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Plain Truth and Blind Ignorance
Truth
'God speed you, ancient father,
And give you a good daye;
What is the cause, I praye you,
So sadly here you staye?
And that you keep such gazing
On this decayed place,
The which, for superstition,
Good princes down did raze?'
Ignorance
'Chill tell thee, by my vazen,
That zometimes che have knowne
A vair and goodly abbey
Stand here of bricke and stone;
And many a holy vrier,
As ich may say to thee,
Within these goodly cloysters
Che did full often zee.'
Truth.
'Then I must tell thee, father,
In truthe and veritie,
A sorte of greater hypocrites
Thou couldst not likely see;
Deceiving of the simple
With false and feigned lies:
But such an order truly
Christ never did devise.'
Ignorance.
'Ah! ah! che zmell the enow, man;
Che know well what thou art;
A vellow of mean learning,
Thee was not worth a vart;
Vor when we had the old lawe,
A merry world was then,
And every thing was plenty
Among all zorts of men.'
Truth.
'Thou givest me an answer,
As did the Jewes sometimes
Unto the prophet Jeremye,
When he accus'd their crimes:
' 'Twas mercy,' sayd the people,
'And joyfull in our rea'me,
When we did offer spice-cakes
Unto the queen of hea'n.''
[...] Read more
poem by Anonymous Olde English
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Gotham - Book III
Can the fond mother from herself depart?
Can she forget the darling of her heart,
The little darling whom she bore and bred,
Nursed on her knees, and at her bosom fed;
To whom she seem'd her every thought to give,
And in whose life alone she seem'd to live?
Yes, from herself the mother may depart,
She may forget the darling of her heart,
The little darling whom she bore and bred,
Nursed on her knees, and at her bosom fed,
To whom she seem'd her every thought to give,
And in whose life alone she seem'd to live;
But I cannot forget, whilst life remains,
And pours her current through these swelling veins,
Whilst Memory offers up at Reason's shrine;
But I cannot forget that Gotham's mine.
Can the stern mother, than the brutes more wild,
From her disnatured breast tear her young child,
Flesh of her flesh, and of her bone the bone,
And dash the smiling babe against a stone?
Yes, the stern mother, than the brutes more wild,
From her disnatured breast may tear her child,
Flesh of her flesh, and of her bone the bone,
And dash the smiling babe against a stone;
But I, (forbid it, Heaven!) but I can ne'er
The love of Gotham from this bosom tear;
Can ne'er so far true royalty pervert
From its fair course, to do my people hurt.
With how much ease, with how much confidence--
As if, superior to each grosser sense,
Reason had only, in full power array'd,
To manifest her will, and be obey'd--
Men make resolves, and pass into decrees
The motions of the mind! with how much ease,
In such resolves, doth passion make a flaw,
And bring to nothing what was raised to law!
In empire young, scarce warm on Gotham's throne,
The dangers and the sweets of power unknown,
Pleased, though I scarce know why, like some young child,
Whose little senses each new toy turns wild,
How do I hold sweet dalliance with my crown,
And wanton with dominion, how lay down,
Without the sanction of a precedent,
Rules of most large and absolute extent;
Rules, which from sense of public virtue spring,
And all at once commence a Patriot King!
But, for the day of trial is at hand,
And the whole fortunes of a mighty land
Are staked on me, and all their weal or woe
Must from my good or evil conduct flow,
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poem by Charles Churchill
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The Teares of the Muses
Rehearse to me ye sacred Sisters nine:
The golden brood of great Apolloes wit,
Those piteous plaints and sorrowful sad tine,
Which late ye powred forth as ye did sit
Beside the siluer Springs of Helicone,
Making your musick of hart-breaking mone.
For since the time that Phoebus foolish sonne
Ythundered through Ioues auengefull wrath,
For trauersing the charret of the Sunne
Beyond the compasse of his pointed path,
Of you his mournfull Sisters was lamented,
Such mournfull tunes were neuer since inuented.
Nor since that faire Calliope did lose
Her loued Twinnes, the dearlings of her ioy,
Her Palici, whom her vnkindly foes
The fatall Sisters, did for spight destroy,
Whom all the Muses did bewaile long space;
Was euer heard such wayling in this place.
For all their groues, which with the heauenly noyses,
Of their sweete instruments were wont to sound,
And th' hollow hills, from which their siluer voyces
Were wont redoubled Echoes to rebound,
Did now rebound with nought but rufull cries,
And yelling shrieks throwne vp into the skies.
