I LIKE THE FEEL

I LIKE THE FEEL

I like the feel of the new heels on my cowboy boots.

I like the feel of breathing in joy like oxygen,

of moving from one small joy to another

without pomp or pageantry

like the constellation of a black swan

on a midnight mindstream

drifting through the small torches of the stars

that won’t go out in any kind of water.

And I don’t know why I’m wounded

deeper than tears by joy

whenever I witness any undoubted example

of human excellence

and penumbrally share in the triumph

remembering how truly astonishing

a human being can be

when compassion and insight

are the fruit and roots of the tree.

So much in the world I abhor,

horrors and sorrows and atrocities

that violate the elemental dignity of life

as it expresses itself in a human so deeply

even the silence cuts out its tongue

as an offence against

the unspeakable decency of the darkest abyss

when it stands before evil.

Like a golden fish in a polluted stream

slurried by a nuclear reactor

into a cancerous elixir

I have ingested every toxic meme

of a sick society in a feverish dream

and I cannot help but think and feel and live

whatever’s written on the water

to soil the stars

that thought they were out of reach

and make manic depressives

of the waves that spoil the beach.

A child of my times, the Zeitgeist, the Holy Ghost,

and the jinn at every well

like the forbidden fires of holy explosives

wrapped in folds of smoke,

I see through the glass darkly

like everyone else

who paints the eye of their telescope

with the shepherd moons

of despair and hope

and reports their observations as the truth

to whomever might be listening.

I can humble the night with my darkness

when the light goes out

and I have fought for years

with the child that I am

not to feel guilty or vulnerable

whenever I was taken unawares

by some happiness

that spilled over the rim of the black hole

that indelibly kept my cup full.

Now I rejoice in the emptiness of things

as useless as rocks and people

and feel a great tenderness for anyone

who needs to feel anything more.

I like the way your gate is hanging by a hinge.

I like the dead bee on the pyre

of the late-blooming fire

that consumes it like a last kiss.

I like the way my portrait’s turned toward the wall

like a delinquent outside the principal’s office

listening for footsteps down the long, empty hall.

Lightning in the lighthouse

or fireflies on the moon

I like the way my Zippo snaps shut

like the beak of a turtle at the feather of the flame

it rose like an ancient moon from the muddy depths

to pull under.

I find joy in the slightest,

in the cast away and the spurned,

in the tiny birds that have learned

to glean the dragonflies

off the car radiators

and the way people like to be found

like hubcaps at the side of the road

holding up a mirror to the beauty

of the wild irises

like a new logo

they hope will catch on.

When you haven’t been saved from anything

there isn’t much left to save you from

or any point in trying

to save the ashes from the fire

after everything’s gone up in smoke

so why ox yourself

to the unbearable yoke of a cross

trying to grind bread out of starwheat

when the children you labour to save like seed

have already died for the night

with nothing to eat?

Who needs to turn themselves into a broom

when they’ve drunk their mirages dry

to sweep the deserts off the stairs

of an afterlife in an empty asylum

that talks to itself like the moon?

I don’t care what kind of bars

silver, gold, iron or bone,

spiritual or corruptly marrowed

by the tainted terrestrial

you want to put on the window

to keep the stars out like thieves at the gate,

I’m already in.

And you’re way too late.

I like to live my life

as if I were getting away with something.

I like being weeded out like a key

to a door that time forgot to close

like the coffin lid of the nightwatchman

who kept an eye on things like a flashlight

looking for his flashlight,

his mind for his mind.

I like being less and less of me

like a rogue sunset that sheds its roses

like a watercolour of its eyes in the void

to see more clearly into the emptiness

there’s nothing to be in this nothingness

that isn’t a last lifeboat without oars

and no one in it to rescue

jumping ship in a turbulent dream.

Illusory cures for illusory diseases.

And once you’re restored to clarity

does it really matter

what the medicine means?

I like the tear in my wounded blue jeans.

I like the autumn dyes that set your hair on fire

like the Gatineau Hills

risking everything

as you squander your leaves like rain-cheques

in the overly salubrious poker-faced casinos of Quebec.

I like the day I was let out of school

with eternity for a recess.

