FEEL LIKE THERE’S A BEAST

Feel like there’s a beast in the darkness

eating my eyes.

I’m a moon-bull

at a crossroads of solar swords

down on it knees

hemorrhaging like a poppy.

And there are constellations

I’ve never heard before

playing the harp of my horns

with pensive fingertips.

How strange this rag of life

soaked in tears and blood is.

Everything dies like a snowflake on a furnace,

a rock on an autumn mountain,

no two the same.

There are nights, there are

vigils of darkness

when the mirror can no longer bear

the weight of this feather of fire,

this vision of life

that estranges the spirit

of those who love it most

like a funeral bell

that once drank to the folly of love.

I am a snakepit of lightning

knotted in a glacier of ice

and every emotion

is the undertow of the tide in a sea of eyes

on the cold skull of the moon,

every thought, a stone lifeboat

inundated by the waves

it’s convinced it’s saving from drowning.

Once I was the dupe

of my own ideals,

now I am the master of none.

This far into the abyss

you forget the name of the god

you died in the name of;

you have squandered your certainty

on greater and greater risks,

the enciphered lotteries of mythic necessity,

only to discover,

though you traversed eras like deserts

that made a skull of your faith,

the donkeys have eaten all the mangers,

and there is as much radiance in the eye

of the dead serpent on the road

as there is the eyelash of a star.

A tear is not a fountain of seeing,

nor a drop of blood, a rose.

How rare the sword in its silence

among all these chatty scissors at war

trying to cut along the dotted lines

of their border highways

crammed with refugees

they once called lovers,

the horizon slashed

and bleeding like a letter.

I want to calculate the half-life of pain;

the pillar of ore it calls home;

the elemental devolution of its atomic evictions

into the leaden passion of a base metal.

I want to know what I’ve turned into.

I want to know what’s making the stars

throw down their spears of light at my feet

though my heart’s out in the open

like a voodoo doll

waiting for a donor transplant.

I want to see myself

opening a door in the mirror

to someone with absolute eyes

irrevocable as yesterday’s rain.

Let the star know

the flower it engenders;

let the rose

taste its own honey.

Blind in a dream; blind,

what light roots in the darkness

that I should want to

throw off this robe of blood like a sky

to slip through the eye of the needle

that binds the seams of this world

like a bird

with the single thread of a life in its beak,

washed out of God’s eye

like a firefly snuffed

in a torrential downpour of stars?

Why am I

always one heart too many

over the threshold of the truth

I had to leave home to discover?

Am I a hoax in tears

or a tear away from a gate and a rafter?

Let the wave know the sea

that packs its caravan on the moon,

let the silence of the waking abyss

write indelible preludes

with a last kiss

that goes on forever

like the white autumn wind

in a turmoil of seeds

that demonically exceed

the life they’re after,

flower by flower,

death by death

like the pulse of a bell

setting the doves free

in the towers of farewell.

It’s the eloquence of a tree

to say what life is

when the full moon ripens

in its leafless branches

and the heart beats

like a windfall of silver apples,

though I have tried,

but love is a bridge

on a finger of water

that not even the moon

can slip off like a ring

when the wind rises

like a gaping fish

to swallow the chimes and eyehooks

of its matriculate ripples.

And with each breath of the night

I took and returned,

I have aspired to succeed

at every failure I was ever inspired by.

I raised every sail,

crossed every wave,

every eyelid, every petal

of the sea of life

in the heart of the rose

only to drop the first crescent of the moon

like an anchor

in the furnace of a dream.

PATRICK WHITE

SAD TO SEE HOW WE BAIT OUR MIND-HOLD TRAPS WITH OUR HEARTS

SAD TO SEE HOW WE BAIT OUR MIND-HOLD TRAPS WITH OUR HEARTS

Sad to see how we bait our mind-hold traps with our hearts,

put all we are on the line, just for a little love, a kiss, a touch

an embrace that doesn’t snap shut like the jaws of a great white

we put our trust in not to draw blood at the first bite.

