Infrequently Asked Questions
Is it true
the most compassionate people in life
are the ones in the greatest danger?
That the most generous
will lose their hands to the ones they fed?
That the bravest will be hunted down by protected cowards
and when the last of the heroes are dead
and the dragons who inspired them
are the advertising themes of amusement parks
those with the smallest balls
will give themselves the biggest awards?
Is it true
those who are creative
chafe the destroyers like anti-matter
and give the intellectuals diaper-rash of the mind?
That just to open your eyes
to watch the stars and fireflies
is enough to make other people feel blind
and insist you black them out
like pearls in an air-raid?
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Going Through A Dark Time
Going through a dark time. Antares, the red ant,
the bitter berry in the heart of Scorpio. Why not
blame it on the stars? How could they deny it?
Living penumbrally in the eclipse of a celestial body.
I want to paint my first old rusty bike that I found
languishing under the neighbour's stairs, its
deflated tires, spider looms and jinxed prayer wheels
that hadn't turned for years, want to paint it
with model airplane enamels again and run
a perfect red stripe down the middle of a black fender
gleaming like anthracite in the blue-yellow sun.
How many worlds away I am from that pure moment.
Dark in my heart, gnawing on the skulls of dragons
that have finally become like the moon
that's never known rain, a frozen watershed
in a locket of ice and no light bulb in the well.
I'm striding down the corridors of a well-polished hell
and I'm turning the portraits of my heroes toward the wall.
Why not? I've got no use for their eyes anymore.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Blue Fire
Blue fire in your eyes, for years
I've watched you smiling everywhere
against the odds
of the secret you carry within you,
the pain you carry within you
like a broken mirror
waiting for the moon to rise
as if you were a thousand lakes, each
waiting for the pearl
that would answer their darkness from within.
I was always afraid of your edges,
the way you pretended
to mistake my face for a mask,
as if I was always up to something,
as if you could hear the whisper
of the assassin behind the door
before anyone else could,
as if your pain had taught you
to be quick and clever,
to double-back like a choir of tigers,
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Everybody Knows Why The Children Are Hungry
Everybody knows why the children are hungry.
Everybody knows why the poor give up dreaming
and the rich can't sleep without surveillance.
Everybody knows why this young girl can't read
and the Taliban throw acid in her face.
Everybody knows why this young boy
at twelve years old
feels about as heroic as a statistic
and looks at the future as if
he were already a has-been.
Everybody knows why there's a rifle in his hand.
Everybody knows why
there are people washed up
on the streets of our cities
as if a great ship of state had gone down
like a garbage barge off the coast of New Jersey.
Everybody knows why
women are being sexually colonized
in the Democratic Republic of the mineral-rich Congo.
Everybody knows their atrocities
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
I Refuse
I refuse to persuade any emotion to a poem
like a horse I can lead to water but can't make drink.
If it's a straitjacket it's a straitjacket.
When its a wet suit it's a wet suit
to go swimming with stars in. Tea leaves.
Yarrow sticks. Tarot decks. Incinerated match books.
I listen to a poem as if it were a response
to what I've said, and didn't say.
I like the counter play of voices and mine
one among them, the whole tree full of birds,
and the chatter of black squirrels in the walls.
Midway between a car starting up and a stanza break
when I write, I feel like a thief that stole the prison
under the warden's nose, and broke out through the window,
exhilarated by the bliss of getting away with my freedom.
I'm on an island alone with the moon.
And it doesn't matter if I was marooned
or just washed up here like a wounded paint rag.
My spine is smoke. I drift tribes away from the fires
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Ten Hours A Day Painting In The Half Wild Fields
Ten hours a day painting in the half wild fields
at Long Bay, eleven miles outside of Westport
for four and a half years without
seeing another human for months in the winter
except when we drove into Perth every six weeks
for smokes and groceries.
A quarter mile of treacherous driveway,
mud, ice, freezing rain, you had to accelerate
just right, and steadily, to keep the car
from sliding back down the hill.
Sometimes two or three attempts
like a long distance Olympic ski jumper
and you standing at the top of the ninety metre hill
so I didn’t kill you going backwards,
one hand on a shovel
planted in a small grey pyramid of rock salt
like a sign of readiness and ownership
that always made me think
this is what an hourglass must look like
when it finally hits bottom.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
It's Not So Much
It's not so much the darkness
that bothers me
it's just that at these depths
the sea forgets how to dream.
