You're Not Mad Enough
You’re not mad enough to understand my poetry.
Suffering hasn’t twisted you into strange shapes
like a hangman’s apprentice
practising knots with your spine
or driven your innocence out into the desert
like a scape-goat for the sins of others
until you had mastered their evil
and become a great devil
condemned to do good
as if it were the most exquisite torment
of the damned.
You’ve never stood like an exile
at a sleepless window
and listened to the night rain
speaking in a foreign language.
Your electrons have never
been bumped out of their orbitals
like the photonic refugees
of a radioactive element
with half an afterlife
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poem by Patrick White
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What's To Keep You From Dancing?
What's to keep you from dancing if you've got nothing to live for?
Dance naked in your tears. Cry through your laughter.
Plunge into a black hole and come out the other side,
renewed, a virgin, no more feathers and tar pits.
No more dead petals in a dry fountain. Absurd, isn't it?
When you begin to compare skulls with the moon,
not at all what you imagined you would see, not even
the prevailing consensus of delusion that passes for reality,
this neo-primordial soup of logos and memes
we're all swimming in like fish in radioactive water.
This pre-Cambrian efoliation of multitudinous sentience
re-inventing cuneiform to write it all down in the Burgess Shale
three hundred million years from now, fossil by fossil
and one among myriads, the lucky lottery ticket
of a fish with a spinal cord that will lead eventually
back to the saddest excuses in the world for the likes of us.
I've stood on bridges late at night by myself
watching the waters flow as if my mindstream
were going on without me, and the pain were too much
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poem by Patrick White
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Not Even The Light
Not even the light of the stars
shining like the keys to the ancient love-letters
bound among the secret jewels
of the queen of heaven
penetrates me as deeply as you do.
The planet wheels into the night
bearing its burden of humans
murdering each other
to enforce one state of ignorance
upon another
as the rabid bees
strafe the demented flowers
on the far side of the world
for enriching their radioactive pollen,
convinced in their madness
more honey than blood will flow from the wound.
I walk by myself
along the brittle banks of a frozen stream
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poem by Patrick White
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I'm Having An Unrequited Love Affair With Myself
I'M HAVING AN UNREQUITED LOVE AFFAIR WITH MYSELF
I'm having an unrequited love affair with myself.
It's surrealistically ironic and spiritually annihilating
at the same time, and I can say from personal experience
black holes have a profound sense of humour.
The waterlilies look up at the stars and wonder
if they could shine like that if they ever dried out.
Fire and water. The serpent fire of my electrical potential
jumps the gap like a spinal cord, a bridge is made.
Spiders weave enlightened filaments in a light bulb
like webs of neuronic wiring into dream catchers
and empowering mandalas. I have ignition.
Billions of eyes light up in the dark like fireflies.
I always thought if I really wanted to do the world some good,
I'd lead it away from myself. My alter-ego
shines like a demon in a dark light whose intelligence
is intent on ruining my life compassionately
out of a begrudging respect for sacred rodeo clowns
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poem by Patrick White
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When Someone Loves You And You're No One
for Kristine Marie
When someone loves you and you're no one,
what happens then? What do you have to give
that they aren't already in full possession of?
The many I have loved have become one woman.
And this is an orchid that blooms in fire at night.
And this is the dove that returns from earth
with a wing like a broken arrow and asks to be healed.
When someone loves you and you're no one,
what happens then? This picture-music flowing
like a carillon of bliss and despair through
my body, heart, mind as if they were all
poured like dragon iron into the casting of the same bell
that yesterday raised like a sword to kill it back into life?
And this is a doorway you can stand in forever
as if you were greeting someone who never comes.
And this is that butterfly among wildflowers
that flutters about like a symbol of the mind
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poem by Patrick White
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I look Into People's Faces
I look into people's faces
and I see the same wound
under many different scars.
I look into their hearts
like a stranger at night
through a passing window
and I see how suffering through
the agonies of life
has ripened some
with sweetness and compassion
and others are already
rotten before they fall.
I look into people's eyes
and some are vast starlit skies
and some are the iota subscripts
of scholarly fireflies
that footnote the constellations
at the bottom of the page
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poem by Patrick White
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You Were A Hooker At Sixteen
YOU WERE A HOOKER BY SIXTEEN
You were a hooker by sixteen.
Your mother, your madame
The navy at N.F.B. Esquimalt, your john.
In the triplex, next door, upstairs
on a Friday night, all the windows
broken from the inside by whiskey bottles.
My friend, since you were seven,
how we struggled to keep our innocence
out of the world's greasy hands.
Oil slick on the rose.
White peonies of blood-stained Kleenex
in the toilet bowl. Eclipse of the flowers
in a city of gardens. Even when the stars
were out, the darkness lurked, the doorways
housed strangers like trap door spiders.
Joy held a grudge against our wariness.
The windows didn't trust us, and the street
was a firewalk of ordeals to test us
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poem by Patrick White
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And It's Not Hard To See I'm Wandering In A Dry Abyss
And it's not hard to see I'm wandering in a dry abyss
trying to squeeze tears as readily out of the stars as the desert
that turns everything that lives here into a chronic exile.
Don't know if I'm talking to a mirage, a reflection of some
aspect of the dark side of the moon I can't see from here,
an eidolon, a fractal of my self-similarity, a 3D projection
of my pineal gland emanating images into a creatively holographic space
and one of them is wearing your face like smoke from a fire
I'm sitting around like a frog at the autumnal equinox
beside a burning waterlily with a parched mouth.
Matters a lot, but that's ok. I've had visitations before
and I know this kind of seance can either go ethereal or carnate
and sometimes, though it's a lottery, not a spiritual discipline, both.
If my solitude talks to its own echo like a water sylph
in a housewell full of stars, who's to say that isn't
my kind of telescope? That some eyes can see further
than mirrors and lenses, and space is riddled with them
like the golden ratios behind galaxies and black holes
I keep throwing sunflower seeds into hoping they'll root and bloom.
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poem by Patrick White
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Your Intensities
Your intensities dissipating in the silence
that follows your urgent avowals,
it hurts to be subjected to oblivion
like a burnt out streetlamp in a city of light,
to stare into the invisible blaze of the vastness
without eyelids
like craters on the moon aghast with shadows
scabbing the nightshift of a crown factory,
love's labour locked out,
a footprint on the neck of a flower,
trampled like a protest sign by the crowd
of platitudinous slogans that defame it,
and the pain growing wider than the bridge
that can cross it
and my heart trying to pretend
it's still a scratched poppy
when everybody knows
it's a haemorrhaging rose.
And the stars have hardened into diamond thorns
that score the eyes like rocks
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poem by Patrick White
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I Keep Returning To This Line In My Childhood
I keep returning to this line in my childhood
I once stood in one dreaded day
every month with my mother
to prove I was loyal and reliable,
waiting for food at what was
back in the late fifties
called the Foodstall.
Though we were not animals.
We were simply poor
at the mercy of the God-wielding charities
and though it’s nowhere near the same degree
as it is of kind, we almost felt
like natives in the hands of the Catholic church.
Mostly separated mothers left in the lurch of love
with two or three whining kids
that were plague rats of measles,
mumps, ringworm, and cold sores,
agitated as electrons wanting to jump orbitals.
Natives, dried-out rummies
with faces like desiccated orange peels,
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poem by Patrick White
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