SITTING IN THE DARK

SITTING IN THE DARK

Sitting in the dark

being who I am by acclamation.

The solitude half memory, half exorcism.

No one else ran for the position

so I’ve settled on trying to live up empathetically

to this person that’s tried for so long to be me.

The sound of the occasional car on Highway 7

six blocks away

puts its hand over its mouth.

Everything’s a secret at this time of the night.

And it occurs to me

I’ve always been a stranger to myself.

The enigma in the doorway across the street.

My windows. My keys. My locks.

But always looking up at my own place

as if someone else lived there instead of me.

A man with no return address on his homelessness.

As if I were always catching a glimpse of myself

going around the next corner

and I’m the tail I’m trying to lose.

Or giving the occasional mirror

caught totally off guard

cold chills in passing

like a ghost with unknown enterprises of its own.

My freedom enclosed

within the sum of its limits

I live in an elsewhere zone

where the mystery of what I’m doing here

goes to extremes

like a tent city outside

the vacancy of an unoccupied metropolis

of anti-social landlords

to prove I have a right

to the portable threshold of my homelessness.

I’m beached like a birch bark canoe

that isn’t going anywhere

on the shoals of my stream of consciousness

trying to figure out who’s doing the saying

and who’s doing the listening.

Though most people think

one is the spitting image of the other’s reflection

verbal expression is not thought

and you can’t hear it before you say it.

Even too late for the drunks to be out

I like the way the half-hearted moonlight

interprets my face through its fingertips

as if I were having my portrait done in Braille.

What could that look like

when you’ve connected all the dots

if not an eclipse or a new moon?

Take your pick.

And I may be somewhat out of touch

with how dark things have become

but I know this much

this much at least I know.

Worse than despair

is learning how not to care.

I mean what have you got left

when all’s been said and done and gone

if not for a few old reflexive delusions

in a holy war of tribal mirages

that have made a habit of your heart

just as drugs become the cosmology of junkies.

It’s no more absurd

to be left standing like an echo in a doorway

long after the house has been torn down

than it is to paint realistic watercolours in the rain

en plein air.

I thought I had a message once

worthy of descending doves.

I could feel the wind under the dragon’s wings

open like the firedoor to a furnace full of prophets.

And the words were mine true enough

until I realized how much life like art

is totally plagiarized from the medium it creates in

and how imperative it was

to be reborn from your mother-tongue

like a whole new language of evolving memes

if you want to be taken at your word

even in hell as in heaven

you know how to speak for yourself

without resorting to paracletes

even when you’re persuasively certain

no one can understand you.

Every word might contain a dead metaphor

but when mine aren’t demonically possessed

and speaking in tongues

they’re buzzing around the azaleas

like hummingbirds and bees

sipping black kool-aid in Jonestown.

I start out writing like a new moon

but by the time it’s done with me

I’m a total eclipse in an ink pot,

indelibly.

That’s why I’m sitting here in the dark

trying not to adulterate the light

with cosmic thoughts of all night streetlamps

in an empty parking lot

where everyone overpays a price

for their little square of time and space.

I’ve got a digital alarm clock

with three and a half numbers that glow in the dark

like an informant trying to warn me

before it’s way too late for all of us

to adjust my time-zone and dial it back.

To when?

To when it was a better world?

To when I was a better man?

To the last chance I had to become one?

PATRICK WHITE

TRY A LITTLE HUMOUR I SAID TO MYSELF

TRY A LITTLE HUMOUR I SAID TO MYSELF

Try a little humour I said to myself

as I held a Baretta up to my temple

to blast my way like the C.P.R.

through a tunnel in a mountain

to the seaward side of Hell’s Gate.

I tried to keep it light as a can of American beer

but beer to a Canadian poet

goes a lot deeper than that.

It isn’t a career it’s fate

and there’s nothing you can do about it

except try to engineer your suicide

like the Little Train That Couldn’t

to make it look as if you were laying track line by line

across a waterbed of four thousand square miles of muskeg

when you fell through a crack in the social net

like a childhood event in the life of Icarus

that keeps you from getting up off the ground

even at twenty-five below in a snow bank

drunk out of your mind

like some Canuck Dionysiac

dumbed down by his revels

after the Eleusinian mysteries of the sacred bars close early.

Revelation arrives here

like the memory of the night before

to a hangover that just can’t believe it.

The prophets of delayed insight

like the lag time on a star

see things in black and white

and hide in the bellies of killer whales

dressed like logos

protesting through their blow holes

the desecration of the seal hunt

haemorrhaging like ice-floes

in the ruthless gloaming

of the land of the midnight sun.

Imagine living in a mindscape

where you can’t dig wells or graves

half the year round

because the ground is as hard as an Irish nun.

And who needs rockets to get to the moon

when we rise per ardua per astra

through bolts and bars to the stars?

We reach cruising altitude

through a long runway

of dams and canals and locks

that elevate us slowly

like salmon swimming up stream

against the flow of time

like mystic beaver waterclocks

to enlightened extremes of undisciplined bliss

just before we die.

Fanatics of fair-mindedness

that balance life with death

by giving each its turn

to put an end to the argument

by seconding the suicides

of the winners and losers

in Last Duel Park

to make it a fair fight.

I’ve lived sixty-three years here.

I was born here

in the salmon-fishing capital of the world.

Campbell River, British Columbia.

And I still feel

like a political exile

who’s just taken sanctuary

on the grounds of the Canadian embassy

somewhere in my home and native land.

Here in Perth, Ontario,

out in the sticks

you belong to an extended tribal family.

