I'VE SEEN WHAT CAN HAPPEN TO PEOPLE IN LIFE

I’VE SEEN WHAT CAN HAPPEN TO PEOPLE IN LIFE

I’ve seen what can happen to people in life,

the broken man, his lack of will not a decision he made,

the crying child no one answered, the woman

who realized her marriage was a post-mortem effect.

Loneliness and misunderstanding so vehement,

separation so cruel, though people were only

a razor-blade apart, adolescents grown psychotically geriatric

with disappointment, yesterday’s victors who saved the world

dismantled erosively like rust in dry dock, casualties

of having lived so intensely for awhile for one another,

the best steel that went through the forge of war

is beaten into ploughshares that till the moon alone

like scars that were sown, but nothing came up

because of the salt that was thrown in the wounds of Carthage.

Good people, innocent, resplendent as Monarchs

among the lilacs in the spring, the kindness of souls

that would give an evil man a moment’s pause,

just enough of a taste of what it means to be human,

not to regret what he is, nor long for what he’ll never be

for another ten thousand lifetimes yet, but intrigued

by being at peace with his own nature as if nothing mattered,

absolutely nothing, everything achieved by just being here

to watch the swept-winged swallows scramble

to intercept the dusk like top guns among the gnats

in aerial combat with the Bolshoi Ballet. Utterly destroyed

by a whimsicality that challenges you to find a reason

it’s more merciful to lie about, than believe in.

Modes of suffering. Tones, wishbone, tuning forks

that can shatter a voice-box with a ballerina on top

like glass, elaborations of the atrocities with

university educations, that can come of knowledge

without love, green apples and gripe, with no idea

what the frost and sunlight can do to sweeten their attitude,

sharp-edged humans that can slash mirrors with their smiles,

for whom wonder and awe, even in the face

of their own awareness, never appeal to the acquisition

of manipulative facts because they don’t confer power

on anyone. Graces of the imagination, Venus,

delinquently radiant in the sunset above the shopping mall,

fireflies in a valley of fog after a thunderstorm

as the stars come out to consult them like a think tank

for innovative constellations, and the richness of the air

redolent with life, as the earth releases a fragrance

you can almost see with your eyes, more indelible

than the sickly sweetness of death. Sentient delights,

raptures of awareness, the inconceivable joys of intelligence

chasing its own tail without a purpose to its play.

I’ve witnessed and experienced these things every day

and even on many eyeless nights of my life when I could see

but couldn’t say what I was looking at because it was cloaked.

I’m not unmindful of how much kids like sugar.

How everyone yearns to live a life of happiness

they never tire of, love, as if it had pride of place

in the periodic table, a sine qua non of the elements

that sat down together around the sacred fire

at the joining of many rivers they’ve travelled down

from the mountain, assured of their dreams of the sea.

Peace-pipes all around, three osprey feathers in their hair.

But there’s an inviolability to suffering that puts a scar

to shame, an eye on a snake that doesn’t blink

even if you turn away from it like a disconsolate flute

that gives up trying to make it dance, gamma ray bursts

of experience that eradicate anything in its path,

that bury you so deeply in your sense of life,

you could open up a private school for meteor showers

and avalanches assiduously scribbling down notes

like the last words of a guru that entered satori,

but never came out of the coma again though

he talked incoherently in his sleep as if he

were chattering with squirrels and pileated woodpeckers.

I’ve seen starlings nest in death bells they feed

like the open mouths of the morning glory

even as they’re tamping down the soil on the grave

of a man they just buried like a potato in his own starmud.

I’ve seen the lowest snatched like a baby rattler

right out of the cosmic egg bite the highest flying eagle

with the keenest insight right in the leg because

it forgot that innocence can be as toxic as experience

especially when you’re trying to put a dragon on the road

that’s oxymoronically immune to the quantum entanglements

of the moon baring her fangs like a gateway drug to bliss

you can’t teach other people to run from like an anti-venom

to the rush of the thrill coursing through a nervous system

like a root fire of white lightning slowly killing you

with a tinfoil facsimile of a less enlightened life that nevertheless

shines brighter than Lucifer showing the Buddha the morning star,

doesn’t it, admit it now, o my brother, my sister of the moment, confess.

I wrote once I seek the eventual forgiveness of the dark.

