NOT MYSELF AND NOT OTHERWISE

Not myself and not otherwise

I endure this discipline of emptiness

into the black hole singularities of my heartfelt extremes.

Rimbaud may have called out for

a rational dissociation of the sensibilities

but that’s just a Maenadic rerun

of an orthodox Orphic dismemberment.

Anti-self on the backside of the cross

asking us all to die

like an alibi

to forgive its sins.

And there are stone calendars

in the Ye Olde Cemetery

who’ve realized like Mayans

since they died out

that we all start raising the dead

the moment life begins.

The star of Isis through the veils of the willows

that lifted like rain.

The face of the Queen of Heaven

stapling posters of the missing

on telephone poles all over town

looking for her lost lover’s body parts

in the Cubist deserts of the Jack of Hearts.

Post-modern neo-deconstructionism.

But ask any asteroid or dinosaur

any hitch-hiker or tractor trailer

or the hadron particle accelerator

you’ve got to bring things together

before you can make a collision

that will tear them apart.

Union individuates.

Like koans and yokes and handcuffs

the oxymorons of the future

will be enslaved

by their reciprocal attempts

to escape the chain-gangs

of their tyrannical freedom.

Enlightened criminals.

The moon leaves out a saucer of milk

for a stray cat

wandering among the vandalized graves

like a leftover from Halloween.

The darkness is human and cruel.

The unliving molest the dead.

The air is charged with a significance

that doesn’t mean anything

though it expects to be fully understood.

There’s nothing very happy about the sin

of taking an approach toward life

as if it were a curse

you felt compelled to be grateful for.

There’s a white styrofoam cup

bobbing in the reflection of the moon on the Tay River

as if it were trying to raise some carbonized elixir

up to its cracked and dessicated lips.

Hell has its grails too.

Its river Styx.

Its next eclipse.

I look at the brick chimney

of the Old Brown Shoe Factory

and the smokeless urn

of its towering shadow

reflected upside down in the water

and I feel like the ghost of a nightwatchman

still making the rounds.

The butterflies of early nineteenth century industrial Manchester

adapted to the soot that left

the patina of an eclipse on the trunks of the trees

and on the souls of men and women

like the mascara of despair.

Taking evolution to heart

I’ve tried to evolve in the very same way

so that my species can survive me.

One man’s furnace

is another man’s chrysalis.

All the loveletters to the earth that I used to write

and burned on the nightshift

are scattered on the wind

like the ashes of black butterflies

and there’s no honey in the hive

of a bitter urn.

The song birds are all writing elegies

to make a big hit

with the turkey-vultures and the crows.

And a poet no more needs an audience

than roadkill needs an undertaker.

I’ve adapted to the way things are

but the night is a lot dirtier

and I’m further from the stars

than I used to be.

PATRICK WHITE

IF A BRAIN CELL

If a brain cell went looking for its mind

what do you think it would find?

Itself as it were transformed

like the birds in Ibn Attar’s poem?

The same I by which I am God

is the I by which God is me

to pun a little on a Christian mystic?

Would there be a grail

a fountain

a lifting of the veils?

Would I see me as I am

whole and sweet and radiantly enlightened

or just another victim

of P.T. Barnum’s dictum

that no man ever went broke

underestimating human intelligence?

Oudeis aneile peplon.

No one has lifted my veils.

So says Isis the Queen of Heaven.

But maybe the subtlety of it is

no one can

as long as there’s any I am

left about them.

Maybe there’s just a seeing.

No seer.

No seen.

What would that mean?

Spiritual optics aren’t Manichean?

Pure awareness?

But what could taint it in the first place?

We don’t think of the mirror as ugly

because it reflects an ugly face.

And this hall of mirrors goes on forever

like M theory in hyperspace.

Percussive membranes

and resonant strings

jamming with the celestial spheres

when physics turns to jazz

to express the multiverse

like Mingus playing Mozart.

If a brain cell went looking for its mind

what do you think it would find?

A lot of brain cells like it

up in over their head?

Like the Zen master said

looking for your mind with your mind

is like looking for your flashlight

with your flashlight.

It’s right where it’s always been.

The flower is red.

The grass is green.

Or maybe we’re all just watching shadows

on a cave wall

sitting with our backs to a fire

people are passing in front of

we mistake for the whole of reality

while there’s a fully enlightened mindscape outside

we conceive of as madness

as Plato wrote

should anyone care enough

for the future of human awareness

to mention it.

No news is good news

for those who are indebted to it.

Maybe we’re just tiny pieces of a bigger puzzle

and every ant heap

and beehive of our society

is just the way we muzzle ourselves

to keep from stinging each other to death.

Or maybe society’s just the big stone

we put on the chest of the living

as well as the dead

to keep them from rising again?

