THE NIGHT IN THE WOUNDED MIRROR

THE NIGHT IN THE WOUNDED MIRROR

The night in the wounded mirror

is only a childhood away from my face

and there’s always a shattered window

between me and my starless shining,

and a dead bird upturned on the sill

as if the sky, too, had its quota of roadkill.

Looking back from all these

lightyears and constellations away,

on the black day I was born under an eclipse

like a flower clenched into a fist,

an eye without an iris darker than a shark’s,

I suspect there was a lot more suffering back then

than I was able to live my way through,

estranged in the corner of a kitchen

that was a feeding frenzy of knives.

I still can’t leave one out on the counter

without fearing it’s just another punctuation mark,

the claw of a comma in a long sentence of blood.

At best, it’s the silver scar of the moon

that slashed me open like a well-honed loveletter

that wasn’t meant for me.

And I still don’t know how to approach

the child I was, the child I still am

time-travelling through himself like a glacier

as if he could put a stop to evolution

or survive his extinction

by keeping to himself like ice.

I look upon his solitude and silence,

the unaccusing indictment of his face,

like a cold, brass plaque

commemorating the unidentifiable victims

of an atrocity that can’t be understood.

He’s still seven and I’m looping through sixty

like the spine of a calendar

shedding me like autumn,

a picture of turning leaves on every page,

until there’s no way of telling what age we are

in this season out of time,

and I want to love him, I want

to say things that could heal us both like water

before I take him with me into my grave,

but I don’t truly know how,

and there are secret vows of violation

that are taken without a mouth

and assassins of intimacy in the shadows

and children sleeping in snakepits

who make up their own bedtime stories

and dream of things that can’t be told to anyone

who hasn’t been devoured in their ancient infancy

by the furious innocence of the sea.

Dark-hearted jewel

of a child in the night,

older than light

who has made more of me

than I can make of him,

when I weep for what he knows

and will not say, what am I,

what are these words

in the inky shacks of the trees

but the lengthening shadow

of the darkness that pours out of him like blood,

or duct-tape like moonlight

over the mouth of a scream?

And if I come back now

like the legend I have made of his sorrow

to gather him up in my arms

like a harvest under a full moon,

and if I sit with him all night

without saying anything

here on this skull of a rock

until each of us is the memory of the other,

could it make anything better,

would it take the thorn of the moon

out of the eye of the dragon

that sheds its skin like childhood skies,

not knowing where things end, things begin?

PATRICK WHITE

EVERYBODY SAYS I'M TOO INTENSE

EVERYBODY SAYS I’M TOO INTENSE

Everybody says I’m too intense and I say

you sure as hell aren’t.

And since I was sixteen in highschool

and before that in the local neighbourhood

in the bosom of my family

people have always thought I was mad.

My highschool graduation yearbook says

most likely to become

a mad teacher mad scientist mad poet mad.

An oracular assessment of my peers

that has haunted me for years.

But I say crazy is the only antidote

to the extreme chaos of conditioned consciousness.

Look at the world.

Lies lies lies.

A coalition of lies

that calls itself

the history of civilization.

Crazy wisdom.

The tantric insight

into the fact

there is no nature to things.

You’re not a very wise human

if you don’t understand ignorance

is the clearest expression of enlightenment.

You see what I mean?

It’s hard to speak of unity

in the split tongue of a snake

without making an oxymoron of it

at the fork in the roads

it mistakes for a direction.

Regard the dead parachutes of Babylon

no one can understand you

I said to myself one day dying with a sneer.

It’s the moral obligation of a writer to make things clear.

I forget who said it.

But he was a nitwit.

One of the lice of literature

that makes your mind want to scratch itself raw

for the next half century.

It’s that word moral that bothers me.

Not his preconception of clarity

though when it gets down to that

you smear the mirror

when you try to be clear about clarity.

I said that.

It takes an amateur madman

to be a good shrink

and make reality

try to correspond

to what you think.

But what an impoverished way to live your life.

What a distortion of humanity.

If you’re mad enough

there’s plenty of room in the asylum

to embrace sanity with decorum.

When in Rome do as the Romans do

and try not to make a spectacle of yourself in the Colosseum.

It’s been my experience

that so much of what the world calls mad

is only freedom

with the courage to open its eyes.

Most people look into the eyes

of spontaneous freedom

and it terrifies them.

They don’t want to know

what’s not there.

The world ends at the back of their eyelids.

Things just get too deep

and they drown in their sleep

like pearl divers on the moon.

At every moment of your life

life is more certain than death.

It’s all you can say about

where you expect to be tomorrow

and where this is now.

Everybody always wants things

to look the way they seem.

They want to live the dream awake.

They don’t go along with their own mindstream.

They’re shore-huggers.

They live at the edge

of the great sea of mysterious being

in sandcastles with blowholes

that burp like tiny volcanoes in the receding tide.

Herculaneum and Pompey

are mummified in the flow

down their pygmy mountainsides

but it’s easy to see where they hide

thinking they’re out of reach.

But who am I to preach

quicksand to cornerstones such as these?

Everybody always tells me I’m too intense

but they’ve never been through a nightstorm

far out on the Pacific

where the moon’s your only lifeboat

and it’s just gone down

like a bright penny in a wishing well

like a last longshot in the slots

of an odds-making hell.

And it’s seven to five you survive.

