IF YOU WERE A THOUGHT AND I WERE AN EMOTION

IF YOU WERE A THOUGHT AND I WERE AN EMOTION

 

If you were a thought and I were an emotion

time would still be at cross-purposes with space

and we’d still be sitting here

dangling our bare feet like two kids

over the edge of the abyss

when we go fishing for stars

not really caring if we catch anything

as we throw them back in with our blessings.

You can taste the jewels the light’s been through

sometimes when you close your eyes

and the revealed and the revealing

are just the water and fish of a feeling

idling in the shadows and reeds of the mindstream.

There’s a way of being lost within yourself that’s starbound.

And there’s a way of being found

where people scatter flowers before you

all the way to a hole in the ground

you’re expected to fill like someone else’s shoes.

You can lie under a gravestone

like a man behind a desk with his name on it

who’s been practising for years

to lie very very still

in case he wakes the others up in the snakepit.

Or you can keep the music on

all through the long uneventful night

and feel things that have nothing to do with you

like stray bits of your neighbour’s dreams on the internet.

Or you can put a finger up to your lips and counsel silence.

Three approaches. Three gates. No difference.

Everyone enters the same garden

as if Eden were a cemetery in slow motion

but that old angel with the flaming sword at the gate

burnt out like a candle a long time ago

and the serpent’s a tour guide for fanatical purists

who can’t get out of the closets of hell

and the apple of knowledge

finally took a bite out of itself

and has been falling down crazy drunk

with the cranky wasps of autumn ever since.

Wonder’s the passive sister of interactive madness

and twice as alluring in her self-restraint

than Rasputin in a burlap sack in the river.

Wonder sails off the coasts of the clouds like the moon

and doesn’t lay a claim to what she discovers.

She can see and be seen

but she doesn’t put a name on it.

She doesn’t need to turn the leaf over

like an unopened loveletter

to know what the tree means

because it’s always been her lover.

So if you were a thought and I were an emotion

would you be the brainwave

that rides the night ocean

of my passion at the flood

or would you be into me

like water into mud

like insight into a ripening lamp

about to fall toward paradise again

to see what I’ve been missing?

If you were a thought and I were an emotion

and we were to hold hands like a bridge

on both sides of the mindstream

would the bridge flow as the water does

or would you think of the two of us

you were the more solid

and I was less real?

Looking upon me from all angles

like a sphere that fills the room

like a habitable planet

with a dead moon in its arms

its only daughter

all ashes and shadows and frozen water

and nowhere to bury her skull in the earth

tell me the truth.

If you were a thought and I were an emotion

if you were land and I were an ocean

because thoughts have legs

and feelings have fins

(or is it scales and feathers?)

if we could bring her back to life

like the weather

and mend her battered body

would it be better to think than feel?

Would the solid turn into the real?

Would she wake up like a koan

with the answer to cancer

and the sound of one hand clapping

high-five the lightning with thunderous compassion

until it rained on the moon?

Would she heal?

If you were a thought and I were an emotion

would all the petals of your loves me loves me nots

you scatter like thoughts on the wind

feel like one whole flower again

that blossoms in the heart

and roots in the brain?

Illusory cures for illusory diseases

would beauty be enough to bluff the pain?

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IF YOU WERE A THOUGHT AND I WERE AN EMOTION

IF YOU WERE A THOUGHT AND I WERE AN EMOTION

 

If you were a thought and I were an emotion

time would still be at cross-purposes with space

and we’d still be sitting here

dangling our bare feet like two kids

over the edge of the abyss

when we go fishing for stars

not really caring if we catch anything

as we throw them back in with our blessings.

You can taste the jewels the light’s been through

sometimes when you close your eyes

and the revealed and the revealing

are just the water and fish of a feeling

idling in the shadows and reeds of the mindstream.

There’s a way of being lost within yourself that’s starbound.

And there’s a way of being found

where people scatter flowers before you

all the way to a hole in the ground

you’re expected to fill like someone else’s shoes.

You can lie under a gravestone

like a man behind a desk with his name on it

who’s been practising for years

to lie very very still

in case he wakes the others up in the snakepit.

Or you can keep the music on

all through the long uneventful night

and feel things that have nothing to do with you

like stray bits of your neighbour’s dreams on the internet.

Or you can put a finger up to your lips and counsel silence.

