MAD YOU MUST BE AND DELIGHT IN IT

MAD YOU MUST BE AND DELIGHT IN IT

Mad you must be and delight in it

like mating killdeer in the spring,

lyrical love-making in the epiphanous air

and one flys into the bumper and dies.

Tears flowing down your cheeks

as you drive on into the incomprehensible

horror and silence of the act. And later,

your girlfriend will elaborate the fact

into a beautiful piece of art. Radiance

thrusts a shard of glass through your heart

out of the blue and there you are

with a baffled pain in your eyes

crying on the easel in paint. Poor man.

Mad you must be and delight in it.

Revel in the absurd. Logic, the shakey stool

of a man trying to hang himself.

Quicksand cornerstones sinking into a miasma

of conditioned chaos. What does it prove

that would have made a difference to the outcome?

Nothing to stand on anymore. Even less

to lie down for. Nature a postcard.

A recurring calendar. And one of those months,

a close-up of a killdeer in intimate detail.

Mad you must be and delight in it.

Uproot your hidden harmonies. Give up

your golden chains. Throw the swill

out of your fountains like wine

from the night before. Ignore your dreams

as the phantasmagoria of sacred clowns.

Everything passes in a riot of stars

before you’re aware of it. Where are they now?

The aerial ballet of the killdeer. Roadkill.

Random encounters with the irrational.

The clarity cruel. The darkness immense.

Mad you must be and delight in it.

Stare at the wall until something appears.

An orphan of mirrors. An estranged elopement

trying to get away with it all. Throw

the moon down from the tower first

and after it your skull. The hearse awaits

and the horses are plumed with black feathers.

Space is warped. Time’s corrupt. And the light

isn’t on some kind of goodwill tour.

Over the newly ploughed field,

where are the killdeer that were there

a moment ago, a year, forever, a figment of time?

So beautiful in the way they impressed each other.

First warm day of the spring. Even the silence

overjoyed with the liberation of water

of earth, of sky, as the stitches came out of the wound

and winter, the scar of a worn out topic.

One of those moments it was intense bliss

to be alive on earth, unasked for,

and delightfully irrelevant the reason.

Mad you must be and delight in it

to embrace the crazy wisdom of the incomprehensible

as a spontaneous medium you’re not involved in

except as the one who suffers what you see,

the terror and the lucidity, the rapture, the monotony

and the worst you could imagine it could be,

the abyss, the car, the killdeer, the unreality

of there being no amends for the tragedy

to fall back upon, not even the pity of the poetry

or the beauty of the painting. And the tears?

What of the tears? What are we to make of them?

Water off the wings of the killdeers? Time

just another water clock that heals nothing

it wounds by accident? Annihilations

of the spirit encountering anti-matter?

You can entertain yourself as delusionally sane

by explaining the stars to the stars,

or you can spend hours trying to decipher the scars

like glyphs on the stone calendars that knew

timing revealed the content in the blink of an eye

and in the cherry-sized heart of a bird

smashed against the sun and the sky

flashing off a chrome bumper at 80k,

who knows, a moment before impact,

if it felt it had desecrated the absurdity of the event

by dying inchoately innocent of its own bewilderment.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LIVING WAX MUSEUM OF THE HUMANLY GROTESQUE

THE LIVING WAX MUSEUM OF THE HUMANLY GROTESQUE

The living wax museum of the humanly grotesque,

the affable mutants, the butterfly minds

armoured by their innocence against their deaths,

bells of fat that responded to everything they were asked

like jocular coffins at ease with their catastrophes,

and the tough made shy by the nemetic streets

and the city roses that came in different shades of lipstick

and chirped about the brutality of their boyfriends

celebrating their psychotic jealousy like a badge of love

as the snake they tried to domesticate by kissing it

on the locket of its head as a sign of respect for death,

the lingham in the yoni, struck them repeatedly in the jugular

like the tinfoil shaktis of black and blue working girls

if they so much as looked at another man

for anything more than money could buy for half an hour,

one ray of light awry, and back to the end of the line.

