I COULDN'T HAVE LIVED IT

I COULDN’T HAVE LIVED IT

I couldn’t have lived it any differently

than it lived me so inseparably

like the moon’s reflection on the water

there’s no point in trying to lift my life

like an emerging face by the corners

out of the developer in a dark room

to see whom I’ve been saying goodbye to

all the years it took to grow into me

all the years I’ve been following myself

like a wanted poster I cut two holes in for my eyes

and wore like a mask into an allnight casino on the moon.

When I look back sometimes upon my life

like a shadow who’s tagged along for the ride

it’s been a long, long getaway to the other side of nowhere

as I’ve lived through these eyeless deserts of myself

from one well to the next

like a slut of water.

And maybe I would have surrendered

if I had found anyone to surrender to

but when I turned around to give myself up

there were no posses in the light

no stool or noose of stars hanging over me in the night.

And everything after that has felt

like the random solitude of the wind

without beginning or end

blowing on the stars

like the heater of my cigarette

to pass the time

and see if I can make them brighter.

But at night the desert turns the mike over to space

and my emotions have a chance to expand

like a herd going over a precipice

or a heart clinging to the moon

like a barnacle on the side of a pyramid sunk in sand

and when I listen to myself

there’s always a left-handed afterlife

living me like a holdup I hadn’t planned.

And then there are times

when I am uplifted by some stray gust of stars

like a dusty fingerprint on the trigger of the moon

I’m pointing like some suicidal holy man at my own temple

trying to convert the thief in me to a new way to steal

from the serpent’s purse that strikes at my heel like a bank alarm

in the desparate attempt of a fading mirage

to prove I’m real.

And then those nights, those long hideous nights

when the darkness hardens like a lump of coal

and shatters me like a windowpane

when I am the least convincing argument

for the existence of God

that I’ve ever met

and the only way that I can forget,

the only way I can keep from going insane

is to live in vain

as if my life depended on it.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU DON'T DO CRACK OR SPEED OR HEROIN

YOU DON’T DO CRACK OR SPEED

You don’t do crack or speed or heroin;

you’re not lifting the moon like an eyelid

to find a new place to shoot,

but you’re boiling your heart in a spoon,

you’re thawing the six rocks of your emotions,

boiling away the seven oceans

that will get you through the night

as if you were another sign of global warming.

And now you’re weeping and raging in my living room,

violently shapeshifting through your withdrawal

like an exorcism gone wrong

because the latest hot lover

you got hooked on like a dealer

proved to be a snakeoil salesman in paradise

who convinced you the scales of your daring

would turn into feathers

and your falling take flight.

Not everybody who jumps from heaven makes hell;

for example, your heart there on that rock

you’re kicking around at your feet

like the skull of the world,

isn’t that the sun on your horizon

pouring out of its broken shell like the yoke

of another tragic casualty of spring

fallen like Icarus from the embryonic wax

of your exaggerated wingspan?

Love is not a form of substance abuse

and I’m not the local, walk-in rehab centre

you can duck into anytime

you’ve spent your last dime like a bullet

on a dealer that’s not reloading,

but pain is pain and I can feel yours

chaining itself to all your emergency doors

so that no one could ever get out

when you go hunting for yourself

like a contract you’ve taken out on a highschool.

But it isn’t the object of your longing,

the focus of the star, the shining

that you’re addicted to

like all those placebos and soothers

you keep calling boyfriends,

faking you’re better

everytime you take one:

you’re addicted to addiction.

You’re addicted to the promise you mean to keep.

And you can keep on taking your clothes off like Christmas

and suffering the usual unwrapping depressions,

but you’re addicted to being a gift that was meant for someone else

and it’s never your name that follows the to or the from on the label

when you give yourself to Santa Claus

like a pimp in sable

and he addicts you to the starburn above the stable

that keeps making an ass of you

when the wise men take back their gifts.

So here you are again

before the perilous depths

of these preciptious cliffs

trashing your afflictions like female newborns

that were born of all that genetic junkmail

you once opened frantically like a loveletter

that wasn’t addressed to you

on the rocky threshold of the shore below

that looks up at you like the sickle of a smile

that reaps what you’ve sown,

but I know what you’ve always known:

that you’re addicted

to being unmarrowed by the moon

when the hummingbird who sipped honey

like gold from a cold stone

finds herself out of money and alone.