I take people’s faces off the shelves as they pass by

like second hand bookstores, and casually browse

their life stories only to find whole chapters ripped out

and sometimes the eyes, so you can see clear through

to the other side of what there was in the way of a view

to look back at you, that someone despised, and cut out

like a number two, twenty pound, book paper death mask,

black holes like the eye sockets of a skull,

slowly eating what was left of a face that yesterday

was the peer of the stars, the great seal of the sun,

the imprimatur of moonlight on the waters of the lake.

And I know those who love love for love’s sake

more than they ever have the topsoil of an erosive human,

or the bedrock and watershed of their darker depths

where the fish, like ghosts, or fireflies and stars

have to shine by their own light if they want to walk

swim or fly the rest of the way whistling in the dark on their own.

Or just want to stand there like lighthouses

unaware of the danger they pose to themselves

when they don’t take the advice of the seagulls in a storm

and just stand there, upright and brittle as the eternal names

on an obelisk in an earthquake, or a candle

whose spine was broken before it had a chance to burn.

Trashed, rejected, betrayed, played and abandoned,

the spring equinox makes its precessional wobbling way

through ordeals worthy of an Apache warrior

daring his adolescence into maturity

like a flagellant whipped through the stations of the cross,

or the slums of the black-hearted houses of a zodiac of anti-matter

dreaming of Shangri Las of light where totem animals and taboos

are tasted like forbidden fruit with ritualistic immunity.

Bitterly estranged by the excruciating transformations of love

I’ve seen people befriend and sword dance with each other

like alarm clocks in a snakepit with what they hate the most

to see which of two assassins is going to wake up first

from the coma they’ve put each other in like a direct hit

in public in broad daylight, or more discretely,

slumped against a lamp post like a garbage bag.

Love can empower a hero in a hardware store,

but once someone walks under a ladder,

love sours into an infernal power base

that depends on the opinion of its inferiors

to sustain its paranoid grasp of supremacy.

Love cuts the power lines to the embassy

like a coup d’etat as it shreds

its correspondence in leaving

for a covert afterlife without extradition.

And fair to say, love’s the white blossom of the moon

on a dead branch that breaks into leaf again.

Love’s the pain-eater, the bliss-giver,

the sacred whore outside the Iseum,

the vestal virgin that keeps the hearth flame

alive for the lifespan of a vow of thirty years,

or be buried up to her headful of honeyed tresses

in red army ants that burn like stinging nettles.

Love’s the lonely career of a bank cashier

that talks through a hole in a bullet proof window

wishing there were no time locks on her heart

to keep the bad guys out of the hope chest of the vaults

or the morgue of safety deposit boxes

where she keeps her feelings to herself.

I’ve been in love and know that when you’re in love

there’s no outside anywhere. I’ve felt the fire

run its fingers through my hair and ignite

the fuses of my cedar roots burning underground

to flare up five miles down the valley,

a week after I thought I’d put it out. I’ve

touched the mystery of life embodied in a woman

and drank the wine of the shipwrecked hareem

of amphorae on the bottom, and been slain

by the beauty of the death that was offered me

by the black muse of a waterlily into witchcraft

and been feted like an Ainu bearcub at the New Year

before she sacrificed me like a message to the gods.

Though less immediately appealing to the Luna Moths

who want to be immolated in the candle flame

that’s driving them tantrically mad with mystic lust,

I’ve loved women who were kinder than most sunsets

and bloodbanks, gardens like nurses

in intensive care units on the nightshift

whose tears could keep you alive intravenously,

whose smiles were bouquets with something illicit

smuggled inside, to motivate a full recovery.

And the way a stone feels the sun seeping into it

in the morning, until it’s saturated with light

like the fruits of the earth, I came to love them

the way a rock with any understanding of life

comes to love its lichens, moss and columbine

even though, a moment ago, it was a nickel-iron meteor

about to put its fist through the mirror like an change of species.

Nymph, wife, and crone. Birth, life, and death.

The triune identity of the moon that gives you breath

and then takes it away like a gift you would be

better off without. A black widow spider

playing a violin as if she were rocking a baby in her arms,

and you couldn’t help but be brought to tears,

and in the blink of a third eye,

the bloodthirsty eclipse of a detached retina

wrecking the rainbow of a promise that wasn’t kept

as if the cockpit just blew out of the space shuttle.