And the scorpions who administered justice to the poor

as if the law were just a special form of betrayal.

And the commissars of good who stepped

on other people’s hearts to reheel their boots

in the name of their militant ethics slumming

for a photo-op among the peasants they recruited

to sacrifice their lives on the altars

that fattened them up awhile to send their alien gods

a loveletter like a rose of blood from an abattoir.

And those who suffered the afflictions of Job

quietly in the corners out of earshot of the violent ones

away from the shadows that sought them out

like spiders with compound eyes and ice-pick fangs

blooding their colours in gangs of arachnids

that came up on you from behind under cover

of a moonrise that violated the sanctity of your asylum

with the pellucid integrity of a rabid syringe

anaesthetizing you with fear like an ice-age

afraid of water. And the daughters who slipped

through the labial tent flaps of the surrealistic circuses

where they tried to ride the snake like ballerinas

on horseback, but wound up being trivialized

by ringmasters with whips and hoops of fire

they jumped through like caged tigresses

for the amusement of their terrorized kids.

Old men like potatoes who’d worked hard all their lives

watching their lives leak out like the waterclocks of urine

they couldn’t hold back like time anymore

without wetting their pants on the porch

as if they were chronically afraid of something.

And the snowbirds and dandelions gone to seed,

old women worn out like looms, crone phases of the moon,

embroidering their pillowcases trying to

surgically stitch up their inoperable dreams

with threads of fate too weak to heal their wounds anymore.

They’re all still here in my mind staggering

under the heavy lift and load of humanity they shouldered

like the bearers of burdens and drawers of water,

slave nations in the ungrateful lotteries of the chosen ones

that buried them like the Burgess Shale

in the Cambrian depths of my mountainous past,

broken, lost, rejected, bent, predatory, victimized,

used, abused, forgotten and mocked like the spiritual duff

and social detritus of last year’s effluvial autumn.

The indelible shadows of a darkness I couldn’t shake off

however many books I read, or languages I mastered

to baffle what whispered in my exiled heart

in the towering shadow of Babel, or poems I wrote

in pursuit of an earthly excellence I could lavish

like my aristocratic poverty on the esoteric beauty of the stars

as I laboured to squander my genius on mystic insights

that kept me from soiling my lunar flightfeathers

in the tarpits and sticky eclipses of starmud that clung to the past.

Freaks, pariahs, outcasts, the insensibly crude,

boisterously loud about their garish bodily functions,

the mad visionaries whose febrile skin always smelled

like mildewed rags however many baths

they took in their graves like compromised shamans

still trying to get their spirits to come clean

with the animal world long after it had gone extinct.

How far, how long it is from childhood that it’s taken me

all these labyrinths of lightyears in a leper colony

trying to grow a new head on a hydra to replace

the prophetic skull that could speak of a future

in the ancestral tongues of the dead that up until now

excluded you from the graveyards of my occlusive heart

like the sacred syllables of creosote and crows

caught in my throat as if my voice cherry-picked

spiritual vowels from the bruised windfalls

of my earth bound consonants grubby with life

shaken from the green boughs of the tree I sang in

above the damaged roots of the humans I sprang from

like a sapling from the heartwood of a decaying stump.

And embrace you, I do. At last. Deservedly or not.

As a sign of self-respect. I celebrate the lustre of the ore,

the flawed jewel, the rusty cankers on the sword,

the missing links in the foodchain of toothless carnivores,

the luckless wishbones that broke like the bull harps

of private Babylons buried in the deserts of the moon

where there is no wind and the sterility of the silence

has never carried a sound like a waterbird

disappearing like a song waning into the distance.

In a prodigal flashflood of compassionate insight

I flow into the dry creekbeds and stagnant tidal pools

of your disembodied lives, the hollow carapaces

of your false dawns gouged out like eyes of loaded dice.

Scorned, humiliated, alcoholic hierarchies of feudal squalor,

I observe the fragility of your baronial protocols

so as not to begrudge you a shadow of the splendour

of your belated normalcy, your upgraded mundanity,

the under rated privilege of being overlooked

like everyone else in the greater scheme of things.

