I WANT TO WRITE LIKE A PHOENIX

I want to write like a phoenix

but my blood is swaying

like a heavy iron bell.

Must be somebody’s funeral.

I want to write like the dogstar shines

rising in the early morning in the east

but all I’ve managed so far

is to shake a few pigeons out of the belfry.

I want to take my boots off

and walk on hot fireflies

all the way to the end

just to prove I’m fireproof

but I’m finding it hard to take the heat

for things I didn’t set fire to.

I want to immolate myself

like a Zen waterlily in Vietnam

that doused itself in gasoline

or an outraged fruit vendor

in the souks of Tunisia

but all’s quiet on the western front

of the Watt’s riots

except for the usual sound of gunfire

making the rounds of the neighbourhood

like the Crips and the Bloods.

And my heart is sick of protesting the wound

to the sword that caused it in the first place

as if there were any point

in bitching to my father

about what he did to my mother.

I’m sick of the froth and fury

of people with spiritual rabies

and the lather of hydrophobic opinions

and the deep dry wells of ungenerosity

that are at the heart of it

and how even the rain

arouses the suspicions of the rich and powerful

as the beginning of a welfare state.

I’m trying to find a flight feather to write with

when I should be painting for a living

but eagles are on the endangered species list

and all I’ve got for a pen

is the plumage of an albatross

and this curse in the doldrums

that’s laid like a white eclipse

on the black hole in my inkwell.

I want the sun to shine at midnight

and my blood to turn like a mood ring

into the dusky yellow of enlightened dragons

that burn without the smoke

that keeps getting teary-eyed with emotion

whenever the wind’s blowing my way.

But the day settles down resigned and defeated

to its diurnal round of disappointments

like sunshine on the wild field stones

in the heritage walls of Perth

that house the bank across the street

that knows the value of everything

but not the worth of anything that counts.

I need a muse with snakes in her hair

to wake me up out of the nightmare

of this stone cold coma.

I’ve kept my balance long enough

on this T-square of a tightrope

between one star and the next

but a web isn’t the same thing as a constellation

even after you’ve connected all the dots

into a dream catcher for spiders

and a good part of the art

of keeping your balance

from going to extremes

is knowing when to fall

without a safety net.

I need a muse

who doesn’t come with an ambulance

and haemorrhage all over me

as if I just had a head on collision with inspiration

at the corner of Gore and the Universe

and I was permanently paralyzed

from the mouth up.

I need a muse who knows

I’m too complex

even if she’s got thick sensual lips

that look like mushrooms on Botox

to be moved to do things

by pulling my strings

with a mere pout

and a turn of the face away

from the direction of prayer.

I need a muse who knows what an eclipse is.

I need a muse who doesn’t feed live fireflies

to the lightning but knows

what a witching stick is for

and how to go divining for stars.

I need a muse who doesn’t light me up

like the only white candle at a black mass

and then pinch my wick

like a monkish celibate

when she realizes the depravity

of the mistake she made.

The devil’s last trick

is to prove she doesn’t exist.

But I’ve caught on to this

like the Hubble Telescope

looking for infra-red haloes

around the black holes

she was last seen in

and I’ve abandoned everything but hope.

PATRICK WHITE

THERE MUST BE SOME STAR SOMEWHERE

There must be some star somewhere

that can give me an insight

into what I’m doing here

on a habitable planet

it’s getting harder and harder

to live on anymore.

God is dead.

Long live the landlord.

Just finished the underpainting in burnt sienna

of an autumn scene I’ll work on in the morning.

My ornamental goldfish Toke

swims above the blue stones

at the bottom of his aquarium

in underwater moonlight

sometimes like a comet

sometimes like an orchid.

sometimes like the Bolshoi Ballet.

Pain.

But I don’t know why.

Fear.

But I don’t know of what.

My palms are covered in paint

and I feel as if I’ve got

the blood of Swan Lake on my hands.

I study my star globe

and wonder how many eyes it took

to work its iconic constellations out of chaos.

The ecliptic will intersect

the celestial equator

at the equinoctial colure

in a little less than three weeks.

And I’ll be sixty-three in less than two.

I imagine the stars hooked up

like neurons in my brain.

Networking.

Dream catchers

and medicine wheels

talking to spider webs

in a vast nervous system of light

that keeps breaking into intelligence.

And I imagine more than a few of the arteries

that supply my mind with oxygen

have had their apertures narrowed enough

there must be black dwarfs

and the gravitational eyes of black holes

all through my brain by now

bending light and space

like apparitions of what they used to be.

Time turns the telescope around

and looks at the astronomer

as if he were further away than ever.

And if you were to examine

most of my wavelengths

through a spectrograph

they’d still be an emission spectrum

but shifted toward the red.

The T Tauri stars in the Hesperides

are aging like a windfall of overripe apples.