They’ve never fallen in love with a hurricane rose

that’s built like a fortune-cookie

and paints her eyelids

with the blood of ex-lovers

who were sacrificial enough to propose.

If you go looking for the meaning of life sincerely

sooner or latter it will find you

like one fact final enough to delude all the others

into thinking it’s ultimately true.

Complete one act well

and you’ve accomplished everything

because one act begets another

until everything is done of its own accord.

Because your birth isn’t terminal,

your death is ongoing.

And the same is true in reverse.

How do I know this is so?

I let go.

I blossom like the memories of a dead branch

in the apple orchards of the Hesperides,

everyone of them

a full moon.

I see how innocent my doubt is.

So even my darkness

is a singing bird on a green bough.

I’ve looked at drops of water

at the tips of the blades of the stargrass

like the thin-skinned tears of the sky in childbirth

and everyone of them

was the seed of a new world.

Worlds within worlds

whose only conventions

are the creative dimensions of the perceivers.

Not one size fits all.

I don’t put my finger to my lips

like an ego-I

to eclipse the great silence.

I let it say me with its eyes.

And we both come as a great surprise to each other

when we’re standing

on the same side of the mirror

on the far shore of the mindstream

like two eyes of the same seeing

astonished we’re here at all

without lying to the miracle

about our reasons for being.

Have you ever considered the enormous distances

in the body of a small bird?

Or how strangely intimate a star can be

from thousands of lightyears away?

A whisper of lucidity in an oceanic ear.

Something you’ve heard for a long time

but never listened to before.

Never this near.

This clear.

Have you ever wondered which of two sisters

is the older of the elements.

Fire or water?

Or why spring lies about her age

when she’s as old as autumn

and then claims

to be the daughter of the grain

when in fact she’s the womb of summer?

Is it insane to wonder?

Is it too intense to fear

living my whole life

as if I were never here

to take a good look?

Is it deranged to feel

the enlargement of my seeing

is not the diminishment of my being

because I opened my eyes

and saw they were both

two ends of the same telescope?

It’s one thing to let the light in through the gates of your eyes.

It’s wholly another to let it get this far

into the palace of your imagination

without being announced

or scrutinized.

Life’s a breeze

when you don’t look at it

like a disease you’re afraid to get over.

If I’m inspired by the vastness of my ignorance

to turn a leaf over now and again

like a new page in an old book

to avoid being obvious

am I looking for a happy ending

or am I just delighting in my indolence

when I read it like a map of my own lifelines

by running my finger over it as if I were blind

and it were the one who could see?

If I don’t believe we appear briefly

to disappear forever

because everything here

is a vast collaboration

with creative emptiness

and it isn’t going anywhere

what do I care

if you’re confused by my endeavours?

What’s it to you

if I’m a mirage on a grailquest in a desert of stars?

Or if I practise compassion spontaneously

toward myself and others

as if we were all the same wound

under many scars

and if my lies heal,

are they not the fruit of insight?

If I’m the dark genius

deeply intrigued

by my own misdirection

that you say I am

though that doesn’t change a thing

about the way I can’t help being

and not being myself,

what makes you think

there’s only one star

you can point out

like the needle

in the impoverished compass

of your last course correction

as if there were only one way to go

and the truth were always

somewhere north of you

instead of under your feet

in all directions at once

like the radiance of stars

before the arising of signs?

Today Jesus and the Buddha walk on water.

Tomorrow Lucifer and Kamamara will walk on fire.

But when the opposites

get their baggage together

and realize they can’t lift it

and abandon it by the side of the road

like an outhouse on a trailer hitch

or a hubcap in a country ditch

that’s stopped spinning around

and come to rest in an oxymoron

posing as the full moon

that’s come to liberate

an empty asylum

they both walk on earth

bewildered by their innocence

when they discover

they’ve never had anything to do

with the course of events

that made them who they are.

Wasn’t the Buddha enlightened

by watching Venus in the dawn

lead the sun up

like the morning star

that once was Lucifer

before he took the fall like a ripe apple,

before he stole fire from the gods like Prometheus

the thief of inspiration,

knowing the moment of his perfection

in all realms of knowledge

infernal or divine

was the best time to jump?

And the darkness will always seem like a liar

to those who don’t know the truth.

If I don’t see life as just a bag of water

with nine holes in it

leaking out of itself

as I once used to

eras and eras ago

and you still do

when I look at what remains

of the desicated parachute of a jellyfish

you’ve made of your brains

clinging to shore

next to the sewage drains

that poured you out

and washed you up

and wiped their mouths of the taste of a dead ocean

what’s it to you

if I run so far out to sea

from so high up

on the down side of the world mountain

I’m swimming with dolphins on the moon?

I’m teaching blind starfish how to shine

like dark matter with a mind of its own

and no sign of a constellation

with feet of clay

afraid to leave home.

Say what you want to say.

Be what you want to be.

Enlighten your ignorance

and then ignore your enlightenment.

Don’t drive the darkness out of your lucidity

like a scapegoat into a spiritual desert

you’re afraid to enter

because you’re not bright enough to see

that under every threshold

between the inside and the out

certainty and doubt

insanity and the sane

the trivial and profound

the homeless and a habitable planet

there’s a sphere

spinning on a tilted axis

in the immensity of space

that’s so far out it’s in.