The trembling streames, which wont in chanels cleare
To romble gently downe with murmur soft,
And were by them right tunefull taught to beare
A Bases part amongst their consorts oft;
Now forst to ouerflowe with brackish teares,
With troublous noyse did dull their daintie eares.
The ioyous Nymphes and lightfoote Faeries
Which thether came to heare their musick sweet,
And to the measure of their melodies
Did learne to moue their nimble shifting feete;
Now hearing them so heauily lament,
Like heauily lamenting from them went.
And all that els was wont to worke delight
Through the diuine infusion of their skill,
And all that els seemd faire and fresh in sight,
So made by nature for to serue their will,
Was turned now to dismall heauinesse,
Was turned now to dreadfull vglinesse.
Ay me, what thing on earth that all thing breeds,
Might be the cause of so impatient plight?
[...] Read more
poem by Edmund Spenser
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Holding On With Wishes To Experience This
Altrhough...
They're slipping with a gripping,
To a bottomless pit.
With an ignorance addicted unresisted.
And,
Holding on and wishing to experience it...
Are the ones who practice posing,
In a darkened abyss.
With a proving that an ignorance for them is bliss.
The people of today...
Are crazed with beliefs.
And refusing to release,
All delusions they've been feeding.
The people of today...
Are crazed with beliefs,
That the only life to live,
Is the one of deceit.
Holding on with wishes to experience this,
Darkened abyss...
With a proving that an ignorance for them is bliss.
Holding on with wishes to experience this,
Darkened abyss...
With a proving that an ignorance for them is bliss.
The people of today...
Are crazed with beliefs.
And refusing to release,
All delusions they've been feeding.
The people of today...
Are crazed with beliefs,
That the only life to live,
Is the one of deceit.
Holding on with wishes to experience this,
Darkened abyss...
With a proving that an ignorance for them is bliss.
They keep on holding onto to wishes to experience this,
Darkened abyss...
With a proving that an ignorance for them is bliss.
poem by Lawrence S. Pertillar
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Ignorance
Ignorance is a dreadful enemy
A malady like psychosis
An ailment with scary prognosis
A disease every human must avoid
Ignorance is lunacy
It is a disease of the brain
Holding the mind captive
Blinding its subject from the truth,
Jaundicing the views of its client
Ignorance is an albatross
Brain behind poor decision making
Culprit for derisorily defective reasoning
Rendering its host a nuisance
A liability in useful debates and discussions
From ignorance we must be free.
Ignorance we must strive to banish
To enable us to be accomplished,
Partakers in discussions,
And assets to finding solutions.
poem by Emmanuel Oduro
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A Poet's Voice XV
Part One
The power of charity sows deep in my heart, and I reap and gather the wheat in bundles and give them to the hungry.
My soul gives life to the grapevine and I press its bunches and give the juice to the thirsty.
Heaven fills my lamp with oil and I place it at my window to direct the stranger through the dark.
I do all these things because I live in them; and if destiny should tie my hands and prevent me from so doing, then death would be my only desire. For I am a poet, and if I cannot give, I shall refuse to receive.
Humanity rages like a tempest, but I sigh in silence for I know the storm must pass away while a sigh goes to God.
Human kinds cling to earthly things, but I seek ever to embrace the torch of love so it will purify me by its fire and sear inhumanity from my heart.
Substantial things deaden a man without suffering; love awakens him with enlivening pains.
Humans are divided into different clans and tribes, and belong to countries and towns. But I find myself a stranger to all communities and belong to no settlement. The universe is my country and the human family is my tribe.
Men are weak, and it is sad that they divide amongst themselves. The world is narrow and it is unwise to cleave it into kingdoms, empires, and provinces.
Human kinds unite themselves one to destroy the temples of the soul, and they join hands to build edifices for earthly bodies. I stand alone listening to the voice of hope in my deep self saying, "As love enlivens a man's heart with pain, so ignorance teaches him the way of knowledge." Pain and ignorance lead to great joy and knowledge because the Supreme Being has created nothing vain under the sun.
Part Two
I have a yearning for my beautiful country, and I love its people because of their misery. But if my people rose, stimulated by plunder and motivated by what they call "patriotic spirit" to murder, and invaded my neighbor's country, then upon the committing of any human atrocity I would hate my people and my country.
