THE WORDS ARE AS BIG AS THEY'VE ALWAYS BEEN

THE WORDS ARE AS BIG AS THEY’VE ALWAYS BEEN

The words are as big as they’ve always been

but the mouths of the people that use them

have grown small, their voices the size of wrens

when they once could shriek like eagles in defence

of the precipitous eyries of their aquiline principles

as if they hadn’t spent their lives with their wings folded

in an aviary with a bird’s eye view of what

the earthworms are looking at. Songs in the dawn,

aubades, but from a cage with an executioner’s hood over it.

People can’t get the word love down their throats anymore

without masticating it to death like flavourless gum,

and the dragons have forgotten how to unlock their jaws

to swallow the moon whole to bring on the rain.

Pain narrows the eyes of oviparous children

like thorns that have upstaged the wounded rose that lies

on the sidewalk in a pool of blood that bloomed like bullet-holes.

Stigmata of concrete. The virgin’s eyes are a morphine drip.

Remember the old Zen mondo about a man

chased over a cliff by a hungry tiger, clutching a bush

slowly pulling out of the side of the cliff wall

like the piton of a mountain climber, while another

open-mawed carnivore waits down below for him to fall

and what does he do, in his moment of peril, but reach out

for a ripe strawberry growing beside him as if

to retrieve something good that might distract him

from the issue at hand. Umm, good, like a cigarette

in front of a firing squad, rabid meringue on the mouths

of the distempered hydrophobes who believe

they’re drowning like waterboarded lifeboats

that drink spit from other men’s mouths like Cool Whip.

Madness in diaspora focused like a gunsight

trying to shoot out the stars like a sniper firefly

with an arsonist’s tendency to return to the scene of the crime.

Ice burns like crystal fire in the heart of a sophisticated savage

electronically wired to its own ideological rage.

I have an expansive heart accelerated by dark energy.

Friends and lovers, children, and family, gods, art, the stars,

things have grown further apart over the lightyears.

Meaning showed up like a gateway drug in my life

and I’ve been interrogating my sorrows ever since,

why we must die, what we were born for, how to live

so you don’t puke at what you’re reviewing on your death bed

just before you drown in the omnipresent abyss

that lets you down like a lifeboat into your own grave.

Words had a facility for me. I was the best liar on the block.

Myths poured out my mouth. I liked to arouse the wonder

in people, watch their hearts gape at the mystery of being alive.

Maybe I was only trying to convince myself, but the power

of the magic I felt was irresistible, and there seemed something sacred

in the sharing, the mutual enhancement of awareness

I could be the catalyst of, and who knows, maybe that was good,

maybe that was love, and though the child in me felt like roadkill,

maybe I could still steal fire like Prometheus with my liver torn out,

maybe there was still some use in the world for a corpse

that could speak like a prophetic skull for what’s about to befall

all of us, by directing their minute attention like the big picture

to the mysterious beauty and ardent truth of here and now.

And if love wasn’t a gift with my name on it, I could

achieve it somehow by making a gift of a gift, by living

open-handed in the midst of so many fists. Not as a martyr,

a messiah, a guru, a walking encyclopedia, a shaman,

an emblematic poor boy who pulled himself up like the universe

by his own bootstraps, I hated all of that as pretence,

fraud, screening myths for an ego coiled like a rattlesnake

under a rose-bush. My head in the stars, my feet in the gutter,

nothing was occult to me by the time I was seven, and yes,

you might feel like a witchdoctor for a moment

like one of the gram masters of the dynastic streets,

but more often than not, your eyes were pierced by dirty needles

like a voodoo doll, or thrown on the pyres of your love affair

with yourself, like a strawdog after a religious ritual.

I was prematurely wise and grey as the concrete I’d been raised on

like bedtime nightmares about some things. I’d seen

what people can do when they’d been taught by disappointment

to hate themselves like a cult of futility dedicated

to evangelizing the viciousness of Sisyphus standing

under an avalanche of stones that rolled back down upon him

like a calendar of moonrises that didn’t have the mountain gears

to make the grade. Spiders of stone enthroned in the dream catchers

of shattered windshields and rear-view mirrors.

