STUPID, STUPID WORLD FULL OF LIES

STUPID, STUPID WORLD FULL OF LIES

Stupid, stupid world full of lies, self-deceit, greed,

conspiratorial stinging nettles, leeching bills, vampiric,

cutting off the flow of things like tiger-mussels,

hillbilly hippies beating up their girlfriends on crack,

all these egotistic puff ball mushrooms with labial gills

mythically inflated by one night’s good rain

into albino planets, people who have more keys to heaven

than they have locks on hell, abandoned school bells

that go on talking to themselves like wandering scholars

light years after the children grew old at their perennial recess

and the moths and the mice and the mildew

keep putting out books epilogues after everyone’s

forgotten how to read the signs of their own decay.

Between the horns of the moon that’s been thrown

like a goat skull into the wishing well of my heart,

roadie spiders string my harp for me like false eyelashes

in the green room, and the nerves of the mirrors

are shattered into the frayed deltas of the ropes of hope

endangered elephants are trying to climb up to heaven on.

The thin-skinned blissed-out gardenias of Maharajji

are wilting under the eyeshadow of their Mary K cosmetics

as their rainbows grow vicious as vegan dogs

in a spiritual junkyard of razorwire and foodchains

that have overextended their supply lines like the umbilical cords

of kites and puppets and angels on the strings of arachnids.

Too pure for me. I’d be afraid of getting myself on their floors.

Tracking starmud in from the mindstream I’ve been floating down

from one neuron to the next, one town to another,

like the new moon of an origami swan in a scenic calendar

of apocalyptic moments in the life of a hand grenade

people keep pulling on like the handle of an empty fridge.

Count me among the Andalusian vandals of the delinquent dragons

who keep writing obscene truths in lampblack and terza rima

on the walls where the flamethrowers post their prophecies.

I was born to burnish gold. I was born to dry the eyes

of weeping diamonds. I was born to wire the rainbow bridges

with satchel charges of fireflies and lightning for demolition

so everybody can learn to swim through stone

like glaciers to the other side of their polarized cataracts.

And whenever I look at a house of worship built on quicksand

I’ve got to laugh like an avalanche of meteors

at the self-serving lustrations of their pretentious extinctions

as the world blazes all around them like a halo of inflammable hairspray.

I’ve got holy wars of my own to go to that won’t be disarmed

by the soft swords of their beeswax candles surrendering

to such a little flame of life at the tip of a limp wick

that trembles with every breath it takes like a feather in a furnace.

I see the mad dogs like arsonists with hydrophobia

frothing at the mouth for war, citing ancient conflagrations

from the burnt out scriptures of their sacred matchbooks

raving at the supernovas that ignore them like ingrown solar flares

that couldn’t stand up to a drought, let alone a forest fire.

What good is inspiration if it hasn’t got a detonator?

Or enlightenment if all it does is ignite a funeral pyre,

cremate a desire to live like a peer of the dynastic galaxies

you were born among with the silver spoon of a universe in your mouth

whether you use it to cook crack, take your medicine

like a human suffers an excruciating transformation,

or let the hummingbirds sip from it like syringes

flagging snakestongues of blood in celestial sugar water?

And all the warrior poets buffed like medicine bags

of talcum powder, and all the healers selling

batches of bad heroin like dealers to the high school kids

who used to steal their mother’s oxycontin from the medicine chest

so they could rail the yellow brick road like roadkill.

All the vates, seers and shamans consulting

prophetic pundits and polls as the critics

repeal the fate of the artist before she’s born,

cuckoos taking over the nests of better birds,

parasitic guests taking over the house of the host

as the journalists turn from objective observers

to political spiders weaving the webs they spin as the news

and the audience, breaking mutually consenting protocol

gets up on stage with Hamlet and turns a play into a talkshow

for the fifteen minutes of pop-tart celebrity left on their i-phones.