Not that it needed to be. But it was a place to start. And

by dark I don’t mean the ghoulish antics of teenagers

digging up corpses like dogs in the cemeteries of Smith Falls

and smearing black lipstick across their mouths. Ooo, bad,

black bubbles without rainbows, anti-heroes of the dead,

do you ever get the bends when you’re coming up

from the Gothic depths of all your ruined cathedrals?

Do things pop like a weasel when you gore your thumb

on a real thorn you hadn’t anticipated like a cotton mouth

under the rosebushes someone planted around an otherwise

unremarkable gravestone? Got some advice

that probably won’t do you any good to absorb

but don’t cheapen the dark and it won’t take you so lightly.

When you’re thinking positively you can be sure

there’s some negativity inciting it like a chthonic muse

pouring blood libations over the body parts

of the king of the waxing year before he evolved

a symbolic imagination. Tropical islands owe a lot

to the slag of volcanoes. You can’t dis the chrysalis

without diminishing the lustre of what comes out of it.

What fool ignores the bud as any less of an event

in the life of a flower than a total eclipse

is integral to the art of being the full moon.

Panning for asteroids or the amino acids of life

it’s always wise to start with the ore. Given time

diamonds can come of dandelions, a star sapphire

light up like enlightenment in the crystal skull of corundum.

Accord the same integrity to pain as you do to joy.

Like the night sea in an unexpected storm

learn to respect your own weather by turning

the wheel over to the waves like a pilot you trust

as much as chaos to navigate by the stars a way

to pass between the whirlpools and rocks of yourself

unscathed by the windfalls of anchors and liferafts

you’ve dropped in the water like the fruits

of what you want to be known by, inverse crucifixes

attached to chains, the first crack of light

under the eyelid of the new moon to wake up in time

to greet the ice burg like a white whale you’re growing

spiritually fond of like the enigmatic co-sponsor

of a salvageable doom as a prequel to the aftermath

of the dangerous, rosey-fingered dawn keeping you afloat

one plank of your lifeboat at a time as if

you were always slumped like a half-drowned, mystic drunk

your life flashing before your eyes like fireflies in Andromeda

on the thresholds of your interminable homelessness.

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

EVERY STEP I TAKE

EVERY STEP I TAKE

Every step I take either a crossroads, an impasse,

or a dubious suspension bridge that looks like

the work of spiders swaying over an abyss.

Eerie thresholds that don’t scare me the way they used to.

I take them now as if I were dancing

with clear-sighted surrealistic suicidal abandon

and what used to threaten me so deeply

I laugh at now as if it were just another buffoon

that overdid it, and turned its legend into a farce.

The furies that swarmed me once for things

I couldn’t even imagine doing at my most bitter

have mythically dwindled into black flies of the mind.

Now I smile at them like a miniature Pearl Harbour

dive-bombing a rotten piece of fruit. Malignant pests.

Even in my homelessness, kamikaze pilots

drunk on sake, bad house guests binging

on a divine wind that sweeps them all away

from the brittle sky above the windowsill

that fakes them all out eventually, though it’s sadder

on the other side, to witness the death of birds.

Once you accept you’re going to lose everything

you’re inestimably freer to spit in the eye

of your tormentor, and in that moment of enlightenment

the power and superstition of a madman in the joint

that could scare even Joe Frazier like Muhammad Ali

losing it at a weigh-in, overcomes you as if

your death were already behind you, inconceivably achieved.

You learn to stay ahead of the past, like a star,

shining down on the future history of who you are

even when you’re convinced you’re not anything

whether you win or lose and everything you do

is a risk you must take to keep on deepening your solitude

without shaming the eagles by living like a maggot

who sees a rainbow in a drug-induced mirage

and dreams it’s turning into a butterfly

with the dead-eyed instincts of a bird of prey.

Compassion isn’t the mirage a white flag you hang

like a bed sheet outside the window

to surrender your ego like a weapon.

Like a flower, it’s a sign of resistance that begins

deep underground in the blood roots

of a cult of rain and light that death cannot suppress.

It’s a compact with pain that enlightens the way of the other

by taking the egg-laying turtle of the world off the road

or using your own backbone to splint the broken rafter

of a house of life that could not stand without you,

one light enjoined to another like honey in the heart of a beehive

buzzing with stars. Not an alchemical crack house

freebasing its own mythic inflation like a dealer

tripping out on his product in a riot of vacillating ideals

that wobble like uninhabited planets losing their spin.

Compassion is a warrior. Not a martyr of circumstance.

Or the short straw of the last chance to be someone

on your deathbed like a sword between you and what you loved

as you lay side by side together and dreamed

your courage away by hesitating in the moment.

