THE ISSUE

THE ISSUE

I see the sadness in the world, the malevolent madness

of the dogs of pain snarling at the moon in the tree of life,

the way people cut and claw and desecrate each other

and walk away as if there were a victory in the slaughter, a hero in the butchery

that hacks and packs the corpses in the shrieking streets,

the raped daughter, the man on his knees who bleats for mercy

from indifferent gods whose thunderbolts have changed to cattle-prods.

Little, petty people everywhere, runts of the heart and mind,

wee weak ones with the poison syrup of your smiles

distilled from killer bees, you who like to grind your heel into the human face

and celebrate your hydrophobic power as a state of grace,

I ask you here on planet earth, this dirty tear among the stars,

in this horrible hour between birth and death, are you a race

of vicious midget, spiritual pygmy, or emotional dwarf,

when you were given breath and blood and light,

were you an atrocity of genetic reciprocity, did you wince at the sight

of yourself in the mirror, repulsively queer and full of fear,

did your mother abandon you on a stone to rot,

give you to a circus, an abortion clinic, a church step, a garbage bag;

are you angry for all the things you know you’re not; do you gag

on the beauty of others, their gifts, their truth

and plot a coup to overthrow anyone who isn’t you, your puny proportions

the prototype of all your replicate distortions

until the earth is filled with ugliness and grief,

and even the strongest are consoled by the fact that life is brief?

What hideous art scars the bitter apple of your heart like a worm

and thorns and norms the form of every thought with malice?

Are you a fly in the chalice, a maggot, a convulsion of dirt;

are you washed clean of yourself by the tears of those you hurt?

Everyday a hundred species disappear, oil and faeces

smeared across the living face that’s mirrored on the waters,

and the moon repelled by the odium of what its light must shine upon.

Lucky the stars that burn so far and furiously away

from this disgrace of molecules and ghouls that only the fools

in schools for the deaf and blind look for reason in the treason,

error in the terror that you wreak. You see birds,

you learn to fly. A century later whole cities die in a flash of light

at the end of your quest for flight. You’re born with a tongue,

you learn to speak, and you say the rich must have what they seek

and the poor will bleed until their hearts are withered by need.

You’re given eyes and clear night skies and a mind behind it all

in a world of revelations, and you learn to see and name,

and by the time you’ve festered into maturity

the vision is grimed by the smog of your vain obscurity,

nacreous cataracts the skies that fog your eyes,

and you’re laying the blame on the picture frame

that holds nothing but the death mask of you, eyes closed,

and yours the signature of the artist for whom you posed,

but nothing of insight, nothing of character disclosed.

Brutal monkey, murderous ape gland, prenatal purge,

is this the world you planned as a gesture of spite,

this jest and riddle of misery on the verge

of serial catastrophe to gratify your calamitous urge

to indict existence for your devolving plight? 

Here among mystics, lovers, poets, painters, sinners, saints, 

singers, astronomers and clowns,

mesmerized by night, or useful as day,

what embodiment of pain justifies the febrile tides of hate

that animate your imagination for decay,

the treachery of the cannibal heart that leeches its own clay?

There must be a hell for you if nothing more

than to meet yourself as you are

behind every opening door, in every house of pain,

in every abattoir, scrying the gore on the bestial floor,

to discover your own features

in the severed eye and lifeless hand of a hundred million creatures.

You’re insane. Every thought, a blister of the brain, a scar too far.

These were your teachers, and every time you applied your iron rule,

and raving in your dementia, or rationally composed, killed one,

you liberated another buddha from a fool, another sky, another jewel

from the treasury of your own lie,

the one that beats on your heart like a drum

and never lets you forget

that for all the noise you make in the empty silo of creation,

you’re not the harvest, you’re the crumb.

PATRICK WHITE

I KEEP RETURNING TO THIS LINE IN MY CHILDHOOD

I KEEP RETURNING TO THIS LINE IN MY CHILDHOOD

I keep returning to this line in my childhood

I once stood in one dreaded day

every month with my mother

to prove I was loyal and reliable,

waiting for food at what was

back in the late fifties

called the Foodstall.

Though we were not animals.

We were simply poor

at the mercy of the God-wielding charities

and though it’s nowhere near the same degree

as it is of kind, we almost felt

like natives in the hands of the Catholic church.

