SICKENED BY THE SUPPURATING WOUNDS OF THE AILING WORLD

SICKENED BY THE SUPPURATING WOUNDS OF THE AILING WORLD

Sickened by the suppurating wounds of the ailing world

attended by political maggots who swear they’ll

eat the corruption out of the system, all of it, except

their own shit. Monostomes. They eat with the same mouth

they enter with, and exit like toilet bowls. Politics

with Lyme disease, dusky yellow sunsets in the green dragon blood

of wisdom they’ve amputated the limbs off like a tree

that got in the way of their powerlines. If it’s green,

it’s gangrenous. Barracuda chainsaws snarling

in an old growth forest that’s already been crucified

by the nails of the protesters as Caesar renders unto Caesar

that which is Caesar’s and no one else’s forever and ever amen.

Listened for a pulse in the voices of the corporate poets

long enough and realized the prizes go to echoes of voices

that sing like lobbyists on behalf of their own egos,

in music, in painting, in science, in life and death,

cannibalistic viciousness like thousands of pigs at a trough

talking like an antiseptic mouthwash to sweeten the stink

of old meat on their breath like the carrion of crocodiles.

Go, little rainbow, and find some oilslick to lie down upon

you can enlighten like an auroral tattoo of a butterfly

on the scales of a rat’s snake’s skin. Too much Ariel

and you’ll suffer the karmic revenge of Caliban

in that one big eye in the sky of your Cyclopean

approach to the brutal vicissitudes of life that kiss

the innocent good night on their foreheads, good night like

wasps laying their eggs on the living host

of tomorrow’s diminishing Swallowtails and Monarchs

imbibing neonicotinoids from the fracked housewells

of the flowers. I’ll look for you on pills in suburbia

o, sometime later, when you’re retaining water

like a bored soccer mom in the second phase of the tripartite moon.

I’ll look into your one good eye and I’ll know

without you saying a word, how creatively numb

you had to become to litter the sunny side of the street

with the glitter of rainbows on the wings of infectious houseflies.

The mutants, the ghouls, the grotesque, the gluttony

of the ignorant trying to die with the most toys

in their war chest to address the hosts of their victims

as winners among the victorious ghost writers

who revise history to exonerate the complicit parts

they played in it like sophists of the heart in an abattoir---

the mutants have taken devolution too far for things

to ever change except for the chthonic outrage

of a habitable planet shocked at the damage done

by guests in the house of life it provided for them

out of its own inner resources and a little help from the Leonids.

Anything goes to amuse the mob with its own insanity.

Bread and circuses, foodstamps and the Olympics

to tear down the slums of the poor to fill the hotels

of the mercantile cartels of tropical Sochi. But not to worry,

Darwin said the nations of the big fish eat

the nations of the little fish like krill

strained like bleeding blackberries

through the baleen of bottom feeding blue whales,

and the little fish have to be athletic. Exceed the record

or perish in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

Even a loser who upholds the myth of regressive development

by trying as hard as an Algerian immigrant in Paris

to make a living that wouldn’t make his family ashamed of him,

can win a place of affection in the hearts,

if not the hall of fame, by echoing the same defections

in the heartlessness of the audience that applauds him

like a little guy trying so hard against the odds

of the debilities they’ve imposed upon him, they

almost remember what it was like to cry for themselves sincerely.

And here comes the press, the fourth estate, engaged

in checking and balancing the lies of the other three

as a safeguard on democracy like celebrity paparazzi

salaciously whimpering platitudes over a newsworthy corpse

they’re interviewing like blackflies on live tv. Why not

talk directly to the guys who own the freedom to speak

like the stem cells of their iphones cloned as

the Wizard of Oz making a big noise about nothing

behind the mythically inflated misquotes of mosquitoes

humming in their ears behind the story like bloodbanks

at the beginning of a food chain with the logos

of peacocks, third eyes, alphabets, and bare initials

carved into the bark of compromised lovers

who forgot what their names were for a long time ago.

Sick of it. Not ill. Sick. Like a fish swimming

in the polluted waters of life at the infectious stage

of a nuclear reactor throwing plague rats into the watersheds

of water being life, life being water if you’ve ever watched

the flowing comets of goldfish in an aquarium late at night for long.