Sometimes mystic disobedience is a greater sign of love

than all the echoes and shades of our oaths and vows are.

Compassion’s a candle with the heart of a dragon

and it roars into the silence of its imperious empathy

like a black czar at the wedding of the waterlilies,

raising them up like paupers and constellations

or the crystal palace of the Celts wheeling in Corona Borealis

like a Sufi dancing with the dust and the wind at a crossroads

to celebrate his own annihilation in the rapture of his wisdom

to leave every room in his heart open to everyone else

as one of the fundamental conditions of intelligent space.

Not to fit the uniqueness of the human face to a life mask

compounded of enculturated delusions of its just proportions,

but to see in every one of its tears, a locket with the moon inside,

like a ripening lyric to the beauty of longing fulfilled,

a windfall shaken down in a sudden squall of stars

that fall to earth like the seeds of urgent cherry blossoms

to make way for the vital fruits of their unspoken exile.

PATRICK WHITE

QUIETLY AND LIKE A THOUSAND OTHER TIMES

QUIETLY AND LIKE A THOUSAND OTHER TIMES

Quietly and like a thousand other times,

I want to go. I don’t know where. It doesn’t matter.

This moment now is as homeless as it gets.

You can have all the entrances, I’ll take the exits.

Been so long I don’t trust what happiness

would turn me into now, though I think

it’s just as stupid to despair. I’ve let go

of the crows and doves of my emotions,

the quantum insanity of my thought experiments,

and if I ever had dreams, they’re lost atmospheres by now

like a childhood among the asteroids

that happened astronomically to someone else.

I started out on a qrailquest, a maculate clown,

a partial fool, and though I stayed in the shadows

of my right-brained peripheral vision, more

a magic circle than a halo, I kept my third eye

out for it in passing. Strange how time mutates

the journey without losing the narrative theme

of the original psychodynamic. Now

I’m drilling for oil on the moon like the watershed

of a full eclipse and I’m no more averse

to the darkness as I was to the light. Either way

there’s more sincerity in being lost than in being

insufferably found. However rough the storm,

whoever comes to the aid of a lighthouse

with a heart as empty as a lifeboat and says

hey, get in, we’ll be swept out to sea together

where the earth can’t threaten either of us anymore.

Doesn’t happen. Much. There’s something fatuous

about security that takes your edge off like a keel

and leaves you bobbing on an inner tube way out

of your depths and your legs dangling

like participial jellyfish out of the mouth of Satan

like Brutus in the coldest ditch of Dante’s Inferno.

For lightyears I’ve practised the furious discipline

of a purposeless art, and betrayed myself

in the name of compassion for the beautiful absurdity

of celebrating the immensity of my own impoverishment.

I passed the test I set for myself like a stranger

at a dangerous gate to prove I was still sincere

in my own eyes. And even when I suspected a trap,

still, I was a wild shepherd of wolves in the wilderness,

and I hopped the fence. Intense as a wounded exile.

As soon as anyone starts explaining themselves to me,

I immediately hear the bells of faithful alibis.

Unfamiliar demons arise like infidels of the truth

and I’d rather follow last night’s wolf moon down

below the treeline, than cry over another fool’s lies.

Not bitter, not overjoyed, my curiosity amused,

given how little hope there is for any of us,

I’d still rather err with the largesse of dragons

who know more about shining and burning

than the fire blossoms of a thousand Chinese box-kites

looking for the ley lines on tinfoil starmaps

that never lead anyone astray creatively, least of all,

stop longing for the more subliminal phases and shadows

of Venus on a moonless winter night at perihelion.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference

between artifice and a genuine sacrifice

but it’s a matter of taste whether you want

bubbles in your poetry breaking the surface

like effervescent sacred syllables at a seal hunt

coming up for air, or add your breath

to the nucleation of new worlds in hyperspace

by going along with the drift, the gist, the flow,

the probable concourse, the aniconic fractal,

the supersymmetrical elaboration of the rococo,

loading every rift with ore like John Keats,

or the wound of a rikku teacup at a Chanoyu

ceremony for the taste of Zen with mended gaps of gold.

If you’re still too distinct to tolerate life with a smile,

at least try not to wince, and pray for a day

when your facial expressions are not in the name

of trying to better anything that isn’t spontaneous.

You can call it mind, form, matter, and then,

you can reverse the spin into the opposite

thought, the annihilant emotion, and achieve

spiritual immolation in a rapture of nirvanic self-destruction.