Closer to town,

a distinguished blood line

of imperial ancestors

rooted five generations back

overly posed in sepia-tinged daguerreotypes

that look like they were painted in nicotine stains

against a backdrop of white with liver spots

and placed in funereal frames

to form a long scornful gauntlet

of moral opprobrium

down the long echoing halls

of the municipal mausoleum

where I go to buy my garbage-tags.

And where are the women

who gave birth to these stalworthies

of pride and place and privilege

in an imported milieu of cultured hypocrisy?

Were none worthy

of staring back at me disapprovingly

or were their hearts so big and compassionate,

their wombs so generous,

the ones who didn’t expire like daylilies

had to go so native to survive

they weren’t worthy of mention.?

Anyway, point is.

On any average day in Canada

since I was born

in the pantry of the world

I’ve felt like an endless Thanksgiving

I spend with myself.

My hospitable passport

a welcome mat I can drop

in front of any threshold in the world,

a screening myth for what was done

to the natives around here.

Maybe that’s why I feel

more homeless at home

than I do on the road.

I’m not staying long enough

to push the host out of his own house.

Good spiritual manners

and I’m a mannerly Canadian

are as much about timing as content.

Space may define the body of my country,

but it’s soul is time

measured in mountains and glaciers

and vast seabeds of prehistoric oceans

in lakes big enough to be the vital organs

of an entire continent

and stars so ferociously bright

in the absolute night air of mid-winter

they’d burn holes in anybody’s flag

like cluster-bombs of white phosphorus

were someone to try and naturalize them.

When you’re living in a country this size

it’s inevitable that you’re going to feel

like a small person forced to do big things

just to survive.

PATRICK WHITE

WHY DO YOU ALWAYS COME BROKEN TO ME?

WHY DO YOU ALWAYS COME BROKEN TO ME?

Why do you always come broken to me? Why do you never come whole and full of heart? I can barely remember the person you wanted to save from yourself. I recall the inspiration you were once to everyone around you, but who are these anti-muses of Logoland you keep wearing around me when we both know because we’ve been there, there are no phases on the dark side of the moon you can put on and take off to mask your faceless emotions. Most people only need three to get them through the rest of their lives, but you were Queen Honeybone, and you needed hives to house yours. And that was okay when things were sweet and every wildflower in the starfields prophesied in its sleep that no eclipse would threaten the honey again tomorrow. You were the black rose back then who wore too much make-up on your eyelids, because it was more important to you, as it still is, that more people saw them than you saw people through them. If you were too much of a sleaze-bag to call it lust, you called it love in those years to take the danger out of it and bind hot blood to you on principle, but when I first met you, I didn’t see a lot of chain marks on your skin, but when I looked in your eyes, I could see a lot of lost keys to an abandoned paradise you didn’t know what to do with. You were a knock-out, it’s true, as cruel and sexy as a winning hand in strip poker, and no one knew how it happened, but you were always the one that ended up with brain damage. I remember that back alley drugstore you used to carry in your purse, and that tiny emergency room behind your secret zipper where your dirty syringe was bagged like a snake in its own coils. And how, whenever I got into bed with you on those bad starless nights in the Glebe, when the snowbanks soaked up the blood of the barfights and the light of the streetlamps like tampons, and we tried to fuck ourselves to death out of desperation, I always felt I was making love to you in the back of an ambulance screaming to get to its own accident as fast as it can. You told me once how cool you thought it was to be the last militant suicide to jump from the Peace Tower. And then they put up the butterfly nets. And you took it as a personal insult. I got caught like a polar bear on an ice-floe in more snowstorms of coke with you that most Inuit have survived a blizzard. Long nights with our backs up against the wall in sparsely furnished studio living rooms that looked that way for real because to live the way we did meant you were only passing through. Brooding candles and mystically bruised bottles of dark wine. I once defined a mediocre poet as someone who was looking for a home, and a great one, as someone who knew he wasn’t going to find it. And you inferred from that you had to be a genius. And given what I wanted from you that night we discussed poetry like an occult science in the Kabbalistic candlelight of Third Avenue, who was I to argue? And though I wouldn’t say it then because I hadn’t died enough yet to know the difference, looking at you now, I am reluctantly repelled enough by your twisted strategies to coax my wavelength into being just another one of those loose threads in your flying carpet to tragically agree. You’ve gone way beyond me into hyperspace like a multiverse blowing bubbles like the spheres of expanding mirrors in a time warp. But it’s your tail, not mine, you’ve got in your mouth like the gaping zero that always let’s you know what time it is in infinity. Forever always comes back to the specious present of here and now as if it had never left in the first place. You can wear a lot of thresholds out on a back country road when you don’t know where you’re going at night, and I didn’t for light years after you left your Schick Lady’s Razor uncharged on the sink. I should have known by the way you put your lipstick on like revenge in that tiny squinting mirror on a spider mount you ripped off my telescope, it was time to turn off the music and close the doors of perception. Good night, my friends, good night. May you bear my absence as lightly as I do yours. It’s profoundly Keatsian to make a gracious bow to the mail man before you jump from paradise without a parachute or a star map’s permission to land without consulting the tower. I wanted to avoid a holy war between your angular stars and my celestial spheres, but you were never in the mood to be wrong and I was always out of white flags I could hang from the window like tragic bedsheets.