Why spend your life

panning your own mindstream

for the fool’s gold of the iron pyrite rule:

Do unto others before they do unto you,

when you know as well as Wall Street

things aren’t what they seem?

Look how an apple tree lives.

It gives. And it thrives

by just expressing itself

like a bouquet in the hand of a bride

that walks like a bridge to the altar

and marries herself in her own eyes

to the earth she’s rooted in

holding her green arms up

to the orchards of the Hesperides

that blossom among the stars

like holy ancestors.

I like the way the comets stray

like hair across her face

and the way she twists her mouth

like driftwood in the sun

to blow them away.

And I like the blaze

of the supernovae of enlightenment

who give it all back to the night

like a blood transfusion,

a hemorrhage of light,

and even more,

these small illuminations

that arrive through the night and day

like anonymous stars and flowers

beside a death bed in a private room

where only the dying know what to say.

Stars above the mountain.

Flowers in the valley.

I like the way the moon’s punked out in the alley

between the church and the funeral home.

I like the way I refuse to assume I know where I’m going

like a newly-hatched garden snake in the spring

or a stream setting out on its own

with nothing for a creekbed

but its own flowing

and how I always catch myself like a fish

rising to the hook and allure of a new direction

as if that were the truth north of not having one.

But let the goldfish nibble at the moon as they will

and swim through the tops of the trees

even as these fire-birds are flying through my roots.

I like the feel of the new heels on my cowboy boots.

I like playing the fool with my own molecules

as if I were madder than plutonium

at having to break my balls like a kick in the nuts

with my own pool cue

everytime I give the game away

hoping somehow that will make me

as sane as lead in the table of things.

I see hell. I live in hell. I breathe hell.

And this pillar of I enshrines and embodies it

like the corpse of a murdered river

flowing through darkness

without any recourse or redemption

for its suffering.

No elixir. No grail. No lapis philosophorum.

No celestial gold to climb the ladders of fire

out of the dungeons of hydrogen

or missing link that breaks the chains

of the slaves in the hold

that labour in vain to endure.

Life isn’t fair or unfair.

Pure or compounded.

Civilized or savage.

Eternal or brief.

Loving or hateful

nor all of these together.

The sky isn’t just

the daily news of the weather

and the sea isn’t just

the tragic rage of co-conspirators

doing their worst to fall on their own swords

as if they could be turned

like waves against one another

and though it is immaculately kind of us to say so

the earth really isn’t our mother

if you go back far enough.

The earth is more of a nurse these days

trying to suckle

a hydra-headed wound

in a nightshift emergency ward

at the full moon

with plastic udders of blood

hanging from a cruclfix on wheels.

For every demon that jumps from heaven

an angel rises from hell

and I like the way

I’m learning to fall toward paradise

without a parachute

like a one-winged samara trying to angel on

with these seeds of loaded dice

riding the luck of the wind

like a wounded albatross

looking for new ground

at the foot of an empty cross.

As much has been gained as was lost.

I like the way time weaves the manes

of the sheepish dandelions

into the emergency ghosts

of a thousand scattered parachutes.

I like the way every conclusion about life

rights itself with its opposite

like a compass or a keel

and there are addictions

so intensely beyond the obvious dark mirrors

and shared needles of true north

trying to snort the stars

to light up the room like a legend

on a neon movie marquee,

unschooled states of mind

so powerfully clear and whole

your being is shot up like a tree in the lightning

that God wants to use for a voice-box

so that the tree is known by its fruits,

the taste of its words,

the joy of its birds,

the blossom of the moon on the dead branch

the butterfly on the green

like the whole notes and stops on the flute

of a snake-charmer

collaborating with the muse of a cobra

on a new song

two minutes long with a hook.

I like the way life goes on in the dark

beyond the painted eyelids of the billboards

running for re-election as a theme park

to improve the fibre-optics of their umbilical cords.

Even as the truth turns out

to be more of a lock than a key

that can be turned in your mouth like a word

to set you free of yourself

like a long thought-chain

that plugs the world into your navel;

and beauty is a pimped-out carnival

of surgical exaggerations and defects

that wear the look of lost luggage

under the sagging circus tents

that taxi down the runways of the rejects;

and the evil that is done in the world

cloaks the oceanic eye of awareness

with the cataract of an oilslick

that giftwraps everyone like water

in the same starless snake-skin

they tattoo their corporate logos on

like a new translation of the Rosetta Stone

in the demotic tongues

of the illiterate mobs of PsychoBabylon.