I sing the praise of my birthplace and long to see the home of my children; but if the people in that home refused to shelter and feed the needy wayfarer, I would convert my praise into anger and my longing to forgetfulness. My inner voice would say, "The house that does not comfort the need is worthy of naught by destruction."
I love my native village with some of my love for my country; and I love my country with part of my love for the earth, all of which is my country; and I love the earth will all of myself because it is the haven of humanity, the manifest spirit of God.
Humanity is the spirit of the Supreme Being on earth, and that humanity is standing amidst ruins, hiding its nakedness behind tattered rags, shedding tears upon hollow cheeks, and calling for its children with pitiful voice. But the children are busy singing their clan's anthem; they are busy sharpening the swords and cannot hear the cry of their mothers.
Humanity appeals to its people but they listen not. Were one to listen, and console a mother by wiping her tears, other would say, "He is weak, affected by sentiment."
Humanity is the spirit of the Supreme Being on earth, and that Supreme Being preaches love and good-will. But the people ridicule such teachings. The Nazarene Jesus listened, and crucifixion was his lot; Socrates heard the voice and followed it, and he too fell victim in body. The followers of The Nazarene and Socrates are the followers of Deity, and since people will not kill them, they deride them, saying, "Ridicule is more bitter than killing."
Jerusalem could not kill The Nazarene, nor Athens Socrates; they are living yet and shall live eternally. Ridicule cannot triumph over the followers of Deity. They live and grow forever.
Part Three
Thou art my brother because you are a human, and we both are sons of one Holy Spirit; we are equal and made of the same earth.
You are here as my companion along the path of life, and my aid in understanding the meaning of hidden Truth. You are a human, and, that fact sufficing, I love you as a brother. You may speak of me as you choose, for Tomorrow shall take you away and will use your talk as evidence for his judgment, and you shall receive justice.
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poem by Khalil Gibran
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Ignorance Has Died
Why are they so gloomy?
Sitting and dressed as if for mourning?
'They have been there for a few days,
Sitting in a vigil.
Praying over the demise of ignorance.'
LOL...
You can not be serious.
Why don't you tell them,
Ignorance has yet to pass.
'Are you kidding?
Do you realize how long it took me,
To devise some kind of a plan...
That would keep them quiet.'
So how long you think they will sit like that?
'I don't know.
I paid some kids a few dollars,
If for two weeks they would walk up and down the streets...
Carrying school books and talking loudly,
About their Math and English classes.
I'm on a roll,
So I'm pulling out all stops to see what happens next.'
But it is still Summer.
All the kids are on vacation.
'When I told those children sitting in that room,
That 'ignorance' has died.
I was joking.
I thought they knew it was a joke.
They have been sitting like that for at least two days.'
And that's why you pay the other kids?
'Yeah.
Do you know how much I've spent on cellphones,
Video games, iPods and 3-D Tv's?
To get those kids nagging off my back.
And all I had to say...
Was 'ignorance' has died? '
I don't believe it!
'You?
I've been trying to find something totally ridiculous to say,
To get them to clean up their rooms.
[...] Read more
poem by Lawrence S. Pertillar
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The Intelligence We Serve
Repercussions will come rushing,
To repay for our own actions.
To react as if it doesn't,
Is that ignorance we lust.
Repercussions will come rushing,
To repay for our own actions.
To react as if it doesn't,
Is that ignorance we lust.
To believe we live for nothing,
Without 'something' that is near.
Knowing everything we do.
And,
IT hears.
Is the ignorance existing in us,
That separates the Universe.
When we are a part of IT...
But thinking the reverse.
We are the mix,
Not the bowl...
In a hold that grows.
And whipped up like ingredients,
To serve a great intelligence.
We are that mix,
Not the bowl...
In a hold that grows.
And whipped up like ingredients,
To serve a great intelligence.
Repercussions will come rushing,
To repay for our own actions.
To react as if it doesn't,
Is that ignorance we lust.
Repercussions will come rushing,
To repay for our own actions.
When we wake up to see this...
Conflicts we'll quit!
Whipped up like ingredients,
To serve a great intelligence.
We are not the bowl,
Just stirred in the mix.
Repercussions will come rushing,
As we're stirred up in this mix.
[...] Read more
poem by Lawrence S. Pertillar
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Not With The Eye, But Through It
Not with the eye, but through it
easy to see all the pristine faults and flaws
in the immaculate mirror of the lake
that asks me to surrender my sword
as proof the scars on the mirage of my identity
were not self-inflicted or mythically inflated.