And being a lamp unto yourself
where the darkness is so naive
it doesn't run from the light
isn't as much fun
as watching stars
try to imitate spiders
in the eleven dimensional corner
of my left eye
like cut-out constellations.
I'm not one of those who go looking for meaning
because they want to mean something themselves.
I listen to the hissing
of olaceously black rain on the asphalt
as the cars go by under my window
and the streetlights run like blood
in the gutters of their hemorrhaging swords.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Dangerous To Love Things That Perish
for Louise and Morgan
Dangerous to love things that perish
but cowardly not to.
You weren't just a cat.
You were Morgan.
You were
as when I first saw you as a kitten
cupped in Louise's hands
a cloud
a whiff of incense
smoke
a breath
a gust of stars
someone in love had breathed out.
And we loved you.
And now you're dead.
And there are two more people in the world
who can't stop weeping.
Because there is no now
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
The Object Of Our Devotion
The object of our devotion
finally asks from us
the very eyes that dazzled us into obedience,
and leads us like a wind,
the last breath we'll ever take,
in the guise of a woman
who beckons at the top of the stairwells and thermals
where the hawk wheels,
a spark of the sun,
to follow her down deeper into a darkness
that even the dead shun
like the deleted shadows of noon,
if I would be her perfect lover.
If I would be her perfect lover,
and the fever of my demon
not go mad looking for her
like water on the moon
to ease the fire, ease the fire
that blazes in my bones,
I must abdicate my consummation
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
One Star In The Dirty Window
for the occupiers of Wall Street
One star in the window and that’s enough to see me through the darkness for another night. Trying to weave a flying carpet out of a snakepit. Toxic wavelengths of mind. Poison arrowheads that make it worse to be wounded than killed outright. And all over Perth tonight I imagine there are bruised hearts like mine and yours turning cyanotically blue from having drunk from the same tainted wellsprings of life like fish that have no choice. The apples of October have been laced with the razorblades of Halloween by the psychopathic tree that hands them out like treats to the children in the doorway of an upright coffin. And the leaves are burning up in a fever of arsenic. Spiders work the loom like the strings of the system that hooks us by our gills in its seine nets until the great wild seas of our awareness and the dangerous freedom to look for new ungovernable continents within us so we can flee the corporate corruption of this one is reduced to the neurotic dimensions of a fish farm. If you are poor. If you’re worried about how to pay the rent this month. If it’s winter and there are harpies and sprites and ghouls threatening to turn the gas, the lights, the elements of life off like trolls under the bridge your money built to bilk you until it collapses from lack of repair. If you don’t how you’re going to manage to buy your kid a birthday present this year and you’re even more afraid of Christmas. If you’re poor and your prospects are as bleak as this deserted street tonight now all the ladys-in-waiting, princes, jesters, and warring kings have called it a night and emptied their street court like a bar. If you’re chronically tortured by the rags of dignity with the blood of a lost cause upon them like something that cost your mother and father their lives to fight for. And you’re ashamed of the straitjacket you’ve been forced to wear in order to have some overseer raise a spoon to your lips three exact times of the day like banking hours and GST cheques. If you smoulder with rage like a underground cedar fire burning in your roots like fuses of lightning afraid to explode. If you’re poor. If the weight of the world is on your back heavier than any cross the spiritual spin doctors of the complicit church and their political henchmen encourage you to carry like a virtue all the way to a fabricated heaven on the installment plan, but you can’t bear the load as a volunteer stretcher-bearer anymore, carrying your own corpse to the grave, while they rave in the wealth of what they have deprived you of here and now. If you’re poor. If you feel like a subliminal archetype of guilt in the collective unconscious of a society of quisling theosophists and weight-concscious c.e.o.’s sitting down to salads of money they eat out of the skulls of the children they’ve starved to death. If you don’t make enough money in Oregon to appeal to hypocritic oaths that sit on decisive committees to see if your son is worthy of a kidney transplant. An education. Piano lessons. A future that isn’t always an echo worse than the voices we heard yesterday protesting to the vampires that without a free blood bank they didn’t stand a chance of surviving the contributions they’re expected to make at night. If you’re poor in a chilly apartment in Perth tonight and you’re being eaten alive by the eggs that have been laid on your forehead like the living host to sustain the