Sick of the strong stepping on the throats of the weak

like snapping turtles at the jugulars of wild swans.

Sick of the asylum, the hospital, the drugstore, the funeral home

the old and disabled retire to when their benefits are cut off

like neurons from hydro, their redoubtable wisdom

unable to keep up with the payments on technology.

Sick of the bumper crops of pharmaceuticals threshed

like genetically modified grains of wheat when the moon is full

and the emergency wards are howling like extracurricular ambulances

they put on in Montreal like banshees at a harvest barn dance

and the violins are shrieking like hysterical crackheads

for more drugs to put them out of their misery

like the mercy of administrative angels on the psych ward.

Someone should publish a dream grammar for the sacred syllables

of our mother tongues raging like offended flower vendors

in the shadows of the Tower of Babel and market it

to the tourists so they don’t get burnt buying a rose

with more thorns than petals in the souk before

the bomb goes off like house nails reroofing

the leak in the shelter of the Lord like the meteor showers

and lightning strikes at the children of Sodom and Gomorrah

who don’t have a chance of growing up to be

a mahdi, a messiah, a hidden imam, exilic patriarchs

commanding all foreign wives be put aside,

a purging of brides heuristically unchosen by a choosey God

as a template for problem-solving extemporaneous

marital affairs. Who dares rend asunder what love

has joined together? The weld is stronger than the original bond.

As the alloys that transgress the limits of the pure element

usually take a sharper edge honed on the wheel of birth and death

than the copper chisels blunted on the pyramids,

dead, dead, dead, innocent and green as moldy bread.

Sick of the disappointments and diminishments

of my humanity. Sicker still of the cloying nostalgia

for what it used to be when the heart was a cause celebre

and not the passing effect of some random circumstance

massed against me like a god particle or birth defect

that’s difficult to detect. I’m here. Where are you?

Not cool, o no, to be disowned by the guildhalls

and literary cults with their unaffordable sentiments

trying to raise awareness of their trivialized art

like the icons and memes of quasi revolutionary saints

parading through Red Square as if life were just

one big chequered table cloth spread out on a sunny spot

in the grass that isn’t as green as it used to be

before they started making the homeless pick up

their own corpses as if they were fouling the foot path.

Not a good space, not pleasantly germaine

to the comas of taste flower-arranging chaos

to go with the urn on the mantle, still too hot to handle,

though it’s beginning to flatline like a dragon that’s flown the coup

or a phoenix in an aviary that sings as if it caught the croupe

from a nightingale with a crown of thorns for a larynx.

Sick of living in a shallow time, in a car pool of shore-huggers

who believe it’s enough to shed a tear or two

to claim they, too, were washed ashore like piratical survivors

who braved the perfect storms on the great night seas

of sorrow and awareness. Sometimes I’ve just got

to get the abyss out of the universe deep inside,

lance the abscess, trepan the prophetic pressure

of the dying planet of my uninhabitable skull

with all its shepherd moons volcanically, expurgate

the ambergris of a sperm whale like a more honest

fragrance of perfume, stick my finger down my throat

like a vomitorium in a Colosseum where

roses of blood in the dirt are being pruned

and tied back like the tree in the moon by

dead head gardeners in a high-walled abbatoir

fascinated by the avant garde aesthetics of blood spatter.

Got to get it out like the Oxyrhyncus sayings

of Jesus Christ, or the Freudian dowagers

of sex-crazed Vienna at the end of a neurotic empire,

or the thorn of the moon in my third eye

I gouged out like the semi precious stone

of a planet embedded in its orbit like an electron

or an engagement ring leftover from an ancient love affair

so as not to be destroyed by what I don’t bring forth.

Out, out, through the emergency exit door

of my therapeutic puncture wound, sick of living

in a shallow time where what’s written off

as the effluvium of the heart in the ditches of inspiration

reeks more sincerely of human content, than what

the mouthwashes and famous deodorants are writing about

as if the stink of enlightenment were the wise

passing cosmic gas just enough to inspire a jackass

to bray like a book with a carrot in front of its nose

that grows like lies in the heartwood of Pinnochio’s.

When your imagination has so little to reveal to you

why try to expose it as if it were real by acclamation?