You had a band. Queen Honeybone and the Drones, and then you had the drummer. And that was that. I gave you back your black snake blues bass guitar like a total eclipse of the moon and decided I had better things to do with my bodily fluids that turn them into tears and spit on the stars you once walked on like a lead singer belting out revolutionary cliches of social behaviour you were the worst example of. So love went to work for the post office like fan mail and I headed deep into the country like a wounded wolf to look for herbal cures to urban maladies. I would occasionally remember you in the morning when I was listening to the honey bees humming in the locust trees powdered with pollen trying not to impale themselves on its Draconian thorns. And I’d write poetry on the flakey picnic table that drove slivers through my wrist like relics of the true cross that wanted to see me bleed from my stigmata to prove this was my real afterlife. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. And I lived for years like a witchdoctor in paradise with six thousand stars overhead visible to the naked eye against a darkness as thick and rich as Turkish coffee that turned Medusas into hookahs. And I saw how gently, everywhere I looked, whether at the ants orbiting the muskrat’s skull like tiny black satellites constantly making course corrections, or groping in the dark without a flashlight for the fuse-boxes of the fireflies in a black-out that came like a revelation of how fragile we all were, I saw how gently death carried the brides of life across the threshold and let them go again in the spring like wild grapevines and deadly night shade. By then I was enough of a herbalist to know the difference between a maenad and a witch. A good drunk and a bad acid trip. Though there was always something dangerously seductive about that hourglass tatoo on your ankle. And the way anyone who didn’t know when they were making love to you that timing was as important as content, disappeared by morning when you woke up like a cannibal that had gratified her sexual appetite. Sex might be food. Desert before dinner. But it bites when it comes down to who’s going to eat whose vegetables. And you were always the one with the inexhaustible golden spoon around your neck. Remember the Chimo Inn when I hung your bag of blow over the toilet like the sword of Damocles and asked you to choose it or me? And you hesitated. You lost control in the moment. You saw your reflection on my silver shield and you turned to stone. You shattered like a chandelier of a tree in an ice storm. And I watched how you struggled to shed your skin to make a new start together like an antidote to ourselves. And how your fangs turned into wishbones and broke apart between your pinky finger and mine and mine got the bigger part three out of four times. If I’d known as much cowboy Zen as I do now I wouldn’t have mistaken a fortune cookie for a real koan and wasted my time trying to break anything open so we could both be free of ourselves together. Sex was always a tsunami in a dead seabed on the moon with you, but what all this time away from you has taught me, is that without love in the mix, there’s no weather. No lifeboats. No shipwrecks. No mermaids calling you to the rocks like an old habit you thought you’d kicked in rehab. And there’s not much of an emotional life to a nightsea that’s flatlining in intensive care. Even if it’s a smart move to give your musical career a good scare now and again.

But I’m not trying to inflict pain upon you for the pain you afflicted me with like the black madonna of killer bees. You were the Aztec Catholic and I got lost in the deep woods like the infidel you made me out to be. The missing thirteenth imam of the Shiites who conscientiously objected to your holy war and more a warrior scholar of the Druids on his own than when I was with you, spent my days trying to decipher the shadows of the Kufic script of the wild apple trees in the exiled orchards around Westport in paint. I fell feloniously into paradise where things encountered each other like bees and flowers spontaneously. They didn’t swarm. And for nine years my heart got along famously with the spearheads that were embedded in it like the relics of bygone Indian wars that drove me off the reservation deeper into the wilderness than any tempter would dare. I said who I was in my solitude and buried my name in the night sums it up pretty much. I watched small things slowly grow for the longest time. I checked a garden every morning for the local news of what went down in the night like corn to a raccoon or a rabbit to a pack of coydogs who got their viciousness from the city that looked upon the country as a pet cemetery where what you once loved unconditionally had a cold-hearted chance to live. Either that, or they didn’t have the integrity to kill them outright. So the wounded were dumped at the side of a dirt road like good physicians to heal themselves. Some people put maggots on their wounds to disinfect them like the corpses of children who died of scarlet fever under their pioneer headstones lost like skulls in the grass epidemics ago. I cauterized mine with fireflies. I sipped home brew with covens of witchy women who asked me if I’d be willing to paint sacred murals in their Satanic shrines in virgin blood they’d blessed for the job. And they didn’t mind when I told them I was into painting country landscapes, but I couldn’t get as rural as all that because I was irreligious without meaning any disrespect to the judas-goats that bound them to the farm. And after they saw my work and caught a whiff of the wolf in me they left me alone to my own hunting magic like Orion on a winter night. A truce between the apostate sheep and the shepherd of wolves without recourse to a lawgiver like Lycurgus to separate the helots from the Spartans. And there I lived among my nine bean rows with one of the noblest women I’ve ever slept with, an artist from Westmount, who was nicknamed Black Savage, though she looked like Nefertiti, who was reputed to be by others who could see deeper than me, the most powerful witch in Ottawa. Sex was never a ritual. It was always an initiation rite. The new moon at its darkest. And then one day Lilith was gone from the garden to see if she could become as famous as Eve without standing in my shadow.

Alone again, heretically, with the black farce of my unconverted personal history repeating itself like an encore of evil clowns, I couldn’t help thanking you in absentia for how much you’d left undone to help me prepare for this event like the foreshadowing of a sad fact embedded in the black pearls of the mystery like a new moon whose youth was eclipsed by the darkness of the truth within her. Queen Honeybone, the Huntress, come back to renew her virginity in the toxic pools of her unicorn eyes spiced with horns and stingers. It’s death to see you again at your bath. But this time I’m not running from your hounds like a white stag or a wild boar. I’m not the shipwreck you tried to turn into a tourist attraction with a marriage proposal that was on the rocks before the first mermaid opened her mouth to sing. This time I’m waiting like a wolf pack of submarines on the moon in all your vital shipping lanes for you to make the first move. And when the jewel at the end of the witching stick of the wizard you broke goes down like the third eye at the end of my dick below the water line, kaboom! Up periscope! Like the lilaceous lifeboats and spotlights of the daffodils trying to trick the sun into shining at midnight to look for survivors in an oil slick. With no chance of history repeating itself like a negative whole number in a burning sea of incommensurable decimals of crack cocaine half a tone off that black bass snake blues guitar that used to sit in the corner like a cormorant on the rocks off shore and sing hauntingly beautiful snake charming lullabies to herself whenever she thought everyone else was sleeping. Queen Honeybone, once the princess bride of a genetic nightmare that pedalled in death like a pyramid, waking up, too late, weeping, with no one at her side but a flowerless wind in the deserted courtyards of her hive. You snorted the pollen and now you cry the hive’s deprived of honey. There’s nothing left to tempt the bears with as you rail the stars of Ursa Major on the one-eyed mirror of a reflecting telescope that finally got what she saw coming. Though it brings no one any joy to catching a falling star and lose a good guitar.