Originality that used to emanate from the roots up

like the light coming out of a dark universe

now seated like an air traffic controller in an orchard

like the wind assigning runways and instructions

on where to take off and land to a riot of blossoms

with pre-conceived flightpaths and well-known destinations.

Creative writing professors in the literary mills

grinding the grist for whole new generations

of mimetically enculturated oxen

to keep the wheels turning of a lucrative careers bank

that used to be the calling of the insanely inspired

too busy working in the visionary mines of their genius

looking for jewels of insight to waste their potential

on getting a job regurgitating words for baby pelicans,

masticating poetry into spiritual pulp fiction

or sipping them from other men’s mouths as if

spit were the nectar of the muse they’ve never met.

The real dragons, their spines lined with sundials,

really don’t care how many chapbooks you’ve published in a year

nor how many times per capita you’ve mentioned butterflies

just to ensure your fan club you’re still sensitive to beauty

or where you’re reading next like a matchbook

burning in the valley of Tuwa or whether your chimney-spark

expiring under the stars is an inferno of unignited creosote

caked in your throat like a callous of black matter

or the ore of the braille alphabet blocks you throw

like snake eyes in dice playing your randomness off

against the lottery of your autobiography copied and pasted

like a colony of red army ants putting your books together

like a folio of butterfly wings perfectly bound for the ant heap.

PATRICK WHITE

ANYONE CAN SAY WHAT THEY FEEL

ANYONE CAN SAY WHAT THEY FEEL

Anyone can say what they feel

but how few can sing what they dream.

You put your heart into any art

and people will follow you like a bloodstream.

In self defence against the omnipotence

of being interdependently originated,

you can substantiate your absence

to prove you’re not living in the same world

we all do, but where’s that going to get you in the end?

You can true your delusions anyway you want

but that’s not going to clear you for the truth.

The destroyed see deeper than those who survived.

That man puts a straitjacket on

everytime he says he’s arrived.

Just because it’s absurd doesn’t mean

it isn’t believable. Me sitting here

writing this to a caste of albino stars

I haven’t reconfigured into a constellation yet

because my imagination keeps shape-shifting me

like a gust of fireflies into myriad myths of origin

since I realized, cosmically speaking, one size

doesn’t fit all like a house of transformation

in an Etruscan zodiac. Or a prayer wheel.

Or the ecliptic of a mystic head band

still bound to the skull of a Druid who died young.

Fifty years, a poet, but I don’t expect

this is as mad as it’s going to get.

I’ve been deepening my ignorance aesthetically

for light years, but when I cry for things I regret

my tears are still wet, and my mindstream suggests

there was no other way of flowing at the time.

I hang on the hook of the moon prophetically

until the pain grows profound

and ten scribes in a tower write it all down.

I am blessed. I am cursed. I am hunted and ignored.

I love disingenuously to keep from being bored.

And when there’s nothing else for the fire to feed on

I offer it my body, my soul, my solitude

and the rare acquiescence of a tumultuous mind

like the third eye of a hurricane with a corneal implant.

I don’t keep the impersonality of what I feel about life

in a little drawer with a skull on a keychain

I use to master the coffin doors of the slumlords

that won’t open of their own accord

like rosebuds in a rusty locket that’s come unhinged.

I don’t pour the ocean into a teacup anymore

as much as I used to and there’s a little more wisdom

in my love lyrics I haven’t completely

taken to heart yet, but I’m trying. I stand

an intimate distance away from the things I cherish.

I’m dying as we all are, but it doesn’ t feel

as if I’m going to perish. My emotions are ageless

and inspiration’s only the whisper of a star away

and though my dark energy keeps expanding the starfields

further apart, so I have to walk further

to find a wild flower I can identify with,

the dark’s beginning to shine like a black candle

with my spinal cord dipped in serpent fire

like a total eclipse of dragon’s blood as its wick.

I rave like the vision of a sacred clown who’s become

the misfit of his own crazy wisdom, heretically so,

to live up to the standards of my own disobedience,

a saintly truant in the labyrinths of spiritual malfeasance.