Why must evil not only be done

but be seen to be done

more often than good?

Why do we treat uranium

with more respect

than we do oxygen?

Is apocalypse more photogenic

or death less camera-shy

than the Big Bang

at the beginning of things?

If a brain cell went looking for its mind

what do you think it would find?

Fourteen hundred and seventy-five c.c.s

of neo-cortical laminations

etched like a Somalian famine

into the parched faces of the good earth

where the Garden of Eden

has turned into a black market

as a sure sign of an advanced intelligence?

Three and a half pounds of starmud

left here like a Martian cowpie

when the cow jumped over the moon

to graze like methane on the ozone?

One half the world is grass.

The other half are grazers.

Control eating and you control the world.

Withdraw the food from a child’s mouth

like foreign aid

saving thirty pieces of silver

and hope that her blood and flesh

turn into the bread and wine

of the bleeding heart that’s sent to save her.

Martyrs are a dime a dozen these days.

And messiahs come and go

like the internecine factions of a holy war.

If a brain cell went looking for its mind

what do you think it would find?

A secret stash of C-four

inside the skull

wired like a nervous system

to the occipital wavelength of a cosmic detonator

attached at the waist of a judas-goat

waiting to blow the ideological roof

off a school house learning to read

the writing on the wall

as a sure sign from God

that when he embraced

an intelligent design to the universe

in the form of a human

he embraced it

like a terrorist embraces someone

armed to the teeth by the same religion.

Who could have guessed

an opposable thumb

would one day be replaced by a trigger?

You figure?

If a brain cell went looking for its mind

what do you think it would find?

Chaos in bed with the Cosmos

like Venus and Mars

making a cuckold

of high technology

with a bad limp

and horns on its head?

The Taj Mahal or Hitler’s Bunker?

Though we prize it to death

what if consciousness

is of no value whatsoever?

Without purpose or meaning or worth

anywhere in the multiverse?

Merely the slurry and foam and froth

of a creative process it plays

little or no part in

except as something that needs to be disposed of.

Something is happening here Mr. Jones.

But you don’t know what it is do you?

A shoreless thought wave

trying to break into light

on the coast of its unending homelessness.

A bad dream that kept space awake

the night before the Big Bang

said it was time to rise and shine.

If a brain cell went looking for its mind

what do you think it would find?

The rock that struck Goliath in the head?

Or the black meteorite they kiss at the Kaaba?

The philosopher’s stone

or the Zen asteroids of the Buddhists?

Maybe something heretofore unknown

so intimately precious

and immanently radiant

it eclipses its own seeing

in the blaze of its being.

Or a realm of dark boundless hyperspace

so sensorially incomprehensible

we don’t realize

that with every blink of our eyes

with every breath we take

and let go of

with every thought

with every gust of feeling

we’re making waves in spatial membranes

like fireflies caught in the curtains of insight.

Cosmic eggs that break out of their shells

like atoms and eagles

and expand their wingspan into new worlds

like the brainstorm of bubbles

that follows the flash of lightning

that sets them free to be what they want.

It’s amazing what you can lose along the way

in the ardent pursuit of something else.

Your mind for example

until you begin to suspect

that it’s your seeking

that lost touch with it in the first place

and all you’ve done since you set out

to find it

is ramble on

like a long unanswered letter home.

So much scar tissue

for such a little wound.

Maybe there’s something worse

than not being blessed or cursed with a mind

that isn’t smooth or rough

sweet or sour

light or dark

loud or silent

big or small

and resembles nothing so much

as nothing at all.

Even to be a puppet

sitting on the lap

of an unvoiced intelligence

speaking through us

to a nameless audience

that hangs on every echo

as if they’d said it in the first place

might be better than posing a riddle

that baffles the Sphinx

with the way time thinks about things

like a human with stars in its eyes

that even the most bitter tears can’t wash out

nor all the facts in the world

cast doubt upon.

Maybe we’re just a shadow of space

with no place in the scheme of things

try how we may to deceive our wavelengths

they’re the warp and the woof of the weave

and not the stray threads

of our unravelling bloodlines.

Maybe the pointlessness of our existence

means there’s no capital at the beginning

so no one can pretend

that where they started from

and where they wound up

isn’t the same open-ended theme of life

that can’t be wounded at the beginning

and doesn’t need to be mended at the end.

Maybe the absurdity of believing in nothing

is the creative opportunity of a lifetime.

Maybe one day Sisyphus

just rolls his rock up over the hill

because there’s nothing predictable about cosmic laws

and the ongoing success of his happy descent is effortless

and worth so much more in the endless effect

of finding himself free of his drudgery

than the cause would have been

if it were not lost upon him

from the boundless beginning.