young of the killer bees that have sewn their nettles in the honey of life like the military-industrial complex of the hive. If you’re poor and you don’t get one year’s free subscription to satellite radio on the bus you have to take to work every morning surrounded by ads for the latest Ford-150 pick up truck ready to do a man’s work at the dropp of a hard hat and then go hunting in the country, and the new black paint is trying to imitate the skin of a naked woman, because your sex life depends on what you drive, and the sumptuary laws of the lies you’re allowed to wear like a Roman triumph are too stringent to get the dirt out of the dowdy greens and browns of your serfdom long enough to get laid by the calendar girls who sit like mermaids on a brand new truck, but have never sung to you. If you’re the poor wretch sitting in the doorway of the Bank of Nova Scotia across Foster Street in the small hours of the morning like a bird that gets to pick the parasites off the back of the hippopotamus that keeps rolling over on you in your sleep. For a fee. To hold up your end of a symbiotic relationship whereby you’re expected to eat shit and call it your daily bread. Eat humiliation, a ration of rat meat, and call it a just portion. Eat your education like bitter food for thought when you see how the fascistic ignorance of antediluvian fat men and their gold-digging wives are dignified by the juke-box of the news as if the point of view of a maggot on how to turn base metal into a gold butterfly it will never become were worthy of the same air time they give to eagles. One hundred news outlets with the same six slug lines like the top hits of the day. Catastrophe du jour. With rescued puppy stories for the trimmings. Eat information like the news. It’s Chinese food of the mind. Not very filling. With a fortune-cookie and a fat tape worm of better things to come wrapped around your bowels like the noose of a downed powerline that spared the cost of the rope to lynch you by your large intestine. If you’re poor and you’re always the falling leaf and never the apple. If you’re poor and it’s always autumn to judge by the banks of junkmail and bills that are swept up on your doorsill at all times of the year. If you’re poor and you’re punished for being out on the streets after curfew for having dropped through the cracks of your caste by a neocon leper colony privatized by the messianic lobbyists of free enterprise with one finger on the scales of equal opportunity because there isn’t a feather’s worth of good in them when they go before the jackal god of death and their grubby hearts are found wanting. If you’re poor and you’re listening to the North Carolina state legislature discussing your extermination in the civic minded tones of the Pied Piper of Hamlin and you’re eating your self-respect like the plague rat of why the rich suffer. Because in their creationist myth your womb is the enemy of the state. And you the infectious carrier of the pestilence. If you’re poor and sitting by the window on a warped floor behind the heritage field stones of an upstairs ghetto apartment in Perth feeling like the second coming of the Irish potato famine with no where to emigrate this time to be third in line below the Scotch and English on the food chain. If you’re poor. Tattoo this on your forehead like an Egyptian destiny you and your eyes will live to see fulfilled. It’s not your fault. Even if you’ve given up. Even if you’re gaping like zero, like absolute nothing, between two hissing sibilants of a serpentine medical symbol unravelling. And the dragon’s lost its wings. And the physician doesn’t care enough to heal himself because he’s lost his faith in oaths. Or dangerous hope has given way to futile despair and they’re both siblings of the absurd. It’s not your fault that you were born into a society where even the mirages in this desert of stars are bundled and sold like real estate. That illusions and diseases apply for patents of ownership. That even the constellations have become the work of surveyors not shepherds on a hillside and the poor are being foreclosed and evicted from the signs of the zodiac because they can’t pay the rent or the mortgage on the house they were born into. Or the hydro on the stars. Even if your spinal cord tinkles like the burnt out filament of a dead lightbulb and the shining’s gone out. It’s not your fault if the universe that was airlifted to you at birth as your portion of life with nothing missing was intercepted and sold at prices that eat their own on the black market of free enterprise for the poor, or they couldn’t afford it, and socialism for the rich because they couldn’t survive without you. You might be like the sea in the lowest place of all but all things flow like rivers down into you. And the depth of the valley of shadows and death you’re walking through alone is a function of the height of the mountain that digs it like a grave it will be buried in. When all the grains of sand like stars come together they make a sea of waves where life thrives in the here and now spontaneously not a pyramid for the sake of a single capstone whose happy afterlife is founded on quicksand.