Words not a cure-all, no, but still mightier than the sword

to judge by the ones that have been thrust through my heart.

Poetry, the most compassionate of the arts except

to its practitioners. A noble calling with a muse

as old as prostitution. Words the sacred whores

outside the Iseum, not thirty years of Vestal virgins

keeping the home fires of Rome burning. I don’t care

what you had for breakfast. I read your book.

It’s a begging bowl of soggy cornflakes. Where

are the waterlilies? What depths did you write this out of,

or did they evaporate on you like shallow tears

and lunar atmospheres before you had a chance

to shed them? You’re a snake-charmer in leotards, ok,

but where are the snakes? Where are the heretics

immolated in the oracular fires of underground volcanoes

filling their lungs like bongs with visionary fumes?

Burn, baby, burn. Even the library of Alexandria

sang in its own flames enraptured like a star

in its own shining instead of merely talking about the light.

Show me a firefly of insight. Show me a black hole

that dug its own grave expecting everybody to lie down in it

with it like Jonestown, or your buddy there with his

three thousand saddle-stitched individually signed books

he’s flogging like the annals of history, volume L,

at a strategically placed table in a shopping mall,

ask him if he knows how to get drunk on death

as readily as he does on his carbonated stuff like

the sixth pressing of life in the vineyards of the Burgess Shale.

Come on, sunshine, put some night into it. Linger

in the doorway of a death in life experience for

the rest of your life, never, ever knowing for certain

whether it’s a grand entrance or a pathetic exit

or someone’s just poking their head through the curtains

to see if there’s anybody out there listening in the dark.

And if there is, remember this like Simonides of Ceos

or Metrodorus of Scepsis, you just have to show up

like a lifeboat, you don’t need to come on like an ark

in anticipation of the flood that will come after you like the Arctic.

PATRICK WHITE

STARING INTO THE FUTURE

STARING INTO THE FUTURE

Staring into the future without my hand

on the rudder of the moon. No sail, no wind

but the air in my lungs, no star to set a course by

but the Milky Way in the wake of this

leaking lifeboat I keep bailing like a waterclock

to stay afloat, drifting as if time had lost its way somehow

or Hart Crane had just jumped off the stern of the Orizaba

at high noon, waving good-bye like a conductor

in an adagio of islands in a logical archipelago

of metaphors, or the footprints of Atlantis

on the waters of life before it sank incontinently.

Grey day. Blue funk. My body washed up

like a broken log boom on a pyre of bones

on a beach somebody will set fire to sooner or later

like a drunk undertaker singing folksongs

to commemorate the ashes of cremated guitars,

but my mind’s awake, contemplating the future

like the biggest mistake I could possibly make.

Two choices in the divergent lives of poets.

You either go down with the ship at moonset,

or you jump it like a plague rat in Genoa.

I smash a bottle of Dom Perignon like a French

Benedictine monk over the prow of a shipwreck,

more seaworthy for all the things I didn’t do in life

than those I did. I can swim but I’m better

at sinking like a dolphin in a fishing net. O Carib isle,

where’s the caress of the Gulf Stream in an ice age

when you need it? I don’t have a daddy to throw me

a lifesaver once in awhile when I break through

the iced-over tears of my former translucencies

into the thriving depths of an oceanic shepherd moon

I didn’t evolve from. I will humanize the darkness

and the terror of not being able to relate to anyone

by metaphorizing it with my presence in residence

like dream figures in a total eclipse that doesn’t

make the flowers wince and close up like inverted umbrellas.

I will seed the available dimensions of the future

with the teeth of lions, les dents de leon, a galaxy

of G-7, post midlife, unmarried suns scattered

like the paratroopers of dandelions on the wind

at Market Garden, though I land on rock or good soil.