PATRICK WHITE

O LITTLE SISTER

O LITTLE SISTER

O little sister you’re an alley-cat alto-sax

howling on the fire escape

under a blue moon

that’s driven you into heat

just outside my window

for that arsonist boyfriend of yours

who used to puke in my potted geraniums

every time the two of you got drunk enough

to crash across my coffee-table laughing

even with each other for a crutch

you haven’t got a leg to stand on.

I was charmed by your romantic desolation.

I was intrigued by how much original sincerity

you both saw fit to squander on a cliche.

C’est la vie, c’est l’amor, c’est le guerre.

Elvis Presley is well and living in Tweed.

And Arthur Rimbaud is running guns

with Jim Morrison in Ethiopia for Al-Shabab.

Most people work harder at hope

than they do at achieving their downfall

and you were a fire hydrant

and now you haven’t got a hose.

No pun intended

I’ve known you too long

to see you this upended slurring your words

like the simultaneous translator

of an hourglass speaking

out of both sides of its mouth at once.

I don’t know why he left you.

Maybe there was nothing left to put out.

You burned out.

A piece flew off your heat shield upon re-entry.

Maybe any man who couldn’t hold his liquor

realizes sooner than later he couldn’t hold you.

I don’t know.

Go ask my geraniums.

They’ve got more to say about him than I do.

You make your death bed.

You got to die in it.

Next time build your house on stilts

in Stanthorpe Queensland

to keep the snakes away from your pillow.

What can I say?

He had a shoulder on his chip

that just couldn’t hold his end of the world up?

And don’t get me wrong.

I’m not laughing at your pain.

I don’t laugh at pain.

Pain is pain.

Different planets.

Different moons.

Who hasn’t gone swimming with dolphins

in the saturnine seas of Titan

or dropped a comet like a match

on a methane moon of Neptune?

Endomorphs and dopamines

can make you do a lot of funny things

that love is at a loss for words to justify.

Even if just for one wild night

of occult hunting magic

everyone longs to run with the wolves.

And howl, o little sister, you can hear them howling

in their blood agony at the waxing moon

as if something had died within them

that was so deep and crucial

it tore their hearts out

in an ecstasy of unrepentant pain.

And many many years later

when the solid abyss and hollowness of life

has grown even greater

you can still hear their voices

screaming like winter winds

above the timber-line

so high-pitched no echo

has ever been able to reach that high again

without shattering like a night bird

against the mirage of the open sky in the window.

Like you, little sister, now.

I’m not a sump-pump for anybody’s tears

not even my own

but I’ve been known

to throw a little heavy water

on a nuclear meltdown every now and again.

Pain. Separation. Loss. Dream death

you keep reliving like an afterlife in your sleep

you’re dying to wake up from

like a coma that’s lost everything worth waking up to.

Not two. Not two. Not two.

That’s the way it is here.

That’s as far as words go.

That’s where Statius takes over

from Vergil on the nightshift

and the stars nod off like children

who couldn’t finish the story

and the quality of the poetry drops

as dark genius opts out

of the company of bright mediocrities

trying too hard to make it a better world

than it needs to be.

For things it didn’t do.

And in a merciful world

that lived up to its teachings

and didn’t shrink the heart

with fear of its own extremes

while everything else is expanding

shouldn’t be asked to suffer like a placebo

in the glands of spurious cure.

And, yes, I know sometimes

it’s hard to keep up with the mysteries

like the elements of life on a geometric scale.

How many jugulars does a woman have

for someone to cut

like the downed powerlines

of the Medusa’s head

for having cast the first stone at herself?

You can wake the serpent fire

at the base of your spine

just above your coccyx

the hardest bone in your body

the little throne

the modest gravestone

you’ll be resurrected on

when you’re summoned from the dead,

but you can’t train love

to bite the people you want it too

and run like an antidote to the rescue.

That’s why you’re getting high

on your own poison right now.

That’s why your drunken tears

oscillate between a broken chandelier

that’s bleeding out

and acid rain that burns like love

congealing into a new ice age.

However deep you dig the grave

to bury someone you once really loved

even a desert at night

when the stars weren’t looking

wouldn’t be enough to fill it in.

It’s a wound without scar tissue

for the rest of your life.

The ghosts keep being pulled out of the box

like that kleenex you keep using

to dry your eyes at this seance

you’ve called on the spur of the moment

to be appalled by how lonely it is

to plead with the dead for severance.