Sometimes the mind is nothing but a fraud of water,
a handful of starmud from the bottom up
with an ego like the snapping turtle of the world
savaging the plumage of the moon,
a wild swan thawing like an ice-floe
riding her own reflection downstream
like the pale fragrance of an elegant loveletter.
This place is the downgraded stuff of dreams
that animates the misfortunes of decay
with calendar-eyed views of propinquitous mortality.
Stakes of ghostly bones embedded like fractured trees.
Red ochre cedars like the fragile skeletons of filigreed fish.
Dozy limbs of basswood on the damp shore
pulped by a flesh-eating disease
like the hard heart of an old man gone soft
in the limelight of a circus of fungus on tour.
Not an outrage, but a lingering kind of odium,
this whole place smells like a human on its death bed.
Stealth in the indelible silence of the dead
undergoing their dissolute transformations
into the effluvium of the living in the wake
of their passage through life. What was
solid and upright as the rung of a ladder of oak
or the lifeboats of the oar-winged maple keys
before they went down with the ship,
good captains, all, with nowhere left to fall,
let's its hair down like wavelengths and willows
and returns to going with the flow of things
like ice melting into water again, everything real,
with nothing to stub your toe upon
like the imagined intransigence of the world.
Wing of bat, eye of newt, heart of toad
and the perfect pitch of a virgin hummingbird,
mummified skin from the leaves
of the star clusters of borage sapphires,
the ashes of a poem that immolated itself
like daylilies that no one had ever cried over,
the unreasoned ennui of a seasoned wizard's
attitude toward suffering to play musical chairs
at the periodic table and rise above the salt
where you properly belong enthroned like a dragon
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
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Shopping
Be my guest
We'll talk forever
Go Ahead
Tell me everything
Encyclopedic scrapbook
Of photosynthesis
Kiss of breath.
The people watching
It's man code
Isee....
Signatures
Covering buildings
Directing traffic
This graffitti and
It's homely charm
Of neighbors
Yard sales
Smoking ciggarrettes
On the porch
Quantum computer
Humble student
Of the arts, sciences,
Autodidactic child
Quietly reading.
Faucets, pressure gauges
Fuel pumps, thermostats
Running errands
Watching television
Shopping online
Behind this:
A black market
Anything any price
The insatiable hunger
Free trade
poem by jonathan Juarez
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Cosmologist With Tweezers
Palace after palace of blood I feed my idiot heart
to the fish and the cannibal stars
from a barge of funeral swans sullen as books.
I told myself not to look for this death when I dropped it
the day I was born, to leave it lie in the violent grass,
a key to a door that doesn’t exist yet,
an insect crushed between the pages of the sky
that reads like the failing eyes of an ancient astronomer
compiling an expanded preface
to an encyclopedic suicide note. O I can say anything
when the mirror is having an affair
with the moon’s oceanic face.
I can put lipstick on the corpse of a rose
and die for the whole cemetery like a callous messiah
sick of being resurrected at the take-out window.
My love forsaken, a beggar reaching into a serpent’s nest
for an egg that longs to be turned
like the handle to a door
that might be a way out, I consult
the crazy wisdom of the crows,
and a sage of the black night
to find my way back to a grave
that has not forgotten the taste of the dream
that was blood and wine and light.
This is a shabby afterlife, an unworthy war of mistakes,
where the orchids are raped on their wedding nights
and a peace treaty is chalk on the sidewalk
around a murdered mailman.
It would be a lie to say I wasn’t wounded,
it would be a falsehood to say I was.
This pain is the blundering apprentice of a mystic knife.
This agony is stupid and futile and vain, this sorrow
a brothel of homesick nuns.
I give my tears the address
of a man I know in Boston, a bibliophile
who might take them in as a first edition
of a bride who was published posthumously.
I give my heart like a fire-alarm to two women
waiting by the bus.
My skull begs for campaign funds
to run as an alternative planet
to the one I’m walking on,
but the terrorist behind the door
with his redressals and reforms, his ancient future
strapped to his waist like a broken promise
has already ruined my vote
by killing off the candidate.
I confess to a puppet government
with the decrescent sickle of the moon at my jugular vein
that I have always been, even in eclipse,
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poem by Patrick White
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I Can Still Hear The Reticent Echoes
I can still hear the reticent echoes
of my wary adolescence among intellectual radicals
demanding the nightwatchmen of insight open the gates.