Mostly separated mothers left in the lurch of love

with two or three whining kids

that were plague rats of measles,

mumps, ringworm, and cold sores,

agitated as electrons wanting to jump orbitals.

Natives, dried-out rummies

with faces like desiccated orange peels,

more alcoholics than druggies back in those days,

the addle-brained with psyches like quicksand

they kept falling into, some lambs

and some the tigers

that wouldn’t lie down with them.

Lonely bachelors that came out

of their self-imposed exiles

once a month to this lottery of foodstuffs

they carried home in a big brown

Vancouver refinery two ply paper white sugar bag

stitched together like the parched skins of mummies,

as if they were carrying a woman back to their place

like one of the Sabine maidens they’d snatched

to populate Rome with their solitude.

Women with too much make-up on,

a lot of them bruised,

their black eyes waxing from dark blue

to the festering yellow of ruined orchids,

as my mother’s used to

before my old man left for good.

A few boisterous madames

with chameleonic hair

that changed colour every month,

laughing and talking too loud

as if to show the more righteous among mothers

how free and flamboyant and flaunting they were

in the face of anyone’s disapproval,

as if they always had a trick up their sleeve,

though that wasn’t always the case

or they wouldn’t be standing there with us.

I keep returning to this line in my childhood

as if it held me no matter

how hard I’ve struggled to get off it

like a spinal cord tied to a kite and a key

that’s dangerously exposed to the lightning.

Shame. Humiliation. Guilt.

Though God knows for what

when you’re a child

trying to figure out what you did,

thinking you must be evil because you can’t.

Three hundred people lined up for hours

like a caterpillar that went around the block

exposed to public scrutiny

that felt it had a right to stare

because they were doing their share

and from the looks of things, we weren’t.

though I saw what bleach can do

to a woman’s knees and knuckles

when she was trying to raise four kids

by scrubbing a rich woman’s floors.

There are bitter moments in life

that can burn holes in your heart

like the Taliban splashing acid

in the eyes of a young girl who can read.

My mother could paint.

But not with her hands bleeding and raw.

Not with her mind and heart

scorched with anxiety

like a hot iron branding an ironing board

like another steer in the herd.

Even writing about it

I am depressed by the ferocity

of my boyish helplessness fifty years later,

as I stand beside her

to help her carry the bag home,

slabs of black bear meat

with tufts of hair still on it

haemorrhaging through the paper,

that would rip open

like the stitching of a wound

in the side of the lunar bull of abundance

Mithras Tauroctonus killed,

partially bruised vegetables and fruit,

usually a small bag of day old donuts,

two loaves of bread, leprous margarine

with a packet of orange dye

to mix into it for a little local colour,

sugar and canned spaghetti,

macaroni with powdered cheese,

brown potatoes sprouting

virginal green tendrils for tails

that made them like giant sperm,

would come pouring out of it

and scatter all over the sidewalk

to deepen the spectacle

of our monthly fertility ritual.

Everything was second hand,

even our food.

Even the way we felt about ourselves

for living the way we had to.

Everything shabby, used, abused

with an aura of ruin about it

you couldn’t get out of your heart,

your psyche, your clothes,

like the smell of death

in the upholstery of a car

where someone had died at the wheel

at the side of the road three days ago.

Street shrinks by seven,

pessimist philosophers by eleven,

even the children reeking of experience,

their innocence rooted like mushrooms

that came up overnight

in the compost heaps of life.

I stood like a pawn beside

the dethroned queen of my mother

and thought one day all this will be reversed

and those who were blessed

and didn’t pass it on

would later be cursed for realizing

too late the hard way,

that you really can’t hang on to anything

in this world of change,

this cosmic hour glass

shaped like lungs,

the valves of the heart

that keep reversing themselves,

that you haven’t already given away

just like your last breath

to make room for more.

Even in the spring,

even in the sweltering heat of summer,

wet winter days when the leaves

were plastered like collages

of artists in despair to the sidewalks,

after the cross burnt the scarecrow

as the strawdog of an idolatrous heretic,

we were always the last birds allowed in

to glean what was left of Eden,

before the hunger of winter

closed it down again and the tourists

went home to their homelessness with the poor.