PATRICK WHITE

EVERYBODY LOOKING FOR SUBSTITUTE STATES OF MIND

EVERYBODY LOOKING FOR SUBSTITUTE STATES OF MIND

Everybody looking for substitute states of mind. Trying to change the veils and myths they’re looking through, the blood-stained glass of their last full eclipse, the rainbow windows that can’t look the light clearly in the eye without dissembling like a chameleon. False prophets and snake-oil salesmen selling digestible fountains of youth to love-struck lightning rods that don’t conduct as well as they used to when they once could thread the eye of the storm like a bird on the wing. Now the shamans sit on cosmic eggs in nests of pubic hair waiting for a crack of dawn that’s long gone. And there are teenagers so far out of it they’re living their youth at the wrong end of the telescope like star clusters of displaced persons who don’t trust anything that isn’t as aloof and alien as the pharmaceutical fire-proofing they crawl into like a chrysalis of stillborn butterflies. True love is a junkie hanging by his neck in the deep woods because he lost his trophy girlfriend who keeps cutting her flesh as if she were inventing the first calendar by nicking and gnawing on herself like a bone. People fuck like pre-nuptials that took a contract out on themselves for vendettas that haven’t even crossed the threshold yet. Future crimes with present punishments. Abattoirs before mangers. The point of the pencil stabs the eraser in the heart. Voodoo as a wedding vow. The aftermath of Armageddon before the four horsemen of the apocalypse have had a chance to saddle up or the Mayan calendar strike twelve midnight. Root rot on the moon. Everyone without a leg to stand on trying to get a leg up on doom. Everyone drowned before the Titanic went down. Sending death threats to the future as a way of trying to survive their own paranoia. Real, imagined, or drug-induced. Terms of endearment dropped like mice into a snakepit. Mirages extolling the illusory nature of this desert of stars. Appearances inveighing against a clarity that can’t be trusted to be on your side like your eyes are when they’re open to whatever comes. Possession by a drug, a demon, an ideal, a political platform, rabies, religion, money, sex, the cult of the body, exotic states of mind with a surrealistic sense of black humour. Genies granting death wishes like urns of losing lottery tickets to Luna moths in despair.

Deranged. Everyone trying to put a happy face on a death mask. An artificial paradise in real hell. And it scares me sometimes. And other times it makes me want to weep. So many fish dying of thirst beside a freshwater lake. So many fish drowning in the dry creekbeds of mirages swimming in hallucinogenic waters. Toxic liars polluting the wellsprings of life like corporate impersonators with the souls of oilslicks. What shit haven’t we tracked into the house? We defecate in our own wombs. What jackal, what wolf, what caste of animal ever fouled its own crib the way we do? We eat everyday like a plague of locusts in the company of children’s corpses. And we call it a standard of living we’re prepared to kill or die for though it cost us the planet and every sentient life form on it. As long as the path is clearly laid out and strewn with rose petals and eyelids just for us, everything else is roadkill. A goatpath of thorns. Ghoulish the uncanny similitudes. All this just for us? Just us? Who die like flies do? This body bag of water with nine holes in it that is always leaking radioactively out of itself as if it were watering something it wouldn’t get a chance to see bloom like a magic mushroom. I remember a madman when I lived alone on a big isolated farm, trying to shoot the stars out all night, night after night, with an M-16 that ricocheted out over the lakes and hills like the echoes of ululating loons changing clips. Cops told me not to stand in the window with a twinkle in my eye. Might get mistaken for alpha Cassiopeiae. But I was so crazed myself at the time, I rose up like Regulus in Leo in a rage of the first magnitude and said like an enlightened sky to someone who is not. Take your best shot. I’m mythically inflated. The bullets go right through me. Though I don’t see what’s so urgently cosmic about this we’ve got to take it out on each other like eye witnesses. To what? How worthy of death everyone else in the world is because of a fucked-up relationship with our own hormones? Mommy beat you with a vacuum cleaner pipe because you tracked your life all over her flying carpet one day when you got home late in a hurry from school. Boo hoo. That doesn’t make you an Ethiopian. A cold sore isn’t Chernobyl. What sorry night scope declares a holy war against the stars in its cross hairs? The way I see it in my skull bound island fortress with emotional moats, the world is a couple of angstroms short of a wavelength to make anything bloom these days. The asylum is prying the petals of a crocus open with a crowbar. But the timing’s off. And not all the flowers open at once like banks and store-fronts with regular hours. And there are people who also serve by standing and waiting like fire-hydrants to be called upon to put Dresden out in a fire-storm. Someone garotted all the swans like prostitutes along the Rideau River as if they were cutting an artery off to staunch the flow of blood. What kind of a wound is that? Is your god a pimp pigfarmer that he should demand the blood sacrifice of the renewable innocence of a sacred whore? Are you the self-appointed proxy of a god who can’t speak for himself any other way than to send the likes of you to express your true feelings? To appall the world with another nightmare of what it’s capable of. See what I mean? Strange, strange dream. Elixirs and lictors of love potions addicted to solipsistic oil slicks. And the Sphinx not a snitch that’s apt to question anyone. The butchers go to sleep and wake up smelling as sweet as little Bo Peep in wolf’s clothing. Atrocity has become an unnewsworthy cliche to a nation of sensation seekers numbed by consumerism marketing alternative lifestyles to the skeletons in the closets they sold you last week. Everyone’s trying to sweat deodorant out of their pores. And when we open our mouths to speak when is anything heard like the word from the man that isn’t a mouthwash of lies? Kids take this in like smallpox among the natives and the next thing you know someone murders a highschool and some genocidal patriot is practising germ warfare by coming out with a new celebrity line of infected blankets. You can’t help ingesting the psychological pollution of whatever medium you’re swimming in. And there’s a critical mass to every tumour beyond which you can’t put the garbage can lid back on the nuclear waste like Pandora’s box or the Fukishima reactor. Or propose amendments to the constitution of a caste system that would help it digress peacefully into the middle ages possessed by the few miserable acres of a feudal land grant mortgaged and bundled by a baronial bank. You get the picture? You see the corpses in the Ganges flowing along with the pop cans to the sea like your mindstream sickened by what it discards the deeper and wider it gets? When do we all stand up and walk out of this snuff movie in disgust? When do we let our sons and daughters see us set fire to the movie house on you tube and go viral?