One stole an Underwood for me from the student newspaper,
saying I would put it to better use than they would
and another drove me to my astronomy exam
against the will of my drunken declinations.
And I remember White Rabbit playing on the radio
first time, and the turmoil of sun and morning shadows
playing Scarlatti on the keyboards of the arbutus leaves.
Happy. Free. And sixteen enough to get away with anything.
I was bright and fearless. No one could take subjective risks
the way I could, but I still had to stand up
on the book of experience to see over the steering wheel.
Spectral figments of the past, smokey remnants
of the fires we once sat around without giving a thought
to how long they'd last. We were zodiacs. We were
hedonists of the light, trying to believe
in our own arrogance enough to roar like dragons
and write like the first green tendrils of an ancient vine.
I was apprenticed to the signs I saw in everything
like a library of eyes in flames, and the subtlety of fireflies
that came like the nuances of midnight,
and shone upon my path like lighthouses among the stars.
Famous days. Baby turtles urgent to reach the tide
among swarms of hovering seagulls, sky rats,
thinning the odds of any of us ever making it
out of the shadows of our predatory circumstances.
Everything a test of our fitness for life, and a laurel
awarded randomly to the luckiest if not the most talented.
Genius was mean and cruel and scoffed
at the slightest adage of the pretentious fool
that published on the back of sententious matchbooks
but at night, in its writing window, overlooking
the lights of the town, it took off its war face
and summoned the moon to a tender seance
like a medium in love with the ghost of a muse
that was playing hard to get. O the fallacious brilliance
of our teaching errors. The illustrious craving
for dangerous love affairs with thresholds and taboos
that had never been crossed or broken before.
Did a knife ever sink into the heart
as deeply as those we fell upon
to discipline ourselves in the black arts
of our tragic flaws? All our fire pits
smothered in ashes by grieving women
who really meant it, though we were too depressed
to see them scattering our urns on the wind
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poem by Patrick White
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I Should Be Light Years Away From Here By Now
I should be light years away from here by now.
Too full of shadows. Encyclopedic sorrows
that keep updating themselves. Artistic ordeals
that return me to the world stranger than I was.
More alone. With my indeterminate talent
for living through things like arrows pushed
all the way through to the other side. I should be
out of this raving asylum any day now.
I should be released like a beast from a zoo
by a lightning storm that gnawed its way through the bars.
My last attachment in this zendo of mirageless monks
a rope in the basement, so as not to discourage the kids.
When is enough, enough? Go ask Plato,
or better yet, Plath, Essenin, Mayakovsky, Lao-tzu,
or that ingenuous adolescent down the street
who shot himself in his parents' laundry room
when his girlfriend said he wasn't fun enough?
Proved her right. Gouged his parents' hearts out.
Me? I thought I could shine for the eyeless.
I thought I could make something out of the starmud
of my middle-aged childhood, that honoured my mother.
One time I knew all the names of the stars
in four languages and all their symbolic meanings.
I taught myself algebra on my grade six summer vacation.
One time I could be grinding pyrex parabolic mirrors
with carborundum and a razor blade and a lightbulb
and a catalogue of diffraction patterns to smooth out
the angstroms for ten inch reflecting telescopes
on equatorial mounts, and the next, lighting
a gang leader from Hong Kong up with a jar of gasoline
to get him and his buddies to stop burning cats
or bashing their eyes out with baseball bats
in my Pacific Rim neighbourhood. A Kafkaesque disadvantage
in a cat fight. But I always had this little black pearl
of hope in my heart to go back to like a new moon
that said the spring is bitter, but things are going to get
better sooner than you think. Green apples
still give me gripe. And they're fallacious when they're ripe.
Translated Euripides, the Gallic Wars, the Greek Anthology,
seeded thousands of paintings on the wind
like surrealistic milk weed pods from the l0lst Airborne,
and written more poems than even I can remember
that sit stacked in boxes by the thousands in the studio closet
like the segments of a column I haven't assembled yet
to commemorate my campaign against mediocrity
that no one's ever heard of yet. Pyrrhic victory
that would have cost as much to lose
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poem by Patrick White
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If I Ever Get To Look Back On All Of This
If I ever get to look back on all this
even if it's just to show me how wrong I was
about so much, how much I risked for so little,
I don't want to have been mean and petty here,
I don't want to have lived short-minded
as if my brain never grew to its proper height
and I had to live close to the ground
with burrowing wasps and centipedes
trading toxins in the grass like slumlords.