I’m in the autumn of my life.

The sumac is burning like a phoenix.

If I didn’t need to make a living

trying to catch the light

of a moment in passing

I’d finish my painting in the morning

and true to life

throw it on the fire

like an immolation

that might lead to an Arab spring.

As it is I have to sell

the way I feel about what I see

just to pay the rent.

But if I were rich enough to have my way

I’d let the wind take them like apple bloom

or Japanese plum blossoms

or the leaves of the maple tree

with a palette of strychnine and arsenic

to complement the photosynthetic greens

or if they were moon scenes

the petals of white peonies

and scatter them across the lawns

upon the stairs

and along the gutters of the streets

just to say I grasped what beauty is

and let it go.

PATRICK WHITE

LIGHTNING STORM IN THE MORNING

Lightning storm in the morning

upstages the dawn.

Snake flash.

A flickering tongue of light.

And then the walking thunder

of a rolling barrage

in the no man’s land

between the trenches and Vimy Ridge.

The leaves a darker more frenzied green.

The rains whips the windowpanes

like the eyes of a shell-shocked horse

up to its chest in mud and blood.

Hysterical alarms sound off

like a squad car full of thieves

pleading their innocence like church bells.

The dripping patter of small arms fire

from snipers in the eaves.

Perth and Pearl Harbour

bombed by the Japanese on a Sunday

but it’s still too early to tell

until the lights go back on

and the dawn gets over the trauma

whether it’s a day of infamy of not.

Lightning rods with heroic nerves of copper

lord it over the weathervanes

who lost their heads

when the weather turned round

for running the lightning to ground

and saving the barn like an ark

in a deluge of water and fire

from drowning or burning down.

And the fire hydrants on Foster Street

feel ashamed of themselves

for being so stalwart and useless

in the face of a pre-emptive emergency.

And the flower barrels

are pulling their dishevelled hair out

like petunias that didn’t see it coming.

The air flinches

as if it had just been grasped

by the karmic revelation

of an avenging ghost.

God’s trying to kill a sinner.

Everyone listens to an inner voice

like the numbers of a lottery

to see if the dice

turned up snake-eyes

or lightning struck the jackpot.

The storm rolls over the horizon

like the rim of a Tim Horton’s coffee-cup

that reads like the happy aftermath

of the last man standing

under a tree in an open field

to get out of the rain.

Please try again.

PATRICK WHITE

ANXIETIES LIKE DRONES

Anxieties like drones, deer flies, turkey vultures circling my head watching every wrong move I make. I couldn’t afford the bomb so how could I be a terrorist? Or get it over with. I’m sick of the wait. I’m standing in front of God’s firing squad in front of a no smoking sign. Should be out looking for a job that doesn’t exist like Parsifal and the holy grail. Should be finishing off three paintings for a quick going out of life sale instead of sitting here writing this. I’m tempted to go off like an air raid siren at Pearl Harbour but I’m trying to keep my composure by being creative. Creative. My small boy’s sixties heroic notion of doing some good in the world to make up for being the useless shit my mother when she was understandably angry with my father thought I was. It was either that or become a fighter pilot, transfer to an American aircraft carrier, get recruited by NASA and leave the fucking planet. Poor boys are encouraged like base metal to turn into gold with a vengeance and golden boys like to drive their triumphal chariots through a slum. How can the eldest son of a welfare mother who sacrificed her life like a pelican to raise four children against all odds ever put anything on the altar that could ever give back full measure and a bit beside? I’ve tried. And I’ve failed again and again and again. No grail. No fiscal elixir that’s going to turn the ailing kingdom into money. No lily white maidens blooming in the swamp of the Fisher King. And I’ve been thinking though my mother loves me enough to deny it that she really does deserve a better son than I am. The lost prodigal of the life of the mind and it doesn’t look as if I’m ever coming back. Black sheep. But the shepherd stayed with the other ninety-nine. I carried the sins of my father on my back like a scapegoat driven out into the wilderness and I’m too much of a heretic (it comes from overthrowing myself every day of my life) to carry anyone’s banner but I share some dark Renaissance characteristics with Azazel whose eyes look like two eclipses at both ends of the telescope at once. And it’s rare and scary but I like to stare into the dark clarity of his intelligence sometimes the same way I like to be immolated by the stars when I’m feeling especially black. Creative. That word again. That shibboleth, that mantra, that hidden name of an unknown god that makes its absence felt like nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum, that eyebeam projected from the pupil of a black hole in my third eye I keep leaking out of like an hourglasss in tears. Braille starmaps of the heart. Cosmologies of feeling on the other side of the shattered mirror that isn’t whole in the sum of its parts. But can’t find a metaphor or simulacrum to reflect what’s missing. Look at all these wrecked fire kites I tried to fly like some kind of image of myself that bore some slight resemblance to the stars whose indifference didn’t strike me as the death mask of a deep-seated bias against shining of any kind. That was definitely a west coast sixties aspiration, chromatic aberration around the gravitational lenses that were convinced they could bend light and space like a rainbow. See what I mean? Even if you’ve uprooted yourself like some metaphysical Mandrake man from the creative seed bed of the sixties, your hypothalamus never forgets.

