Why Do Children Of The Poor
Why do children of the poor die so readily?
By the age of five
they're already disarmed for life.
Is money a gene they're missing?
Or is their suffering
just a diminished immunity to the rest of us?
The gluttons of knowledge
discuss James Joyce in a loud voice
in well-lit universities.
With great nuance and finesse
they enumerate the seven kinds of ambiguity
and the mean diameter of the vowel O
in the context of neo-Chicago Aristotelianism
in the latter plays of Shakespeare
where the commas fall like worms
out of every page of his art
as if he couldn't punctuate
the death-rage in his heart
with the subtler points
of the neo-critical literati.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Child, It's Okay To Break
Child, it's okay to break.
Go ask the trees.
They've been through a few ice storms themselves.
And, yes, sometimes the lightning
mistakes your unicorn for a lightning rod
and strikes it like a drone out of the blue
when no one's home but you on a Friday night
because you're ashamed to go out
for fear of people seeing what your boyfriend did
when he came down on you like the Leonids.
And I've seen how you've tried
to craft tiaras out of broken chandeliers,
how you've sat late into
the darkest hours of the night
alone at the kitchen table
trying to pick up the pieces
and try to put them back together again
like a jigsaw of your battered reflection
in a shattered mirror that cracked
more like a fortune-cookie than a koan.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Someone To Rejoice In
Someone to rejoice in. Foolish thought.
Epiphanous absurdity. My interminable longing
for a treasure, a happiness, a companion
I'm not even sure I deserve, is agitating
oceans of emotion again,
and wants to run before the wind,
wants to raise up apple blossoms
like sails with the skull and crossbones on them
and skirt the rocky coasts of extinct volcanoes
that once served as lighthouses in the distance
when I was island-hopping
like an infidel among the angel fleets.
The dragon's howl in the dead skull.
Moments when my heart shrieks with life
like a red-tailed hawk falling upon a snake.
I am a ravenous man who wants to eat the light.
The night flows into my bloodstream
like an atlas of arteries.
As time has passed, the pain in me
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
The Only Way To Control Things
The only way to control things is with an open hand.
Water on rock
a fist can't do anything to stop the rain
that keeps washing its bloody knuckles
by kissing the raw red buds
of the pain-killing poppies clean.
Anger grows ashamed of itself
in the presence of unopposable compassion
just as planets are humbled by their atmospheres.
The soft supple things of life insist
and the hard brittle ones comply.
Bullies are the broken toys of wimps.
Power limps.
But space is an open hand.
Mass may shape it
but it teaches matter how to move
just as the sky converts its openness
into a cloud and a bird
or the silence nurtures
the embryo of a blue word
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Impoverished Like A Loser With A High IQ
Impoverished like a loser with a high IQ.
It’s a darker discipline than art
to learn to love what you must live.
The aristocratic penury of a poet
who keeps giving it all away
as if generosity were a form of protest
against the sock puppets of common sense
whose mouths move like empty wallets
when they speak of the lives they’re living.
We lived from rented dump to rented dump
and beautified the yards
with gardens we dug
and flowers we stole
from a better neighbourhood six blocks away
until it came time for the landlord to sell them
and we moved on to the next lunar landing
when I was a boy
and maybe that’s why
I’ve always seen things
as temporary ever since.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Imagine Me
Imagine me being here now this very moment just as I am slipping through my own disembodied awareness like a silver dolphin alone in a sea of shadows on the moon on the eyeless side of the mirror. And you. Just as you are. Doing the very same thing because it's in everybody's nature to swim through themselves as if they were shoreless, looking for islands in the mindstream among the stars. To be free. To delight in the mystery of exploring themselves like a new medium they discover they have an unknown talent for beathing life into. Beyond reality, beyond delusion, beyond enlightenment and ignorance the knowable human divinity of pure sentience omnipresently at home with itself like the homeless everywhere. Everywhere within yourself even at midnight can't you see the aura of the gold in the ore that dreams of being dug up? Or how the fireflies are always trying to get your attention like tiny lighthouses off the coast of continents that have already run aground like mountains? Or gone down with Mu and Atlantis? How many lost civilizations are waiting in the overgrown jungles of yourself for you to let the dead use your voice to decipher their ghosts at a seance of whispering hieroglyphs? If the one word the wise never use is complete then you're a fool to think there's an end of you in sight. But that shouldn't discourage you from looking.