High-tech viciousness. Killer bees and nano chip parasites. Eleven dimensions and a shapeshifting multiverse with as many cosmologies going on all at once like feature movies ahead of the cartoons. And we’ve got this one, starring us as both the hero and the villain of a black morality farce. The Arabs say if you can’t help a situation with your hand, then use your mouth, if not, your mind, and if not that, keep a kind thought in your heart. And I used to think even growing up under the street here, you can get fat on the garbage of the promised land and rolling all your deprivations up into one massive black hole, still be looked upon justifiably by the rest of the world as a glutton. Rich people feel they deserve to be spoilt. So do most of the poor. And I’d seen enough shit by the time I was seven to make me want to write about roses for the rest of my life. But there’s the blood of children caked all over their eyelids like make-up. And being the Canadian poet I wanted to be at the time expiating my guilt for a crime I didn’t commit, I thought counter-intuitively maybe the word is mightier than the sword, though less succinct and to the point, if I were to scream murder when I saw murder being done upon the innocents, maybe the unwitting complicity of an eye witness might get off with a lighter sentence for being a dependable air raid siren. I went to boot camp to wage peace. I declared a holy war upon myself. I learned how to put root fires out with gasoline. I protested against my own seeing in the name of the inalienable rights of the blind. But savage indignation is no more protein rich than fame and flattery and going to war with a plough in your hands feeds about as many people as ploughing the moon with a sword does. So I met in the middle just a little to the left of Canada, and retrained them as shovels to dig their own graves given they weren’t all that good at gardens. Which left me as defenseless as Baffin Island wearing the scars of other people’s wounds. Quicksilver dolphins ran aground in mercurial bays due to a lack of tunnel vision. Driven exponentially by dark energy things began to expand in the aftermath of that insight until the stars grew so far apart I was compelled to make do with fireflies as an alternative state of mind. A little radiance for the blind. What did Robert Lowell say? We’re all here for such a short time we might as well be kind to one another? Before he died of a heart attack in a New York airport. And if he were alive today? I’d put these words into his mouth. If you won’t throw your pearls before swine, why sacrifice another messiah to a snake pit when no good comes of it? When in Rome do as the asylums do and wait for the sane to come to you pleading to be enlightened by the crazy wisdom of your daily meds. Learn to give your futility a purpose in life. Your absurdity a reason to live. Stop trying to get a grip on your mind by believing everything is out of control. Regard the extreme chaos of conditioned consciousness, yes. But don’t pollute the drinking water in a mirage by throwing a goatshead into it to deprive others from finding the holy grail. Where the delusion of power rules compassion is not well served by a crueller truth. Being is highlighted by the void with a magic marker. And if your myth fits your demonic origins wear it like a housefly that’s proud of its shit, but doesn’t take it out on other people because maggots don’t turn into butterflies. Drink deep from the dark elixirs that pours excruciating transformations into the chalice of your skull like spiritual exiles sweetening the hemlock with artificial flavours of black kool aid. Taste life right down to the last tea leaf of despair. Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, bone of my bone, suffering is a stronger bond than love if you’re not used to it. If you haven’t lost your appetite for eating your own. If you haven’t stopped cherishing your misery like a voodoo Barbie doll in military fatigues. If you haven’t stopped taking a bite out of your heart like a noble enemy who gives you the homoeopathic courage to carry on without one. Don’t shun the black mirror to keep up with appearances and plead you haven’t got time for reflection because nothing’s indelible in a world that keeps changing your mind like a watercolour that didn’t get it right the first time. Don’t suckle your sour grapes on acid rain. There are no substitute states of mind that are fool proof. Everybody answers after their own kind whether they’re on the road to paradise, Damascus, Pandemonium, purgatorial Perth, aligning compass needles in the direction of prayer, or drawing up starmaps like emergency escape routes out of here. As if here and now weren’t the precise space and time of what their own minds are trying to run to and from like the long odds of dark horses running back into a burning barn you can only enter through the emergency exits like a substitute state of mind gone critical on an artificial life support machine.

And, hey, who has the right to say, who can blame them? And expect an intelligible answer. Trying to open your third eye isn’t the same thing as trying to launch a spy satellite in Kazakhstan. Life isn’t a dirty movie your wife made behind your back you’re compelled to live frame by frame like a director’s cut. The triune identity of triple XXX isn’t restricted to sex alone. There are substitute states of mind just as guilty of identity theft that don’t leave any fingerprints at the scene of the crime because when you mark one you mark them all like plague doors and ostrakons and jewels in the net of Indra. Data is power when there are bugs in the tree of knowledge. Telescopic keyholes in the gravitational eyes of dark matter. The bituminous clarity of deep space washes its hands of the matter in fire. Which makes fire out to be just as big a liar as the hot water we’re all up to our necks in watching our lives flash before our eyes like post cards from an acid trip we haven’t come back down from yet because we’ve been down so long it looks like up on our passports. Born in the thirteenth house of a raving zodiac, it’s your front door, and there’s no doubt it’s your sign, but the junkmail accumulates on the inside like substitute states of mind without a point of reference or a reliable address. Life after life passes you by like a loveletter with return to sender as the final resting place of your name. As the windows frisk the light for concealed weapons and liberation armies addicted to dope. If the doors of perception were open, and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds thawed into a Hard Rain That’s Gonna Fall without the carbon emissions of an exhausted life committing vehicular suicide in the garage by breathing in the expired atmosphere of a tired planet, if the cataracts in your eye were to disappear like ice off your mindstream by noon, and the mud and clouds in your puddle were allowed to settle and clear like Soto Zen, and you didn’t rely on substitute states of mind like simultaneous translators trying to express your mirror image in your native language without a Rosetta Stone, all things would appear as they are. Boundlessly finite. And homelessly out of reach. Whether you’re wishing upon, or trying to shoot out the stars.

