Trying To Interpret The Silence Like Glyphs In A Jungle Ruin

Trying to interpret the silence like glyphs in a jungle ruin.
Afraid of what they might say if I cut the vines away
like a Medusa's head of spinal cords connected to my brain,
or this octopus of major blood vessels plugged into my heart.
My dna is the long molecule of a Zen cowboy,
with the Mongolian genes of a shaman practising
hunting magic that ensnares what he loves
in the nets of constellations that do no harm
to the wavelengths of the prey. You've got
to keep on dying every day if you want
to be born again in the dream tree of a shaman.
This is the way you avoid taking possession of your transcendence.
This is the way you break out of a cosmic egg
like a dragon without making an aviary of your solitude.

So many voices all at once in my head,
trying to say something in the living languages of the dead
about annihilation in a time urgent with the mystery of need.
When space isn't expanding the potential of its own medium
into the available dimensions of a future

[...] Read more

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

All The Duff And Detritus Of Meaning In My Head

All the duff and detritus of meaning in my head.
Turmoil of celestial sediments in a tormented creekbed
of starmud. Images and symbols, glimpses and insights,
effluvia of indelible impressions that focus
a whole lifetime into a locket of tears, mingling
in the waters of life like the tributary of a deeper feeling
entering my mindstream like a first violin
in a symphony of picture-music conducted
by the silence of owls with blood on their talons
singing Allah hu, Allah hu, Allah hu under their breath
like a Sufi dancing like the axis of a galactic umbrella
at the crossroads of enlightenment and extinction. I don't mean
to be thematic about all this. It's more a synthesis
of happenstantial contradictions and random nuances
in a matrix of suggestive wavelengths having sex
in a lunar snakepit like a triple x porn flick
wasted on a blind prophet who had already seen too much.

The sting of the most beautiful sorrows
ages like wine in the catacombs of your heartwood

[...] Read more

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

A Fluctuation In The Cosmic Void

A fluctuation in the cosmic void,
a wink of atoms,
a fallen eyelash of light,
the seeing of a lifetime
nothing but candle vapour,
ghost-water on the moon,
the exhalation of a vagrant star
looking for its lost constellation
like a berry or a gem
that had wandered off road
from the vine of a crown.
The eye that regards all
as it rises like a blue mystic sun
over the morning eyelids
of the remote hills
waking up in the arms of their shadows
demands exposure of the sky,
a clarity pure enough for stars
as it turns the day over
like the palm of a hand

[...] Read more

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

What I Want Is A Starfish

What I want is a starfish
that can pry open the mouth of a word
not for the pearl but the tongue that said it.
What I want is an irrelevancy of slurred minerals,
a negligence of light, a torn candy-wrapper,
a whistle without chrome peas,
but what I want is a footprint that isn't my own
on a desolate beach out of the grasp
of the raking tide that sweeps
the lifeboats up with the garbage. What I want is free,
and that's why no one ever gets it,
when the world is placed in their open hands,
and not seeing their own reflection
or the rag of their wounded shadow
wearing their face like the sky they've always known,
deluded by the cheiromancy of their own entangled lifelines
cries out in their denuded emptiness
that nothing is for free. What I want
is not knowing what I want
on certain lost islands chipped off

[...] Read more

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Eyes In The Shadows, In Blood, In Space

Eyes in the shadows, in blood, in space, incubating the light
that has yet to be born, wild asters in the deflowered fields of death,
and the return of the living out of the eyeless abyss, delinquent,
and a redness in the air of this September night,
saturating it like a deep wound it holds under its breath,
a black rose, a fossilized thorn that no longer grows old,
memories fixed like crucified bats to the sticky brown stars
of the fanatical burdock trying to wear me like a starmap
as if every day of my life has felt like the approach of autumn
watching the constellations turn like the pages of a calendar,
a waterclock of new moons flowing like dark matter,
sundials at midnight encircling me like shark fins
slashing the water like sabres with surgical precision
and their eyes, oblivion, a focus of shadows, perennial night
after a supernova of dismemberment, dehumanizing horrors
in a hydrodynamic abattoir. Spirits of old root fires
smelling of pine and cedar at large in the dark like hunting magic.