Excruciating agonies of isolation en masse. Status, at last.

PATRICK WHITE

ENROBING MY NOBILITY

ENROBING MY NOBILITY

Enrobing my nobility

in the aloofness of a spurned beggar,

or a musician on a street-corner

opening the coffin

of his exhumed guitar for change

to keep his humilation

enraptured and alive,

his song denied its bough

by a warning

from the window of a squad car

enforcing the petty complaint of the loveless

who douse

the flaring of the flowers in law

as if all that unimposing ecstasy

were merely another match

that failed to consume them,

I conceal the generosity of the stars

that urgently lavish their light

on the deepening night that reveals them

in the lordly pockets of my impoverished repose.

I want to want something again

that isn’t an expletive of acquisition

that ages into the accusing silence

of an unattended toy.

I want to knock down all the probabilities,

all the odds and evens

of the gravestones placed like bets

in a cemetery of bookies

that have hedged their deaths

with double or nothing on the long shot.

Love bides its time in me

like fire in a stone

that rings the ashes of its last revelation

and over the clamour of ghosts at war,

I try to live up to myself in the silence

like the impossible conditions of an unsigned truce.

I have plucked the wings of angels

and feathered my heresies

in the tars and flammable shadows of the night.

If I have withdrawn into myself

it is only to advance and transcend and array

like a wave or a breath

when the abyss gathers me into its unassailable immensities

and then sprawls me out like a map

on the shore of an uninhabited island

to discover what I’ve buried.

I am always curled

like the sickle of a harvest eclipse,

a question-mark, an imported executioner

over the pure, black point of my existence

even as I offer myself up

to the hidden face of the moon

as the first, shining stalk of wheat

to venture out of the tomb

under her inscrutable auspices.

But I am not the redivining of an old sacrifice,

I am not a child in the attic

playing in the valley of the kings

with the castaway cargoes of a rudderless moonboat

scuttled in time;

I don’t dress up in the abandoned wardrobes

of the oversized past

to practice the mute afterlife of my future.

Denied the bough of the day,

I am the nightbird perched in your roots

and singing,

not to summon,

not to warn anyone away,

and even less to convey

the bitterness of unrequited beatitudes

or the serpentine intoxicants of unanswerable longing.

Sometimes it feels as if

I were an extremity of fire

frozen in the ice of hell,

or I find myself lingering

over the petals of the pimped-out magnolias

like the pages of a torn book

or old Venetian blinds askew at the window,

to look for eyes between the lines

I might add to the watersheds of my seeing like rain,

but I’m never a pilgrim on a road of smoke for long.

And I don’t know

if I have enhanced the waters of life

with the tears that fell inwardly

from the lightless side of my eyes,

but I am not the urgent miscellany

of the misunderstood

and I have always been suspicious of the bread

that calls itself good

and founds its thunderous, empty silo

on a curse in the cradle of the grain.

I don’t peck like a pigeon

in the holy squares of the doctrinal,

and it’s been an ironic consolation at times

to wryly affirm with a quizzical smile

that only my uncertainty is certain.

My life may have been blown about

like the windswept froth of a pathetic guess,

and everything I know

be phantoms of foam clinging to ruinous rocks,

but I have that in common with the stars,

and there are tides I ride bareback without a bit

like my own bloodstream

that fly like wild horses on the moon,

muscling the dead seas of the heart like waves

that expound no more

with the gavelling of their hoofs

than the astounded pulse of the running.

I am no longer estranged

by the parsecs of solitude

that are the true measure of my age,

once I realized

it was my only way of meeting everyone.

And I have never mistaken a chain

for the rosary of a dead liberator

and linked the name of God

to anything that is bounded by what it binds.

My freedom is slanderous,

lightning and a star,

but my devotion glows like a firefly in a jar

when I consider that I owe more

to the things I got away with

like a fugitive

compelled to cross the unknown badlands

by a posse of judicial compasses,

than I do to the foghorns and lighthouses

that bellowed over my unsalvageable corpse

because it rose on its own

like an unschooled coast,

and there’s still a morning in my smile I can’t regret.