PATRICK WHITE

MY SOLITUDE BLUNTED BY DIVERGENT PSYCHES

MY SOLITUDE BLUNTED BY THE DIVERGENT PSYCHES

My solitude blunted by the divergent psyches of too many split ends. The strong rope unravelled into a million weak threads of downed powerlines and neural disconnections. Messiahs on meds asking that the bitter cup be taken from them as they despair of ever being able to express their martyrdom in paint for a forty buck a night muse of morphine that smiles upon them like Mary Magdalene. I seek the silence of the stars out in the dark fields beyond the lights of Perth. I crave their radiance. I expose my veins to the light sprinkling from the tips of their fangs like happy syringes to hit up on the vastness within and how close we all come to eternity without ever experiencing it like fish that are unaware of water. If space is expanding does time go along with it as well? Does time really stand still at the speed of light or does it just slip into the coma of another thoughtless waterclock that carries everything with it downstream? I feel like one of the untimely incommensurables of my own lucidity getting by without a starmap or anywhere in particular it wants to go like a sign of the times with equinoctial black holes that ate the spring and now the autumn of my life. At home with the damaged outcasts of an expedient extravagance that adapted them like seagulls and crows to the generosity of garbage as a survival tactic that made them feel they were getting away with something like slaves right under their tormentor’s nose, I am anciently at home with all things nocturnal like a pariah of dark energies who shuns the spotlight so as not to be blinded by his own blazing and be ambushed on the bright side of things. I face my own extinction like a timber wolf mourns what happened to the moon. And the people I run with know what a leg-hold trap tomorrow can be for the cow they savaged today in the time-honoured way of life to survive on itself. I stray up out of the valley as often as I can on my own after a day of hunting down below just to get the streetlights out of my point of view and keep the omnidirectional edge of my focus on the wild side of things by renewing my acquaintance with stars like Rhea’s milk flowing out of a Cave in Crete where she suckled Zeus into the Road of Ghosts as the Ojibway called the Milky Way and kept him from being swallowed like a swaddled asteroid by Chronos. My mother almost saved me from my father, but I was not breast fed. My teeth came in too early. Long before I was littered like Rome and both sides of my personality were abandoned by my father to a she-wolf’s tit, I swear I was the Egyptian wolf religion Lycurgus brought back to Sparta like a law-giver to straighten things out there by telling everyone to steal all you want but just don’t get caught. I suppose I could have lived like a fat maggot on carrion, or taken one of my frayed life lines and gotten wrapped up in a political career like a tapeworm naturally selected to live securely in the bowels of life with high priced consultants to chew my food for me. But I preferred to pull the sword out of the stone with my teeth like a porcupine quill for myself and take one of these old mountains for my throne rather than be spoonfed Gerber’s bullshit in a high chair. I’d rather be one of the zodiacal misfits not invited to the calendrical table of domesticated knights each with a sign outside a house of their own. I’d rather drink blood from my own skull in a year of drought than holy water from a grail the ailing kingdom is propped up in bed to sip from like soup spit out of a faith healer’s mouth like a cobra or the Taliban into the open wounds of my eyes. I shrug the acid rain off with a twist of my body and inflate my fur for snow. I like the ferocious clarity of the air up here. I’ll get back to the pack later with its lead female and big strikers nipping at the size of the balls of their juniors who keep contesting their place in line. Up here where the ice cracks through the unmarrowed bones of the mountain like a miner into motherlodes of gold I like to clear the coalbin of my head until all that remains of the original impact down below are grains of meteoritic diamond that bear a slight resemblance to the stars that do not so much as shine by a light of their own as snarl.

And O my good bad aberrant brothers and sisters with your precipitous insights into where you have to stand at the edge of the known world to get the best acoustics if you want to be heard like a madman in mourning by the moon above the world mountain Sisyphus is trying to re-roll the last avalanche up. As if even this absurdity of the turning season had an undiscerned purpose you had to be right out of your undefined mind to be privy to. There’s a stark dignity to a bone the flesh has been stripped from like a white-tailed buck in deep snow. Something romantically savage about the emptiness in the eyes of a skull that fell like a bead off the foodchain like the secret name of the god that first threaded it with blood like a rosary of alternate new moons and eclipses of the heart. Here killing for sport and recreation or ideology and desecration isn’t the same thing as killing to pass the flame of life on like a theft of fire from a lightning strike. Maculate mutable blood caked on the maws of the predators sticking their noses in the vital organs of haemorrhaging roses is a scarlet letter closer to the truth of the way things are up here than all the Valentine’s candy that rots the teeth of the sheep in the valley. There’s way more compassion in a sharp knife and a quick kill than there is in being tapewormed to death in the cattle barns and dairy farms of human kindness. Or to have your heart gouged out while you’re still alive like an Aztec sacrifice to a god who’s got his hands full forging passports in an embassy of scapegoats looking for asylum in their afterlives from crimes against humanity the victims are expected to redress on behalf of those who dispatched them like a priestly Stockholm syndrome in reverse.

