A WOMAN'S VOICE SEEPING OUT OF THE WINDOWS LIKE A FRAGRANCE

A WOMAN’S VOICE SEEPING OUT OF THE WINDOWS LIKE A FRAGRANCE

A woman’s voice seeping out of the windows like a fragrance

of melodic fire in the rain, her song wavering in and out

of earshot over the hissing of cars, the percussive water.

But one heart resonates with another like echoes

in a big room trying not to make a grand entrance

on a stage designed for petty exits. The sorrow true,

the joy in life unanticipated, and the mystery

of being human to suffer and rejoice in the awareness

of both, an alloy of the worst and the best made stronger

by the oxymoron than either alone, or a bridge

between opposites like a nose in the middle of your eyes.

The lyrics might be blurred like watercolours

smudged by weeping, but the hues of the sound are clear,

and dusk is sitting in the front row of the dawn

with a backstage pass to the apartment across the street,

practising for a Thursday night gig at O’Reilly’s

among the clinking of beer bottles and the clatter of spoons

where the orchids dress up to cheat on the dandelions.

Still, it’s the solitude of the music that will touch

their wounds tenderly as if she were putting a finger

softly to their lips and saying hush now for a moment

and listen to the beauty of your own silence

taking compassion on what hurts you the most,

as if the ghost that was summoned by her music

had come to you privately with a cure for an absentee heart

in harmony with the perfect timing of the rain.

The medium is not the message and the word for it

isn’t experience, though you can’t separate the moon

from its lacustrian reflection on the broad waters of life.

The distinction is as valid as a keyhole in an open door.

A gate that doesn’t even shut out those who won’t walk

through it to see that even their fear of shadows

is rooted in their own starmud like the eyes of strange jewels

that shine in the dark like shy nightbirds in the audience.

The stars whisper offstage to your eyes not to be afraid

of your own radiance, or the chromatic range

of your rainbow refractions unlocking your voice

like an aviary that just let all the bats and butterflies

peacocks, crows, hermit thrushes, nightingales and doves out,

o and the great blue herons, the Canada geese, the killdeer

and quail, and the threnodies of the waterbirds I don’t know

the names of but only have to listen to know they mourn

like fire on the water to judge from the wild asters

of the autumn in her voice that burns like fireflies

in the eyes of the rain, then smoulders like wet cedar

before breaking into stars like sparks in the hay

of the scarecrow dancing with a phoenix in the flames

of a torch singer bound like a heretic of joy to the stake

of a microphone in the high fields she’s setting afire

with her voice, then putting them out in the tears

of the music in her heart like soft chandeliers of rain.

The words we put to our sorrows are as wayward as joy

or the hidden nightcreeks following their own melody lines

like the distant whispers of ghosts through the woods

that will return them to their graves like the mists of the morning

when the sun comes out, soon enough, soon enough

like the glare of the lights after last call as the singers

pack their black coffins like scratched guitars

with scars on their voices even the stars can’t lip synch

without their reflections burning like bridges

in the lyrics of life waterclocking like windows in the rain

you can hear singing all the way down the block

as the music blooms like waterlilies in the gutters of the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

PRETTY BONES FELL FROM THE SCAFFOLDING OF HER OWN RIBS

PRETTY BONES FELL FROM THE SCAFFOLDING OF HER OWN RIBS

Pretty Bones fell from the scaffolding of her own ribs

like the rungs of burning ladders she’s spiritualized into serpent fire

that climbs up her spinal cord like the pilot lights

of the scarlet runners to paint paradise in earth colours

with invisible highlights of the hotspots in a candle flame

anybody would hold their right hand of power over

just to talk to her for an era or two as if she were

Van Gogh’s unmarried cousin. The kind of beauty

that makes everyone in whatever room of the palace

of recycled chandliers she steps into like an ice storm

feel cold and lonely and longing as they’re drawn to her

like Celtic bards burning their poems in the fires

she jumps through naked as a witch that inspires them

like an heretical muse to take greater and greater subjective risks.

