I SPEND TOO MUCH TIME

I SPEND TOO MUCH TIME

 

I spend too much time indulging

the petty appetites

I’ve generated out of my despair.

I should eat more light.

I should care about something more

than the nothing that moves me now

toward the door

like a sleepwalker

in a palace of pleasures.

Cool bliss in unsustainable measures.

I let my worst habits get into me

like debts I owe to myself

for being me another day.

So even when I’m made of gold

like the better day behind me

my future wears a crown of clay.

And I loathe the way my ignorance

tries to wax wise about everything

like a blue moon in late October.

I’m a North American,

a wasp in a windfall of apples.

It’s hard to be born here and stay sober.

And other things: the way

I keep looking down on life

like a head higher than the stars

to remind myself how little I mean

in the great theme of being

to anyone with their eyes open

and how when I try to come clean

my lips part like the haemorraging rose

of the Red Sea

to let Moses pass

like a mountain that kept its word

like an avalanche.

I’m clinging like a song

to a dead branch

that’s witching the moon for water

way past the time

I should have gone south

and everything that used to blossom

is a tattered flag at half mast.

I don’t impugn the stars of my birth

for setting me adrift

like a message in a bottle,

Jonah in the belly of Leviathan,

when everyone’s marooned from the first

like an anchor that fell like a hard tear

from the eyelet of a moonboat,

but I am erosively disturbed

by the disloyalty of my oxymorons

to anything approximating the truth

when I summon the ghosts

that disciplined the futility of my youth

to be true to my own hopelessness

like all these shipwrecks

along my contentious coasts.

And I don’t know why

whenever I try to get along with myself

like aloes on burnt skin

it feels more like a pact with a hypocrite,

fire patching my sails

as I tact into the wind

like the wounded fluke

of an unresponsive rudder

that’s sounding like Moby Dick.

I wanted to swim naked with the mermaids

in the pools of their impossible longings

like moonlight in aging mirrors

but I drowned in their tears

when my whole life flashed before me

like a baleful absurdity

that had perpetrated me on nothing

like a voice in an empty lifeboat

calling out through the fog

for the lost black box of its own echo

to second-guess what brought me down

like the snapping turtle that got Icarus.

Since then I look at my own face in the mirror

like a mirage I’m tired of weeding

and my identity hangs

on the horns of a dilemma

in a Minoan labyrinth

that insists its my fingerprint

even as I am uplifted like a constellation

from the scene of the crime

to do my time in isolation

with the whole of creation on death row

staring into the snake-eyes of a dicey reprieve.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOUR OWN LIFE IS THE WAY

YOUR OWN LIFE IS THE WAY

 

Your own life is the way

whether it charm itself through the woods

like a small snail

or kick the stars up like dust

along the Road of Ghosts

or hang back like the sea

enduring its own weather

waiting for the next loveletter

to arrive like a sail

over the event horizons

of so much unopened junkmail.

But you’re a long way off

and deeper in darkness

than you realize

if you’re using a searchlight

to look for a star.

There’s no reason

to keep showing up

at the wrong address

like a bad definition

of who you are.

You go looking

for the meaning of things

as if meaning were precious and rare,

baby teeth under a pillow

or lost wedding rings

through the noses

of unmarried skulls.

You chase your own tides

back out to sea

and then go ask the waves

trembling in their tidal pools

like children you’ve frightened

about the meaning of water.

But when they tell you

your mouth hangs open

like a grail in the hand of a drunk

who’s sure she just drank poison.

You want to pry

the petals of the flowers open

before they’re ready to bloom

as if you were unwrapping your presents early

although nothing’s been hidden from you,

cloaked, eclipsed, or covered by a lie.

You paint the window you sit at

all the colours of a parrot

to enhance the clarity

of your longing for stars,

or scare yourself to death

with things you can see in the night

like someone who’s been left behind

like a key under your own doormat.

The return journey goes faster than the first

as you progress backwards

looping like a planet 

through all the stations of your youth

into the second innocence of awareness

knowing how deeply the soul

can be soiled by the truth

of things as they are

and how, sometimes

to the baffled astonishment of the purists

it takes a little dirt to wash it off;

which is to say, you’re human.

Not one reason for everything.

You keep ploughing the same broken record

like a season stuck in a groove

never leaving anything long enough to itself

to germinate and bloom.