Maybe longing and seeking

the enlightened fragrances

of flowers and stars

blooming in the moonless night wood

is the way life seduces us deeper

into the darkness of being

the only living witness of our solitude.

PATRICK WHITE

CHEWING ON MEMORIES LIKE BROKEN MIRRORS IN HER SLEEP

Chewing on memories like broken mirrors in her sleep

tears of blood run from her eyes.

She doesn’t know I’m watching

but I’ve got windows everywhere.

But for her

just for her

because nobody else cares

third eye satellites with unlimited airspace

in her choice of skies to match her eyes.

A haemorrhage of sunsets.

Fly little bird fly

as if you weren’t the shattered sparrow

God took his eye off

when you fell.

Sometimes the mystic oversights

have more to say

about the great revelations of the world

than all the burning bushes in the valley of Tuwa.

Rumours and news.

Fly little bird fly.

Be an apostate waterbird

and let your skull skip out over the lake

like the moon through a glass house

that’s been asking for it for years.

There must be stars

that haven’t bloomed yet

somewhere in the corner of a leftover garden

that no one’s trampled on

like moon rocks

on a firewalk with a spoon

that hisses like the head of a viper

boiling with venom

at the tip of the tongue of a Zippo lighter.

Fly little bird fly

into a state of grace

that isn’t tainted by your experience

of the taste of humanity

that threw you like bad meat

down your own wishing well.

How they pried your innocence out of you

like a flower before it was ready to open

like a keepsake from a locket

your mother gave to you on her death bed

like a silver bullet that would keep you safe

from the grave robbers

the moment you used it on yourself.

Fly little bird fly.

I don’t know why

people attach more of an emergency

to the exit

than they do to the entrance

but I guess you’d have to ask a junkie about that

who’s used to coming in through the back door

with a ticket to ride

that’s better than a forged passport

to Disneyland

after you’ve done business with the Pentagon.

Fly little bird fly.

Don’t lose your nerve for enlightenment.

There’s the Bodhi tree.

There’s Venus in the dawn.

And there’s all this emptiness.

Isn’t it sweeter

than a hot fix

once you’ve gone beyond

the last judgment between right and wrong

like the pick up sticks of the I Ching

into the nirvanic bliss

of discovering nothing

was your best guess after all?

Fly little bird fly.

Disappear into your own eyes

like a candle

that’s stopped sticking its tongue out at the darkness

looking for a new place to hit.

Fly little bird fly

as if you weren’t tarred and feathered like Icarus.

And may the sun that shines at midnight

find you a lot more approachable

than apple blossoms

scattered like ashes on the wind

or fireflies that can’t hold their fixed positions

like the stars.

O it’s so anatomically true

that life on earth hurts

especially when you’ve fallen

out of love with love

like a baby out of the nest of a lullaby.

Down will come baby

shaman and all.

I see your bruised body on the bed

like the embryo of some past miscarriage

that taught you how flesh

can grieve for its own death

while it’s still alive.

I see the black haloes.

I see the bright horns.

I see the butterfly feelers

that have burnt out

like the short-lived filaments

of your average light bulb

and the place where you were anointed

with holy oil that hissed.

And it’s hard to miss where the apple sat

when William Burroughs

shot you through the head

pretending he was William Tel

like your crackhead boyfriend did last night.

Luckily he missed your heart.

He should have hired a firing squad

instead of relying on a sniper.

You don’t send a single viper

to do the job

of the whole snakepit

when you take out a contract

on anything as elusive as that.

I’ve made the bed

and you can lie in it alone

for as long as you want.

I’ll keep watch over you

like a mongoose or a lighthouse

over a bird that was stared to stone by snakes

and I won’t have anything to expiate

if I see their shadows

sliding hate mail under the door.

Fly little bird fly.

No more skies that lie like windows

about what you’re going through.

No more pretending

those bruises on your arm

are rare orchids of jungle love.

When you went to sleep

tangled up in the powerlines

you couldn’t teach to dance to your flute

and the rhythm of your body

like bullwhips

you might have felt

like a broken kite on a funeral pyre

but if my magic still works

by the time you wake up

I’ll make sure

you open your eyes like a phoenix.

So fly little bird fly.

The world won’t heal while you sleep.

Your lover won’t have a change of heart.

He broke you like a chandelier

he threw down the road

in a drunken rage

on a Friday night

like a bottle of beer.

One solitude denies another theirs.

Lovers take each other hostage.

The rest is the Stockholm syndrome.

One fanatic.

One addict.

It looks like devotion

It looks like a life raft on the sea of love

but the ocean’s gone rabid and mad.

Just look at the way it foams at the mouth.

Things are bad.

Fly little bird fly.

You’re not caught in the chimney

with no way out.

You’re the genie of the lamp.