PATRICK WHITE

MORE PEACE THAN DEATH IN THE QUALITY OF THE SILENCE TONIGHT

MORE PEACE THAN DEATH IN THE QUALITY OF THE SILENCE TONIGHT

More peace than death in the quality of the silence tonight.

In such a vastness, after so many turnings at the crossroads,

I can feel you breathing in the dark within me

as I used to watch you dream for hours

in the glow of the fire on an ice bound night

when no one was on the roads like buttered mirrors

and only the shadows and moonlight moved

like ghosts that were sure of their footing

and the elastic cats were stretched out in the warmth

like deserted shorelines as far as they could go

as if they never wanted to come back to themselves.

My love for you burned like a poppy of blood

in the white gold of the wheat of my body

I offered you like bread, as you, yours to me,

wine that had been crushed like wild grapes

from the vineyards of a thousand new moons.

Though space and time be one continuum,

dimension and direction, vectors of shadows on a sundial,

two feathers of the same flightpath of a nightbird

that disappears into the silence of its longing

as if it had found its voice in the stillness of the immensities

that enclosed us like two secrets that revealed

what was intimately human about the mystery of life,

just to feel the light gathering in my eyes

as I looked upon your face the way the stars

shine down upon the earth was always and only

as far as I ever had to seek to know why I lived.

The journey finds itself like a planet around a fire at night.

And all that is huge and incomprehensible about love,

is contained in the watershed of a single tear

we shed in joy as it floods the heart to realize

how wrong our starmaps were for so long about so much

though they try to fix our brevity to a time and a place

and a myth we could look up to when we’re lost

all we ever had to do, rooted in each other’s starmud,

was let the shining find us, even on the coldest nights,

like flowers blooming in the soporific aura of a fire

while your eyes were dreaming like a nightstream

under its eyelids of ice, and mine, for all the lightyears since

my seeing has ripened in time, and this night is no exception,

were grateful to witness the poppies flaring

in the gardens of the afterlife of Orion as near

as a pair of cardinals taking shelter in a snowbound cedar tree.

We burned brightly together for awhile, did we not---

two flames of a root fire folding its wings

like a love poem I wanted you to find in the morning

that didn’t return to its grave like a ghost of smoke

lingering long into the dawn of that hour you awoke

beside me, the sun gleaming in the crude chandeliers

of the icicles and the snow fronds of the ferns on the windows,

though things that were near and familiar have been

estranged by space and time, and the melting roads we once

walked down together in the spring are long gone, I write to you

in warm tears as I did that night in the glow of a fire

even after all these years, that can still take the chill off the air

as if the flames in the heartwood of the lives we are consumed by

refeather the dragons on the pyres of sumac, even time, though

it’s cold and cutting, can’t blow out like stars flowering on the wind.

PATRICK WHITE

WON'T MEAN MUCH IF YOUR EYES AREN'T OPEN IN YOUR BLOOD

WON’T MEAN MUCH IF YOUR EYES AREN’T OPEN IN YOUR BLOOD

Won’t mean much if your eyes aren’t open in your blood.

If the stars can’t see you because you don’t know how

to read them poetry in the small cafes of your heart

accompanied by spoons and plates and broken goblets

of the cheap house wine that smash just like love affairs

dashing your skull against the rocks, hoping the mermaids come back.

If you can’t hear in the parking lot of a raucous industry

the colours of your emotions, you’re a deaf chameleon

and who could make you listen to what you can’t listen to

even if you had enough people who loved you around you

to want you to try to listen to your own tears when you cry?

Your ear on the same wavelength as a corrugated tin roof,

maybe you can see what I’m trying to say to you

if you close your eyes, and just listen to the rain without

trying too hard to make a big effortless effort to be

auditorily enlightened by the racket of your delusions.

I can’t remember when my life stopped being my own

and I went to bed one night, and I was as human as my toes are

and I awoke, I was merely the afterbirth of a visionary

I didn’t recognize, as my eyes were being igneously wrung

from a cope of dark ore like stars out of the distant hills.