I can help you out with the cash flow

and though I know I’m not your drug of choice

measure my feelings out like methadone to ease the abyss,

but if you want my advice,

being addicted to addiction

is like trying to step into your own bloodstream twice

or drowning while diving for pearls

that have already risen like the full moon

and crossed you off the calendar

like the X that sucks the poison from the kiss.

Everyone longs for a night, a face, a space

they knew once even if just for the glance of a moment

when joy spiked the wine

and what was singularly human

rushed like a flashflood through the valleys

of the universally divine

and rain that had fallen like tears for years

on an ocean of sorrows

with no hope of flowers

suddenly bloomed like the moon’s corals

in the meadows of a mystic sea

and everything that could possibly be, was.

I knew that moment, for instance, once with you

but the inconceivable eventually flows down into the believable

like stars into mountain streams

and we end up panning for the irretrievable

like a nugget of night we lost in the moonbeams,

and impeaching each other like credible constellations

that can’t shine out of the box,

we check the locks on the mine

and go our separate ways

like abused metals,

mutants of gold and lead

that couldn’t turn the one into the another

once the alchemy wore off

and the glass alembic of another transformative cocoon

was shattered by the harvest stone

of an unphilosophical moon

and the pain was a change of species.

And you’re still the anti-muse of the butterfly effect

that inspires my chaos theory

of postdeconstructive poetry

when I strike one planet against another

like your heart against mine

looking for a spark

that might keep the universe warm for another night

but I know I can’t light the same fire again

or shoot the moon like silver

into the same exhausted vein

now all that matters is the next homeless hit

and this infinite choice of elixirs

that don’t quite do it

whenever I go looking for my voice

like a small word

in the ashes of a burning bush

or that bird of your phoenix heart that once sang in me like you

and fell like an autumn cradle from the lullaby tree

that still calls to me sometimes

and still keeps me up

like the ghost of an albatross

wailing off the coast of a lost art

wounded like the black sail of a loveletter on an unlucky wind.

But that doesn’t mean

I wait for you like a widower on the moon

for the last lifeboat that overturned in space

when the seas evaporated like the eyes in your face.

I’m not rummaging through my heart

like a medicine chest

for the three bells of the last all’s well

I can crush like the moon into a paste when I cry.

I’m not flagging my heart like a fit

sucking up the tranquil shadows of the moons’s dead oceans

as if I could bind your heart again to me like a barrel,

a clown in a shipwreck he’s wearing for pants,

and go over your falls again as I once did

in a Niagra of love potions.

We’ve had that dance

and the music we heard in each other

was wine unique as night

to the glass that contained it like a body,

and I don’t need to seek again

in these lotions of rain that fall gently now

what was so wholly and incommensurably once

that in every drop of water I feel you like the sea.

A truly enlightened junkie

only needs to hit once

and it’s good for a lifetime

so there’s never really any chance

of coming down from the people we’ve loved

who poured the stars into our abandoned wells

like a nightwine that shunned the sun

so why all this talk about kites

that caught fire and crashed

and the new space shuttles

you keep wheeling up to your gantry

like all these love affairs you keep trying to launch

like a rave on ecstasy,

trying to swim with the stars

when you’re already flying

with the whole of creation

like the nightsea of a black rose

that can only be seen

in the depths of its darkness

with eyes of wine

that have shed their petals and waves

like a sky that has let go of its lifeline?

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

IF YOU HAVE ANY DOUBTS

IF YOU HAVE ANY DOUBT

If you have any doubt this is about you, don’t

because I’ve summoned snakefire

to tatoo it like an underground constellation

indelibly upon your eyes

and the small skies

you mark like full moons

and forthcoming events

in the calendar of your tears.

How many doctors can you cram in a womb

to get the baby right,

or critics in your head

to align your poem with the axial north

of what everyone else has said

as if inspiration came with a coward and a compass?

You want the roads to follow you.

You stand up like a shaky mast

at public readings,

holding your poems

like a fleet of immaculate sails

that never leave harbour,

hoping some continent drifting toward China

will eventually bump into you

and some cartographer with a publishing deadline

will eventually give you a name.

I don’t mean to set fire to your watercolours

or leave them out in the rain like leaves

or deny you’re a capital looking for a country to star in

or throw myself like junkmail

on the threshold of your overpriced jeans

but I hate the way you keep setting up prisms

at all your rainbow intersections

like traffic lights and rush hour cops

to direct the flow of your reds and greens.