And the seagulls and the mice

and the feral cats and the rats

that always seemed to have

so much more right to be there than we did

waiting for the loaves and fishes

to be broken on the hillside

though we were made to stand for hours

on heel-numbing cement designed

to torment your feet by standing

in place too long as the line

inched its way up the the front

like a millipede of people

growing nasty and impatient

to get what they needed to get

of what was left, then get gone

as fast as they could not to belong

to the bottom feeders in the same lifeboat

they’ve just been standing among.

And though my mother didn’t say much,

standing there in her isolationist silence,

there was always a troupe

of housewives in kerchiefs,

turning the trivial gossip of a reality show

into a running sore soap opera

they improvised from one end of the line

right up to the time the door opened

to let them in and they left the stage

to get down to the serious busy

of picking out the best turnips

and the less stale loaves of bread

suspecting the Elk’s Lodge ladies

had stashed the freshest for themselves

as a spiritual perk for all their altruism

that remotely tasted like vinegar

mixed with the deathly sweetness

of the canned milk of human kindness

as if one too many flies and angels

had dipped their wings in it

so that by the time it got to us

or we to it, it was an albino oil slick

from a cow that jumped over the moon

in total eclipse. Circus tricks,

hoops of fire with ringmasters

the barnyard made the caged tigers

jump through once a month

through the endless zeroes

of a slinky wound around the block

that had swallowed all of us heart first

like a multi-headed hydra

with a bellyful of hungry people

in a line that’s only grown longer over the years.

PATRICK WHITE

SUDDENLY THE NIGHTWIND

SUDDENLY THE NIGHTWIND

Suddenly the nightwind comes

and scatters me like dust, leaves, stars, birds,

flakes of blood and paint from a dried rose

and I am nowhere again among the extracted windows

compiled like used theories in the mind-dump,

cataracts, fog, ice between their thermal panes

an obsolete encyclopedia of seeing, image, view,

skating rinks and skies that shattered like eggs

from which nothing ever flew.

Believe me when I tell you

there is not a flame or a shadow

as lost as I am when I fall like moonlit rain

from this endless pilgrimage of clouds

into the wells and watersheds, the dark godheads

and cracked mud of ancient creekbeds

once urgent with my flowing. And I am a fanatic

of unknowing when the darkness

overtakes me on the wing, an apostle

of undelivered monologues

humming like a powerline

in the ears of inattentive telephones,

the dirty needle of a compass

that has shared one too many directions

with the addicts of the north. In the freefall

of this vast space that confounds my eyes

with numberless illuminations, gravity

is just another superstition, light

a bride that leaves me standing at the altar,

baffled by absence, time, and futile distances.

Even the atoms of my body

are the liberated doves of a scuttled ark

that waits in vain for signs of land

when the waters roll me like a drunken sailor

far from any port of call

that ever pressed me into service.

I grieve like a passport

for vanished borders, circumferences

subsumed in parsimonious points

once radiant with lighthouses,

and all the clandestine crossings of my youth,

the zeniths, nadirs, transits,

all the date lines and ecliptics,

the equinoctial colures

that adorned my green meridians,

my perilous explorations,

with nautical clocks

and astrolabes that shone like jewellery.

Now I drift, an empty lifeboat

through unknown waters, the toy

of any wind and current

that wants to play me like a map

or a spiritual castaway

that grew old on the way to the rescue.

Even the language that I use, the tongues

I once mastered to implore the world to stay,

the tines of disaffected lightning

that taught me how to pray,

are the fossils of white serpents, harps

and combs of bone between the shale

of books that sank like continents,

the cacophonous keyboards of burnt pianos,

the scales and frets

of Pre-Cambrian guitars

that never learned to lie

by listening to themselves

like birds in rootless trees.

And if now I write with the unmanned rocket

of a pen that’s left the solar system,

sending back these junkmail messages

these chainletters without return addresses

in my search for intelligent life

to thresholds that don’t exist

except as the lost and founds

of imaginary households,

it’s only my way of whistling in the dark,

of trying to make contact with myself,

of riding to shore like a boy on a dolphin

or the crest of a homing wavelength

from the ghost of a failing beacon.