You’re the one that tunes the power lines

that are humming along with you

like Mozart with a sparrow.

You’re the silence

that times the rhythm of the music.

You’re the tuning fork

not the lightning rod

of a wanna be god

in a pick-up truck

who keeps you around

to beat on like a false idol

who shalt not come before him.

Stop pecking at the crumbs of your dreams

like the leftovers of a garden

that used to be secret

That’s no way to get out of a labyrinth

when you’ve got wings.

So fly little bird fly.

Disappear into the depths of a starmap

that breaks into flames as you approach

the creative intensities of your own shining

like sumac in the fall.

Here’s the dead branch.

Here’s the green one.

You be the moon.

You be the blossom.

You be the firefly.

You be the hidden night bird

with the faraway call

that doesn’t make the distinction at all

because you’re too far gone to tell

by any feature of the light

you can often see things deeper

in a black mirror

than you can in a white.

PATRICK WHITE

I’M NAILED IN SPACE

I’m nailed in space by counteracting forces. Paralysis. Dismemberment. A coincidence of oxymoronic circumstances. I know I’m being killed because I took my freedom as my birthright. I didn’t stoop to earn what was already mine. But right now my progressive liberal idealistic humanism has been trivialized by the gigantism of the sacrifice. And I’m tired of jumping out of planes and precipices without knowing whether I’ve got feathers or a parachute to back me up. Freefall. Racing Icarus to the bottom. They can bury my body parts in different parts of the kingdom as far as I’m concerned. I don’t even want to write. Any muse that gives me the eye I look at with resentment. I’m twisted by the crazy wisdom of a creative tantrum that overwhelms me like an electrical storm that abuses me more like a tv antenna than a lightning rod. Roses of blood on the vines of the razorwire. The great escape. My life is a joke that keeps me waiting for the punch line. But you mustn’t say that or someone will get the wrong impression and smell blood in the water. I’ve got to remember not to thrash around too much emotionally. I’ve got to stay as cool as the eye of a hurricane. I’ve got to put a bright happy face on things like a brand new reflection in a second hand mirror. Can’t show up in the morning of a new creation every day like the smear of a morning snail in the dawn. Sticky play dough covered in the decaying detritus of an unkempt garden. Try to act like a whole planet even when you’re living on the street among the asteroids.

No exit. No starmap. No affable demon with a suggestive way out. Maybe if I put shoe polish on my feet they’ll look like shoes. And I can tie knots in my snapped nerves and use them for laces. Or fishing lines with a live swan for a lure. Why am I writing this? Who is it to? What’s the good of sending an s.o.s. out to Atlantis. Or Mu? Or Pangea? I’m torn like a continent into different species of the same unzippered gene. Giant ground sloths and and proto-wolves already hunting in packs like killer whales. I keep writing loveletters in distress to extraterrestrial life forms but they read as if they drew for inspiration from the Burgess Shale. I have been spiritually disfigured by love and poetry. I’ve got three third eyes and an oversized windsock for a heart with a hole in it. I’ve been ordained a sacred weathervane. And the forecast for today? Crash and burn.

All my life I’ve known the humiliations of the destitute. The anguish of the caring mother in the kitchen trying to crack the koan of what there is to eat. Cosmic eggs and sacrificial meat. The judas-goats of piety. The void gnashes its teeth. The worthless father enraged by the drunken excruciations of ego and self-pity he’s going through by himself alone in the bitter bedroom. Squalls of ratty children with cold sores and ringworm the size of craters and lava flows you’d only expect to see on the moon. Dead seas and sunspots. Blasting caps and solar flares ready to go off like the Big Bang if the universe slight so much as a single atom of their air space. No one looks up when you fall from grace. And you don’t know why until a soliciting Sunday school teacher tells you you jumped. And if the Holy Ghost is within you even poverty shines and this isn’t a dump where you can’t flush the toilet. It’s a shrine. Point is. Poverty isn’t an economic condition that’s a sign of the times and the corruption of the rich who will always be with us. In the eyes of the Lord and his angelic hordes of social workers and in the seeing of those the Lord loves best who have enough or way too much. It’s a sin. It’s a fiscally superior reproach of your soul. You’re seven years old and already you’re cast out you’re evil you’re a pariah a leper a threat a scapegoat a plague rat a warning a burden a lesson to everyone else who thinks they’re better than you in what not to be. Who to avoid. Not what to avoid doing.