Not a lot of self-respect from the beginning, maybe

it wasn’t that hard becoming everyone and everything else,

and I was a prime candidate for effacement

but when I looked into the mirror of my

ten inch, equatorially mounted, clock-driven, reflecting telescope

I used like a canning jar to capture and mount stars and fireflies

on a black velvet starmap, all I could see

was this abyss staring back at me that couldn’t say

where I’d gone, but the last I thought I heard

was that I got a job as a janitor in an hourglass

sweeping mirages out of a desert of private school stars.

I say what I see as it occurs to me spontaneously.

And I’m compelled to say it without hesitation

so the vision isn’t tainted by the colour of the jewel

it’s passing through, from one eye to the next, ad infinitum.

No light pollution in the shining, though there’s something

about the idea of purity that continues to appal me

because I never had so much against chaos from the beginning

and I sense a deep hatred of all that is soiled and flawed,

in which case, I’d rather be an outlaw than one of these monks

who disdain me because I can’t help seeing their discipline

as uncreatively redundant. Eventually, if they’re blessed,

all our faces are going to fall off by themselves

like the scabs of sunspots that healed the wounded light

like a wildflower shedding its petals like nurses’ caps

and deathmasks frozen like a moment in time meant

to last forever though we go on being estranged by them forever.

Uncanny transformations of the solid into the real.

Maybe it’s time to let the mindstream flow as it will

and let the burning bridges of our delusions cross us for a change

to get to the other side of a life that’s only got one bank

and it’s as clear as space, we’re not even standing on that.

Hang on. Let go. It’s just your hand opening and closing

like a door in a dream, and you’ll find your falling

just as fast as you ever were and if you were to ask your eyes

they couldn’t tell in this vastness whether your were falling up or down.

When you’ve dismantled all you’ve desired,

post neo-deconstructionism sets in like spiritual rigor mortis

and you can’t tell if you’re sleeping with the living or the dead

when you haven’t got your mask on. You can wear holes

in your shoes, and windows and carpets, pacing

like a waterclock of the heart in an hourglass of waiting

like a boy at the edge of the curb with his elbows on his knees

and his face in his glum hands, waiting for a parade

with sacred clowns throwing away free candies

like stars along the route of the mystic Milky Way.

Just be sure to keep your eyes open like a spring thaw

so the light can recognize you like the flower that brought it

to full illumination this time last year like a candle

that keeps blowing its petals out so you can see

the black matter of what you are not deeper

into the eyeless dark than you’ve ever bloomed before.

PATRICK WHITE  

UNDEVOTED, FREE, AND WILD

UNDEVOTED, FREE, AND WILD

Undevoted, free, and wild,

no one to answer to, no one to answer for,

the urns shattered, and the ashes scattered,

and the fire liberated to perfect its own combustion

and the stars without anyone to walk home,

and the solitude silent, dark, and deep, cool

as the bliss of a wine-cellar talking in its sleep,

I have grown mad in the heat of the purple sun.

I have spoken from the mouths of the caves in the desert

and not expected the echo of my own voice

to return to me like a pilgrim stashing a gnostic gospel

deep in the sand, without realizing

how much closer to the stars dirt is than I am.

When you’re no one but the wind in disguise

you don’t need to be humble, you don’t need to be wise,

nothing to trust, and no one to rely on,

you can watch the dead at night

streaming toward Orion

like a blue-white ribbon of light

undoing the gift wrappings off the bodies and eyes

of people who can see and be again.

And you know it comes to everyone

like a nebular orchid with a fragrance of stars,

that the Sahara will green and bloom again

and the wind sing hymns to the grass

and the gazelles sport their elegant legs,

adolescents in the spring brush,

running like violins succulent with beginnings,

and it doesn’t matter you’re alone out here

listening to the ashes of a mirage

make up legends to tell the fire

about its ancestors buried on the moon anonymously

and how their blood once stained the earth

like a scarlet letter even the stars couldn’t wash off.

The mystic anti-hero of my own dragon myth

I exalt in my isolation like a shriek of revolution

and overthrow myself like a book in the flames

to keep something I don’t understand alive in me

as if I had to keep on dying to sustain myself

and the distinction between one and the other were lost upon life.

It’s a touch, it’s a feel, it’s a hole in veil

with one eye looking out at me to see

if I’ve intensified the dark enough to break into stars,

if I can unravel my heart like smoke like water like fire

and perfectly disappear into the atmosphere of my dispersal

without a shudder of farewell to the masks I wore like scales.