Even when the moon

walks on your waters

tapping its white cane

at the curb of every wave

to show you how to master

your own blindness

with your own light in the darkness

of why you won’t open your eyes and look,

you cover your face with your hands like a book

you fell asleep reading.

But you can’t wake up from a dream

you’re not having.

You can’t look into life

like a window from the outside

or arrange your eyes

like lenses in a telescope

to view things at arms length.

I know how hard

you’ve been looking for enlightenment

and the agony of your disappointment

that you can’t pull the sword from the stone

or the apple from the seed like autumn.

You account the waste

of time, energy, aspiration,

and want to burn the whole orchard down

like a bride widowed in her wedding gown.

But the fire you set

like a last blossom on a dead branch

goes out like a torch in your own reflection

and you’re lost in the woods at night

without a road going in any direction.

You thought you’d hang around

with the constellations,

but there you are

whenever you kick the earth

like a stool away from your feet

dangling like a streetlamp in space

with only go slow and stop

the three expressions

that ever cross your face

like birds hoping they’re heading south.

And I don’t want to sound mean or unkind,

or suggest that I know

how stars taste to the blind,

or that you’re not a fury of insight,

a blazing chandelier, a broken mirror,

but when you cry

you launch your tears like submarines

into your own paranoid depths

to listen to what the others

are saying about you now

and you deploy your emotions like spies

to keep an eye on the opening night projections

you’re trying to groom into a movie

where everything comes true

all at once

in a stunning climax of you

holding out like a bridge at the fall of Rome.

Let go. Give up. Let the barbarians across

that you’ve abused

with the severity

of your savage passions for years.

Abandon the walls

you’ve beaded like a rosary of skulls

around your imperial frontiers.

How can the frowning jewels

of a dying civilization

dragging itself by the heels

like a corpse through the night

compare with the more imperfectible delights

of leaving the mindstream to its own devices

as if it were wise enough all alone

to make its own circuitous way home

like blood returning to the heart

while we, who don’t know the answers,

throw our swords back into the lake

as if we were surrendering to water.

We could feed the demons

of our startling immensities

all those doves you sent out looking for land

that came back like cornerstones of quicksand.

We could stop trying to square the circle

like college drop outs

trying to corner the rain

and forgo the blinding lucidity

of what we think we know

for the darker esprit

of being swept far out to sea

like two castles effaced by the undertow

of an abyss even the light can’t cross.

We could lower our bridges

and open our gates

and liberate our prisons

as if we were making love

like two more bad little reasons to live.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOUR OWN LIFE IS THE WAY

YOUR OWN LIFE IS THE WAY

 

Your own life is the way

whether it charm itself through the woods

like a small snail

or kick the stars up like dust

along the Road of Ghosts

or hang back like the sea

enduring its own weather

waiting for the next loveletter

to arrive like a sail

over the event horizons

of so much unopened junkmail.

But you’re a long way off

and deeper in darkness

than you realize

if you’re using a searchlight

to look for a star.

There’s no reason

to keep showing up

at the wrong address

like a bad definition

of who you are.

You go looking

for the meaning of things

as if meaning were precious and rare,

baby teeth under a pillow

or lost wedding rings

through the noses

of unmarried skulls.

You chase your own tides

back out to sea

and then go ask the waves

trembling in their tidal pools

like children you’ve frightened

about the meaning of water.

But when they tell you

your mouth hangs open

like a grail in the hand of a drunk

who’s sure she just drank poison.

You want to pry

the petals of the flowers open

before they’re ready to bloom

as if you were unwrapping your presents early

although nothing’s been hidden from you,

cloaked, eclipsed, or covered by a lie.

You paint the window you sit at

all the colours of a parrot

to enhance the clarity

of your longing for stars,

or scare yourself to death

with things you can see in the night

like someone who’s been left behind

like a key under your own doormat.

The return journey goes faster than the first

as you progress backwards

looping like a planet 

through all the stations of your youth

into the second innocence of awareness

knowing how deeply the soul

can be soiled by the truth

of things as they are

and how, sometimes

to the baffled astonishment of the purists

it takes a little dirt to wash it off;

which is to say, you’re human.

Not one reason for everything.

You keep ploughing the same broken record

like a season stuck in a groove

never leaving anything long enough to itself

to germinate and bloom.