I’ll write open-eyed starmaps that can see in the dark

what everybody’s been looking at all these years

like chandeliers in the house of life after the last candle

in the lantern I’ve been given to go by has gone out.

Thumbs up, thumbs down, I’ll burn like white phosphorus,

or the torches of the dadaphors at the Roman New Year,

quantumly entangled in the umbilical cords

of my creative annihilations like an albatross in the rigging

of a ghost ship that’s been known to haunt these waters.

I’ll release my blood like the banner of a rose

and wait for the sharks to circle me like sundials

and break my body up like loaves and fishes when they come.

I’ll return my tears like water to the river of sorrows

I took them from like the crown jewels of my heartfelt abdication.

I will not unseat myself from the unforgiving stations of life

I’ve ruled over nothing from. Here in this domain of the future

I’ll endeavour to be as good a pauper-king as I was back in the world.

A prophetic skull that could look into the eyes of the abyss

and prophesy, but seldom interfered with what I saw.

Not a sin of omission, but obedience to an unacknowledged law.

And all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well.

No moon like a goat’s head polluting its own watershed.

I’ll make amends to the dark matter that took me for granted.

I’ll sit meditating in front of this wall of the future

nobody’s written on like a turf war of grafitti call signs

like A Bodhidharma doll. Seven times down. Eight times up.

Such is life. And I’ll introduce my illimitable understanding

of Pacific cowboy, lunatic fringe, seahorse Zen

for those who want to seek wisdom as far as it can be lost in.

I’ll clothe the imageless acts of what’s to come

like a retinal circus of defrocked sacred clowns

that have given up trying to make anybody laugh at themselves

as if they were an in-joke that God just got

like a numbing shock to the ulna nerve of her funny-bone.

I’ll be a trickster, a crow, a fox, a neo-gestural

expressionist gleeman or jester, I’ll be a salmon,

mare, seal or fly that bothers an elderly woman

like Loki, the shapeshifter, saying, bless me sister,

because I’m the annoyance that keeps you from dying

in this oceanic multiverse of bubbles and blisters.

I’ll paint streetsigns named after surrealistic wildflowers

I came across anonymously like a vagrant in the star fields

where every step I take is the threshold of a long, lost road

back to my homelessness that waits for me like the conjunction

of Venus and Jupiter through a western window

as if power and love weren’t the waste of a good heart

dumpster diving for the black pearls of an occluded art

that refused to be blinded by the opalescent blazing

of a false dawn like a silver lining on a locket of slag.

I’ll apprentice myself all over again like a metal worker

in moonlight to the flightfeather of a black swan

in the company of Orphic lyres and the eyes of Arabic eagles

everyone can identify with like the iris of a starmap

shining like a new myth of origins over the tarpaper rooftops

of irremediable slumlords clinging like barnacles

to the skulls of the drowned with eyes that stare

like the lachrymal glands of hourglasses and glaciers

on the move on the moon into a future with the tear ducts

of a snowman inundated on a floodplain of oceanic compassion

for the longing in the hearts of the dolmens of coal

trying to keep warm in the Arctic night like stalwart guides

to the river deltas where this mindstream of flowing diamonds ends

in a penumbral vision of life of an imperfectly flawless life.

PATRICK WHITE

VENUS IN THE WEST, ALWAYS A GOOD SIGN

VENUS IN THE WEST, ALWAYS A GOOD SIGN

Venus in the west, always a good sign.

And the night temperate. The balm of the air,

herbal, cool bracken in the shadows,

the flowers stepping back out of the light

as they pack up their circus tents

like clowns and dancers after the show

and move on to who knows what underworld

of root fires in the eyes of the Lord of Jewels?

Why is it the wind always seems crueler

to the pines? Lachrymal glands of dolorous amber.

Hard honey. Broken horns. Is it because

they endure their own ennobling by standing

up to things like the skeletal remains of evergreens?

Venus and Leo blossom on a dead branch.