A shepherd of wolves, I don’t drive the stars

up into the high fields like a small herd of scapegoats

like a hard rock on a mountain keeping

its fossils to itself like apocalyptic alibis

for the silence in the voice of the void that unwords me.

No truth ever mattered a damn to me

if it defeated people who were just trying

to get on with not knowing what to do with their lives.

No beauty ever took my breath away for long

that wasn’t emotionally siderealized

or hadn’t drowned like a sorceress on an island

in the oceans of the black rose of a new moon.

I prefer to look at the blessings of life

through a broken window more than

the polished mirror of a purified mind

blinded by its own blazing to the diamonds

that pour like stars from the eyes of weeping meteors

that have initiated the extinction

of too many, too much, without rancour

for the fragility of the afterlives in the ashes

that emerged from the inside out

into the available dimensions of a random future.

Time might observe the protocols of its waterclocks

for some who still drink from wishing wells

and hourglasses that are always pouring another

for the road, but in the intimacy of my solitude

time acts extemperaneously upon my heart

like a stranger who could always feel his way past

what he didn’t know about what could hurt him

if he ever stopped long enough anywhere to find out.

I’m grateful to the abyss for the black hole

in the centre of my life that can’t be fulfilled

galaxy after galaxy at a feast of light that keeps

my appetite for the moonrise of the mystery

intrigued and hungry. My mind was never an experiment

nor my heart the rube of experience.

I didn’t map the rain to know where to go.

I let the mountain be my goat-footed guide to the top

and when it came time to come down,

I won my wings falling toward paradise

with more joy in taking the plunge

than I relished in the angelic aviary of my arrival

where nobody jumps unless they’ve got a parachute on.

Buff the risk with a safety net or you’ll candle

like a daylily all the way down into an early grave

people used to say to me when I was a young precipice

ferociously faithful to exploring the nether depths of myself

like a comet jumping the orbitals of a dark halo

to shed a little light like a petal of the sun

on why I’d rather perish in the night like a firestorm

on a purple passage of the wind, than blossom

like the wildflower of a savage mystic

in the genetically engineered garden of a false dawn.

PATRICK WHITE

EVERY LEAF, EVERY PAGE, EVERY POEM, A PATCH

EVERY LEAF, EVERY PAGE, EVERY POEM, A PATCH

Every leaf, every page, every poem, a patch

that’s been ironed on to a leak in the mindstream

I’ve been watching from the stone bridge on Gore Street

while the Perth Water Tower stands astride the Tay River

like a Martian colossus out of the War of the Worlds,

its reflection wavering like the dissipating wavelengths

of watersnakes as the moon ascends like a pearl

above the ragged willows pouring their hearts out

along the shore where a long overhanging veranda,

an iron stairwell and several backyards end at.

A commingling of poetry and prose, I’ve got

to walk several miles out of this sleeping town

before a Zen cowboy can take his spurs off in the wild

and wrestle his boots like sections of chimney pipe

in exchange for a pair of winged heels that can fly by night

like an autumn waterbird. Let my life flow on without me

like a spinal cord I’ve been hanging on to

like a rope I used to try to climb up to heaven on

like serpent fire entwined around the axis of my backbone,

on the flip side now, an anchor chain of chakras

tied to my body like a lifeboat my heart isn’t in anymore.

I lament the dry paper that became of the orchids

and waterlilies, the skin of weathered women

or an aging snake that slipped out of itself like a condom.

Autumn in my earth mind, I’m consoled by the stars

gleaming through the leafless trees of my emotions.

The whole forest floor, a sodden library underfoot,

trying to get to the roots of things like etymologists

reverentially deciphering the cartouches of dynastic words

that were once as common as the Huron all through these woods

until smallpox, the Jesuit, and the decultifying schools

that savaged their magic with white, and taught them

to turn the other cheek to the dark side of the moon,

brought on an onslaught of the Iroquois who finished the job

a few beaver pelts, an arquebus, and Champlain

in a war canoe, without really wanting to, had begun.