PATRICK WHITE

IT'S GETTING EASIER TO DIE

IT’S GETTING EASIER TO DIE

It’s getting easier to die looking at the way the world is. We’ve got this bigger brain pan thanks to evolution but I think we’re just exaggerated chimps. Vicious flea-pickers nibbling on parasites for strength in numbers and the security of a small place under the table like a missing link in the food chain we call love. Even absurdity has lost its pebble like a misshapen asteroid trying to bring something to life by making a big impact on the dinosaurs of Yucatan. Panspermia. Martian meteors like spare kissing stones lying in the snow of Antarctica waiting to be cubed like the Kaaba into the continental skullcap of a new religion. Someone told me we were an intelligent species once and that knowledge opens doors. No one can argue with a heart transplant but knowledge looks more and more like a doorman at the shrine of ignorance selling doves on the sly to the unholiest of holies climbing on its knees up the stairs where it throws its crutches away like the election promises of born again politicians on their way to Damascus in sunglasses. Even to say the words noble aspiration is to invite the sneers of a lobby group of crows. How many cosmic eggs do you need to see smashed on the rocks at the foot of the tree in spring before you get the idea that death is a way of life down here where the wind rocks the cradle and the babies fall to their deaths like Siberian shamans. How many turtles have made it all the way to adulthood like children running for cover in the high tides of providence in a Pearl Harbour of gulls without ever having heard a lullaby from their mothers’ mouths? The aesthetics of desecration have salted the roots of art. Morality is a game of snakes and ladders. Politics is a card shark playing strip poker with the public. Religion is a pervert that lies about the light and denies the existence of the shadows it casts on the spirit even as it scars the children like sexual flagellants for life. Has Jesus really become a blue blood haemophiliac who needs Rasputin to keep him from bleeding to death?

Scotty knocks at the door. He needs a ride out to Watson’s Corners. I need the money but I decline the offer. He checks his facebook page and goes. I commit financial suicide and shake my head like a twist of the knife at how ludicrously demented I am by getting back to this. Baby needs new shoes. And here I am standing like Empedocles on the rim of Aetna getting ready to plunge into the plasmid magma oozing from a wound in my continental drift. But you can’t become a legend without living the farce of creativity as if it were something inconceivable you could believe in because it had nothing to do with you. I raise the skull and crossbones and stand for an anthem of starmud that bleeds out like Van Gogh’s ear or Manet’s matador lying like a dead honeybee in a rose of blood. Ever since the late sixties I’ve been dying of love and compassion and the aristocratic poverty of poetry as if they were the only local anecdotal antidotes I had left to spit back in the cobra’s eyes. I knick the snake with whipper snippers, railroad tracks, and razorblades. And the snake spits back like the Taliban or an honour killing by splashing acid in the eyes of an Afghan girl who wants to learn to read or fall in love. I live in a town called Perth not far from Last Duel Park. But I’ve pawned my silver bullet to pay the rent and Zorro isn’t fronting me any more swords like an American foreign policy run by Boeing and Halliburton. I’m a dancing master in a snake pit. I’m down to the last G-string of the spiderweb I’ve strung between the horns of the Lyre of Orpheus like a cosmic dreamcatcher in a nightmare of killer bees and Maenads screaming for my dismemberment like a firestorm of air raid sirens in Dresden where people were twisted into the shapes of Pompeian agony like an Alexandrian library of matchbooks. Inspiration rides the dragon with sidereal spurs of apocalyptic indignation and rage at what is happening to us as human beings at our own hands. Evolution never made these kinds of demands on us to change. To mutate like logos in the corporate genome of Coca Cola imperializing Belize. Eleven dimensions of space and time and one unknown continuum of death. How can love ever hope to penetrate the hareem of hymens in the hyperspace of the multiverse without relying on the cop-out of a virgin birth? Propagation without ecstasy. Sex is food. People are the krill of corporate blue whales breaching like a market. And love is their ambergris. The x-rated vomit of Parisian perfumes. The R-complex at the back of the brain we hold in a commonwealth of carrion like houseflies and crocodiles. We’re still snapping turtles under the carapace of our neo-cortex. Don’t kid yourself. We’re still the same old scum-sucking mud dwellers that littered the bottom with the bones of gutted swans eras ago. Twenty-five million children a year are shovelled into the grave pits of their open mouths still gaping after all these horrifying years at the atrocity of how blithely we let them starve to death while obesity is about to have a heart attack that’s going to feel like the catastrophic revenge of an indigestible planet. Gather ye rosebuds and wealth while ye may. Carpe diem. Seize the day. Because tomorrow’s going to come like the false dawn of an unmarrowed bone through the nose of an unmarried cannibal and grab you by the neck like a drug cartel playing narco music on the Spanish guitar of your jugular vein. Prophetic skulls are dancing themselves to death in violent paroxysms of hydrophobic rabies trying to hold back the rain like sacred clowns in a mirage of nightmarish pain. We’re stinging ourselves to death like scorpions in a ring of fire. We’re playing Russian roulette with lethal interrogatives we raise to our temples like the triggers of crescent moons at the business end of our cul de sacs. Murder like war is a job creation program for the poor to give killing for the rich a purpose in life and a reason to get up in the morning. In the backrooms and dark alleys of a doomed consortium of corporate laybyrinths I’ve learned to whistle Mr. Bluebird’s On My Shoulder like a port-a-pack heat seeking missile and address my peers when I’m on my own as if the third eye of the Wizard of Oz were taking aim through a fully enlightened keyhole at terrorists planting bombs in the Yellow Brick Road. Democracy lands in the Fertile Crescent like the House of the Unrepresentatives of the People on the wicked witch of the east. You can watch her toes curl like fiddleheads and the embryos of oilslicks that will rise up like a snake pit to sink the fangs of the first and last crescents of Ramadan like the Old Man of the Mountain into your throat. Hash. Venom. Assassins in the shadows of your sundials and eclipses like a black snake under the pillow you dream on waiting for the tooth fairy. Radioactive noon at midnight. The human heart too scorched to feel any pity. Calloused hands close the eyes of the dead like can-openers. Magisterial pomp and ceremony attends the trivia of the irrelevant like the paparazzi a golden chariot being driven by a rock and roll sun king with the popularity of a pimp through a slum of infatuated children. Justice upholds the freedom of expression like gun laws in the ghettoes of Philadelphia. Compassion has become the idealistic shill of a faith healer laying his hands on the daughters of his parishioners like the cervical scar tissue of the dilated profit margins that wound the flesh and the spirit like an empty wallet some misguided soul returned in hell.