Tried to live like a magnanimous man
with an open hand whenever my luck kept pace
with my generosity. Didn't want to die
knowing nothing about the stars, that shining
that grew in time even brighter in the dark within.
Wanted to know the fury and compassion, genius,
the affable kindness, madness and love of humankind.
Used to say we were born to see and be happy,
and if you couldn't find a meaning that suited you,
make one up of your own. Don't waste
the great creative potential of the absurd
and try to fit yourself like a little polyp of sentience
into the fossilized coral reefs of the past.
Go for the galaxies. What's to lose?
If you're going to fall, fall from a height.
Sooner a brilliant failure than a mediocre flight.
You'd be surprised at what the timing of one comet
falling out of the black halo around the sun
can mean to millions watching down below for signs.
Sensible shoes, or starmud on your winged heels,
Icarus or Neil Armstrong using his foot
to take a big step for humankind, walk your mile
standing up as if you were scanning for leopards,
your simian continuum at a fork in the road.
Danger is a capricious muse, but it can still
rivet you with inspiration. The hunters get eyes.
You grow an exoskeleton, then rib
the walls and rafters of the house and soon
the sun decides where the windows are going to go.
The Hox genes talk, and you're the topic of conversation.
You start listening as if
you were listening in on yourself,
all those voices and things
for words you don't understand,
bliss, butterflies, sorrows and assassins,
the victimized heroes of egoistic tragedies,
and the poetry in the pity of unexpurgated passion.
Lovers in the last throes of unmitigated catastrophe.
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poem by Patrick White
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If Only I Could Remember You As You Were
If only I could remember you as you were
for a few, brief radiant moments as indelible
as light in space and not as time would have it
the way things have changed. To see you
lingering in the doorway on a winter night,
the snow lying lightly on your hair like the Pleiades
over your shoulder descending below the treeline
as if it knew more about saying good-bye than you did,
and o how I loved you for it. If only I could
remember that lonely ghost of a mirage
that hovered over the watershed of your tears
and looked at me like the first lifeboat
you'd seen in a thousand years respond
to your s.o.s. in a hourglass. If only I could remember
the fragrance of the summer rain on your skin
as if it had mistaken you for one of the flowers
and how I used to like wiping your tears away
with my opposable thumb like plum blossoms from your cheeks.
Eternity coming to the surface of time
like old corduroy roads and bones in a makeshift graveyard.
Not likely I'll ever see you again in this life
but if only I could remember you before circumstance
underwhelmed itself and killed the ambiance
of our last dance by turning all the lights on at once.
But there you go, no help for it. The nightbird
transits the moon and the eternal sky as is said in Zen
doesn't inhibit the flight of the white clouds.
And this moment, too, though it's endured
a thousand deaths to come to this afterlife,
always saying good-bye to some aspect of you
that symbolizes the evanescence of love and life
in metaphors that buff the open wound
like scar tissue on the moon, like fireflies
welding living insights into the dead brain coral
of this encyclopedic coma life
can sometimes seem without you, even after
all these ensuing misadventures it would take a fire
and half a dozen bottles of wine to tell you about
if only I could remember you as you once were
like the lamb that laid down with the lion without fear.
For light years, images of you have flashed out of the abyss
as sharp and quick and vital as moonlight
wielding a sabre, or a bird quickened by a purpose
out of the unknown into the unknown
and I recognize them as blossoms that have blown
far from the tree that was lovelier
than the whole orchard to me, though angels
attended upon it like scripture from its roots to its leaves,
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poem by Patrick White
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Jumped Out Of Nothing
Jumped out of nothing. The fish did. Golden.
A flake of the moon. When I wasn't looking.
Into a lifeboat cupping something precious in its hands.
The mind an old junkyard that's been collecting windows too long.
So many points of view. So many glass eyes
looking for the stuffed animals they belong to.
Death after knowledge. The silence that follows the music
after the bird has flown. Is the abyss death's rebuke
of life's dangerous proposal to let us look through the keyhole
at what's going on in the uninhabitable room next door?
To dream a little in the interim between two enormities
abstracted from the need of our perishing to persist
aeonic light years beyond anything we can imagine?
The golden fish jumps into the boat like an unsought insight.