Three approaches. Three gates. No difference.

Everyone enters the same garden

as if Eden were a cemetery in slow motion

but that old angel with the flaming sword at the gate

burnt out like a candle a long time ago

and the serpent’s a tour guide for fanatical purists

who can’t get out of the closets of hell

and the apple of knowledge

finally took a bite out of itself

and has been falling down crazy drunk

with the cranky wasps of autumn ever since.

Wonder’s the passive sister of interactive madness

and twice as alluring in her self-restraint

than Rasputin in a burlap sack in the river.

Wonder sails off the coasts of the clouds like the moon

and doesn’t lay a claim to what she discovers.

She can see and be seen

but she doesn’t put a name on it.

She doesn’t need to turn the leaf over

like an unopened loveletter

to know what the tree means

because it’s always been her lover.

So if you were a thought and I were an emotion

would you be the brainwave

that rides the night ocean

of my passion at the flood

or would you be into me

like water into mud

like insight into a ripening lamp

about to fall toward paradise again

to see what I’ve been missing?

If you were a thought and I were an emotion

and we were to hold hands like a bridge

on both sides of the mindstream

would the bridge flow as the water does

or would you think of the two of us

you were the more solid

and I was less real?

Looking upon me from all angles

like a sphere that fills the room

like a habitable planet

with a dead moon in its arms

its only daughter

all ashes and shadows and frozen water

and nowhere to bury her skull in the earth

tell me the truth.

If you were a thought and I were an emotion

if you were land and I were an ocean

because thoughts have legs

and feelings have fins

(or is it scales and feathers?)

if we could bring her back to life

like the weather

and mend her battered body

would it be better to think than feel?

Would the solid turn into the real?

Would she wake up like a koan

with the answer to cancer

and the sound of one hand clapping

high-five the lightning with thunderous compassion

until it rained on the moon?

Would she heal?

If you were a thought and I were an emotion

would all the petals of your loves me loves me nots

you scatter like thoughts on the wind

feel like one whole flower again

that blossoms in the heart

and roots in the brain?

Illusory cures for illusory diseases

would beauty be enough to bluff the pain?

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IF YOU REALIZE ME I'LL REALIZE YOU

IF YOU REALIZE ME I’LL REALIZE YOU

 

If you realize me I’ll realize you.

And maybe we could make something

come true for a while

we both could believe in

keeping in mind that space isn’t skin

and we’ve still got to pay the rent

on the metaphor we’re living in

like mystic honey in a killer-bees’ nest.

And I won’t try to heal you

if you don’t try to heal me.

If you don’t play the wounded muse

I won’t look for inspiration in your pain.

And worse than indifference

if you don’t reproach me for the chaos

that is the crude ore of my quest for stars

I won’t look upon your delusions with compassion.

If you don’t ask me to outlaw the clowns

of my traveling circus at the edge of town

if we were to get serious

about having some fun

I won’t show you where God is buried

without a headstone.

No river’s flowing the wrong way to the sea

we’re all going to make in time

mindstream after mindstream like waterclocks

with our tails in our mouths like serpents for eternity.

Madness is an eternal recurrence

with intense moments of lucidity

it scrapes out of the darkness like the stars

of an old passion that never went out.

So if you don’t think of me

as if I were insane

and you were not

I won’t hold you responsible

for the dream in which we are and are not

caught up in the life themes

of what we seem to each other

when we make one gate

from the crescents of the moon

there’s an infinite number of ways to walk through

without needing passwords for love

when we haven’t got any clothes on.

People turn to sand and water and clouds

when you try to grasp them.

When space tries to keep time on a short leash

traveling at the speed of light

the dog runs away from home

like a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest

and learns to eat at the backdoor of a neighbourly absolute

that doesn’t dispute what it’s learned to ignore.

An open hand that doesn’t expect anything

receives more than a fist that does

and it’s a weak human

that mistakes freedom for disobedience

and transformation as a betrayal

of the loyal chains that kept it all together.

So if you want peace between the constellations

like different houses of the mafia

blackhanding their contracts

like blood-sealed eclipses

to keep the body count low

and spin the public like a planet

knocked off its axis by a meteor strike

you’re tampering with the wrong species.

Cold consolation for the dinosaurs

but I’m the new hotshot mammal on the block

not the ashes of a truce I made with stolen fire.