Not to be constrained by even so much as

the single thread of a straitjacket, the husk

of an abandoned sanctuary left to the imagination

of the hermetic flowers to do with as they wish.

I shriek freedom across the heavens like the death cry

of a hawk waking the valley up in the morning.

I whisper to the water things the wind was never meant to hear.

So faithful to my calling, I lead those who come, away from me,

as if it were the perennial custom of the universe

to meet like this for a moment in time and space

and then disperse into the darkness alone like a unlit candle.

I’m a riot of fools in the sublimity of the presence within me

that elates the crazy wisdom of my spontaneous ignitions

and schools the black lightning of its absence

in the folly of trying to enclose my spirit in gates

like a candle in the niche of a tempestuous vision.

Yeeeeeeessssss, I scream into the face of nothing

like the efoliant scripture of my confession and protest

that life doesn’t need an alibi to live and die by,

no extraneous, no outer, no other, no object, no subject

no flying buttress to act as a bridge

over a flowing river of Gothic stone,

no strong tree standing on its own to cut down

and carve into a crutch, no cork to keep the ocean out,

no bucket to bail the moonlight out of the lifeboat,

no jade Buddha to make your supplications to,

no footprints on the water Jesus walked,

no cave in Ramadan to receive the angel of light,

no Kabbalah to baffle your way through the night,

no Schmidt-Cassegrain reflecting telescopes

on clock driven equatorial mounts geared to the heavens

to thread the golden needle of the mystery

without any knots in your spinal cord,

to penetrate the vulva of the sea like a sacred shell

that once gathered armies on a burning hillside

to contest their revelations with the tongues of swords.

I shall tell you, my brother, I shall hasten to you my sister

like moonlight through your window, I shall not

hold back from you the least shadow of the furthest star

releasing its dark wisdom like the black doves

of its own excruciating ashes glowing like the pain

of horrendous transformations into light.

I shall not bring you the skins of the dragons I’ve shed

but inspire you with a fire you’ve never been burned by before,

a spiritual immolation into a godhead without a metaphor

to guide you by, a torch you can’t drown in your tears,

a long firewalk down to a river of stars,

and there you shall cross on a burning life raft

of the bones you’ve been carrying around for lightyears like a body.

And it’s a heresy of silence to say, but there

you shall you shall lie down in the nocturnal emptiness

in the long blue seagrass of the moon

and empower out of your own creative abundance

whatever worlds your longing inspires you to embrace

to amuse the bright vacancy of eternity with time, like love,

and the dark abundance of unperishing potential

with space, like wisdom, and the clear light of the void

and the unspeakable absence of any other voice

to ruin the silence with the bliss and sorrow of seeking

the mystic night you found within you longing like a bird

for the stillness to write it like a lyric of the wind,

a passage of blood through the labyrinth of the heart,

a shadow against the moonrise of a compassionate awareness

there’s a divinity that sings like a human

in the heart of everything that breaks its long fast of nothing

with praise and celebration, with fire and light and rain

with the firstt sacred syllables to touch the lips

of the black rose charred in the heart of the dragon, like poetry.

PATRICK WHITE

THESE MEMORIES, SHOES I'VE WALKED IN TOO LONG

THESE MEMORIES, SHOES I’VE WALKED IN TOO LONG

These memories, shoes I’ve walked in too long

and worn out, holes in the bottom of my universe,

watercolours fading in the glare of my mind,

the ghosts of vivid sunsets overshadowed

by the mystique of the stars like New England asters

caught by surprise in a shock of blonde hay

or pawn shop poppies selling their dreams cheap.

Cool bliss. More joy in the dark watersheds of my heart

than these abandoned housewells I keep swimming in

like a garter snake lapping the rain with the tines

of its lightning tongue, not sure, like the fireflies

and the moon, I can rise, smoke from a chimney,

the same way I got in, a wavelength of the sun

that shines at midnight in the depths of a nocturnal mirage.

I don’t know much about success. My life has been

a rear guard guerilla action against the odds

of even achieving an orderly retreat from

the invasive armies of inanity I’m surrounded by

like drones fighting a holy war without caring

whose side they’re on like a retinal response to reality.