O and then the cooling loaves of the flesh

she makes of her occult body and breaks with you

like a wishbone she makes of her hips

from the throat of a black swan in the chimney

of an amorous anaconda with the eyes of a running doe.

And I know that death is love, is passage,

extinction and renewal, is growth that leaves you

feeling like a stranger on your own doorstep,

or it was your house but there was no one left

to answer you when you showed up again

like a loveletter feeling like junk mail.

Walk away, walk away, walk away,

on your own two feet, not your hands and your knees

and on your way out, see if you can remember

all the names of the stars in the Pleiades,

beginning with Alcyone, even as space turns to glass,

and ruminate on the beauty in the vastness of things

that come together, mingle, and separate

like restless sacred rivers out for a fling

that ended up crying alone before themselves or God

as if their eyes were jewels, and their hearts

the mystic watersheds of flowers smiling through their tears.

Walk away like an actor turned audience

walks out on his own play on closing night.

Not always, but often, separation is a veil of tears

that gives its eyes up to the beauty of the light

that comes shining through them like a smeared insight

into how easily the simple radiance of being alive

to discover in compassion the sweetness and wisdom of life

how easily the afterlife of love can thaw

the diamond snake-eyes, the lunar fangs

of the most intransigent horrors at zenith or nadir

and liberate all the stars like the pollen of fallen flowers

from the glacier the Milky Way turned into

to bloom again like starmaps gone mad

and green the Sahara into a sea of mammals and grass

with ten degrees of warmth and affection

at the end of a long ice age weeping into its hands

for how creatively beautiful, sad, freaked

with motherlodes of wisdom in its darkest ores,

inspired visions in fires that put the constellations to shame

when love goes supernova and can be seen a galaxy away.

And the metaphors that proliferate like new forms of life

as if the Pre-Cambrian were merely the blueprint

for masterpieces to come, and yes, even when love

plays the delta blues with its face against the wall

like Robert Johnson, and the abyss breathes in your face

as if you were about to be swallowed like a cosmic egg

by a dragon of dark transformative energy

unhinging its jaws to consume you without pity

like a black hole that turns you

like the key to another universe

where snakes can fly and you’re not denied

some of what you weren’t granted in this one.

And looking back at what you thought had ended

you’re amazed at the dark harmonies of picture-music

that kept on playing while Atlantis sank,

like deep undercurrents of love

in the watershed of your housewell,

and the eclipses that no one heeded in time

or mistook for sunspots, shed themselves

like the petals of a black rose

emanating the fragrance of a new moon

tempting the martyrs of moonlight

to the danger of her thorns

and the elixir of her tears

we sip from our own skulls

like hummingbirds at the lips of holy grails.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU SAY YOU'VE TAKEN ALL THE TENSION OUT OF YOUR LIFE

YOU SAY YOU’VE TAKEN ALL THE TENSION OUT OF YOUR LIFE

You say you’ve taken all the tension out of your life,

but to me you’ve just planed a mountain range

into a parking lot. Your sacred syllable is flatlining

like a synonym for death, and your eyes,

o those eyes were so blue once

I could have made a cult of the colour

and happily sacrificed myself on the altar

of a sky burial where the angels reverted to ravenous birds,

but now they’re one way windows on a braille runway

for blind aliens on the Nazca plateau.

You talk like a tourist guide

with a photo-shopped cheeriness

in the same tone of immaculate voice

as if genesis were beginning all over again

with a logo in the mouth of a vociferous abyss.

I believe in your natural kindness,

those summers of feeling so much like August

out in the fields of an abandoned farm,

where the light kissed the fieldstones on the forehead

as sweetly as it did the eyelids of the wild flowers.

I believe in the integrity of your search,

the sincerity of your confusion, the sway

of your compassion for cellular tissue

over the ideological abstraction of the living details

extracted by vampiric points of view.

Life is messy, soiled, tantrically spoiled,

and even when the moon spices the wine

with love potion number nine, most of the time

we’re still drinking out of a dirty cup,

but I know you’re not blind to the rapture

of the fireflies showing off to the stars,

or the waterlilies shining like a starmap in a swamp.