            That’s why I’m looking for asylum in this poem. That’s why I’ve jumped the embassy wall like a social democratic exile wanted for starting a revolution among ingrates. For the first twenty years of writing poetry to touch hearts and minds like the light touches flowers to what was humanly inviolable and mystically factual about their own abused divinity hoping it might slowly become apparent to them like stars emerging from the darkness, no two alike, seemed radiantly feasible. The message might not be but right now the messenger feels ridiculous. And for the last three decades almost every painting that tries to picture me, every poem that blooms in the duff of my decay always makes me feel I’m writing my last appeal to a hooded executioner about to drop the other side of a two-bladed lunar ax on the nape of my neck like a new moon in full eclipse at harvest time. I finish typing. And then I’ve got to wait for several hours before the muse repatriates my fingertips for crimes against the inhumanity of human to human, for spreading seditious literature that agitates the heart like hives of killer bees to turn into secret cells of compassion. No more bulldozers in the fields where the skylarks lay their eggs. You hear me? No more children fed like live hamsters to the hydra-headed succubus of Medusan corporations that turn them hard as rock even before they have a chance to learn to read their own gravestones. If poets haven’t hung around universities too long to forget how to curse like a Druid cease and desist or I’ll turn your trophy chicks into inflatable sex dolls that stick it to your prick like a pin cushion effigy in a fashionable voodoo ritual. And the karma of every day for the next ten thousand lifetimes turn into the chronic reckoning the poor know every one of their godforsaken nights on a planet where all species have been forced to line up every morning at a foodbank for global resources. If you refuse to read the writing on the wall I’ll deliver the message to you in comets that will smear the mirror of your point of view in red slug lines of blood guilt. Oligarchic obscenities of human lovelessness in the board rooms of Sodom and Gomorrah. See how easy it is to talk like God when your own house is on fire? But I’m an old growth conflagration from the northern cordillera of B.C. and I know how to put fire out with fire without getting burnt by the inspiration. God’s a lot more intense and enflamed since he last talked to Moses like a burning bush in the valley of Tuwa. Either that or people have grown so insensitive it takes a forest fire to keep anyone’s attention long enough to deliver a message to pharaoh. Magician in a snake pit. Sitting Bull revives like a ghost dance that’s been outlawed by one too many treaties. The long flowing locks of Custer’s honey gold hair flying in the wind have been over run by killer bees that stick to it like flypaper. It can be dangerous to mistake the truth for a treaty.

            And I’ve broken all of mine because they weren’t worth the paper they were written on. I’ve kept my word but the word hasn’t kept me. Creative. Black farce in the dead ends of tragedy. Creative. How to live orginally and die like a cliche. Creative. Nothing less than everything all the time. Creative. Living like hydrogen but giving birth to stars. Creative. Mongoose to cobras that don’t dance. Creative. Who could have guessed how much dying goes into it? Creative. No one there to hear it when the tree falls. The sound of one hand clapping for applause. Creative. Imagination truing the laws of its own origination by oxymoronically disobeying them. Creative. When the mirrors turn black and you can see all your afterlives walking on stars like somnambulists all the way to this one. Creative. Projecting humanly habitable symbols like planets into the available dimensions of a highly suggestible future. Creative. Anathema, antidote, antimatter to the destroyers. Creative. Living life as a sum of destructions that ends in a creative breakthrough. The eclipse as much of an insight as the light that’s blocked behind. White candle. Black candle. Same flame. Creative. Your life such a sin of omission the world comes pouring in on you the way the moon fills its empty cup to the full.