No hook in it. And you can tell by the scales of light it emanates
it's risen from the starless darkness of its own depths
like moonrise out of the encyclopedic corals
of accumulated knowledge that's found a place for everything
like a polyp on a library shelf, calcium in a cave
shaping itself into temples from the top down.
Stalagmites and stalactites of cathedrals inspired by water
to enshrine themselves in form as an aid to the blind.
Though things along the way might change
does the journey stay the same ad infinitum?
Did you amount to everything you dreamed you might be,
or were there more stairs to climb than doors to enter,
more walls than windows in the way you saw things?
I've seen the most sublime things humbled by their own insignificance.
And I think I've heard God more than once
weeping at the stern of a sinking ship for a turn of events
she couldn't do anything about once they were set in motion.
And I've listened to people my whole life
talking in their sleep about how to put a rudder on a dream
as if there were a focus and a direction for life to flow in
like a solid, particulate thing instead of the wandering wavelength
of this exiled mirage of water that it appears to be
depending on the mood of the chameleonic mirror you're looking into.
The donkey looks into the well and the well looks back at the donkey.
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poem by Patrick White
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More Past In My Brain As I Get Older Than Future
More past in my brain as I get older than future,
intrusive memories like ghosts come seeking absolution
I still can't give them sincerely after all these years
of irrelevant tears evaporating through holes in the ozone.
Things I'd wholly forgotten about, returning to this seance
convened by the mother of the muses in her crone phase
like stars and flowers come back to make you smile again
for something as simple as remembering their names
you thought you'd lost in the grass like rings on a key chain.
Painful images I wish I'd never lived to see
but came to understand slept just under the eyelids
of the things most people dream of damaging
by inflicting the worst wounds on their own savage humanity.
Lovers that reoccur in the night air like fireflies
recalling some moment when we touched illicitly
double-crossing all of our mutual taboos to risk
the burning bridge of the dangerous blessing
of the passionate dragon on the far shore of our urgent flesh.
The riverine sediments of the mindstream's starmud,
an encyclopedic compendium of outcomes and random eventualities.
Any single one of these mystic details is the table of contents
of a whole other life than the one I've been living so far,
stars matted in the hair of the leafless willows mad with despair.
Joy, pleasure, tenderness. Sorrow, anger, recrimination.
With the planet tilted a feather's weight more toward joy
on its axis, or we wouldn't have anything to cry about
when the season passes. When the wild irises
burn out like pilot lights in the urn of the furnace of the phoenix
losing its will to rise again out of its own ashes.
And through it all, so many afterlives arrested by the mystery
of what we were to each other now that kept
calling us back to each other like wolves in the fog
on opposite hills of the heartscape we couldn't find a way out of.
There's still generosity in my fingertips
when I touch the eyelids, the lips, the lunar thorns,
the feldspar pictographs that have been carved into me
like the braille cartouches of the dynastic royal houses and scars of love.
I like to err on the side of a generous spirit as if
there's always a factor that stands outside the equation
like a fulcrum maintaining a balance that has nothing to do
with equality, but deeply affects the course of a parallel universe.
And I can see through the eyes of the chorus of a hundred voices
chanting like a mantra for me to look at it one
of a thousand other ways to say yes what happened between us
was meant to be, and hear all these fanatical pamphleteers
trying to exonerate the culpability of what we had to do
to survive one another like two separate shoes going their own way.
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poem by Patrick White
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My Heart Said Yes To Everything My Mind Denied
My heart said yes to everything my mind denied.
Certain women, poetry, doorways, cosmic risks,
a few back country roads that knew enough not
to ask me where I was going that late at night.
My absurd familiarity with sacred clowns
and this ghost dance of stars I see in their eyes
whenever one of them makes me cry in remembrance
of some old rag of laughter that ran before the bulls
like a rodeo clown in a whiskey barrel of fermented sorrows.
I said yes to exile. I said yes to my homelessness.
I said yes to the reflection of the kid
in the broken window of the burning orphanage
he'd just pecked his way out of like the shell of a phoenix.
I said yes to the abyss, to nothing, to emptiness
to the purr of the tides of sand in a desert
combing out the manes of lion-fire
that bloom like spiritual ferocities on the wind.
And I said yes to the rocks on the mountainside
who repeated what my secret teachers had said.
If you're still clinging to one placard of your freedom
you still haven't truly let go. And I said yes
and jumped like a snake at cruising altitude
without a parachute into a sudden enlargement of everything
and said yes to the dragon of that transformation
as it took to the wing like a fire in a furnace.