I can’t count the times I’ve been collaterally killed

by hungry blue whales in the sky screening for krill

like a food chain with its tail in its mouth.

My flesh gets passed around like a torn loaf of bread

though my aspirations are more galactic

than messianic, it all comes down to atoms in the end.

The small things you remember, the enigma

of a distant star winking intimately at you

through the boughs of the black walnut trees in the fall

as if there were more to the encounter than you can second-guess.

The crumb of a dream some lover rubbed from the corners

of her eyes as she woke in the morning, her hair

flowing like night rivers down into the bays of her eyes

washing the stars out from the evening before.

The thorns of the rose that nicked your heart

like scalpels of cuneiform that baked your starmud

in the kiln of a book fired like a clay urn.

Is it sacrilege to pour the ashes out on the wind

that scatters you like a narrative theme on the roots

of a dragon that doesn’t want to be burned alive again

on the pyres of the sumac and daylilies expiring

by a river of sorrows that tastes of a thousand

self-immolations in the cold furnaces of love

we all stand prophetically in like heretics

who could see their fate painted on the lenses

of the telescopes of the orthodox who insist

the moon isn’t pitted like rings that have lost

the initial sparkle of their jewels and the the sun

isn’t maculated by dark spots. What use now

these gnostic starmaps I sited through an astrolabe

of fireflies, if it isn’t to start a fire in the morning

to take the chill off these desert nights

and warm up the leftovers of my daily bread?

Memory is the mother of the muses but she recalls

visions, not photographs trapped in their own image

like the Burgess Shale. The absence of so many

people and things is still a transformative event

that keeps on growing within me like an expanding universe

where every star is a diaspora of one driven

by the dark energy of some occluded insight

into the oblivion of lovers who have become

so interspatially out of touch with each other’s

lightning and fireflies their eyes atrophy

because of a lack of light and the company

of strangers, and you, no less of a stranger

to the intimate distances of the dusky solitude

you disappear into like a crow or a mourning dove

into a sky with an infinite wingspan whenever you open

the gate on the aviary of your hooded heart

and every love letter you write after that

sounds like the silence of a flightfeather in an envelope

cresting like a wave breaking on the shore

of some island galaxy you’ve been washed up on

like a sea star with a new way of shining

that doesn’t throw a light on anything but is

blazing with life that reveals a lot more than can be seen.

Things don’t die like gravegoods around you.

They take the same journey you’re on

like a ka gun pointing at Osiris, the dog-star, in Orion.

Whether your embalmed or dismembered

all the parts are assembled once more as if death

were only a bad joke no ever catches onto

until they can hear laughter on the other side

of the black mirror you’re peering into

that doesn’t recognize the new identity

you’re dreaming in your sleep as if you were

awake again, and none of this had happened yet,

great joy, great pain, and the freedom to forget creatively

even when you walk alone by your own light

you cast thousands of shadows.

PATRICK WHITE

LESS AND LESS THE HEART ENGAGED

LESS AND LESS THE HEART ENGAGED

Less and less the heart engaged, though not dispassionately,

with emotion intensifying into form, and the elaboration

of its shadows into a sign language of the light.

More a clarification of time, how the golden apple,

about to fall, looks back on the blossoms of the spring,

and sees how everything has already been achieved

by the beginning blooming like a tentative leaf of foxfire

in the ashes of the stars that cram their urns

into every cell of the body to honour the creative detritus

of the light all things are the embodiment of.

How gently the stars open our eyes to them

amazed at how much tenderness can be expressed

by a dragon at a distance sage enough to know

life is a function of its shining blindly into the dark.

And we’re all trying to second-guess like children

anticipating gifts, what’s behind the tent flaps

on the midways of our blazing that drowns the night out

with the white noise of our mind. The careerism

of being alive, the lucky throw against the odds

that wins the prize that mythically deflates the carnie

as he hands it to you like the best of a bad situation,

happy to see you gone like an offence to his opportunism.

How many have wandered off a path that doesn’t exist

except they make it, rogue planets across the starfields,

leaving their wake like a green shadow in the wavelengths

of tall grass that soaks their shoes as if they were crying

and there were seeds in their tears like the waters of life.