           Ask any Greek. Ask Sophocles. Ask Shakespeare. Tragedy is best expressed in broad daylight. It’s comedy that’s nocturnal despite appearances. Fools thrive best by night and my whole life I’ve refused to be an exception. Once you stop letting the darkness use your head for therapeutic voodoo by sticking hot needles of insight like a snake pit into your eyes the night might not be a reward but it doesn’t feel like a vendetta against anyone who took their space and time and life as their birthright in the first place as if it were a freedom, as water and light and oxygen are free without discrimination each according to their need. And you’re just as free to enslave yourself to something, keeping in mind that attachment too is a Buddha activity, as you are not to. Sometimes liberty doesn’t feel real to people until they can feel the weight of chains on their back. And truth to tell what is it that holds most people on a leash like a kite on a spinal cord if not fear of what’s dangerously unknown about real freedom and love of their misery as if there were some kind of entertainment value in it? They see a blue rose and they admire it for its thorns. The ignorant guess their way into tried and true principles they drive through your heart like a stake. While the enlightened buddhas all attest to the fact they don’t have any more of a clue about what’s been arrayed and illuminated before us by our own shining anymore than lightning and fireflies do. Is it the darkness that befriends the star or the star that befriends the dark or do you see them like blue-eyed homicidal equestrians like Custer do as enemies at the opposite ends of the same broken arrow? I see the beak of an arrowhead and I see the fletcher’s tail feathers and a long stick of rigid intent but where are the wings where are the legs? What kind of bird is that can’t hit a note right without being launched from a one-stringed harp that makes it sing as if it were born with only one vocal cord? Or a man who shoots his mouth off as if he’d just fit his tongue to his dick like a trigger? And how can the picture-music ever take hold of you if it hasn’t got a leg to stand on? A branch, a powerline, a sacred birch grove, for the red-winged blackbird to perch on? Whether it’s the Taj Mahal, black and white, or a big dumpy apartment like the one I’m in trying to dissipate my solitude in the company of the insane strangers words can be when you don’t let them have their way with you as if you were just along for the ride. That’s why I’m trying to disappear into this poem as if it were an endless night sky that doesn’t wash the birds out of its one good eye like specks of dust looking up at the stars. You can save face behind a lot of masks and debilitate almost any nightmare that keeps coming back like a ghost to a seance if there’s no one there to scare in the first place.

PATRICK WHITE

IMPOVERISHED LIKE A LOSER WITH A HIGH IQ

Impoverished like a loser with a high IQ.

It’s a darker discipline than art

to learn to love what you must live.

The aristocratic penury of a poet

who keeps giving it all away

as if generosity were a form of protest

against the sock puppets of common sense

whose mouths move like empty wallets

when they speak of the lives they’re living.

We lived from rented dump to rented dump

and beautified the yards

with gardens we dug

and flowers we stole

from a better neighbourhood six blocks away

until it came time for the landlord to sell them

and we moved on to the next lunar landing

when I was a boy

and maybe that’s why

I’ve always seen things

as temporary ever since.

I give to people as if they knew

what I know

that everything we have

will be taken back soon enough

and you can’t keep what you won’t give away.

Life for example.

Or light. Flowers. Stars. Children. Poems.

More seeds in the autumn

than there are in the spring.

And because I’m so aware of time

I see so much eternity

in their tears and their smiles

everyone always seems to me

myself included

half ghost

and half mystic shadow

of the lucidity they could be for awhile.

I’m always urging brown stars like Jupiter

to shine a little harder

to open the other eye

of its three hundred year old methane hurricane

and greet the sun at midnight

like a peer of shining

that could set carbon and oxygen

on the spiritual path to us

like blind pilgrims on the way

to a shrine of eyes with liberating visions

that are released like doves

to look for land

by people who understand

they’re walking on stars.

But you’ve got to see way beyond that

if you want to get a fix on who you are.

You’ve got to walk that extra mile

in someone else’s moccasins

if you don’t want to underestimate

the size of the universe

and your place in it.

Your brain may be three pounds of starmud

but your mind

is the intangible of intangibles.

Light upon light

you can’t catch up to

or run from.

And whatever that light illuminates

enhances its awareness

of how things can change

just by looking at them

but when it turns back on itself

to enlighten the source of its shining

everything is dark and clear and imageless

without thought

without feeling

without witness or metaphor.

And if you thought you were poor before

think again.

When Lazarus returned to life

did he leave the dead anything?

I’m counting cans of beans in tomato sauce

like acephalic feet in Horation odes.

I’m reading the I Ching

with the fascistic rods

of brittle spaghetti sticks that break

like the false dawns of misfortune

as if they were the fragile wing bones of birds

spread out like the delicate skeletons of Japanese fans

that consulted the wrong stars

to escape the winter that overtook them.

Maybe I could drill holes in them

and unmarrow them like a syrinx

just to lighten the mood of the music in Sparta.

Or make a prayer wheel of birds

and blow them clockwise

to lift this jinx of a galaxy

turning the wrong way

like the German version

of Madame Blavatsky’s Aryan swastika.

The ubermensch too has underwhelmed himself.

Pipe dreams.

Napoleonic schemes in civilian dress.

Arks in an ice age that don’t float.

Fly-fishing in glaciers that move like the Hoover Dam.

Mood rings of climate change

challenging the adaptability of man

to survive his own works like Atlantis.

You can sing about the sweetness of the honey-bee

on twelve grain whole wheat bread

but when there’s nothing in the house

but an emaciated mouse

in a cupboard that echoes like the Grand Canyon

you eat like a praying mantis.