Somehow their ghosts in the birch groves

make everything seem more human to a trespasser

that responds more like a guest at a seance

than the host of the exorcism that drove them

from their lands. The moon’s not a swan

and I’m not laying traps like a snapping turtle.

Nothing heals here, but the wounds seem more manageable

and death isn’t a dirty secret sequestered in a hospital.

Everything out in the open you can even

have sex with the stars and nobody’s eyelashes

are going to fall off like a haystack of pine needles

that blinked once too often at what they couldn’t believe

they were seeing without their death masks on.

I like the symphonic chaos of the place as life

over writes itself like wild grape vines climbing

a trellis of deer ribs like the palings on an unhinged gate.

It’s really just a matter of taste what you prefer

to furnish your solitude with. I like to spend my time

in the company of things suffering the same fate I am.

PATRICK WHITE  

A FEELING IN THE HEART THAT OVERWHELMS THOUGHT

A FEELING IN THE HEART THAT OVERWHELMS THOUGHT

A feeling in the heart that overwhelms thought.

Can the stars feel our pain like distant neurons?

Thorns blunted in moments like this, the hands of time

almost folded in prayer like the wings of a nightbird

whose lament has seized the air with something

so sad and true, everything that lives,

and everything lives, can sense it,

even though they can’t think it or say it.

The vigil of sentience is arrested by the same

mysterious note of suffering that binds us to everything

in the courage that it takes to live it beautifully

by burning with insight to flower compassionately

in the midst of the heretical flames of our own damnation.

The presence, the friend, the blaze, an affable familiar,

enlightenment or an expedient delusion of an hour or two

when pain isn’t the personal possession of anyone,

and a vision emerges that supersedes empathy

when even the demons cry alone for things they can’t explain,

too deep for tears, though they’re never far away,

when a kind of peace overtakes you from behind

and there’s heart break in the clearing of the clouds

and you know you haven’t lived humbly enough

to see it without fear, but you open your eyes

and look anyway and they’re seared

by the dragon of awareness looking back at you

as if you could feel every mystic detail of hurt in the world,

time past, present, and to come, all at once,

a bolt of black lightning splitting your bones open

like an oak to expose your heartwood to the stars

as if the scars just fell off a chronic wound that never heals.

And there’s no injunction behind this devastating insight

into the pervasive depths of the grief that must be endured

as one of the terrible conditions of life if for no other reason,

and reason’s always a small guess, than to live to be aware of it

and try to love one another better than we’re capable of.

To fail at what we’re trying to attain from the unattainable

because there’s no love in the acquisition of anything

we can get our hands on in a world of forms and dream figures

that are always passing away from us like roads

that leave us walking alone with the moon

for our only companion, wondering where the others went

who used to chatter in the trees like homing birds

about whether you were a threat or just another lost soul

going anywhere in the defeated hope that he might be found

even though what he seeks is doing the looking

and there’s nothing retroactive about our eyes

that can creatively repeat the immediacy of our seeing.

Eternity wounds the children of time like wild flowers

at the end of autumn, and the harvest dance is ruined by death.

And whenever and whatever we celebrate, it’s as much

of a protest singing through our tears like light

in the false dawns of our candles and chandeliers,

as it is a party. If we act happy, maybe that’s half the proof

we were born to be, even alone at night in the woods,

saturated with decay, trying to convince ourselves

all passage is the prelude to the renewal of a recurrent dream.

And may it be so. May it be imaginal and necessary.

May delusion always be the cornerstone of enlightenment

and the impact of meteors always splash us in diamonds

like the tears of the fires of life that don’t wash off.

May what’s already been given to you always outweigh

the reward of what you think you laboured for

so your gifts perpetually exceed the limits of your just deserts,

and the praeternatural walk beside you like the dark sage

of everything that remains to be known but can’t be

until you learn there’s nothing to master in the stillness.