Night now. Skateboarders outside in the deserted street. No one knows what I do up here but I feel like I’ve been testing lead kites in a wind tunnel all day long. Been working out creatively for a heavy lift. But I’m not sure if I’m strong enough yet. My head is pounding something momentous on the anvil of my heart. Tempering swords in a trough of blood that hisses like the background radiation of the ghost of a cosmic snake. Or a thought train mourning like a funeral procession in the distance. No rain. So the windows are thick with dirt and stars. And the streetlamps are wilting like black-eyed Susans with tungsten petals in the heat. She loves me not she loves me not she loves me not like losing lottery tickets. I’m reaching critical mass like a nuclear reactor that o.d.’d on its own plutonium 239. My eyes glow in the dark but what I see makes me wish I were blind. Something’s tattooing prophetic starmaps on the inside of my eyelids. My brain is shredding secret insights into the conspiratorial nature of the future of life. Putting words in the mouth of the embassy incinerator like apple blossoms and autumn leaves just before the wind leaves town without the orchard. Taking too long to put a little English on the spin of the planet like a cue-ball in the right hand pocket of a black hole. You lose control in the moment if you hesitate. And I can hear some Zen master battering me with my own advice. Stand up. Sit down. Walk left. Walk right. Walk zigzag. Walk straight. But whatever you do don’t wobble. But even if I make the shot. Nobody wins.

It’s getting easier to die when I see how many more innocent there are among the dead than there are among the living. I have a survivor’s guilt. And nowhere to expiate it except on a poem on a painting or the flip side of Patti Smith. I am a Canadian artist. I feel nothing but guilt. And it’s hard not believe sometimes that I’m not already dead and what I’ve been dying and living for all these years is a just this mindless art of the life of the mind. And fifty years of poetry isn’t worth one loaf of bread in the grasp of a starving child. What comes out of the mouth. What goes in. Like ebb and neap tides dragged around by the moon by the hair where they practise rape like a martial art against women in the Congo. In the wars of the Druids it used to be that you could defeat a tribe by learning the secret name of their god. Bran. Or Exxon. For example. But these days they go straight for the genome. And it’s been a struggle even here where you can grow fat on the garbage of Toronto just to survive. I was born under the street. Learned classical Greek. Didn’t want to be victimized by the stereotype of the golden poor boy who got rich to lift his family out of poverty by his bootstraps like the spontaneous creation of the universe and reclaimed his throne from his wicked father as if he’d been raised in secret by a wise old woodsman. And who knows? Maybe I should have tried. But the sixties was firing up and I was going through economic culture shock at a wealthy university in my own hometown. It was my mother who taught me to cry. It was my father who taught me to rage. Fire danced on the water. I was a cool savage in an age of abandonment. I learned to throw stones and thaw like ice at the same time so I didn’t get caught living in a glass house. I hung around a lot of rich kids with long hair who all got shorn like Samson and ended up lawyers in their daddy’s office after they pulled the pillars of the establishment down. So I put down the sword and picked up the pen and in the deafening silence of the afterlife of the party when everyone stopped believing in the music and returned to their senses like the Toronto Stock Exchange thought if I couldn’t do anything else to justify the ambiguous luck of being born into a selectively prosperous country I could write poetry that would scream murder for those who were being killed pre-emptively because they didn’t have a voice of their own. I reconciled poverty guilt rage education inspiration fire water and light in one austere calling too high-minded to call a literary career. I was a prophetic skull in a desert that women like to dance for. I was a poet. I was endowed with a great negative capability for being nothing. I let my identity lapse like a passport. I wiped my face off the mirror with the sleeve of my shirt to see more clearly what I was looking at. The mirrors haven’t heard of me in years. I spent twenty years learning secret tree alphabets in a poetic college on the island of Mona and became a wandering poet scholar. An astronomical priest of sacred clowns who could wander unharmed through the clash of armies through a mystical path in the Blood Red Sea. I studied murder. I studied genocide. I looked at the heaps of spectacles piled in the lost and founds of Auschwitz like the spindly legs and hourglass thoraxes of dead insects in the commercials for Raid. And I felt my way into the camp as close as I could for someone who had not been killed or lived their way through it until I understood that most of the passions of humankind are nothing more than insecticides for butterflies and honey-bees. That angels were crop-dusters and there was DDT and Xyklon B and mustard gas on the apple of knowledge in the garden of Eden long before Eve took a bite out of it. The Holocaust taught me three things. The overwhelming complicity of silence when murder is being done. That humans are the scourge of God when he flagellates himself for their creation by whipping his back with black hydra-headed snakes in jackboots that cock their hats and snap their heels to attention like the triggers of a firing squad trying to shoot the stars out like a disciplined eclipse. That one should never underestimate the great opportunistic potential there is in human suffering. I scream for the bone. I scream for the blood. I scream for the flesh of those who had lovers and children and violins that set the teeth of the windows on edge when they were practising. I scream for the home-made socks on the corpse of the dead child being used as a doorstop to the crematorium. I scream for the button that was torn off the jacket of the boy at the back of the cattle-car and I scream for the needle in fastidiously loving hands that sewed it on and then sewed on a yellow star. I scream for the six pointed. I scream for the eight-pointed star. I scream for Isaac. I scream for Ishmael. I scream for the gypsies the gays the German Christians the Poles the Slavs and the children in line at the foodbank being cowed by charity into licking the boots of the anti-welfare protesters as a way of saying thanks.