And though the solitude is overwhelming,

the oceanic closure of the dark

a rock on the tomb of embryonic ages

that will rise to their feet again

and learn to walk from heart to heart,

star to star

in a revery of origins

that seeds the journey back,

certain of their courage in the open,

do not mistake the obvious fools

for the hidden harmony

that guides them with an empty hand; there is

no plea or warning in my voice,

no call for help or a place to stand

that isn’t already the ruined capital of the going,

and it’s been that way for years.

PATRICK WHITE

AND I DON'T KNOW IF I SUCCEED

AND I DON’T KNOW IF I SUCCEED

And I don’t know if I succeed myself

in every moment, a hereditary dynasty;

are ashes the continuum of fire, sorrow

the natural legator of joy, one thought

the progenitor of the next? How

can the mirror reflect itself

unless all things are mirrors

drinking from their own faces; unless

there are roses even as we speak

growing the eyelids and lips

of young women elegant

as eighteenth century herons and willows,

a poet who once dedicated himself like rain

to the battered body of the moon,

trying to turn his visions into atmospheres

that she might breathe again,

that the atrocity of her nakedness

might be clothed in orchids and grass

that shuddered in the gentle foreplay of the wind,

now bagging grams like the loaves and fishes

of a street messiah? In a world

where it is always autumn for the children

who wither and twist like brittle leaves

in the arms of desecrated mothers

whose wombs are trivial catastrophes, the flesh

of their emaciate sons and daughters

buried like shoes in short graves

pathetic with flowers, is art, is God, is love

merely the dodge and deceit

of the bored and obese, these

metaphors and symbols, this search

for a truce among these unknown factions

on which I ruin myself

in minor holy wars against ferocious kennels,

only the debauchery and douche

of a mystic luxury

that refuses to see the moon and the earth

for what they are, a blood-stained rock

beside a shattered skull? I love

the orange trollops of the wild honeysuckle

and the open palm of summer stars

that comes in the night for a reading,

I love the negligent beauty of the high fields

and the radiant empires of time

that suggest I was not always thus

in the all-night laundromats

that pry through my dirty linen

out of the corner of their small town eyes

to see if I’m deranged or dangerous, but how many times

in a mudpack of disgust and laughter

who has not reviled the self-indulgent facials

that estrange them from the truth

of what they fear they have become,

a pampered sin of omission

looking for the words to enroll their emptiness

in a night school for working corpses?

PATRICK WHITE

PATRONYM

PATRONYM

And relieved to be vast again, stepping through the backdoor

of the murdered house where I left my heart

inscribed on the studio floor

in a rosary of chalk, martyr to a rage of freedom,

I fathered a gentle nation in the eyes of bellicose stars

humbled by the failures of the wise.

Venus in Virgo and eras of birds in the trees, my blood

proclaimed propitious omens of a thriving solitude

to the knife of light that candled in my hand.

The ghosts of dead wolves padded through me like a pulse

and as far as the night could see into the blind water

of the flowing clock that aged like the moon

on a pilgrimage of tears, I was saved by the bleeding bell

of my own sorrow, a lifeboat in the desert,

the colossus of the sky bridge in my brain

that spanned two hemispheres with owls of inquisitive light.

And though I’ve agreed to disagree with fate

and account my eloquent wounds

the restless graves of dark angels buried in sacred mirrors,

there’s no point in desecrating the obvious,

I enflamed the insurrection of lost keys

that clamoured for sanctuary at the cemetery gate

with radical slogans of bones and ultimatums of flesh

demanding passion or death for the squalls of sparrows

that kept arriving like refugees, relics of the true cross.

And I have been liberated by so many things,

science, art, religion, history, politics and love,

struggled and died in the name of so many opening doors

that every thought is a transgression of thresholds,

every morning, one link less of the chain,

the victorious entrance of rebel birds into an abandoned capital.

I’ve lost count of the nights, furious with stars

that have overthrown the masters of precision,

and the soft blue skies charmed by the eyes of elegant women

that have run up my spine like makeshift flags

they’ve suppled from their urgent blood,

everyone a comet, an evangel of leaves, fire-bloom

on the dead branch of long, imperial winters.