Even in this deepest eclipse of hell

that swallows us whole

like the eggs of the moon in a nest

and is running out of eyes to darken,

even here there are still small lighthouses of joy

that shine through the cracked skulls of these coasts

and haloes of fireflies

that still iris the eyes of the black holes

that are too deep for anyone to put down roots

or go witching for water with lightning

screwed into the eyesockets

of their spineless lightbulbs

playing peek-a-boo

in their see-through birthday suits.

Let evil offend or amend its own statutes.

I like the feel of the new heels on my cowboy boots.

PATRICK WHITE

DON'T APPROACH ME

DON’T APPROACH ME

Don’t approach me with your cozy round gratuities of old age

exuding geriatric sophistry

as if time had worn all my thresholds down

like old sway-backed stairs on their way out.

Vast space behind this blossom of my face

this bad moon

still clinging to my spine

and the night is not young or old.

Since the day I was born

I’ve been off the clock

like some illegitimate hour

no one ever talks about

and I’ve got a salmon-nature

that keeps swimming upstream

against the flow of things.

Saccharine ghosts of cotton candy

handing themselves out

like new hairdos of hovering kindness

to the kids on a derelict midway

missing a lot of lights

and if it isn’t that

it’s missing the point entirely

like bullets in the attic

trying to remember who

they were supposed to be shooting at.

Don’t pat me on the back

as if we were the same as one another

because we’ve outgrown our experience of things

and there’s this wise sunset glow

that wraps its light around things

like the golden skin of a sage in autumn

or an apple just before it goes rotten.

I was a fool then.

And I am a fool now.

And I will be a fool tomorrow.

And my life has been more of an anti-scripture

I’ve kept writing to warn people away from me

than the word of an abiding god

looking for followers.

The book of an idiot

though it took eighty years to write

though its falsehoods be fossilized

in pages of shale

like the lost diaries of time

confiding what really went on

is still just the prelude to ignorance

that reverences its own stupidity

by quoting itself lavishly

about evolution gone wrong.

We’ve all heard these brass knockers before

talking through the door

about what life’s taught them

and how you should live

if you ever want to see

through their window on the world

in a home of your own

what it means to look and never be

the stone that shatters the past like the moon.

The buddha rides the back of a braying buffoon.

A clown milks a judas-goat for cheese.

There was a man standing here a moment ago.

Now he’s on his knees in his own abyss

shaking his afterlife at the gods like a fist

as if he were always dying for someone else

the gods woke with a kiss on the palms of their hands.

As my friend Charles Fisher called them

dusties and mumblies whinies moanies

and weekend croanies

greeting each other like bookends.

The dust of the road may settle like vision

in the eyes of the dew

and the stars that once burnt so furiously

to be let in

gather like dead flies

on their potty windowsills

where all their cute trinkets lie about things

as if they were butterflies in the web

of a spider with wings

they were teaching to fly

but I like the demons who flock

to my states of grace like refugees

who’ve burned the bridges

of their homelessness behind them

and know there’s no way back to bind them

to any path but the one they’re on.

So it was in the beginning.

So it is now.

The road grows old before you do

and the body begins to fall apart like a weary shoe

that walks as if it knew its own way home without you

and the spirit can’t remember

all the names of God

it’s been beading for years

like a rosary of skulls that just keeps getting longer

and though you advise everyone not to

the world keeps making the same mistakes you do

even as the brahmins of desire succumb like autumn

to the ashes of the pyre

to get closer to the stars

like smoke from a dying fire

giving up the ghosts of its past lives

to animate something inestimably higher than sex.

But when it rains like a woman crying over my grave

it’s not the blossom that craves to be enlightened

by the firefly mystics in the valley of her sorrows

it’s my roots that want to possess the truth

like a woman in the prime of her youth

like a summer on earth

without giving a damn how it flys in heaven

or who it is that’s firing up the oven

because when I’m the starwheat

she’s the terrestrial leaven.

I’d rather cook in her fires

and break bread like my flesh with the devil

than immaculate myself

on the celestial sickle of the moon

like an old fertility king

that can’t get a rise out of anything.