Yes to the altars when it was time to sacrifice the hero
to the unattainable he surrendered in the name of.
Yes to the dark niches of love
when the candles have gone blind
so much like eye-sockets in a skull beside a wishing well.
Yes was a way of sharing what no
had a tendency of hoarding for a day that never came.
Yes is doing it for everyone. No
does it for no one and can't even make it on its own.
There's something fundamentally revolutionary
and heretical about yes that burns in cleaner fire
than the dirty holy water no washes its hands in
to rid itself of the matter once and for all.
No takes account of every injury like a mandarin
standing off in the shadows of a rain dance of willows
to see who prefers the moonrise to the lightning.
Yes hasn't even figured out it's wounded yet.
Yes is the sacred syllable that all others words aspire to.
Yes opens more eyes than there are stars to look at.
More flowers and doors and hearts to the mystery
than there are keys in the spirit's lost and found
outside the gateless gates to paradise on earth
where no throws its crutches down as things
of no use anymore, and yes, the seed
that everything shape shifts out of
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poem by Patrick White
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No Shelter For The Heart
No shelter for the heart, the wind
is a wound of torn birds.
Too long in the dark
the star blooms without eyes.
I break a vow of silence with my solitude
and poems materialize
like lifeboats on the moon
in a sea of shadows.
I light my last candle
and the darkness in the room
holds a black mass for what I've lost.
Sensitive as a window
the sky changes like a mood ring
and my muse is an albino chameleon in eclipse.
I keep an abacus of skulls
to remind me what year it is
but the hours go by
like pilgrims to their death
and I can't relate to this eternal view of things.
The ghosts are used to me by now.
I keep the spiderwebs at bay in the corners.
I teach those who died young the names of the stars.
I remain undiverted by death
as the lesser of two differences.
And what do I know of love
I wish I didn't when the longing returns
to come down like a hard rock from the mountain
into the valley like a rogue foundation stone?
My memories are all the first drafts
of lives I've scrapped like bad addictions.
I made a bad play
out of my encyclopedic sorrows
and closed it on opening night as a farce
and everyone on stage applauded for an encore.
Leave a gate open and I'll walk through it.
Otherwise I'm the stranger at the fence.
I'm passing by. I'm where the road
runs out into the wilderness
and I won't stop until I'm irrevocably lost.
I've decultified myself from my identity.
Even my own mind doesn't recognize me.
But I'm one of the sacred clowns of words.
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poem by Patrick White
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Some Things You Weep Over Forever
Some things you weep over forever.
Fathomless watersheds of infinite sorrow.
Others last as long as it takes the rain
to get a flower to bloom and perish,
with promises of good things to come.
Beauty cherishes a lock of wisdom.
Separation, departure, exile, severance, change,
since the womb, and a good chance earlier,
things coming apart like a mother giving birth
to the ghost of herself she gave up
to facilitate your coming forth upon the earth.
Here you are in the splendour of your mystic specificity.
And who knows how many lifetimes
had to be achieved and forgotten just as they were
so you could show up here so uniquely?
Point is. Goodbye's always half of the greeting
and sorrow uses the same hand to hang on to life
as it does to let go of it with.
Our entrance is a back-handed exit.
We celebrate the seance and mourn the exorcism
depending upon which way the wind
is blowing our mother's ghost in our face.
Out of sorrow was born compassion
as our eyes were born of the light
flirting with nerve cells, as the sky and the stars
adapted to our ocularity and soft-bodied animals
grew shells and thousands of scales like eyelids
and the Burgess shale became the communal gravestone
for millions, and all the new angels
were snow blind lab technicians in white coats
and the goddess who embodied life
in a ceremony of picture-music
became a particle and a Hox gene.
Do you see how it all transmorphs surrealistically
as it sings you to sleep in a dream of life
that fits the typography of your mindscape perfectly
like the skin of moonlight brushing up like a feather
against the skin of water, mutually realizing
the millions of waterbirds that arise
like oceanically enlightened emotions from them both?
I've heard the sea weep. The sky release the tears
that others pray for like rain. The earth groan in its agony.
I've sat at the bedside of dying friends
and said nothing the numbing silence
wanted to overhear whether it was wisdom or a prayer.
Here. Then it's There. Now it's Where?
We die into a mirror we can't look into.
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poem by Patrick White
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