Boo hoo. So what? I said to myself. But that’s the kind of tough scar tissue you have to put on like the moon to keep face among so many death masks of yourself. By the time you’re in your late teens spring just seems like a lot of cut flowers in a cemetery where every gravestone bears your name. Intense heat. Unusual sprouts. And what’s not numb about you as you begin to thaw like a snake pit evolves into a strange empathy with weeds stray dogs and tragic acts of random chance. Your wavelengths stop flatlining like the entropy of social justice and rage lifts weights with your pulse. You’re dangerously alive. You stop spoonfeeding the phoenix its own ashes. You feel like an arsonist in a volunteer fire brigade. Peace with complicity seems like a maggot’s death compared to the tigers of wrath who die snarling. Cut a tapeworm enough slack and eventually it will hang you. The rent grows up inch by inch. How is it that the rich get to live symbiotically while the poor are forced to live like parasites? The gastronomy of economics. Are the poor why the rich suffer? A hungry man goes to bed with an empty stomach and all night long you can hear it prowling and growling like a jaguar in a zoo that’s pulled its fangs. A rich man goes to sleep on a full belly bulging like an anaconda that’s just swallowed the cosmic egg of a global corporation whole. But it doesn’t make the same kind of sound going down. More like the rasping of scales on satin sheets. More well mannered it puts its hand over the peeps and bleats of its victims.

My spirit longs for fireflies and stars by a lake where I can sit alone for hours and heal like water. I hate it when my scars open their mouths as if they were taking the stitches out of Frankenstein to see if he still knows how to smile. It’s human to want to feel that God’s in her heaven and all’s well with the world even when it isn’t. But it’s hell to forgive it if you’re sitting in the walled garden of an absentee landlord admiring the neo-gestural brushstrokes of the masterpiece flowers knowing there’s a hurricane of people raging around your third eye like a haemorrhage of poppies waiting for an ambulance that can’t afford to come because they don’t have a medical plan that covers them. I want to listen to the waves and the crickets and wonder like the smoke of old fires that have gone out what my ex-lovers are up to now. And how we ever thought we couldn’t come to this trying to evolve that many scales into a few feathers of love that would fly away with us like Pegasus at the beginning of a movie that promised to be uplifting and transformative. And who knows maybe it did change us somehow but instead of horses we took to the air like prayer rugs and flying carpets. Wavelengths of the sorrow there is in radiance. It’s soothing to think about these things. It’s a wild herb you can chew on emotionally and smear like a cooling ointment of the moon on your burns and wounds. You can spit antiseptically knowing it might do you some good. I love poetry but what good does it do in the world if it’s merely the opiate of a physician who heals himself while the poppies bleed out like children caught out in the open like terrorists in their infancy? And don’t call that silence when it’s an aesthetic sin of omission. You hear the nightingales and see the moon running down the blades of stargrass like a sacred syllable but you don’t hear the screams of the women and children. Or listen to the vows of violent men who’ve turned as cold in their hatred as the absolute Kelvin of silence and science.

For as long as I’ve been homeless I’ve been on a heretical crusade of one to liberate my human divinity from the profaned shrines of the holy land like the black dwarfs that became of the stars that used to shine way way off in the distance. I’m not a choir boy. I’m not a magus. I’m not a pilgrim. Even less so a prophet with the mouth of a furnace. And even if I did know. I wouldn’t tell. What’s the use of the truth in hell? It could only add to the agony. Who calls for an evangel when they need an exorcist? Who wears a charm bracelet of skulls and funeral bells to curse a wedding in the wilderness like a black mass trying to turn cool-aid into wine by uprooting the vines and blood lines of paradise just as it is right here where everything’s a sign of everything else? I don’t dance with angels on the head of a pin that’s stuck through the third eye of a voodoo doll in the arms of an abused child. There’s got to be fresh water ahead in this hourglass desert that no one’s ever drunk from before. A well that doesn’t know what wishes are because one drop of it’s enough to green the wounded rage of an angry planet for a lifetime with thornless thistles for the killer-bees. And hollyhocks for the hummingbirds. A secretly funded public fountain that can’t keep its mouth shut like birds giddy in the dawn of a new age that doesn’t taste like sewage. I was a revolutionary in the sixties because all elections felt like mass defections of what I was fighting for to me. I’m older now and revolution looks more like the evolution of reality tv to judge from the way it’s promoted as the truth. Revolutions like dictatorships happen because they can. The cause has nothing to do with the final effect. You can blame the sea the storm or the mermaids on the rocks for why things go down the way they do. But more often than not it’s the ship that’s the cause of the shipwreck. Things just drown in their own depths. The cause is the effect. Atlantis went down to Atlantis. And I look around today now that things have gotten a lot worse and I say without a doubt there are exceptions but I see how most of the leaders of humankind in politics business art and religion are monostomes. They defecate out of the same mouth they speak with. They reek like orchids at the back of an outhouse. Forty-one percent of the House of Representatives are millionaires. Every ten seconds a child dies of hunger somewhere in the world. And his brother gets even by eating his own. Starve a child. Breed a terrorist. Mosquitoes can adapt faster to insecticides that they can be invented. Bread and circuses used to work to keep the population docile but now there’s a lot of circuses but no more bread. It’s exactly the same as when I was a kid. Some fat toad’s sitting on the garbage can lid complaining about water lilies to a swamp full of corpses and crocodiles. Carrion in the well. Carrion in the watershed. Carrion on the wind and in the cloud and rain overhead. Unforgivable. Unforgiving. And the dead still smell far better off than the living.