You eat your brain.

You eat your heart

for the food value of your enemy

to give you the courage

to stand up to your genius like a warrior

offering a blood sacrifice

to the prophetic skulls of your ancestors

who said you’d end up here one day

if you kept on going the way you had to

if you were to make any sense

out of why you were lost.

Born too stupid to be a cynic

and tell Alexander to get out of my light

I let my right eye

that could only see

the value of things

like an incorrigible positivist

grow larger than the negative one

that only looked at the cost.

Even when I looked into things

and saw that nothing had an identity

and all was emptiness

and interdependent origination

I didn’t become a balanced nihilist

and think the glass was half empty

but saw how the dark abundance

in the hidden watersheds of the plenum-void

spilled over the rim

like fountainheads of bright vacancy

that bubbled up and were blown off

like wavelengths of sea foam

into nebulae and galaxies

and the white-maned horses of Neptune

by the winds of time and space

blowing on the coastal tides of consciousness

like a lover on the skin of the moon

when he returns to her like an atmosphere.

And I may be a shipwreck in the Sea of Shadows

living penumbrally on the memory

of some spectacular eclipses

and magnificent supernovas

and a handful of first magnitude stars

I’m still trying to arrange

into a new constellation

to explain my myth of origin

but I’ve forgotten more about

the occult science of shining

and how to go divining for water on the moon

than all these blind star-nosed moles

trying to burrow their way through wormholes

into a heaven they don’t even know they’re already in

will ever realize in light years.

I may be the grasshopper who fiddled

too long throughout the summer

to keep things dancing

at a field party I was always the last to leave

and even far into winter

scraped his legs together like firesticks

trying to catch flame and thaw the ice.

And I suppose I wouldn’t be in this mess

as my friend Willie P. Bennet used to say

if I could have learned to take my own advice

but when I saw

how the ant mulched its heap of formic acid

into the hill tomb of an organized society

like Surabachi Mountain on Iwo Jima

and smelled how it reeked of stinging nettles

I thought it’s better to play a blue violin

on the stern of the Titanic going down

than it is to try and over run Asia

like my Mongolian ancestry suggested I should. 

People too lazy to work get jobs

and retire like watch fobs.

People without a calling

a passion a summons in life

that demands nothing less

than everything all the time of you

and the total sacrifice of all other options

because there are people who are born

to choose the sea and not the lifeboat

who prefer to disappear into the sky

than stand at a window

that’s only a wingspan wide

and wished they’d learned to fly

thirty years earlier

instead of wearing out the carpets that could have.

Better to fail radiantly

than eclipse everyone with success.

And when you’re lying on your death bed

how are you ever going

to commiserate with your ghost

when you see clearly

you’re going to be reincarnated

as smog over Los Angeles

for not burning white hot enough

when you were given two lungs for bellows?

The brass ring might be a ripple

worth reaching for

like a life preserver in a storm

but the dark ore cries tears of silver

like the new moon in the arms of the old

when she sees how everything

it shines upon like base metal

and September fields of flowing wheat

turns to gold.

The winners do their crying out loud in crowds

and everybody wonders why

and takes their wound on as their own

and listens to every viral syllable

of what they had to sacrifice to heal.

The Mithraic bull bleeds money

like Jesus on the cross.

And twelve days later only half meaning to

undramatically backs into

an overanalyzed suicide

and then rises like the circumpolar star

of a music legend that never leaves the set.

Elvis Presley is alive and well

and reviving in Tweed Ontario.

Anywhere your ghost wants to go

the world is a seance that wants to know

why you left one foot sticking out of your afterlife

as if you were buried

somewhere between shore and a lifeboat

in the undertow of the providential tides

that pulled you under.

But an impoverished loser with a high IQ

who’s given up

trying to unionize himself

like a cult of heretics

that don’t think that any sacrifice

is too great to radicalize

the square roots of Rubrik’s cubes

circumambulating the Kaaba

like shepherd moons

is already haunting the kitchen

looking for food left out to attract the dead

back to the living

as he weeps alone in his apartment

for everything he’s missing.

And the stars outside howl in the distance

like the eyes of a lean wolf pack

lit up like the lamps of a search party

they’ve rounded up

to go looking for him

all through the long hungry night

like fellow appetites on the food chain

as his heart bleeds out like a magic bean

in tomato sauce.

An impoverished loser with a high IQ

who upheld the value of things

like a meteoritic cornerstone

grounded in the quicksand of the cost.

PATRICK WHITE

WATCHING THE SKY TURN BLUE

for Steve Forster

Watching the sky turn blue

in the last hours of the night.

Up like the stars dreaming myself awake.

Insomniac watchman making the rounds

of my own private zodiac

on the graveyard shift

looking for signs of an afterlife

that’s in spiritual alignment with the pyramids.

