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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476845" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Sad To See How We Bait Our Mind-hold Traps With Our Hearts</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476845" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Sad to see how we bait our mind-hold traps with our hearts, <br>put all we are on the line, just for a little love, a kiss, a touch <br>an embrace that doesn't snap shut like the jaws of a great white <br>we put our trust in not to draw blood at the first bite. <br>I take people's faces off the shelves as they pass by<br>like second hand bookstores, and casually browse <br>their life stories only to find whole chapters ripped out <br>and sometimes the eyes, so you can see clear through <br>to the other side of what there was in the way of a view <br>to look back at you, that someone despised, and cut out <br>like a number two, twenty pound, book paper death mask, <br>black holes like the eye sockets of a skull, <br>slowly eating what was left of a face that yesterday <br>was the peer of the stars, the great seal of the sun, <br>the imprimatur of moonlight on the waters of the lake. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476845" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And I know those who love love for love's sake <br>more than they ever have the topsoil of an erosive human, <br>or the bedrock and watershed of their darker depths <br>where the fish, like ghosts, or fireflies and stars <br>have to shine by their own light if they want to walk <br>swim or fly the rest of the way whistling in the dark on their own.<br>Or just want to stand there like lighthouses <br>unaware of the danger they pose to themselves<br>when they don't take the advice of the seagulls in a storm<br>and just stand there, upright and brittle as the eternal names <br>on an obelisk in an earthquake, or a candle <br>whose spine was broken before it had a chance to burn. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476845" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Trashed, rejected, betrayed, played and abandoned, <br>the spring equinox makes its precessional wobbling way <br>through ordeals worthy of an Apache warrior <br>daring his adolescence into maturity<br>like a flagellant whipped through the stations of the cross, <br>or the slums of the black-hearted houses of a zodiac of anti-matter<br>dreaming of Shangri Las of light where totem animals and taboos <br>are tasted like forbidden fruit with ritualistic immunity.<br>Bitterly estranged by the excruciating transformations of love <br>I've seen people befriend and sword dance with each other <br>like alarm clocks in a snakepit with what they hate the most <br>to see which of two assassins is going to wake up first<br>from the coma they've put each other in like a direct hit<br>in public in broad daylight, or more discretely, <br>slumped against a lamp post like a garbage bag. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476845" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Love can empower a hero in a hardware store, <br>but once someone walks under a ladder, <br>love sours into an infernal power base <br>that depends on the opinion of its inferiors <br>to sustain its paranoid grasp of supremacy.<br>Love cuts the power lines to the embassy <br>like a coup d'etat as it shreds <br>its correspondence in leaving <br>for a covert afterlife without extradition.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476845" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And fair to say, love's the white blossom of the moon <br>on a dead branch that breaks into leaf again. <br>Love's the pain-eater, the bliss-giver, <br>the sacred whore outside the Iseum, <br>the vestal virgin that keeps the hearth flame <br>alive for the lifespan of a vow of thirty years, <br>or be buried up to her headful of honeyed tresses <br>in red army ants that burn like stinging nettles. <br>Love's the lonely career of a bank cashier <br>that talks through a hole in a bullet proof window <br>wishing there were no time locks on her heart <br>to keep the bad guys out of the hope chest of the vaults <br>or the morgue of safety deposit boxes <br>where she keeps her feelings to herself.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476845" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I've been in love and know that when you're in love<br>there's no outside anywhere. I've felt the fire <br>run its fingers through my hair and ignite <br>the fuses of my cedar roots burning underground <br>to flare up five miles down the valley, <br>a week after I thought I'd put it out. I've <br>touched the mystery of life embodied in a woman <br>and drank the wine of the shipwrecked hareem <br>of amphorae on the bottom, and been slain <br>by the beauty of the death that was offered me <br>by the black muse of a waterlily into witchcraft<br>and been feted like an Ainu bearcub at the New Year <br>before she sacrificed me like a message to the gods.