If You're Braver Than I Am

If you're braver than I am
it's only because you're more desparate you said
and I broke down laughing in tears
as you were tripping on mushrooms
and I was starting to peak on acid.
Why should you love me at all you asked
and I said I like to take subjective risks
and I can still light up at the smile you gave me
because you thought I thought you were dangerous.
Have you stayed dangerous over the years?
Did you ever find enlightenment?
Or have all those Doors of Perception we stepped through
way back then to expand our cosmic consciousness
by crossing all our thresholds
and dotting all our taboos
closed like space behind you?
Have you made your return address a point of view
you can live with
and turned those beautiful Hispanic eyes
into late night windows

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poem by Patrick White
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Not To Be With You

Not to be with you,
not to know your breathing beside me,
not to be able to put my arms around you
and kiss the black candles away,
change skies with a glance,
feel your mystery seeping into me
like a veil of rain,
my heart a hive of stars,
my body crazed
by a fragrance of the moon,
to feel the intimate moment hang
like a dropp of dew
poised like the silence that falls before it;
is a mountain peering down into its own valley
at a whisper of cloud
that passes like a secret,
a red carpet of blood that wants to fly
laid out for an unknown dignitary.
You are not here
but I walk with you alone

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poem by Patrick White
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Too Long In These Depths

Too long in these depths, sullen and sublime.
So dark you've got to be the light
if you want to find your own way around.
No moon. No colour. No star. No sign.
And even my presence doesn't help
to humanize the place. No day. No night.
In this space eyes almost seem redundant.
No seer, no seen, just this seeing deeply
into a dark mirror you have to drown in
if you want to see your whole life
flash before your eyes like a school of silver fish.
Even the ghosts of the dead candles
don't linger here for long
and the brittle sticks of incense
find the lack of smell here
a fragrance too strong to be borne.
Almost muggy, a viscous summer night,
when you can almost hear through your skin
things humming to their own ripening
like iron on the nightshift being poured

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poem by Patrick White
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Awake and Labouring

Awake and labouring for light in this dayshift of dreams
as the platitudinous dawn takes her make-up off,
her eyelashes the hands of amputated clocks
that once prayed over the ruptured acids
of identical batteries, the premature twins
that exhausted their patrimony of corroded polarities
on the green-blue lichen that eats them in their graves
and spreads like an infection of the moon, I realize
I need a new emergency, a more radical embryo
than this destiny of durable shoes to fulfill the imploding uterus
of a radioactive fortune-cookie. I need more bells,
I need more bullets, I need to rise from the ashes
of my passport to anywhere with a completely new identity
that’s good for an eternity of idiotic bliss. Give me a face
I can believe in that isn’t
a drug-sniffing dog at the border, eyes
that don’t know more about me than I do,
that aren’t surveillance cameras of everything I do,
that don’t watch for me like herons hunting fish. Unspool
the movie and give me conch-shell labyrinths for ears,

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poem by Patrick White
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Buried Under An Avalanche Of Tongueless Bells

Buried under an avalanche of tongueless bells,
I want to scream. I'm an oyster shell in the midden
of an archaeological dig. Who shucked my pearls?
Trying to weep my way into singing away the pain.
What happened to the Algonquin village that once stood here?
My skull's an empty locket at the end of the foodchain.
I've given more than the less I had to give in the first place.
What do the takers know about sacrifice?
I'm not a strawdog with a deathmask for a face.
My emotions aren't tinfoil. My tears aren't wax.

I embroider my dreams in blood on a pillowcase
of razorblades. That way they'll last like a dye
that holds fast against fading in the bleaching sunlight.
But my varnish is cracking along the agitated fault lines
of my nerves. My shining freaked with gaps
like the dry creekbed of a splintered mirror.
I'm trying to condition the split ends
of the uprooted lightning I transplanted into an urn
of fertilized starmud with enough death in it

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poem by Patrick White
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Hallowed Be The Gentleness Of A Pacified Mind

Hallowed be the gentleness of a pacified mind.
Uplifting, a gust of stars, dust doing wheelies
in a back alley like a vehicular Sufi in a Ford,
because, and this is significant, it doesn't, I swear,
mean a damn thing and therein lies the joy of it.