In the silence. In the essential grammar of the abyss

which is us trying to express ourselves like mediums

of our own minds with these nouns of sorrow, verbs of bliss

of the whippoorwill, the hermit thrush, the barred owl,

the starling and the mockingbird singing without meaning

anything to anyone but themselves like an artist or a child.

The heart of the petty is always a compass needle

Zen-duelling over the proper direction of prayer

as if it were swinging a sword over your head,

but among those born demonically blessed enough

to be self-defeatingly great in the name

of a few noble absurdities they’d prefer to live than explain,

this feeling that flows through you like electricity

through a glacier, that fills you like a silo of suffering

is the spear head that’s embedded in the starmud of your heart

you can’t pull out and you can’t push through

given there’s no exit, no entrance on the enclosures of life,

whether it be a secret garden, or a famous grave,

or you just want to be let off your leash like a playful dog

to chase the nurses like gulls on the terminal night ward,

or not cry out in pain to prove you’re a Mongol of the soul,

this emotion that makes you feel so empty

in the light of the truth of the enormity of the pain

that’s been overcome by life through the agony

of everything that’s been endured for no one’s sake

to vitally accommodate the unassessible transformations,

of sentience adapting to its cruellest mutations,

and so surfeited with it all in the shadow of a lie,

this is the birthmark of that counter intuition

that makes life worthy of being lived against the odds

of ever being able to justify it to yourself or God, the zeitgeist

or anyone else in need of a proxy or a paraclete

to moderate the human divinity that’s been bestowed upon us,

at the very least, by virtue of our suffering

and the unknown voice in the void of its release.

PATRICK WHITE

TARRED AND FEATHERED BY YOUR OWN WORDS

TARRED AND FEATHERED BY YOUR OWN WORDS

Tarred and feathered by your own words

or basted and rolled in stars until you were sugar-coated

on everyone’s tongues, you remain a stranger to yourself

just the same. Nothing further from home than fame.

Notoriety just another unconvincing disguise

for your emptiness. A deathmask that never quite fits.

I remember the day I gave away all of my books

like a life raft I’d built to get to the other side

of the sewer that aspired to be a clean mindstream

to a coke-bound woman who needed them

more than I did to sell for drugs. Book awards

I’d won as a welfare kid in grade school.

I let them go, I let them go, I let them go

like a dragonfly emerging from its chrysalis.

I wanted to see what was standing on the other side

of me and them. Rid myself of my compendious identity

by exorcising the library of its most infamous ghosts,

mine among them. I shed them like scales

of snakeskin that hadn’t evolved into the flightfeathers

of birds yet. A whole cemetery of well articulated gravestones

shelved like a jury of hung witnesses setting their own precedents.

After light years of isolated incarceration in the scriptorium

when the midnight sun burned within me like candlelight

and I was consumed by the blazing like a moth

going crazy among the stars, I wanted to live

under the law of my own imagination even if it were

to have none. Walk skinless in the world, clear

of the mummies at last, like a wild rose in autumn

carrying its own ashes in a green urn with the withered star

of a jester’s cap on top like another clown nobody

knew very well, least of all me. No inside. No outside.

No forwarding address that could haunt me like a bill

I owe to the past. No medium trying to find my own voice

among the myriads of those that I’d summoned.

A whisper of earth worms in the grass and a wall came down.

No more gates that ask you to abandon everything

when you leave your soul on the threshold

like the windshield of a spiritual vehicle with starmud on it.

The mystic turned inside out, happy to be earthbound

to a specific time and place. To see his own face

like a lifemask carved out of accumulated projections

like a hologram of the pineal gland when the third eye

is sitting for its own portrait. If you stare long enough

at anything, it will begin to look like you after awhile.

I stopped peering into the dark, looking for signs,

when I discovered I was the revelation I was waiting for.