O my fierce companions baring your lives like the fangs of broken mirrors, your delinquency is not a sword dance under lofty chandeliers that have reserved a space under the table of life for you, not an underground legend of cosmic necessity in a comic farce of star-nosed moles. Raise your muzzles like telescopes to the stars and howl out loud to let them know you’re gathered here in all your crazy wisdom waiting for the snow hare to break cover and run like Lepus kicking up stars at the heels of Orion. Let the world lavish its affection like a leash on house broken lapdogs nosing the stumps of a clear cut forest of fire hydrants for any signs of life they might hesitate to pee on like a truce it wouldn’t be too circumspect to break. I see your gashes. I see how you twist in agony and chew your legs off like Huike at Bodhidarma’s cave seeking liberation. I know how you eat your own hearts for courage. I see your scars. I see the strong medicine of the antiseptic tongues you apply like lunar poultices and bandages in the way you seek solace from one another without making the other vulnerable and weak. You are not the ghost amputees of an ancient dismemberment that defaced the wilderness at the hands of a serial killer among missing messiahs. You are not lurking in a dark wood to ambush a cynical poet karmically waiting to be summoned by a beatific vision of a muse who died long before he got a chance to touch her. Yours are the lineaments of fire not smoke. Desire, hunger, hunting, longing, freedom, grief, and life all burn in you like the rogue stars of a constellation that refuses to be fixed to the usual wavelengths of blood on the snow that hang halfmast from a flagpole in front of a creative finishing school for dead metaphors and symbolic acts to extract nature red in tooth and claw out of the hard cold facts of an explicitly illicit existence.

PATRICK WHITE

LOOKING AT STARS FROM SPY ROCK

LOOKING AT STARS FROM SPY ROCK

Looking at stars from Spy Rock

on top of Foley Mountain,

Westport glowing like an alloy

of red algae and fireflies down below

around the sacred pools of small mouth bass

raised from fingerlings

to lure the fishermen of Hazelton Pennsylvania

to this pioneer pantry of wildlife up north.

I can remember you naming them out loud

like Santa Claus’ reindeer.

Deneb, Vega, Al Tair.

And I tried hard to look

but I couldn’t take my eyes off of you.

And I’m up here again by myself many years later

and there are two ghosts on the wind

casting their shadows on the Milky Way

two black holes in time

that took it all in

then disappeared.

We didn’t separate.

We just evaporated into thin air

and I can hear the flowers saying

in their small damaged voices

I’d rather die than put up with this time of year.

Semi-hibernating raccoons

and the occasional brown bear

looking for a last snack before sleep

before snow

before the flame of life

is turned down so low

it’s merely a candle living off

the lifespan of its own fat

just long enough to keep the dream

of what bears dream about alive

until hunger drives them out of their caves

twelve thousand years later

into a world they can no longer recognize

as the one that dressed up in their hides and their skulls

and spit-painted on their cave walls

and appealed to their power not to kill it outright

as it begged forgiveness for its trespass.

Bear magic on Foley Mountain.

Ursa Major in starlight.

And for awhile I thought you might be

my circumpolar girlfriend

and I could be your mystic star map.

You had the right ascension as me

but the wrong declination

and like everything else

that’s ever led me out of the wilderness

like the only direction left to go in

you rose and set over my event horizon

and what had been the fixed stars of my eyes and heart

wandered off like fireflies and chimney sparks

into a darkness I could only imagine

enhances your shining somewhere

like a warm breath of life and light

hovering in the cold night air

as mine is exorcised here.

We breathe the stars in

and then we breathe them out

and it’s been going on like this

for thousands of light years.

Three more nights

and the moon will catch up to Jupiter.

You said you couldn’t be famous

standing in my shadow

but what you didn’t realize at the time

I was the shadow of your shining

whenever you approached the earth

like Venus on a moonless night.

But how remote it all seems now.

Encounters of the human kind

reverting like the unploughed fields around here

to something intimately alien and wild.

We embodied all these stars once.

We stood here on this mountain once together

and breathed these vacant interstellar spaces in

as if we could hold all of space and time

like a single drop of insight

into the circuitous blossoming

of our riverine hearts

and oceanic minds.

And what myth of spring fish

could fathom our depths

though it jump like Pisces into the boat?

Up here in my eagle-eyed eyrie

do these receding hills at my feet

remember anything as vividly as I do

as the sound of your voice when you spoke

and the mountain came down prophetically

like an avalanche of stone tablets

across the ups and downs

of the road that led us up here

to look into the empty beyond

as far as the light

we were given given to go by

whether it be the hundred billion stars

of Messier thirty-one

two million light-years away

like the sister galaxy you are to me tonight

just this smudge of light at eleven o’clock

above the middle star

of the constellation Andromeda

or a firefly in the spider mount of a parabolic mirror.

Sometimes you can notice things more clearly

that you can see head on at the time

out of the corner of your eye

as you look away from your line of sight

astronomical units of light later.

I have come back to those moments

from so long ago

like time with an expanded field of vision

of wildflowers dying all over the mountain

like cornflowers in the grave of a Neanderthal

incarnadined by red ochre

though none were ever buried here

we still share this common ground of death

or Indian tobacco at the eastern gates of the burial hut

of an Algonquin who once stood here as I did

and gazed upon the moon in wonder

estranged by the wound of the rapture

just moments before he disappeared for good

into the bone-box of his having been here once

to amaze his solitude with precipitous stars

looking up from the godless pulpit of Spy Rock.

The cedars sway in the wind

like children learning to swim beside a pool

ploughing the air with their arms.

And the shadows tremble

like the waters of life

inside the heartwood of a rootless tree

the moon ripples with forgotten springs

that once made the fish jump at fireflies

wavelengths out of reach of their eyes.

Sight is a kind of love.

As above so below

like the palindrome of the moon goddess Anna

in the Arabic jana

the English heaven

and the Greek ouranos

Romanized into Uranus analeptically.

O what a brutal exchange.

All that life and light and love

all those stars

all that seeing

just to exhume a few dead metaphors

and breathe a little life into them

as if you were giving

mouth to mouth

heart to heart

spirit to spirit

resuscitation to words

that once saw their whole life flash before them

before they drowned

up to their necks and out of their depths in stars.

PATRICK WHITE