Can you hear me where you live? My voice shatters the stars an octave higher than the celestial spheres that crack like wineglasses. I’m flint knapping chandeliers into holy Clovis spears of light and arrowheads I’ve dipped in my blood to make sure the first sword of truth I hang over your head is wounded by my own first. I scream like the scarlet letter on the Whore of Babylon’s forehead. And blood is trickling out of the corners of my eyes at what I see. Something thunderous and heavy-limbed approaches. The fireflies are panicking to get out of the way of the lightning and the ants are amassing in heaps of defunct punctuation marks that can read like pundits the signs of the writing on the wall as if they’d reached the end of the trail.

Drunks smashing whiskey bottles on the street. The violence is too deep in us. The greed. The need. The excruciations of apocalypse will not enlighten us. Release is not liberation. Desecration doesn’t make one worthy of hell. A lightning rod won’t tell you where to dig the well. I’m sick of this. My skull is thick with paleolithic wallpaper I’m trying to compile into a Book of the Dead for casual readers with short life spans. Even madness looks like it’s wearing sensible shoes compared to walking barefoot through the scorched cities of Rumi and Hieronymous Bosch where the black corpses practise the yogic postures of death. We won’t transcend being human by mending being human until our identity is drowned like a torch among stars trying to get a mirage of an insight into what it is we’re seeing when we look back at them. But who am I kidding? Idealism is the footstool of a hanged man. Who takes a match to go looking for a volcano? I scream for the runaway in her chrysalis of shadows in the corners of the doorway across the street trying to snort cocaine from the back of her hand like fairy dust on the pinkest of her dreams. Good night Tinkerbelle. Good night. I scream for Betty who went to nightschool for her affliction and received her degree last night in post-graduate suicide when she finally freed herself from her addiction to addiction and died of an overdose. I scream murder. I scream culpability. I scream for the unphotogenic atrocities of slow human attrition drawing the agony out like junkie Don Quixotes tilting at the windmills of their arms. Or cracking rocks with Sisphyus to roll up the hill in the morning like crumbs of the sun over the whole sapiently forsaken earth. Babies get eaten by pitbulls. The homeless heroes are demonized. Demons are lionized and then sent back to where they came from. Political decisions are passed like hold-up notes to a volunteer teller at a food bank. Stunned. Beaten. Abandoned. Betrayed. Throw a snake into a fire and it just might sprout wings and turn on you like a dragon. Nemetic karma. Dark matter. The spontaneous reversal of spin in a charged particle field. The people are poor. Dispirited. Ravaged by political warlords. The global oligarchs have stolen the moon from their windows like a corporate logo. One lick of jam in the jar. One crust of bread that once modelled for Van Gogh’s painting of his boots. It wasn’t much of a journey if you’re still a traveller at the end of it. The road walks on with or without us. Hurry up. Hurry up. It’s got wings on its heels and an immensely hopeless message that makes a black hole look like an optimist. Deranged gates and bent weathervanes. All the emergency exits blocked by our grand entrance as the most intelligent species to ever fuck up what they were doing on earth. And hell. We’re not even kind or spiritually well mannered. But isn’t it like listening to shadows in the blaze of a Roman triumph? You are mortal. Don’t cradle your reflection on the waters of life like the only survivor in the lifeboat of your hands. From one dazzling extreme to another of eyeless despair. Rage upgrades the contradictions of life and death into dirty mind bombs of anti-matter. Serpentine wavelengths of radioactivity that are as immune to us as we are to their antidote. And even the animals given only four choices to throw their lives in the ring of evolution like shepherd moons around a savage planet. The abattoir. The black market. The lab. Or the zoo. Gruesome tomorrows where you’ll be investigated for the political nature of your sorrows. Enforced consumerism. Ants and aphids. The scales of justice a spy satellite in the constellation of Libra. Spiritual espionage where your third eye plays all three sides at once. Data is power. And dice are the new currency. The human spirit decultified by pharmaceutical exorcists. The money changers throw Jesus out of the temple along with his doves. Peace will say render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and that which is not. And if you want to follow me. Go your own way. And don’t come back. Hell loses its sting compared to the venom of life on earth. There’s nothing holy enough left to scare anyone with the night sweats unless they’re going through withdrawal. A man of vision is a mugshot of a politician. Mystery. Enigma. Paradox. Oxymoronic ambiguity. The intuitionally unteachable concupiscence of the inevitable. Irony. Longing. Inspiration. Reason and compassion are all retooled as commercially acceptable mimetic paradigms of behaviour. The one-eyed liar throws his voice like a ventriloquist into the echo chambers of the heart. And the puppet poets design a use for art that no one could have imagined until they were told.