You see the green candelabra of the maple saplings

rooted in the decay of the mothering stump.

I know there’s love in you. I’ve gone

pearldiving in your sea. And whatever

the coral reefs that rip the hull

out of your moonboat now, I’ve seen

that great Atlantean heart of yours

and its irrepressible buoyancy

rising to the surface like a breaching whale.

You don’t need a broom to sweep

the mirages of an encroaching desert off your stairs.

You don’t need to cherry-pick your delusions

to accommodate a school of gerry-mandered gurus.

Just let your thoughts roost like birds at dusk

in the black walnuts for the night, and rinse

the stardust off your wings in the Milky Way,

or the Pleiades if you want to take a bird bath

before you dream at cruising altitude without a flightplan

or course correction, of bettering the world we are,

by washing it off like a smear on a myopic mirror

that’s impatiently elitist about its perfection,

though everytime we do, we’re sure to leave,

even if we have the rainbow body of a Tibetan rinpoche,

a galactic rim of human rime around the tub.

Delusion is the doorway to enlightenment.

Samsara is nirvana. Noumena, phenomena.

Even a mirage, a feature of real water,

however many times its been reflected

like the echo of a dragon in the valley

that’s inexhaustibly as deep as the mountain

is insurmountably high. Sweet one,

sometimes the mind might be a chandelier

of fireflies making up the dance as the wind blows,

but it’s definitely not a crystal skull

goose-stepping to Deutschland uber alles

to spiritually cleanse the world of aberrant translucencies

that move more like the wavelengths of mindstreams

among the symbologies, than the autobahn

among its traffic signs, or road kill

along the dangerous fast lane highways

to the artificial paradise of an inert motel

in a gaseous state. Why throw out the garden

and keep the gate at attention like a Roman legion?

There are no locks or lost keys, one-winged hinges

that have to be retrieved from the river

we threw them in like a tribute of silver swords

when we first stepped into the open out of the void,

or endless pages of grass to part

like the Book of Total Knowledge, Volume L,

like the bloodied waters of the Red Sea

or the civil war we declare on ourselves

like ambassadors in chains, trying to secure a freedom

that was already ours indelibly

long before we were born to live it creatively

in the vaster spaces we return to on the inside

with heart, with immense heart,

like the fruits of the earth

we’ve all come here to gather

with the worms and the birds, the wasps,

the raccoons, the groundhogs and the humans

to deepen our awareness, to sweeten our insight,

to feel the bliss of an expanding universe

taking a great cosmic risk in the darkness

like the first time with a lover,

that the path to enlightenment begins here

and leads everywhere to the windfall at our feet.

Who insults the feast by bringing

a loss of appetite to the table as a spiritual gift

and though you don’t read the menu,

ask for a guest list to make sure you’re

seated above the salt of the earth in the right place?

Shakespeare suggested we assume a virtue

if we have it not and make a habit second nature.

One of the chief uncharacteristics of enlightenment is

it can’t be abused because it doesn’t have a face to lose

and there’s nothing to imitate except a second head

growing on top of your own, you don’t know whether

to crown or stick pins in like the eyes of a voodoo doll

to confuse the issue of taking full advantage

of this as it is, like a singing bird in an apple tree,

the light and the rain and the flaws in our song, in bliss.

PATRICK WHITE

FACELESS THIS TIME OF NIGHT

FACELESS THIS TIME OF NIGHT

Faceless this time of night, my skin evaporates like dry ice

into a deepening sense of containment

by a dark space with distant cities of light

trying to colonize the Pythagorean fireflies of Cretona,

or the shimmering mirage of Port Angeles

dancing like a seance at the foot of the mountains

across a hundred miles of the Georgia Strait at night,

the immensity of the freedom that dwarfs the stars

with the sheer magnitude of the labour before them.

The fragility of a spinal cord traversing the abyss

of a one-stringed box guitar made of cardboard

when you were a kid, the mere filament

of an anachronistic light bulb with the lifespan

of the wick of an apostate candle at a black mass,

disappointed it wasn’t born a flower,

but a weed more at home among the stars

that uprooted it from its intimacy with the earth

like a kindred spirit of light

that must wander through its own solitude

like music at night from an open window

in the life of the mind to reach out to them

like a tendril of smoke from the embering nugget

of the heart nesting in a private crown of fire

that abdicated its empire of ashes for a single note

of the night bird’s longing to sing back up

like a bell for a sad universe that’s always on the road.

