All The Good Reasons That Get In The Way Of Writing

All the good reasons that get in the way of writing,
baby needs new shoes, and you're conscientious and diligent,
will kill you faster than the bad ones
that brought you to the edge of your mindstream in the first place
to dip your skull like the cup of the moon
in the wellsprings of your own imagination
instead of always sipping spit from other men's mouths.

I'm not saying don't do what you must do
to be a decent human being, or as close as you can get,
but when you're creatively underwhelmed
by the rising Rockies of Circumstance
losing their footing like an avalanche of cornerstones
coming down on you like a barrage of asteroids,
you better find a mountain gear deep within yourself
to power you out of the way of your own collapsing mindscape.

Don't come to a reasonable truce with the ashen exigencies
of the underwhelming reality love married you to,
or pontificate like a hollow urn on the tragic absence

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poem by Patrick White
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Softened By The Spirit

Softened by the spirit of the elegant day,
saturated colours and the bluing of shapes
in the distant mist,
homogenous grey sky
and the last green leaves of the sumac
consumed in their own fires
(that's enough of a local habitation and a name)
there's a sweetness in the choirs of the ashes
that fall everywhere like feathers
from the passage of my emotions
as I consider the course of my life
like the tenderness of smoke
unspooling from a blue hill
I've been driving down
this snakey dirt road
forever on and on and on toward
without really knowing who lives at the end of it
or even if there's an end of it
or a door and a threshold and a fire
that speaks the same language I do

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poem by Patrick White
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O Igneous Rose

O igneous rose, are you the furnace or the urn of the butterfly?
Or should I ask the vatic wind which pyre is mine?
Will I be be food for the stars again, will I mulch
the dark matter of the roots with my remains
or will my ashes retain some semblance of the light
like the ghost feeling in the heart of a spiritual amputee
or linger among archetypes like fossils in the Burgess Shale
that haven't reached their full potential yet?

Not Hell, not Heaven, not Hades, Sheol, Tartarus
Dis, Avernus, Jana, Jahannum, Nirvana, Samsara,
or the great abyss where nothing is even in the slightest,
and presence, and absence, and time aren't even
anachronisms of their past lives. I'm not going
anywhere when I die, because death is not discontinuous
from life in the known universe, though one's a lifeboat
and the other's what you need it for to stay afloat.

Wherever your mind walks in unison with your heart
deep in emotional thought without too much attention

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poem by Patrick White
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Things I Would Say To My Daughter If She Were Here

for Jody

The important thing
is to stay ahead of the pain
like a debt you'll pay tomorrow with your life
they're calling for today.
Tips for survival:
Luck has nothing to do with intelligence.
Stupid will get you killed faster than evil.
The most dangerous assassins
conceal themselves under the eyelids
of those who say they love you best.
And as any bruised heart knows
there's more power in an open palm
than there is in a fist
and the best way to get someone
to taste their own effluvia
is not to point to it.
A lot of opinions
is the frenzy of gnats in the sunset.

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poem by Patrick White
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Not A Black Wind On A Blue Day

Not a black wind on a blue day
but definitely grey.
Enter image of a slumping gas pump
with red paint flaking off it
and a coca cola sign just as old
hanging lop-sided
above an abandoned grocery store
across a small wooden bridge on a dirt road
beside an old stone mill with a seized waterwheel
that stopped turning in the flow of the river a long time ago.
Now take it a step further
and try to imagine a black pot-belly stove
in the middle of the wooden-floored grocery store
with people warming their hands around it
like petals turned toward
this black sun that shines at midnight
almost cast iron cherry red when its stoked
with two year old red oak
and it's snowing thick and heavy outside
as if someone got into a pillow fight with swans

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poem by Patrick White
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Living On A Planet That Kills More People Than It Heals

Living on a planet that kills more people than it heals.
And the most dangerous of predators, our own ideals
turning on us like ingrown hairs, solar flares the wind
blew in our faces without any of the veils or auroral graces
that used to adorn our amazement at what our eyes
in creative collaboration with victimized ions, could do
with the last breath of an expiring sun god to make it
mystically beautiful and awe-inspiring. Just
to be a witness to it was enough to keep your mouth
shut for the next ten thousand years, the silence
before the sublimity of being in the presence
as convincing to the farmer as it was to the astronomer.