Even when the moon

walks on your waters

tapping its white cane

at the curb of every wave

to show you how to master

your own blindness

with your own light in the darkness

of why you won’t open your eyes and look,

you cover your face with your hands like a book

you fell asleep reading.

But you can’t wake up from a dream

you’re not having.

You can’t look into life

like a window from the outside

or arrange your eyes

like lenses in a telescope

to view things at arms length.

I know how hard

you’ve been looking for enlightenment

and the agony of your disappointment

that you can’t pull the sword from the stone

or the apple from the seed like autumn.

You account the waste

of time, energy, aspiration,

and want to burn the whole orchard down

like a bride widowed in her wedding gown.

But the fire you set

like a last blossom on a dead branch

goes out like a torch in your own reflection

and you’re lost in the woods at night

without a road going in any direction.

You thought you’d hang around

with the constellations,

but there you are

whenever you kick the earth

like a stool away from your feet

dangling like a streetlamp in space

with only go slow and stop

the three expressions

that ever cross your face

like birds hoping they’re heading south.

And I don’t want to sound mean or unkind,

or suggest that I know

how stars taste to the blind,

or that you’re not a fury of insight,

a blazing chandelier, a broken mirror,

but when you cry

you launch your tears like submarines

into your own paranoid depths

to listen to what the others

are saying about you now

and you deploy your emotions like spies

to keep an eye on the opening night projections

you’re trying to groom into a movie

where everything comes true

all at once

in a stunning climax of you

holding out like a bridge at the fall of Rome.

Let go. Give up. Let the barbarians across

that you’ve abused

with the severity

of your savage passions for years.

Abandon the walls

you’ve beaded like a rosary of skulls

around your imperial frontiers.

How can the frowning jewels

of a dying civilization

dragging itself by the heels

like a corpse through the night

compare with the more imperfectible delights

of leaving the mindstream to its own devices

as if it were wise enough all alone

to make its own circuitous way home

like blood returning to the heart

while we, who don’t know the answers,

throw our swords back into the lake

as if we were surrendering to water.

We could feed the demons

of our startling immensities

all those doves you sent out looking for land

that came back like cornerstones of quicksand.

We could stop trying to square the circle

like college drop outs

trying to corner the rain

and forgo the blinding lucidity

of what we think we know

for the darker esprit

of being swept far out to sea

like two castles effaced by the undertow

of an abyss even the light can’t cross.

We could lower our bridges

and open our gates

and liberate our prisons

as if we were making love

like two more bad little reasons to live.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NO REASON WHY I SHOULDN'T LEAVE

NO REASON WHY I SHOULDN’T LEAVE

 

No reason why I shouldn’t leave

is not as good as a reason to stay

but the first has its eye open

while the other is shut.

So when I find myself

at a fork in the road

I don’t go either way

but pick it up like a witching stick,

and go off in directions of my own

trembling all the way

like water in a stone.

It can be deeply restorative sometimes

to be alone and lost

as you walk through the front door

of your original homelessness,

remembering where you hid the key.

Your shadow stops following you like the north star

of the threshold you left behind,

unhinges itself like the pivot

of the prosthetic arm

of the disabled clock

you’ve been all these years

and walks beside you like a bridge

to anywhere you want to go.

You can feel what a star feels

when it looks down in envy

at the fireflies all over the map

wondering if their disobedience

to the higher forms of order

might not be the fulfillment

of an enlightened discipline

that radiates out of its own

spontaneous lucidity

free of meaning anything

to whatever it casts its light upon

than the sheer delight of shining.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ADDICTION IS LIKE LUST

ADDICTION IS LIKE LUST

 

Addiction is like lust

is like a bank is like a drug

is like a life of your own

you’ve got to keep on taking

because the symptoms of withdrawal

are more catastrophic

than the risks of overdosing.

And we’re all hooked on the planet

like a big rock we’re trying to break down

like blasting caps in a crystal skull

we found buried in the light

like the motherlode of all bad needles.

We want to do five rocks tonight

and save three for tomorrow

we can sell in the morning

to begin again

the beginningless end of everything.

And don’t say it’s

just a lack of conviction

because the truth of the matter is

we’re fanatically addicted to addiction.