And the clouds a wolf pack of shapeshifters among the stars,
the exhilaration of spiritual wariness out in the woods alone at night

[...] Read more

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Angry, Smashing Antiquated Croci Like Faberge Easter Eggs

Angry, smashing antiquated croci like Faberge Easter eggs.
The air is rationing its oxygen, and even the wind begs.
I'm holding it all together like an abandoned barn,
but there are flashfloods in the mirror trying to humble
my lack of concern whether it rains for forty days
or all goes up in fire as I've been forewarned.
Don't care if it's nuclear winter, or just a passing storm.
I'm not mining diamonds like stars in the rifts of the clouds.
They can do without my eyes for awhile. Looking
for a white hole on the other end of this black one
like a ground hog with two, or the flip side of a telescope
shining at the other end of the tunnel the dead go through.

Madness imparts a significance to everything I do.
The spiders are weaving dreamcatchers and badly tuned harps
between the antlers of a dying caribou, and here
in this cow pie of starmud I call a brain, the warp and woof
of my axons are hairbraiding dead protein
into straightjackets for the two-headed wavelengths
of my meditative theta snakes. And it hurts to write this

[...] Read more

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

I Listen To The Silence

I listen to the silence, not the ambassador birds of the message
aligned along the branch of a black tree,
waiting to have their say, deliver
the formal meaning; I follow them back
to the original fountain-mouth of the silence
that isn't dawn or sunset, or a woman in a garden,
but a clear light with the presence of a feather
and, almost at times, a face, that's always been there
behind the racket and the paint rags
of the cacophonous actors gathering on stage,
the understudy that hovers like a silver fish
in the reeds and the shadows of the undulant curtains,
rarely seen, and more of a fragrance of light
than a second queen, an unverifiable void
with delicate gestures that turn all my questions
back on me like the soft underside of milky green leaves,
as if something took my hand and turned it over
to show me the answers pearled in my palm.
And it would be wrong to attribute eyes to this silence
though I feel it's the space where the seeing happens

[...] Read more

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

A Little Thought In A Big Space

A little thought in a big space, I'm falling
through my own immensities here at my desk,
one of my Icarian propensities for plunging into things.
My voice intimidated by the violence of the silence within.
I'm on the dark side of my eyes.
No one's ever been here before.
No window, no wall, no door,
I'm on the threshold of my homelessness again.
I'm looking at stars, but I feel like rain.
I'm talking to ghosts that I don't remember.
Might be the wrong medium, but it's the right seance.
I don't even know what I'm doing here myself
but it seems I'm free to go or stay as I wish.
I'm wearing my shadow like a candling parachute
that didn't step back from the edge in time.
No point in pretending you're an airborne dandelion
when you feel like a rock with a message
someone just threw like the moon through a mirror
disguised as a sky the night birds keep flying into blind.

[...] Read more

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Carrying Water To The Burning House

Carrying water to the burning house,
the bottom of the bucket falls out,
a ship on the rocks, a hemorrhaging bell
that broke one of the blood vessels
in its throat like a pipeline to its vocal cords.

I see a woman who went back into the fire
for her purse, her hands pleading against the window
like a Neanderthal cave painting,
melting into the glass like a fly in amber.

Charred vision of a dangerous day in the sunlight.
I don't want to be writing about this.
I want to be writing about red-winged blackbirds
swaying on the cattails like dozy metronomes
and something sufficiently eternal in the suffusion of sun.
Undisciplined, as if life were all I had to do.

Deep within me someone is angry and weeping.
There's a wound that wants to take over my mouth

[...] Read more

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Beauty In The Aloofness Of My Usual Sorrows

Beauty in the aloofness of my usual sorrows.
A respite in time and care. A hole in space
I can escape through without setting off any alarms.
And I don't care what this poem is going to be about
I can write it with no preconceived deceptions,
no utilitarian intent, no split lip ego-defects.
For a moment, the ice age is thawing
and the blue chicory and English ox-eyed daisies
like the taste of the air, and the drainage-ditches
are a riot of Queen Ann's Lace and Viper's Bugloss.
Temperate consolations modify my mood
into a truce with the bleaker conditions of life.
I'm gulled by the sunshine. I'm a schill of the mindstream.
The killer bees are away from their hives.
Amber tears of Baltic honey flow in my veins
without attracting flies. Life is unconscionably reasonable
in the efflorescence of its mystically specific details.
Even my dragon skull basks in the beatific wavelengths
of a better attitude toward its own martyrdom
in the greener fires of earth like salt in a flame.

[...] Read more

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!