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Cinder In The Sun's Eye

Cinder in the sun's eye, there's fire in your tears.
You plunge into the light like a moth on a mission
and it's the sun that disappears to shine at midnight
in the black mirrors of your eyes. Dark light, intense,
starling, charred swan, you know as well as I do,
the occult approach to the optimism of an eclipse
is to act radically in the name of things you can
only unattainably conceive of. Love on your wrist
like a hawk whose wing you healed, dwelling
in your homelessness without a fear of eviction.
No truth in the mouth of the snake that's pulled
the fangs of its conviction out of the sky
like crescent moons, pins from the eye
of a voodoo doll you've nursed for light years
on the nightshift of a morgue that's aroused by death.
Milk of your left breast kills. The other practices compassion.
Whole snakepits in the shrines of the wavelengths
mourning the death of Medusa, as if snakes too
had something to mourn that makes them shine within you.

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poem by Patrick White
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Manically Slashing Paint Late At Night

Manically slashing paint late at night
on a white canvas.
Blood on the snow.
Chewing my limbs off to get out of a leg-hold trap.
Tearing my heart out like that of a noble enemy
to eat it for the homoeopathic courage
to make something out of the chaos
of conditioned consciousness
like a small tent in this homeless desert of stars
that might let me enter
like a loveletter into an envelope
that’s empty enough to offer shelter to anyone
with a return address on the point of no return.
The dove is bleeding down the handle of my brush.
Insomniac poppies are haemorrhaging on their feet
after they got caught sleepwalking
down the dark alley of a dead end street
and a bad moon rising cut their throats
like a serial killer exploring the creative potential
of blood spatter as an expressive form of forensic art.

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poem by Patrick White
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And It Shall No More Be Given To Me

And it shall no more be given to me
than it is to another to understand you if I could
or you, for that matter, shining above the dark wood
as if it didn't matter where your light fell or upon whom.

And who could not say your aloofness was not a right?
But there's nothing more ridiculous than a spurned heart.
I was a flower for a moment, now I'm a red toadstool
spinning around as I did as a kid with nothing to do
but endure a long, hot afternoon on my own
in a nineteen fifties restaurant with a broken jukebox
and where there was a prayer rug rumoured to fly
now there's just blind linoleum and a repetitive lie
I repeat like a mantra to keep the obvious away.

There is within me, who knows where it came from,
a laboratory of largess that's always working overtime
to cure what ails love in myself and others.
As if we were the devoted apostates of an estranged emotion
that didn't quite know what to do with our devotion.

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poem by Patrick White
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If You Don't Take The Risk, Jump The Abyss Like A Firefly

If you don't take the risk, jump the abyss like a firefly
between two polarities, how are you ever going
to release your potential as the stem cell of a bridge of light
from one hemisphere of your brain of starmud
to the other side of your shining? Whenever
there are two eyes it's crucial that you make a third.
And if you haven't got the courage to jump from your artificial paradise
without knowing whether you've got a parachute on or not,
go ask the dandelions gone to seed how to take a fall
like the free radical of a kiss on the breeze, touch life
lightly as if you were feeling the weave of the silk mist
rising like someone's last breath off the morning lake
or ask the seasoned helicopter pilots of the dragonflies
and maple keys about doing double wheelies like dna helices
when you've driven way past the end of the road like Thelma and Louise
and your animation's been suspended trying to cling
to the wind like a rafter of air you can hang from
like the larva of a caterpillar repelling down a Dutch elm
on a thread of fate you've got to pull like a rip cord
if you want to be a skydiver instead of a half-baked butterfly

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poem by Patrick White
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If You Were A Thought And I Were An Emotion

If you were a thought and I were an emotion
time would still be at cross-purposes with space
and we'd still be sitting here
dangling our bare feet like two kids
over the edge of the abyss
when we go fishing for stars
not really caring if we catch anything
as we throw them back in with our blessings.
You can taste the jewels the light's been through
sometimes when you close your eyes
and the revealed and the revealing
are just the water and fish of a feeling
idling in the shadows and reeds of the mindstream.
There's a way of being lost within yourself that's starbound.
And there's a way of being found
where people scatter flowers before you
all the way to a hole in the ground
you're expected to fill like someone else's shoes.
You can lie under a gravestone
like a man behind a desk with his name on it