Presence of mind. Hamlet was right. Awareness is all.

Ghosts in the mirror, pale fire to the blind,

won’t burn on the moon however you blow on the flames

like a dragon with a ferocious sense of compassion.

But ripeness will come in time like a windfall

of glowing embers to a winter solstice that longs

for the heartwood of what it remembers of the life behind it.

Dismembered like a wardrobe for disobeying the sumptuary laws,

I let my Orphic skull bob all the way

like a black walnut to any uninhabited island

that had never seen the new moon rise before.

I came ashore as if I’d just been keel-hauled

down to the bone on the hull of my own lifeboat.

And though I’d slipped my moorings, I was

still singing like the cries of the waterbirds lyrically

that knew of the long night sea journey ahead

I had yet to go before I was wholly beyond myself

and everything that was said that was worth listening to

after that, took on a life of its own hardly distinguishable

from what the dead thought they were going through.

I was interdependently originated by everything else.

In this desert of stars, I stopped chasing mirages of light

and started drinking real water from my own two hands

as if I were holding them up to the mouth of humankind.

The man or woman who knows, aren’t the ones

who understand. Until you’ve deepened your ignorance

of the mystery of life and your thought waves

are crashing in a rage of breakers against the sea walls overhead

you’ll never know the ease of those who drown and drift in it

like the unpredictable undertow of a black hole

draining the stars like water in a Sufi whirlpool.

You’ll remain a shore-hugger and all your crystal skulls

will cry themselves to sleep at night like tidal pools

cluttered with the relics of those who died at sea.

And all your creativity observe the protocols of salvage.

And all that light turn into a false dawn

scrying lightbulbs in a lantern as lost as you are

until it’s lit up by the fireflies and stars that shine

brighter for the wayward stranger, than someone

who clings to the path like the last

remaining wavelength of the blind

to see where they were going like an optic nerve

that didn’t have the axons it takes to wander off without a guide

through your own mountains and valleys

shaped out of the starmud along the banks

of your own mainstream in the course of time

like a waterclock passing the word around

like the Milky Way from mouth to mouth,

that we’re all drinking from the same watershed

as the dead with tears in their eyes, who took a different route

and those with stars in theirs that their tears just can’t put out.

PATRICK WHITE

EVEN WHEN THE ROAD IS MISSING

EVEN WHEN THE ROAD IS MISSING

Even when the road is missing

like the absence of God, or a woman I love,

I praise that emptiness for the freedom it accords me

to create a way of my own like a river of stars

and for the universe it’s left me

like a travelling companion I couldn’t improve upon.

The gate shut, the door closed, the window locked,

I slip a key to a poem under the welcome mat

and say my house is your house anytime you call

and then go get drunk with the moon down by the lake.

And after awhile we’re laughing at ourselves,

rolling in the leaves like the groundswell

of two happy vagrants with homeless hearts

making off with our lives for free as if

we’d just pulled off some cosmic B and E.

without leaving any sign of culpability behind,

except for the joy of our felicitous crime.

And when my moonboat’s in port for repairs

like bedsheets in a backyard fleet of laundry on the line,

I don’t mind being land locked for awhile.

I just take a walk along the shore of the lake

and gather moonlit feathers

from the scales of the waves

that have evolved from raptors into swans,

and binding them together

like Daedalus did for Icarus,

take a joy ride into the sun at midnight

not really caring too much about whether

I’m at zenith or nadir as long

as I’m transiting something akin to a threshold.

The sun can hold Venus on a short leash,

and me on the chain of my spine

like a barnyard dog barking at wolves

trying to tempt it deeper into the night

but the last crescent of the moon

will cut right through them both

like the umbilical cords of a new life

where we can both roam free

like rogue planets from star to star.