PATRICK WHITE

ON THE COLD SIDE OF THE FIRE

On the cold side of the fire

where the poor sit

there’s more magnanimity in a maggot

than there is in a tapeworm.

At least you can see it.

It doesn’t eat alone in the dark

like a midwife with a garotte around a child’s gut.

It swarms.

Hey goof

what kind of spoof are you

in your duck-billed running shoes

and your strategic hair do

trying to rap about poverty around my oil-drum

when your daddy’s a slumlord

that’s enslaved half the neighbourhood to the rent

and you’re the latest issue

of a rich man’s brat

laid like the egg of a wasp

on the forehead of a caterpillar

that could have been a butterfly

if your daddy hadn’t eaten her out of house and home

before she had a chance to bloom?

Do you feel like the guest with the most

after you’ve eaten the host

like a parasite?

Hey goof

what kind of spoof are you

to show up here

like a cross-dressing closet in disguise

among people huddled in Salvation Army overcoats

with their hands and feet to the fire

burning fashion magazines to stay warm?

All these people sleeping on cardboard

and you show up here

like a giddy girl at a pyjama party

with your embroidered pillow and your flying carpet

for a stay over with the homeless

to make yourself feel real

by living off their nightmare

to fulfill your dream of becoming a rap star

by forging your credentials

like counterfeiters in the spring

as if all this suffering

were just a fashion statement without the bling.

Hey goof

what kind of spoof are you

that you’ve got to resort to identity theft

by stealing from the little the poor have left?

Don’t you have one of your own

parked in a three car garage?

Don’t you have a mirror at home

that can lie to you like a girlfriend

who’s been sleeping around with your homies

like a credit card on a shopping spree?

Did you buy those holes in your jeans?

Were you wounded in a robbery at the foodbank

or did you wear them out

trying to make ends meet like a welfare mother

wondering how to feed her family on three magic beans?

Hey goof

what kind of spoof are you

acting as if you’ve had it as rough

growing up as an anti-hero with a safety net

like a high wire funambulist

pulling strings

whenever you took a fall

like a spider-web of uncut umbilical cords

as these in a snakepit of downed powerlines?

What did you come here for?

You just another national anthem

slumming with the theme-songs of the poor

as if you got a whiff of real life

humming along with a garbage-can?

I don’t like you man.

I don’t like the way

you attire yourself in the skins of your victims

and wear your logos as if they were prison tats

you could buy at any department store

instead of earning them?

And what are those?

Stick on scars

you got from a package of bubble gum

so can look tough on the cover of your album

like ten thousand other rap stars

from the wrong side of the zodiac in Tinsel Town?

Hey baby

maybe they’ll put your star

on the walk of fame in Hollywood

right next to the bag lady sleeping

like the embryo of a voodoo doll on a heating grate

as if she were back in the womb again

and you can say you earned your name on the streets

like a false water mocassin

you fooled them into not treading on

by imitating the real thing

as if you had sting

not just the latest app for your cellphone.

It’s not cool to be a legend of light anymore

so what’s a prince of darkness like you doing

trying to pimp himself up like a constellation

that walks on water

and talks like fire

when you ought to be getting down

with the next generation of the deprived and the depraved

like a mugshot

a rose of blood

and a chalk outline

on the cemetery sidewalk

with its anonymous headstone

that leads to a grave nobody puts flowers on?

Hey goof

what kind of spoof are you

that you come on like the shining example

of a black hole to atavistic children

who envy your car rims

like steering wheels

that took their lives

into your own two hands

and drove like a golden chariot through the slums?

Hey goof

what’s a spoof like you

doing down here with your ear to the slang

trying to get the demotic patois of poverty down just right

like the language of people without a voice

who had to learn to talk to themselves

because you and your Daddy

and all the rest of your infestation

didn’t give them a choice?

And where’d you hire your girlfriend?

Rent-a-wreck?

She looks like a cross

between Billy Holiday

and Amy Winehouse

singing Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot

on the stern of the Titanic.

What’s she supposed to be?

Tinkerbelle on angel dust?

A talented trophy awarded a starlet

in a look-a-like contest

trying to elevate

the living conditions of the destitute

to the catwalks of the runway and the stage?

When has their ever not been an age

when the fashion plates of parasites like you

didn’t make a career out of human suffering

by imitating their symptoms like money?