How could I not be grateful

to the underground cabals of the rising spring

that has purged my house of fanatics and spies

who watched me out of the corner of their eyes

with the cunning of shattered windows? All praise

to the uprising of the wind and the revolutionary rain

and the sun that comes beaming like a general

dressed in his workday shadows without his medals on

in a coup of transcendent water that has moved my roots to light.

And in the night, when I drink and laugh with the stars,

among philosophers and mystic poets stashed away like wines

against a day of celebration, what a joy

to throw off the ruse of my heart

and turn my tongue loose like a slut,

no more informers at the table. Who cares

if I am famous for falling down

among the lighthouses and watchtowers of sober cities,

or if I’ve got my life on inside out?

What road doesn’t follow me home to my last address

like a star that wants to get lucky or a crutch

that doesn’t want to enter heaven limping?

How can I be lost among the last minute godsends

and landmark suicides that have put an end to the firing squads

and their chronic executions of ice and snow;

even my glasses have emerged from their chrysalis

like a dragonfly with wings, and I am inconsolably happy

among the water hyacinth and clefs of fiddleheads

tuning up like heretics to all that whispers of change

between the parentheses of the moon that enfolds me in her arms.

And that is a mighty charm in the marrow of the matter,

that is much and more than enough to believe

that today is a literate beast that will confide in me tomorrow

the cryptic source of the star-flavoured rivers of life

and that now is the seed of being where all these rivers end.

And there is no doubt of the wonder that enraptures the radiance

of simply being here at all to enhance the shining

with wheels of rain and the light upon light of a mind

that was born to see things in a very human way. I am

so brief and little among the magnificent planets,

the whole universe out to the most ancient galaxy

acquainted with the void, no more in my deepening ignorance

than the smeared mirage of the seductively unattainable

on the tinest shrine of insight and water

that hangs from a blade of stargrass in the morning like a world.

When the seeing is all there is everything lives

as if it were entirely the wealth of an empty hand.

And I have squandered myself lavishly

on teachers that were never home until I discovered

where I live and who reveals the wells they drink from.

My death is behind me like the history of everyone

who’s ever walked upon the earth

welded like a fossil by the lightning

to the heartwood of their own mortality; and my afterlife

is affluent with cradles that only the moon can fill

with the dark fires of the new in the glowing arms of the old.

And never let it be said that I have not been intimate

with the indiscretions of the divine, not heard

the whisper in the background at the other end of time.

Despite the bleach of platitudes and the phantom auroras

that leech the colour from the truth like ions and sunspots

the lighter elements at the core of my burning,

the beautiful hydrogens, the heliums of spring

fused into iron and calcium, earth, blood, and bone,

and the watersheds of the shining almost

a ghost sea of the moon fed by rivers of dry shadows,

the dust of the road is under the feet

of the dust that walks upon it

like an old teacher who has known all along

what the white, sweet clover knows

and red-winged blackbird won’t deny.

The sweetest songs of the spring are robbed from the dead

who live on in the silence of exhausted chains,

the used umbilical cords of windless weathervanes

keyed to the lightning like keepers and clocks

and miraculous swords drawn from the stone

of the darkest prisons that ever gave birth

to this last, most terrifying metal of the disenfranchised,

this final embryo of liberty hidden in the rocks,

this incredible last stance of a defiant planet

that even in the confines of the grave

tools the crowns of its afterlife

from an ore without locks.

PATRICK WHITE

BRUTAL BLUE OF TWENTY BELOW

BRUTAL BLUE OF TWENTY BELOW

Brutal blue of twenty below,

a serial killer with angelic eyes.

The light slashing off the snow

like sabres in full gallop reaping throats.

Even the windows going through

a mini nirvanic death-in-life experience

to catch a glimpse of the fireflies

of enlightened diamonds

that let them warm their hands awhile

around their blazing, hoping

they’ll catch on and be back soon.

O sweet one, hurt one, wounded blue rose,

your eyelids have turned brittle in the cold.

Your heart’s a baby mammoth

caught in a glacier

that’s exposing you to the wolves.

Your tears flow like slow rivers of glass

all the way to the sea that rejects them

like holy oil on the wrong forehead.

Blood on the snow, lipstick on kleenex,

a haemorrhage on the bedsheets

at four in the morning,

a flag of the rising sun

flying over the miscarriage of a virgin birth.