Addiction is what gives our lives

mass and gravity;

if it weren’t for addiction

we wouldn’t know which end is up

we wouldn’t be able to point ourselves out at night

to the blind child within us

like the trackmarks

of a new constellation

shining out for everyone to see

our likeness in a braille of blackholes.

And it doesn’t really matter

what you’re addicted to,

money, art, sex, power, cruelty,

your own abject licentiousness

born of being bored with death,

religion, enlightenment,

the desparate goodness of everything,

the mystic exotica of your own mind

dogpaddling in the abyss

with nebulae and jellyfish,

or even deeper than Freud, the void

that swallows the mind whole;

addiction is the dream that wakes you up

like the lips of a black rose

on the forehead of the moon

just as your skull is going into full eclipse.

Addiction is an art. Is a discipline

that would shrink the rigour of armies

by contrast with the demonic ferocity

of its artificial will to live on death

as if the next door you open like an eyelid

were already the coffin of your last breath.

Addiction doesn’t drink

from the sacred wells

on the holy mountainsides

voicing their prophecies like pythons.

Addiction looks for muses

like dangerous night-mirages

in a desert of inspiration

the wind blows away

like hydrogen ghosts

in a graveyard of stars.

Addiction drinks its own tears

like small drops of glass

it’s purified

from a shoreless sea of quicksand

where every grain

is the tiny cornerstone

of a pearl of a world

that couldn’t stand up on its own.

Addiction is a mode of devotion,

a faithful tide

in the unfaithful ocean

of everything that people feel they’re missing

when they’re washed up on the moon

like a lifeboat with no one to save.

Addiction is a thirsty fish

trying to breathe stars

through the gills of it shadows

like light through the nets of its scars

without getting caught.

You might be addicted

to your own reflection

like a bird to the eyes

of an undulant snake

making you dance like a flute

to your own music,

but it’s as impossible

to be addicted to who your are

as it is for water to drown a wax museum

because addiction is born

in the empty mangers

of who you are not

and sustains itself like solitude

on nothing.

(Black angels like the white

prefer the light to solid food.)

Addiction is the rush of the Second Coming

trying to save enough kick

to sprint to the finish line

past the first Apocalypse

on anabolic steroids

even when it knows the race is fixed

by the last flag of blood in the fit

to fly at half-mast

even before you’ve made an end of it.

Addiction shoots time

like a mirror 

in a dealer’s bathroom

that’s just washed off your face

like a fingerpint on space

that doesn’t belong to anyone

whose last known address

was a loveletter

returned to the sender

like a threshold of homeless snakes.

For those who are falling

addiction blossoms like a parachute

that inflates time into eternity

so that every moment sways Icarus

at the first toke 

like a club-footed pendulum

dancing with chandelier Cinderellas

who never die like candles

at the stroke of midnight

for flying too close to the light.

And for those who are rising

like erections from the dead

getting up from the wounded eras

of the afterlives they’ve spent

trying to make brides of their hospital beds,

addiction is the honeymoon suite

that unveils the princess of the mist

like the seven colours of a rainbow

through the prism of Niagra Falls

just before you go over

and down your own throat

like a tiny barrel of Viagra

you hope will keep you afloat

long enough to thread the needle

like the eye of one more salmon run

before you die.

When chaos denudes reverence

and discloses the pillars of our insitutions

are stacked like poker chips

in an earthquake

without rebar;

when the cornerstones

of our spiritual foundations,

the Himalyas of our own imaginations

pushed up like a mountain

by the rutting of continents

into two hands in prayer

cruelly baptized in the tears of things

that run down their cheeks like rivers,

are shaken into dust on an old book

that once looked into the darkness of the truth

with a lantern of lies,

and you look back down the long road

you’ve just walked

and you see nothing but roadkill,

and your own children among them,

and even the bones we put in the dirt

to rise again like heavenly bread

and the ashes we give back to the sky

like the loneliest of clouds, a bird

that hasn’t learned to fly

poured out of its urn

like smoke from a factory chimney,

and no one knows how to live

or die anymore

or what for,

addiction sucuumbs to itself

and becomes the ligature of the world,

the one-stringed guitar

it thumbs like a spinal cord

to keep the dance going

and the one-eyed wine

it serves to the two-eyed stranger

who stopped to ask for directions,

flowing.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When everything in life is blooming

I fear the terrible curse

implicit in Basho’s haiku:

for those who say

they have no time for children

there are no flowers.