Hey goof

what kind of spoof are you

that you hang around here

like the noose of a tapeworm

trying to come on like a bad executioner

when you know there’s nothing to eat but pain?

You’re not a head hunter.

You’re just someone

who likes to shrink the brains

of the underfed

while they’re still children.

You’ll do what your Daddy did for a living

because you were raised and bred to it.

You’ll sit down at Thanksgiving

and carve up the world

according to familial protocol

and thank the Lord for giving it to you

as if the food

you took out of a child’s mouth

were manna from heaven

for living the good life.

And you’ll say that you know

what it’s like to be down and out

because you’ve been there

and you’re an expert

but when an ad comes on tv

showing a child too numb with hunger

to brush the flies from her eyes

you’ll make a grand gesture

and pass on the custard.

Hey goof

what kind of spoof are you

who thinks he can stand around my oildrum

and warm his hands alongside the destitute

as if we all went to the same church

and heard the same sermon?

Do you really think those threads you’re wearing

make you bullet proof

or are you just looking for a few more holes

to make you look convincing?

PATRICK WHITE

NOT ANGER NOT SORROW

Not anger not sorrow

but the stillness of things enduring along with me

as if there were nothing single-minded about purpose.

Use is another matter.

I see my illuminated star globe

reflected in the open thermal-paned window

and I feel just like that reflection.

Uselessly redundant.

The understudy of the Milky Way.

A street cleaner hisses and swishes by

clearing the gutter of the long weekend.

Forty-seven years of writing poetry

and I still feel like a chandelier in a meteor shower.

The Alpha Aquarids.

I’ve been painting most of the day.

Making lewd decisions about colour

that are mystically suggestive

to a potential audience of holy men.

Now the night is hot and humid

and I’m sitting here in the glare

of my computer screen’s one-eyed page

trying to come to terms with my age

like a bad burn that left a scar

in the likeness of an affable death-mask

inside the urn of my heart I scatter like ashes on the wind

to keep things perfectly clear and empty.

Ready for what comes.

I haven’t heard a car for hours.

I don’t wish to be young again.

With all I’ve learned about burning

I don’t think I could survive

the acid rain

that scorched like tears

a second time.

Once was enough of a bad neighbourhood

where I wore my starmaps

like prison tats on my sleeves

so no one would fuck with my solitude

as I reached for stars nobody had ever touched.

I hear from the philosophers

that a lot of bad breaks can make you stronger

if you know how to weld them back together again

but just as often

as the angel in the way let’s you go

to transcend your character like the Ubermensch

it can leave you crippled for life.

I know people who didn’t get up after the first blow

and maybe it was stupid of me

not to squat on a comfortable footstool

in the corner of my coma

but I didn’t want to throw the fight

win lose or draw.

I didn’t want to make a career of betting on the wrong man.

Now its all dirty windows and deserted streets

and watching the daffodil lamp posts

shine as they might

trying to open their buds like love letters

that never come to full bloom.

Well past midnight as Mayakovsky would say

for nine lines more

before he picked up the revolver

and declared the Russian Revolution dead

in keeping with the kind of heretic he was

and the reactionary nature of love.

Lost on the vast night sea

without the blessing of Isis

after your ship’s gone down

it isn’t the flare that comes to your rescue.

It isn’t the darkness that blows it out.

It isn’t the depths that drown the captain.

Things just happen

when you strategically retreat

and turn the wheel over to the storm.

God bless you Mayakovsky.

I cry a watershed of mirrors

that don’t break when they fall.

And there are birds dropping seeds

like poetic airlifts

on the new islands of life

you left like afterthoughts

in the widening wake of your volcano.

But you knew as well as I do now

that things just take their course in life

like skulls and rivers and revolutions

and if you live them out to the bitter end

everything you ever dreamed of

that was beautiful and luminous and free

turns into the black farce

of a prophetic heretic

burning at the stake

in no one’s name but his own.

Nine lines of poetry past midnight

and it wasn’t as if you’d run out of things to say

you just realized

as we all have since

that no one was listening from the very beginning.

Period.

A bullet hole.

Poppies of blood spatter

spreading like gypsy wildfire

among the Queen Anne’s Lace of the curtains.

It’s not the windows

but our eyes that thaw like glass

in the intensity of the clear light of the void.

Any welder will tell you

the hotter the flame

the lower the candlepower.

When you’re burning perfectly

you’re invisible.

You become a black mirror of dark energy.

Undetectable.

Indelibly invisible ink

you have to hold up

to the stars to read.

Some people look into it

and don’t see anything.

Nothing but lamp black.

Others tremble like divining rods

above the watershed

of its dark abundance

and feel free to be what they want.

Appearances are only deceptive

because of what you believe.