Pretty Bones hands you a begging bowl full of thorns

and tells you not to mistake the decrescent crown

of the moon even when it’s neaping on the wane

for a nest of inspiration it would be folly to hope

the same blue herons are going to return to

as they did last year and the year before that

like a recurring dream that nothing’s gone, it will all

come back like symbols of dusk to the limbs

of the dead trees washing their corpses in the waters of life

by the glow and the gloaming of the apple-green irises

in the eyes of a peacock spreading its feathers out

across the sky like a starmap to enlightenment

tinged by the sad colours of cool bliss in the background

as if she had an aerial perspective on time

and could turn the hour hands around like the petals

of the wildflowers leaping back into spring

without advancing forward into the auras of autumn.

Pretty Bones maintains she’s still vernal even here

in the tarpits of hell where the white swans

drown in their own darkness like vows they made

to the occult promise of a new moon to open their eyelids

as if they were giving birth to the light out of

the dark abundance of their own innate potential for radiance

like waterlilies shining as if their eyes were shy peers of the stars

saddened by some deep secret of life they enigmatically

keet to themselves like the silence of the nightbirds

that falls like a veil of longing and wonder over the distant hills

buried like sacred gravegoods in the same afterlife

they stole from like the vernal equinox from the bone-box

she carved out of her own heartwood like a place

she could rest her prophetic skull with no fear of being snake bit.

Pretty Bones is never any less fictitious than you want her to be.

She accommodates the freaks and the ghouls,

and the demonic zombies that are trying too hard

to have their mummified leathers patched by

the ghosts of dead outlaws with the rockers of their own gravestones

as a testament of their unthinking loyalty unto death.

Her compassion is alluvial as the flesh of the Nile

and even the crocodiles who eat carrion are too beguiled

to open their jaws like satin coffins to unwary gazelles.

Pretty Bones can see windows within windows like the light

in everyone as if she were passing by on the street at night

on her way to some hectic rendezvous with her anti-self

to paint the town red in scarlet letters as if

she were just learning how to spell the alpha

of a new beginning in elaborate labyrinths of magic kells

that say it all iconically in elaborate fractals of random spontaneity

singing like crows and angels in the sacred groves

of trees abandoned to their own fate like spray bombs and chainsaws.

PATRICK WHITE

ALL THE GOOD REASONS THAT GET IN THE WAY OF WRITING

ALL THE GOOD REASONS THAT GET IN THE WAY OF WRITING

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

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

will kill you faster than the bad ones

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

to dip your skull like the cup of the moon

in the wellsprings of your own imagination

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

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

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

but when you’re creatively underwhelmed

by the rising Rockies of Circumstance

losing their footing like an avalanche of cornerstones

coming down on you like a barrage of asteroids,

you better find a mountain gear deep within yourself

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

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

of the underwhelming reality love married you to,

or pontificate like a hollow urn on the tragic absence

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

or tell me you squandered it all like apple bloom

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

smells like smoke from a distant pyre on the wind.

Remember the fire. Even if you have to burn underground

through the occult roots of the cedars, or bury yourself

powdered in red ochre under the hearthstones

of your prophetic forebears erasing your picture-music

from the cave walls like graffiti under a bridge

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

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

Remember the fire. Remember the discipline

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

like a Spartan boy with a hot fox, as it

eats you from the outside in without you saying a word

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

Or regenerative Prometheus chained to a rock like a salamander

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

Lightning doesn’t strike the roosters of fire

that crow like weathervanes pinned

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

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

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

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

a candle in a hurricane of boarded up windows,

the light of your own mind, casting shadows of time

like a sundial with a wilder imagination

than its usefulness might at first glance suggest.

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

or pour gold down your throat like the Parthians did Crassus

and expect to shine like a lighthouse in a diamond mine

with the voice of an oracular canary in a cage.