PATRICK WHITE

HOWEVER GRATIFIED I AM

HOWEVER GRATIFIED I AM

However gratified I am, always I’m left with a hunger

for something more than I’ve tasted before

as if my emptiness were not perfect yet and I were

ready to let everything ride on a single throw of my skull

up against the wall just to see what falls out of its own will,

or change my species once in a while. Over-reaching

perhaps, spiritual pleonaxia, something amiss with my heart

or maybe I just don’t want to be left behind, resigned

to an expanding universe I can’t keep up with.

Things are as they are. It’s clear. My mind’s a hawk

with the blinders off. I’ve thawed the diamond.

Enlightenment flows through my heart like electricity.

I’m shining. I don’t need a star to find my way home in the dark.

I can look upon the earth demonically.

I can see it through the eyes of the angel.

But the fireflies have taught me all they have to share.

And the lightning looks like a slacker compared

to the discipline I exact from myself just to

shock me out of the old growth forest in my heartwood

like a chainsaw, despite the nails I’ve hammered into it

like a crucifix without a saviour, an ark without a sail.

Though I’ve beamed like the full moon out over the harvest

the bounty of life never quite fills me all the way up to the brim.

I’m always a drop shy of my longing for completion,

as if there were always a crack in the cup I drank from.

And this agony has summoned me for years

from as far back as my beginningless beginnings

like a bell that swings both ways between sex and death

and though I answer it like the s.o.s. of a lapwing

by the time I get there, it’s irrevocably gone

as if it were just a ruse that were leading me on.

Deeper into life? Though what I make of it, like the stars,

I make alone? No trysts on the rainbow bridge at midnight?

No god to rejoice in these works of love within me?

No abyss to delight in the sheer absurdity of it?

A gleeman, a jester, a sacred clown, a morose fool,

a mystic, a scholar, a sailor that went down with the ship

just to stay true to the spirit of the storm within me,

an open doorway for the dead to come and go as they please,

an astronomical prodigy, an optician of mirrors and prisms,

a cowboy Zen master who rode into town on a seahorse,

a poet living on the edge of the word that thrives like weeds

around the graves in the cemeteries of the dead metaphors

I’m always digging up like a dog who buried a bone.

A gardener on the moon, an usher of history, a lover

who learned to sing like a martyr in the flames

of a gnostic heresy that gave up all its claims to knowledge,

a triviality that mentored the grand scheme of things

in the mystic specificity of not just the cosmos,

but the chaos under our noses as well, and all these avatars,

this pageant of characters I look back on now

like a children’s crusade, consumed like straw dogs

in the fires of their adoration, and the smoke they left

like a script on the air, unencompassed by any direction of prayer.

A lunar mirage behind a veil of heat, a delusion of water

I raise to the lips of the man on the moon to drink slowly

from his own hands, and the mouth of the man he sees in them.

I hang on a hook through my gut in the air and speak

in tongues of pain nemetic forecasts of the New Year

as a volunteer for the mystic excruciation of agony into bliss,

without insisting that it should be so, and each time

I say next year that’s going to be effortless, but it never is.

I’ve tried denying it to win its affirmation.

I’ve tried affirming it to have it issue a denial

and still it haunts my solitude like a mute siren I can’ t resist.

And don’t want to hear. And don’t want to listen to.

This undemanding imperative to live more deeply, more darkly

than I ever have before such that all my dragons

are diminished into fireflies at a distance by comparison

trying to burn their way out of the blackholes

I enter like a rite of passage I can’t do anything but trust

to the other side of why I risk so much to be here.

I can hear the wind howling through me like a wounded wolf

cauterizing its heart with stars. No mercy on the mountain,

I steel my blood cells with the carbon of old extinctions

and eat the pain, gnawing on a bone in my mouth.

Praying to my own echo for silence, cessation, release,

without taking a step backward over the edge of where I came from.

Let it come, let it come, let it come, encounter or collision the same,

exit or entrance, gate, wall, consummation or the upper limit

of it all just before it turns into a windfall of beginner’s luck

and I’m the chance it takes I’m not playing dice with the universe.

That there’s more to learn from a curse than a blessing.