I hear crying in the distance, the dark lament of the hills.

The night creek weeping unseen through hidden valleys.

I can taste the deaths and sorrows, the broken promises

of the rain, drifting like the fragrance of a waterlily

like a star reflected on the undivined watershed of its tears

saturating the air. Matter a condensation of the light,

I can feel life moving through this body, this flesh,

this scrap of starmud, a rush of water, a gust of stars,

a purple passage of blood, a breath of fire and wind,

and the earth, not solid, but real, animating all my limbs,

my vital organs like the ripening fruit of a rootless tree

as if time wept like a bell in me as well, and its tears,

heavy with the weight of too many separations,

yet wise in the ways of the sky, sweetened the fall to come.

PATRICK WHITE

I'VE ALWAYS THOUGHT

I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT

I’ve always thought a shared vision was best,

the tree, doubly witnessed, sweeter in the fruit,

the star seen rising over the hill by two,

exponentially enhanced in its shining

because it binds more than itself and another

in the herb of its light, because

nothing exists except as the sum of the eyes that have seen it

either side of the mirror, and two watching

in love or friendship

realize the world as a solitary river

with an infinite number of confluent banks

unravelling like snakes in every direction,

none flowing the wrong way, all,

the vivid wavelength of an ancient pulse

that grows a heart like a door in a tree,

a lighthouse in the dark

or the moon on the breast of a wave.

Look at a shoelace or a chromosome

or the wings of a thermalling hawk

to see what I mean:

one and together make three,

and three makes everything a shape of space.

I and you are only two, a mere reflection.

But when you look upon something with love,

one glance is enough to show you

all the rivers and trees and valleys of earth,

all the flowers and mountains and birds,

all the fingertips and bells and tides and tears,

all the planets clustered like cherries

that laboured to make your face

the mould and model of their own,

right down to the urns of the stars

that marrowed the gold of your bones

out of the ashes of their dead, all there

from the very beginning of all

when God said let there be light

and there was only light and God

until the light said

let there be love instead

let there be love instead

let there be love instead

and the dark was filled with eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

ALL THE GOOD REASONS THAT GET IN THE WAY OF WRITING

ALL THE GOOD REASONS THAT GET IN THE WAY OF WRITING

All the good reasons that get in the way of writing,

baby needs new shoes, and you’re conscientious and diligent,

will kill you faster than the bad ones

that brought you to the edge of your mindstream in the first place

to dip your skull like the cup of the moon

in the wellsprings of your own imagination

instead of always sipping spit from other men’s mouths.

I’m not saying don’t do what you must do

to be a decent human being, or as close as you can get,

but when you’re creatively underwhelmed

by the rising Rockies of Circumstance

losing their footing like an avalanche of cornerstones

coming down on you like a barrage of asteroids,

you better find a mountain gear deep within yourself

to power you out of the way of your own collapsing mindscape.

Don’t come to a reasonable truce with the ashen exigencies

of the underwhelming reality love married you to,

or pontificate like a hollow urn on the tragic absence

of even so much as an echo of yourself to make a comeback

or tell me you squandered it all like apple bloom

when everything I’ve read of what you haven’t written

smells like smoke from a distant pyre on the wind.

Remember the fire. Even if you have to burn underground

through the occult roots of the cedars, or bury yourself

powdered in red ochre under the hearthstones

of your prophetic forebears erasing your picture-music

from the cave walls like graffiti under a bridge

between this world as it never is when you look too closely,

and the one that’s working on you like spiritual water on limestone.

Remember the fire. Remember the discipline

of disobedience that tempted you to steal it in the first place

like a Spartan boy with a hot fox, as it

eats you from the outside in without you saying a word

lest you get caught ratting your deepest secret out in agony.

Or regenerative Prometheus chained to a rock like a salamander

born in the fire of his own afterbirth. Know this.

