The Flowers Of The Street People

White trash with their faces punched in like catcher's mitts
mooning the flowers of the street people as they drive by
like a float in a pageant of ignorance having a good time
at everyone else's expense. Pygmy heroes of their own irrelevance.

Annie, the bag-lady, puts the avalanche of her head down
and spits like salt as if she just survived Sodom and Gomorrah
as she passes by, sullen and resigned to the blackflies
that have swarmed her like the shadows of commas for years.
You just have to take one look at her face to know
she's the dried rose of a gnostic gospel that went flakey
long before women were forbidden from invigilating
their own spirits. Given the protocols of the bleakness,
even the city can serve as a shrine of sorts. Man bulls
in lunar labyrinths, and the Princess of Spiders,
unweaving her thread in a moment of desire
waiting to have her webs elevated among the stars
in cosmic reprisal for the betrayal of her abandonment to love.

And there's Peter, the architect turned shipwreck,

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poem by Patrick White
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You Don't Need To Tell Me You Don't Care

You don’t need to tell me you don’t care, not caring
is an environmental condition since humans became
too dangerous to trust their own minds as the world,
let themselves be morning doves in the phoenix-fire of the sumac,
or a light within a light like a planet in the dusk,
the pink lilac of Mercury, the flashing white
gardenia of Venus. Killing only lets you be
one thing else
after you’ve deleted all the rest. Not caring
is the shape of a final heart, the rose recast by the minerals
as stone, cell by cell, nest by nest, petrified
by the cuckoo whose young shoulder the eggs of its host out
like refugees that take over the government
that gives them shelter. Not caring
is an ancient battlefield in the morning
where crows and old women, idiots, wretches, dogs
plunder the dead lying like islands in the mist,
a cemetery of maggots that froze before
they could finish eating the horse. Not caring
is deciding to live without punctuation

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poem by Patrick White
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Never Alone With A Candle

Never alone with a candle
a firefly in a valley,
a star above the hill,
is your seeing less beautiful
than that stranger in the mirror
who takes you by surprise?

Can you hear your eyes
your eyes your eyes your eyes
falling like rain
on the plectra of the flowers?
Is that a coffin or a harpsichord?
Scarlatti playing the columbine
or the midnight requiem
of a dolorous pine longing
for a nightbird that never comes?

I can sense you count yourself
a dandelion among delphiniums,
a brown star without solar flare,

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poem by Patrick White
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Autumn Swings Its Bell

Autumn swings its bell like an eyelid over my heart
and in the penumbral umbrellas that bloom
in a garden of eclipses and sundials,
I discuss you with an enlightened ghost
and an ignorant shadow
that have learned to see star to star
in this echoless abyss of silence and solitude.
Within, where the winds scrawl
their spray bombs on the wall,
delighted with their literary delinquency,
I realize what's beginning to look like
the mouthless howl of an ancient agony,
the collapsed bridge
of that which was separated
from the moon's reflection,
an ache deep in the ores of the earth
before it learned to speak of trees and rivers,
before its longing invested the dead branch
with a fugue of nightbirds
trying to write themselves like a dream

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poem by Patrick White
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Seeds Of Fire In A Nightsky

Seeds of fire in a nightsky root like flowers
in the ashes of my eyes I scattered on the wind
like the dust of stars I followed even into oblivion
to remain faithful to the life of the light
whatever transformations within me grew
into the starless darkness of the unknown heart
I've carried in my chest for years like the empty shrine
of a dead lantern to the last firefly to go out.

And this is a seeing without the eyes of the stranger
I no longer recognize as who I thought I was
when I could read the constellations like the Linear B
of the lost civilization that was elaborated out of me
to perish in the mountainous silence of what was abandoned
when I burned my starmaps and entered chaos
like the blackhole of the singularity
that could rejuvenate me out of nothing like a grail
I was seeking at the bottom of the deepest grave
I ever descended into, a spider at the end of its silk,
or a caterpillar like the distant rumour of a butterfly

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poem by Patrick White
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Wired To Looking For Gardens of Eden

Wired to looking for Gardens of Eden at the wrong end of my dopamines.
Want to move back to the country
and live in a secluded place
you couldn't find unless I led you there.
Want to take pride again
in knowing all the names of the trees and stars and flowers
as if they all lived in the same small community
of intimate immensities that I do
like pebbles on the edge of an avalanche.
Tired of playing Russian roulette with the asteroids.
Want to live somewhere even the animals know
the plants know more about healing than they do.
And it would be great
to have a woman who knows how
to think and feel and make love there with me
to laugh at what a brilliant idiot I am
to know how to make soap out of the sap of flowers
that smell like their names.
Bouncing Bet.
Pride of London.

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poem by Patrick White
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I Wish Everyone In The World Were As Mad As You Are

I wish everyone in the world were as mad as you are.
I wish everyone in the world talked the same nonsense you do
and meant as much.
Stop crying.
I wish everyone in the world were as good as you are
and didn't lie to anyone else
other than themselves
about what the truth is.
You shape chaos to your mind
like light to space
to make a habitable planet you can live on
and if it isn't round sometimes
and O doesn't always cast the same shadow
that the others mimic with theirs
I wish everyone could put on your kind of airs
and be as good to life as the kind of atmosphere you are.
Come on now.
Here.
Dry your tears with this.
All those constellations you made up

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poem by Patrick White
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Waiting For A Thunderstorm

Waiting for a thunderstorm
just me and the moon
and these deserted streets with their heritage lamps
and tungsten suns
swarming with frenzied insects
like the brain of the occasional crackhead
who's made a hoody of the night
and pulls it down tighter as he passes
wondering whether he should have asked me for a cigarette.
Lines from sad songs like lingering smoke
from distant fires
curl through my head
like the ghosts of roads I once walked
then break off like old shoelaces.
O and the faces
like blossoms from a tree
hidden deep in the night
suddenly crossing the moon
like birds with messages and destinations
not meant for me anymore.

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poem by Patrick White
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If You Had Any Compassion For Yourself

If you had any compassion for yourself,
others wouldn't have to suffer for you
and the world wouldn't show you
such a sad, woeful, wounded face.
You wouldn't see the withering leaves
and petals of the rose in autumn
as merely the scar tissue of its thorns.
In winter, mend your severance.
In spring, attend to your joys.
Like fishing nets and snow fences.
Like delphiniums in a garden bed
that's beginning to bloom like a starmap.

And you know that stranger inside
that's always witnessing everything we do
like a perfectly clear mirror, even in dreams?
Take another look, you might be surprised
at whose face you see at a meeting of eyes.

It's important not to pass judgement on yourself

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poem by Patrick White
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Darkness, Let Me Enter

Darkness, let me enter. Oblivion, open your arms.
Sweet liberty, lengthen my chain by light years.
Venus in the Pleiades, let me feel your charms.
I want to ride the light, o yes I do, as far as I can
toward some flowering of the mystery
I can add myself to and bloom as the stars do.
My most intimate familiar, solitude, eras of it,
yet it's never known my name. My best feature
once you get pass the indignation and the anger,
compassion. And though love seems to me
the sum of many hearts, trying to express itself
as one, when have I not been a doorway to the dead?

When have I ever preferred my happiness
even as my last rainbow bridge went up in flames
and there was no where else to cross before the falls,
to that of the ironic beatitudes of the forbidden and the blessed?
Make me a star again one day with a few habitable planets,
each with at least one moon that can make me crazy as this one.
Promise? Promise me it will be so and mean it.

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poem by Patrick White
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