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poem by Patrick White
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Sometimes The Intimacy Of The Silence

Sometimes the intimacy of the silence
can grow so profoundly intense
it seems impersonal. Or the heat of life
burn like the dry ice of the holy ghost
as you shudder with spiritual chills in the cold.
And when you see things whole in and of themselves
it's always as if you were looking through a broken window.
Truly fulfilled, you realize everything you're missing.
The more you explore the mystery of what you're doing
just walking around on the earth, aware
of your awareness, the more of a stranger
you seem to yourself, decultified of your identity.

The birches are glowing in skin tight moonlight
and there are sixties hash burns in their white leotards
and the leaves are falling and the river's flowing
and the Canada geese are sowing themselves
in the wake of the plough of the moon
like black and white sunflowers seeds further south again
and my heart is saturated with autumn's sad sugars

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poem by Patrick White
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Won't Meet Most Of You In A Lifetime

Won't meet most of you in a lifetime
and know there are six billion of us
and more coming all the time, each trying
to interpret the sign of their own star,
you know, the one that nobody else can see
but for a few rays of light breaking
through the clouds here and there,
that says, this is the way to shine,
this is the way to shine, and that includes
black holes everywhere as well.

Whether you can see through it or not
as a plagiarism of water and sand
every mirage has its own meaning,
every star belongs to a different zodiac,
each with their own totems, mandalas,
and shapeshifting constellations, each
their own houses of worship and disrepute,
we're all wearing on our foreheads
written in between the lines of fate

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poem by Patrick White
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Who Isn't Trying To Live

Who isn't trying to live
as they vaguely hope they are
whatever extremes of moderation they've gone to
behind all the masks and fraud?
Crosswalks and bridges of fire
trying to get to the other side of themselves
like the promised land, or God,
ladders up to heaven
like vertebrae and ribs,
and ropes like spinal cords
down a well on the moon
that hasn't enthroned hell in her depths yet,
everyone's trying to put a face on chaos
they remotely hope is their own.
One by one the plum blossoms
fall to the nightstream
like loveletters
from the branch of the tree
that read them once and then let go.
No one knows where they're from

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poem by Patrick White
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My Third Eye Opening Oceanically Of Its Own Accord

My third eye opening oceanically of its own accord.
The wingspans of the flowers bloom omnidirectionally.
The blue sky lays a balmy smile upon my flightfeathers.
Blood hums to the blissful resonance of being alive.
Even the glowing concrete seems benign. The gates
with their rusting guns triggered like locks, the fences
holding the occupying gardens with their placard poppies
back like riot cops. Time without haste. Consumed
by a moment as perennial as summer on earth.
Nothing urgent in the fulfilment of small destinies
in the grass, no antecedents necessary to know
how to live this, no event trivial or especially significant,
I'm as open-minded as the wind on a shoreless afternoon
that tastes of the stars gusting in the dust at my feet.

Wild parsnip, Queen Ann's Lace, mullein, goldenrod,
purple loosetrife and cattails in the ditches along the roads,
Lichens of the moon on the staves of the cedar rails
where the red-winged blackbirds sit
to paint their picture-music on the unprimed air

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poem by Patrick White
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Coming Out Of A Blue Funk

Coming out of a blue funk, this seal,
under a sky thickening like sheet ice all day
has found an airhole it can breathe through for awhile.
Been wondering about my life. What
it's been doing to me for the last fifty years
for the sake of poetry, for the sake
of pursuing an earthly excellence
though it hardly matters why anymore.
I used to have an answer on the tip of my tongue
when I was young and thought more
with my mouth than my heart. Less so now.
Time, death, suffering, love and the devil,
certain intense realms of creative bliss
attuned to the dark harmonies of hidden roots
that flow back like the delta of a river
to the watershed of a single dropp of water
that got it in its head to do something big with its life
and turn something trivial into the sublime.
Did not the sun and the moon, the whole of the sky,
fit it like skin? And that was just the outside.

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poem by Patrick White
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