Getting old. Getting easier to die. And the answers to the incomprehensible sublimities of the question why always seem so much tackier than the starless silence of a lost song bird disappearing into the distance as if to fly out of the cage through the night window were to win your wings like a sky that’s always waving good-bye. I’m reminded of Hart Crane jumping off the stern of the Orizaba at high noon in his pyjamas a hundred and fifty miles off the coast of Cuba. And the glee on his face as he drowned. Where the cedar leaf divides the sky I was promised an improved infancy. If you can’t find any use for your life. Live for art. Add your musical note to the choir of celestial spheres like one long scream of a tuning fork that resonates with the times like a lightning strike on a sacred tree. There are more creative ways of waiting for death than standing like an unused shovel in the corner. If you want to be a master grave digger first apprentice yourself to a garden. Then you’ll know what it’s like to feel the roots of life groping through the darkness of their starmud like blind star-nosed moles waiting for their third eye to open. Root fires creep like dirty rumours among the cedars of Lebanon in the valleys of death. I scream for the children who twist in their sleep as if every breath they took were a kite on a lifeline tangled like a sour note in the nervous hymnals of the power lines. Every bird is a whole note. And every sky the sheet music of silence. You can sing like a parakeet or shriek like the ailerons on an eagle dive-bombing a Japanese invasion fleet. You can hum like the drone of the avenging engines of a hive of approaching killer bees. Or you can bite your tongue to see if it’s real gold or not. If the best steel really does go through the forge.

See how the water-lily pads its swamp life with beautiful concessions of enlightenment? It’s rooted in leprosy and rot but can you taste the flavours of the reflections of the stars that are mingled in its mindstream like an empty lifeboat on the moon? You can test the atmosphere for the noxious vapours of decay like air on the tines of the tongue of a rat snake hunting toxic frogs like a radioactive wavelength of water with fangs. And you can have a lightning insight into the double feature of life that turns the lights of the matinee out at noon to foreshadow the horrors of what’s coming to a theatre near you. Cannibal frogs and punctual vipers with lockjaw. Soon. You get the big picture? Clarity is a dream’s worst nightmare. And there are times when all you can do is sit like an insomniac in the middle of a sleepwalking audience and scream like a air raid siren until you’re as hoarse and broken as the wishbone of Orpheus’ lyre when it got stuck in the throat of his prophetic skull bobbing its way like a silver apple of the moon all the way from Thrace to Mytilene on the island of Lesbos with greetings for Sappho and Terpander. Or you can lay a cool vision like a herbal poultice down on the forehead of a skull that’s been running a high fever that makes it delirious with life. You can grow orchids in the shadow of an outhouse. Or you can drain the swamp and clean its wound of infection to keep the spiritual gangrene of a planet in crisis from spreading. Or you can turn your back on the urgency of the emergency nightshifts like the dark side of a harvest moon and say Physician heal thyself as if your life were held in ransom by a medical plan issued by a drug cartel. Knowing it might be the butterflies with beautiful bedside manners that are wearing their wings like nurses caps on the terminal wards of the pharmaceutical asylums but it’s the maggots that mend the wounds and prepare the bones for a decent burial like graverobbers convinced of an afterlife. I give you my word like a boomerang on the cutting edge of space that what goes around like a helicopter gunship comes back like a galactic sawblade in your face. On the thresholds of the available dimensions and event horizons of the future the black rose of blood whose beauty was eclipsed by the miscarriage of the corpse of a child whose eyelids were shut in death like shedding petals will be frisked for thorns like pins in the heart of a voodoo doll looking for revenge on us all. Beware the fury of the dark mother when the moon is in its crone phase and she sees what we’ve done to her young. The female principle of the world flares like a Medean cobra rising like an executioner’s hood over her shattered cosmic eggs. Can you read the sign on her mantle like the royal cartouche of a deadly queen sealing a death warrant in our own blood? Can you taste the poisonous fruit of your loins in the sweetmeats of the children she serves up like the four and twenty blackbirds of a ghoulish lullaby to the nightmarish apple piety of your blasphemous genes? The Achilles heel of the destroyer of worlds will be stung by a Parisian arrow of love with the wingspan of a vampiric universe sucking the blood out of the venom under the sign of the cross that makes the first incision. And nothing will be healed. Seven come eleven like a winning lottery ticket at the all night grocery store on the corner of hell and heaven but the short-sighted dice trying to game the table will still roll with their self-destructive luck like snake-eyes staring through them. Medusan puncture-wounds to the moon rock of the heart. The colon of the asp at the end of our imperialistic aspirations to live in the lap of luxury like Egypt but kill like Rome. But what follows is astronomically tedious and as far from home as the light of an occult candle in the hands of a lonely exile tabooed by its own creation myth has ever been driven out into the darkness on its own. What hour is it? Time casts our shadows like Mayan calendars on shark-finned sundials circling the penumbral blood lines of a feeding frenzy where there is no host there is no guest at the foodbank. Just the ghosts of starving children wiping the crumbs of their dream of life from the corners of their eyes like the dead waking up to a nightmare.