Tabla rasa.

A clean slate.

A new day.

The world a new creation every morning.

Empty streets empty stores empty sidewalks.

The vertebrae of bridges sheathing the Tay River

like a spinal cord that’s stopped

sending messages to the brain

like wavelets and rain

to put the serpent fire out

that’s rooted at the base of my spine.

And the windows that couldn’t get over

the loss of the moon

aren’t talking to those

anticipating the sun rise

like the trickle of water music

arising from the willows of Stewart Park

slowly leaking out of the silence

like a crescendo of birds that come out

one by one like the stars

until you’re washed away

in the undertow of it all

like the words of this poem

riding the mindstream like a paper boat

all the bumpy way down to my heart.

The leaf and starmap of a lost art.

The dew on the cool blue green grass

has taken the spit shine off my boots

and turned their anthracite

into a flat Mars black nineteen-fifties Ford.

I can see the glass tears of a streetlight

that’s been crying all night like a candle

in front of the broken mirror

that’s been seen with another lover

slowly turning like a mood ring

into the sapphire blue of a new birthstone

with the occasional star in it.

A runaway Milky Way of lapis lazuli

pops into my head like Indian jewellery

in the showcase marinas of Dragon Moon.

Dolphins and flying fish

are leaping off the prow

in the fathomless depths

of the subconscious mind

floating ghosts

from my shipwreck

like the nautical find of the century

up to the surface

to mark where I went down.

Maybe the Perth Courier will carry the news

in black slug lines of mourning

indelible as the darkness I feel

whenever I walk past the office door

and remember when my buddy

was Clark Kent editor by day

and Big Steve Forester and the Mudcats by night

singing Kansas City rhythm and blues

to night owls and feral cats

prowling and howling

into the wee hours of the morning.

And his death may have passed

like yesterday’s obituary

into local history

but there will always be

some events in the lives of poets and reporters

that will always be breaking news to the heart.

He’d come to my place

at seven in the morning

and we’d sit at the kitchen table

like seven year old boys

dealing with death and cancer

trying to find an accurate answer

among all these rumours of an afterlife

about what it was going to be like

to wake up one day

any day now

without eyelashes ears

fingers toes a nose and skin

and your eye for picture-music

the braille stops of a bird bone flute for the blind

buried beside you

as if you were an Archaic Indian

who died young

five thousand years ago

by the Straits of Belle Isle

knowing timing’s just as important as content.

We corroborated each other’s testimony

on the wild side of things

and whenever I’m down

by the Perth Soap Factory

lavishing its thick floral scent on the night air

I look up at his old apartment window

that the new tenants look through now

and though he and I would both agree

that it blows the public cool

of a private clown

to be so sentimentally foolish

even when no one else is around

I say God bless you Steve

wherever you are now.

And I think I can almost hear you

rocking out with the celestial spheres

like a blues harp among the angels

and I like the new underground sound

that’s taking heaven by storm

though it brings me to tears

that water the root fires

of this whiff of wildflowers

working on the nightshift

to think of you gone.

Gone gone gone

altogether gone beyond

like the riff of a base run

on a guitar-shaped universe

under the travelogue of play-dates

and places you gigged

stuck to the lid of your coffin

like the leaves and constellations

of an autumn that always comes too soon.

God bless you man.

I sing it out

like a one man band

with soul and heart

under your window

like a wolf pack

howling at the moon

for the loss of one of their own.

God bless that big awkward heart of yours

and the lonely boy you told me about

playing by himself

in the abandoned World War Two airfields of France.

I’ve tried to get closer to him over the years

as I always did when he was near

by impressing him with

the smoothness of my take-offs

and the fireworks of my emergency landings.

You were the first unimperial Englishman

that ever convinced me

he could wear cowboy boots convincingly.

And that you knew what it was like

to be down and out with George Orwell

in west Vancouver

sleeping among violent drunks

that kept waking up

just to spit into your wishing well.

I know you spent your whole life wondering

whether you were or not

and wandered off the horse trails

of the bronze riding academy often enough

just to prove you were

to me and to yourself

but you were real.

Outlaw blues man

with a lot of good habits

you were addicted to like your upbringing.

I’ve ridden with a lot of bad dudes

and seen a few hung along the way

like identity thieves caught red-handed

branding their names

on other people’s logos

but none of them knew how

to head off a stampede

in a lightning storm

like you could with a mike

and an edgy audience in front of you

as if you’d just pulled a gun in a bank

like Robin Hood.

I don’t know if it does any good

to lay food and tobacco and beer

bread and a baggie

of Lanark County homegrown

with colas the size of treetops

frosted with the galactic radiance of stars

with crystal healing powers

and wine-tipped Old Port cigarillos

at the eastern doors

of the burial huts of the dead

approaching the autumnal equinox

as the Ojibwa at this time of the year

believe it does.