Enlightenment doesn’t maintain a teacher.

The muses don’t hold auditions

and life isn’t the dress rehearsal of anything

that can be prompted in the spotlight of the moon for applause.

Poetry isn’t the slurred autograph

on the second edition of a suicide note

and I’ve seen how you press your mouth to common paper

as if it were a royal document, a lettre cachet

sent through a cultural attache

to assassinate your reader like a lover

but red wax isn’t the same as sealing your words in blood,

and lipstick on a white hanky

isn’t a rose petal

or even a real kiss

and just because you’re a bleeder

doesn’t prove you’re the surviving child of a murdered czar

or that your future’s as bright as a vampire

that just got a job as a teller at a bloodbank

because you don’t know how to die for anything.

You’ve never lived a lie intensely enough

to make you come true

and though you’ve watered the moon for ages

with the rootless shadows of your mirrors and mirages

nothing ever grew.

PATRICK WHITE

LET THE MUD SETTLE IN THE PUDDLE

LET THE MUD SETTLE IN THE PUDDLE

Let the mud settle in the puddle

if you want to clarify the sky you’re walking on,

the stars underfoot, and the clouds.

If you want to see your face as it is,

the front door that everyone recognizes as their own

after they’ve washed off the clowns,

if you want to return to yourself,

not as an address

but as home,

stop trembling like a witching wand

that’s just discovered an unknown sea,

stop throwing your bones around

like a prophetic skeleton

your grammar’s too bad to read,

like birds against the window

or stones skipping out over a mirror

if you want to part the waters like curtains

to see who drowned

when you flashed before your eyes

like the afterlife of Egypt

running the promised land down in the desert.

Love like life may be just a matter

of learning to keep your word to a liar

as most decent people bleed to believe

on the rock of their faith,

but I have passed through the belly

of the serpent crescents of the moon

uncoiling like a ram’s horns,

and endured the acids of this long, dark ordeal

in order to coax the pearls

of my transformative delusions of human divinity

like waterlilies out of the snake shit.

Graffitti under the bridge in ancient hieroglyphics,

I lost the Rosetta stone of my voice in the desert

lives ago that I relinquished like a language in your name,

because you were the most ferocious hunger

to ever consume me,

and even now

in the ashbucket of my heart beside the stove,

this chafing of flame like the wings of a distant phoenix.

Now the prophets play more among themselves

and it’s anyone’s guess who’s left

to bless the horns and haloes

of the knocked-up moon

in all these cradles in the treetops

but all night long I hear them fall like apples.

Do I remember you? You were a scalpel of lightning

that shredded me like the secrets of an abandoned embassy

and there weren’t enough stars in the sky

to cauterize the open wound

or urge my blood to clot like rubies

and I’ve been pouring out of myself like this ever since

astonished by the courage of the light

still streaming through the available dimension of your ageless abyss

as if I had a future.

PATRICK WHITE

IT'S A GESTURE OF THE HEART

IT’S A GESTURE OF THE HEART

It’s a gesture of the heart

that no one can explain

that lays its words down like cool herbs

gathered on the moon

to silver someone else’s pain.

We lie down in the same wound

like two stones in the same river

that might make it to the other side

without drowning in the stream

and I speak to you of shores you can reach if you try

and you add yourself like a drop of water to a shoreless sea, and cry.

And for a moment you are the devastated solitude

of a runaway in the rain

who can’t abide the stranger she’s become

as a lipstick butterfly emerges

from the shell-casing chrysalis of your rage

and you put your lips on like wings.

You’re a princess with a white flag

approaching the ashes of a dragon

who sleeps in his own fires

to wake him up from his dream of water

and negotiate a rescue now

if only I’ll concede to show you how.

You want me to respect you because you’re dangerous.

You want to ensnare me

in the white voodoo you’re practising

on the dark side of the moon,

you believe in my eyes

and want me to see something

you’ve never shown anyone before

because a window’s as good as a door to a thief

and you know we have neither in this homelessness

that shelters our grief like dark matter in space

or the far side of a face

we refuse to acknowledge is ours.

I can feel your powers

chafing their scales in the snakepit

like straitjackets they’re urgently trying to slough off

like the old skins of a hand-me-down moon

that don’t quite fit the new one right.