You’ve got to live inexhaustibly

what you’re going to write about first

if you want to burn down the Library of Alexandria

in a gamma ray burst of creative annihilation

because you can only master as much life

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

or a pine cone germinating the seeds of enlightenment

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

all the beautiful green swords flaming like wild irises

whose beauty you fall upon like an honourable death

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

Even if you’ve only got a firefly of talent

left in the caldera of an extinct volcano,

a spark in the firepit of a burnt out dragon,

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

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

you must be crazy and wise enough oxymoronically

to be the benign tyrant of your own Golden Age

like Pericles of Athens, with a politically incorrect

lover for a muse you look upon like the Parthenon

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

you love the swaying silver of the wind

over the heavy-grained harvest breaking water

like a bell under a redundant blue moon,

don’t shrink from threshing it if you want to

share it like bread with people as hungry as you are

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

like Wodin made a sacrifice of himself to himself,

or life thrives on itself like a soccer team

that crashed landed on a mountaintop,

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

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

Or if you’re too sensitive to compassionately take life

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

on the whetstone of the moon, and express your mercy

as Muhammad suggested, with a quick kill

you can hold love responsible for like a spiritual alibi

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

You have to be part salmon. A battering ram

swimming upstream against the flow of circumstance

like the gate of a water castle you’re besieging

to lay your blunted sword down in tribute

among the sacred pools of life that gave it to you

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

to wage a holy war of one on their behalf

you’re doomed to lose like a conflict that progresses

from one defeat to the next against ever stronger adversaries,

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

who realize, too late, with every encounter,

you’re growing stronger than the best reasons

could have anticipated strategically.

Be a good apple tree, lyrically seasoned and epically strong

as Lao Tzu and the Druid aptly described you

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

and express yourself completely without intending

the betterment of anything, though all do,

from wasps and birds to bears and humans

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

and the generosity of the sacrifice that laid you out

like a windfall of dice enshrining the eyes that can see

like seeds in the sibylline books of the apple

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

of the sun and the moon to keep their planets shining

from the inside out in the Goldilocks zone

of a light that’s been sweetened immanentally

by a dangerously habitable life holding up

a lantern in the dark that disappointment, defeat and struggle

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

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

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

poppies flaring uncontrollably across your field of vision.

Burn like a two-eyed passion for everything

you can see and be on the earth that consumes you

in the equinoctial fires of your vernal immolations,

not a magnifying glass that intensifies the sun into

the capricious focus of an idle boy on a cruel afternoon

shepherding ants like prophetic semi-colons into a furnace.

PATRICK WHITE

THE MIND REFLECTED IN THE SILENCE OF ITS OWN LIGHT

THE MIND REFLECTED IN THE SILENCE OF ITS OWN LIGHT

The mind reflected in the silence of its own light.

Chaos is not pacified, but your memory remains

like a work in progress, fireflies with no fear of heights

arc-welding the wounds of the suspension bridges

that use to sway in the wind over the fathomless abyss I risked

to love you more obsessively than solitude. Black candle

of the heart, you burned in me like a votive flame

in the visionary shrines of my prophetic skull, a tender madness

veiled in the shadows of a thousand extinct stars.

Your body an amphora of wine on the sea floor of Atlantis,

an hourglass full of goldfish and nocturnal mirages

of oracular starclusters, I’ve never fully shaken the hangover

of consuming entire watersheds from the sorrows in your eyes

whenever I went witching for the rootfires of your flesh

with lightning rods as urgent as the tusks of the moon.

The memories circle back on me like a solar storm

of firebirds over the tree line and though it’s getting dark now,

I can still smell the fragrance of your light lingering

like auroral apparitions of deadly nightshade, wild orchids

and black roses that smeared their eyelids in the lampblack

and mascara of total eclipses that weren’t manic enough to go punk

when your rage smashed your insights like frosted lightbulbs

in a morgue where you burned the dead in effigy

on a pyre of ice, a cremation of fireflies, dragons

in the hulls of those Viking funeral ships you liked to launch

like matchbooks with crazy stamens and anthers

even the bees couldn’t churn into honey when you

weren’t in the mood to water down your blood

by tempering the Celtic weaponry of your metalwork

in the elixirs of acid rain that scalded your eyes like wildflowers.

I loved the refreshing arrogance of your blue tattoo

and the unassuming vulnerability of the way

you never expected the steel in your heart to fail

when we used to meet secretly every night

on a burning bridge like thieves of the fire

we stole like graverobbers from our own urns.