I don’t ember long in the ruins of old extinctions.

My eyes aren’t creased like a fossil record

in the permanent press of time.

And who needs to squeeze diamonds

out of the darkness like stars

when we’re already shining for free?

So if you don’t turn our beginnings

into myths of origin

I won’t nail your saviours to a cross.

Today you suffer the win.

Tomorrow I suffer the loss.

But we can be two eyes in the same head

when we want to be

without arguing over

whose dream it’s going to be tonight.

Joy was already old when delight was a girl

but if you were to ask them their age

they would say

how old is a circle?

So if you were to agree that time is mortal

and eternity doesn’t fancy itself

anyone’s afterlife

we could both live free in the moment

where beginnings transcend their ends

like perfect flaws in the schools of perfection

that don’t know how to pass through the cracks

in their own reflection

without blaming the mirror.

We could fall through each other forever

toward paradise

parachute after parachute

and never candle our reserve in the perishing

like a daylily that’s fallen down drunk beside its grail

and given up the holy ghost on its own threshold.

I could see the extraordinary

in the most ordinary things of you

like a lipstick cartridge left on the kitchen table

ejected from a hunting rifle

like the gold bullet

I used to point at my head

like the lead of a base metal

until I was transformed by the red rose within

when you offered me your lips like painted petals

and I accepted the wound.

And I could summon the fireflies

from their fogbound valley like stars

after a storm

and ask them to tailor your earthly likeness

into a constellation

that would be the envy of all the zodiacs

sentient life forms anywhere

have ever held their fortunes up to like a mirror

martyred in a blaze of starmaps.

If you were moved by the courage it takes to be me

and I were in awe of the solitude

you had to maintain to stay free

we could be great heretics together

and fulfill ourselves by breaking each others’ rules

about not having any

and let the fools enlighten the Buddhas for a change

about how to make small talk

when you’re deeply deranged. 

You could be the one in the many

that didn’t return like a bad penny

and I could be the one

you picked up off the street for luck.

And way beyond the billboards for a better life

and the lies and the lies and the lies

that keep breaking down

into subatomic minutiae

like senate hearings

looking for the God-particle of the truth

they’re investigating for proof of their existence

we could create one of our own

like a night within a night

that belongs to strangers

alone with the Alone

whose shadows aren’t slaves of the light.

I could say your name

as simply and beautifully

as a unified field theory

laid out before me in bed like your body.

And we could bend space with our toes

like bed clothes

and the dark matter of the issue at hand

could lend a little gravity

to our electromagnetism

until we exploded primordially

into a climactic universe

too far gone to explain

why we had to go beatifically nuclear

to ground our pain in the joy of the curse

that keeps us demonically earthbound.

You could be my unholy treasure

and I could be your lost and found.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NO TIME NO SPACE NO MIND

NO TIME NO SPACE NO MIND

 

No time no space no mind.

A star falls.

A drop of water falls from a leaf.

Nothing’s diminished.

Nothing’s enhanced.

If you want to believe in something

believe in the silence

the stars dance to

and the trees when they’re trying

to grow like music.

How can the center

judge the circumference

of its own boundlessness?

Nothing’s enclosed.

Nothing’s set free.

Everything’s perfectly defined

by its lack of identity.

And yet here we are together

on planet earth

monadically living ourselves

as the embodiment of an intelligent species

trying to grasp its own mind

like the head of a poisonous snake.

But what’s the point of getting bit

by trying to take your thoughts by the tail

as they disappear down their blackholes

when you’ve already turned to stone

looking in the mirror

at the new hair-do

you’re sporting like the Medusa?

The snakepit fell into you.

And even when you have your tatoo done

by the fangs of the moon

to remind you of what you love

it’s still only as indelible as skin.

So many long agonizing hours

trying to figure things out

like a short thread in a labyrinth

or a long one in the Bayeux Tapestry.

And even when you put out to sea

like a disciplined sailor

on the theta waves of a guru

you’re following like a star

that’s shining in all directions at once

you’re still sitting in the corner with a dunce

wearing a sail for a hat

consulting a map to nowhere.

The world is in turmoil because we are.

The world is in pain because we are enslaved by ideas.

The world is impoverished because we have forgotten

how rich and generous it’s well within our means to be.

The world seems dark and hopeless

because we keep our eyes closed in the light

and open them at night like nocturnal flowers

mistaking the stars for bees.