They’re the fall guys of the truth.

They’re the scapegoats of what you conceive.

They’re the illegitimate children of reality.

They’re the martyrs of a misspent youth.

They’re scarecrows on a makeshift crucifix

that shoot themselves in the head

with snub-nosed words

to scare away the birds

who think they don’t mean it.

It takes the spunk of a drunk poet

with a downed powerline

and a short circuit

to shoot out the stars.

I’ve heard it said

that poets love the pain.

That it’s the wound

that drives us insane.

But I don’t think it’s that way.

We hate the scars

that make child’s play of our nightmares.

We hate the clock on the wall

and its whirlwind of scalpels

that tells us all things are healed in time

like those old one-eyed one-armed house wells

we used to draw from

for inspiration

until they were capped

and taken out of circulation like a tree-stump.

The betterment of human kind.

Rimbaud said be thoroughly modern.

You agreed like a locomotive of poetry

on the wrong gauge of track

and died for the oldest of reasons.

A change of heart.

Deeper reasons the party would disavow.

But when and what did they know about you anyhow?

A revolutionary can’t afford

to have an identity of his own.

Wasn’t that the point all along?

All for one.

One for all.

But millions of people

can’t fill the absence that one can.

You lent them your emptiness

and they filled it like a hall

with politics and poetry.

Eventually the people

will make holy relics

of the hands they cut off

for the usual reasons.

Someone tried to help them too seriously.

The wolves are tolerated among the flock

as useful sheepdogs for a while.

But wolves don’t pant for praise

from their master’s hand

and sheepdogs that want to run with wolves

don’t last very long.

Well past midnight

and I can hear you up above the timberline

howling like a mountain at the moon.

But I don’t think it was love that killed you.

You were thoroughly modern.

It was getting late

and you didn’t die a moment too soon.

You weren’t the content of the revolution.

You were the timing.

PATRICK WHITE

CONSOLATIONS OF DARKNESS AND SOLITUDE

Consolations of darkness and solitude.

No stars.

No fireflies.

Just the low sound of the town

breathing like an air conditioner in its sleep.

The trains are silent.

The highway is empty.

The streetlamps

haven’t found anybody

they can show the way home.

The stores are as despondent as sunflowers at midnight.

Consolations of darkness and solitude

I attend upon my body

like a ghost at a seance

I keep being called back to

when I wake up from the dead

and come back to my senses

like the road less travelled by

to its old neighbourhood.

Where are the stars?

Where are the fireflies?

I’ve been gone so long

I don’t expect to be recognized

by my own windows and mirrors.

When I’m shining

I’m the kind of moonlight

that comes in through the backdoor

while everyone else

is being interrogated by their paranoia

through a two way mirror in a dream

that doubles as a movie screen.

If truth’s a test

than let’s see

if a polygraph can pass me

when I’m the only one I answer to

dogpaddling in this vast night sea

like a message in a bottle

that isn’t meant for anyone

that isn’t on the same wavelength.

And if not

there’s always the cosmic resonance

of my own sentience

to fall back on for strange company.

The voices of all the afterlives

that haunted me before I was born.

The hearts of the people are martyred by survival.

The heretics are arguing over how big the tent has to be

for a spiritual revival.

And the revolutionaries

are showing off their guns to little girls.

The dealers keep their secrets to themselves like pit bulls.

None of it makes for much of a conversation.

You can pick up a seashell and put it up to your ear

anytime of the day or night

but you can’t hear the ocean

and none of the mermaids know how to hold a tune

worth dying for.

The roar of a lone skate-boarder

on a deserted street.

Me whistling to myself on a dark road.

And now an approaching train

mourning its own passage

before it’s arrived.

I am reminded of all the teenagers and drunks

it’s already killed

but there’s art on the sides of the boxcars

all the way from North Carolina

like prehistoric studio caves on tour

that gives me an uncanny sense of what age this is.

Where are the stars?

Where are the fireflies?

Why do I feel I’ve accomplished something significant

when I jump the crossbars and stop lights at the railway track

and really give the train something to scream about?

And it occurs to me

maybe as a tribute to their ghosts

waving their lanterns

far down the tracks for me to step back

that a suicide is just someone

who didn’t get out of the way

the way they were told to.

They bit the bullet

instead of dodging it

wounded less by its exit

than its entrance.

There was a picture here for awhile

and a toppled vase of flowers

to commemorate a young man

who was killed on these tracks

when he slipped into a drunken coma

on his way home from a party.

What can you say to anyone about death

when someone loves you like that?

Consolations of darkness and solitude.

Sky-blue chicory along the roadside

blooming eerily in the streetlights

as if the colour had gone out of its eyes.

No stars.

No fireflies.

PATRICK WHITE