And isn't that what we were born for? To see and be happy. To attain a transformative insight into the tragic innocence of seeing itself that let's the witness go free to delight in its eyes without accounting for anything? Even if you're trying to wash your reflection off your face like a deathmask in a mirage in a desert of stars. Even if you're scooping up the moon to drink from your hands like a lifeboat in the rain. Even if you've crawled into one of the wormholes of space like a prophet in the belly of a snake whispering in Eve's ear things that weren't meant to be heard by anyone other than yourself. Even if you're the most fucked-up, twisted, mutated, incontravertible perversion of yourself, a black dwarf that ate its own children after it had starved them to death by keeping its light to itself. Even if you're dropping breadcrumbs like asteroids everywhere you go or threading the eye in the needle like a spider in a labyrinth to figure a way out of yourself like genetically inherited dice. You're still not a victim of gravity. Whatever excruciating transformations you must undergo like the sea enduring its own weather. Nothing can get you down. Nothing can bring you up. Because the whole universe in all ten directions is wired to surround-sound listening to itself like an old recording of what it had to say at the beginning of things before it discovered its voice. But it's not a Big Bang when nothing's come into existence yet to compare it to. It's not the sound of one hand clapping or the crash of a tree in a forest when there's no one there to hear it. And even if you're holding on to your religion like a superstitious grudge against the world. And it may be hard at first to discover the universe God the Zeitgeist the Cosmic Id whatever you want to call it never had a motive from the very first that wasn't invasively human. But that's just you being godlessly unconvinced of your own existence. That's just you trying to believe in your own inconceivability like an established fact. That's just you trying to spread your angel wings over the earthly turbulence of learning to fly on your own.
So what if you're a dead civilization before you're seventeen? That doesn't make you any less intriguing than the living ones. It's the tragic heroes we remember the most not the ghosts of the bookends who lived to the end of their long and boring biographies wholesome as twelve grain bread. So what if you're gnawing on yourself like a bitter black crust of starwheat? You're still shining. You're still breaking yourself into loaves and fishes. Some people are bright and light with stars in their eyes and smiles that can only be measured in lightyears. And some are dark and deep as Solomon's mines hiding their wealth from the graverobbers in gnostic caves of black matter no one's thief enough to enter. Here's a Zen koan I just made up specifically for you. If a thief stole the moon from your window would your window miss it? If you ever find an answer that doesn't let you in on the know as immediately as your mind. Let it go. It wasn't meant for you.
You get up every morning and you open your eyes like storefronts and informers and for all that appeared and disappeared in plain view before and through them have you ever heard them complain that anything was ever missing from the seeing? Whatever you're looking at. Awake or dreaming. Whose light is cast over everything and then withdrawn like day and night? When it's gone. Stars. When it's here. Flowers. When you fail at finding happiness you discover peace as a way of consoling yourself. When you fall a god or two shy of perfection you master an earthly excellence that's out of reach of the angels. Cornerstones and quicksand. Everything here stands solidly on the unsubstantiated reality of everything else. The defeated don't stand like shadows in the victor's light. An eclipse isn't midnight on the sun when the clock strikes Cinderella with a pendulum like an executioner's ax. You can call it praying if you like but from here it looks like swanning on the block for betraying yourself.
Or is it Chicken Little when the sky's falling in all around her like Leonid meteor showers? Did you raise a false alarm? Did you let the world down? Have your zeniths caught up to their nadirs like snakes with their tails in their mouths? Zero. Forever. Did it become inconceivably unholy to tempt yourself with the earth's believable fruits because they fall back on their dark roots like pregnant rain to climb up the waterslide again like clear fountains everyone can drink from like clouds and birds that pass without a trace? Is that blood or lipstick on the mirror? Was your last loveletter a suicide note full of agitated compassion for what you'd done to everyone else by killing them into life with your absence or were you just kidding when you said life was too hard for the living and what's the point of swimming when the lifeboats are full of the dead?
It's too late for the Mayan calendar to do the Mayans any good. And Nostradamus' worst guess on a bad seeing day is just another unenlightened truism at the wrong end of a telescope looking for signs of intelligent life. And maybe we'll destroy ourselves out of hate and ignorance long before we get any answers that might have prevented the onslaught of doom like a prophetic skull that had spoken. Everything is broken. Fractious. Raptors in rapture they've made a comeback at last like Nazis in the Black Forest. Like Dante in a dark wood. Like children all over the planet tonight turning into young men and women who remember war like the scar of a childhood Caesarian that marked them for life like that which has been rent asunder. Like an olive tree by lightning without thunder. Or the Israeli airforce. A flash of insight without wondering what they've seen that makes them want to kill themselves in a holy war of mirrors vying for perfection of the reflection of a God that escapes detection like a cosmic Houdini whatever chains straightjackets or suicide vests or religions you want to dress him up in.
