAR CRYING ALL OVER THE EARTH TONIGHT

I CAN HEAR CRYING ALL OVER THE EARTH TONIGHT

I can hear crying all over the earth tonight,

sad children in the windows of their eyes longing for things

they dream of growing up to make come true,

fireflies in wishing wells the shadows drink from

on the moon where the spirit’s lost and found dwells

like a small glove shed like a skin of moonlight years ago

as we grew out of ourselves like shells of the dawn in the morning,

waiting for some flesh and blood human hand

to loop back like a habitable planet in its second innocence

and come and claim us like life on Mars again.

The return journey of the morning glory to unmapped islands

we set out to explore, each to our own star,

like the lifeboats of newly-hatched turtles running

from the cosmic eggshells of our abdicated crowns of creation,

toward the abysmal shore of our oceanic aspirations,

each of us enduring the transformative initiations

of our shapeshifting hearts on the thresholds

of the endless event horizons of the black holes and rainbows

that beguiled us with their joy and despair deeper

into the mirage of the music believing in this desert of stars

even here we could hear the mermaids singing,

and pluck pearls of enlightenment from the third eyes

of oysters open on the beach. Or the mouths of books

that had lost their place in the universe, left open

gaping in the sand at the incontrovertible signposts of the stars.

So many echoes from home you can’t help but lose track

of your soul sometimes along the way trying like the rain

to better the world like a green tree ring pinging

the heart wood of a petrified forest like a tuning fork

or a witching wand that might break into blossom yet

if only we don’t give up like grails and constellations

looking for the watersheds of the shining whether

they’re dragons that swallow the moon to bring the rain

or the bell weathers of irreversible delusions

that fill the abyss with the elixirs and love potions

of our intoxicating affair with our own laughter and tears.

Over the course of the intervening lightyears

the lost flightfeathers of many strange skies

under our wings, lonely prayers in the moonlit tents of the doves

growing like morning glory all over the childhoods

we abandoned like buckets beside the wells we fell into

like hourglasses of quicksand leaking out of ourselves,

like stars from the perfect bodies of contiguous time and space.

We’re exalted in the midst of our humiliations. We’re humbled

by the excess of our celebrations. We ghost dance against

the gathering thunderclouds of preeminent war

like a guild of sacred clowns and shepherd moons

on tour in protest against the bulwarks of gravitas

enslaving third world planets, and for a time, our hearts

feel like angry strawberries glowing in the starfields

as if Aldebaran had just blue-shifted toward the spiritual life

of the Pleiades, and were young again, the red flame

of the poppy in its blood that dreams of sustaining

and renewing life, even if it be just the tender green placard

of a leaf unfolding in the ashes of our urns, one

shy tendril of morning glory seeking the light

in the terrible stillness of an implacable abyss,

we are made young again, clear again, by the gusts

of a moody, blue muse of emotional hydrogen

flaring up in us like the inspiration for goblets and fountains

of cool white flowers hanging our bells and trumpets

like music growing all over the cedar hedges in the early morning.

Can you listen with your eyes? Can you see with your ears

how the ghosts of the stars walk the earth at night

in the flesh of flowers blooming like chicory along the roadside

in the blue irises of the eyes of September, or in gardens on the moon

left untended by the gentle rains of our imaginations

for more childhoods than there are watermarks in the heartwood

of the tears it took to get here like rootless trees

spreading across the earth like an unplanned pilgrimage

of exiled immigrants returning to the ancestral shrines

of their prophetic skulls burning like prodigal stars

in the spacious windows of our visionary homes?

Realizing at last, if nothing else from our insights into life,

the starmaps of the fireflies at the headwaters of our source

aren’t bounded by the hearthstones of our wandering hearts

where the vagrants lay their heads down at last

on the hard pillows of the moonrocks they brought back with them

to dream of breathing new life into the lost atmospheres

of their childhoods returning like the lyrics of the nightbirds

to a wheeling mobile hanging like a windfall of planets

and dancing apples from the rafters and boughs of the ceilings

that couldn’t keep the lid on the toy boxes of their bedrooms

or the hoods on the marvellous third eyes of the falcons

perched on the tree limbs of their telescopes in the corner

trying to see into the dark as far as the wingspan of their light will let them.

PATRICK WHITE

I COULD ALWAYS TELL WHEN YOUR EYES HAD TOUCHED SOMETHING

I COULD ALWAYS TELL WHEN YOUR EYES HAD TOUCHED SOMETHING

I could always tell when your eyes had touched something.

The stars were dazzling through the tops

of the pagodas of the pine trees airing their wings

like totem poles carved into the features of moonlight

on the distant hillsides that swept up from the lake

in waves of stone that broke like an avalanche against the sky.

And by the number of miracles under your feet

as ancient as the wingspans of the stars

I knew all the paths you’d taken like the lifelines

in the palm of the alluvial deltas of my right hand

to make your way to the sea like a leaf with a flightplan

laid on the mindstream like a Nazca pictogram

as if you were waiting for the return of the plumed serpent

like the feathers of the highest weighed

on the scales of the lowest dancing on the balance beam

of the unitive life of a draconian oxymoron.

Per ardua ad astra, I couldn’t look at the starmaps

in your eyes without seeing the blueprints

of a successful paleolithic attempt at rocketry

celebrated by a fountain of fireworks like falling stars

that quickly exhausted my heart of myriad desires

trying to wish upon them all like meteor showers

in the Heavy Bombardment taking the shape of the earth

I was standing on like Stonehenge at the winter solstice

when you reached out and touched my skeleton

like spring in the bone-box of the vernal equinox.

And there were signs of a mysterious calligraphy

on the petals of the roses in your blood

I couldn’t see that directed the sweetness of life

like bees to your heart of hearts. I could never tell

for sure, if you were the spirit of life within me

or the runaway daughter of a wayward muse

that cherished your creative freedom above all else as I did

the inspiration that kept my fires burning long into the night,

trying to write odes to your beauty in evanescent alphabets

in cedar scented smoke from candelabras of driftwood

I burned like the bodies of the drowned that made it all the way

to this far shore on an enlightenment path of their own,

like overturned lifeboats rowing toward land like arthropods.

Sometimes I still wake up out of a deep sleep and think I hear

the clacking of the shells and crutches the sea

handed out like drafting compasses with knee joints for legs

so when they made a side-ways move they clicked their heels

and snapped their claws like the castanets of Spanish dancers

at a bullfight in one of the cratered arenas on the moon

where the shadows drive their dark swords into the hearts

of solar matadors that taunted them with the capes of red poppies

bleeding out in the sands of the gored hourglasses of the dead.

I could easily follow the echoes of your voice after you’d spoken

and left the rest to the silence to explain because

it never took any of your dream grammars long

to master me fluently whenever I tried to open my mouth

to say something when I realized immediately

my vocabulary of sacred syllables stuck in my throat

like tarpaper eclipses of creosote compared

to the inflammable starclusters of your astral eloquence.

You spoke in the tongues of flames that healed

the heretical sunspots on my heart by setting my body afire

and leaving me your spirit to follow suit

as if Joan of Arc had turned pole-dancing

into the religious art of two wavelengths

of healing serpent fire entwined around

the axis mundi of my spine and I were chalking

pool cues with the open chakras of my vertebrae

getting ready to put some English on the planets

in my solar system and take a long shot without sinking

the eight ball of my prophetic skull in the black holes

of the side pockets on the elemental table against the odds

of ever making it without a lot of luck and a kiss

from your risky lips like a chance I was willing to take.

PATRICK WHITE