PATRICK WHITE

JUPITER GONE FROM THE WINDOW

JUPITER GONE FROM THE WINDOW

Jupiter gone from the window. Homage

to the ambiguously forgotten moments of light

that shine down upon the earth awhile

whether anyone’s watching this time of night

or not, intimate fireflies of the terrible largesse

of the diminished gods that once dwarfed our childhoods

in the shadows of the shepherd moons they cast

like an abacus of wandering stars. Thaumaturgic

strangers at the gates of our youthful wonder

as we cried ourselves to sleep at night because

we were born too early to walk on another planet

surrealistically pictured in the collectible spacescapes

of the bubble gum cards we swapped like Jupiter for Mars.

Nothing more hurtful than the unrequited love affairs

that ached with longing at the city limits of our starfields.

Postcards from the edge of nowhere left unsigned.

The first betrayal of astonishment on the thresholds of time.

A curse of distances that left us spell bound

by an abyss of inconceivable mysteries illuminating

the ancient texts of our estranged starmud homesick

to return to the original fire wombs of our shining

instead of being marooned here burning our ships

on the beach of a circumnavigable island

as if we could do nothing but under reach ourselves.

Lightyears ago before I discovered thought was faster

in the gaping interstellar spaces of my own mind than light

and sight was a kind of love that touched the heart of things

and brought them infinitely nearer than a mirror or a lens.

That what I really longed for from the intangible brilliance

of their emphatic absence in my life was to

humanize the unknown with the evanescent metaphors

that bridged the gaps between our departures and arrivals

like analeptic waterclocks thawing the tear ducts

of cold eternities eager to learn as much as they could

from the brevity of our unbearable passage through

the recurrent perishing of our lives and unborn deaths.

No lack of midnight specials flashing in the dark,

I grew up looking down the long Buntline barrels

of alta-azimuth refractors with small spotting scopes

aiming at things impossible to hit. No collateral damage

from ricochets, except for the occasional planet or star

through the heart, and the childhood fever

of the wounded wonder of it all lodged there forever.

Despite what the Cyclopean optimists insist

with their big third eyes orbiting like automated proxies

for their spiritual lives in a brutally cold, space

you have to look into the dark if you want to see the stars.

I looked up at them out of the immensity of my solitude

and they looked deeply back out of their abyss into me

and once our eyes met and mingled like wary animals

in the woods at night, out of the corner of a window,

fireflies hair-braided into the willows, in the cuffs of a dream,

in the nebular chandeliers of a lover’s eyes moist

with the Pleiades, none of us have been the same ever since

like mini nirvanic flashbacks from the eternal sixties.

Light upon light, the way of gods and humans in the world,

and well beyond, o so much deeper into the dark

where seeing leaves our eyes behind, and it’s not

the insights that are revealed along the roadsides

of the starmaps we’ve memorized like wildflowers

that our divining aspires to, not the lamps

of the nightwatchmen with master keys to secure

the doors of perception our childhoods walked through,

light through the black holes and pupils of our eyes

and telescopes out into the open of our expanding minds

and their multi-tasking worlds, a seance of friendly faces

at the end of a tunnel of light, but to be enlightened

by the shining of the secrets that leave you in the dark,

burning in the window on the grave yard shift

long after Jupiter has set in the west over the Lanark hills.

PATRICK WHITE

OLD SORROW, I'VE FORGOTTEN YOUR NAME

OLD SORROW, I’VE FORGOTTEN YOUR NAME

Old sorrow, I’ve forgotten your name,

you’ve been with me so long, pouring

the iron in my blood into the heavy bell of a heart

that’s climbed back up this sad tree of my spine

so many times out of the afterlives of my windfall,

these sad planets collapsing in on themselves

under the decaying weight and water of their own tears

from the inside out, and gone to seed

like a small fleet of lifeboats in this floating world,

trying to make it up out of these watersheds

to run the vertical deltas of this autumn orchard

whose roots I keep falling upon like a radical place to begin

climbing back up toward the stars again,

until one night I’ll raise my sail

like the moonrise of a blossom on the Milky Way

and be gone like a ghost ship in the fog of a nautical legend.