Influenced by birth under Virgo putting a good face

on a harem of moon goddesses, I’ve never

been able to tell when I look at Spica, that

stalk of wheat burning in her hand, whether

I was raised in a temple or the back of a sacred brothel.

An obstreperous boy among so many women.

You can tell by the way I revere the willows

down by the Tay they’ve had a lasting effect upon me

though remembering yesterday as though

tomorrow hadn’t happened yet, how seldom it seemed

I could ever get them to stop crying as if

love always had a hole in it somewhere

they were leaking out of like escapee waterclocks

squeezed like glaciers out of the rocks,

antediluvian diamonds in tears, and me

just beginning to fire up the Hadean darkness

with stars of my own. There was always

the silent taboo of a secret I wasn’t privy to,

a mystery to life too big to fit like the sea in my ear

as I walked away back to room, thinking

I’ll never be holy enough to overcome death,

but who knows how much of what’s

demonically estranged about me might be esteemed

if I could deepen the shadows to enhance their lights

and alleviate even a single chandelier of sorrow

the way I used to delight in discovering

new, unpicked blackberry patches that were ripe

and bleeding from the eyes like the visionary stigmata

of an infernally compassionate wine you drank from a skull.

PATRICK WHITE  

EVEN WITH ANTS CRAWLING DOWN IT

EVEN WITH ANTS CRAWLING DOWN IT

Even with ants crawling down it

like lava and nuggets of black ash, an ant heap

is not a volcano that threatens Atlantis

with a caldera like the gem of a third eye

that just fell out of orbit like a halo and lies

embedded on the bottom close to a fumarole

mythically inflating cucumber worms.

My subconscious is trying to associate

with me again. There’s a crack

in my oracular tortoise shell it’s trying

to squeeze through by slipping

the continental plates of my prophetic skull

like the San Andreas fault, chief

among the lifelines on the palm of my hand.

Not Kufu’s Great Pyramid on the Giza Plateau.

Sand at the bottom of an hourglass,

Sumeru, the world mountain, not a ziggurat

or an Aztec temple, the barrow tomb of a Celtic king.

Do ants have architects like Imhotep?

Do they think they’re going to be born again

among the stars, women to Isis in Sirius,

men to Osiris in Orion, the Duat.

Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. Maybe

they were undertakers in another life,

urns and canopic jars, given the way

they keep retrieving body parts from No Man’s Land.

Butterfly wings and bees curled like commas

in death, as if death were just a pause,

and the sickly sweet smell of embalming fluid

though it’s only formic acid. Same thing

in stinging nettles. Is an antheap a surgical theatre?

I’m propped up by an elbow on a mat of dry grass.

The kind you put between your teeth

as if you had all the time in the world

to see who gets the short straw. The mind

is an artist. Able to paint the worlds. At the moment

my body’s an easel in a waking dreamscape

with emphasis on my evanescence. I’m

as coherently directive as a road of smoke

that really doesn’t care where it’s going.

I’m taking out a second mortgage on my afterlife

just for a little peace now as the lake laps

at the intransigence of the rocks scarred

by glaciers calving water prematurely at the North Pole.

Here in this leper colony of a birch grove

the beavers are making pioneer forts out of,

as if there were always something you had to be

on guard for, bush wolf, road superintendent

with blasting caps, or fisher, let it come, let it come, let it come

whether life is as effortless as a gift,

or hard labour when birth gets turned around

and bringing things into the world isn’t

as much of a joy as it used to be. If they

had to move Ramses II to a shelter for

homeless mummies in the Valley of the Kings,

I’m not going to spend my life watching a starmap

for dawn to break. This strange sentience

that animates me to free associate

the hardy blue of the chicory with the eyes

of several women I’ve loved, and soon,

the New England asters like mystics in daylight

with starclusters among the lolling goldenrod,

this is about as monumental as it gets. This,

just as it is, red winged blackbirds among

the wild roses, talons and thorns, a solitary bunting

singing to the sky at the top of a bedraggled cedar,

this ant heap I’m keeping my distance from

is the cornerstone of my tribute to the stillness

of the abyss in motion, all I am of any worth to offer.