PATRICK WHITE  

I FLESH YOUR SPIRIT OUT IN STARMUD

I FLESH YOUR SPIRIT OUT IN STARMUD

I flesh your spirit out in starmud. No creator.

No created. Between the leaf and the sky

I mix the colour of your eyes on the palette

of a rainbow that let’s the darkness

sit at the same fire it does. Because the spirit is free.

I hang crescent moons from your earlobes.

I release the sacred deltas of small night creeks

into your veins, and talk to deserts on the moon

about the manes of sidereal lions for your hair.

I search the darkening hills at night for a black rose

with eyelids as cool as mushrooms, and lips,

that are more the wings of auguries, birds and bows

disappearing into the distance to imagine you

than they are the words and arrows

of a flightless heart dipped in stars that don’t ignite.

I’m a blind man in a room, painting eyes,

trying to grow flowers out of last year’s fragrances,

interpret every syllable and sacred pixel

of your red ochre glyphs of lipstick

I used to bury myself in when I lived in caves with bears

and rubbed the stuff all over my face

like blood and corn flowers under the hearthstone.

Now I’m a dragon rising from my urn of ashes

like a volcano of serpent-fire out of the chrysalis

of my crystal skull, looking for signs, hints, clues,

any whisper of linear B as to who you are

in the shadows of the sundials of the mountains

you go walking with at night with your dogs.

And the stars you must see in the clear-eyed desert

when the temperature drops and all you’ve got

to keep you warm from the inside out is not

you in my arms, but this small drop of blood

in our chests, this cosmic thermometer of a heart

on the night ward of a perilous greenhouse.

And I went to a cactus with thorns like a voodoo doll

with oracular powers to ask about the shape

of the body I should root you in like an hourglass in sand

and she said to me, a rootless peach tree on the moon.

And ever since, I’ve touched your skin

with eyes at the end of my fingertips

like a new world gnostic gospel for the blind

that can see you in the flesh, naked, sublime

like a desert island it would be worth drowning for

just to be washed up on the curvature of your dunes

like a starfish when the mind comes back to its senses

like the first sign of life on the moon in a long time.

You emerge like wild irises of hydrogen out of

this cloud of unknowing, this cocoon of nebularity

like one star among many in an almost perfect vacuum.

I can see you. I can almost taste you. I can feel

your last lover trying to squeeze into the chrysalis

of the infinite straitjacket of your last exorcism

as if he’d finally run out of dawns as alibis

for why he didn’t want to leave just yet. Who

hasn’t stood in the doorway of Orion

sinking down in the west? For some

the threshold’s the longest part of the journey

and they make a nadir of everything at zenith

by letting their horizons down like a crosswalk

waiting for a change of colour blind traffic lights

that don’t know, for all that Stop. Go. Maybe so.,

anymore about passage than the road does

or a starmap that always certain of where it’s going

but never has a reason why it should

jump the gun like a star and get ahead of its light

like a car on a long dark dusty country road at night,

one headlight out, trying not to hit a doe

in the glare of the sun at midnight

on its way out of town,whether that’s up, down,

or omnidirectionally radiant as the Pleiades in tears.

Drift and mingle, merge, enhance,

dance, glance, shadow and glow,

still more ghost around you than I am a mirror,

I know what it means to be summoned to a seance

and not know what to wear. What lifemask to put on

like a Mason jar full of fireflies trying to decide

what constellation has the fewest short circuits in it

and is the least likely to lead anyone astray

when the lights go on and off like a fickle tranformer

or a Cepheid variable that was just born that way.

And here, now, your ears and your hands, your arms

and bones of your own that don’t owe a thing

to anyone else’s bird cage after the bird has flown.

And now I think I’ve got the eyes just right

but it’s the heart calling its rivers back to it

like the sea I can’t quite find the likeness of

even when I appeal to the most ancient galaxies

in the Hubble mirror for a similitude of love

that might serve as the understudy of a metaphor

in an expanding universe that keeps exceeding

the boundary stones of the stars at zenith

and even the chipped cup of the moon full

and a skull that used to juggle mirrors

like shattered insights into reality for those

so spiritually inclined at harvest time to listen

to the blue moonrise peering through the cedars

like an effulgent pearl of wisdom shedding her skin

like a mystic in rapture on the dark side she keeps to herself.

PATRICK WHITE

HUMBLED ON EARTH, EXALTED BY A STAR

HUMBLED ON EARTH, EXALTED BY A STAR

Humbled on earth, exalted by a star,

I say nothing and wait for the echo.

It’s bad with me tonight, more than I can bear.

I’m in isolation, but I don’t know where.

And there’s a half moon apricot blossom

over the roof of a bookstore that swears

that it’s a scar. Maybe so. But there you go.

Why blame your eyes for what they see?

Venus earlier tonight, that was the key

to a thousand doors of insight

without a threshold among them

to say how far the light had travelled

just to get to me. O, yes, no doubt, beauty,

and time-shares in eternity you can’t forget

all that easily. Something sharp and cold

and romantically aloof, diffuse, smeared

like a name on a window someone signed

in their own breath, as the night cooled down

like a glorious life into a homely death.

Crazy-wisdom, but without a path.

I followed the river to a sacred syllable

of a single drop of water on the tongue of a leaf.

Though my immutable present be the aftermath

of flowers after a funeral, a skull with a laurel wreath,

just because I steal fire, doesn’t make me inflammable.