Old sorrow, I know you like the smoke of a thousand fires

I’ve danced around alone like the only child

of a midnight sun that abandoned me on the threshold

of a black hole I orbit like the rain in a broken mirror.

Who did you bury that we weep for, what

did you aspire to that you were too earthbound to reach,

what love of yours was so betrayed when it had

its eyes pecked out by the song birds

you never sing anymore when the bees

are in the locust trees, and the ants are opening

the peonies like loveletters from the Pleiades,

except there’s a wound in your voice the lyrics

are bleeding out of like a thorn in the eye of a hurricane rose?

Old sorrow, are you the tears deep down in things,

the lachrymae rerum that fill the wishing wells

with oceans of disappointment like the run-off

of our hopes and dreams descending the world mountain

after we’d talked to God like bathyspheres

trying to get to the bottom of our tears

like glass bubbles in our crystal skulls,

our third eyes frozen like the lenses of a telescope

fixed on a star above a shipwreck in Arctic ice,

looking for a northwest passage out of ourselves

toward a mythic Cathay beyond our continental shelves?

And what did God have to say that you kept to yourself

when you came back down from your tete a tete,

and returned your commandments like a library book

that was way overdue in Alexandria?

Old sorrow, I can sense in you how many seasons

have scarred you like a calendar of crescent moons

as you hang like the pine cone of one dolorous note

of the silence you sustain like a blues guitar

ripening in the corner of the room where the spiders

are writing music you’ll never play like the wind

in the hair of the willows down by the Tay River

when the black walnuts are floating by

like the scorched planets of sunless solar systems.

Old sorrow, I know you like a heavy boot cloyed in the starmud

of all these roads we’ve walked together to get

nowhere in particular but wherever we are now

in this graveyard of shadows

that talk to the stars who have none

about how to wash our names and faces off

like deathmasks that are tired of trying to light up the darkness

like a candle at a black mass at high noon

with an eclipse high overhead the flowers won’t look at

for fear of burning their eyes. Compendious companion,

you bend my boughs toward the earth

with the low hanging fruit of a giving nature

seasoning your inconsolable wisdom with compassion.

Immovable buddha, are you the ancient echo

of the birth pang of life, the groan of sentience

being torn up by the roots out of the indwelling forms

of things you used to take shelter in like lenses and mirrors

you could blow into bubbles of the mind

like the multiverse through a keyhole into the abyss of hyperspace?

Old sorrow, were you rounded like a shepherd moon

in the undertow of time, your teeth blunted

like the molars of the asteroids eating stoney wheat

growing wild in the starfields of the neolithic grasslands?

Sometimes I can feel you possessing my heart and body and mind

like the corpse of an ancient ancestor, my spirit

like a prophetic skull on the dark side of the moon

lamenting the loss of its atmosphere like one of its eyes.

Other nights, I look upon you like the ruins

of a palace of water that once greened this desert of stars

like a Persian gardener that ruled an empire of flowers.

Venerable exile, do you despair of ever

finding your way home again through your lion gate

or have you encamped like so many other nations

to weep like Zion beside the rivers of Babylon?

Is your diamond corona occluded by the protocols of coal

that sully your face like the memory of darker days ahead?

I shall call you, friend, given how long

we’ve known each other like shadows of the valley spirit

blinded by the sundials of the unaging mountains of the moon.

I shall open my heart like a fire to you

and we can share the silence together for hours at a time

on long winter nights when the wind is howling outside

and there’s no need to speak of things

that neither of us understand about why

the fountains with the deepest watersheds

are always sadder than the last of the flowers

in a late autumn rain, or the willows along the Tay.

Slowest of rivers, you can sit saturnine and soporific,

red shifting into the longer wavelengths

of the oldest of your dreams, if you still dream yet,

and I’ll work on a poem in the shipyards of the mindstream

that will displace its weight in tears, and hopefully,

though you probably know better, keep us both afloat

like a paper boat shooting the rapids of a waterclock

that’s been running a little late like the two of us for light years.

