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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476597" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Going Through A Dark Time</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476597" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Going through a dark time. Antares, the red ant, <br>the bitter berry in the heart of Scorpio. Why not <br>blame it on the stars? How could they deny it? <br>Living penumbrally in the eclipse of a celestial body.<br>I want to paint my first old rusty bike that I found <br>languishing under the neighbour's stairs, its <br>deflated tires, spider looms and jinxed prayer wheels<br>that hadn't turned for years, want to paint it <br>with model airplane enamels again and run <br>a perfect red stripe down the middle of a black fender <br>gleaming like anthracite in the blue-yellow sun. <br>How many worlds away I am from that pure moment. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476597" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Dark in my heart, gnawing on the skulls of dragons <br>that have finally become like the moon <br>that's never known rain, a frozen watershed <br>in a locket of ice and no light bulb in the well. <br>I'm striding down the corridors of a well-polished hell <br>and I'm turning the portraits of my heroes toward the wall. <br>Why not? I've got no use for their eyes anymore. <br>I've drained the lies out of the samples of their deaths. <br>I've chewed the flavour out of what it was they had to teach. <br>I've trashed my best features in dangerous neighbourhoods. <br>I've broken my own brain like bread with them, <br>offered them my blood like a rose with teeth<br>and watched them evaporate like stars in the sun<br>as if they never really knew they had my devotion. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476597" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">What I made of them to set my own potential an example. <br>Something unattainable to aspire to <br>so I would be sure to lose as they did<br>preferring a brilliant failure to a mediocre triumph. <br>I think the quality of a human is a direct function <br>of the depth of their suffering. And I loved the ones <br>who cried out so beautifully in their agony <br>the night birds didn't dare lift their tiny voices <br>up again for fear of being put to shame<br>for the pettiness of their desire. Or the wolves <br>ever howl at the moon again without being aware <br>of the absurdity of their longing for an old stone. <br>I have danced barefoot on the splinters <br>of the winter chandeliers that brought the trees down <br>like a palace of tears in a brutal ice storm.<br>I've heard the Pleiades crash like silverware <br>all over the ground of a botched burglary <br>and seen the junkies run like collapsed veins <br>to pick the spoons up like fences and crows. <br>Going through a dark time. The shamans <br>are dying in the treetops from the shock<br>of what they had to see and live to be <br>if they wanted to die thoroughly back into life again, <br>apprenticed to their own foreseeable pain like savage healers. <br>Winged serpents angered by the humiliation of the flesh<br>like a rose too beautiful not to be abused <br>by those who desecrate life out of their own self-hatred <br>that they are possessed by what they despise the most<br>and beauty will have nothing to do with their power<br>that isn't forced, or broken, or garbaged. <br>The mirrors of the spirit freak and flake away <br>from the ideals of their silver lining in horror.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476597" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Funny how you can come to look upon <br>even the most passionate of loveletters <br>with the eyes of a three hundred million year old reptile <br>as if life could not be borne any other way than as a thorn <br>through the heart of a voodoo doll <br>that cursed the good in life for the passing of it. <br>What have I not buried in this desert of stars <br>as if one night I would be able to come back to it <br>and ask it what it dreamed of in my absence? <br>To see if the afterlife of a mirage tasted <br>like water, blood, or wine, or more real than death, <br>the tears of someone who had aged into understanding<br>when the windows that looked out on life <br>like a valence of silicon dioxide slow down<br>like glaciers of glass, and the mirrors speed up <br>as if they were running out of time for reflection. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476597" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Ask a man what he misses the most and listen to the echo <br>of how long it takes to reach his ears and if <br>there's an ocean in his eyes he drowns in <br>and I'll reintroduce you to someone you already know<br>talking to themselves in the dark to keep from going mad. <br>Who toys with the smiles of their approaching assassins <br>like the slash of a snake's mouth breaking into blossom? <br>Life is the puncture wound of the staple <br>that was meant to mend it like a bridge <br>that sat cross-legged on a lotus in meditation. <br>And it's easy enough to look at the fireflies after a storm <br>and the stars so out of touch with the world as it is<br>you long for the innocence of the childhood distances <br>you traversed every night you crawled out of your sleep <br>to approach the mystery of your own solitude <br>like an estranged familiar calling you to come alone <br>to the furthest extremes of the night and beyond. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476597" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Going through a dark time. Too many gates. <br>Too many doors. Too many worn thresholds <br>Too many threadbare carpets under the one-sided window. <br>Too many dead birds killed by a lack of transparency. <br>And still, I refuse the blindfold when I'm standing <br>in front of a firing squad of stars <br>armed with the latest telescopes.<br>I've always been one of those who prided myself <br>upon my strength to see it coming from afar off <br>and stare at my own death in the third eye of it. <br>And what monument could you possibly raise<br>befitting someone who made exile and rebellion <br>the two monolithic cornerstones of their life<br>if not a rogue planet beyond the reach of gravity <br>looking for a star they could thrive in the light of <br>without the slightest shadow of ulterior spontaneity? </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476597" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Going through a dark time. I will not put my eyes out<br>by turning up the light on what befalls me, <br>as if there were something I could save myself from.