Inspiration never aspires to meaning. It doesn't
cling like a God particle to give the matter at hand, mass.
The morphology of the multiverse is bubbles.
Iridescent, rainbow-smeared grackle-headed bubbles.
And that includes the black-pearled oil slicks
shining like new moons after their first eclipse.

Meaning, that hovers like a ghost of grammar
over the things of the world that can find
their own place in it without consulting anyone.
Who turns around to ask their shadow where they're going?
Grammar's a dead shaman. Time for new orthodoxies,
to let the rain make some new creekbeds to flow in
when it's lamenting the death of a Spanish guitar

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poem by Patrick White
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I Would Speak To You In My Night Voice

I would speak to you in my night voice
if you were still here. If you were even as near
as the stars commingled in my breath,
I'd thaw my secret zodiac of crystal skulls
and let my mindstream run wild at your feet
like a flashflood waking the dry creekbed up
from its long dream of making the desert bloom
with real flowers in a mirage of metaphors.
I would ignite the pilot lights of a thousand stars
to blaze in an honour guard of mythic starmaps
waiting for you to bless their colours,
because wonder's never been known to start a war
with a world it's amazed by in every mesmerizing detail
without annihilating itself first, bursting
its own bubble in an efflorescent multiverse.

I'm a surrealistic mystic to give it a funny name,
and you've seen my hidden housewells, sacred pools
receiving the moonlight on the water like the blades
of ceremonial swords that tasted my blood first

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poem by Patrick White
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Empty-handed I Come

Empty-handed I come; empty-handed I go.
The road has no name.
The destination doesn't exist yet.
By my side, no one. Little bird, you want to drink
from the dragon's chalice, but faces from now
I will not know you; the mirror
will not breathe. Unlovable, strange, some
warrior mystic under an expanding sky
where the stars move further and further apart
I hammer swords of light out
on the igneous anvil of my heart
folding the metal
like the first edition of a holy book until the edge
draws blood from space
with a slash of lethal intelligence.
The clowns of God are rehearsing for a play like this
and you have your lives, your disgraces to live;
your clock of lies that says
it's always a lonely time to forgive. Now and here, never
anyone or anything, all objects turned to thought;

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poem by Patrick White
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The Nuns Are Sleeping On Graves With Their Pagan Lovers

The nuns are sleeping on graves with their pagan lovers.
The black walnut trees have shed their leaves
half way between feathers and scales
like arboreal dinosaurs that are learning to fly.
And the branches of the staghorn sumac
that went up in flames like the rest of the greenwood
now look like the ribs of a snake blanched in the ashes.

I tell the hard rocks chiselled down to the lake
as if they were animate, sapient, sentient life forms
I know just how they feel
when they're dreaming of Carrara marble
and someone steps on them
like a skull of a common cornerstone
you can take for granted, but the birds,
why is it always the birds that are the first
to be alert to things like this, tell me
not to deprive them of their extinction.
So I'm prone to keeping my words to myself
when I'm on a backwoods pilgrimage alone

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poem by Patrick White
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How Strange To Recall Childhood As An Aging Man

How strange to recall childhood as an aging man
as if nothing had changed for the last sixty years
you're watching yourself as a young boy
from a point of awareness somewhere in the air
above him like someone he couldn't have foreseen becoming,
looking back upon him with great tenderness
that I'm what I made of his future as he
tries to reverse the bike chain he caught
his pant cuff in, and I can do nothing to help him
at this remove, except love him as someone should have then
when these strange tears didn't taste so much of time.

Who could have guessed it would take all these years
to fill the absence in his heart up by becoming
the intimate familiar of the solitude of a child
who could befriend anything that was as lost and wild
and wounded as he was and yet could dream
of doing great things up late in his room at night
to prove he was at least as loveable as any achievement.
He was off to fight a holy war of one with himself

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poem by Patrick White
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