We keep our mouths shut in the rain

and drown like fish in our own water.

Noah fills his mind like an ark

with two of every kind

and ends up selling real estate in Atlantis

with the morals of a praying mantis.

If you still think of yourself as a good person

wholesome as a homemade loaf of bread

cooling on a country windowsill

you’re not dying hard enough

to make your life credible

in the eyes of all you see perishing before you.

If you’re still running your constellations aground

like dolphins into the nets of your braille starmaps

that glow in the dark like dice and fireflies

then you might be surprised to learn

not just the truths

but the lies have their mystics too

and it’s dangerous when you listen to what they teach

and all you hear is you.

You can’t liberate your face from the mirror

or pick the moon’s reflection up

like a lily-pad from the water

or a stray dime by a telephone booth.

And eternity’s just a monstrosity of time.

But there are no chains of iron

no chains of gold to throw off

like umbilical cords that have been keeping you back

from being born in your own image.

Why perjure the witness of your own clarity

by trying to define who you are moment by moment

like the sea trying to predict its own weather?

You can’t distill the inspiration

from the expression like wine

anymore than you can kill time with space

or separate the mortal from the divine

like filth you can wash off with the stars.

You’re just falling like the rain into your own halos

and smearing rainbow lipstick on the blackhole

that seeks the light like you

but to different effect.

You want to feed on perfection.

You want to eat beauty and God and inorganic ideas.

You want to eat your paints like Van Gogh

so that you can become as they are

but they keep changing into someone else

you begrudgingly acknowledge is you.

And it’s impossible to know

what blackholes change into

or what they do with the light

they consume like krill

but my bet is

they don’t recognize themselves in the light

when the light’s so drastically deranged.

Both sides of the mirror distort space

when the moon’s estranged

by the water that reflects it.

Whales don’t listen to the prophets they swallow.

You stare into the infinite eyes

of the face behind everything

hoping to see your own

in a mirror that blossoms like water.

It shows you an orchard

you forgot to gather up into your arms

like a lost daughter that disowned you

for not seeing yourself in her.

It shows you what a failure you really are.

It shows you the flowers you want to see.

But no star.

No tree.

Nothing but the sad mystery

of a man by himself in a garden at moonrise

with eyes that are lonelier than an abandoned tv.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I DON'T KNOW HOW TO BE ANYONE ELSE

I DON’T KNOW HOW TO BE ANYONE ELSE

 

I don’t know how to be anyone else.

I confess my ignorance.

I am more possessed than possessing.

I’m a ghost haunted by humans.

I’m not some maggot of a blackhole

eating my way through space.

Between heaven and hell

I prefer the earth.

A little to the left of the salt.

People are more mammalian there.

A higher quality of laughter.

Better taste in the protocols of compassion.

A good place to hide out

when you’re tired of running

from the enhanced versions of yourself

that keep rolling out on the runway

for you to take a test flight in

without an ejection seat.

Who is there to share

the meaning of your life with

when even you can’t see through it like a glass darkly?

I’m fond of the light.

It’s the flower of clarity

but what could it mean to anyone else

that you are who you are?

They might love or abhor

their interpretation of you

but that’s a theme of theirs

not yours

from many lifetimes back

and it says more about them than you.

Every accusation is a confession.

But we’re like stars.

By the time we’re revealed

we’re somewhere else beyond the light.

And how could I explain all this darkness to anyone?

It’s an illusion that we know what our words mean

when they say us out loud

like a secret we meant to keep to ourselves.

And who’s to say what’s happening

beyond these event horizons

that keep losing you

like the road you were on

before it turned into this one?

Walk one road well

and you walk them all at the same time.

There’s no need to choose to be confused.

So I stick to my lonely homely mystic self

like a poster for a play

that got tired of waiting for an opening night

and tore itself down from the wall

like a bad review of yesterday

and went my own way without a script.

Or I could be seventeen again

on acid in San Francisco in nineteen sixty-six

and any minute I’m going to come down now

and discover my old life

like one long dark strange radiant trip

someone else took before me

and didn’t come back.

And I’m still waiting for a postcard

from the edge of nowhere

from someone I haven’t seen in a long time

and probably won’t ever again

though I hold him with affection in my mind

like a blossom that never let go.