Or if our souls go east or south

in the bodies of migrating Canada geese

when the moon takes them off

like lockets and rosaries around her neck

as the Ojibwa Pythagoras the Persians

and the Christians

who caught on to the thought

all said they did.

Or if the Great Spirit

has a wingspan that includes us all or not.

Hard to imagine nature

comes pre-prepared with a womb

but not a tomb

that’s big enough for all of us.

And maybe there’s no more distinction

to be made between the exit and the entrance

than there is to be made between

a sacred grove and a parking lot

and in the clear light of the void

we’re all bound to see for ourselves

you don’t notice the difference

between the living and the dead

the way I do

looking up at your window

as if the oldies and goldies

of the rhythm and blues

had turned into the base metal

of an alchemical universe in reverse.

And maybe everyone ends up here

sooner or later

beside a soap factory

below somebody’s window

trying to throw

a philosopher’s stone through it

like a grain of sand

through the blank stare of an hourglass

whose timing is as bad as eternity’s

always half a note off the tempo

like a white boy playing jazz

with one foot on shore

and the other in a lifeboat.

And maybe you’ve got to

syncopate the backbeat

to stay on your feet dancing

long after the music’s over

and the lights have been turned off

like stars and streetlamps in the dawn.

I don’t know Bud.

I’ve just lived on

doing what I’ve always done.

And I hear they put that painting

I did of you dressed up

like one of the Blues Brothers

bending the music

like a mike stand

up against your coffin

and I was happy to hear that.

And there have been two elegies

I’ve written for you since

that have tried to say farewell

in a way that could convince my heart

but they both failed like a funeral

and it looks like

given I’m standing here tonight

watching the sky turn blue in your window

that it’s going to take more than your death

to make me say good-bye

at the end of the gig

when they’re breaking down the music

like roadies disassembling a Rubik’s cube

or typesetters yesterday’s news.

So I’ll just keep saying thank-you

over and over again

for being a friend of mine

until you hear me

wailing like a wounded blues harp in pain

and not just another banshee

scratching at your window

like a cat that wants to come in

and make a demo

with fading stars in the studio.

I’ll watch the sky turn blue

over the Old Brown Shoe factory

that’s given over to body builders

and tomorrow’s ballerinas now

and intrigued like the bees

by the smell of soap

I’ll jack into the sun like a power-amp

and you’ll grab the mike

like the bud of daffodil

or a streetlamp around the neck

and we won’t play

Should Old Acquaintance be forgot

on the deck of the Titanic

as it’s going down

like the moon and the stars

but as I heard you once sing

Kansas City on stage

in Stewart Park.

The amplified echo of your voice

long after dark

all over town.

PATRICK WHITE

AND THE VOICES COME

And the voices come. Some with bouquets of razorblades. And some with white Russian irises. They gather like smoke and Milky Ways and born again pilgrims on the Road of Ghosts. Water snakes in the moonlight. They come the way my last lover’s voice would sound now. And I can hear the thunder of the blue stones and the sarsens walking all the way from southwest Wales to Stonehenge just to make a new religion out of the way farmers look at the sky. Sad voices like dolorous iron bells swaying like women heavy with child. And those incomprehensible voices that are still looking for their Rosetta Stone that just stare at you blankly and say more about the meaning of loss with their eyes than they do with their mouths. Like children starving to death in East Africa.

            I listen without judgment or distinction for the living word or the dead. I listen as if I were listening to a grove of nightbirds on the outskirts of Babylon. I hear the turkey vultures shuffling like undertakers at the sky burials of random road kill. And I hear the nightingales. I hear the anthracite crow on the dead branch of featherless sumac mocking my diamond insights like a chunk of coal. A great nebula of voices ingathering out of the void. And I wait. I wait to see which of all these in this cloud of unknowing will be the first to precipitate into stars.  Rain. Myths of shining. Alcyone in the Pleiades. And I never know whether I’m going to be dancing on water with fireflies or waltzing with despair under a chandelier of black holes. Or wheeling up and down the stairwells of helical thermals under my wings like a red-tailed hawk until the sun goes down on a long lazy August afternoon with the moon coming up in the west. And it doesn’t matter if the mirror on the wall is white or black or pthalo blue. White and light or dark and deep. Weeping or giddy with delight when I tell her that she’s obviously a more beautiful similitude than I am. I listen to what the rich pleonast appeals for like more and more and more of the same thing. Kingfishers and halcyon seas. And I hear the poor man pleading for a lifeboat like an echo drowned out by the sound of one hand clapping in a thunderstorm. I hear the voices of the dead trying to unsay things through me. Things they said and did not mean. Or should have said in tears. I try to undo the silence as much as I can for them and set them free. But whose seance I answer isn’t up to me. Out of the polyglot chaos of insights and words I let spontaneity emerge into a choir of picture-music like schools of excitable fish in the moonlight turning all the same way at once or flocks of Canada geese colliding with one another as they rise from the autumn cornfield and slowly begin to string themselves together into a flying necklace. And I’m wholly possessed at the first advance of the mermaids who’ve come to sing to me. I place myself in their hands like the scratched guitar they learned to play on and for all the time it was treated like luggage on tour has kept its voice like karaoke night and stayed in tune for years.

