O Sweet Freedom
O sweet freedom to be nothing for awhile.
To blindfold the clock
with its own shadow
like a masked bandit
and let it get away with something for a change.
I love the cheap thrill
of feeling like a thief
with an ageless sense of timing.
One tug on my serpentine spinal cord
and I unplug my electric identity
like a searchlight
that keeps its eye on me
like a blackhole it doesn't know anything about.
I've stopped looking for meaning
in the flight of the doves
I release from their cages
like words stuck in the throats
of Selkirk chimneys
like harps and hearts and wishbones.
The joy of a liberated dove
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poem by Patrick White
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Childhood Never Ends
Childhood's never over.
It goes on evolving along with us
as if maturing had nothing to do
with growing up.
It's what's still creative about yesterday
that lives on inside us
like an ongoing work of art
whose finishing stroke of genius
was never to abandon it.
My childhood has the eyes of a homeless boy.
The eldest son of a single welfare mother
how could I not become a hero
to be worthy of her
who gave her life up for me?
Even the worthless can make noble mistakes
and if I started out tilting at windmills
the ironic absurdity
of my many-headed imagination
has long since turned me into
some kind of dragon voodoo doll
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poem by Patrick White
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To Be Alive Here
To be alive here
is to suffer the godspear of light
that enflames your breath with life
through the heart, the night
of its knapped shale
embedded in every part
like a mystic jewel in a wound that never heals
or a hidden nightbird in the far fields
when only the stars are listening.
To be alive here is to know
your only here and now
is to be alive.
Born into the lifeboat,
who needs to be rescued?
Is the fish afraid of drowning,
does a bird implore the sky;
is there not enough room in your eyes for stars?
Images, thought, symbols, feelings, words,
we live behind billboards illuminated
by artificial daffodils of light,
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poem by Patrick White
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Infrequently Asked Questions
Is it true
the most compassionate people in life
are the ones in the greatest danger?
That the most generous
will lose their hands to the ones they fed?
That the bravest will be hunted down by protected cowards
and when the last of the heroes are dead
and the dragons who inspired them
are the advertising themes of amusement parks
those with the smallest balls
will give themselves the biggest awards?
Is it true
those who are creative
chafe the destroyers like anti-matter
and give the intellectuals diaper-rash of the mind?
That just to open your eyes
to watch the stars and fireflies
is enough to make other people feel blind
and insist you black them out
like pearls in an air-raid?
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poem by Patrick White
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Going Through A Dark Time
Going through a dark time. Antares, the red ant,
the bitter berry in the heart of Scorpio. Why not
blame it on the stars? How could they deny it?
Living penumbrally in the eclipse of a celestial body.
I want to paint my first old rusty bike that I found
languishing under the neighbour's stairs, its
deflated tires, spider looms and jinxed prayer wheels
that hadn't turned for years, want to paint it
with model airplane enamels again and run
a perfect red stripe down the middle of a black fender
gleaming like anthracite in the blue-yellow sun.
How many worlds away I am from that pure moment.
Dark in my heart, gnawing on the skulls of dragons
that have finally become like the moon
that's never known rain, a frozen watershed
in a locket of ice and no light bulb in the well.
I'm striding down the corridors of a well-polished hell
and I'm turning the portraits of my heroes toward the wall.
Why not? I've got no use for their eyes anymore.
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poem by Patrick White
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Blue Fire
Blue fire in your eyes, for years
I've watched you smiling everywhere
against the odds
of the secret you carry within you,
the pain you carry within you
like a broken mirror
waiting for the moon to rise
as if you were a thousand lakes, each
waiting for the pearl
that would answer their darkness from within.
I was always afraid of your edges,
the way you pretended
to mistake my face for a mask,
as if I was always up to something,
as if you could hear the whisper
of the assassin behind the door
before anyone else could,
as if your pain had taught you
to be quick and clever,
to double-back like a choir of tigers,
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poem by Patrick White
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Everybody Knows Why The Children Are Hungry
Everybody knows why the children are hungry.
Everybody knows why the poor give up dreaming
and the rich can't sleep without surveillance.
Everybody knows why this young girl can't read
and the Taliban throw acid in her face.
Everybody knows why this young boy
at twelve years old
feels about as heroic as a statistic
and looks at the future as if
he were already a has-been.
Everybody knows why there's a rifle in his hand.
Everybody knows why
there are people washed up
on the streets of our cities
as if a great ship of state had gone down
like a garbage barge off the coast of New Jersey.
Everybody knows why
women are being sexually colonized
in the Democratic Republic of the mineral-rich Congo.
Everybody knows their atrocities
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poem by Patrick White
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I Refuse
I refuse to persuade any emotion to a poem
like a horse I can lead to water but can't make drink.
If it's a straitjacket it's a straitjacket.
When its a wet suit it's a wet suit
to go swimming with stars in. Tea leaves.
Yarrow sticks. Tarot decks. Incinerated match books.
I listen to a poem as if it were a response
to what I've said, and didn't say.
I like the counter play of voices and mine
one among them, the whole tree full of birds,
and the chatter of black squirrels in the walls.
Midway between a car starting up and a stanza break
when I write, I feel like a thief that stole the prison
under the warden's nose, and broke out through the window,
exhilarated by the bliss of getting away with my freedom.
I'm on an island alone with the moon.
And it doesn't matter if I was marooned
or just washed up here like a wounded paint rag.
My spine is smoke. I drift tribes away from the fires
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poem by Patrick White
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Ten Hours A Day Painting In The Half Wild Fields
Ten hours a day painting in the half wild fields
at Long Bay, eleven miles outside of Westport
for four and a half years without
seeing another human for months in the winter
except when we drove into Perth every six weeks
for smokes and groceries.
A quarter mile of treacherous driveway,
mud, ice, freezing rain, you had to accelerate
just right, and steadily, to keep the car
from sliding back down the hill.
Sometimes two or three attempts
like a long distance Olympic ski jumper
and you standing at the top of the ninety metre hill
so I didn’t kill you going backwards,
one hand on a shovel
planted in a small grey pyramid of rock salt
like a sign of readiness and ownership
that always made me think
this is what an hourglass must look like
when it finally hits bottom.
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poem by Patrick White
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It's Not So Much
It's not so much the darkness
that bothers me
it's just that at these depths
the sea forgets how to dream.
And being a lamp unto yourself
where the darkness is so naive
it doesn't run from the light
isn't as much fun
as watching stars
try to imitate spiders
in the eleven dimensional corner
of my left eye
like cut-out constellations.
I'm not one of those who go looking for meaning
because they want to mean something themselves.
I listen to the hissing
of olaceously black rain on the asphalt
as the cars go by under my window
and the streetlights run like blood
in the gutters of their hemorrhaging swords.
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poem by Patrick White
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