Nihilism when it isn’t in vogue as fashionable sentiment

looks at the world and says it’s empty as if

something were there that isn’t anymore, an absence

that lets the meaning leak out through their pores.

The little green apples of disappointment are sour

but if you hang around long enough, the return journey

is sweeter than the first, and disappointment

gets drunk with the wasps in the decaying taverns

plying the windfalls of dusk with nectar and ambrosia.

When things go supernova creatively, it’s not the end

of anything. It’s just one prelude over the line

like the Big Bang before it was wired for sound

like one hand clapping and all the lights going on

when you enter the house of life late at night

like a stray thought in your mother’s head

that nudges one stray photon into a collaborative avalanche

of interdependently originated genetic chain reactions.

You can be an inert gas and light up like a flavour

of neon or argon, with a fixed address

at the candy store of a highway motel, or more

significantly radioactive like a heavy metal

you can shine like an enfant terrible orphaned

by your own catastrophe in the name of art

as the potted plants wither on your lethal windowsills

for the lack of deuterium, and the waterclock

glows in the dark like a small zodiac on a stopwatch.

There’s no lack of fraudulent embassies ready

to forge a false passport with a name and a face

into countries that don’t exist without a border and a map,

but in all the years of my transits and zeniths, nadirs

and pain thresholds, gates, doorways, taboos,

dares, taunts, threats, holy wars and peaceful defeats

without any regrets, I’ve secured my passage

by exploring spiritually poetic realms without

a lack of identity in a universal mindscape

that doesn’t have one separate from everything else

for fear I’d give myself away as an imposter.

Why sip from the waters of life when

you can gulp the ocean whole in every drop?

Quick, quick, said reality to the passenger pigeon.

Humankind cannot stand too many birds.

PATRICK WHITE

MY STOMACH IS A MAN GINGERLY WALKING ACROSS QUICKSAND

MY STOMACH IS A MAN GINGERLY WALKING ACROSS QUICKSAND

My stomach is a man gingerly walking across quicksand.

If they’re not looking at the sky, my eyes

do more looking on the inside than they do

the phenomenal world I’ve brought in doors

homelessly out of the cold, a stray

that burnt its paws on ice, shepherd moons

around a rogue star, fire enough for the night.

I’m painting waterlilies, late summer sunsets,

apple bloom on a moody spring day. Spring

in violet and green. I find a dynamic repose,

sanctuary, shrine, a white hole that shines

on the other side of this carboniferous eclipse,

an embassy I can run to from the secret police

by painting mirages that drift out of the ether

like the visions of desert poets with an oral tradition

of making watergardens out of hourglasses out of time,

a madman who knows by the taste of the wine,

the jewels encrusted like barnacles to the grail,

amber, rubies, star sapphires, emeralds, diamonds,

amethyst and topaz, are mere tears of the rainbow

and not the night nor the radiance he’s in love with

like a hundred billion stars wheeling like a prayer wheel

at the crossroads of a Sufi ghost dance. I’m

absorbed into the mysteries of life, light,

the human heart, darkness, the elaboration

of the imagination aware of its own mindstream

flowing from one form into another, transmorphically,

butterflies out of their cocoons, dragonflies

from their makeshift chrysales, a sentient heart

lilaceously embedded in its starmud like the bulb

of a skull about to break into light like a waterlily

that effulgently lost its mind, trying to cling

to a starmap that can tell you approximately

where everything is, but not, syllogistically, why it shines.

I’ve been sweating the details about how

I’m going to pay the rent as I hang

helical coils of flypaper from the rafter

of the seasick feeling I have on the gallows

where I’m suppose to forgive the maenads

for severing me from my prophetic skull like Orpheus,

keel-hauled on the hull of a cretaceous moon.

I wish I was a chandelier of sticky monoicious catkins,

an alder that wasn’t so co-dependent upon attracting bees

to the wildflowers, the asters and chicory

of my paintings and roadside poems to churn out

just enough of a taste of honey to keep me going

long enough to spread like loosestrife through

the cemeteries and sunken fleets of the birch and cedar trees.

Uprootable. Like lightning, rivers and nerves.

The brachiation of dark matter, the skeletal trees

bound to their own masts like three bells of morning glory

singing all’s well to the pink skies of a warning

that’s isn’t enough of a storm front to dislodge them

like the big bad wolf at the door of the little pigs’ house

trying to blow the roof off the zodiac again

as if every hurricane were a sign from God

to found a new tent city of stargazer lilies for the dispossessed.