            It’s easier to raise a corpse from its grave like a potato or a tuber than it is to raise a fire brigade or an air-raid siren in Atlantis. But some voices sound like that. Boys who cry wolf and Mayan chicken-littles trying to decipher their own calendars in a multiverse of worlds within worlds one no worse than another breaking like bubbles in their ears at all times of the year. In this matrix of interdependent origination when has one moment of life here and now not been the sum of all the death in the infinite permutations and combinations of worlds thriving like a phoenix in the ashes of their own extinction? Cosmic calamities breed comical mammals anticipating apocalypse like karma and blood guilt. If catastrophe can happen in favour of you at the expense of another species like a woman you seduced away from your best friend. You know how it’s done. You grow paranoid thinking it could happen to you. And thus the voices that try to possess the whole of your soul but never find it enough though no part’s left out like water on the moon to bind it to their own. Water in a state of grace flows. But water in a state of vice turns to ice and doesn’t listen to anyone’s advice that isn’t at least as cold and brittle as it is. The mirror never thaws. Eyes frozen in time. Three pounds of starmud. The brain. Five million years in the making. One hundred billion neurons with fifty thousand neuronic connections each to other brain cells just so it can conceive of its disconnection to the multiverse as if it were just a plug with a spinal cord. As they have been from the very beginning the intelligentsia of today are the lab rats space monkeys and guinea pigs of tomorrow. Evolution is a screening myth for murder. And we all advance in sorrow for the end of things every step of the way. Yesterday’s achievement is the hurdle in the way of today. Get over it. War is twice the genius that peace ever was. Medicine’s learned more from body parts than it ever did the whole ones. Just as there seems to be more love in a broken heart than there is in a full one without cracks. One voice suggests I imagine a baby tortoise in the Galapagos descended from the one that is supposed to be holding up the world mountain on its back pecking its way out of its cosmic egg suddenly start to cry out as it breaks open the sky is falling the sky is falling! Everybody into their tortoise shells! And another spreads its wings like a water bird and takes a run at flying. But the one I like the best crawls out of its chrysalis in the morning like a butterfly that can’t tell whether it dreamed it was a wise word of wisdom in a fortune-cookie or a replica of the Cutty Sark under full sail that someone folded up and slipped like a love note into a bottle pleading for help like the ghost of a shipwrecked anachronism.

            I listen to a Friday night voice on the sidewalk below my second-storey window. I’m a bad ass muthafucka. Expressive but not too cogent. And the drunk girlfriend with a peal of laughter to put him in his place without taste or subtlety like a lower caste of sexual society. You wish. And then a voice says as if it were panning for gold nuggets of meaning. There’s no significance in this. And another that counters this is the triviality that history and archaeology will come looking for like the intimate jubilation of their own profound inebriation with the mystery of the dead that trembles over our bones like a divining rod over a watershed. The mystery of what we’re doing here on Foster Street on a Friday night in Perth as if it were a stage with streetlamps whether we’re drunk on whiskey drunk on stars drunk on the prospect of getting laid drunk on rage and humiliation drunk on our solitude or cooking up moon rocks in a tinfoil lily drunk on meanings colours words or what grows along the banks of the Tay River like teenagers and wildflowers along the meandering mind. Our life here on earth is expressive not definitive. The function of meaning is just the easel. The provisional scaffolding. Not the paint. The function of picture-music in the empty shrines of the mind is the singing not the saint. They’re both free. As I am. As anyone is. Of delusion and reality. And what’s absurd and what’s profound in the spirit’s lost and found is of no relevance whatsoever in a world where everything seems so brutally playful or playfully brutal while up above in the radiant expansiveness of time and space the stars are putting as much distance between themselves and us as they can as if they didn’t like what they see when they look at themselves through our eyes. And then a voice of assent that comes like the soft syllable yes of a blessing in disguise. This is the way it is. The way it expresses itself with nothing intervening. But the moment you set out to seek the meaning of it all you will see how ever long you search is not what it was meant to be. You won’t hear the drunken voices of the bad muthafuckas and their tougher girlfriends trying to shoot the stars out like road signs and mail boxes on a Friday night. You won’t hear the unvoiced watersheds of despair in the noisy fountains of their joy. 

PATRICK WHITE