Saw a huge spiderweb once under a streetlamp at Carleton University thirty-six years ago. Six spiders, their abdomens obese as lightbulbs, six tumours ripening on the panicked cells and neural networks of more frenzied insects drawn to the light out of the dark than their webs were meant to accommodate. The webs were ripping under the weight of the horrified fruits of their gluttony stuck in the powerlines like kites and running shoes and treacherous parachutes. The dew spangled veils of the morning were being torn off like consumerist dream catchers to entice the mob to the artificial radiance of the light that drove them crazy. But the spiders were too satiate to move. And they were being pulled down along with their prey under the massive superflux of their immensely successful catastrophe. Pleonaxia. The disease of more and more and more. And all the insects had to do because the conglomerate spiders were too immobilized by the obscenity of their gigantism to stick an ice-pick in the back of Trotsky’s neck in Cuba was to keep a cool enough head to extricate themselves puppet string by puppet string, spinal cord by spinal cord, straitjacket by straitjacket, wing by wing from the web. But most were paralyzed by their own fear waiting for the fatal moment of the ruinous agenda to come like a budget cutting knife to end their nightmare. And after all these years that terrible insight still provides me with blood-freezing metaphors into the present economic system that preys upon the poor by beading the foodchain with black thoraxes as if they were the ninety-nine names of God and it were a rosary we could all say our novinas on pleading for more lifeboats and happier lifelines than the rigging of this ship of state that’s going down with all of us aboard as the captains of industry jump like rats in Genoa back into the year 1348 when there were corpses galore to feed on.
If you’re poor. Come to the revolution but leave your guillotine at home. Come to the revolution but leave Lenin in Geneva. Come to the revolution like Wat Tyler but don’t believe the promises of the king. Come to the revolution like Spartacus but don’t put your faith in pirates to provide you with the means of escape. Come to the revolution like Toussaint L’Ouverture in Haiti but first drive the fer de lance out of your sugar-cane so that no innocent bystanders get bit as an off-handed matter of population control. Come to the revolution like Aung San Suu Kyi ready to sit down in the teahouses of Burma to pry the fingers of the junta off the throats of the people like the petals of a flower whose time has come to let go. Come to the revolution like Ghandi walking all the way to the sea to turn the pillars of British imperialism to salt without all the fire and brimstone of Sodom and Gomorrah. Come like him to the revolution as a leader who knew how to follow his people. Come to the revolution like Helen Keller who stood up to the Rupert Murdochs of the age who were more in need of signage than she was on behalf of the rights of the working people and declared Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! What an ungallant bird it is! Socially blind and deaf, it defends a system that’s intolerable. The Eagle and I are at war. Come to the revolution like Nelson Mandela to an international rugby match in the uniform of a Springbok scrum half to show that over-rated hatred can’t make a comeback over the jubilation of people in play with one another in time enough to win. Come to the revolution like Victor Jara and the Chilean art brigades and bring that guitar and that voice he left us that you’ve been wanting to play for decades with a compassionate feel for the sorrows of others right down to the tips of your social democratic fingerprints as if you weren’t born too late to celebrate a lost cause with a Cinderella story right out the social pages of the mid-sixties into the front page slug lines of msnbc news today. And remember it’s better to sing sincerely than well when you’ve got Bob Dylan for a voice coach. Come to the revolution like Tuwakal Karman of Yemen like the first coffee flower of the Arab Spring to raise her voice against Ali Abdullah Saleh in the name of human rights and freedom of expression. Come to the revolution like Martin Luther to the church door in Wittenburg and post your thirty-three articles of protest but don’t think because you throw inkwells at the devil that’s the same as writing your name in blood on the marble of Wall Street or a war memorial for the dead of Vietnam. Come like George Washington to the American Revolution ready to lay your power down as a sign of complete victory over what satisfies the industrial complexity of the generals’ hearts. Come like Barack Obama to the wellsprings of a cleaner watershed than that which flowed like the corrupt ditches of the tainted bloodstreams of Eden like the four rivers of the running sores of the trickle down economics of the political food chain that ran before him for office by putting a carrot in front of a donkey and all your eggs in one basket in front of a rampaging elephant. Come to the revolution like Emmeline Pankhurst to a hunger strike in a game of cat and mouse with the government who’ll catch you and let you go to fatten you up and keep you from being force fed before they arrest you again for throwing your weight around like Emily Davison at the king’s horse in the name of wanting to run like a candidate at the same race track without the handicap of not being able to vote. Come to the revolution like Dolores Jiminez y Muro with a political plan to give Emiliano Zapata a Mexican classroom of political reform worth dying for. If you’re poor, as Kurt Cobain said, come as you are. And if Jesus doesn’t want you for a sunbeam then come as a cloud. Come as a mountain. Come as a full eclipse of the moon or a loveletter that someone sent back or come as seven come eleven and trust in your luck when the dice are not loaded like skulls with no eyes against you.
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