You’re the Pearl Harbour that sank

your volcanic battleships in a sneak attack

in a sea of shadows on the moon

and now you’re waiting for the birds

to seed them with new life

like islands stuck in port for the duration,

waiting for prophetic skulls

to wash up like coconuts on shore

where you go bobbing for the head of Orpheus.

And you’ve learned that your body

can only say so much

and you’re stuck in the doorway

like a word in your throat

for something you can’t quite

put your finger on like a braille starmap

of where to go next,

a morning dove

in a chimney,

out looking for land,

smoke without fire,

that won’t sully your shining with creosote.

And it seems your life’s gone on ahead of you

into the starless abyss of a forwarding address

and left you as homeless as a loveletter

in an abandoned mailbox

that’s beginning to get the feeling

no one’s going to answer you back.

And even though you’ve mastered

several zodiacs like Druidic sign language,

the finger ogham of L.A. Gangs,

to make yourself well understood to the mob,

you keep being reborn facing west

and you don’t know how to turn

the baby around in the tomb.

Your singing voice is baffled

by the dawn that rises at midnight

like the silence of a zoo with open cages

where someone let out all the animals out

like nocturnal animals to fend for themselves.

And it’s not hard to miss

the forty days and nights of flood in your eyes

you’ve been lost at sea

like an ark washed out of your tears.

And now you appear here like Morgana la Fey

trying to con Merlin out of his art again

by thawing you out of that pillar of ice

you’ve been locked into

like a butterfly in an ice age

that’s booked like Alice in of the Looking Glass.

But I’m not the Mad Hatter, Merlin

or the Wurm-Reiss interglacial warming period.

Nor yet an aristocracy of trees

in the democratic grasslands

of a Saharan savannah

where the deserts come

like crude beasts slouching toward Jerusalem

for the restoration

of their delusions and mirages

in a worn-out hourglass

with eyes in the sides of their heads.

And even the crazy wisdom

that drips from the tongues

of enlightened clowns like rain

from the gutters of a house

that’s been stuffed with too many leaves

from the book of the trees with knowledge

can sound like utter foolishness

by the time it traverses the universe

to bridge the gap

between your mind and your ears.

So I’ll just suggest you start listening

to that small, inner voice of yours

that’s been speaking

softly to you for light-years.

You know, the one you keep ignoring

like a candle among the illuminati

whenever you can’t take your own advice

and go looking for mentors and gurus

like a first magnitude star

seeking the advice of flashlights.

Stop looking at stardom from the outside

and turn the light around

until you come to the omnidirectional edge

of the known universe

and then instead of balking

on the threshold of the gateless gate

take your shoes off

as if you were going swimming

and plunge that torch

you’ve been carrying for so long

into the fathomless darkness ahead

like a sword you’re tempering

in the great night seas and watersheds of life,

not the wishing wells

you’ve been exorcising like steam

trying to cool your demonic magma

into the islands of the blessed in the mindstream.

Be brave. See what the oldest stars see

on the growing edge

of the expanding universe.

Nothing but darkness before them

and nothing for a lifeboat

a starmap or lighthouse

but the shining they brought with them

like those bioluminescent fish

that find their own way of illuminating

the sunless depths of the sea

where each is their own north star.

Here you deepen the darkness more

with your eyes open

than you can with them closed

like coffins in a graveyard of eclipses.

Here the light of one star

doesn’t fall upon another

to enlighten it like a wounded flower

at the side of road in a tragic attempt

to catch the eye of what’s passing it by

only to render itself ripe for the picking.

The clear-eyed light of the void

is as invisible as space

and hidden as time

under an executioner’s hood

whose blood runs bluer than death

when something gets in it way

like the lightning flash

of the double-bladed axe of the moon

falling on the nape of your neck

to separate your head

like a prophetic skull

from the long wharfs

of its earthbound mooring.

Here the solid becomes real,

and the corpse of thought

is reanimated by insight

like a nightlight in a morgue

like a canary in a coal mine

like a firefly with a longer lifespan

than the flash in the pan of a starmap

that thinks it’s the beginning of a gold rush

when it’s just the same old iron pyrite in chains

that you walked in here with

your your heart up your sleeve

like a dreamcatcher

in a broken windowpane.