No joke. Sometime you just have to let go of the wheel

of birth and death when you’re swept overboard

by a maverick wave from the stern of a Tarot deck

trying to wash you like a cinder out of the one good eye

you’ve got left to navigate with like a mystic

clinging to the planks he’s been compelled to walk

like water on the dark night of his soul, trying

to salvage himself from his own wrack and ruin

as if Apollo Delphinus were going to send Delphi to his rescue

so the oracular dragoness that coils around me now

like the umbilical cord of Pythos, the earth mother,

post-mature as I grow gummy in the womb

of her lunar seas, with long hair and the Mandarin fingernails

of Edward Scissorhands trying to perform a Caesarian

from the inside out like a medicine bag he’s using

as a collapsed lung to stay afloat until he’s born

with a less ambivalent outlook on learning to dogpaddle

in a gale of raving mundanities that shriek like banshees

at the jagged windows of the eyes into his soul.

Times like this, counter-intuitively I purse an earthly excellence

as if I were painting landscapes like placards in protest

and writing poems as if I were framing the Declaration

of Independence with French overtones of the gathering fireflies

of revolutionary insight into the Enlightenment

about to strike the tree of life from the roots up

like a guillotine of lightning dropping the blade of the moon

on the neck of a black swan like an intinerant executioner

leaving murals on the walls for the next prisoner

who’s about to go under the knife, or about to be hung

from an easel by the neck as he lyrically addresses the crowd

like the body bag of the Shroud of Tourin, or Napoleon

going into exile, weeping se souvenir de moi as he

kissed the colours, proclaiming, like Mnemosyne,

the mother of the muses, apres moi le deluge. Je me souviens.

Like a license plate that hadn’t forgotten its cultural heritage.

PATRICK WHITE

DARKNESS, LET ME ENTER

DARKNESS, LET ME ENTER

Darkness, let me enter. Oblivion, open your arms.

Sweet liberty, lengthen my chain by light years.

Venus in the Pleiades, let me feel your charms.

I want to ride the light, o yes I do, as far as I can

toward some flowering of the mystery

I can add myself to and bloom as the stars do.

My most intimate familiar, solitude, eras of it,

yet it’s never known my name. My best feature

once you get pass the indignation and the anger,

compassion. And though love seems to me

the sum of many hearts, trying to express itself

as one, when have I not been a doorway to the dead?

When have I ever preferred my happiness

even as my last rainbow bridge went up in flames

and there was no where else to cross before the falls,

to that of the ironic beatitudes of the forbidden and the blessed?

Make me a star again one day with a few habitable planets,

each with at least one moon that can make me crazy as this one.

Promise? Promise me it will be so and mean it.

I will continue. I will keep on. I will endure like a mountain

that never capitulated volcanically to my own rage.

I’ll walk the road standing up. I’ll traverse it on my knees.

I’ll be the nightbird. The green bough. The apple bloom.

I’ve learned. I’ll listen. And when I’m overwhelmed by words,

I’ll give you my voice and let you speak for yourself.

Whoever, whatever, you are not or you are,

though I hear you’re too ineffable to get to know,

should the day ever come you want to disclose yourself

like a hidden secret that wants to be known,

I’ll understand that, I’ll be the night in your mirror

that shows you four hundred billion stars in the eyes

of as many life forms and more in the multiverse

than you can see without being astonished by the beauty

of all the secrets you’ve kept to yourself for light years.

Even if I’m just talking to myself like a waterclock

pouring my mindstream from one ear into another,

whether you’re there or not, or just the matriculated anima

of a pineal gland projected onto a holographic space time continuum,

and my spirit be no more than my own breath

condensing on the diminishing window of this cold sky

where I write the name of someone I’ve never met

with a frost-bit finger, longing for encounters I won’t regret,

let me flow into your awareness like a wavelength

into a river of light or let me burn in the immutable darkness

a firefly of thought, a thread of lightning, a distant star,

a thinning fragrance of a wildflower you might have known

a long time ago that reminds you of someone

so many changes away from anyone you’d recognize today.

I’m not looking for someone to whine to.

I’ve been omnidirectional since I turned forty-five

so I don’t need anyone to tell me where I’m going.

I’m not looking for a soft shoulder of the road to cry on.

After so many nights of laying my head

on this hard rock pillow of a world

that’s refeathering itself in scales and razorblades

I’m not dissing the occult wisdom of my consolation dreams.