One fang, stars; the other, a starless night,

you know how to open things with a smile

and strike like a gate

should anyone walk between your crescents

like a terrorist with carry-on luggage

who doesn’t dream he’s been detected

as you recoil like a theme to make your point.

It would be easier to tinker with the genes

of the ancient ancestors of a life before sin

than not to want to want to sleep with you,

than not to want to be your bay for the night

and tell you everything’s going to be all right

and mean it and drown the world like a torch or a dragon

in the intimacy of our most urgent delusions.

And even if I didn’t put a match to the candles

they would still ignite

and a black sun would rise at midnight

and let the stars and flowers decide for themselves

whether they wanted to open in its light or not,

and for awhile, deep underground,

there’d be laughter in a coffin

as we posted dirty notes on our headstones

like shocking lovepoems that just rolled off the tip of our tongues

like drops of water charged with stars and snakefire

humming down our spines

like the deathbed hymns of the hydrolines

when they break the news to God.

PATRICK WHITE

THE MORNING AFTER EVERYTHING: FOR LUKE COCHRANE

THE MORNING AFTER EVERYTHING:

FOR LUKE COCHRANE

Saturday morning rain in Perth

and things seem as intimately far off and strange

as the new maps of water running down the windowpane.

No birds on the black boughs of the November trees

and black mirrors in the empty funeral home parking lot

and on the other side of me

the stalwart bloodbrick of a wet church

that looks better in the nicotine lingerie

and dusky seaspray

of a single yellow floodlight at night

that can’t get it up to be a lighthouse.

It would be a lie to say that I’m not in love

and happily alone, but I most wistfully am,

as I excuse myself for being me

and put myself off like the small death of another way

I could have taken to get back home, but didn’t.

November’s an orphanage after the last kid has left

and I’m sure there’s an ancient chthonic wisdom

under the duff and detritus

of all these slick, leechy leaves

that the earth has applied to herself like a poultice

to draw the violets and worms out in spring,

but right now my mouth is not a wound

with anything deep to say

about things too deep to be said

and there are memories of women and friends in my head

sleeping like keys in the bottom of a drawer

that I have saved for when the day comes

to open the flowers and doors

that I’ve forgotten,

all the soft sorrows that rime the radiance

of the halo around a black hole

haunted by these ghosts of light.

I am absorbed like tears in a tenderness of grey

and there’s more healing than thorn

in the cool aloe of the air

moist with a seance of emotions

that gust lightly around me

as if yesterday were merely a fragrance

hovering over an eye of wine

like the dust and smoke of today

that bottles its purity like water.

Sometimes love passes like a glacier over you

and there are runes and scars and striations on your skin

and lakes and craters and eyes the sky fills in

and the sun comes out like an exorcist

and you feel like you’ve been baptized in ice

or tucked into the crevice of a wailing wall

like a baby mammoth, or an unanswered prayer

and you try not to care

that you’re a freak of your own evolution

trying to clone yourself out of the museum into a zoo

and that all these people are staring at you

like a missing link between the parentheses of your tusks

that have unhinged you from the gate of time

you once swung on like your next breath,

and if you were asked about the extremes of mercy

you would say, without hesitation, death.

Sometimes it’s that hard to accept

that nothing that happens here, including death

is ever over, and that the absence of something or someone

doesn’t mean they’ve ceased to exist

like footprints that lead down to a river.

Because we all live the same beginningless beginning

that is the once and forever of this universe

even if it should call itself home occasionally like an eye,

we go on living and dying each other alone

like an extinct species always asking the time

when the moonlight burns like lime in a grave

and then, once more, absurdly never the same

riots of flying fish leap from every drop of rain

that remembers the passion of the wave

offering itself in the life of every moment

like a jewel thawing, or an icecap over the eye

or the opening of a brittle window

to be scoped out by the nightwind

that longs like a thief for the sea

to gather him up like one of its belongings.

But you can’t pour the universe out of the universe

where the whole is sustained by every part

anymore than you can empty the human heart

that is renewed by its own exhaustion like a tide.

Time is always prelude

and death has never known when

to take down its sail like a tree in the fall.

And because things are never the same twice

and the road back is not the road taken

the world and everyone in it

just as they are, have always been here.