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476845" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Though less immediately appealing to the Luna Moths<br>who want to be immolated in the candle flame <br>that's driving them tantrically mad with mystic lust, <br>I've loved women who were kinder than most sunsets<br>and bloodbanks, gardens like nurses <br>in intensive care units on the nightshift <br>whose tears could keep you alive intravenously, <br>whose smiles were bouquets with something illicit <br>smuggled inside, to motivate a full recovery. <br>And the way a stone feels the sun seeping into it <br>in the morning, until it's saturated with light <br>like the fruits of the earth, I came to love them<br>the way a rock with any understanding of life <br>comes to love its lichens, moss and columbine<br>even though, a moment ago, it was a nickel-iron meteor<br>about to put its fist through the mirror like an change of species. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476845" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Nymph, wife, and crone. Birth, life, and death. <br>The triune identity of the moon that gives you breath <br>and then takes it away like a gift you would be <br>better off without. A black widow spider <br>playing a violin as if she were rocking a baby in her arms, <br>and you couldn't help but be brought to tears, <br>and in the blink of a third eye, <br>the bloodthirsty eclipse of a detached retina<br>wrecking the rainbow of a promise that wasn't kept<br>as if the cockpit just blew out of the space shuttle. <br>O and then the cooling loaves of the flesh <br>she makes of her occult body and breaks with you<br>like a wishbone she makes of her hips <br>from the throat of a black swan in the chimney <br>of an amorous anaconda with the eyes of a running doe. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476845" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And I know that death is love, is passage, <br>extinction and renewal, is growth that leaves you <br>feeling like a stranger on your own doorstep, <br>or it was your house but there was no one left <br>to answer you when you showed up again <br>like a loveletter feeling like junk mail.<br>Walk away, walk away, walk away, <br>on your own two feet, not your hands and your knees<br>and on your way out, see if you can remember <br>all the names of the stars in the Pleiades, <br>beginning with Alcyone, even as space turns to glass, <br>and ruminate on the beauty in the vastness of things <br>that come together, mingle, and separate <br>like restless sacred rivers out for a fling <br>that ended up crying alone before themselves or God<br>as if their eyes were jewels, and their hearts <br>the mystic watersheds of flowers smiling through their tears. <br>Walk away like an actor turned audience <br>walks out on his own play on closing night. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476845" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Not always, but often, separation is a veil of tears <br>that gives its eyes up to the beauty of the light <br>that comes shining through them like a smeared insight <br>into how easily the simple radiance of being alive <br>to discover in compassion the sweetness and wisdom of life <br>how easily the afterlife of love can thaw <br>the diamond snake-eyes, the lunar fangs <br>of the most intransigent horrors at zenith or nadir<br>and liberate all the stars like the pollen of fallen flowers <br>from the glacier the Milky Way turned into<br>to bloom again like starmaps gone mad <br>and green the Sahara into a sea of mammals and grass <br>with ten degrees of warmth and affection <br>at the end of a long ice age weeping into its hands<br>for how creatively beautiful, sad, freaked <br>with motherlodes of wisdom in its darkest ores, <br>inspired visions in fires that put the constellations to shame<br>when love goes supernova and can be seen a galaxy away.<br> <br>And the metaphors that proliferate like new forms of life <br>as if the Pre-Cambrian were merely the blueprint <br>for masterpieces to come, and yes, even when love <br>plays the delta blues with its face against the wall <br>like Robert Johnson, and the abyss breathes in your face <br>as if you were about to be swallowed like a cosmic egg <br>by a dragon of dark transformative energy<br>unhinging its jaws to consume you without pity <br>like a black hole that turns you <br>like the key to another universe<br>where snakes can fly and you're not denied <br>some of what you weren't granted in this one.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476845" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And looking back at what you thought had ended <br>you're amazed at the dark harmonies of picture-music <br>that kept on playing while Atlantis sank, <br>like deep undercurrents of love <br>in the watershed of your housewell, <br>and the eclipses that no one heeded in time <br>or mistook for sunspots, shed themselves <br>like the petals of a black rose <br>emanating the fragrance of a new moon<br>tempting the martyrs of moonlight <br>to the danger of her thorns <br>and the elixir of her tears <br>we sip from our own skulls <br>like hummingbirds at the lips of holy grails.</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>