Quotes about skull, page 6
Awake At Six A.M.
Awake at six a.m. The clock ticks, nicks,
flintknaps little pieces of my life off,
a French executioner's sword quicker and neater
than the sloppy axe of the moon
naping the strike. I swan on the block
to the drum roll of a panicked palpitant
among kitchen utensils. I'm the crucifix
of Cygnus in the Summer Triangle,
arms outspread. I'm severed like a carrot.
I'm the headless horseman. An acephalic shallot.
Someone yanks me up out of the earth
and holds me up by a gout of hair
like a prize turnip with a characteristic look
of freeze-framed despair on my face
as if it had just been amputated.
I had a snake transplant. Now I'm Medusa.
The star, Algol, in the grip of Perseus.
The ghoul of my own solitude, I can heal
or I can enflame the disease with an unclean needle.
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poem by Patrick White
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I Bring You Nothing Like A Featherless Bird
I bring you nothing like a featherless bird
that's fallen from a nest, a sailor that knows
how he's failed the wind all by himself
like a black sail off the coast of his hopeless gates.
But the doves in an avalanche of regrets
couldn't reach that far into an advanced salvation
well past the last unmanned constellation of the cross.
I do not bring you my martyrdom like a relic of coal
from a primeval eclipse of occult flowers
for you to weep over like diamonds on a sunny day.
I do not ask you to kiss the curse of my birthmark
nor average out what's crucial about the way
I approach life like a dragon in its sleep
as if I wanted to whisper something new in its ear.
I don't need a sunspot to play dice with the sun.
Nor the rafter of a bird in flight to hold my tent up.
I'm not looking for someone to lie down nude
like a threshold to my solitude in candle light
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poem by Patrick White
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The Fire Hydrants Look At The Chandeliers Of The Black Cherries
The fire hydrants look at the chandeliers of black cherries
like Leonid meteor showers they're never going to put out,
a pawn shop of new moons, a rack of tabled cue-balls.
A difference in the quality of heart, if not kind.
The stolid earthbound. The more translucently cavalier.
Hearts that function. Hearts that look for somewhere to dance
against the gathering storm clouds like fireflies under the stars
while it's still clear enough for everyone to shine.
The galaxies whirling around their black holes
in three four waltz time knowing behind
all that beauty and grace, like a death mask of dark matter,
lies a chaos of rapture, a state of unknowing
that nonetheless knows, a crazy wisdom,
a lucid ignorance in the eye of a draconian eclipse.
Who needs a crystal skull, or a rattle of the spirit filled
with the sacred seed syllables of a dream grammar
that undermines and derails the logic of syntax
like underground rivers of lunar clay moving
under them in the night, not out of radical spite,
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poem by Patrick White
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A Thousand Years From Now
A thousand years from now
who will remember me
once I've disappeared from this windowpane,
a vapour of breath with awareness,
a nebular stain on the clarity
that will wash its hands of me
like a scar of water that has clung too long?
I'm not trying to embalm
the elegiac content of these obvious sunsets in words,
and it's hard to shake honey out of these mordant bells
that lie like duplicitous lifeboats to the gullible compasses and maps
that keep crashing like doves that don't have the wingspan
to come back with news of land
to this museum of DNA, two of every kind,
I keep scuttling like an ark on the top of every wave.
And what is a grave if not an abandoned embassy
that didn't have time to shred its dreaded secret?
And sometimes, when the emptiness and the silence
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poem by Patrick White
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Counting Skeletons Maze Masterpiece War
counting skeletons
broken dreams
upon destruction rocks
lost dead souls
who died in revolutions wars
lost grand causes
festering generations
decline in dissent protests battles
paid for in blood baths
wasted lives
rotten corpses
dead heroes
scared or reluctant sacrifice souls
afraid to offend authorities rogue countries
play non-confrontational activities
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poem by Terence George Craddock
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Extensions of Crash - Strophes For Frieda Kahlo
As with love, also the bellows.
Strophe 1
She could not stop there,
had to flare out, dry paint,
and the dryer flesh peel down
to bone, a sexless esqueleto*,
skull no longer mustached,
a calavera**, nothing more,
curved calcium reliant forever
upon canvas, what is congealed
there to fan and burn,
a 'cauda pavonis'**.
*Skeleton
**Skull
***Pea cock's Tail (an image in alchemy)
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poem by Warren Falcon
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Verses For Alfeo Faggi's Stations Of The Cross
I
HERE Pilate's Court is:
None may clatter nor call
Where the Wolf giving suck
To the Twins glares on all
'Strip Him and scourge Him
Till flesh shows the blood,
And afterwards nail Him
On cross of wood.'
O Lord
Silence in us the condemning word!
II
Heaven witnesseth, but only in the heart
Is any aid:
'They know not what they do,' and then on Him
The Cross is laid
The Cross that's wide and long enough to bear
His flesh and bone:
A spectacle unto the crowded way,
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poem by Padraic Colum
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To a Black Gin
Daughter of Eve, draw near—I would behold thee.
Good Heavens! Could ever arm of man enfold thee?
Did the same Nature that made Phryne mould thee?
Come thou to leeward; for thy balmy presence
Savoureth not a whit of mille-fleurescence:—
My nose is no insentient excrescence.
Thou art not beautiful, I tell thee plainly,
Oh! thou ungainliest of things ungainly;
Who thinks thee less than hideous doats insanely.
Most unaesthetical of things terrestrial,
Hadst thou indeed an origin celestial?—
Thy lineaments are positively bestial!
Yet thou my sister art, the clergy tell me;
Though, truth to state, thy brutish looks compel me
To hope these parsons merely want to sell me.
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poem by James Brunton Stephens
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Living On The Cutting Edge Of The Lunar Waste
Living on the cutting edge of the lunar waste
I made of my last moonrise. A truce
with underwhelming circumstances for awhile,
no apparent pitfalls on a Saturday night in Perth,
too cold for snakes, and the leaves playing their cards
close to earth and the air a knife at your throat,
I can remember when I tried harder to exist,
and it's still a holy war every day just to subsist
and not let it scar your spirit into being cauterized
like a bad tattoo of the moon you had effaced,
but tonight I seek the ease of a solitude older than humans
down in the wetlands of the Tay River just off
Sunset Boulevard before you cross the first bridge.
Waist high in the broken antennae of the brittle grass
yellow as the fossils in a graveyard
of green praying mantes, decultified romantics,
I pad the skull of rock I usually sit on like a prophetic throne
with the old manuscripts of fallen maple leaves,
recalling lines from poems like lyrical snippets of chromosomes
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poem by Patrick White
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Feel Like There's A Beast
Feel like there's a beast in the darkness
eating my eyes.
I'm a moon-bull
at a crossroads of solar swords
down on it knees
hemorrhaging like a poppy.
And there are constellations
I've never heard before
playing the harp of my horns
with pensive fingertips.
How strange this rag of life
soaked in tears and blood is.
Everything dies like a snowflake on a furnace,
a rock on an autumn mountain,
no two the same.
There are nights, there are
vigils of darkness
when the mirror can no longer bear
the weight of this feather of fire,
this vision of life
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poem by Patrick White
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