Somehow our afterlives got mixed up with this one

and eternity crept into our love affair like autumn ivy

or sumac burning in its igneous flightfeathers

for the long, strange, heartless journey ahead

as we looked at each other like orphanages

waving good-bye to someone we’d have to get over

by closing the windows we opened up in each other

like a starmap of dark matter in mourning

for the black doves that died like sacred syllables

in the throats of the fires that roared like a larynx of stars,

o, can you hear me now, wherever you are

like the other wavelength of this lap-winged caduceus

where the grave of the wound is the cradle of the cure,

still trying to say things after all these circuitous lightyears

to you, to me, to each other in the evanescent vastness

of the darkness that came like a coroner

to our unsustainable dreams with surrealistic autopsies

that were meant to be whispered like rain

into the ears of the dead listening to it weep

like tears that either came too early or too late,

sema soma, to open their coffin lids amid

this garland of fruitless plumage and rootless flowers

like seeds of fire wired to the wayward fuses of the wind

as if love were still glowing like a night light we left on

in the ashes of those starfields we were immolated in.

Foxfire, I suspect, and fiddleheads on the first violins of the bracken.

PATRICK WHITE

TIME TO STOP DYING AND PRAISE THE SKY

TIME TO STOP DYING AND PRAISE THE SKY

Time to stop dying and praise the sky.

Time to set your eyes free from what

you’re looking for and marvel at the stars.

Time to forgo the Leggo girders of your intent,

and offer up a few sand castles to the tide,

release your mind from the petty chores

you apply it to and grow astronomical

in the way you let things come about as they will

without trying to raise a sail or attach

a rudder to chaos, as if you could so easily lead

chaos astray into doing things your way,

forgetting you’re not the road, you’re

just the one who walks it like a dream figure

in the omnipresence of the rain. So many eyes,

so much to see, and you’re still looking at it all

from the angle you were born with.

Sylvia, uncuff your shepherd moons

from the dungeons of your bedposts.

Life is cruel. Stop blaming the swallows for it.

You ever get caught nude in a squall of fireflies before

and stay in the water long enough to feel the delicacy

of their lightning sending little shocks of ecstasy

whitewater rafting down the axons of your deltas

as if you had a chance to drown in your joy

at being alive for a change, instead of holding your head

underwater in your sorrows to see if you’re a witch

that’s huffed too much rue? Time to let go,

fledgling, your first nightflight into the abyss.

Time to ride your own thermals, my kestrel,

like bannisters down the stairwells of the maple keys

then swoop up like an arrow from the bow of a lead guitarist

and take hold of the moon in your talons.

You can do it. Turn your scales into feathers.

The low raised up high like moonrise

on the threshold of your wingspan, come on, dragon,

one big gulp of atmosphere to overcome

your fear of koans at these precipitous heights,

stop lingering in the doorway like a portrait in a picture frame

it’s time, it’s time, it’s time to jump.

Don’t tax the tolerance of the wind for shore-huggers.

Get rid of all those thought chains that tie you

to your own wrist with a hood over your head

and designate your prey like an agenda with a menu.

Thinking about freedom enslaves it. Don’t try

to earn it like a gladiator longing for a wooden sword

from the emperor, take it. Be a great thief of fire

and do a victory roll because you got away with it.

You jumped into the black hole of chance

and trillions of stars smiled favourably upon you

like a zodiac of fireflies when the sun’s off road on its own.

Sylvia, dry your tears like puddles on the footpath

and let your eyes, vapours in the sky, fly on the wind

as if your seeing weren’t a lapwing and your crying

weren’t a housewell with a lightbulb that keeps burning out.

Get around like sentience in a dream for a while,

No lack of nightmares in the world to make you sleep

like a trap door spider peeking out from under your eyelids

like a false dawn, or squinting at the stars as if

you were looking into oncoming highbeams,

frozen in your tracks like the ghost of a doe on asphalt.

Lavish some space on yourself and take a bubble-bath

in the universe and you can tell the gargoyles

on your Gothic cathedral you’re sitting in a blast furnace

trying to come up with new ideas for stained glass

and you think you might be on to something

more seraphic in its zeal than fire and blood.

You’ve got the attitude. Maybe it’s time

to de-alpha your beatitude as if life were a friend

with nothing to prove like a river that isn’t always

swimming for its life or a waterclock that overidentifies

with aqueducts and is convinced time runs in a straight line

only a slight gradient off true midnight well within

the margin of error between the mountains and the swamps,

between this inconceivable life and that unbelievable death.