As civilization progresses into an improved savagery
and people grow more bovine in their living rooms
as the one-eyed liar at the nadir of the third eye
entrances them into believing they're still
grazing in the starfields of genetically modified astroturf
they were raised on, slowly, from a moon cow's point of view
it's beginning to dawn on people that civilization

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poem by Patrick White
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Prima Noctis

Of human misery what’s left to tell
the single bead of the moon
that makes a lonely rosary of revolutions,
one face always turned away
as if it refused to look upon
its own imploring features
in the brutal, breathless, garish light of day,
or those of the earth
reviewed in the turning below?
I am nothing, a man, a microbe on a skull
picked clean by immaculate cannibals
whose hands are greased with brains,
my much vaunted, cultivated consciousness
and sterling will, free, or spontaneously
predetermined, the leaf of an afterthought
enhancing my passion for light
and periodic sentences.
Look where you will
and tell me this is evolution; tell me
this is that continuum of used mutations

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poem by Patrick White
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You Don't Do Crack Or Speed

You don’t do crack or speed or heroin;
you’re not lifting the moon like an eyelid
to find a new place to shoot,
but you’re boiling your heart in a spoon,
you’re thawing the six rocks of your emotions,
boiling away the seven oceans
that will get you through the night
as if you were another sign of global warming.
And now you’re weeping and raging in my living room,
violently shapeshifting through your withdrawal
like an exorcism gone wrong
because the latest hot lover
you got hooked on like a dealer
proved to be a snakeoil salesman in paradise
who convinced you the scales of your daring
would turn into feathers
and your falling take flight.
Not everybody who jumps from heaven makes hell;
for example, your heart there on that rock
you’re kicking around at your feet

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poem by Patrick White
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If You Worry About Where You're Going

If you worry about where you're going
before you go, you're not worthy of the road yet.
If you're not having some black-hearted fun
with your worst nightmares, because they're
just as surrealistically absurd as the bliss
of your most recurring dreams are, how
are you ever going to avoid taking yourself literally?
If you're not crazy enough to wander
through a cemetery saturated with the moon
in the early hours of the morning, trying
to organize a choir of singing gravestones,
how are you ever going to recover a voice of your own?
That dowdy wren you let go of when you first discovered swans?

If you ever want to sweep across the lava plains of the moon
in a rush of emotion of a homecoming ocean,
but you can't feel the tide in a single dropp of water,
you haven't cried enough yet to drown in your own sorrows
and see everybody's life flash before your eyes
as you go down in retrospect, wiser than bubbles

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poem by Patrick White
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I Want To Make A Contribution

I want to make a contribution.
I want to leave something on the stairs of the temple
in the dead of the night and steal away like a shadow,
hoping my small gift of a gift is well-received.
That the stars don't think they're wasting their light
to shine down upon it. Nor the wind resent the seeds it carries.
Fifty years of poetry. Painting the picture-music
the darkness pours into my heart and my heart conveys to my ears.
I can taste thousands of wildflowers like eyes in my blood.
I can taste the homelessness of the rogue stars in my tears,
and pull the wounded swords I cull like thorns of the rose
from the stone of my brain that fell in the farmer's field
like a rock through the window of the abyss
and make it clear as Merlin locked in his tower of glass,
that the stars only look fixed from a distance,
up close and intimate as atoms they're in a frenzy of creation
like a cloud of gnats in the last rapture of the sunset
radioactive with the bliss of being alive to know this.
That we're all longing for home in the lap of an expansive awareness
that threw the starmaps away the moment we were born

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poem by Patrick White
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