Empty-handed and full-hearted I come by day

to a low place looking for fire

from the daylilies with a bucket and an urn,

because I’m so tired of what I’ve had to do

to stay alive for the past fifty years as a serf of poetry

to keep it a calling, instead of a career,

and suffer the consequences of not attending to it

as a business that makes a profit off the stars,

but by night I’m a starling of creosote in a chimney

singing my heart out as if I wanted to eat it

because it has all the virtues of a noble enemy

and there’s no poetry or protein in the junkfood of fame,

though I think that might be a trifle ingenuous.

Impoverished Druid, you lean on a crutch for a tree,

as a flying buttress to your sacred folly,

and running out of time to avoid

a head-on collision with eternity

all your devotions the ghosts of yesterday,

you kick the stool from out under your feet

and garotte yourself from the bough of an oak,

like the berry of a single moon of mistletoe

and the last crescent of a golden sickle just out of reach

of the harvest season of the King of the Waxing Year.

Poor heart, what a battered shoe

of a vital organ you’ve become, a bone box

for the sacred skeletons of hummingbirds and elephants,

a Burgess Shale for the creative fossils and footprints

we both had to evolve through to come to this

inconceivable moment without a time scale

to measure how far it is from then to now

like the last leap of faith of the waterclock of life

into the abyss without a bucket for a safety net

or any deep assurance of even having a bottom anymore

to fall out of the ongoing over the edge of a precipice

as if even the rivers of Eden sometimes

had to seek release from it all and fall

even without a parachute to candle

like an exclamation mark all the way down,

a descent into hell creatively much to be preferred

than stagnating in paradise with nothing but apples to eat.

But still you know you won’t do it, given

the number of times now I’ve come running

with a chair and a rope to let you down

out of the window of a burning building

not knowing whether we were committing suicide

or I was running to your rescue as I always have.

Your daring has always said feathers and falling

has always taken wing like Pegasus before,

and what a wild strange radiant white water ride it’s been

across the high unbounded starfields of the shining

with Vega and Deneb goading us on

ever further like spurs of Spanish silver

just you and me, my blood brother, together

in the vastness of a mutual solitude.

My God, when I think of the flights we’ve taken.

When I think of the things we’ve seen,

and the orchards of sorrow that found more bliss

in the fruit than they did in the blossom.

And what did we ever write about all those stars

that didn’t declare how impossibly illiterate we are

compared to the lyrics of light and time and wonder

they’ve been singing all these lightyears

since I first opened my eyes to why I’m conceivably here,

though here can be anywhere by now like a bird

that loses its bearing under the stars everytime

it tries to get a fix on where it’s going like a photon

jumping orbitals like tree rings in a flash of insight.

When you’re light, when you’re foolhardily alive

you don’t need to pay heed to where you’re going

because there isn’t a single stage, place, or phase

that isn’t the destination of what you’re shining up at.

And I never thought the day would ever come

when sadness would sweeten into wisdom enough

to take pity on the mirrors like the eyes under our lifemasks

when we went down to the river to drink

our own reflections like faces from the lifeboat of our hands,

like a rain of mercy far out at sea far from the sight of land,

when we first began to understand how clarity like unity

can be broken down into little pieces of sand

that reflect the whole universe as readily

in their mystic particularity

as the stars and the sun and the moon do

when they lay their swords and feathers

and flying carpets like wavelengths of light

down in tribute to our third eye weeping its way to the sea.

And you were surprised, admit it, weren’t you,

to find so many white horses like you running ashore,

mustangs from the waves, to check out the new guy’s wings.

And me standing there like an avalanche of winged heels

wondering why I didn’t make as big a splash

and if all we walked away with was a detailed starmap

who could say the journey really wasn’t worth it?

Let the shore-huggers do what they want with it

to find their way around in the dark like fireflies.

Leave it to them. We were ever explorers

from the beginningless beginning to the endless end,

and we’ll rise up again on a gust of stars

caught up like a dust-devil at the crossroads of earth

and ascend on a thermal of the sun, the stairwell

of a star-studded chromosome that could

take a coil of flypaper and turn it into a poem.

PATRICK WHITE