Lightning doesn’t strike the roosters of fire

that crow like weathervanes pinned

like a medal from an old campaign to the axis of the wind

as if the dawn were some kind of triumph over the night.

Cradle that fire in your hands like a bird that’s fallen to earth,

or a lamp of holy oil in a niche of unanswered longings,

a candle in a hurricane of boarded up windows,

the light of your own mind, casting shadows of time

like a sundial with a wilder imagination

than its usefulness might at first glance suggest.

Nor will it do to catch a falling star and put it in your pocket,

or pour gold down your throat like the Parthians did Crassus

and expect to shine like a lighthouse in a diamond mine

with the voice of an oracular canary in a cage.

You’ve got to live inexhaustibly

what you’re going to write about first

if you want to burn down the Library of Alexandria

in a gamma ray burst of creative annihilation

because you can only master as much life

as you’ve surrendered to like a heretic at the stake

or a pine cone germinating the seeds of enlightenment

like a zen hermit in a forest fire. Don’t take

all the beautiful green swords flaming like wild irises

whose beauty you fall upon like an honourable death

and abuse them like the palings of a gate or a fence around paradise.

Even if you’ve only got a firefly of talent

left in the caldera of an extinct volcano,

a spark in the firepit of a burnt out dragon,

a smouldering ember from last night’s fire in the stove

on a cold morning when the windows are blazing with ice,

you must be crazy and wise enough oxymoronically

to be the benign tyrant of your own Golden Age

like Pericles of Athens, with a politically incorrect

lover for a muse you look upon like the Parthenon

as if she were a phase of the moon. Even if

you love the swaying silver of the wind

over the heavy-grained harvest breaking water

like a bell under a redundant blue moon,

don’t shrink from threshing it if you want to

share it like bread with people as hungry as you are

to eat the heart of the king of the waxing year,

like Wodin made a sacrifice of himself to himself,

or life thrives on itself like a soccer team

that crashed landed on a mountaintop,

or the cosmic eggs of turtles feeds a manger of seagulls,

and the grass eats the grazer, and the grazer eats the grass.

Or if you’re too sensitive to compassionately take life

in order to give it, sharpen the edge of your golden sickle

on the whetstone of the moon, and express your mercy

as Muhammad suggested, with a quick kill

you can hold love responsible for like a spiritual alibi

if you’ve got genius enough to heal it like a inspired liar.

You have to be part salmon. A battering ram

swimming upstream against the flow of circumstance

like the gate of a water castle you’re besieging

to lay your blunted sword down in tribute

among the sacred pools of life that gave it to you

at the beginning of your song, like fire from their eyes

to wage a holy war of one on their behalf

you’re doomed to lose like a conflict that progresses

from one defeat to the next against ever stronger adversaries,

angels in the way, shaitans obstructing the path for your own good,

who realize, too late, with every encounter,

you’re growing stronger than the best reasons

could have anticipated strategically.

Be a good apple tree, lyrically seasoned and epically strong

as Lao Tzu and the Druid aptly described you

like the sacred syllable in the heartwood of the letter Q,

and express yourself completely without intending

the betterment of anything, though all do,

from wasps and birds to bears and humans

with the beauty of your blossoms, the wisdom of your leaves,

and the generosity of the sacrifice that laid you out

like a windfall of dice enshrining the eyes that can see

like seeds in the sibylline books of the apple

the risk they’ll need to take tomorrow like a fire swallower

of the sun and the moon to keep their planets shining

from the inside out in the Goldilocks zone

of a light that’s been sweetened immanentally

by a dangerously habitable life holding up

a lantern in the dark that disappointment, defeat and struggle

could no more put out than a volunteer fire brigade of waterclocks

for the best of reasons could put out the stars in an arsonist’s heart.

Set the world afire like a flame that writes on the wind,

poppies flaring uncontrollably across your field of vision.

Burn like a two-eyed passion for everything

you can see and be on the earth that consumes you

in the equinoctial fires of your vernal immolations,

not a magnifying glass that intensifies the sun into

the capricious focus of an idle boy on a cruel afternoon

shepherding ants like prophetic semi-colons into a furnace.

PATRICK WHITE