That all this isn’t just an agonizing farce of humourless shadows,

non-spatial impersonalities slowly being humanized

by life masks of scar tissue as a way of facing up to things.

That a calling isn’t just a matter of putting up a plaque

to commemorate the garden life was first introduced to time in.

That humans weren’t just born to be sundials of the flesh.

That suffering is a dark enlightenment that’s mother of the stars

and compassion tastes of the tears of the tree it ripened on.

That ego isn’t the king of thorns in a world full of balloons.

Or if so. A rose is a mere rhetorical device of the blood

and there’s nothing beautiful about a puncture wound

to a mythically-inflated universe waiting for a heart transplant.

That art’s just the phoney climax of an unbearable impotence

that breeds cunning and guile as an antidote to spontaneity

and it’s an indictable offence to bear true witness

to the untenable relationship between the fiction of beauty

and the delirium of meaning that follows in its wake

like gulls behind a river barge of surgically removed body parts

being dumped out at sea like bad meat down a neighbour’s well.

Anomie. Ennui. Menses and memes of homogenous angst. Normalcy

of reflexive desecration. Solipsistic nihilism. Home-grown anarchy.

Gnats in the dusk. Frenzied star clusters. Saddles without horses

lined up seriatim along the fence like the pelvises of extinct animals

waiting to get asked to the dance by a water ballet of wheelchairs.

Schools of thought slyly amended by X-box.

Heavily armed poets buying bad ammunition for their books

and the clarity of a life that was never there to return to

going through violent paroxysms of withdrawal in de tox.

Locusts dying in the starfields they swarmed like civilization.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

I’m out here in the weeds, ploughing the moon back under.

Let the seeds fall where they will on any night of the calendar.

Intense heat. Unusual sprouts. I’m not a hunter, not a farmer.

No ploughshares beaten into swords, no swords into bells.

I don’t read meanings into what I sow like dragons’ teeth,

open gates to let things in and out or through.

I was an exile in progress the day before I was born

to be returned to my solitude like a waterclock

of siloes and urns on the moon scattering my ashes

among the stars that bloom to be consumed by their hunger,

as it is becoming increasingly clear to me I do

like a salmon leaping upstream against the flow of time,

to spoonfeed the abyss an elixir of remedial eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

SISTER LUNACY

SISTER LUNACY

Shall we dance, shall we spin and wheel, hesitate, advance,

stall and recover, whirl like maple keys, and blow

the ashes of the starmaps we burned like passports

out of the palms of our hands to shine like dandelions

on an eye to eye level with the light they bloom in?

Sister Lunacy, I watch you uprooting your garden usefully

and shaking the stars out of the clumps of grass

as if you caught Medusa smuggling diamonds in her hair,

and I say such is woman when she forgets to be aware of herself,

and the goddess comes down to earth with dirty fingernails,

a gazelle in rubber boots. And no flower of the field,

no planet in the sunset, no eyelash of the moon over a barn

quite adorns the twilight the way her numinosity does.

And I want to take her by the hand like a binary star system

and circle one another like two hawks in the sky

until the night cools and the loons pack up their keyboards

and the stars work the graveshift on into the early hours

of the forthcoming dawn as if the end of all their labour

were extinction in a deluge of light

that doesn’t recognize any of them by name. Shall we dance,

shall we let the picture-music carry us away

like a word that hasn’t hurt us in a long time,

shall we gather wild rice in the holds of our birch bark canoes

as if we were threshing jewels on the shallow end of the lake,

or do you just want to walk the Road of Ghosts with me awhile

and see what blooms along the way, sunflowers and waterlilies

opening up like observatories and prophetic skulls

with a penchant for looking at things the same way?

Sister Lunacy, be kind to the mandalas and paradigms

I bring you like dreamcatchers woven of spinal cords

like tree rings of heartwood, ripples of rain, the net of Indra

where you mark one jewel and they’re all marked.

Or as Jesus said, insomuch as you do it unto one of these,

you do it unto me, and everyone thought he was special.

As if he owned gravity and everyone had shares.

It’s a radical act to come like a sweetness to ripen

the heart of a human that’s stayed green too long.

Just as you and I know madness is the quickest way

of never getting it wrong and if you’re going to argue

do it in song, don’t exorcise the answer

out of the person who possesses it and bid it be gone.