This rock of starmud from a habitable planet

I hurl overhand into the undulant quiescence

of the waters of life just to hear the frogs plop.

PATRICK WHITE

NOT LOOKING FOR WORDS TO UNSAY

NOT LOOKING FOR WORDS TO UNSAY

Not looking for words to unsay

the sorrows and horrors of life.

The heart’s not always a bell.

Ultimate eloquence to let things

speak for themselves. Every solitude

adds a petal to paradise, a flame to hell.

A seance of willows glowing

like grey-green ghosts in the moonlight

as if they had bedsheets over their heads,

every one, a maid of the mist

behind a hanging garden of waterfalls,

gardenias of late summer stars in their hair.

Friends dead, lovers gone, children

grown and flown like waterbirds,

beauty and bliss, the happier shadows

of despair washing old selves off

in the abyss like the slow tears

of a window in the rain, a Burgess Shale

of encyclopedic pain, rising like Atlantis

from the alpha of the bottom to the omega

of an ark run aground on a mountain top.

Fossilized blood seals of ancient oceans

in the wild roses, the heart stands signatory

to a truce with time. The mind witnesses

its act of perishing like sunset in an apple

about to fall, an astronomical event

of absurd and insignificant proportions.

One bite for Eve. One bite for Snow White

in a coma still waiting for a kiss

to wake her up, and one for Aphrodite,

the toxin and elixir of the soul in a garment

of flesh when it goes slumming in its own starmud.

Whether at dawn or dusk, the patina of time

is never enough to occlude the radiant heart

with the grime of cosmic history allegorized

as human events. As the surface so the depths.

Even if you make a passing appearance

in front of your mirroring awareness,

the river tells me not to worry, the light’s indelible

and raises up a wave like a T-short

to show off the Summer Triangle tattooed

around the navel of the world with a diamond in it.

Might as well be kind about the eschatology

of the end times, given only sacerdotal fools

with limited imaginations know for sure

death, judgement, heaven and hell

can be quantumly disentangled like axons

of white lightning in your left front parietal lobe.

Let the mandrakes shriek if they feel uprooted.

I’ve watched the sabre of the moon slash

through that Gordian knot of hot koans more than once.

My spiritual advice after a lifetime of looking?

Proceeding into the unknown, keep your eyes open.

Who really knows? Que sais je. If it isn’t

a fake reality show of the dead in an unworldly habitat,

it’s a religion that never knew when to say

enough is enough, the cemeteries are full,

and we’ve enslaved the imagination

to the sacred syllables of a few dead metaphors

the first bloom has peeled off of

like paint and nickel plating on a deathmask

disguised like a snake-oil nightmare

in a choir of lullabies that makes the human spirit

cry itself to sleep defamed by infernal rumours of love.

I want to be looking up when I die at the stars

that have kept an eye on me all these lightyears

as if my creative freedom had always been

a starmap of my own making in the open palm

of my own hands grasping for nothing

that didn’t morph into a mirage of water and sand

like an optical illusion in a dichotomous hourglass.

The withered bloodstream of the grape

might long for the purple passages of wine

it once drank out of the skull of the moon

to the dynamic equilibrium between birth and destruction.

But bring it on like a holy war it will be a glory to lose.

I’ve always taken an aleatory approach

to the paradigms and pageants of chaos

like the cosmic morphology of a hydra-headed

shapeshifting multiverse expanding hydrocephallically

in all directions at once so we never notice

how much we grow from moment to moment

like an imagination run wild in a moshpit of stem cells

that yesterday waltzed in three four time

under the Fabonacci curve of Hapsburg chandeliers.

I’ve seen sunflowers spiral into galaxies like prayer wheels

and when the mind is an artist able to paint the worlds

I divided my canvases up two to one, right to left

in a ratio of seashells I could hear eternity in

like the surging of a distant sea of awareness.