So why are you crying like a broken teacup you couldn't pour the ocean into? Is your mind too big for your skull? Look at how the trees bag all the stars in the sky into the tiniest dropp of water and throw a hobo branch over their shoulders like a jolly swagman down under and walk away with the spoils of the victors like a windfall at their feet. You say you've lost your purpose for living. But here's one that's as purposeful as evolution. Begin. Anywhere. Now. Like a crowning achievement that returns to transcendence by getting over itself.
When misdirection comes to its senses where are you that isn't always here and now? Because there is no other place to be. If you make goodness the standard of life then you'll end up practising an occult alchemy looking for a philosopher's stone to turn maggots into butterflies with the wormy afterlives of people obscenely out of touch with themselves. Knowledge feeds on ignorance and true wisdom doesn't acknowledge the difference. Great enlightenment doesn't maintain a teacher. You want to be a star. You want to rise and shine. As well you should. But remember this. The darkness is a star's best feature. And beauty and meaning and art don't mean anything to anyone with a heart if they haven't lived through their own passionate annihilation. You won't find a phoenix in an urn on a mantle. You want to burn? You've got to learn to eat your own ashes sometimes.
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
What Did You See Just Before You Committed Suicide?
in memory of Heidi Clow
What did you see just before you committed suicide?
Did the snake mesmerize the bird that used to sing inside
your rib cage, turn it to stone, dis the lyrics of its song
with a cosmic hiss that underwhelmed all other sound?
Did you die from the inside out or the outside in?
Was there a light that summoned you to the end of the tunnel
like candles on the hillsides of Blue Skies, or did you
step out on stage in the glare of a bare lightbulb
in an interrogation room where you finally answered
what you were keeping secret from yourself? I won't ask you
to forgive the candour of this if it's cruel. I've been
the kind of demonic fool the earth opens up
and swallows from time to time, so I know
death has its jewels as well as life and when the dark energy
expands your eyes like space, you can see them shine
like wolf's eyes in the black mirror of a midnight lake.
And I've always found the brightest diamonds of clarity
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
All That I Could Wish For You
All that I could wish for you or anyone else
is more than I could attain for myself.
So far from home for so long
as if home were the alibi
that put the distance between me and a lie
I got sick of telling myself
to feel I belonged somewhere to some people
who might look up from the compass
of what they’re doing once and awhile
into the thirty-six years of my absence
and care that I’m not there anymore.
So I wish you a door that opens
before you need to knock.
And a thief in a window you leave unlocked
so he can steal your heart like sterling silver
and pawn it off as moonlight.
I suspect most people are way too clever
to ever be loved the way they want to be
and I’m not saying that I’ve never been graced
by the mystery
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
For All The Seers And Seekers Out There
For all the seers and seekers out there,
all you bright seeds on a blind wind
looking for a vision of life you can root in
and express yourselves like willows in the moonlight
to the night creek nearby that listens
when you cry out in mystical bliss
at the surprise of waterlilies gathered at your feet
to catch a taste of the same essence that makes you weep,
deep inside, inside, inside, look there for paradise,
where the stars are dazzled by your eyes
that don't fade away in the blazing like Venus at dusk.
Looking for the spirit with the spirit
like a breathless wind looking for the wind
to give it mouth to mouth resuscitation
is a snake with its tail in its mouth
enchained to its own liberation.
Is a candle in the sun living on borrowed light
when it's already well-provisioned with its own shining
for the long nights in the heart
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Someone Keeps Following Me
Someone keeps following me
like the shadow of who I was supposed to be.
The dark sibling of light
whose face got turned away from the sun.
He's the remnant of perfection that's left of me.
He's the one I was expected to achieve.
He's the one I'm supposed to believe.
I'm what happened to him along the way.
And the defeat goes on and on and on.
I want to say look you were there.
You saw what went down.
How natural everything seemed at the time.
How inevitability governed everything like hindsight.
But he just stands there staring
if I were the most inconceivable thing on his mind.
He's the son my mother should have had.
I'm the one she didn't deserve.
He's the blue flower.
And I'm the black dog.
He's the favourite of the rain.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