Heretics convinced they’re blessed by an inviolable freedom

to dispossess themselves of the conventional fruits

of the tree of knowledge by which it is known.

Do you know the name of the emerald star in the core

of the apple when you slice it open with a Sanskrit blade

of consciousness, which loses its edge the moment

it goes looking for something that exists outside of it

to see where the light’s coming from. Easy enough

to return to the ivy-smothered gates of Eden

but there are no more gods in the garden, nor demonized reptiles

the angels have to raise burning swords against to keep out

of the no fly zone above the exiles and refugees

fleeing the wrath of Nobodaddy like the sock puppet

the manipulative wear like the deathmasks of their unmollified humanity.

There’s a dynamic that’s missing from our creative solitude,

alone with so much beauty it hurts our eyes sometimes

just to behold it and know there’s no one to share it with

but strangers just as amazed as we are at the lack of mirrors,

that there is no more mystery behind it when you peel back space

than there is in who we are, though only the dangerous

know for sure. You can make a housewell of this, or

you can risk drowning in your own watershed like a diving bell

crushed in the depths like a coke can, looking

for an ancient shipwreck that might give you a clue

to where you’re going, as if the truth were still

the prophetic skull of a cave-dweller buried in fire.

Should we dance to the music in the voice

of the life of meaning inspired by the riot of its absence,

and call that liberty, or submit to the slavers of a police state

with a golden chain linked by a consensus of selective orbits

we’re allowed to revolve in without arousing

astronomical catastrophes of petty suspicion?

Should we trust death more than we do life?

Turn over custodianship of our indefensible humanity

to evil clowns that laugh like lobbyists for the rich

at all the wrong things? What’s impotence if not the habit

of letting someone feed you lotuses or bread and circuses

in a repressively tolerant garbage-can?

Little doubt it’s easy enough for the light to be bent

by the gravitational eyes that warp the spaces

we live in like cameras born without eyelids

keeping watch on us in the weird belief

they’re keeping a prison population safe from themselves,

though they plead the focus of their seeing is fraternally pious.

Our children’s children will have mastered the shallow art

of seeing with their eyes, but how rarely, and what

a life of pain will pursue the visionary who actually

sees through them as if light were merely the key

to the magnificent gravegoods of our imagination

long after our children have forgotten how to see in us

what they’re not looking for in themselves.

Waterclocks pouring into the available dimensions

of an empty future, for the sake of the unborn,

let us carry the seeds of metaphors that will bloom

of their own accord in the starmud of the nascent imaginations

of our children so we don’t lose touch with them

precisely when they need us the most to be human.

To share the scars and shadows of our maculate conception

of ourselves, the way we’ve been invariably defeated

by the best that’s in us as a protest against death

that hasn’t suffered enough to understand

the genuine transcendence of a symbolic gesture

that took its hands away from its face as if the sun

weren’t ashamed to shine on it in the full light of a long day

of wandering where we will by the river to include

the wild irises some bush hog has cut to ribbons

in our transmorphic gaze, as it raises the unlikelihood

of the battered stalks of its budding colours up

like the torches of two blue-white, ultra violet flames,

to a suggestion of the Pleiades to bloom like a paintbrush in the face

of the sword that slashes at the beauty of its freedom of expression

like the spirit of the living word to exceed the bounds

of all plausible definitions of itself that limit

the sacred syllable of disobedience caught in its throat

like the blue-blood of an aristocratic nightbird

bleeding out into the future of longing in our children’s eyes

like the ancient anthem of what’s heroically perennial

about humans defying the self-imposed imperatives

of their own tragic existence, by blooming nonetheless

like stars renewing the innocence of our children’s sense of wonder,

our dark abundance shining into the bright vacancy

of the unknown spaces their faces are slowly emerging from

like moonrise over the burgeoning mindscapes

of sleeping hills dreaming aerially like fruitive familars

into the blue distance and intimately human shadows

of our inheritors tasting the same stars in their seeing

that lit up ours when we bothered to look up like wild irises

that refused to be laid low along the shores of our mindstreams

that insisted like water in its outflowing upon

the miraculous follies of an incontravertible life of awe.

PATRICK WHITE