Imagination isn’t an agent of hope

into espionage, so I’ve never been in the habit,

more of a standing visionary than a kneeling voyeur,

of peeking through the keyhole of an opening door

into what might be going on over

the event horizon of the next black hole

breaking into the false dawn on the brighter

side of things. Like fruit to the apple bloom,

like stars emerging out of the dark, like

the sea to the river that’s been following it

like the stray thread of a lifeline back

to the tapestry it was unravelled from by the moon,

everything will be made clear in its own sweet time.

How much the stars have revealed to the waterlilies

about learning to shine without diminishment

in the mucky skies of an umbilical riverbed

where the bloom’s never off the flowering

of the first magnitude starmud of the dead.

PATRICK WHITE

HITCH HIKING OUT TO RICHARDSON FOR DISCOUNT CIGARETTES

HITCH HIKING OUT TO RICHARDSON FOR DISCOUNT CIGARETTES

Hitch hiking out to Richardson for discount cigarettes.

A hundred and fifty cars go past, someone counting sheep

in a dream that’s got nothing to do with me.

I may look like a pauper but my vehicular inferiority

is more than compensated for by what I can see

close up and intimately in the grass, and the sun

on the brawn of my arms protruding from a tank top

like the Bronze Age. I’m a Mycenean setting sail

on the surge of the wind in the gladiatorial reeds

of the oceanic cattails at peace with the rage of the world.

The dusty white clay of the road chalks my runners

like blackboards of starmud in the Burgess Shale.

Six miles and I can already feel my femurs

starting to take on the air of fluted pillars

as my muscles stretch around the block

like hemophiliacs at a bloodbank gasping for oxygen.

I stick out my thumb like a spectator in the Colosseum,

neither up nor down, not the first nor the last crescent

of the trigger of the moon, one road in a yellow road

as if I had no opinion on whether the defeated

should live or die and I stare straight into the eyes

of the windshields like the Pythian oracles of Delphi

with no life left in them as they whizz by without breaking stride.

Nice try. Let them live. Empathy for the hell of it.

Swathes of grass the road crews cut. Rags

of chicory and Queen Anne’s Lace have learned to duck.

Mandalic starclusters, doilies of brocade

in an ageing house of life, have you ever noticed

how they fold their spokes up after they’re flowerless

like inverted umbrellas into the most elegant nests

as if they’ve been tooled like Faberge egg cups?

I look across the open fields to the albino scars

of the birch in the border bush rows of a Euclidean theorem

about where to plant the cocker-spanieled ears of corn.

I see neolithic villages in the spikes of the wheat

as I have in the bleached hair of the blondes

I’ve gone out with wondering if it’s the ergot on the stalk

that engenders the little tree of the magic mushroom

that walks you through the stations of the Eleusinian mysteries

so you’re never the same after that, and why

in Islam the staff of life is considered forbidden fruit

if it isn’t at least as hallucinogenic as the gods

growing paranoid about how much we may and may not know.

Candelabra of purple loosestrife, vetch and clover,

and the evening primrose that reminds me

of all those sunsets I spent cooling off in paradise

with a woman more earthbound than Lilith or Eve

who believed in the way I painted the petals

of English ox-eyed daisies the wind had dishevelled

like matchbooks some boy had pryed open

like people and steeples before they were ready to bloom.

Black rimless shades. Do I look like a serial killer?

I feel like a mendicant Zen poet on my way to Eido

in Tokugawa Japan, minus the hossu and the fan.

Life overgrows itself, a niche-dweller, in the culvert,

the fence post, the asteroid belt of gravel I’m walking on,

no occasion for flourishing overlooked, its stillness

in a hurry as I am not, the milkweed nursing

its Monarch butterflies, the pampas grass

preening its plumes like the quills of hieroglyphs,

what a riot of overstatement it takes to makes its point

as if there was a point to it all in the first place.