Slow and sad, among my myriad mirages

and heart-dwarfing immensities. What is this?

What is that? I keep asking myself

so I don’t have to listen to my own answers

as if someone were here to explain them to me.

Trying to saddle a bubble on the moon

and rise to the surface like a seahorse

to see if I can ride off like Venus

into a sunset somewhere with atmosphere.

Is this a labyrinth? Is this a cul de sac?

I embody a silence deeper than death.

Forgive me, mother. Forgive me Apple laptop.

I didn’t ask for this afterlife. It’s the sum

of what I had left after I ransomed myself

from those who would have deprived me

of this tragicomedy with pastoral overtones

I’m living now like a whole new golden age

still in the ore, but reputed to be there,

though I don’t hope for too much anymore.

And it’s o.k o.k. o.k. o.k.

I’ve got a place to sleep, a painting on the go,

a poem toying with me, two cans of tuna, one

of sardines, half a loaf of bread, and a clean window

to look through when I want to disappear

into the aura of sidereal distances

that backstops the rooftops of Perth

with an atmosphere that just isn’t another

bubble of glass, and offer myself to the moon

as a qualified substitute for what it’s lost.

Probably good to serve some function in life

you know about, even if you’ve got to

make one up for yourself while you’re waiting

for the inevitable to come back for your shadow,

just to say thanks to everything, good or bad,

for why you’re watching Venus in the sunset,

as if you once had a personal relationship with it

like the third eye of a telescope that thought

it must notice you, if you stare long enough

into the nothing, face to face, with a deep love

of the universe that has abided me

so much longer than I would have.

PATRICK WHITE

WHO ISN'T TRYING TO LIVE

WHO ISN’T TRYING TO LIVE

Who isn’t trying to live

as they vaguely hope they are

whatever extremes

of moderation they’ve gone to

behind all the masks and fraud?

Crosswalks and bridges of fire

trying to get to

the other side of themselves

like the promised land, or God,

ladders up to heaven

like vertebrae and ribs,

and ropes like spinal cords

down a well on the moon

that hasn’t enthroned hell in her depths yet,

everyone’s trying to put a face on chaos

they remotely hope is their own.

One by one the plum blossoms

fall to the nightstream

like loveletters

from the branch of the tree

that read them once and then let go.

No one knows where they’re from

or where they’re going.

Some give their wings up

like graduate degrees to the ants

and others are raising their sails

like the flames of a great fire

that consumes the prophet

who wanted to hold his arms up

like a wishbone to the lightning

in the revery of his desire

until everything is ash and nails,

and others who think they’re

the rudders and keels of the flowing.

Sometimes I am nothing more

than this terrible inevitability

of flesh and bone

alone in the vastness of my unknowing

where neither ignorance nor wisdom prevails

and then it’s as clear as stars

on both sides of the window

that everyone’s everyone else’s good guess

as they encounter one another

passing the time

in a crumbling game of graveyard chess.

I don’t know why what’s wise about me

always ends up listening to myself

like a fool’s confession

but I’ve run out of rosaries

like habitable planets

and my homelessness has exposed

the ruse of divining purity

in the afflictions of compassion

as if everything had evolved in sorrow

like a heart-bending occasion for tears

as the mountains that fell

like an avalanche of cornerstones

into the valleys they’ve dug

like pyramids and graves over the years

abide like salt in the eye of the sea.

Intelligence might be

an elaborate mode of paranoia,

but eased into the wonder

of being here at all

with trees and stars

and the midnight rainbows

on the necks of the grackles

and the hectic butterfly

among the grape hyacinth,

since I was enlightened

by my absolute uncertainty,

I have gathered all my voices together like leaves

and burned the old texts of myself

for not being much of a liar.

Five petals opened

and one flower bloomed

like a good laugh.

Now my awareness

is a kind of playful fire that doesn’t burn

what it consumes

though the light

still tastes of the jewel

and even as the good-byes deepen their voices

like echoes in wells,

because I’ve grown older

and autumn keeps shedding its choir,

the hellos still take on a life of their own

as if nothing had changed.

An illuminated clown

I am astounded by the profundities

in every jest of being

revelling in the creative hilarity

of its mystic specificity

and how everytime

I get serious about something

as if I had just remembered myself,

I bring the house down.

Only a hypocrite is humble enough

to underestimate his own irrelevance,

and go sorting through himself

like a cellphone in the ashes

but for those who have become fire,

aspiration is achievement

and fulfilment and desire, one breath.

In every event

there’s nothing to be

further than you can see.

But that doesn’t mean

take a harder look

as if your life were a book

you were learning to read

or a mirror you had to stare into

until your eyes bleed

to know who you are.

When you stop thinking

every perception is a clue

to who you are

you’ll shine out like a star

ahead of its own light

and stop trying to recognize God

through the featureless eyes

and vigilant simulacra

of a stolen identity.

You will be neither partially

nor wholly yourself

and before and beyond

will not seem

the unending extremities of now

rounding the skull of a clock

that’s lost its way home.

Your seeing will grow deeper than eyes

and you will stop sending

your reflection out

like the moon’s last lifeboat

to haul you up out of the abyss

like a fisherman gilled

in the tangled mess

of his own s.o.s.

You’ll let go of the oars

and breathe easy like the sea

that takes the low place

and in every blossom of being

you will taste the whole orchard

drunk on its knees in laughter,

not knowing where to begin.

PATRICK WHITE