<br>I will eat every detail of the pain and not waste <br>one unmarrowed bone of it. I will consume it whole <br>like a prophet in the belly of the whale, make the message <br>flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, and then <br>I'll spit it out like a bullet I pulled out of my heart <br>with my teeth, my soul, the elegance of my desolation. <br>I'll make key chains for the blind out of spite <br>and striate the rocks of this cold prison with the runes<br>of the horned ones who linger here with me. <br>I'll be a mile-high corrective lens of ice<br>and putting one hand over my third eye <br>I'll read the writing on the wall from memory <br>and renounce every sacred syllable of it like heretic <br>that thrives on fire, that scatters his ashes in triumph<br>and feathers the wind like a gnostic phoenix <br>with gospels of my own where there's not one imperative. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476597" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Pain demands my obedience, threatens to break me. <br>I smash myself on the rocks like an empty wine goblet <br>and say, you can break what remains. You can grind <br>me down to dust, if you like, you can step over me <br>like Spinoza lying down in the threshold of the synagogue<br>to atone for what he opened the world's eyes up to, <br>but my vision of life, though a squall of stars, remains my own<br>and the seeing isn't in my eyes, and the one who suffers <br>isn't in chains, nor the door locked on my heart <br>for fear of the night, for fear of turning to stone <br>when I look the snake pit in the eye with a microscope, <br>and observe the minutiae of the heart's addictive attention to detail.<br>Though every word be a thorn through my tongue, <br>Yet will I sing of the agony of lemons and roses <br>bleeding on the razorwire in No Man's Land for mercy, <br>and those compelled by the whips of circumstance <br>to dance themselves to death because it amuses the cripples, <br>and the little, amoebic man who never amounted to anything <br>and his wife who has aged like salt in a conquered city<br>still thinking she's a garden ornament, I will sing <br>in the name of what even the worst must endure, <br>just to set this methane moon afire in the darkness <br>like a furnace in an abandoned school of unregenerate clowns. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476597" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Going through a dark time. A rite of ordeals, <br>the brutal pit of the mystery you can break your teeth on <br>like a koan or an iron-nickel tektite in Antarctica<br>to get at the life inside your own panspermic mind.<br>I should happily break my flesh like bread upon the waters <br>for the fish and the birds, and save the life <br>of an unworthy man from drowning <br>like bad meat in a well, or lose <br>my own precarious foothold on the precipice of an abyss <br>that humbles me to the point of no return. I should do this<br>for the thought-trains of the birds that shall come after me <br>high and late at night through the bars of my longing, <br>yearning to return to my ancestral homelessness<br>like a wandering planet that doesn't give off any light of its own <br>but shines with life, despite the odds, shines <br>tenaciously with life through all these transformations<br>I take on like a river in its own running, <br>pouring myself out of one life wholly into another <br>like an igneous fireclock on the nightshift<br>that keeps adding more carbon to my steel.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476597" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Going through a dark time, I will not suffer <br>this passage passively like smoke, I will not plead <br>to abstract my senses from reality to deaden the pain <br>or thin my blood with holy water from a dirty fountain.<br>This dark child of my life shall not be an orphan. <br>I will not disown the pain, I will not drive <br>myself out into the wilderness like a scapegoat <br>to wash the soot off the temple I cry in <br>though they were my doves that were stained <br>in their own blood in the name of a useless sacrifice <br>to a unity that includes as much of separation <br>as of love that welds a stronger bond <br>that doesn't scar the spirit, or dull the eyes, <br>or deaden the tongue to the taste of the stars <br>on the lips of the people who pass through our lives <br>like thresholds on their way to somewhere else<br>than this palatial homelessness we dwell in alone <br>throwing boundary stones like asteroids through the mirrors<br>just to keep things abundantly clear and open between us.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476597" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Going through a dark time. Swimming through a tar pit. <br>Another doorway without an exit or an entrance. <br>Another keel-hauling on the hull of the moon <br>trying to maintain discipline aboard a shipwreck. <br>And the unbearable sadness that crushes your heart <br>like a pop can in the depths of an unrevealing ocean. <br>Your face is a skin graft on a burn victim.<br>People reach out for you, but only with their hands <br>when there's nothing at all, nothing at all to grasp <br>of what has already come and gone for good or bad, <br>who can tell? I'm centered like rain in my falling. <br>And there's something vaguely radioactive about the way <br>I glow in the dark, though there are dozens of dead fireflies <br>on my windowsill that dropped like exhausted stars. <br>I move into the available dimension of a future <br>that hasn't won my confidence, and the past<br>is the burnt foundation of a crack house in the zodiac<br>cooking rocks like a meteor shower with its radiant<br>in the eyes of everyone I meet who's trying to shoot the stars out. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476597" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Going through a dark time. A bardo state. Nirvanic doubt. <br>The new moon no brighter than the last eclipse. <br>I hear the disembodied thunder of my amplified heart <br>making its way toward me like an enlightened storm front. <br>I've always chosen the hardest teachers to ignore <br>and where the road divides, I've gone both ways at once <br>just to give my earthbound guides a chance of a wishbone <br>to find their way back on their own by following <br>the choices they made to get here like an avalanche.<br>I'm as effortless about my despair as I am about bliss.<br>I treat them both as if they were none of my business. <br>The birds and apples come to this rootless tree <br>of their own accord and the tree does not protest <br>the unleaving of an earthly excellence <br>that blossomed awhile in the human heart and was gone.<br>A windfall of loss. The dead flower frosted with winter stars<br>in a dream where the waterclocks are frozen in time <br>and this is perfect and that is perfect and if you take <br>perfect from perfect, it's still as perfect as it was then<br>and as it is now and shall be tomorrow.<br>I watch the moonrise without breathless aspirations.<br>I observe the sunset without lingering disappointments.<br>What I have received in joy, I will not deceive in sorrow.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Patrick+White">Patrick White</a></strong></div>