A yellow Mustang muscles its middle-aged paint job by

polished like an enamel buttercup, but it’s not

going to stop as it sucks the dragonflies up like krill

through its grill, cruising for sulphur butterflies

that gives it that jaundiced colour as if Van Gogh

had been eating his chrome yellow again. Avaunt ye,

knave, I’m the errant dragon knight that isn’t

going to save you from the damsel as she says

soft shoulders go slow before she drives you off the road.

Part of looping like an eternal recurrence

through time I guess. But, yellow, man, yellow.

That’s a bad guess. Don’t you remember what

Henry Ford said. I don’t care what colour you paint them

as long as they’re black? How wide does

that racing stripe of yellow down your back

need to be before you realize you look like the lines

of a passing lane? Not cruel, brother, just got to

vent a little at your sin of omission. Where do you

park your horse, cowboy, at the drugstore?

You ride on like the Lone Ranger. Tonto’d rather walk.

A raccoon’s severed paw at my feet, the catatonic full moon

of an empty Tim Horton’s cup trying to civilize

pagan Germania in the Teutoburg Forest, brown paper bag

from the liquor-store, I’m in the middle of a modern midden

that runs like a country highway through a landfill.

Who needs the NSA when you can take on the identity

of what you throw away? Don’t underestimate

the power of the earth to remember and redress.

Wherever you keep your garbage. That’s where your home is.

Two miles more and my lungs are alien atmospheres

trying to cling to a habitable planet like an aura of air

laced with diesel fuel, hot asphalt, carbon monoxide.

The Taliban of the wild parsnip throws acid in my face.

A thousand yards of silence punctuated by birdsong

flooding the woods after the roar of the long thought trains

passing bumper to bumper like Bactrian camels

on the Silk Road behind a driver asserting his will

by mean-heartedly doing the speed limit to live forever

like an accident waiting to happen to a self-righteous caterpillar.

The road grows long. I’m doing my time standing up

like a red blood cell on a pilgrimage to the shrine

of the goddess of nicotine at the eastern doors

of the burial hut of Smokin’ Eagles, until my bones are dust,

and my spirit’s gone south with the Canada geese.

Whenever I make a truce with the world

I stuff my peace pipe with tobacco and pass it around.

In another life I think I might have been a hookah.

I’d rather be killed by the thing I love than something

I didn’t have any feelings for. You can live

three lifetimes more a moment when you’re happier

than you can when you’re doing it by a book

you didn’t write. Still think its dangerously debilitating

to be too wholesome like the smell of bread in a denatured bakery

that reeks of frustrated capitalism. The angels

only know one side of things. They’re cyclopic.

The demons have two eyes like we do. They’re stereoscopic.

Who knows? Maybe I’m dropping ashes on the Buddha?

As an SUV pulls over to the side of the road behind me

with the smile of a friendly New Brunswicker

who’s been living in Innisville for the last thirty years

and he immediately puts me at my ease because

I can tell he’s the real thing, a decent human being,

and I start talking cheerful normalese to prove

I’m definitely not a serial killer. Peace, brother,

beauty, love, the sixties fifty years later just got

into your car and to judge by that light show in your eyes

you were there, as an unspoken vision of life

binds us to this road we’ll travel down awhile together

like two passing strangers as the night approaches

the simple kindness and sincere gratitude of the encounter.

All part of the spiritual evolution of two retrograde revolutionaries

looping back on themselves like the second innocence

of the return journey, better than the first,

like green wine from wild grapes that’s had a chance

to age the dream awhile like coopers in our heartwood.

And too close to death to lie, still wonder what

it was all about. Did it do any good? Have we lived it well

over all these intervening light years we’ve been

holding it together like god particles without sacrificing

the creative freedom that comes with being vast

and spaced out. Did the effortless meaninglessness

of our evanescence ever make a difference to anything?

A chaos of fireflies or a cosmic array of stars in the sky,

one thing for sure, we’ll be long gone by the time

the light gets to where it’s going so the circle,

even squared with the way things seem, remains unbroken.

PATRICK WHITE