Things don’t come and go

like migrating geese ascending southward out of a field,

or things fallen returning to their leaves

because there’s nowhere to come from

nowhere to go to

that isn’t now and here

as intimately far as it is impersonally near.

Ask almost anyone who they are

and they’ll look down a well in a mirage

to haul up their reflection on a wheel

and insist it’s real

when they ladle their face to their lips

like the moon on dark water.

Or they’ll tell you a story around an unending fire

where the shadows are always truer than the flames

and the most illuminating themes burn like stars without names.

Mind is space and there is

nowhere inside or outside of anything

that is closer or futher than anything else

because everything is mind as far as you can be.

So I can stand here in my lengthening shadow

like a long departure

turning into the wind like a sail or a sundial

as if I were the last of my species of eclipse

and life were merely the long, hard discipline

of unmastering the art

of saying hello to the living

and good-bye to the dead,

or turning the telescope around

and saying good-bye to the living,

hello to the dead as I please,

but I’d rather shed myself

like all these falling maps to anywhere

that once arrived like the fleets of the leaves like me

on the shores of this rootless tree

that doesn’t let go of things for its own survival

but lives in itself like a stranger come

to the opening gate of an endless arrival.

I let the birds come and go, the apples fall,

the stars build their webs in my crown,

and grow like a holy road I take as my own,

like geese passing overhead at night,

or the small birds that come to me like voices

a moment here then gone

who taught me that it’s always dawn

because there’s no end of the beginningless beginning

and it may be a green bough

or a dead branch

you hop up and down on like the hidden notes

of something you’re singing

on the rungs of these crazy snakes and ladders

that long like flesh and bone in the night

for things they can’t see anymore in the light,

or fish dying of thirst in a fathomless pond

or a fire putting itself out in its own eye

or someone dying and someone else asking why

and the whole of creation left alone at home

feeling it doesn’t belong under its own sky

like this Saturday morning rain in Perth

the day after your death

that falls like a loveletter too late upon the earth

or the harvest moon of a delinquent heart

above an untimely skeleton

that can’t decide whether its a tuning fork

or a witching wand

looking for answers like water

under every stone on the moon,

the way we cry for people we think are gone,

but green bough, dead branch, Luke, same song.

PATRICK WHITE

THE ONLY DIFFERENCE

THE ONLY DIFFERENCE

The only difference between a winner and a loser

is that the winner cries out loud in crowds

that trample on his pain

and the loser weeps alone at home in his room

like a faucet without a drain.

Two drips of the same hurricane.

So why put these distinctions on like handcuffs

and spend your life looking for a pin

to jimmy them loose,

or run around in a panic

trying to make bail

by pleading with loansharks

not to bite through your cage as you drown?

You may know the truths of hell religiously well,

but are you as well versed

in the lies of heaven, or is it with you

that one turns into the other

so all the lies come true

and it’s all just a big mess of demonic stew

you keep stirred up with your tongue

to keep from burning on the bottom?

Or are you like most people

who spend more time looking for a guide

than they do at where they’re going,

who think the colour of their eyes tints what they see,

who paint their windowpanes to improve the view

and abide like first stones

in their righteous mansions of glass?

If the angels jump from heaven

so the demons can rise from hell,

you would do well to lie in your grave like a threshold

that knows the way in

and the way out

instead of trying to deport the dead back

to a native way of living.

If you were to ask me, and you haven’t,

so I’ll presume,

you need to take a good bath in a hot mirror

and wash that face off

you keep trying to renew

like a virgin on the moon

every time you start to seek the spiritual.

Clarity isn’t an enlightened target

you can paint on the ass of a baboon

and there are no line-ups and limousines

when the truth is screened like a lighthouse

in an empty theatre

and the sound of one hand clapping

is definitely not applause.

You can walk out of the darkness

like a shadow into a blaze of noon

while your mind streams the credits of the last dream

you’ve left behind you like a life,

or you can hang out like flypaper at midnight

and catch a few stars on the main drag

as if every constellation were the logo

of a mystical consumer brand

blinged out like a shrine

to pimp and pope its radiance.

Either way you cut it, the way I see it,

win or lose, up or down,

thorns, horns, haloes, cosmic eggs

or the full moon itself

in the begging bowl of your crown,

you’re still drinking cool aid in Jonestown.

PATRICK WHITE