I’d give you the answer

to life and death and love if I had one

that wasn’t just another

rusting weathervane on the roof

trying to lay a windproof cosmic egg

with a cast iron flight plan

to improve the direction of prayer.

But what would be the use of it

even if I had one that wasn’t seized

upon the axis of the turning world

like a bird wheel that’s lost its bearings?

But you’re a pretty girl with cold blue eyes

this winter sky that drives its icicle

through your heart like a sword

you keep deluding yourself

you’re falling on like a samurai

to uphold the honour of your defeat

at your own hands in Tokugawa Japan

is jealous of.

So I’ll tell you what I tell myself

not for love, or art, redemption,

or a polyp’s place

in the Great Barrier Reef of history,

not out of ignorance or enlightenment

when the silence snatches my name

right out of the mouth of my solitude

like a baby hawk in a crown of thorns

tearing the heart out of a morning dove

like a locket of blood; say

what I say when no one is listening

to the rain on the roof with me

and there’s only a homely echo of longing

in the valleys of death I’ve passed through

like the blade of bird slashing through

the air of its wounded passage.

There is no message.

There is no meaning but that

you make for yourself

on your way to finding one.

Ignorance and wisdom

write and paint

in the same creative medium.

The heart is a fire alarm

for arsonists and poppies alike

Tattooed snakes on a scaffolding

of burning ladders aspiring to dragon fire.

Angels in the ash buckets

of Icarian over-achievers

who fell to their deaths

from the skyscrapers of heaven

like an accidental gargoyle

from a demonized Gothic church.

Just to be walking around on the earth

huddled in your flesh and bones,

or swimming with stars

through the white-water

of your own mindstream,

or salting your own good nature cynically

until the baby gets turned around in the womb

and you look upon birth

as nature’s way of keeping death going.

You can curse. You can bless.

You can live like a heretic in joy.

Or die like a saint in rage.

From a single wavelength of thought

you can grow a thirty foot oracular python

you end up consulting

about everything you do

as if it had already been done

by somebody else with a bigger snake than you.

Or don’t blink until the stars do.

No matter. It’s your face.

You can wear it anyway you want to.

But just to be here, do you understand?

To have passed through

so many lion gates already

that were only meant for you to enter by,

whether you came in through

the backdoor or the front

or through the window like moonlight,

or a thief that did b. and e.s from the inside out.

You’re indebted to the roads you’ve walked.

You’re indebted to the things you’ve seen,

the elements, the moon

and what it revealed to you,

and you’re way in over your head

in what you owe to the ocean,

trees, stars, the children who

came and went like fireflies

before and after you.

They’re all the embodiment of you.

And you, you’re all

that they’ve achieved to date

and they’re neither guilty

nor innocent of you.

Because everything in this universe

is complicit with everything else

including the judges,

and that means there’s no one

to answer to

but your own questions

and when you do

you’re only ratting yourself out to you

like a woman hanging out laundry

singing an illicit love song under her breath.

All this and everything that’s missing

the physics, the math, the art,

the myth, the mystery,

the lyrical picture-music of your mind,

all the wisdom, the ignorance,

the cosmological theory of you

shape-shifting through your own space and time.

This is the starmud you were born of.

This is the chaos and order of you.

This is the harmony.

This is the dissonance.

This is the house of pigeons

that would rather be haunted by doves.

This is assent. And exile.

This is the lost and found of existence.

This is where you come to claim yourself.

And this is where you give it back.

This is where the losers

aid and abet the winners

by wanting to be one of them

and when they can’t even manage that,

hope, at least, they’ll inherit their afterlife.

Now take everything I’ve said

and throw it up in the air

and let the wind winnow

the chaff and the grain alike.

What will root will root.

And who knows what bloom

will come of that?

When you’re ploughing

and sowing the moon

as I am here with all these words

I occasionally look up from my labour

when my blade strikes a rock

and remind myself

from a lunar point of view

at the other end of the telescope

I’m looking at you through

just to be walking around on the earth

making tracks in the snow

no one’s ever walked on before

is proof positive

you’ve got the right stuff.

And even to live in vain here is enough.

PATRICK WHITE