The way it seems is the way it appears. Let it.

I grew up on the streets, drastically. I know how

to break a mirror in case of a catastrophe.

Just let me pretend for awhile out here in the woods

where I always feel as a human it’s the first day

of a kid in the schoolyard until I make friends with an owl

or the occasional, curious bush wolf wondering

what I’m doing so far off my natural turf, and why,

just like a dog from the city abandoned on a farm

I feel so disowned sometimes I should learn

to snarl back at the moon when it bares its fangs at me

instead of baying its praises to the rest of the asylum.

Just let me suppose for awhile that a poet

isn’t the orphan of the absurd, that there’s

a bloodline of meaning that still seeps into everything

like the dye of a black rose in the night that steeps the heart

in all frequencies and colours of the clear light of the void

that tastes like the mystic poetry of the waters of life

on the tongue of a stranger who’s just wandered in from the desert,

his lips dusty with the stars he’s been drinking

from an hourglass rimed with sand and salt.

I don’t want to receive everything only to find out

I prayed for nothing, so I won’t, but if you’re

the shapeshifting creatrix of subtle intelligence

I intuit you might be sometimes when I’m alone

with the stars like a childhood that hasn’t forgotten me,

and there’s a sudden breeze out of nowhere

that grazes the back of my neck like a sabre of the moon

so close I could swear we were lovers in another life,

light a candle for me somewhere in the universe,

and you be the light by which the light is known.

Show me your smile like moonrise on the lake.

Let me see your eyes in the rain, so inter-reflected

they can’t help shining out of everything as if

no one could keep you a secret for long, except you,

and for the moment, at least, I’m not accepting this.

Don’t care if I’m painting a lifemask to put on an abyss

of molecular indifference. You should see the tears

I’ve smeared under my eyes to save face

with the sacred clowns I’ve been from time to time.

You keep your distance and I’ll play hard to get as well.

You take one step toward me, and I’ll go the rest of the way.

Devotion’s always been a weakness of mine. One sign

and I’ll light up like an esoteric zodiac that just went electric.

I’ll meet you on a bridge at midnight, and I won’t forget

when fire comes down to the water’s edge, fire

has to use the bridge as well. Just tell me that you care,

if not for me, for all these humans that die like roadkill

stunned by the highbeams of oncoming circumstance

as if nothing in life, however rightly or wrongly,

however young or old the blood on the hands of the clock

that kills them as if they were as devoid of characteristics as you

could console them for the loss of what they dared to hold close.

That’s the gamma ray burst of the protest that has kept us apart

since my innocence first started bleeding in childhood

for the impersonality that mutilates 3.5 billion years of evolution,

the sum of all our infirmities and strengths, as if there were

nothing to cherish or venerate in us, like a homeless drunk

beaten to death on a fire-escape in a back alley just for the fun of it.

That’s the thorn in my heart. I watched my mother

half beaten to death three times by my father before I was seven

and it wasn’t you, it was me, that picked up the ax

to put a stop to it. Who could aspire to heaven

when that’s going on in the snakepit at your feet?

How do you return to your toy truck after

the cop cars and the ambulance has left with your mother

and the absence is so terrifying even the nightmares

don’t dare echo an answer that isn’t an atrocity of guile

that lies to a child about the good that will come out of it.

I’m sixty-four now and ever since my eyes were pryed open

like the petals of a flower that wasn’t ready to bloom yet,

everywhere I look, the indignity and ferocity

of intrusive happenstance inflicting itself upon life

with a few intermittent truces to lick our wounds

like razorblades in candied apples. Yes, I stand my ground.

Knock me down. I’ll get up again. And I’ll carry my pain

in my heart, in my voice, in my art, my blood, my arms,

in the urn of everything I’ve ever cherished

like a silver eagle, a placard, a birthmark back into the tear gas

of the last crusade that never had a chance, if I must,

until the human divinity that broke the seal of our suffering,

small as our light may be now, leaves an indelible impression

upon space and time, or you, if you’re there,

like the labyrinth of a fingerprint you can’t ignore.

And I’m not asking for an emergency exit,

just take the gate off the entrance and let everyone in

on the secret of why everything seems so brutally true

in the bright vacancy, dark abundance of your absence,

and I’ll dance with you in a garden on the moon

until the lemons turn blue as the wild grapes in late October

when you shall be my folly. And I shall be your fool.

PATRICK WHITE