You can’t post a bond against a ghost.

Myriad guests of the mind, but seldom a host to speak of.

And Sister Lunacy you speak as if you were letting

a thousand voices all at the same time use you

as if they had no other mother tongue of their own,

and somehow it comes across as what you had to say.

So I’m asking you now. Do you want to dance,

do you want to bend space the way a body moves,

reshape the universe in its own image, abberate

a few wavelengths into falling out of synch like damp hair licks?

And I’d remember to remember that only horses sweat

and read your aura by the glow of the hot dew on your face.

After the last lifemask comes off, nothing but space.

Nothing but imaginative room to move as if there were nowhere

we needed to go and we didn’t feel bad about it.

We just went off into the ongoing like everything else

that’s looping and coiling its way through time,

a fragility of the air, caterpillars swaying in the wind

at the end of a fishing line tied to the allure of a butterfly.

Don’t be fooled by the vertebrae, everyone’s flying kites

at the end of a long spine when the air revs up.

You can see them tangled in the powerlines of their ancestors.

Sky burials without altars. Road kill. Cheap cremations.

The whole panoply of the tragically absurd.

But here, sister, here volcanoes still strew

islands in their wake and the birds keep arriving with seeds

and coconuts still wash ashore like prophetic skulls

you’re free to believe or not, and the air tastes like emeralds.

Here you could mentor the stars in their myths of origin

as you made them up to honour some quirk in your character

and they began to speak of you as their dark mother.

And nobody need know what you mean when you spoke to me

about those things that encroached on your silence inside.

I know how to listen for dissonant sounds in the night.

I can hear the falling of a single eyelash of light

when the moon goes out, the footfall of a spider on the stairs.

Sister Lunacy, should I take your hand, shall we dance

to the picture-music that overtakes us unawares,

you with your dark tears, and mine so far in arrears?

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETIMES THINK

SOMETIMES THINK

Sometimes think I’m always

a life too late

to catch up to my own

walking away weary of waiting for me.

Or I’m a star too far ahead of my own shining

and that’s why it’s always dark.

I know the agony

in the stones of an abandoned bridge

that shoulders the world for nothing,

upholds nothing but its own mass

and waits for things to pass.

And even when I fall into the river

to flow along with my own mindstream

without consulting the leaves like maps

I still can’t get the moon off my back.

Look at all these orchards

littered along my banks

from the tent of a single blossom.

And there are nights

when I can smell snake on the wind

as if everything were about to happen again

and I still haven’t milked the fangs of the moon

for an antidote to the pain

or put out the third eye

of the irrational surveillance camera

that oversees the sorrows of the insane

when it’s full.

I like my perfections whole enough

to include what is not

and if I am immoderately empty

it’s so I can make space for the world

like the blood-sea of the rose

that flows out of nothing

into tides that shed their waves

like the eyelids, brides and petals

of a human heart.

My breath is silver.

My breath is gold

I’ve mined from the mystic mountain

that got in my way

whenever I tried to cross

the valley threshold.

I had to evaporate to rise to the top;

I had to get myself together like a cloud

to transform my own delusions

into a glimpse of the other side

that didn’t take a scapegoat for a guide.

Now space is my only familiar

and the being behind the face

of who I was a moment ago

is just another snake in the furnace

of this star that sheds my skin like fire.

Streams of insight

that are not predicated like mirages

on deserts of thought

trying to spin themselves

into mirrors and silks of glass

like a new religion

sweeping the world like sand

advance the gardens

of the water-givers underground

who teach the flowers how to bloom

and drown like stars

in the infinite opening of their eyes.

And I’ve mauled the nets of the constellations

like a man in the morning

walking through a high field

radiant with spiderwebs

and if there’s anything

left hanging in the wardrobe

that used to house my masks and cloaks

they’re veils I’ve torn from the light

to better see into my darkness.

I’m still looking

but nothing has appeared yet

and no sleight of mind

that’s ever mastered me

has ever taught me how

to realize the inconceivable

except in the proportions of a human

whose mere existence is utterly unbelievable

whenever I turn the light around

and discover the dispersing stars

I have followed so long and far

into the unborn darkness where I begin

shining within.

PATRICK WHITE