What are you holding your breath for, it’s

a generous atmosphere, let it out like genie from a lamp

no one’s ever wished upon before. Imagine,

a star of your own. The first time the light’s ever

seen your eyes you weren’t trying to hide them

like sunspots, though all those beautiful

auroral storms of yours were a dead give away

there was a star sapphire somewhere beneath

all those bruised orchids of yours you grew for lightyears

in the shadow of an outhouse in a shitty world.

Don’t be so corvid in your approach to the moon

you forget you had a bright side once as white as doves

when you went looking for land and they went looking for you.

So what if the dove came back with a leaf in its beak?

Silver-tongued cousin of diamond, you still speak

less incorruptibly, an eye to the eloquence of moonlight

on the dark side of your neglected veracity.

Black is always the colour of wisdom in an aniconic abyss

that compassionately takes every wandering wavelength in,

every one of them a prodigal daughter of the dark mother,

that’s you, Sylvia, raven flint-knapped from pure obsidian,

all around you like the thorns and petals of a black rose

little chips and lunettes of a spear point in an eclipse

of the new moon, the new moon, Sylvia, opening

its eyelid like a star or a waterlily out of the muck

in the cauldrons of our fetid starmud working its morphic magic

already one white feather into the flight of a wild, wild swan.

PATRICK WHITE

IN THE DARK, IN A TONGUE-TWISTER OF A WHISPER

IN THE DARK, IN A TONGUE-TWISTER OF A WHISPER

In the dark, in a tongue-twister of a whisper

I can hear the silence has added a new voice

stuttering over the sacred syllables of my past

as, even after all these lightyears, it’s still trying

to pronounce me like the patois of a dead language

rooted like a stump in an old growth forest to the earth.

Desecration follows in the wake of anything

you try to create out of your own starmud

like an empty lifeboat drifting aimlessly

through the fog toward the ghost of an unknown voice

pleading to be rescued from its own night sea of awareness.

Or dream-figures cremating secret loveletters

in rusty oil drums burning under the overpasses

of my rebarred solitude as if an embassy

were about to be overrun by outdated passports.

Stars are the flowers in the gardens of the homeless

and a few sparks like breadcrumbs from a final analysis.

The desecrant noetics of a viciously troubled mind

seeks freedom from itself in the dark to keep

from self-destructing before its prime like wine

and supernovas. What terrorists love best about themselves

isn’t so much the explosion as it is the timing.

Can’t you hear it, the nightingales singing like cellphones?

And this is the hour of the noble word that sounds

like smut in the ears of the cynically liberated

confounded by the chaos of their ungrounded indecisions.

Sometimes it’s better just to sit by the river

and watch the light on the water dancing

with its own shadows like the music of your eyes

playing a soft lament that uplifts your spirits somehow

like the passing and approach of an undivined beginning

in every moment of silence between the whole notes

of the nightbirds answering one another like longing

in the heartwood of the rootless trees

that yearn to echo in the spring again like tree rings

and the tintinnabulum of the rain that ripples through them.

Who doesn’t wish for a taste of something gentle

and forgiving that hasn’t been conditioned

by perdition or horror, especially in this hour

of quantum foam frothing rabidly at the mouth

like frog spittle on the grass with a hydrophobic

animadversion to the waters of life. No asylum

from the madness, even the river laced with

the antidotes to our own toxins as we strike

at one another for boiling ourselves like kids

in our mother’s milk while we were still on the tit

so even the galaxies are dying like sea stars from the acids

we spit into their eyes like a snakepit of angry umbilical cords.

And God forgive the boy scouts who show up

with one eye open and nooses around their necks

as if they were mastering knots that might prove useful ahead.

In a dark time endure like fire in an ice-age

painting on the walls in the house of life

whenever the shadow of a bird crosses your mind

with a suggestion of what to paint with all the flightfeathers

that have drifted down to you over the years

like a road of ghosts that leads anywhere you want to go

because you’ve shed your last starmap like a windfall of eyes

that ripened in the light of your own seeing

without aiming your telescope like a firing squad at the stars

that shoot back from ambush if you look at them blindfolded.

