You Lied To Me Once
You lied to me once
and then you lied again about why you lied.
And I couldn’t tell if you were a hall of mirrors
who thought you could warp the truth like space
and bend the light to your way of shining
or just liked talking out of your ears
like the sea in a seashell
with multiple piercings along its nacreous lobes
like a Stonehenge of silver moon skulls
you kept like a calendar
to mark the best night of the year
to start planting things
in the hearts of the lovers
whose flesh you turned over like soil.
You said you were a witch
and I was your broomstick
but you didn’t mind
if I came along for the ride.
And though it felt foolish
to fancy myself a warlock
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poem by Patrick White
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To See The Glee In Your Eyes At Eighty
To see the glee in your eyes at eighty
as if you were about to achieve something as big
as you did at three.
And you, there, shy one, freaky adolescent
day after day in the same corner of the restaurant
like a bruised mermaid
riding the clock out like a sea turtle
until it’s time to go home again and face the music;
you who drive your pen so deeply
into the fleshy paper
of your black arts journal
as if you were carving up a body
or intensely wedging the tiny bird tracks
of your hieroglyphic footnotes
like some bitter aside
into the shin of that Ramsean gigantism
you’re standing in the shadow of
waiting for it to get dark enough
the fireflies might come out.
To see you light up like a rainbow at a black mass
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poem by Patrick White
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Everything On The Garbage Dump
Everything on the garbage dump
like the picked over pyre of an unholy death.
The rubes seeing through the ruses of the rich
straight into their computerized living rooms
behind the razor wire and grapevines.
Bad mistake. The poor begin to compare,
and where they wanted to be elite yesterday,
today they smoulder like a root fire
at what's been done to them
many days before by what goes on under
the cornerstones of our quicksand institutions
imploding under the mass of corruption at their core.
Lies so immense, even the media can't eat them,
and scum-bag politicians wallowing in what
they don't want anyone else to have. A cure
for a child that's dying, after having lost her hair,
a bed for a homeless man who's off his meds,
a job for his son and daughter, open-handed economics
where the destitute aren't eating the scraps
that fall off the elemental table of the obscenely overfed.
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poem by Patrick White
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God, I Hurt Sometimes For Reasons I Can Only Guess
for Sally
God, I hurt sometimes for reasons I can only guess.
Don't know what it is, too much love, too little,
but it feels like I'm giving birth to fog,
or my heart is standing in the doorway
of an abandoned chrysalis asking if
we could do it all a little differently this time,
and ingather like the nebulae of the stars
instead of the circus tents of these gypsy moths
swarming the Dutch elms like fake starmaps
that don't know much about shining in the dark,
but eat mini blackholes through the leaves
that have known greener days of radiance,
and more creative things to do with the light.
I can see the stars even in daylight
from the bottom of this fathomless well
only the snakes and the frogs and the fireflies
descend into to drink from the dark watershed
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poem by Patrick White
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Things I Must Say To You The Crystal Said
Things I must say to you the crystal said.
Jewels I must turn in the light.
Things I have gathered
like wild herbs from the starfields
to make a cool poultice of the moon
to draw the pain out of the wound
like a child that got turned around
when she was born
on the nightside of her blue eyes
to colour outside the lines of her constellation
like one of the original watersheds of Aquarius
that didn't take to the bottle and spoon of lesser wells
that warily sip from themselves
as if they were testing for poison,
but poured herself out
in an elation of so many lifelines
so many rivers vital with beginnings
the world mountain discovered her
like gold in the stone
gold in the mindstream
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poem by Patrick White
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When You Look At A Star
When you look at a star
can you see
how the night leaves
the intimate doors
of intuitive eventuality ajar?
I'm all future with a prophetic past.
Aviomantic signs of liberated doves.
So many lifespans in a single moment.
How many light-years to the nearest star?
And how many shadows back?
Trying to say the inexpressible in words is like
to trying to thaw a snowstorm
on the tip of your tongue
flake by flake syllabically
or trying to explain bubbles to a glacier
in a momentary suspension of disbelief.
When you look at a star
do you see
that's it's you
that's shining up that far
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poem by Patrick White
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It's Writing Me
It’s writing me.
I’m not writing it.
It’s got nothing to do with obedience
and there’s no chance of betraying it
even now that I’m three thousand miles
and forty light years away
and all the fireflies and lightning bolts
in my mystic cloud of unknowing
have turned into a frenzy of fanatical killer bees.
I’m swarmed by anxieties like mental space junk
and snakey wavelengths of yesterday
still trying to shed the sky like sunburnt skin.
Like the mythic names of old lovers
tattooed on our foreheads and firearms forever
and the obsolete starmaps in braille
that we followed like the magi
across this friendless desert of stars
as the signage of something divine.
And it isn’t the ironic sublimity
of the implacable circumstances of fate
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poem by Patrick White
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My Eyes Are Getting Better
My eyes are getting better
as I get older
despite the sunspots
and leggy eclipses
and when I look back
I can see further than I ever did
except it isn't the light
that illuminates things any more
it's time
and that's a whole other palette
with colours of its own
wavelengths faster than light.
When you see things with your eyes
the past may be red deepening into black
and the future a furious white-blue
that pushes the darkness back
a T Tauri star or two
but when you see things
with the whole of your being
it isn't time that's passing
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poem by Patrick White
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Because I Don't Confront You
Because I don't confront you
doesn't mean this tree
doesn't know how to stand up to the wind.
If I bend like a river reed in a current
I'll still be here
long after the current has passed.
To the unenlightened it's inconceivable
there's nothing to win
because both opposites are empty.
Take empty from empty it's still empty.
No reason to put a gun to your head to check it out.
Just because you've got a trigger
like the first crescent of the moon
doesn't mean you have to pull it.
Three for three.
Blood and cartridges.
Strange lipstick.
But you're still banking on the one that's empty.
Those that have the power to hurt
but will do none.
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poem by Patrick White
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You Don't Come
You don't come. Your absence is a guillotine. My heart
plummets from the altitude it risked in looking forward
to a day with you outside of time and circumstance, jumps
from the edge of paradise, the flat earth, the back
of a winged horse. You don't come and such
is the nature of love
I go out of the plane not knowing
if I've got a parachute on and my heart
pulls the rip cord to see if there's any salvation in the fall,
any flowers for me in the bag, morning glory
or dandelion seed, or this is just another
mode of acceleration to death. You don't come
and my heart candles without a reserve,
I haven't packed a spare dawn
and though I will make every effort to understand
there's a grave waiting down below like an open mouth
and the void is laughing at the persistent folly
of my believing you would come,
and my fear of not being worthy of love anymore
sends my mendicant self-image out
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poem by Patrick White
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