And over the long forever

of this afterlife ever since

I’ve tried to forget what he saw

that made him disappear

but he was the only poet I ever met

whose suicide was sincere.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I DON'T KNOW HOW TO BE ANYONE ELSE

I DON’T KNOW HOW TO BE ANYONE ELSE

 

I don’t know how to be anyone else.

I confess my ignorance.

I am more possessed than possessing.

I’m a ghost haunted by humans.

I’m not some maggot of a blackhole

eating my way through space.

Between heaven and hell

I prefer the earth.

A little to the left of the salt.

People are more mammalian there.

A higher quality of laughter.

Better taste in the protocols of compassion.

A good place to hide out

when you’re tired of running

from the enhanced versions of yourself

that keep rolling out on the runway

for you to take a test flight in

without an ejection seat.

Who is there to share

the meaning of your life with

when even you can’t see through it like a glass darkly?

I’m fond of the light.

It’s the flower of clarity.

but what could it mean to anyone else

that you are who you are?

They might love or abhor

their interpretation of you

but that’s a theme of theirs

not yours

from many lifetimes back

and it says more about them than you.

Every accusation is a confession.

But we’re like stars.

By the time we’re revealed

we’re somewhere else beyond the light.

And how could I explain all this darkness to anyone?

It’s an illusion that we know what our words mean

when they say us out loud

like a secret we meant to keep to ourselves.

And who’s to say what’s happening

beyond these event horizons

that keep losing you

like the road you were on

before it turned into this one?

Walk one road well

and you walk them all at the same time.

There’s no need to choose to be confused.

So I stick to my lonely homely mystic self

like a poster for a play

that got tired of waiting for an opening night

and tore itself down from the wall

like a bad review of yesterday

and went my own way without a script.

Or I could be seventeen again

on acid in San Francisco in nineteen sixty-six

and any minute I’m going to come down now

and discover my old life

like one long dark strange radiant trip

someone else took before me

and didn’t come back.

And I’m still waiting for a postcard

from the edge of nowhere

from someone I haven’t seen in a long time

and probably won’t ever again

though I hold him with affection in my mind

like a blossom that never let go.

And over the long forever

of this afterlife ever since

I’ve tried to forget what he saw

that made him disappear

but he was the only poet I ever met

whose suicide was sincere.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTHING SADDER

NOTHING SADDER

 

Nothing sadder than the soul of a clown in spring

or an old man sitting on a park bench alone

like a garden gate someone left open for good.

And deep underground I can feel the roots of the flowers

waiting for news of the weather

so they can decide what to wear

and which colour goes with another.

And I can’t look at the white chalices of the morning glory

whatever it’s tangled up in like a junkie

without seeing some kind of grail-quest going on

and I always want to say

Don’t look for it before it’s gone

but delusion too is a way of getting on with things

and what have I ever gone looking for

that wasn’t just as beautifully foolish?

God for example.

Or enough light

in an ice-storm of a woman

to survive the night

like a wooly mammoth

though it lasts twenty-five thousand years.

I keep trying to carve chandeliers out of glaciers

but everything just ends up in tears on the sea-floor.

Or the wind wants to give the waves a haircut.

But as my brother would say

That’s ok too

and expand his black laughter like space

to include everything wise or foolish

that wants to take its place inside the theater.

Existence is an occasion I dress for like a human.

And one size fits all.

So I assume everything lives as I do

even inanimate things like rocks and bones

as if we were all modes of the same intelligence

that excites us with insight

when the light strikes the water

and we all begin with no proof of anything

except somehow we’re all here alone together

rising and falling like waves

on the great night sea of awareness

that cradles us in its arms

like the full moon between opposites

and shines down on everything alike

purring with ancient lullabies of reality

and says in a voice even children don’t fear

You can trust the universe completely.

Even when the babies fall down

like blossoms torn from the fruit.

Even when the wind gusts up

like a dervish of stars in your face

with the moon like a dagger between his teeth

and his blood like a savage rose

and says There’s nothing to affirm or refute

but you should try dancing

for a change of direction

and spins off like a galaxy into deep space.

An echo perches on the branch above me

like a bird from a distant valley

feathered by the shadows of death

and asks me if I know how to live

and I let the green bough in my heart answer

poem after poem like plum blossoms

trying to be serious

God may have had the first word

but the last word will be up to us.

 

PATRICK WHITE