PATRICK WHITE 

NOTHING MYSTICALLY INTRIGUING ABOUT MISERY

NOTHING MYSTICALLY INTRIGUING ABOUT MISERY

Nothing mystically intriguing about misery

but I do the best I can with what there is to work with

when I’m down, when I’m blue, it’s not azure,

it’s a stormy Prussian waiting for the sky to clear

and array a starmap of lapis lazuli freaked

with flecks and fuses of gold. Add a touch of cobalt

for aerial perspective to give myself a little space

to wander in while I remember not to short-circuit

the tarpits in the shadows of my depression

or under estimate what’s so extraordinarily ordinary

about the lifemasks I’ve shucked in the mundanity

of my middens, the museums of arcane waste

I’ve squandered over the years like garbage on nothing.

Just because someone drove a nail through your eye

you keep insisting is a sliver of the true star

might wallpaper your imagination like Matisse

but doesn’t mean you’re a one-eyed messiah

crucified like a Cyclops by a red hot stake

from your own fire, or that your tears are somehow,

because of the quality of your crying, better aged

than New York City tapwater, or the ensuing darkness

is necessarily prophetic. Could be a black hole

or the heavy lift of the cast iron lid of the total eclipse

I used to remove like a shark’s pupil to look into

what I imagined the sun must be like on the other side

without my eyes evaporating in the blaze with the hiss

of water droplets falling on my mother’s wood stove

when I was a blistering kid. Uncannily shaped

like this archaic desk I sit at now trying to write

my way like a counterintuitive backroad out of hell.

The train through town is trying to howl with the wolves

but it hasn’t got the agony for it and I’d rather

not know where I’m going despite the exuberance

of the gnostics who indict the same appearances

they’re enlightened by like apparitions in shallow mirrors

though I don’t mean anymore than they do by it.

It’s like art, love, life, the less you know about it

the more you’ve taken it to heart. If the whole

is in every part of what’s been broken, then mastery

must be as well. The human brain a ballet of cotyledons

performing swan lake on tour rising from the stage,

flowering out of death with the unfurling of a leaf

with a twist to it like the turning of a page by the wind

trying to read what it wrote behind its own back

when no one else is looking to see what it sowed

in arable rows of boustrophic print on the moon.

Like thornapples and rabies, I’ve cured my own disease

at times, with home remedies that very seldom,

if you live through them, leave you feeling

like the happy lunatic of a creative psychosis

inspired by a compendium of excruciating transformations

learning to swim hydrophobically in the Burgess Shale

as you say to evolution, physician heal thyself,

and somehow like a snakey faith healer miraculously

it does by killing entire species of itself off at a time.

Where are the fireflies in this ice fog of nuclear winter?

Why is the moon sleepwalking with the dead?

Who’s pulling my wishbones apart like crutches

that nothing depends upon not even my struggle

to wrestle with the dark angel in the way,

the prophylactic shaitan keeping me from

harming myself in the apprentice years of Lucifer

fulfilling the prohibitions that were expected of him

as my railroaded emotions walk away with a limp?

I’m screaming for red. I’m going through

ultra-violet withdrawals from life at dangerous frequencies.

I’m boiling like a kid in its mother’s milk.

Who cut the tongues out of my deaf mute cowboy mutes

and left me nothing to say in a sign language

not even the abysmal silence up ahead where the road

leads me into a wilderness with keener eyes than mine

nods, empathically, and bows its head like a sunflower

mimicing a streetlamp and says, yes, I think I understand.

My heart’s been torn out of my chest

like a canal root of starmud at the hands

of a Mayan dentist pulling my back room wisdom teeth out

like the molars of astronomical temples he had to abandon

like the calderas of extinct volcanoes impacted

like chimney fires of lava and creosote on a shepherd moon

marking the cards that bluff genetic codes into signs

of thermophilic life to prove we’re not freakishly alone

with the dark energies of quantumly entangled light

upstaging the dawn by clinging to the gunwale

of a lifeboat waiting to be salvaged by a coffin.

PATRICK WHITE