Beyond understanding, the dark watersheds

these mirages in the void reflect like the fountainheads

of our flowing away from ourselves as if

one step forward were one step back in the perpetual stillness

of the here and now throbbing with the improbability

of a pulse as erratic as love buried at sea on the moon.

Even the most tender of fools bobbing for apples

in their birth sacs to amuse the giddy children

with the unforgivable delinquency of their sin of omission

will eventually be toughened up by the crazy wisdom

of forging their words like swords out of an alloy

of compassion and intelligence that doesn’t cut the cord

under their tongues because they speak left-handed

in a world that’s turned right, to find directions out

by wind-resistant indirections at the crossroads of chaos

muttering to themselves like sleepwalkers

grazing on shepherd moons that have put them out to pasture.

Lost sheep in wolf hides trying to follow the herd

like shamans afraid to embrace the absurd as if

they didn’t have any faith in their own prophetic words.

Be the first among poets to be recognized by the homeless

for the way you wander in and out of doorways

like a drunk off the street who’s sure he’s been sent

to the wrong address like a nightwatchman who

keeps on turning doorknobs nevertheless

while everyone else is asleep in their beds

thousands of thresholds away dreaming like photo-ops

of all the children that went missing from the lost and founds

of the abandoned milk cartons they were weaned from

as if some perversity of radioactive starmud in the gutter

had just pulled the plug on their camera shy haloes,

like trap door spiders peeking at butterflies out of their black holes,

undertakers of their own desecrated innocence

as if to have been them and young once were a gateway drug

to the hard stuff that didn’t get off on them

like head bangers in a moshpit of polka-rock

that smiled like an accordion at the end of every gig

as if their lives were kind and fair and intelligible.

Merd, the self-exiled anarchist sings as he drives a knife

through his art in the process of disassociating rationally

from his surrealistic sensibilities burning cold and clear

like stars shining down upon the dry ice of the broken chandeliers

weeping glaciers over the plinths in the eyes of the Pleiades

as if they were firewalking on the toxic thorns of fractured mirrors.

Apocalyptic imagery appears when ecstasy can’t find

a metaphor for itself like an equals sign between its energy

and the speed of light it’s travelling backwards through time

advancing into the abandoned dimensions of its derelict solitude

as dawn breaks like an empty on Devil’s Rock

as if you’d come to the right door, but forgot how to knock.

PATRICK WHITE

I RUE MY OWN IGNORANCE

I RUE MY OWN IGNORANCE

I rue my own ignorance trying to get somebody

to lighten up, live, blow it off, forgive, move on,

get out the snakepit or at least teach the snakes to dance.

Stop thinking about it. Start living it. What

do the stars taste like shining in your blood?

Have you forgotten we’re all innocently culpable?

Alone together with everyone in the same lifeboat,

or dogpaddling in the abyss until we’re buoyant enough

to float for ourselves again, not dying of thirst

like fish in a freshwater lake? Wish I had the herbs,

wish I had the words, the keys, the open sesame

to say to the time locks on the vaults of brighter stars

that might illuminate the hidden agendas of your dark matter,

I truly do. Pain’s not to be disregarded because, because,

and I can see you’re hurting, I can feel the agony

of being you, I can see the rage and the beauty

and the ugliness of the human ego labouring to compensate

for its devastation, whether it be ethically sanctioned or not,

you caught a mirage that’s evolved into a fever,

persecuted, betrayed, wounded, ignored, Narcissus

taking it out on all the mirrors he can’t drown in,

you plead for rescue then you pray for death.

And maybe it’s a dress rehearsal for something serious

you’ll make us all live to regret, if you don’t

enslave us first to the nose rings of our compassion,

make us the dupes of our own ideals like

the conceptual nets it’s easy enough to get caught in

like dolphins who’ve lost their sense of direction,

and most people cling to their best second guesses

like flypaper and fridge magnets, they’re not likely

to understand it on the inside the way you do.

What do you know, for example, about what

makes me cry when I’m on the nightwatch alone

singing three bells all’s well on the upper decks

of the shipwrecks deep in my own sea of awareness?

