Ever Since I Became A Poet
Ever since I became a poet
my whole life is an open wound
I've been bleeding out of
like a ribbon on a gift addressed to everyone.
Started out an astronomer
and then came poetry and painting.
And ever since, on days like this,
feels like I'm hanging in mid air
like Sri Lankans do to prophesy at New Year
with a great hook of a question-mark
through my gut. And I do. I prophecy
just to get a grip on the blinding pain.
Probably prophesy too much.
Wish I was talented enough to say nothing
and wasn't compelled to scream out like this in agony
like a screech owl with blood on its claws
and huge wise eyes that can see in the dark.
End times. Sixty three years closer
to being reborn again as someone
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poem by Patrick White
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The Rain Tonight
The rain tonight
a gentle carillon of afterthought
pensively lingering like eyes in the window.
The town unusually quiet
even for two a.m.
Asphalt with the albido of a wet rat snake
or a black bull
and blades of garish light
thrust through its back
like the swords of the streetlamp matadors
poised over its haemorrhaging
like solar daffodils
about to deliver the coup de grace
to the new moon.
The farmlands and the pot patches flourish.
Everything's wearing the mirror of everything else
like skin
and the leaves
pour their hearts out
like spouts without pitchers.
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poem by Patrick White
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There's Nothing Cozy About Real Beauty
There’s nothing cozy about real beauty.
That’s why it scares you to death
when you’re around it. You sense
that it disdains to kill you
simply because it knows it can
but that only makes you beg for the knife
even more, even deeper, until
you’ve suffered more death
than you ever knew there was to suffer.
It’s the same with the truth. The truth
isn’t the act of a well-meaning
coffee-table sentiment,
a hundred dollar book
of recycled paper
to help save the Caribou,
an a chequered impressionist table-cloth
with compositionally balanced butter-knives
that have never tasted blood in their lives.
If you can’t hear the shriek
of the red-tailed hawk as it plunges
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poem by Patrick White
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Everybody Says I'm Too Intense
Everybody says I'm too intense and I say
you sure as hell aren't.
And since I was sixteen in highschool
and before that in the local neighbourhood
in the bosom of my family
people have always thought I was mad.
My highschool graduation yearbook says
most likely to become
a mad teacher mad scientist mad poet mad.
An oracular assessment of my peers
that has haunted me for years.
But I say crazy is the only antidote
to the extreme chaos of conditioned consciousness.
Look at the world.
Lies lies lies.
A coalition of lies
that calls itself
the history of civilization.
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poem by Patrick White
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Poetry Used To Live In A Forbidden State Of Courageous Grace
Poetry used to live in a forbidden state of courageous grace
but now it's palpably culpable of cowardice.
Paper-mache lifemasks with all the characteristics
of a gaping sin of omission. As F.R. Scott said of E.J. Pratt
in his poem about the building of the CPR
where are the coolies in your poem, Ned?
The ten thousand that died lining and tamping track.
Now the real subject matter of most works of art
is not what was put in, but what was left out,
where's the heart, the soul, the imagination,
where's the grief and the longing that slowly matured
into the black flames of the charred roses
that immolated themselves in their own fires
for the love of someone they couldn't live without
like the other wing of the song of a bird
maimed by the oversight like a tree in chains.
The applause of trained seals isn't praise
and celebrity isn't fame. Everyone's good
at divining the well, but who takes the time
to dig one any deeper than their own shallow grave?
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poem by Patrick White
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I Remember The Bees
I remember the bees
moving like heavy slow notes
among the sunflower microphones
two octaves lower than the fireflies
on late August afternoons
perishing in the light.
And the irrelevant felicity of being me
with nothing to do but time.
Many roads and years away now
and this is another life
another town
and I'm staring out of a window
that's been forgotten by the eyes
that used to look through it
at the bleak winter rain
trying to distinguish the oases
from the mirages
in this glass-blowing desert of pain.
I remember white sweet clover along the dusty roadside
overwhelming the still hot air with its sweetness
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poem by Patrick White
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Now Halcyon Seas
Now halcyon seas, the Kingfisher Star, Alcyone.
No sign of ever having drowned here. Most
are as unaware of the sentient space they're immersed in
as a fish is of the water it wears like skin
or a bird of the air it plunges through. I was
given a brain. The universe was rolled up
into a ball of starmud, a planetesimal of my own,
that was meant to receive a lot more than it
could ever transmit. The way this bursting bubble
of a multiverse gets you to listen to it
once you get sick of listening to your own voice
trying to lift words and feelings like an ant
with a butterfly wing in its mandibles like a sail
that knows more about which way the wind is blowing
than it does. I may be only a whisper
of the shriek I used to be in a much denser medium
than this when I felt my lungs being crushed like bag-pipes
by the implosions of a black dwarf. Thirteen tons
per cubic centimetre of mass. Things weighed
heavily on me back then like basso-profundo bells
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poem by Patrick White
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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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