Even when I write them down, do you see

the same pictures I do, or is more left out of the translation

than even the most vehement expressionist

could possibly include base-jumping

from his precipitous solitude without a parachute,

a wing, a prayer? Maybe one day we’ll all meet

at the speed of light but it occurs to me

we have to take the training wheels off first,

ditch the crutches, stop mytho-poeticizing our alibis

into the paranoid metadata of our reversible screening myths.

There’s no starmap on the other side of the umbrellas

or the eclipses we use to keep the rain off our heads,

and even if there were, look what happened to the moon

when her subconscious watersheds froze up inside

and her ideals were no longer fed like tributaries

by her tears, in joy or disappointment, the former

younger than yesterday, and the latter, old and finished

way before its time, out of synch with its prime.

The pill punching drugstore cowboys of the mind

have ferret souls and holes in their noses and tongues.

Star-nosed moles accusing everyone else

of being blind to the light at the end of the tunnel

as if a firefly of insight were coming at them like a freight train.

Maybe so. Maybe so. Everything makes a private impact

on the familiar witness we made up to testify

to the secret lives even our eyes only aren’t cleared

to breathe a word of like picture-music

in the corneas of the rain, every drop an eye-transplant.

I’ve never met Jesus, but I’ve met ten thousand messiahs just like him

over a lifetime of trying to save myself in a wilderness

as most of the living do, living on bees and locusts,

among thorns and scorpions, and the pharmaceutical vipers

dispensing opioids like the honey of killer bees in Lotusland.

How does the Hill of Skulls in Jerusalem stack up against

the knoll of heads the Mongols piled up before the city walls

to encourage it to surrender? The distinction’s lost upon the dead.

And I hear voices like the swarming of blackflies sometimes,

and others, Salomes, mermaids and lamias singing

so intriguingly with their bodies and their minds

in this desert of mirages unveiling the stars,

it’s as if the night were using my skull as a vessel

for the black grail magic they held it out to me and said, here, drink.

You’ll never be the same after this, if you’re shameless enough.

Like so many poets, huddled in their immensities

declaiming some local muse who blew in their ears

like the ashen firepits of their embering intensities,

you’ve immunized your life and works with sacred syllables

against the very thing you’re afraid of killing you

deeper into the unknown darkness of your own shadowless eyes.

Your Mummy doesn’t love you and your Daddy’s

a stretch of the imagination, and you’re strung out

like pilot lights of vetch entwined like barbed wire

around the towers of common mullein tangled

in the strangle hold of your fishing lines snagged on the moon

hooked to the lures and the flies of the lies we tell ourselves

to explain why we shriek like a three alarm fire

in the house of life whenever someone turns on the lights,

and it’s only another false dawn flaming out

in the usual phoney sunsets of the lamp-posts and daylilies.

You task me with drawing up a starmap of the firing squad

of deranged constellations you’re standing blindfolded in front of

trying to carve a chandelier out of the one good third glass eye

you’ve got left to focus your own inner light on

until all these fallen leaves withering at your feet

like pages of your life you keep tearing out as if autumn were a threat,

break into fire again, as if a choir of arsonists had asked for an encore,

as you have said yourself, you spent the first half of your life

being loving, brilliant, and beautiful, and this is what you get for it.

So I summon the fireflies, illusory cures for illusory diseases,

though by that only the fools would think I meant something unreal,

to a seance in a hall of black mirrors in a palatial labyrinth

of cul de sacs and dead ends, black holes in the hearts of the galaxies,

and I speak to each of them like an intimate insight

into my own human nature, shadowed by what I think

like a mindscape it’s harder than a tarpit to shake:

You see this man here, he’s a friend, and he was once

loving, brilliant, and beautiful, a lantern, a lighthouse, a star

shining like a beacon on a coast of shipwrecks,

and just look at what he gets, a porchlight with insects

buzzing in the ripped spiderwebs dripping from his panicked windows.

And knowing the thieves of fire they are I’ll never be,

I ask them if they might condition a bit of a chaos

into a myth of origin for him that’s a little more of a moonrise

and a little less of that gazelle of light he’s enthroned in a wheelchair.

Cool the fever his eyes have caught, uproot the nettles, and treat him

to a sweeter dream of chaos than the ones he’s most likely to get lost in.

PATRICK WHITE